Films of the Year 2011

Presented without much comment, but with the invitation to discuss and add your own titles, my cinema year 2011. (And apologies for text size issues - Wordpress really needs to sort out its IPad compatibility issues... When I get back to my laptop I'll fix what needs addressed here.) For what it's worth, I still think 'Andrei Rublev' is the greatest film ever made (and hope for a Blu ray release in 2012).

Just outside the top ten/Undiscovered Gems from 2011

Bridesmaids - a female 'Tootsie', and as good as that film.

Warrior - the most emotionally substantive ring fighting film since 'Rocky'.

Road to Nowhere -a slow-burning endless loop return from Monte Hellman.

Anonymous - the most underrated film of the year: an inspirational comic drama about how art can change the world.

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff - a delightful, educational, and ultimately lazy moving labor of love focused on a man who painted some of the finest images on film, and seems to have been one of the kindest people in his field.

J Edgar - An art movie with the guts to paint a historical villain as a human being.

The 'B' List

Rango

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Contagion

Drive

A Better Life

The Descendants

Melancholia

Midnight in Paris - Which is glorious when it takes place in the past; but a little didactic in the present.

Something Special, but Not the Whole Package:

The Adjustment Bureau

The Way Back

Battle LA (honest: kinetic cinema that (perhaps un-selfconsciously) presents the truth about war addiction and the lies nations tell to defend their violence.)

Paul

Win Win

Source Code

Hanna

X Men First Class

Buck

Project Nim

Sarah's Key

Attack the Block

Crazy Stupid Love

50/50

The Ides of March

The Skin I live in

Margin Call

The Rum Diary

The Muppets

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Young Adult

The Way

The Adventures of Tintin (a leap forward for animation art, with the most beautifully crafted Speilbergian chase sequence since Indy, Short Round and Willie Scott went down a mine shaft; but lacks heart and a clear sense of purpose)

Disappointments:

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol/Country strong/Limitless/The Company Men/The Conspirator/The Beaver/Harry Potter/Captain America/In Time/ Sherlock Holmes (left early but intend to see the rest eventually)Terrible Messes

Green Hornet/Sucker Punch/Your Highness/Thor/Horrible Bosses/Cowboys and Aliens

Chief Sinner

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Films I Haven't Managed to See Yet

(I'll revise this list as I see them)

Barney's Version/Biutiful/Even the Rain/Certified Copy/Jane Eyre/Meek's Cutoff/Cave of Forgotten Dreams/Sympathy for Delicious/The Trip/The Ledge/Tabloid/Winnie the Pooh/Another Earth/The Interrupters/Senna/ Amigo/Higher Ground/Margaret/Into the Abyss/London Boulevard/Twilight/Tyrannosaur/The Artist/We Need to talk about Kevin/ Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy/Carnage/War Horse/Pina/Iron Lady/Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close/Albert Nobbs/Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives/A Separation/Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Best Films of 2011 (US Release)

10: A Dangerous Method - A threesome with Freud, Jung, and Speilrein; the revelation of how flawed people can produce great work; an up close and personal engagement with how to get up close and personal with yourself.

= with: 10: Submarine - Brilliantly funny and smart coming of age in Wales tale; it's a cliche to say it, but 'Submarine' is a British 'Rushmore'.

9: Super 8 - Far more subversive than its reputation allows, more than a homage to Spielbergian childhood-wonder-and-brokenness adventure stories, but a love letter to the USA we want to believe in, wrapped in an alien invasion plot whose resolution provides a kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment for those whose vision of post-9/11 necessity asserts the primordial importance of restorative justice for perpetrators, and empathy with survivors in place of retribution and keeping victims in a place of idolatrised yet powerless martyrdom.

8: Le Havre - Gorgeous, color- and light-filled tale of community helping a lost one, managing to take in population movements, gangster cinema, the power of love, the greatness of baguettes, the simple miracle of living one day at a time, and the dissolution of boundaries between 'The Man' and 'the man'.

7: Beginners - My favorite performance from my favorite actor - Christopher Plummer - in a charming, thoughtful, moving and gloriously funny tale about learning to be yourself.

6: Of Gods and Men - love and choice and attempted atonement for religious imperialism: facing the fact that each of us if going to die for something, so we should make it count.

5: Take Shelter - A film about terrible anxiety that gifts its central character with the dignity of allowing his suffering to become a gift to the world: Take Shelter takes seriously the notion that sometimes the people we call mentally ill are actually apprehending profound truth, and both need time to adjust, and could be part of our salvation.

4: Hugo - Magical, intelligent, exciting: I felt as I had done when I saw 'ET' at 7 years old, 'The Exorcist' at 16, 'The Sacrifice' at 20, 'Magnolia' at 24... that is to say, I was watching a MOVIE that understood something about life without feeling like it, offered eschatological hope, and elevated my sight beyond myself.

3: The Mill and the Cross - Maybe the 'best' film released this year - far as the revelation of cinematic art goes; certainly the best 'Jesus film' I've seen since Denys Arcand and Martin Scorsese tried their hands at it; a work of mystery, beauty, and profound insight into the human-divine condition.

2: The Tree of Life - Too many words have been written about a film that is more about the language of feeling and sensation than semantics. We could talk for hours about it, but I'd rather just experience the film again; Malick calls to mind Meister Eckhart's astonishing adage that 'the eye with which I see God is God's eye seeing me'.

1: The Guard - My favorite film of the year; a perfect fusion of humorwish cultural critique displaying the best and worst of what it means to be Irish (and in Ireland) in the post-Celtic Tiger era.

3 Women/Warrior

In Which Olive Oyl and Carrie go Head to Head for the Sake of the Female Id, an English lad and an Australian bloke re-enact the tortured soul of American masculinity, Nick Nolte tries not to crumble, and Robert Altman smiles down from the heaven he didn’t believe in.

When you’re watching Robert Altman’s ‘3 Women’ on Blu-ray, it would be easy, if potentially clichéd, to equate the grain of the image with the seriousness of the director’s intent.  It’s like looking at the lined face of an old professor; but on Blu-ray you can see inside the lines.  Everything looks so clear on the just-released Criterion edition, and the California desert images are so evocative of a world that hasn’t yet left the Old West behind that it almost makes you yearn to be watching it on a scratched and faded print at an isolated Drive In.  The trouble with Blu-ray is that it makes everything perfect, which sometimes crowds out the space for an imperfect human response.  It can be a bit like looking at the Grand Canyon: contemplation is invited, analysis pretty much impossible.  (Think of the difference between watching ‘Attack of the Clones’ in high-definition [on disc or theatrically projected] and the first time you saw ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in a theatre; the fact that ‘Empire’ felt more substantial wasn’t just because it has a better script and you were six: the grain and the matte paintings and the models and, yes, even the performances, were more real than a computer can generate, or a digital image can convey.)

But a perfect film deserves perfect presentation, I suppose.  So ‘3 Women’ has what it warrants; and it wasn’t a bad way to spend a couple of mild insomnia-induced hours the other night.  Given that the idea behind the film came to Altman in a dream, we were on solid ground.  And when the camera opens us into a swimming pool in which young people are guiding the elderly toward their metaphysical exit, we the audience are being born too, so the shift in consciousness that comes late at night - reflective, open to something new - meant it was natural for me to be along for the trip.

Altman was an intellectual artist of the most engaging kind: his camera, fluid, as Bruce Cockburn would say, like the wind in grass, inviting us to observe just like he did, around and near the action, but never in it.  He was a man of vast tastes (too easy it is to suggest that because his films had a certain demeanor that the themes were unified - I mean, c’mon, this is a guy who had Anouk Aimee take all her clothes off to make a satirical point about fashion, put US army medics in a Last Supper tableau as a preamble to suicide, and had Harry Belafonte invert everything we think we know about Harry Belafonte so that he could channel Christopher Walken into a jazz era Missouri psychopath).  The intellect and tastes here engage the question of what it means to be human - so far, so much that’s-the-point-of-art, I guess - specifically what it means for its trio of female protagonists to be human in a world that wants to make them into machines; either as workers in the factory farm, or as the receptacles of men’s lust or anger, or as the bearers of the very image of humanity by having children.

These are not likeable people - played by Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall and Janice Rule - walking around in circles in the water as they’re dying.  Their faces are frightening, their behavior irritating; they invite pity at best, and sometimes fear, because you wouldn’t want to get too close to them, partly because they are carrying on the surface that which you fear most about yourself: that you will never know who you are, that you will always be alone in the world, and that you will spend your life trying to impress people who don’t give a damn.

The murals that Rule is painting in the swimming pool evoke archetypal myth; but the pool obviously has to be drained to permit the paint to dry: it’s a barren space for her to project her fantasies.  The 3 women seem to be animated only in their dreams: when Spacek’s Pinky convinces herself that she is someone else; when Duvall’s Millie thinks of the near-ridiculous cowboy Edgar; when Rule is painting ancient stories without ever uttering a word herself.  No one could accuse Altman of wanting to be someone else - or at least no one could accuse him of being obsessed with trying.  Is this the task of living: to avoid wanting to be someone other than who we are?  Maybe.  But is his coruscating critique of the lives of these women just cynicism?  Does the fact that the film opens with people walking round in circles, waiting to die, suggest nihilism on the part of its director?  I don’t think so.  ‘3 Women’ is the work of a man in love with cinema (not just the obvious antecedent in Bergman’s ‘Persona’, but the mythic American West too, and there’s even a touch of ‘The Exorcist‘ in the nightmare sequence toward the film’s climax)  - and just as Kubrick saw ‘The Shining’ as an optimistic film because it avers a belief in an afterlife, you can’t be entirely cynical if you’re in love.  There’s a very telling moment when Millie walks in on an elderly couple making love, on a night when they are distressed by something that has happened to a loved one.  Bad things happen, but you can still live; as a certain other film-maker/lover might say.  We’ve mislaid some of the tools that might be useful in determining how to function as a whole person; the task for now is to figure out how to figure out who you are without stealing someone else’s soul.

[Brief note: I’ve been thinking about something that Thulsa Doom, the bad-bad-BAD guy  in ‘Conan the Barbarian’ (which I saw for only the first time this month), says to the Austrian oak at that film’s violent climax, so derivative of the final encounter between Willard and Kurtz that it’s a good thing John Milius wrote that film too otherwise Francis Coppola would be the new Art Buchwald.  Thulsa Doom killed Conan’s mother when he was a child; and Conan has pursued vengeance against Thulsa Doom ever since.  When he is just about to kill his enemy, Thulsa Doom suggests that this might not be in his best interest, because his whole identity has been so shaped by revenge that he will not know how to live after eradicating his enemy.  ‘It will be as if you never existed,’ says Thulsa; and for a moment I thought that Milius was going to tell the truth about retribution: that it serves to perpetuate, not heal, the wounds of violence.  But such moments of philosophical clarity do not a Dino de Laurentiis 80s epic make; so Conan cuts Thulsa’s head off, and all is well.  Just such a kind of vengeance drives Pinky in ‘3 Women’, and in one of the most surprising collisions of artist intent I’ve seen, you can see a populist male version of ‘3 Women’ at your local multiplex right now.  ‘Warrior’ is a far more thoughtful film than its posters suggest; in fact, it may be the post-9/11/Iraq war/war on terror/WTF just happened? movie we’ve been waiting for.  Two angry brothers and a broken dad isn’t the most original narrative trope, but neither is love conquers all; doesn’t mean it can’t contain vast emotional truth.  ‘Warrior’ is about the need to transcend the violent shadow and the avoidance of anger alike; about how being a man who hopes to do justice to the calling of being human requires integration of what is too simplistically called ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’; about how people deserve a second chance, not least because your desire to withhold that chance from those who have harmed you may actually be continuing your own experience of woundedness.  It’s a wonderfully engaging, brilliantly edited, emotionally honest film that moved me.  Its vision of what the integrated US American male could be is the inversion of Conan’s path: violence begets violence until someone is willing to change the script.  We need an interruption.]

'Warrior' is on general release; '3 Women' is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion.

For What It's Worth: Oscar and I Have a Disagreement

Oscar's Ten Best Films of the Year:

Black Swan

The Fighter

Inception

The Kids Are Alright

The King's Speech

127 Hours

The Social Network

Toy Story 3

True Grit

Winter's Bone

My Ten Favorite Films of the Year (podcast review here):

Carlos

Hereafter

The Book of Eli

Lourdes

And Everything is Going Fine

Enter the Void

Howl

I am Love

Inception

Shutter Island

Paths of Glory/Seven Samurai

Hearing Stanley Kubrick’s voice on the new Criterion edition of his coruscating anti-war melodrama ‘Paths of Glory’ is like listening to a ghost; not because the director has been dead for over a decade, but because he said so little in public when he was alive.  It’s one of the characteristic delights of a marvelous disc that provides thoughtful context for a film that was so dangerous to Gallic pride that it couldn’t be seen in France for over twenty years after its first release in 1957.  It’s a powerful, painful experience to watch; a story of true horror - on the Front, and in the chateaux occupied by sneering generals playing chess with life while Kirk Douglas tries to save his men from the evil that distorted notions of honor breed.

As is so often the case with Kubrick, the actors aren’t embodying characters, but playing archetypes - you watch Timothy Carey falling apart after being faced with his own death, and realise that he was cast because he acts the way most of us would - his face is crumbling under pressure, his voice a childish moan; it’s like a high school theatre performance.  And that’s not a criticism: it’s the strength of ‘Paths of Glory’ that the people in it - with the exception of the generals and Kirk Douglas - feel like you and me.

Kubrick’s philosophy of glory underwrote his entire career: the question of what makes  a real man surfaces in narrative arcs as diverse as that of Quilty in ‘Lolita’, Barry Lyndon, Alex Droog, and most transcendently, Dave Bowman in ‘2001’.  ‘Paths of Glory’ feels like a template for everything else Kubrick made: men sitting in large rooms and talking, men and violence, men and women, opulent ballrooms, classical music, resistance heroes unable to defeat authoritarianism.  Ego and power, and the echo of formalised feet dancing at parties taking place during wars.  So the function of ‘Paths of Glory’ is to invite us into an appreciation of the director’s later work, while forcing us to think about the idiocy of relationships between people who aren’t allowed to admit doubt.

Like ‘Seven Samurai’ (below), also released by Criterion this month in a magnificent Blu-ray edition, overflowing with genuinely fascinating special features, ‘Paths of Glory’ confronts the economics of death: men who think they are in control haggling over the lives of others, playing with them ‘for sport’.  It’s a short, compact film, which gets under the skin of its star, who in one of the special features - a 1979 BBC interview - reminds us that there was a time when actors were actually expected, and willing, to talk intelligently about themselves.  You feel Douglas’ compassion for his men; and his powerless position in the war game.  You don’t need to remember much about the absurd context for the First World War to experience despair when a man is executed while on a hospital stretcher.  You don’t mind the comedy bad guys because the story is so insane that they seem ironically to fit into its scheme, prefiguring the generals in ‘Dr Strangelove’.  And when it ends, with the heartbreaking, national boundaries-transgressing song from Christiane Kubrick, the actor credited here as ‘Susanne Christian’, a young woman whom Stanley met at a masked ball (there’s a Jungian coincidence for you) you wonder if the director didn’t look back on this film as being his finest declaration that the only thing worth fighting for is love.  Kubrick got a wife, Kurosawa got a profile in the West; the rest of us got two of the greatest films ever made.

Bowie Knife

The first scene of Nagisa Oshima's 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence' (new on DVD and Blu-Ray from Criterion) is occupied with the horror of a soldier being forced to cut his intestines open as a punishment for being in love with another man.  The last image of the film is the smiling face of a soldier the night before his execution, beaming a greeting of filial affection to a former enemy.  We're in a POW camp run under the auspices of the Japanese military, where Allied soldiers are half-subjected to, and half-ignored by an honor code that proposes self-disembowelment as the response, it appears, to just about any infraction.  In between the attempted seppuku and the smiling greeting, the adorable Tom Conti reflects poetically on the mutually assured idiocy of war, Ryuichi Sakamoto gets angry, and then gets healed while his fascinating and eventually ubiquitous score overplays but not so much that it bothers, and gorgeous burnt light provides a mystical hue to what is ultimately a nightmare that becomes a dream and then finally a reality the audience always wanted: reconciliation between people who were otherwise ready to kill each other.

But not before David Bowie saves the world.

This is probably the least actorly of Bowie's screen appearances; his portrayal of callow/shallow and ultimately penitent youth is all the more resonant because he seems out of place in the movie: we know him to be something other than either the rigid Japanese or the sentimental English colonel; his off-screen status as chameleon works because he's more like us than anyone else in the movie.  He wanders through a context in which violence is sexualised, men are murdered for loving each other, and everyone is fantasising about being somewhere else.  It's probably the most erotic war movie ever made; it's a perfect companion piece to the thematically similar 'Bridge on the River Kwai', whose British Colonel is the antecedent for Sakamoto's character here: both men obsessed with honor over humanity, both undone at the last possible moment, both the points of deepest frustration for the audience.  The formal beauty of the compositions could overwhelm the point of the film: a kind of insider's apology for, or at least critique of, his nation's particular brand of nationalistic idiocy, which here is probably best summed up by the institutional nonsense of lying about killing.  Not far off my homeland's own nonsense, nor that of the day I'm posting this, when a holiday is observed in the US, marking the arrival of a genocidal maniac who no doubt believed God and his queen had told him to love the natives by burning some of them alive.  Oshima and co-screenwriter Paul Mayersberg evoke Columbus and any number of other pioneers of the sacralising of violence, by having Conti's character exclaim, 'Damn your gods.  It's your gods who have made you who you are,' at the point where he realises that he is to be killed to preserve a sense of order that was psychotic to begin with.  And it's in the confrontation of the madness of the scapegoat mechanism where 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence' takes on the deepest core of the human tendency to spiral downward into mutually assured destruction.  Regret for the past is why men war with themselves today; an unthinking assumption that someone must be punished is why we kill each other; and the film locates such regret and assumptions in nothing more complex than the cruelty of boys who become men without changing.

But it neither labors nor over-philosophises its point; Oshima trusts us to get it - the first scene is so memorable precisely because it starts half way through where you'd expect.  We're right there - in an attempted imposed ritual suicide; there's no introduction, no preparation, no consolation for those of us who want our war films to pretend that war isn't murder.

At the end, I'm left reflecting on three things (beyond the easy admiration for the remarkable career of producer Jeremy Thomas, who in the splendid interview series on the Criterion disc seems to prove that he hasn't lost any thirst for making films that are both aesthetically compelling and politically humane): How childhood trauma can both cause us to dysfunction within adult relationships, but might also provoke us to live differently; to avoid the suffering we caused others, or was caused to us when we thought we didn't know any better.  On the role of sexual repression as a foundation for violence; and how a well-placed kiss could end conflict between people.  And finally, as Thomas says, how certainty is often the enemy of peace, for in war, 'we are victims of men who think they are right'.  'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence' sounds, at first glance, like a humorous title; but it's not, and it could not just as easily have been 'Happy 4th of July'.  It's a film that begins with a man being forced to torture himself to death, and ends with the anunciation of what, for Rene Girard, perhaps the thinker most capable of explaining why scapegoating kills us all, would consider nothing less than the axis of history.  Along the way there's blue light, Bowie's blond locks, Conti's smile, Takeshi's ambivalence, Sakamoto's rage.  And a war film that sometimes feels like science fiction, sometimes like romance, sometimes like nothing you've ever seen before.