The Best Films of 2011

I wrote up a Top 10 list for The L Magazine, which I slightly amended for its contributors' poll. Here's my ballot:

1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
2. Drive
3. Cold Weather
4. Poetry
5. A Separation
6. Meek's Cutoff
7. Tuesday, After Christmas
8. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
9. In the Family
10. Silver Bullets
11. Putty Hill
12. Weekend
13. Pina
14. Carnage
15. The Trip
16. The Artist
17. Melancholia
18. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
19. Tree of Life
20. Hugo

Honorable mentions: Bellflower, Into Eternity

The Artist

Written & Directed by: Michel Hazanavicius
Full credits at IMDb

Talk about your escapist prestige seasons. Over the past few weeks, I haven't yet seen a 2012 Oscar contender set in the present day; I've hardly even seen one set in America. Scorsese chose to make a movie not only set far in the past, but also in Europe. The Europeans have also been focused on the past and on Europe, as in My Week with Marilyn, or the upcoming Iron Lady. France's The Artist is the apotheosis of this escapist trend: it's set in the 20s-30s, in Hollywood (escapist for French people), and it's not only black-and-white but silent—that's right, an honest-to-goodness silent movie, a sort of ode to the charm, physicality and romanticism of Chaplin. How much more distanced from unpleasant realities could you be? Though, the film more often references talkies of the 30s and 40s. It seemed more enamored of a different kind of Hollywood than the one it ostensibly celebrates; I saw a lot more direct "quotes" from Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Broadway Melody of 1940 and, especially, The Thin Man than I did anything by Melies or Harold Lloyd.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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A Separation

Written & Directed by: Asghar Farhadi
Full credits at IMDb

Have Iranian censors gotten sloppy? I suppose they might consider A Separation a straightforward domestic drama; it could certainly pass as one. But to these Western eyes, this shaky cam melodrama, this soap opera for sophisticates, is implicitly critical of its country, an indictment of systemic oppression. Yet it wasn't smuggled out of the country on a USB drive—it's Iran's official submission for the best foreign film Oscar...Farhadi avoids contriving heroes and villains: every character is sympathetic, stuck in some pitiable position, doing the wrong thing by trying to do what seems right for their families and selves. There are no bad guys; if the movie has a malevolent force, it's Iran itself.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Hugo

Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: John Logan

I'm surprised that Hugo has literary origins. It's such a tactile and mechanical film—it's so cinematic! Such an ode to the analog, the industrial, the mechanical—clocks, cranks, gears, trains, robots—so possessed of a nostalgia for all things pre-digital. So, though it tells the story of post-heyday Georges Melies, and restores appropriate awe and majesty to the works of the Lumieres, Edwin Porter, the silent comedians, the silent beauties, and of course Melies, I'd say it's less a love letter to cinema's origins than to its foundations: to light, legerdemain, and whirligigs. So isn't it funny then that some of the movie's most magical moments—the dance of the wind-up mouse, the epic train-crash nightmare, the jaw-dropping opening shot—are obviously achieved with the help of computers?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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My Week with Marilyn

Directed by: Simon Curtis
Written by: Adrian Hodges
Full credits at IMDb

This sort of reminded me of The King's Speech. There's a scene in which production-assistant protagonist Colin takes Miss Monroe on a sight-seeing tour of England's grandest grounds and institutions while narrating their histories—and then gets Derek Fucking Jacobi himself to meet them as a kind of ambassador! Since when did American movies get so sentimental for the English crown? If the Academy defines these kinds of monarchy-boosting as prestigious, and then we raise our daughters to idolize Disney princesses... this is how democracy dies. Anyway, do we really have to talk about this movie? I guess just for Miss Michelle Williams' embodiment of Miss Monroe, eh? She does a thorough job of impersonation, but that's easy because, like any icon, Marilyn was all signifiers: mole, white dress, platinum curls, a whispery coo and lipstick as red as a Coca Cola can. But Williams also captures her emotional life—the insecurity and private anguish. The gratitude pouring out of her eyes every time she's paid a compliment made me want to cry, until maybe the sixth or so time she does it. It's a good performance—Williams is always terrific—but I'll take Meek's Cutoff, thanks. (Even Dawson's Creek DVDs, honestly. Those crazy kids!) The role is straight-up Oscarbait: the tortured soul of the bombshell superstar, the private life of the public figure.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Extraterrestrial

Written & Directed by: Nacho Vigalondo
Full credits at IMDb

Julio and Julia have done a bad thing: they've indulged in a drunken one-night stand even though Julia has a boyfriend. They'll spend the rest of Extraterrestrial, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo's sci-fi comedy of cuckolding—a cynical and screwball study of love and suspicion—trying to cover it up, trying to do it again, and finally trying to undo the damage and walk away. Following their tipsy tryst, the accidental lovers awaken to an abandoned Madrid and four mile-wide UFOs hovering above. (Yes, they slept through the evacuation.) The movie, though, stays confined to Earth, rarely leaving Julia's modernist apartment and its tangle of romantic jealousies, exacerbated by the aliens' presence and the isolation of the four main characters—including said boyfriend and Julia's lovelorn neighbor—who're among the few who've stayed behind.

Vigalondo uses genre as a way into romantic relationships. His debut, 2008's Timecrimes, was on its face a wacky time-travel puzzle that kept folding in on itself. But at heart, it was a story about a middle-aged man grappling with his marriage. Here, the presence of aliens is used to cover up infidelity, becoming the basis of lies used to foment mistrust and exacerbate romantic rivalries...

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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J. Edgar

Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Written by: Dustin Lance Black

J. Edgar turned out to be a lot more interesting than I initially expected. For an hour or so I was thinking, "this is the Oscarbaitiest piece of shit I ever sat through," but then I realized Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black were up to something kinda interesting. Structurally, their film is as tricky and sophisticated as The Social Network, blending a present-day narrative with two flashback storylines from different points of view; Black ups the ante by having the same character enunciate both of them: Hoover (Leonard DiCaprio) reliving private memories regarding his mother (Judi Dench) and his chastely homosexual relationship with associate Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer); and Hoover the unreliable narrator revising his own professional history. (We observe the sad, sad process of a bitter, broken man trying to invent for himself a heroic arc.) I thought it was interesting how Black and Eastwood try to subvert, or at least complicate, the old-fashioned, law-and-order, silver screen-style archetype Hoover embodies—and Eastwood used to embody—by suggesting he was a mincing mary behind closed doors; at the same time, Eastwood's grasp of gayness sometimes struck me as unduly flamboyant. (Like, that cross dressing scene is a doozy of high camp.)

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Caitlin Plays Herself

Directed by: Joe Swanberg
Written by: Joe Swanberg and Caitlin Stainken
Full credits at IMDb


Director Joe Swanberg is working at a pace unseen since the B-movie mavens of the 1930s. Caitlin Plays Herself is his fifth feature released in 2011 (with at least two more in the can), and it feels loosely shot and quickly assembled—but that's not to say clumsily or without forethought. Co-written by Swanberg and Caitlin Stainken, the movie is a sad, simple, and effective glance at a relationship that, more substantially, explores the blurred distinctions between life and art. A lot of the movie's 70 minutes are filled what the title implies: Jeanne Dielman-lite snippets of eating a banana, reading a magazine, rotating compost, writing, rehearsing conceptual theater pieces. "I perform," Caitlin explains of her stage projects, "but I play myself." While rooftop gardening, she remarks of a worm, "he'll have a nice little life and then he'll just die and become part of the dirt." Caitlin Plays Herself feels like glimpses of the nice little life of such a worm.

Keep reading at The L Magazine

Fright Night

Directed by: Craig Gillespie
Written by: Marti Noxon
Full credits at IMDb

Vampire stories are usually centered on women, serving as allegories for the alluring threat of sexual desire. But in the brisk, tense and cheeky Fright Night remake, women occupy the margins. Instead, this is a story about boys and men, about growing up and struggling with different models of masculinity. As such, its central vampire, played with bemused arrogance by Colin Farrel, is less dreamy than those to which we've recently grown accustomed. "He's not brooding, lovesick, or noble," explains Christopher Mintz-Plasse in the genre's "Randy" role. "He's the fucking shark from Jaws." Take that, Buffy, Twilight, and True Blood!

Mintz-Plasse says this early on; Fright Night, written by former Buffy scribe and producer Marti Noxon, wastes little time on exposition. Instead, we're introduced to Anton Yelchin—a neurotic, pubescent geek navigating the vicissitudes of adolescence—and his seductive, charismatic neighbor, Farrel, who's the epitome of cocksure chauvinism. Oh, and he's pretty quickly outed as a vampire. (Subversively, the movie portrays an America of bad neighbors.) Yelchin has recently abandoned his childhood friends for a cooler crowd; that is, he has gravitated toward a bullying kind of masculinity that Farrel represents—he's the grown-up apotheosis of Yelchin's new, mean, good-looking, popular friends. Representing a different kind of man—the Dr. Livesey to Farrel's Long John Silver—is David Tenant, playing a hammy Vegas showman who goes from coward to would-be hero while sending up the genre's Gothiest cliches. (Speaking of Vegas, the movie exploits its Sin City setting expertly: the city's transient and nocturnal nature making it the perfect place for a vampire to settle down and make people go missing; its foreclosure crisis provides copious For Sale signs atop big fat stakes.)

Despite its male focus, as a coming of age tale Fright Night does grapple with sexuality. The vampire attacks, largely carried out against women (though not exclusively, suggesting an omnisexual immorality), intimate rape—they're penetrative, violative, and draw blood. Farrel emasculates Yelchin repeatedly, including by "turning over" a "motorcycle" that Yelchin can't "start." Also, the kid can't relax enough when his girlfriend throws herself at him; does that suggest that sex is a potentially deadly threat, or at least corrupting? I don't think so. It's just that Yelchin first has to grow up—to learn how to use his stake responsibly. Grade: B+


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Shame

Directed by: Steve McQueen
Written by: Abi Morgan & Steve McQueen
Full credits at IMDb

Steve McQueen's follow-up to the celebrated Hunger is an unintentionally campy Catholic cautionary tale about the pitifulness of a life dedicated solely to earthly pleasures. Make that fleshly pleasures. Wisely, McQueen has again teamed with Michael Fassbender, who plays a Flatiron district-dwelling orgasm addict—a serial masturbator and prowler for pussy. Most reviewers have noted that for all its sex, Shame isn't sexy. Really? Sure, there's a tragic orgy soaked in wailing, mournful string music, and the movie climaxes with history's saddest climax. But even heterosexual men melt for Fassbender. I recently saw him in person and he looked ruddy, diminutive. But the camera adores him—his anguished gazes, his prominent brow—as it has no other actor since Marilyn Monroe. The movie works best as a vicarious thrill: watching Fassbender ply his charm on the movie's women is a treat, regardless of your sexual orientation.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Into the Abyss

Written and Directed by: Werner Herzog
Full credits at IMDb

Werner Herzog's last few documentaries have taken him to exotic locales: the south of France, Antarctica, the Alaskan wilderness. But his latest travels to perhaps the most unusual yet—rural Texas, where he explores a murder case and crafts a sober, persuasive, and serendipitously timed argument against the death penalty. (We are all Troy Davis, even Herzog.) In 2010, Michael Perry was executed for a triple murder he committed a decade earlier in the city of Conroe for the sake of stealing a Camaro. (His accomplice, Jason Burkett, received a life sentence.) Herzog investigates this messy, petty, senseless true-crime story and fills it in with lurid and poignant details, wielding his talent as a probing and insightful interviewer in conversations with the families and friends of both the victims and the killers; he tours the town, genuinely interested in its inhabitants and their colloquialisms, like "balls to the wall."

But Herzog's never condescending: he highlights our shared humanity, even Perry's—who, when the director interviews him just days before he would be executed, smiles boyishly and avers his innocence...

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Paranormal Activity 3

Directed by: Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman
Written by: Christopher B. Landon
Full credits at IMDb

Minimalism was the key to Paranormal Activity's success, so the sequels' bigger effects, greater number of cameras, and more convoluted narratives have only been detrimental. Paranormal Activity 3 continues to drag the series down; chronologically, it moves it farther back: this threequel, directed by the vain kids behind Catfish, is yet another prequel, this one set in 1988 and focused on the characters' childhood relationships with the demon who would continue to haunt and torment them into adulthood. This is one of the franchise's largest missteps: its increasing focus on backstory.

The other is its aesthetic choices. In this film, for starters, moving the setting so far back becomes problematic. It's neat, I guess, that the movie is shot on, or at least made to look like, videotape. (It'll make an interesting companion piece to Trash Humpers.) But it also poses unaddressed practical problems: like, why would someone keep the camera running as he walks slowly up a staircase if he has to pay for VHS cassettes?

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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