But mostly I really wasn't able to catch as many films as in other years. I missed half of the films I wanted to check at the IFFR, I had to skip the Imagine Festival in Amsterdam this year, and the films I did see with friends were mostly out of curiosity (cough "Sucker Punch" cough). In total I missed three separate screenings of Miike Takashi's "13 Assassins" this year, one of which was the longer Japanese cut! I finally caught up on it through the pleasures of BluRay, but still...
On top of that my targets for reviewing here at ScreenAnarchy switched somewhat from cinema to anime DVD-releases, which is just as fun to do but does not give you many 2011 titles to watch.
So keep that in mind while perusing my list. I'm still playing catch-up with 2011 now that more and more of the films I missed this year are getting to be available on disc, and I'm watching films on a daily basis. Maybe in a few months my list would be quite a bit more definite, but I don't intend to wait that long. To counter this a bit I will start with a short list of what I missed, yet I suspect would have been on the list had I managed to see them.
Sometimes circumstances just work against me.
Drive
Tyrannosaur
Tree of Life
Troll Hunter
Incendies
'Nough said. I am ashamed.
I am VERY ashamed...
Especially about "Incendies", as I've bought the film a while ago and it's looking at me every single night. It won the 2011 International Film Festival Rotterdam's audience prize with a ludicrously high 4.739 audience rating, out of a possible 5.
I've even put the BluRay on several times, and the trailer alone gives me goosebumps already. But somehow I fear watching the film itself, for I am sure it will hurt me...
Runners up:
It's always the same isn't it? One moment I doubt whether I've seen enough films to even make a top ten list, but before you know it there are more than ten. Some pruning later I had my list but these were the ones which had left it.
Lee Chang-dong was back and both he and his lead actress (in this case a vibrant Yun Jeong-hie) could go on a world tour of gathering awards as usual. Once again Lee made a beautiful film showing someone getting ground to bits by circumstances, but that "Poetry" doesn't become a gloomy mess is because both Lee and Yun show a cast-iron dedication to the lead character's sense of morality, and the dignity she can take from that. The film also shows the joy of discovering the poetry that is in the world, though you sometimes have to look pretty damn hard.
By all means this film ought to be in my top-ten but for one detail: I couldn't be bothered to find out who was the spy. I loved Gary Oldman's Smiley trying to solve the question and both Mark Strong and Tom Hardy were marvelous, but the reveal was empty for lack of any feeling regarding any of the four suspects. Apart from that this was almost the best film of 2011 and a wonderfully shot revisit to the cold-war seventies.
Speaking of nostalgic visits to the seventies: put on an Abba record, give me a Tintin book and I automatically revert to my inner seven-year-old, 35 years back.
Spielberg often makes films in pairs, releasing both a serious drama and a matinée entertainment at the same time. Normally the matinée film will suffer and be the worst of the two, but in this case there really was nothing wrong with "The Adventures of Tintin". Not a top-ten film but I had plenty of fun at the cinema.
That director José Padilha is not in jail right now may be astonishing, for his follow-up to the very good "Elite Corps" is a call to arms like no other. It almost screams for a revolution against the Brazil government and while most of the political villains may have their names changed, Brazilians know damn well who the real-life counterparts are. Picking up after the events of the first film, "Elite Corps 2: The Enemy Within" shows what happens to Rio after the war on drugs is basically won. The revered BOPE squad has grown into a small army, but the vacuum in greed and crime that is left when the drug gangs have been annihilated gets filled with something worse: armed militias, covered and pampered by politicians looking for easy votes...
Some overblown melodrama keeps this film out of my top ten, but only just.
And now, finally, my Top 10 of 2011 in no particular order:
I am fondly remembering a time when Korean cinema kicked our collective asses on a regular basis, Park Chan-wook especially rocking our world three times in a row with his Revenge trilogy. Well, even though it is not by Park Chan-wook (or even from Korea), "Confessions" was the one who performed that duty for me in 2011. There is a crime and a terrible revenge, and that is just the start of it. Consequences and (im)possible redemption in the aftermath of the first half hour start chasing each other in a downward spiral. And just after this gets boring the finale kicks in, an incredibly stylish tour-de-force of editing, special effects and soundtrack, and all of this services the final gut-punch in the story. Hats off to Nakashima Tetsuya for a truly excellent film.
There was no shortage of superheroes in the cinema this year and while both "Thor" and "Captain America" were done quite well, they weren't top ten material. "X-Men Origins: First Class" however scored points for being the biggest surprise of the year for me. I had zero anticipation for this film and did not intend to go see it, with the franchise having died on me somewhere during the third "X-Men" outing. But friends who know me well urged me to go and, apart from some minor niggles, to my astonishment "X-Men Origins: First Class" completely succeeded in bowling me over. Fassbender and MacAvay had onscreen chemistry as friends-to-become-enemies and the story worked as an origin, as an explanation, or as a separate tale for fans of the comic. This one was so much better than I expected that it lodged itself firmly in this list.
The signs had been there for some time but in 2011 it actually happened: after slowly relinquishing its undisputed lead for the past few years already (in 2009 and 2010 you could even speak of a tie...), Pixar finally got royally clobbered by Dreamworks in the cgi-animation department. "Kung-Fu Panda 2" surpassed "Cars 2" in quality, delivering a far more satisfying movie experience on all levels.
Directed by Jennifer Yuh who did the opening animation on the first film, this sequel does something unusual: it actually builds on what happened earlier, with all characters grown. Like the first "Kung-Fu Panda" the story fits on a stamp but the devil is in the details, and its execution is stellar all the way. With art direction by Guillermo del Toro, bit-parts in voice acting by Michelle Yeoh and Jean-Claude van Damme, and inventive martial arts choreography for all animals involved (just look at that peacock), "Kung-Fu Panda 2" is gorgeous, funny, and kick-ass. But the biggest surprise is maybe that it is also emotionally honest, going for poignancy rather than crass sentiment. When Po gives Shen an evil "owned!" look at the end, it is earned.
A Colombian farmer discovers a big pile of corpses in his field and alerts the authorities. They are, however, NOT happy to see him as there is an election going on and a massacre does not look good on the community's crime statistics.
How do you make a funny movie concerning a mass-killing without taking the sting out of the subject? Director Carlos Moreno holds the answer. He deftly never even once makes light of the killings themselves nor does he revert to slapstick gags featuring the casualties, but instead he targets the corrupt local authorities. The satirical entertainment comes mostly from watching the pedantic government officials trying to act like they have the situation under control but getting increasingly desperate as time passes, squirming in the heat and the scrutiny of their unseen criminal superiors.
A stellar, stellar film and criminally underseen. It also features a brilliant ending (always a bonus). Here's my review (link).
I've already mentioned this film in the intro as I seemed to be cursed to not seeing it, despite chomping at the bit to try. But in the end the BluRay arrived and all was well. All was very well, actually, as "13 Assassins" was as good as I hoped. It made several top 10 lists last year already but the Dutch release was in 2011 and I'm including it here. Miike Takashi took an old Edo-age samurai genre film which was not truly a classic, kept only the good stuff, embellished some of it to an epic level and added a few of his own eccentric sensibilities. With all the recent discussions about remakes it's nice to see an example on how to do it right. The first half is an often intriguing build-up, the second half is one big action-packed finale, up there with the best in cinema history. "13 Assassins" may not have a lot of depth but it is incredibly satisfying.
Despite very strong word-of-mouth here at ScreenAnarchy this movie took me by surprise when I saw it this year. It's not a Stephen King film nor is it based on any source material written by him, yet this intelligent film would probably count as my favorite adaptation if it were. It shows a world overrun by demented rabid vampires, with humans huddled together in fortified little pockets of civilization reminiscent of the settlements in the "Fallout" games, only set in the present day. Featuring a very Stephen King-ly view of humanity in such a situation, "Stakeland" follows a slowly changing group of travelers through a landscape. Incredibly the film manages to have its cake AND eat it by being dead serious while playing with fun genre tropes. Director Jim Mickle and writer/star Nick Damici deserve a boatload of awards for this film, as well as bright future careers if there is any justice in the world.
Originally aired as a television series, "Kaidan - Horror Classics" contains four stories, each based on works by famous writers, and each directed by a famous director. How famous? Try Shinya Tsukamoto, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Lee Sang-il and Ochiai Masayuki.
Don't be fooled by the "horror" in the title though: the stories mostly consist of gentle drama with some maybe-or-maybe-not supernatural content. It's very well-done drama though: the Tsukamoto segment nearly made me cry, while the Kore-eda episode DID make me cry. As an added bonus memory to last year's IFFR I was allowed to interview all four directors together, which probably made me more tense than the film did.
A domestic drama concerning a divorcing couple in fundamentalist Muslim Iran. Bring out every bias and judgment you have upon reading this, and know that you can leave them at the door. This is not about the plight of a poor woman beaten by her husband, who constantly is in his right because of his religion. Uh-uh, wrong bet. Instead you get one of the best films on the nature of morality it's ever been my pleasure to see. A tragedy happens, a crime even, someone gets arrested, and there is a desperate investigation. Picture yourself as one of the leads at any given moment and wonder what you'd do, and if you'd do better. The way director Asghar Farhadi's film plays with our sense of justice, of law and even religion is masterful. And the best thing is, it's not called "The Crime" or "The Investigation". It is called "A Separation" for a reason, one that is completely evident when the end credits start to roll.
An anime about a crazy race with crazy racers on a crazy planet, "Redline" seems like a throwaway piece of fluff on paper until you actually sit down and WATCH it. I saw this film in the best possible circumstances, in a cinema, with booming sound and an appreciative audience, and it was very impressive. But guess what: at home on BluRay after innumerable re-watches it is still just as impressive! Meticulously handdrawn over a timespan of seven years, "Redline" is a glorious work of art. On top of that it kicks major ass and is very funny too. This film may not be to everyone's taste but it sure was to mine, and this was my favorite film released in The Netherlands in 2011.
Allow it. I'm a sucker for a good monster flick and this is once again a film where the premise seems slight, but where the execution totally kicks ass. At several points it had me thinking "Oooh, clever!" and the monster designs are original AND cool. Making the most of its urban setting and young cast, "Attack the Block" did not pull punches and scratched an itch in me that hadn't been scratched in a loooong time.
And that concludes my list for 2011.
Hopefully I'll have a more prolific run in 2012 but that's just guessing...