Usually, the words ‘gourmet’ and ‘British food’ don’t end up in sentences even remotely near each other, so the idea of a restaurant like Waterloo + City is potentially abhorrent to those who are unable to conceive of it. Andreanna and I joined another couple, also foodies, to give it a taste…
*I haven’t done one of these since February ‘09. I may have to get back into the habit.
The trailer that got the most attention in 2011 was for Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with its powerful Trent Reznor/Karen O cover of classic Zeppelin. Smart, effective…and completely obvious. “I come from the land of the ice and snow,” yeah, we get.
For me, true artistry was found in the first trailer for Battle: Los Angeles. A serviceable if unremarkable sci-fi action movie, B:LA will be memorable for years to come mainly for this brilliant teaser featuring music from modern composer Johann Johannsson’s IBM 1401, A User’s Manual.
Filmmakers, take note: this is how it’s done. Johannsson’s haunting, coldly alien sound elevates routine Michael Bey-esque clips into something both terrible and beautiful.
Hollywood is bashed - and rightly so - for an over-reliance on sequels, remakes and rebooted franchises. This year’s 7 highest grossing movies (worldwide, according to THR) were all sequels: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Pirates of the Caribbean: on Stranger Tides, Kung Fu Panda 2, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Part One), Fast Five, and The Hangover 2. Potter aside, that list makes me sad.
So let’s give credit where credit is due. Last year, two very different bands of misfits got franchise reboots well worth seeing: The Muppets and X-Men: First Class.
Jason Segal is clearly a lifelong Muppets fan. For my money, his clever update did Jim Henson proud, reminding us what makes these characters indelible for those of us who grew up with them.
Meanwhile, who would have dreamed Mad Men-plus-mutants would work so spectacularly? Sending the franchise back to it’s swinging ’60s Cold War origins was a stroke of genius. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender pull off the neat trick of evoking and surpassing Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan’s performances as Professor X and Magneto.
Added bonus: putting the ubiquitous (and enormously talented) Fassbender on screen with Kevin Bacon as the villainous Sebastian Shaw automatically changes the game to “Five Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”
2011 Honorable Mention: Best Middle Thrid of a Movie
“The Diary of Anne Frankenstein” is writer/director Adam Green’s contribution to the entertaining but uneven Chillerama. Set on the last night at bankrupt drive-in movie, the film offers three and a half movies-within-a-movie, of which “Diary” is by far the funniest.
Green is clearly a graduate of the Mel Brooks School of Hitler Humor (with a minor in Young Frankensteining). Joel David Moore (Avatar) sends it over the top, playing der Fuhrer with a gibberish German that would do Sid Caeser proud.
2011 Honorable Mention: Best First Third of a Movie
We Need To Talk About Kevin is impressive from the get go, from its bold, expressionistic use of color to its temporal fluidity. (Has any film ever relied so much on an actor’s hair style for narrative comprehensibility?) Tilda Swinton, in nearly every scene, is captivating as a strong-willed woman whose life is upended by her dark offspring.
Unfortunately, director Lynne Ramsay’s spell over me was broken when it came time to talk to Kevin. Played at different ages by Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller, Kevin is such an obvious, cliched “bad seed” that the movie threatens to tip from serious drama to total kitsch.
The camera clearly loves Swinton, though I am hard pressed to think of a performance in which she elects to reflect it back. Crucially, I wish they had cast as her clueless husband someone who could match her intensity. Pairing John C. Reilly with Tilda Swinton is a bit like putting a beer jingle up against a Mahler symphony. I like to imagine John C. Reilly and George Clooney swapping roles in Kevin and The Descendants. In my mind (and perhaps in only in my mind), the switch betters both.
10 Movies Released Last Year That I Really Liked, 2011 Edition
The best (in alphabetical order):
Melancholia
Rubber
Senna
Take Shelter
The next best (ditto):
Attack the Block
Drive
Hugo
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Stake Land
The rest:
Midnight in Paris
Note: only 2011 theatrical & direct to DVD/VOD releases were considered.
As in the past (see 2008 and 2009), the last spot was a virtual coin flip. I liked but didn’t love Paris, just as I liked but didn’t love two other comedies, Bridesmaids and Young Adult. Paris gets the nod for doing for the City of Lights what Manhattan did for Manhattan. For that, and for the way Corey Stoll’s Hemmingway utterly steals the movie. (Corey who?Exactly.)
So much for the bottom. Up at the top, I think of Melancholia and Take Shelter as a matched set. Both use apocalyptic imagery as metaphors for mental illness, bipolar disorder in the former and schizophrenia in the latter. Von Trier’s film explores (predominantly but not uniquely) female anxieties around marriage, family, career and identity, while Nichols unpacks the stereotypically male fears of providing and protecting the family in this age of recession and foreclosure. For my money, no two films better capture life in 2011.
I’m tempted to pair up Senna and Rubber as well - the first a documentary about a Formula 1 driver and the other a postmodern tale about a killer car tire. But really, the two films could hardly be less alike. Senna tells the story of a pretty remarkable life in a truly remarkable way: without talking heads or voiceover. The filmmakers deliver an uplifting tale of a full if tragically short life relying on nothing more than TV coverage, home movies and breathtaking in-car race footage. No knowledge of or even interest in car racing is required to enjoy this great documentary.
As for Rubber, the less said the better - but be aware that there is another level to the film beyond what you see in the trailer. Madman director Quentin Dupieux is the antidote to tired, formulaic filmmaking.
Attack the Block was the best sci-fi film of the year and Stake Land my favorite horror film (think Zombieland meets The Road, but with feral vampires and crazy cultists).
Martha Marcy May Marlene could almost be considered a horror movie. It delivers a sense of inescapable dread as we peel back the layers of a young woman’s past in a rural cult and her present with her materialistic sister and brother-in-law. First time writer-director Sean Durkin is clearly one to watch, as is his star (and Olsen Twin sibling) Elizabeth Olsen.
I adore Scorsese for sneaking a primer on the history of film into a big budget, 3D holiday release, though I have some problems with the source material. (As with Super 8, I kept asking myself “why is the boy the star and the girl the sidekick?” Here are rare instance where Scorsese and J.J. Abrams could take a page from Robert Rodriguez.)
Drive could have made it into the first group, except it went off the rails for me after the over-the-top elevator fight. Sure Gosling’s “Driver” is a badass, but he’s not the goddamn Batman.
Overall, a pretty solid list, if not as strong as last year’s. That’s my top 10. What’s yours?
(Check back later this week for a few “honorable mentions,” including my favorite movie trailer of 2011.)
My boyfriend visited the American Horror Story house (without me!) and snapped this pic.
The house is rather close to my apartment. I’m making it one of the stops on my very own personal Horror TV Tour, wherein I also visit Sunnydale High School, located in nearby Torrance.
Sixty-something days after the damn thing ended, I’m finally getting around to throwing some thoughts together about Fantastic Fest 2011. This is because (a) I miss Austin, (b) I finally found the keys to my Tumblr account (they fell behind the sofa!), and (c) in a few weeks I’m going to do my annual fourth annual 10 Movies Released Last Year I Really Liked post (TM Liz Shannon Miller) and it’s going to feel a wee bit redundant. (Years 2008, 2009 and 2010 here.)
So without further ado and in no particular order…
Take Shelter (in theaters now) may not be the best film of the year but it is the one that best captures the year’s zeitgeist. If a century from now our children’s children’s children want to know what 2011 felt like, they need look no further than this movie. Curtis (played by a mesmerizing Michael Shannon) has the American dream - a lovely wife (played by the equally great Jessica Chastain), a deaf but happy young daughter, a reliable blue collar construction job and a modest home of his own. But it all starts to slip through his fingers when Curtis is visited by apocalyptic visions that may predict real disaster or may just be symptoms of mental illness. Economic anxiety, mental breakdown, natural disaster, and biblical apocalypse add up to a horror film unlike any other.
Livid (opens December 7…in France, no US distribution yet) is one that disappointed many but pleased me. Fans of filmmakers Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s first film, Inside, were no doubt expecting something visceral and violent. Instead, they got an atmospheric dark fable that feels like a Gallic Guillermo del Toro. Calibrate your expectations accordingly and you too might dig this entirely new take on the haunted house genre, notable for its stunning visuals and strong female characters.
Headhunters (no US release date, but Summit is working on a remake) is a tense heist movie, a violent cat-and-mouse thriller, a surprisingly touching romance, a social-political satire and, best of all, a damn entertaining ride. Aksel is top-level executive recruiter by day and an art thief by night, damn good at both. He has to be in order to afford the lavish lifestyle he needs to keep his tall, supermodel-gorgeous wife happy. Aksel’s world is turned upside-down when he runs afoul of a ruthless executive (played by Game of Throne’s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) with a violent past and a hidden agenda.
Juan of the Dead (unreleased and as yet unauthorized by the Cuban film board) was the happiest surprise of FF2011. I found myself in the midnight screening more by default than active choice, only to discover a really smart, truly subversive, uniquely Cuban and wholly successful take on the zombie/horror/comedy genre. Fingers crossed that this one reaches more than just the festival circuit.
Those four were my favorites. There were others, both good (A Lonely Place to Die, Penumbra, Kill Me Please, several good shorts) and not as good (The Corridor, Last Screening, Two Eyes Staring). But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention The Human Centipede Two (Full Sequence). Did I like it? Let’s just say I appreciated it. If you enjoyed the first one but wish it had gone further, this is the film for you. If the very idea of the first one was enough to make you ill, avoid this at all costs. You have been warned.
Three other films that would have easily made this list except that I saw them before or after Austin were Pedro Almodovar’s unsettlingThe Skin I Live In, Lars von Trier’s audacious Melancholia and Ti West’sThe Innkeepers. West’s bait-and-switch workplace comedy has grown on me over time: though I still think it’s a flawed film, I really like what West is trying to do with the genre. The last ten minutes were as terrifying as any horror film I’ve seen all year.
Of course, one could make a pretty compelling “best of” list out of the movies I didn’t see but still want to: A Boy and His Samurai, Extraterrestrial, Sleep Tight, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and You’re Next.
All in all, the mix of films I saw was not as spectacular as FF2010 but still engaging enough to make me eager to return for FF2012.
Better Late Than Never: Favorites from FF 2010 and SXSW 2011
As promised about an hour ago, here are five of my favorites from my previous two trips to Austin for film festivals:
FANTASTIC FEST 2010
Stake Land (available on DVD), a road movie about a makeshift group trying to survive in a post-vampire apocalypse America. If you like The Walking Dead, you’ll like this.
Undocumented (now on IFC On Demand, finally), a truly scary portrait of a group of ultra “patriots” out to stop illegal immigration by any means necessary, as seen by a group of do-gooder documentarians who lose control of their movie.
Rubber (out on DVD), the fourth-wall bashing tale of a homicidal car tire. I still have no idea how the director got a Buster Keaton-style deadpan comedy performance out of an intimate object. Wholly original, totally riveting filmmaking.
SXSW 2011
Xavier Gens’ The Divide (coming eventually), in which a group of ordinary city dwellers turn into predators and prey when trapped together in a bunker following a 9-11 style attack. Not for the faint of heart.
Kill LIst (coming eventually), which starts out as a kitchen sink dysfunctional family drama, turns into an assassin buddy road movie, and then takes a sharp turn towards the uncanny in its final act.
There you have it, five must-see genre films. Here’s hoping I come back from Fantastic Fest 2011 with quite a few more…
