Post-Grad

My Top Fiveish Movies of 2011

Okay, let’s just get in and get out. I have decided to make a top-movies-of-the-year list, you must decide whether this interests you. No hard feelings if you have read plenty of these, I’m afraid mine won’t be terribly different than the rest. However, I do have content that might win your time, oh inattentive reader. Like I do, there were several critically lauded movies that I really did not enjoy. So, I will take the time at the very end to explain my hilarious detractions to some of those films that snuck their sinister way onto other lists. Stay tuned for the hate.

 Away we go…

6. Beginners

 Now, I happen to be one of those people that hate spoilers, trailers, and knowing anything about a movie before I see it. Beginners proved that wrong. I knew everything about it way before hand and I still found it irresistibly charming.

Just to ruin your day, Christopher Plummer plays Ewan Macgregor’s father who comes out of the closet in his early 80’s and dies soon after of sad, sad cancer. That’s the movie. It is an autobiographical account, written and directed by Mike Mills. And, even though I, and now you, knew everything about the movie beforehand, there was an honesty and personal sincerity about it that hit home. I’ve heard some critics call it out for being sickeningly sweet, and I will admit that the love story between Mr. Macgregor and his interest does routinely brush up against the twee. Never the less, it painted an emotionally brimming and youthful account of trying to begin a new phase in one’s life, set against the background of how hard it can be to teach an old dog new tricks.

 5. Martha Marcy May Marlene

 Somehow, the Olson parents had another daughter. And, somehow, the universe decided to just scrap everything Mary Kate and Ashley touched and try again with this new breed that proves more beautiful and talented than anything before.

 I remember one critic’s take on this movie, he remarked about how the director seemed to obsessively glorify the visage of Elizabeth Olson and her physical portrayal of an early twenties girl’s escape from a land-living commune and her increasing paranoia and frustration with the only refuge she can find. And maybe it is my sincere fascination with what I found a striking performance or my baser attraction at a simply gorgeous girl, probably something in between, but I totally enjoyed this movie.

 Olson plays this wonderfully self possessed, just fucking cool girl, who is somehow smarter and more interesting than I find myself. Pardon me for using this word, but she embodies a transcendence above where normal schlubs schlub. Women like her create fashion, start trends, and don’t care about either. I believe that is why, when this same character shows cracks in her facade and begin to exhibit real, obviously deep, emotional pain, it shakes the plain upon which the movie is set.

 As the film unraveled, which I find a good word for what this movie did, I found myself wondering what exactly the filmmakers wanted to show me. The disjointed narrative and falling actions forced me to ask where they wanted to take me. Only in the final scene did it come full circle and made all intentions clear. I saw other critics find this ending difficult and maybe manipulative, but it truly did work on me. It felt like it gave me a punch line to a joke I didn’t know I was hearing.

 I didn’t even mention Mr. John Hawkes’ wonderful portrayal of the commune leader. So there, I did.

4. The Trip

 Since this is the only comedy in this list, I guess that makes it the best comedy of the year. Apologies to the never-the-bride crowd, I just liked this movie better. And what is it, you ask insufferably. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take an improvisational culinary tour of North England and annoy each other along the way with improvisation. Unabashedly English, it certainly hit that Anglophile bone that is lodged somewhere between my stiff upper lip and my cricket bat hand.

 Although, I did laugh heartily at this movie, I place it so high on my list because of the way it dramatically portrayed a lost 40 something, which would make me cleverly label it a coming of middle age movie. You may now chuckle wryly.

 In the bent cultural landscape of psychological man-children, this later in life struggle to define adulthood has affected a number of recent movies. And I ashamedly say that it strikes at something within my own determination to healthily age. This movie winningly approaches that concept with the English sarcastic exterior and never draws too much attention to that which the characters would regretfully display.

3. Drive

 Hot damn, now we get to the big stuff.

 As I sat in the theater watching Drive, I began to realize it as one of the best realizations of visual art I had ever seen.

 I frequent art like things. So what. I know you do too. And, somewhere in the back of every one hides someone’s example of video art. You know what I mean. Usually seen as a mish mash of fractals or jagged landscaped revolving, rotating, or subtly moving. The most guttural, discordant music accompanies it, growling endlessly as a soundtrack to nothing. I do not like these things. As art, I could never dismiss the stupid things. They have just never moved me.

 Drive wrapped me in synthetic fur and told me a drowsy story that numbed me until it wanted a reaction. And reaction I gave it. Soft and slow, it purred on my mind, the soundtrack being more apart of it than any movie in recent memory (musicals excluded, of course. Der.) Whether the whine of digitized orchestras or the low hum of an engine, there sang the constant white-noisy sounds, which made me feel encapsulated in a singular vision.

 And then violence happened. More than any other central complaint critics gave to this movie, some were turned off by the violence, finding it jarring or unnecessary. I don’t crave violence. I don’t need it to function on some basic level. I can get by without it. In terms of this story, however, I feel like it lulled you into this character in the way that he wanted to be shown, and then it yanked you out of it, reminding you of the nature that he couldn’t avoid. As (kind of blatantly) exhibited in the film, it presented itself as a fable, overtly the scorpion and the frog. Along the same lines, the violence challenged me in the way I want art to challenge me. It showed me things I wouldn’t ask to see, but within the narrative, I’m glad I did. I’m getting all preachy and sentimental-like regarding this’un, but it charmed the hell out of me. I have no more hell here.

 And it did this in such an interesting way. I never felt immersed in this film. I never felt apart of them and their troubles. It always kept me at arms length and I found myself wanting to get closer. Exactly like a painting in a museum. It exists. You see it. It does something indescribable to you. You walk closer to see which particular brush strokes move you the most. But never do you see yourself in the painting. Get out of that painting; you are too big for that frame.

 Wow.

 So, you ask, what could possibly top that?

2. Melancholia

 Kirsten Dunst plays the bride in what, at first, seems a family drama about the worst wedding in history, only to find her struck with crippling depression while a renegade planet named Melancholia runs on a collision course with Earth.

 This.

 So, in order to justify this penultimate movie choice, I must, as they say in the business, get personal. I have had the lucky opportunity to deal with crushing, life shattering clinical depression. I did it! At this point, it has removed itself safely from me, but all the same, its spectre haunts me like the spectre of Communism haunted Europe. The most extreme forms that writer/director Lars von Trier shows the audience, that I have known.

 With that personal bullshit out of the way, I have two reasons for adoring this movie.

 First, as said, it resonated so personally with me. Many live who, rightfully, cannot understand a depression such as this, from where it springs, or why it ruins so much. I hold up this movie as visual, contextual evidence for how I have felt, what it resembled, why it devastated. Von Trier almost makes the metaphor too obvious. Almost. Depression feels like the world is being demolished and everything you have ever loved will die and you can do absolutely nothing about it. True, true.

 So why did this movie make me smile with a warm fuzziness throughout and after?

 The second thing I loved about this movie lies in the reminder that, when you have hit that bottom, you reach a plateau (which I’m aware doesn’t fit with the bottom image, jerk), which gives you a kind of nihilistic serenity. In short, you do not give a fuck. At the utmost end, you bask in the sadness. You absorb it. You create it. And nothing will ever matter again. This film reminded me of that fatalistic peace. It comforted me in the way that weeping comforts, in the way that screaming comforts. Von Trier’s films have a way of making me feel unclean or uncomfortable. Melancholia just made me wistfully smile and sigh contentedly for old times to which I never want to return.

 And just to say it, that first 10 minutes were just some of the most breathtaking images I have probably seen.

 What, oh what, could be the tops of the tops.

1. The Tree of Life

 Okay okay okay. Now just stop it. I know everything you are thinking, and you pull those eyes back from your brow. Enough with the judgmental nonsense about how pretentious and posturing you find my list.

 Get your own list. This one’s taken.

 Now. Yes, there are dinosaurs. Yes, Sean Penn just looks all sad and walks on the beach for what is probably an exorbitant amount of time. Yes, there is an awful lot of slow nature footage with someone whispering things at you. But this movie. My good dear sweet lord, this movie.

 Finding emotional and physical correlation between the birth of the universe and the death of a child, wrapped around the struggle between the force of your father and the care of your mother makes for an extremely ambitious movie. And it just works.

 This film made me feel a part of a universally large network in a devastatingly real way. Yet still, in highlighting my insignificance, Terrance Malik made the individual’s growth so completely beautiful as we boil and groan against that which holds us. The natural connection cannot be avoided, but is almost never personally addressed, at least by myself. The childish rage felt as natural as the swirling eddies of space dust. I do not mean it a pun when I say how organic it all felt. Inconceivably, this movie connected the near imperceptible dots until it drew a picture of everyone.

 All right, maybe that sounded a bit stupid. You can make fun of that line. I temporarily lift your judgment ban.

 Still, I wept. Like, wept. Like, an hour after the movie ended. Not out of sadness, but out of the sheer beauty that I received from this vision. I now reinstate the ban on judgment.

 I continually think about it. And, I always hope I do.

 This movie made me feel like a better person, living in a more complete world.

 But it is definitely not for everyone.

 Woo, you made it this far. The pride swells from my bloated heart. If only I had some way to stop the hemorrhaging.

 I have other movies I liked this year, and there are several that I have yet to catch up on. If this list requires change, you will be the first to know.

ONTO THE DISAPPOINTMENT!

 At heart, I remain an optimist, but goddam do I hate things. I have just listed to you beautiful pieces that shook me in ways wonderful and unexpected. Please, allow me to bitch about the things that didn’t.

 Third most irritating movie that most critics loved…

Midnight in Paris

 I love Woody Allen, and have many times been an apologist for some of his lesser fare (Melinda and melinda not withstanding). While at the core of it, I found Midnight in Paris slightly whimsical and charming, I found the bulk of the movie to be inane intellectual masturbation.

 Have you ever read any Umberto Eco? You don’t need to answer that. There are a few of his books that just seem like dumping grounds for all of the various scholarly schlock he has collecting with which he found nothing to do. And your job, as the reader, is to smile into your beard with each reference you get, comforted in the fact that you do know some things and can meet this, admitted, genius on some level plane. Like I say, intellectual masturbation.

 I saw this movie in a theater full of people who were only too happy to chuckle first when Picasso said something that was an in-joke to someone with a passing knowledge of his life. How they smile to themselves when thrown a damn bone. Not only do I have no wish to be pleased with myself when I catch a literary or artistic reference, but I also have no desire to see a movie that tries to illicit that satisfaction. Fuck me.

 You can see my hate-filled review of The Blind Side here. To summarize, I loathed that white people were made to feel good for being non-racist, like they accomplished something and needed a treat for human fucking decency. Midnight in Paris, while not nearly as awful, made me feel this way.

 Second most irritating movie that everyone seemed to love…

 Hugo

 Okay, to start, I did think Scorcese used the visuals, particularly the 3D, very effectively. It played out like a rich wonderland with all the enchantment intended. Unfortunately, I found the whole thing just wretchedly boring. Every line required some beat where the other character just took in the dialogue. Long still moments evoked nothing that required such stillness. None of the characters embodied the complexity asked by such careful camera study. And before you call me out on needing frenetic pacing and what not, see above to how much I love the careful minimalism of Drive.

 On top of all of this, the plot unfolded in an incredibly clunky way. I still cannot exactly understand what everyone sees in this movie with a plot that proves so meandering and accidental. An orphan living in a train station is skilled at clockwork, then there he has an automaton, then the girl introduces him to books, then she has a key, then out of nowhere the damn thing turns out to be concerned with film. This plot tripped down more stairs then my clumsy ass ever did. Exhaustive and frustrating, then rolled in a sheet of seaweed to make tedious sushi.

 I get the Georges Méliès thing. I get what Marty wanted to say. But even for a kids’ movie, this just seemed a mess to me.

 And the number one most irritating movie that everyone seemed to love….

Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

 Man, people really loved this movie. I mean, those whose opinions and faces I hold most dear had an unabashed whirlwind tryst with this movie. So here is why their perfectly respectable views are wrong:

 1.) Just who the hell am I supposed to care about here? Jimmy john Franco is completely nothing in this movie, reading lines off of an unimpressive fortune cookie. I could not begin to tell you what his lady’s name was immediately after leaving the theater, so that’s something. And Jamey john Lithgow does a fine job with not very much.

 But, of course, this is a movie about the world ending at the hands of humanity’s cruelty and unfeeling havoc with which they molest creation. So, I guess the filmmakers would rather you care about the Andy Serkis puppet show of an ape. And I simply could not. I got it. And the visuals, as soon as ole Andy got his mo cap suit on, were terribly impressive. And I understood all that he expressed. I understood the ‘fish outta water’, ‘no place to call home’, ‘who am I’ motif that his watery eyes were trying to convey. Unfortunately, he tied it around a teenage tantrum brick and kept walloping me over the head with his angst. I continually have so little patience for self involved, muttery, under-developed, unearned dispair.

 I hear you now, cupping your hands over your mouths shouting boo, hissing like temperamental snakes, saying some version of “But it was meant to be teenage emotions, HE was a teenage apey thing. It fit with all the rest of his problems and whatnot.”

 Put your hands down. No one likes a hisser. Sure, I MAY concede that point. Which still frustrates me, because I cannot identify with such misguided, wild emotions. They seem juvenile because they are.

 BUT, wasn’t he supposed to be some biologically enhanced ape of a greater intelligence than all other, rising in supremacy with his genius? If so, you would think that he would understand Johnny Franco not having any choice in his going to the sanctuary place. You would think that Caesar would see the anguish and emotiony sad sad on his face when he visited and, I don’t know, added two and two together as four.

 Yikes.

 So, I just couldn’t care about anyone. That doesn’t discount it immediately, kind reader. I can enjoy a movie that just lets unremarkable characters interact with a dynamic world as it affects their lives in exciting ways.

 Huh.

 2.) The filmmakers set this movie in a world so utterly unbelievable and goofy that I could not make myself take it seriously. From the crazily underprotected, sloppy, and overly high tech research lab, from which Johnny steals monkey, to the embarrassingly over-the-top sadistic sanctuary (thank god they used this word to cash in on the irony), it was a disaster. Ugh.

 If you want any sympathy for the humans, why not make some of them sympathizable. If not, stop having sappy moments where we realize how little we care for the characters. Why can the circus orangutan speak and follow the sign language logic of a genetically modified Caesar? Where the hell did all those extra apes coming from at the end? Where were they going? Why would they decide to go to the trees?

 What a mess.

Woof. Hopefully, this makes up for any nice things I said in the first half of the post. I’m so glad that we were able to get in and get out of here with all the speed of something speedy. Have a good night and just enjoy the fact I didn’t do a full top ten.

Notes

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