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The Best and Worst Films of 2011

02 Monday Jan 2012

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THE BEST FILMS OF 2011:

1.       “Midnight in Paris” (written and directed by Woody Allen) – Whoever thought you’d someday utter the words “Woody Allen” and “magical” in the same sentence?  After all, it’s been a long time since his “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985).  America’s greatest living filmmaker gives us not just his biggest box-office hit in forty years but the longest running movie of 2011.  A delightfully literary meditation on time travel and the Lost Generation.  No one can assemble a cast like Allen; Owen Wilson channels Allen without parodying his jokes and gestures in the City of Lights.

2.      “Drive” (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn) – This ultra-violent vehicle for Ryan Gosling, as the anonymous “Driver,” is a rough patch of LA noir, vicious and thrilling.  It also solidifies Gosling as the most versatile leading man to watch – politically mercurial in “The Ides of March” and a sartorial stallion in the comedy “Crazy Stupid Love” – in 2011.  “Drive” is on track to become a lasting cult favorite.

3.      “Take Shelter” (dir. by Jeff Nichols) – A harrowing meditation on paranoia and climate anxiety with the indomitable Michael Shannon (a sure-fire contender for the Best Actor Oscar) as an Ohio man coming apart.  Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”) was the ingénue of 2011, giving here, as a foil to her bubbly Southern belle in “The Help,” a restrained performance as the wife of a man either mentally ill or clairvoyant.  You decide.  Another powerful psychodrama, set in the heartland, from the writer-director of “Shotgun Stories.”

4.      “The Tree of Life” (written and directed by Terrence Malick) –  It appears only the “little things” in life matter to Malick (“Badlands,” “The Thin Red Line”).  His moving meditation on childhood, love, family, dinosaurs, Texas, the cosmos that had Americans demanding a refund must be worth the price of admission.  Believe it or not, in 2011, many movie-houses had to enforce their NO-REFUND policy for those left dazed and confused by 2011’s only poem-on-film (also the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes).  Costar Sean Penn even admitted that he had no real idea what Malick’s movie is about.  Actors!  Like any thoughtful work of art, it demands a lot from its viewer, but this tree’s roots stretch far and wide.

5.      “Bridesmaids” (dir. by Paul Feig) – Sure, it’s the female “Hangover” – replete with scatological slip-ups and crudely sexual candor – but “Bridesmaids” will get you to the church on time and, potentially, buzzed on the drive there.  Kristen Wiig dropped the over-the-top personae she brings to life on “Saturday Night Live” and surrounded herself with a hilarious ensemble cast that turned the chick-flick genre on its head.  That image alone of Wiig riding the automatic gate to Don Draper’s love pad is comic gold.

6.      “The Descendants” (directed by Alexander Payne) – After reading George Clooney boast to Rolling Stone that he’d be “surprised” if “The Descendants” didn’t go on to become a Best Picture nominee, I went into a showing of Alexander Payne’s new dramedy with my critical force-field up.  Yet its achingly honest tone and gallows humor eventually win you over.  Clooney’s light is less intense than newcomer Shailene Woodley as his truth-telling daughter.  The family bonds forged here feel real rather than Hollywood hokum.

7.      “Beginners” (dir. by Mike Mills) – It’s hard to believe that the man who, nearly fifty years ago, played Georg van Ludwig Von Tropp in “The Sound of Music” has the gumption, not to mention the joie de vivre, to play a newly widowed man who belatedly comes out of the closet.  Playing Plummer’s son, Ewan McGregor is on hand to scratch his head and find love (and roller-skate) for himself.  Mike (“Thumbsucker”) Mills based the comedy on his father’s own coming out and cancer.  A more cross-generational cancer comedy than the also entertaining “50/50.”

8.      “Young Adult” (dir. by Jason Reitman) – After stumbling with “Jennifer’s Body,” Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) reestablishes herself by drawing up the virtually unlikable Mavis Gary, a “prom queen psychopath bitch” (lovingly described by a fellow native of Mercury, Minnesota unhappy to see her back in town and trying to break up a marriage).  Theron embodies another kind of “Monster” while Patton Oswalt delivers the laughs as a self-described “fat geek” who shares the most surprising love scene of ’11 with a wine-stained, cutlet-wearing Theron.

9.      “Hugo” (dir. by Martin Scorsese) – While contemporary Steven Spielberg stretched himself thin with “The Adventures of Tintin” and the mawkish “War Horse,” Martin Scorsese focused his attention – his 3-D attention, no less – on his first children’s film.  “Hugo” has a timeless feel, capturing the hurly-burly of an urchin inhabiting the walls of a Parisian train station and the advent of the motion picture in the age of Georges Méliès.  Is there anything Martin Scorsese can’t do? Oh, that’s right: comedy (see, or don’t see, his “After Hours” of 1985).

10.     “Moneyball” (dir. by Bennett Miller) – After last year’s “The Social Network,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin hits another home-run with Brad Pitt  as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.  Even a sports-phobe like myself could connect with a script this dizzy with details and  dialogue for grown-ups.  It’s probably time Pitt picks up his first Best Actor Oscar and why not for a willful film that venerates all of you who think outside the box – or better yet, the diamond?

THE (VERY) WORST FILMS of 2011:

1.    “Abduction” – Sorry, Twi-hards, but Jacob Black of the Twilight Saga film series committed a serious error here in the lobotomizing tale of a kid raised, unbeknownst to him, by secret agents.  Lautner is far from ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.  He has the vacant, Neanderthalic gaze of Kim Kardashian’s short-lived husband, Kris Humphries.  If only “Abduction” had felt as short as that marriage.

2.    “In Time” – A perfectly acceptable script from Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”) was marred by the calling-it-in acting style of Justin Timerblake who, like Taylor Lautner, is best kept in the chorus.  Costar Amanda Seyfried resembles a dyspeptic goldfish as she and Timberlake chase across rooftops, trying to beat the clock in “In Time.”  An acting malfunction.

3.    “Shame” – For some inexplicable reason, Michael Fassbender is being praised for playing a Manhattan professional addicted to sex in the impotent “Shame.”  Never has sexuality been so boring, characters so undeveloped, and a narrative so negligible as in Steve McQueen’s self-serious sophomore effort.  If the audience isn’t laughing derisively by the time Brandon descends into an inferno of gay bars and Sapphic three-ways, they’re not paying attention.  I returned to the lobby to dispense liquid butter directly into my eyeballs to blur this nightmare of a “drama.”  Shameful, indeed.

4.  “I Don’t Know How She Does It” – The one-note Sarah Jessica Parker fails to mix it up a bit (again) in this wannabe feminist twaddle.  Parker plays Kate Reddy, a finance executive juggling professionalism and pampers.  If only Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha had helped with babysitting duties, we might not have had to once again sympathize with the saccharine sentimentality of white woman bourgeois guilt.  Far from a breadwinner, this is a bread-loser that confirms the old adage that indeed you can’t have it all.

5.  “Trespass” – What was Nicole Kidman thinking to team up with the execrable Nicolas Cage and hit-or-miss director Joel Shumacher (“Dying Young,” “Phone Booth”)?  Cage plays a businessman and diamond-dealer victimized, alongside wife Kidman, during a sadistic house invasion.  If it’s pointless violence you’re after, “Trespass” has more than enough gore to go around.  If you play this loudly in your house, your neighbors will likely call the police due to its vociferous gunfire and relentless female shrieking.

In a year belonging to Woody Allen, it’s worth remembering a line from “Annie Hall” (1977).  (It’s a classic older than I am with insights immemorial.)  In the following, replace “television shows” with “movies,” especially the soulless “Trespass”:

Annie, in California: “It’s so clean out here.”

Alvy (Allen): “They don’t throw their garbage away. They turn it into television shows.”

Review: “Drive”

17 Saturday Sep 2011

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“Auto-matic for the People”

Film Review: “Drive” (2011)

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

 

REVENGE, THEY SAY, is a dish best served cold.  Even colder when served at midnight in the mean streets of Los Angeles, or so “Drive” from Danish director Nicolas Winding Ref (“Bronson,” “Valhalla Rising”) would have us believe.

After the film’s anonymous protagonist (played by Ryan Gosling) sees his friends victimized by ruthless gangsters (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman), he swiftly avenges their deaths in the film’s final twenty minutes, a stunning finale reminiscent of a very obvious influence here: the vigilante bloodbath known as “Taxi Driver” (1976).  But Gosling, fresh from the one-two punch of last year’s “Blue Valentine” and his comic turn in “Crazy Stupid Love,” smartly eschews a recycling of DeNiro to breathe new life into a young, marble-mouthed Brando, an über-cool Hollywood stunt driver by day and criminal getaway driver at night.

Before the pink cursive credits roll – oh yes, Mr. Ref is a stylist and “Drive” is part music video, part urban nocturne (the best shots, in fact, of the City of Angels at night since Michael Mann’s “Collateral” of 2004) – the film’s opening demands that you fasten your seat belt as Gosling’s driver escapes the LAPD with two masked gunmen hiding in his backseat.  It’s not the high-speed car chase we’ve seen a thousand times before but a vehicular game of cat-and-mouse, a chess game on squealing rubber tires.

We get to know the driver’s softer side when, inside his Echo Park apartment building, he attracts his married mom of a neighbor, Irene (played by the always-restrained Carey Mulligan) and fills in for her  husband, who’s behind bars, and takes a special liking to Irene’s small son.  “What do you do?” Irene asks.  “I’m a driver,” Gosling replies.  “Like a limo driver?”  “No, like in the movies.”   There’s a brief period of paradise – the trio drives the city’s empty culverts, á la “Terminator 2” but slowly and in the sunshine – before Irene’s husband named Standard (Oscar Isaac) returns home.  That homecoming presages the fatal breakdown of virtually every relationship in the film: the driver’s bond with Bryan Cranston as a grease monkey known as Shannon, Standard’s with Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks as a double-dealing grifter, and Perlman’s with Brooks (playing against type as a diabolical ringleader).  When the driver doesn’t shake his hand, explaining “My hands are a little dirty,” Brooks shoots back: “So are mine.”

In keeping with the film noir of “Drive,” Ryan Gosling reveals what could be called the black leather interior of his complicated character.   It’s as sleek and stinging as the scorpion emblazoned on the back of his blood-stained jacket.  The pace of this little ultraviolent gem may not be fast and furious – at times, it’s closer to rush-hour traffic on the 101 – but “Drive” is sure to pick up more than a few passengers on its road to cult status.

Review: “The Help”

25 Thursday Aug 2011

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“Separate but Sequel?”

Movie Review: “The Help” (2011)

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

IN THE SPRING of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was imprisoned for eight days in an Alabama jailhouse.  The crime?  Leading a peaceful protest against the institutionalized racism of the age otherwise known as segregation.  The result?  M.L.K’s masterwork “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” perhaps the second most important work of antiauthoritarian argumentation after that little-known piece of paper called “The Declaration of Independence.”  In a blend of aphorism and oratory, King writes of what he calls the “interrelatedness of all communities and states,” adding: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  The part, in other words, infects the whole.

The part in Tate Taylor’s “The Help” is the kitchen or the nursery in any ordinary Southern house and the whole is the deeply racist and paranoid world outside.  The uniformed maids working long hours in those humid, white-owned spaces have grown bitter and resentful after generations of hardship.  Known euphemistically as “the help,” they’ve got a few stories to tell about the white women they’re forced to “Yes Ma’am” all damn day long.  All they need is a person in power to get the word out, to publicize their notes from the underground.  They get more than they bargain for when a brash white woman comes home, proclaiming: “I’d like to write something from the view of the help.”

Based on the much-anticipated film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 best-selling novel, “The Help,” director Tate Taylor preserves Stockett’s sense that even the domestic sphere has something instructive to say about the world outside.  Set not in Birmingham but in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, the narrative unfolds inside a hermetically-sealed world of upper-class white privilege, one in which dessert forks and serving from the left still matter.  There’s Hilly (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), a veritable slave-master in a beehive who believes wholeheartedly that black maids should use separate bathrooms from whites, and Allison Janney as the cowardly mother of the film’s white heroine, Skeeter (the starlet du jour Emma Stone of “Easy A” and “Crazy Stupid Love”).  It’s not just Skeeter’s name that sets her apart from the vapid dilettanti of Jackson high society but Skeeter’s freckles, corkscrew hair, her literary aspirations, and her little interest in marriage and men.  When Skeeter returns home as an Ole Miss alumnus with a new writing job, her mother corners her about her unconventionality, worried that she’s having “unnatural thoughts” about the same sex.  “I read there’s a cure,” blurts a worried Janney, even a “brew tea” to make her more like Hilly and herself.

But Skeeter sticks to her guns and to the marginalized black help of Jackson, namely Aibileen (the indomitable Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer).  Davis earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for just eight minutes’ worth of screen time with Meryl Streep in “Doubt” (2008).   She has a fascinating face – deep and protuberant eyes always on the verge of crying – and alongside Spencer’s Minny, she’s the emotional core of “The Help.”  The two provide Skeeter with first-person accounts of their humiliations.  One of Skeeter’s questions, which we hear twice, is even sadder the second time: “How does it feel to raise white children while your own children are being raised by someone else?”  Unsure, or perhaps afraid, to answer, Aibileen can only stare at the portrait of her dead son (the victim of a racial hate crime) on her kitchen wall.   When the testimonials of Aibileen and Minny grow into Skeeter’s book-length exposé of white establishment, the joke is mainly on Hilly.

The film’s pace and performances are equally fine.  It’s refreshing to see Bryce Dallas Howard drop the usual blankness of her expression and relish in the bitchy malevolence of her role.  Her senile mother, played by a cat-eyed Sissy Spacek, garners laughs since even she finds her daughter’s racist airs repugnant.  On the narrative sidelines, perhaps, is the character of Celia (played by Jessica Chastain, the ethereal mother-figure in “The Tree of Life”) who, like Skeeter, sees no value in separate bathrooms and dining areas and relies on Minny (who is fired by Hilly for insubordination) to teach her how to cook and play the perfect wife.  The fact that she can’t get pregnant and that she’s viewed as a harlot by the in-crowd has driven her slightly batty.

By empathizing with Celia’s predicament as well as Minny’s, “The Help” smartly rounds out the various levels of subjugation at work in 1960s culture.  What’s worrisome about America’s nostalgic return to that era – thanks to “Mad Men” and its various offspring – is that the age of the skinny tie was, in reality, an age of wide disparity.  For every Don Draper in a skyscraper there were a million more Aibileens and Minnies.  The ditsy Celia is as much a victim as they are since all these women, white or black, are relegated to social roles that simply don’t fit.  The main deficiency of “The Help” is that it doesn’t do enough with this parallel form of oppression.  Too eager to please, the film loves to watch Hilly fall flat on her face over and over again, but in this respect, it can’t see the forest for the trees.  “The Help” misses the fact that racism and patriarchy are overlapping forces, which means that even the most villainous women are sometimes victims.

Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”

08 Monday Aug 2011

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“Isn’t It Bromantic?”

Grade: B (RENT IT)

IN CASE YOU hadn’t heard, the feet are the windows to the soul.  At least, the opening shots of “Crazy Stupid Love,” in which we see various couples engaged in playful games of footsy under restaurant tables, suggest as much.  The credits come to a screeching halt with the first sight of Mr. and Mrs. Weaver’s feet which, removed from each other and planted firmly on the floor, say a lot about their moribund marriage.  Worse, Cal Weaver (played by Steve Carell) is decked out in suburban dad-wear – khaki pants and New Balance sneakers – and unbeknownst to him, his wife has slept with a coworker (Kevin Bacon).  Yes, the thrill is gone for Emily Weaver (played by Julianne Moore) though she’s not sure she wants the single life either.  When the two can’t decide on a dessert, Cal suggests they simultaneously blurt out exactly what it is they’re craving.  But Emily doesn’t exude baked Napoleon, as Cal might have hoped, but “I want a divorce.”  How a good-natured guy like Cal can rescue and restore his marriage becomes the premise which “Crazy Stupid Love” pursues with entertaining results.  This is another comic success from “Bad Santa” writer-director team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa who, in 2009, debuted with the underrated “I Love You Philip Morris,” the story of a gay conman (Jim Carrey) who only has eyes for Ewan McGregor.

After free-falling into newfound bachelorhood after twenty plus years of marriage, Cal lands in a posh nightclub packed with beautiful and available women.  He becomes something of a dreadful fixture in the bar, however, as he drinks too much and bores strangers with the details of his breakup.  Carell’s delivery is pitch-perfect as we watch an inebriated Cal talking (slurring) to himself: “You know what word isn’t used much any more? Cuckold!  I was cuckolded by my ex-wife!  She made a cuckold out of me.”  And just as Cal becomes a social car-wreck from which you can’t look away, Jacob (Ryan Gosling) steps in to remake this lonesome loser into the Casanova he knows Cal has hiding inside.  In his crisp collars and tailored suits, Jacob isn’t just a clothes horse but a sartorial stallion.  Gosling is also like licorice for the eyes and even Cal is seduced; the two develop a deep and enduring bromance.  When he meets Cal at a LA shopping mall, Jacob throws Cal’s sneakers over the balcony before shepherding him through a new-clothes shopping spree, assuring him that Emily will rue the day she ever left him.  This is the capitalistic ethos personified: the road to romance runs right through your wallet.

The banal title notwithstanding, “Crazy Stupid Love” will charm you in large part because of Carell’s anxious everyman antics and the smirking ease of Gosling’s performance.  It’s good to see the latter lightening his pallette after last year’s pathos-laden “Blue Valentine.” The script is also layered with charming though familiar subplots. The Weavers’ preadolescent son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo), for example, has made a religion out of his babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton) who is too infatuated with her employer Cal to notice.  Coincidences multiply in “Crazy Stupid Love,” which is cleverly plotted by “Cars” screenwriter Dan Fogelman, but perhaps too much so in the film’s final moments.  Set at a backyard BBQ, the resolution feels like a sitcom where loose ends are tied together too tightly.  Still, in a summer cinemascape occupied by Smurfs and penguins, it’s refreshing to see a romantic comedy aimed at grown-ups as crazy and stupid as we may be.

For my “Bromance Flix and the State of Dudedom” (2010 Film Review of “The Hangover,” et al) see:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/’Bromance’+Flix+and+the+State+of+Dudedom.-a0216644249