We Need To Talk About 2011: Kurt's List-ish Look at Last Year

So.  Another year has come and gone.  Festivals were attended, Cinemas were occupied, DVDs were spun and VOD was streamed.  On balance, I would say that 2011 was a banner year for film-going, judged by content and ambition of the films put out there (most on the festival circuit, mind you).  The year was not quite a 1999 or 2007, but still a solid one.  The chief driving force in the films that I watched was a placement of craft above all else.  There were so many films that were more rich with their own sense of cinema than with what they necessarily had to say.  Some might say this is empty calories, but I might argue in this year of everything in the world going to hell in a handbasket, it is refreshing enough.  Your tolerance of craft for crafts sake much says what side of the line you will be on in terms of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive or Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist or Steve McQueen's Shame.

The other big themes of 2011 in my movie-going were a) Personal drama represented by planet-in-danger consequence: Take Shelter, Another Earth, Attack The Block, Kotoko, Tree of Life, Cafe de Flore, and of course Melancholia, all focus on personal crises with an epic cosmic scope.  And b) How NOT to parent:  One has only to look at Polanski's hilarious satire Carnage, or Lynne Ramsay's horrific school shooting film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, to say that criticism of modern western social mores is well at play in cinema - both films attracted John C. Reilly who has left the Adam Sandler / Judd Apatow style comedy for the time being to make more upscale films. 

Lastly, it was the return to form to the 70s era 'cult film' - not so much the cult-film Rocky Horror Picture Show variety, more of The Wicker Man or Race With the Devil - films about cults.  Films about cults and the occult had all but disappeared until Ti West came along with 2009's fabulous House of the Devil.  The stunning Kill List was the king of this particular pack which featured the far too picked upon Red State (see it for Michael Parks' performance if for nothing else), the quite underrated The Wicker Tree (an Evil Dead II styled satire of Robin Hardy's own 1973s cult masterpiece), and somewhat overrated Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Because it was 2011, I feel I can cheat by slipping in an extra entry.  These are not numbered, but they are in order from 11 to 1:

Rango (USA)
Glad to see Gore Verbinski jump ship from the creaky Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and supervise the most Looney-Tunes fun in animation this year.  Any kids film that structures itself around Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Sergio Leone Westerns, yet still has time to recreate the famous Huggies-chase from Raising Arizona, has my unreserved love.

Drive (USA)
For Ryan Gosling's restrained performance leading an all-around game cast of characters in a film that exudes craft and style.  Want to know why going to the movies is different than reading books or watching theatre?  Drive is as compelling an answer to that question as anything else in 2011.

Hanna (UK / USA)
Young Irish lass Saoirse Ronan proves the most unlikely but compulsively watchable action star of 2011, playing a Bourne-type educated in secrecy by her rogue-CIA agent father (Eric Bana.)  An empty vessel taught the specifics of self-sufficiency with the option for revenge on the CIA handler, Marissa Weigler (Cate Blanchett sporting a feminine power-suit and a crocodile smile) who killed her mother.   It all sounds patently ridiculous, but a driving Chemical Brothers score, a change-up of the action hero mould and a nuanced series of long-take set-pieces from director Joe Wright make this potential guilty-pleasure, simply a pleasure.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (UK)
Forget the labyrinthine plot, you don't have to sweat it - that is the job of the characters and it is less the point than the clothesline on which Thomas "Let the Right One In" Alfredson hangs on display the decaying snake of England's former superpower eating at its own tail for 2 hours.  The Glengarry collection of great British actors don't even need dialogue, as this movie is all about the facial tick, the subtle gesture.  Gary Oldman gives a master class in icy precise acting as he waltzes about in the lock-box of Le Carre's dour take on the cold war spy game.

Project Nim (UK)
As much as the motion capture of Rise of the Planet of the Apes received all the attention in that surprise hit, the real gem in simian cinema was James Marsh's Project Nim.  The stylish talking heads documentary is framed like a he-said-she-said custody battle for Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee taken under the wing of academia in the effort to prove that chimps might learn sign language and possibly converse with University of Colombia grad students.  The filmmaking and storytelling takes things a significant step forward in further by using Nim's unfortunate trajectory as a means to understand all the foibles of the human condition.  The lessons learned makes PETA look like the kindergarten farce that it is.

Kotoko (Japan)
As Shinya Tsukamoto and Sion Sono duke it out to be the leading Japanese auteur in extreme-art-house drama, Sono won round 2010 with the domestic serial killer Cold Fish, but Tsukamoto took 2011 with his character study on parenting and paranoia.   One of several films in 2011 to tackle this theme - one might argue that every film in the top 5 above touch on this in one way or another - Kotoko has the loose and chaotic cinematography, the director's signature, used marvelously to depict a mother who is ill equipped to care for an infant.  Tsukamoto plays the man who comes into her life to fix her at the cost of himself in a form of cinematic martyrism.


Contagion (USA)
Steven Soderbergh re-invented the celebrity studded disaster film with this one that got lost in the shuffle of Moneyball and TIFF and labour day rush back to school.  As ABC's telemovie The Day After Tomorrow attempted to showcase nuclear war in as realistic a manner as possible, so does Contagion examine the avian-bird flu pandemic which shockingly good results.  Seeing this in a public cinema, every audience member sniffle or cough is magnified into ominous signifier, hell your own seat is crawling with germs, and the way Soderbergh lingers on the objects we touch elevate this into a great horror-show.  See it with a hypochondriac for better effect.  But see this damn movie.

Café De Flore (Canada)
Music is an emotional balm, music is an emotional bomb, and director Jean-Marc Vallee never lets you forget this two-edge sword or the power of music on people's lives with his existential drama that is the standout in Canadian cinema (barring Incendies which was released last year in Canada) for 2011.   The story asks a lot of the big questions with gusto and style:  "Are you Happy?"  "When does love and care become selfish and suffocating?"  "Is the whole soul-mate thing real, is it unique, or merely a numbers and chance?"  Also, Café De Flore is the best edited film of the year, how the editing hits the emotional beats and plot points might as well make the craft a character in the film.  More emotion than brains, but don't hold that against it, the craft on display is magnificent.

Melancholia (Denmark)
Lars von Trier's disaster masterpiece:  part vérité drama, part blockbuster end-of-the-world special effects spectacular and all earnest satire of the human condition.  The earnest satire is a particular von Trier contradiction that has been on display for much of his career, but this is the first time in a while that it doesn't feel like he is poking the audience with a stick.  Ultimately, it's a pretty great use of an obvious depression metaphor, and the film is one of those increasingly rarer drop-dead gorgeous big screen experiences.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (UK)
Instead of issuing birth control pills or contraceptives, one needs only to show Lynne Ramsay's superb film to high school classes as a deterrent to early pregnancy.  Front as a drama, but really, a horror film in arthouse clothing, the eponymous Kevin is a distillation of the collective fears and anxieties of the challenges of new parents.  The film itself seems to reside in Hades, I suppose Tilda Swinton's head-space after giving birth, and is in equal measure, soaked tomato juice, ink and bodily fluids - all bathed in harsh red filters.  There hasn't been this much red in a film in some time and there is enough compulsive scrubbing on display to make Lady MacBeth blush.  The film is not meant to be literal, and it pushes its metaphors into a memorable miasma of movie making brio.   With We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ramsay has surpassed both Jane Campion as the premiere female auteur director.

Tree of Life (USA)
There was simply no other movie made in 2011 that looked or sounded like Terrence Malick's cosmic opus.  Conflating the personal and the cosmic, Malick seems to re-write the book on how to make movies, even in light of his own previous works.  Looking at memory and existence as being as infinite as the universe itself, it makes the film that is very, very earnest and but aims for the profound.   Hell, this film figuratively and literally reaches for the stars,  and comes as close as cinema has ever came.  You, as a viewer, may have to do a lot of the leg-work while watching Tree of Life, but that doesn't make the film any less magnificent, possibly moreso...

The Honorable Mentions:  The Innkeepers, Generation P, Kill List, The Raid, Sleepless Night, Carnage, Shame, ALPS, Attack The Block, Page Eight, Tyrannosaur, Take Shelter, A Lonely Place To Die, Another Earth, Head Hunters, The Artist, Redline, Beauty Day, Resurrect Dead, Manborg, Carre Blanc, Bellflower, Love and Oslo August 31.

The most fun bit of weirdness of 2011:  Milocrorze:  A Love Story, Hobo With A Shotgun, Trollhunters and Headhunters


Significant films that I missed:  The Skin I Live in, A Dangerous Method, Certified Copy, Beginners, The Future, Wu Xia, Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, The Day He Arrives, The Flowers of War, New Kids Turbo, Bullhead, Headshot, Clown.

Yummy 2012 anticipations:  A Topiary (if it ever happens), Looper, The Grandmasters, Moonrise Kingdom, Prometheus, Haywire, Gravity, Black Out, Nameless Gangster, Savages, Cosmopolis, Under the Skin, and the sort-of Untitled Terrence Malick movie (aka The Burial.)