2012 list

Here’s my best-of-2012 list that I have finally made myself post. I saw a record low number of films from this year (barely over 100). So, if you think I’m reaching a bit with some choices, I might be. Also a note upfront that English, French, and a bit of Korean are, sadly, the only languages represented here. Don’t ask me why they continue to dominate (I did see others). As always, each ten is listed in alphabetical order because numerically ranking movies is impossible. I reserve the right to change this list until the Academy Awards (if it’s past then, I obviously haven’t changed it because this sentence is still here). Don’t ask why you should care about such an arbitrary extension of time to see other movies. As always, there’s still plenty I haven’t seen….

Amour (Austria)
Michael Haneke gives us a story about the strength of Love wrapped in the slow, helpless, eventualness of Death. His usual lack of sentimentality adds weight to a film that, by nearly any other fillmmaker, would be wrought with melodrama. Comparisons to Bergman here are apt, though I hesitate to wonder what that means for Haneke in the future. It’s worth pointing out that the two lead actors stand in for a life of Cinema, as they have been on screen for over 50 years each. Also, if you feel like killing yourself after this (or any Haneke) movie, try checking out the fake Twitter in his name…

Beasts of the Southern Wild (USA)
An enchanting film set in a world that is both our own and nowhere close; it’s a kind of ethnographic mythology of the Southern bayou. I am grateful for having seen this the theatre, since it is such an immersive experience. I am better off for being one of the people who knows that there once was a Hushpuppy who lived with her daddy in the bathtub. The lead actress (Quvenzhané Wallis) was 8 years old in this movie. Just making sure you knew that.


Cloud Atlas (USA/Germany/Hong Kong)
I have a hard time understanding why this film is so disappointing to some. It is overly ambitious, but that’s the point. A truly epic undertaking that is both experimental and utterly conventional. You may not care for a particular story, or actor, or choice of makeup prosthetic, but taken as a whole experience, what’s not to like? It is your fault if you didn’t know that the running time is close to three hours long. The ensemble is put to a uniquely great use, but, for me, Doona Bae is simply amazing.


Holy Motors (France/Germany)
Leos Carax awakens from a literal and figurative Cinema slumber to bring a tale without any context outside its own creation. Denis Lavant gets to play the fool (and the monster, assassin, father, lover, etc.) and Edith Scob gets to revisit her Franju mask. Leave any expectation of a conventional narrative behind; each performance segment is its own internal movie. The Intermission is perhaps the most joyous scene I saw all year.


The Innkeepers (USA)
A throwback to the slow-boil of the 1980s supernatural horror film that doesn’t need blood or guts to draw you in. This is Ti West‘s strongest film yet. I hope to see more. Some thought this movie was too slow. Those of us that have sat through the first hour of many a 90 minute horror movie to just see it all get started know better.



Looper (USA/China)
Time travel is a favorite conceit of mine. There’s not much screen time given to its construction here (the science part of the fiction is jokingly swept aside). Rian Johnson continues his skewing of the genre picture and gives us a nice story about weighing one’s own individuality with that of another (which, in this case, could be one’s other self). And, of course, it’s fun to watch JGL ‘s intentionally weird looking face.


The Master (USA)
I was among the initial impressions that this is not a Paul Thomas Anderson “masterwork” (that being said I also feel like I was holding it to such high comparative scrutiny), yet it was intriguing enough throughout to still be one of the most interesting movie-going experiences of the year. Joaquin Phoenix gives a performance of such physicality that really hasn’t been seen since the time period the film covers (from the likes of Dean or Brando. Seriously). Whatever you might think of the actual character (and his interplay with Hoffman and Adams‘s also less-than-likeable characters), it really is that good.

Moonrise Kingdom (USA)
Wes Anderson finally figures out that his sensibility works best with child actors as the leads. While not as nearly well directed as Rushmore, I do think it might be the best of his films after this. While I have my issues with parts of it, it does try for a less jarringly obvious musical palette this time. While it may, in ways, seem like a yellow and green version of The Royal Tenenbaums, I think it is a worthy revision of his past attempts at whatever you think he has been doing so far. I think he is a meticulously good director, but I wish he would try an adaptation of something outside his own mind for once. If you couldn’t tell, I am ambivalent about Wes Anderson. The rhetorical question that follows this statement is: Why is this film on this list, then? See above, I guess.


De rouille et d’os/Rust and Bone (France/Belgium)
This was at the top of my to-see list as soon as I heard of its existence. Maybe I had high expectations. Maybe I loved this movie anyway. Matthias Schoenaerts is, to me, simply one of the most interesting actors out there right now. Marion Cotillard is stunningly unique here. It’s a bit more pulpy than some might expect, but it doesn’t pull punches. It just throws them at you. It’s best to not try to figure out where they’re coming from ahead of time and just let the film knock you out.



Your Sister’s Sister (USA)
Lynn Shelton reconfigures the chamber drama, with a low budget, by just letting us see three great performances. Mark Duplass is everywhere now, but I am on the bandwagon. Emily Blunt (who I could normally take or leave, has never been better) and Rosemarie DeWitt give us sisters I feel like we can believe. I want to say that it’s like a ‘fractional Big Chill‘, but I’m not sure if I really know what that means exactly.

And here are another ten that stand out from the rest:

Berberian Sound System (UK)
Toby Jones plays an English sound ‘genius’ flown in to work in an Italian film studio on some sort of giallo-like “horror” movie. He doesn’t speak the language, so we don’t get subtitles. He is isolated, so we are isolated. He goes a little crazy, so…. This is one of those movies where people complain that “nothing happens in the entire film”, but its all about sound, see, so you have to listen and feel and, well, it’s slow and not very conventional. I thought it was interesting, because its not like anything I’ve seen before while also having seen little bits of all of it in other places. If anything, it has the year’s best opening title sequence for a movie that is not the movie you are watching.

Chained (USA/Canada)
Jennifer Chambers Lynch does the serial killer thing again. I was not expecting much from this film with the (intentional?) tonal mess that her previous two features were. Vincent D’Onofrio gives a performance perhaps above (perhaps even slightly outside) the construction of this film, but I found some of the scenes between him and the younger (and especially the even younger) male riveting to watch. While the suggested explanations for their motivations is a bit psychologically lacking, check this out if you like this type of depraved genre pic.

Compliance (USA)
Craig Zobel takes the ‘based on a true story’ and makes it about more than the sum of its parts. It’s about ‘merica, people; a metaphor for our an ageless time. Uncomfortable without fault. Maybe that’s why it’s the only picture on the list here that I bothered posting about previously (I tried for some others, but didn’t bother posting).



Killer Joe (USA)
Trash theatre to the extreme. Exploitation at its core. Freidkin takes on Tracy Letts again and builds an NC-17 worthy (though recut for an R-rating) farce. Lots of stupidity. Lots of uncomfortable situations. Matthew McConaughey had year full of crazy good roles and this one might be the best of them. Don’t plan on eating fried chicken afterwards…



Les Miserables (UK)
Some parts fall flat (literally), but it has enough accomplished grandiosity to be worth listing here. Hugh Jackman takes on the role like very few could do as well and Anne Hathaway‘s rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” is a glory to behold in its single take of on-set singing. Yes, there are better singers, and for some roles, even better actors, but I was pleasantly suprised at how well it turned out for such an ‘intentionally big’ movie.


Not Fade Away (USA)
David Chase (the creator of The Sopranos) captures the essence of early rock n’ roll in this anti-bio-pic of the 1960s. A story about the band that never made it. Recollections of time not so perfect. Nostalgia done right. And the soundtrack ain’t bad either.




Ruby Sparks (USA)
Zoe Kazdan (yes, grand-daughter of Elia) co-stars as the title character of her debut screenplay about a young male writer who writes himself a girlfriend out of thin air. Of course, it ain’t that easy. The film has its problems, but the conceit is such a good one, and played well enough by Paul Dano and Kazan, that it deserves a mention here.



Seven Psychopaths (UK)
I’d like to think Martin McDonagh had some problems writing a script and this was the result. Or maybe he just took a page from Charlie Kaufman and was going to end up getting this meta-crime farce out of the process anyway. Either way he manages to send up every cliche proposed while making it both funny and functional at the same time. I would guess the great ensemble of actors agreed. Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken in the same movie. How could you pass this up?


Sleepwalk with Me (USA)
Mike Birbiglia plays Matt Pandamiglio, who, surprise, happens to be based on himself (and based on the book he wrote before the movie); a stand-up comic with a sleeping disorder who is also dealing with life/relationship problems. It’s one of the best movies about road comics out there. Well, there aren’t that many. But it’s still one of the best so far. Helped along this year by the ingenious idea of having Joss Whedon challenge it in box office gross, and then appear to actually take that challenge on.


Sound of My Voice (USA)
Brit Marling gives us an intriguing little mental sci-fi drama akin to last year’s Another Earth that deals with the cult of personality and what an individual can bring to it. Though one may see where it’s going, it still seems like a great riff on the genre. Looking forward to more from her and her collaborators.




Special Mention:
Zero Dark Thirty (USA)
There’s a lot of controversy about this movie, apparently (find your own links for that). More importantly, there’s also a lot of very good film criticism about it. I have refrained from putting it in my list proper, because I’m not really sure what to think about it yet. I think this is one of those films that you can gain more from the discussion than the actual film. It is constructed in such a way as to be a springboard for whatever one wants to perceive it as. The film shows torture. The film shows negotiation. Are we to infer that the torture brings about a state amenable to negotiation, or that negotiation succeeds where torture fails? Like the film, reality does not always present a logical answer. As the links above point out, this film is about the puzzle of knowledge-building in the face of (mis)perception. I agree that the refrain: “Partial information is treated like a lie” is key. The film is nothing but partial information. Cinema is nothing but partial information (where Reality is the under-perception of all information?). Whatever one believes, (the) film, masterpiece or not, can therefore be nothing but a lie.

Cracks (2009)

I’ll have to admit upfront, I like boarding school movies. There is something about the isolation; the enclosed space of solitude among rigorous collective order that makes me interested from the get-go. And, of course, the plaid uniforms aren’t bad either. Having said that, this movie has so much else going on. For one, it stars the incomparable Eva Green. Having managed to move from Bertolucci seductress to historical queen to Bond girl to a most recently movie-stealing turn as a vamping vampiress, she is pretty impressive (some may emphasize the pretty more than the impressive, but I believe the full clause stands rather well as a descriptor). However, this is also Juno Temple‘s film. She astounds here in ways that I will not be able to articulate. So, I’ll not try to get to that yet.

Let’s point out that this is also impressively Jordan Scott‘s first feature film. She is the elder daughter of Sir Ridley. She directs this Picnic at Hanging Rock meets Lord of the Flies type setup here, with some Sapphic Jean Brodie/Lillian Hellman Children’s Hour thrown in to boot (if none of that means anything to you, then this movie will probably seem that much more unique to you). It’s a cruelly beautiful picture about lost innocence, though perhaps more specifically about the sublimation of that innocence in place of ‘growing up’.

 

 

 

I won’t bore myself with relating the plot, suffice to say it’s about a group of adolescent girls who must contend with a new girl being thrust into their clique at a private Protestant boarding school in 1930s Britain, and how it effects their being led/enchanted by their teacher and swim team coach whom they affectionately refer to as Miss G. As the story progresses we learn more about this Miss G and the dangers of said enchanting qualities. I’ll just leave it at that. It is a visually lyrical (ok, I don’t really know what that phrase means) piece that unfolds with rolling landscapes and an attention to recreating a time and place that I would obviously know nothing about personally.

Unlike, say, The Moth Diaries, another erotically charged girls boarding school film from earlier this year, it is entirely grounded in reality. Yet, this reality is an enclosed one in which its characters live in a kind of fantasy world of stories that fill their developing minds. While it borrows from some of the aforementioned films in its depiction (the look of Weir’s Picnic comes easily to mind), it feels like it is its own creation.

The film noticeably contains absolutely no male characters, aside from the few brief scenes outside the school. I mention this because I do not want to force a Queer view onto the film, but it calls for one quite clearly. The tension is there from the opening moments of the film. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the film to me. The genre obviously carries numerous examples of this, but I cannot think of another film off the top of my head that treats its subject in such a way as to balance its flights of fancy with an equal sense of dark paralysis.
Some have/will criticize the film for its lack of development near the end. We naturally have questions. I have questions about the Juno Temple character, Di, and how her experience here informs her own sexuality. The film chooses to leave this aside, despite my feeling that this is in large part what her character development is about (and by extension what a significant portion of the film is partially about). Scott seems to intentionally ride-the-line between innocent girlishness and full-on homo-infatuation (if you will excuse the uncouth phrase) in a way that is entirely non-verbal. This is frustrating, but not altogether unaccomplished. Miss G equally acts alongside the girls (or perhaps more so) as if she lives within a fanciful story, yet because she is an “adult” the film occasionally reveals her true emptiness of character as a person. The ‘midnight feast’ scene comes to mind with Temple in her quasi-drag paste-on mostauche, crouching in candlelight, applying makeup to the Spanish princess. The scene screams for an intimacy that is beyond the years (in age) of the girls. Contrasting this with the subsequent scene of said princess with Miss G underlines that innocence. As I write these veiled not-so spoilery thoughts, I want to make the comparison to Sofia Coppola‘s The Virgin Suicides. Cracks is, in my mind, a much more accomplished take on this time of adolescence. Perhaps this is merely because it avoids the music-video-like aesthetic for a more conventionally ‘painterly’ cinematography (perhaps it is too simplistic to attribute this to a stereotypical difference between American and British visual tastes?). Though perhaps its superiority comes from its being made by a woman more mature (in age and obvious influence) in her debut film.

 

 

 

A more tangential thought follows here about how children learn from their filmmaker parents. It wouldn’t be fair to compare these individuals on the basis of one film (or retrospectively across an unbalanced output), but I find it interesting, personally, that I am more impressed with this debut than Sofia Coppola’s, because I have recently come to realize how much of the output of Ridley Scott that I consider as ‘auteuristly groundbreaking’ (or whatever you want to call it) as that of Francis Ford Coppola. Trailing back off into the land of incomprehension now….

Compliance (2012)

Compliance is a disturbing film. Some critics are laughing at its ‘unbelievable’ plot, despite it being based on true, verifiable stories(obviously, don’t click if you do not want to know what happens in the film). I think these critics are missing the point (I would link to some, but I don’t want to single any one out in particular). It is not a story to be entertained by. The writer-director, Craig Zobel, is not wanting us to get lost in the story. We are supposed to be questioning the believability here. In our questions of “How could this ever happen?” or our flabbergasted exclamations of “There’s no way this would ever happen!”, we should be reminding ourselves: But it did happen. And go back to our original question.
It’s all there in the title: Compliance. Just as some people are programmed to never respond well to authority, others are the opposite. There are many people that would do whatever someone in authority tells them to do, because that is what they have been told is the right thing to do. And everyone wants to do the right thing (even if they don’t know what that actually is). This is backed up by countless examples like the infamous Stanley Milgram experiment. Society conditions subservience. After all, that is what civilization is: a collective reigning in of our individual base instincts and desires.

What makes this film so interesting is the way in which it leaves us to work all of this out for ourselves. Perhaps I am putting way too much onto the film myself that is not actually there in its construction. I would argue this is not the case, though. It is specifically framed in ways to prompt us to bring up these questions. However, it is only a questioning film for those in the audience that are prompted to question it. It is making its point by showing us our own predilections. If you say, “that could never happen”, then are you predisposed toward not being one of the characters in the story? Do I find this disturbing because I am one of those people who is more likely to blindly follow authority? I don’t think I am, but I wonder if there are less extreme situations where I have/have not done just that. For those that are so cynical as to laugh at the unbelievability of the situations, I wonder if some of these viewers are merely laughing at their own blindness; not being able to see the nuances of psychological control that are at work here. That may seem pretentious on my part to suggest this, but since these things actually did happen, one has to wonder why some people have such a strong negative reaction toward the film’s believability. There is a lot to not ‘enjoy’ about the picture, but I don’t expect to be entertained by everything I see. Sometimes a film makes me think. That is usually an indication that I will want to let people know about it. Because I allowed it to manipulate me into a state of contemplation. The difference here between this film and, say, primetime news or a non-fiction documentary, is that it is dramatized. We are predisposed toward empathy (and therefore emotional illogicalness) here. Like with his debut feature (Great World of Sound), Zobel gives us an underlying layer of emotional argument filtered through a documentary-like aesthetic. Though, most of the news is just like that nowadays too. Maybe a little more critical thinking in that arena might do us viewers some good too…

Jeff Who Lives at Home (2011)

I don’t write on this thing as much as I’d like. Truthfully, I really only pick movies I feel like writing about at the time, or, on the rare occasion, feel like I can articulate something worth reading. This is one of the former, I guess. The Duplass Brothers have something and I can’t quite articulate what that is (see above). Here I go failing to do that: They made The Puffy Chair for $15,000+ and showed a bit of it. They made this very similar film for around $10 million, but wrote a better script. I have seen all of their collaborations together and think that they are gradually becoming better filmmakers with each film. While their previous feature, Cyrus, may share the same fate as this one (meaning that it was hated by a lot of people who were either mislead by the trailer or thought it was going to be something it is not), these brothers are carving quite a quirky niche for themselves in developing awkward dramedies about people who see very little comedy in their own lives. Like the above-mentioned first feature, this film follows characters who may not learn much about their own lives (or the film just doesn’t go beyond that point to let us see it), but it serves to allow us as viewers to process our own relatability through the emotions they display throughout the story. Despite that ridiculously convoluted sentence (see what I mean about articulation?), these are simple stories with simple problems. Whether or not you like the films depends on whether that’s enough for you, I guess.

This is the story of two possibly-perceived-as-loser brothers who seemingly have no direction to their life. Jeff is a 30 year old man who looks for signs in everything (even in the movie Signs) to guide his stoner Buddha-like existence while living with his mother and apparently not doing much else (He is obviously the character Mark Duplass would play, if Jason Segel wasn’t available). His brother Pat is played by Ed Helms with a kind of seriocomic naiveté that removes nearly any ability to laugh at or with him (I’m not sure if this makes me like the performance more or less). He is a man in stereotypical 1/3-life crisis who can’t see the forest through the trees, or whatever metaphor you want to use for his lack of attention to his relationship with his wife (played well by a noticeably more raw than usual Judy Greer).

I feel like I’m getting into plot summary here and that is not my intent. The whole point of this movie is following the emotions of the characters and seeing where it unpredictably takes you. The Duplass Brothers say they are influenced most by documentary filmmaking. While this movie does not try to be like a documentary in form (like, say, The Office), it makes use of a DV aesthetic that allows them to focus on the actors rather than the visuals. This is not a movie with great shots or camera movement. In trying to find some stills to add to this post, I had some frustration with getting a decent static image from the lack of attention to character framing or the numerous readjustments of shot length in the middle of a scene. The Duplass Brothers do not seem to be interested in a conventional cinematic display (though they do show occasionally that they are capable of beautiful images of their actors). They simply choose to film the actors in the loosest way possible to capture the emotion they are going for. Mark Duplass has said that, while there is always a traditional script to work from, he prefers that actors improvise, make up their own dialogue, and do whatever works best for the story. This is one reason why they are getting more exposure, because there seem to be a lot of people that want to work with them…

 

 

 

 

 

I was suprised by how much I enjoyed The Puffy Chair, a film that became one of the first to be labeled with that post-millennial moniker of “mumblecore“. I’ve written about this term before, so I’ll spare you my tirades on the breadth of difference between all these filmmakers that are lumped together under this ‘movement’. This film is especially different than those that I have seen in that it chooses to focus on the mother (Susan Sarandon), an older woman, as its main subplot and it has a final act that is markedly not like any of the others (spoilers withheld here and ahead).
I liked the ending of this movie. It worked for me. Other people will be disappointed, or perhaps even infuriated, based on their expectations coming into it. This is not a traditional comedy. Despite it starring two actors who are mostly known for comedic roles, this film is on the other side of the dramedy coin, so to speak. I like that. I do not need to laugh out loud, if the film is trying to do something else. I won’t try to presume that I can tell you what to feel that this movie is doing, but I have my own version of what that is. While I have some distance from the film now, when it was over I did think it was one the best films I have seen this year. It still is, but I know that’s a personal choice and nowhere near an objective one.

Caged (1950)

Despite being an multi-Academy Award nominated film (Screenplay Virginia Kellogg, Supporting Actress Hope Emerson, and Best Actress Eleanor Parker), this film has been relegated to the Cult Camp Classics label by Warner Brothers on DVD. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve had problems in the past with the “camp” signifier, especially for films not necessarily intended as such. Though this apparently was originally envisioned as a Bette Davis/Joan Crawford vehicle to be titled The Big Cage (according to IMDB), I don’t see much of that carrying over in its finished incarnation (though imagining Davis as the inmate and Crawford as the warden, or vice-versa, makes me want to see that movie!). There are plenty of moments of heightened acting in this film, and the most blatant Sapphic references of probably any Hollywood picture of its time, but it seems to play it quite straight most of the time. Maybe some of the more sober moments come out of give-and-take rewrites with the studio over its wavering morality messages? This is a picture that aims to depict the seediness in the Women’s Prison, while introducing the idea of needed reform. Though, I noticed with interest how blatantly the film suggests that a lack of progress in this area comes specifically from a divide in gender. Men hold the power and they are ignorant of its uses and abuses. While its Prison Matron Harper is portrayed as a corrupt power hog, indoctrinated into the male idea of abusive punishment as a kind of reinforced subservience, Agnes Moorehead‘s Warden Benton fights for a more humane approach to reform and rehabilitation (that I suppose can be coded ‘feminine’, since it is the marginalized one?). It is a clichéd dichotomy at this point, though I don’t know how novel it was for the genre at the time. The interesting part is the defeatist attitude the picture allows of itself. The coda to the film, while functioning as a bit of a Code-inspired justice tag, paints a rather bleak picture of the Warden’s progressive mindset. Bottom line: It is a borderline B-picture, but a B-picture elevated by the talent involved.

 

  

 

IMDB points out that Eleanor Parker’s role here is the tenth that John Cromwell directed to a Best Actress nomination. Though I haven’t seen much of her work (and when I have, like in The Sound of Music, I didn’t know who she was), she is clearly an interesting ingenue. I think I first admired her in The Man With the Golden Arm (in which she is crazily magnificent) and later in The Naked Jungle (a decent Charlton Heston action-adventurer that the last Indiana Jones film stole its ‘ant scene’ from). She is clearly over-the-top in some scenes, but even here her performance is spectacularly accomplished. It all serves the material and the film is better for the presence she brings to it. And not just because of the ‘haircut scene’. I wonder whether her or Cromwell might have seen Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (I’m not sure how available it was before being discovered in that Norwegian Mental Ward closet in 1981). It’s been a few days now since I’ve seen this film, and I am still impressed (which is why I felt compelled to write something about it).

People frequently use the phrase that some films are ‘tame for today’s standards’ as some sort of pejorative qualifier, but you really cannot compare these pre-Method/pre-New Hollywood films with more contemporary ‘realistic’ acting. It is a continuum that has to be looked at in context (which is why it peeves me to no end when certain people complain about early Method actors looking ‘fake’). I guess my point is not that Parker is rivaling Method-like-ness innovation, but that her approach here is so above the need of the film. She (and her quasi-noirish direction) carry this film into an eminent watchability, that I would hope is more appealing to those less inclined to watch these so-called period pictures. I liked the fact that this really seems to have been intended as a “woman’s picture” more than an exploitation film. Films like Caged Heat or Chained Heat obviously came later. I found myself wanting to compare this to something like the Cagney picture Each Dawn I Die (an earlier, higher-budgeted WB male prison drama, granted with a more narratively complex story). I haven’t seen Ida Lupino in Women’s Prison, but that might be where to go from here…though I can’t expect there will be better lines than “Thanks for the haircut” or “Pile out you tramps, it’s the end of the line”….

The War Game (1965)

Peter Watkins made The War Game in 1965. This was only four years after the Bay of Pigs, yet marked 20 years since the attack on Hiroshima. And, as we know, retrospectively, we had decades more of the “Cold War” threatening Thermonuclear War. This film is a staged documentary (before such a thing was its own genre) made for the BBC to staunchly dramatize the realism of what would happen in the aftermath of a nuclear strike on Great Britain (specifically 40 miles away from its location around Kent). The cameramen, Peter Bartlett, was an actual news cameraman (occasionally being literally pushed around by the director with his telephoto lens to capture an air of shaky realism within crowds). The narrator, Michael Aspel, was an actual voice of the BBC. The film was self-banned from broadcast by the BBC, some say for its gruesome depiction of the situation; some say for political reasons (probably for both). It won the BAFTA for Best Short Film and, more noticeably, the Oscar for Best Documentary Film in 1967, despite being a document of events that did not actually happen. Even out of its historical context, it is probably one of the most intentionally damning documents I have ever seen.

Arguing not necessarily against nuclear armament (it seems to realize we are beyond any point of return), it highlights the utter ridiculousness of our assumption that it somehow comes out of a ‘civilized’ world. As the best of art, its purpose is to inform and compel thought. It questions the cultural “silence” on this issue that effects every single person in a war-fearing country. It attempts to persuade its audience of the wrongfulness of nuclear weapons by providing much needed factual information in the context of an emotional depiction. I think it still works.

At a point, one commentator mentions that while we were within the Atomic Age technically, we were (and still are) in the Stone Age, emotionally. The film uses a cross-cutting effect of having dramatization juxtaposed with talking head “interrupters” (as DVD commentator Patrick Murphy terms). This serves to further reinforce its documentary style. This tactic also aides in its realism by cutting away from showing certain actions that would never be shown on television. Though it still shows much more than anyone would ever expect to see on television in 1965; Burnt bodies, mangled limbs, shock and horror on the ashen faces of its people in the background, the film does not shy away from attempting a realistic portrait.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It uses simple effects like overexposure or shaking the camera to dramatize the blast, but they are no less effective than any more complicated contemporary special effect. The “firestorm” scene is created through a combination of effective editing and well-researched and directed movement of actor’s bodies. The makeup used to show burns and blood is that much more effective in the fact that the black-and-white does not need to be fully real, but rather more familiar as television and photojournalist ‘real’.

Before and during the still effective dramatizations, Watkins shows interviews with people to ask their knowledge of what the bombs are made of, if they would want retaliation, etc. It depicts a general ignorance and lack of forethought (and emphasizes this with the fact that readiness literature was not made easily available to the public). Watkins used unprofessional actors throughout. The interviewed people were acting too, but he began asking these questions without a script to prompt a more genuine response. Another stroke of genius in this masterpiece of its time. And I think this is still much more effective than a more blatantly satirical (and overtly political) work like The Gladiators (which is, in a way, like a proto-Hunger Games for adults). I haven’t seen much of Watkins’ work yet, but that will be changing shortly…

2011 list

I’ve finally given in and made my list of favorite films from 2011.
Below are a “top ten” that is admittedly a bit arbitrary and another ten, most of which could be in the top ten also if there was more room. As always, there is no ranking, since I find it ridiculous to compare completely unalike movies (If you want me to even try to do that, you’ll have to ask). With the exception of Drive (which I happened to see twice), this is all based on first impressions…

Akmareul boatda/I Saw The Devil (South Korea)
Gruesome, brutal, violent, bloody. This film is all these things, yet it is uses them within the context of asking a classically moral question: Can one truly confront evil without becoming evil oneself? Choi Min-Sik takes on the other side of the Oldboy coin here, in a way, while Lee Byung-Hun delivers his best performance since, well, the last Kim Ji-Woon movie he was in. This is the latest in a number of impressive films since his debut at the height of the so-called Korean Wave in the late ’90s (FYI: He has been recruited to helm the Schwarzenegger resurrection as his introduction to Hollywood).

Le Bruit des Glacons/The Clink of Ice (France)
Here’s the other movie starring Jean Dujardin that came out in 2011 (The Artist, despite being an enjoyable film, just doesn’t quite work the way I wanted it to as the mainstream po-mo “silent film” that was inevitably coming). From aging provocateur Bertrand Blier, this film concerns an alcoholic writer who is visited, and subsequently hounded, by a human looking representation of his own cancer (a kind of cancer buddy, if you will). A zany, kind-of-funny-even-though-some-of-it-shouldn’t-be romp that loses a bit of steam along the way, but is still as entertaining as nearly anything else I saw this year. Perhaps stereotypically “French” in ways that can either be seen as a positive or negative, depending on your own personal taste.

Cold Weather (USA)
Aaron Katz, uber-mumblecore auteur, brings a slow-burning regular-people type-mystery story that will either be annoyingly slow or freshly interesting depending on your interest in its interest in the slacker-type, Portland-set, late 20′s age stuck characters. Like in the films of Andrew Bujalski, another of the ill-monikered mumblecorers, the focus is less on driving a particular plot or character development than evoking an overall tone and situations of the characters (though Katz seems to have a much better eye for the visual). You may not find the characters all that particularly interesting, but that’s how most people are in reality, right?…

Contagion (USA)
Steven Soderbergh happens to make one of the best films of the year without seeming to infuse it with any sense of excitement or flair. There is a style here that comes from his superior craftsmanship, but it is a purposely detached one. The film is a percolating genre exercise that rides a line between horror-thriller-mystery in a way that can almost seem emotionless at times. The massive scale of such a plot and set of characters is handled in such a way as to include only the minimum needed to coalesce into one of the finest ensembles of the apocalypse of recent memory. I really hope the man doesn’t stay away from movie making too long.

Drive (USA)
Nicolas Winding Refn comes to America. This is what that looks and sounds like. An experience of a picture that is less about driving than it is about changing lanes. I think there is a level of corniness in this picture that exists right along side the ”serious” violence it displays in its execution. It’s not quite laughable; it’s not black comedy, but it’s an otherworldliness that prods you into its movie-ness. It is a movie for people who like movies. Another genre exercise turned on its head: Pulp fiction at its best. Neon-noir, as it has been coined elsewhere.

Hugo (USA)
Scorsese makes a(nother) love letter to Cinema inside a children’s picture, shot in the adolescent technology of 3-D, based on a massive picture book by a man with the last name Selznick (yes, he is related to David O.), Scorsese gets a wonderfully clever story from John Logan‘s adaptation, about how Time and Technology effect our future that can also just be a simple adventure tale for all ages. This is a marvelous film that is an easy pick for one of the best of the year. If you don’t agree, you must not care about movies much. Or Méliès. [I admit there is a sentimentality here that may turn some people off, but imagine how horribly different this film would be if, say, Spielberg directed the story of a orphaned boy seeking out his father in the machine...yeah, exactly].

Submarine (UK)
It would be unfair to say that this is like a British Wes Anderson movie. It is the first feature by a very talented Richard Ayoade (probably best known from television show The IT Crowd) of which I hope there are many more. While not as overtly comical as his previous television work, this film is a quirky coming-of-age tale with a way-too-smart-for-reality teenage protagonist who has parents (Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins) who are way too much of a literary construction. But none of that keeps me from thinking that this is one of the best films of the year.

Tabloid (USA)
If people in documentaries could be eligible for Best Actress honors at the Oscars, I would nominate Joyce McKinney. I didn’t know anything about this story, part of which was apparently quite well known in the (British) tabloids in the late 1970s, so I was glad to be amazingly surprised by what is told of it, fact or fiction, in this Errol Morris film. Morris always chooses interesting subjects for his films and he always delves deeper to find something beneath the surface of what most have seen before. This has to have the most outrageous ‘plot’ of any movie I saw this year; stranger than fiction indeed.

The Tree of Life (USA)
Yes, this movie is divisive (It apparently forced many theatres to revise their ticket refund policies). I recommend it at my own peril. It is not for everyone in a similar way that 2001 is not for everyone. But to say that either of these films is “bad” would be a disservice to Cinema. A grand experiment in narrative and philosophy, Terrence Malick gives us a movie about, well, EVERYTHING. I was in awe in a way I know I will probably not be experiencing from a film for quite some time…The most apt word I can think of to describe it would be ‘glorious’.

Womb (Hungary/France/Germany)
A great piece of conceptual sci-fi that touches on the subject of human cloning in a way that I have never seen depicted before. Starring Eva Green and Matt Smith (filmed before he became the Doctor). Despite its slight obtuseness, it is both thoughtful and provoking, as science-fiction should be. I wrote a bit about this below, but I prefer to say as little as possible. Certainly not mainstream fare, though. Just warning you.

Here are some more titles that I liked (I saw 140 or so movies from 2011, so I have to be allowed to like more than ten):

Another Earth (USA)
Conceptual/lo-fi sci-fi as a backdrop for a picture about the curiosity of the Unknown and seeking out a life outside oneself; Meaning that the sci-fi is very minimal. However, it is ultimately a piece the very terrestrial concepts of regret, forgiveness, and redemption. A couple of truly great scenes make this worth seeking out. And it has a man who will probably forever be referred to as Tom Cruise’s cousin as the male lead. (I really wanted to see Sound of My Voice, Brit Marling‘s other more overtly sci-fi from this past year, but it apparently hasn’t been properly released yet).

Le Havre (Finland/France)
Aki Kaurismäki gives us yet another tale of awkward people who emote very little and are unaware of the (sometimes very funny) comedy of their situations. I haven’t seen a lot of his films, but he is known for an immediately distinct visual palette with a style that adds a bit of social commentary and, sometimes, like in this film, a couple rock n’ roll songs in concert. An acquired taste, but a good place to start if you’ve never seen him (He and his brother, at one point, apparently accounted for a third of all film production in Finland).

Jane Eyre (UK)
Mia Wasikowska deserves some sort of award for being most prolifically better than the films she was in this year (also see Restless and Albert Nobbs). Michael Fassbender could possibly be the male equivalent to this (eventually). So, this gets a spot here for them. And it made me cry, even though I knew exactly what was going to happen. The story is great from a great book and has been told/filmed countless numbers of times, yet Cary Fukunaga still manages to make it seem romantically modern (romantic with a capital ‘R’ and modern with a lowercase ‘m’?).

Jodaeiye Nader az Simin /A Separation (Iran)
I am assuming this will win Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars this year. I sought it out because Scorsese and another filmmaker that I like (but can’t recall who) recommended it as excellent. It is. A couple in Iran, with a child and an elder who needs home care, separate because one wants to get a divorce. To go into any more of the plot might be too much. This is a family drama, a look into the legal system of Iran, and, perhaps, a commentary on the universal self-servingness of the adult individual. Surely soon to be remade into English so certain people don’t have to bother with the oh so horrible burden of subtitles and exposure to different cultures…

Like Crazy (USA)
A surprisingly effective drama about the impact of immigration on young love; A mature look at the emotions involved in a long distance relationship. Your level of appreciation depends on your emotional connection to the portrayals of the two leading young actors (Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin) who are said to have improvised a majority of the dialogue with the director. Probably because of this the film story is told in chunks, with what could be seen as having particular important parts missing, but it still works.

Meek’s Cutoff (USA)
This has the other great Michelle Williams performance from 2011 (the other being Marilyn Monroe). This is basically a stab at ‘Oregon Trail: The Movie’, if you want a blurb-like description. Yet, it is shot by a filmmaker, Kelly Reichart, who is focused on atmosphere and construction over traditional narrative. It is a digitally shot, anti-Cinemascope landscape picture that looks spectacular in the right viewing conditions (as I was privileged enough to see it in). It is a Western that plays with the idea of what a “Western” should be.

Melancholia (Denmark)
I was initially underwhelmed by this film, thinking it was a step back for Lars Von Trier. One could see it, in a way, as a more passive companion to Antichrist, with its introverted depiction of Depression that he has been personally wrestling with.  The plot point of a planet named Melancholia potentially, devastatingly colliding with the Earth and all its life is yet another grand metaphor Von Trier uses to depict his take on Humanity. I ended up liking this film much more a few days after I had seen it, but I need to see it again before making any personal conclusions. It’s is perhaps unfair to ‘downgrade’ the film because it doesn’t match up to his previous work for me (this is clearly no Breaking the Waves or Dogville), but I include it here because some people don’t care for him at all and that is a shame.

Midnight in Paris (USA)
Near the start of the year, this was the only picture I had seen that I knew would show up on this list. This is one of Woody Allen‘s best films in the past couple of decades. To some, that’s not saying much, but for a man who has consistently made a film EVERY year or two for over 40 years, it should be celebrated when one turns out as well as this. A magically simple tale of love and art with an flightily acerbic Owen Wilson marvelously standing in for the filmmaker in his first great role outside of a Wes Anderson movie.

Le piel de habito/The Skin I Live In (Spain)
This movie is like a mashup of Hitchcock, Eyes Without a Face, and a bit of Last Year in Marienbad. So, basically, it’s another Pedro Aldomovar picture (complete with references to even his own past films like Atame!). He always makes great looking films with great looking women. He also tends to provide really good roles for those women in a way that the majority of other filmmakers do not. I initially thought the plot was a bit too off somehow, but I like it just fine anyway. I regret not championing his previous film higher last year, so I’m hoping I don’t regret the same with this (or any of the other choices) when I get a chance to see it again…

Tyrannosaur (UK)
This movie starts out with a man kicking his own dog to death in a fit of alcoholic rage. And then he moves on to other humans. But he’s not a completely unsympathetic character. At least not in the end. Paddy Considine‘s debut feature as a director shows the possible redemption of a harsh life through  the power of kindness from those who have no kindness given to them (Olivia Colman is amazing). A punishing character study made more interesting by Peter Mullan‘s performance (Warhorse this ain’t). And, yes, the title is explained, but it’s obvious early on that if there are dinosaurs in this film, they aren’t from the prehistoric era.

Special Mention:
Kill List (UK)
I was completely bored with the entire first hour of this movie, so it doesn’t really belong here. However, it might have the best ending I saw all year. It’s like three different movies in 90 minutes: a troubled marriage drama, a hitman documentary, and a I-wouldn’t-even-dare-spoil-it (in case you actually want to see it). Well, it’s not great, but it was completely unexpected, since I had no idea what this movie was about at all. And now I am inclined to think there might be more to it the second time around, if I ever were to watch it again…

Special Mentions of movies with notable lead performances (aside from Polanski‘s film, all by women perhaps not-so coincidentally) that all stand out better than the films themselves: Albert Nobbs, Carnage, L’Crime D’Amour, Hanna, Svinalängorna, Trust, We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Whistleblower.
I also have a whole list of movies I did not get to see. Most notably among these are A Dangerous Method and Take Shelter, which I have wanted to see since I heard about their existence over a year ago….and I am still waiting.

I wrote this quickly, so let me know if you care to have me expand on any of these movies. Or feel free to leave your own comments, etc.