It seems like just the other day we were discussing the best films of 2010 and which of those were most likely to win at the Academy Awards. For a while, I was glad to be done with that. Now we find ourselves halfway through the year, meaning we are only a few months away from the deluge of “best-of” lists and Oscar prognostication. Then we will have to sit through four hours of television just to see which prestige film gets the magical golden statue. In other words, IT NEVER ENDS. I appease this horserace just as much as anyone, so I have decided to give in and give you all a brief post summarizing the year in film thus far. This means a list of bests, worsts, and a few other things.
I do not claim to have seen every good movie that’s come out this year, particularly those out of the art house scene. As I live in Ohio, I don’t get films like Meek’s Cutoff all that frequently. (Sheer luck played a big part in my seeing The Tree of Life.) Also—unless this year takes a sharp turn downhill—there will be several great films coming out later which will dramatically change my current feelings. Also, I might just change my mind. But as of right now, this is where I see the year in film so far.
The 5 Best
1) The Tree of Life (review)
This is the best film I’ve seen this year almost by default. Based on what I had heard going in, my expectations were not astronomical. Yet the film that I saw enthralled me, intrigued me, and ultimately moved me. No other recent film I’ve seen has had the astronomical ambition of The Tree of Life—you’d need to go back to Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York just to find a competitor—yet I found the experience thrilling rather than a slog. It is like no other film, and while that does not (and should not) guarantee its greatness, its boldness and beauty should at least be praised. Not only is it the rare film which seeks to find reason for our existence, its real accomplishment is that it seems more than up to the task.
2) Win Win (review)
If you fail to look past the surface of Thomas McCarthy’s Win Win, you’ll likely miss the genuine heart at its core. Yes, the wrestling story is formulaic, but the film’s magic is much more intangible than that. It feels like a universe that’s been lived in for years and years; not simply created by a screenwriter in a dark room. These are the types of films I tend to gravitate toward. To me, seeing a group of characters onscreen who feel wholly realized is something you almost never experience at the movies these days. It may seem ordinary, but Win Win is some kind of miracle.
3) Cedar Rapids (review)
Barring an atrocious second half of the year, the bottom three films on this list are unlikely to make my final “Best of 2011” list. At this point, we have yet to get to any of the really deep stuff, as the first half of the film year is usually populated with superficial fluff above all else. There have been exactly three really good comedies released this year, but Cedar Rapids remains my personal favorite that I’ve seen so far. (The other two are Bridesmaids and Bad Teacher.) It tells the story of insurance agent Ed Helms—who could likely play a serial killer and make him affable—and his journey into the big city for a convention. It’s a modest but terrific comedy about what happens when an innocent man-child is exposed to a darker side of humanity. Not so dark, but darker than he’s used to.
4) Super 8 (review)
The further away you get from J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, the more disappointed you may become with how the film turned out. Yet while I was experiencing the first two acts of this film, I was preparing to pack my review full of Inception-worthy superlatives. (“Super 8 is super… times eight!”) While it sputters a bit toward the end, the ride is nothing but joyful to experience. It may ape the Spielberg films of the ’70s and ’80s, but it is still able to become a J.J. Abrams film above all else. This is not likely to be making many year-end lists, but at this point in the year I can’t deny just how much fun this movie was to behold. It could have been even better, but what we got isn’t so bad.
5) Cave of Forgotten Dreams (not reviewed)
I saw this movie a while ago, but for one reason or another I haven’t been able to squeeze out a review. This is a rather simple documentary from Werner Herzog about the Chauvet Cave in France, but what makes this particular cave unique is that it contains some of the earliest examples of human art and cave paintings. As usual, Herzog turns this into something of a grander statement on nature itself. What made the film such a unique experience was the use of 3-D, which is utilized to capture the shapes and contours of the walls. This is the rare film where the experience might have been diminished without all three dimensions. It may be a little dry for some, but most every sequence inside the cave is as hypnotizing as documentary film gets.
The 5 Worst
1) Sucker Punch (review)
Maybe there are more inept films that came out this year. (Screw it, there are.) Yet Sucker Punch is so unique a failure that is deserves no less than this spot. If I were Zack Snyder, I would be much happier with an ‘F’ film than a ‘C’ film, because the only way to do a passion project like this is to go all out. Unfortunately, watching Sucker Punch was an unforgivably unpleasant experience for me. I found nothing about it redeeming, mostly because Snyder has yet to figure out how to handle violence without leaving a bad taste in my mouth. This movie is at the top of my “worst of the year” list because unlike most terrible films, it has yet to leave my mind. Perhaps Snyder deserves credit for that, but that doesn’t change my opinion that Sucker Punch is an adolescent jumble of everything I dislike, and I don’t take back a word of my unusually scathing review. That said, I am kind of looking forward to checking out the director’s cut. This is too fascinating a film to outright dismiss, and it belongs at the top of some list. For now, it’s this one.
2) Rubber (review)
Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber is a slog, despite its relatively lean running time of 85 minutes. Yes, it’s a film about a tire that kills people, but that’s the least annoying part of it. In fact, I found that premise rather interesting. What’s more puzzling is that Dupieux adds a second plot about a large group of people who watch the film’s events through binoculars. Eventually, Rubber takes a drastic turn toward the mean-spirited, and any meta-commentary found within is drowned out by its unpleasantness. There’s a fine line between cleverness and weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and too often Rubber falls on the wrong side of that line. It’s like watching the most conceited person on Earth look at themselves in the mirror.
3) Just Go With It (review)
What makes Just Go With It terrible should be self-explanatory. If nothing else, it provides Adam Sandler with another chance to coast through a film shoot in Hawaii and come out the other end with a nice, fat paycheck. This is a man who has shown he can a) act well, and b) be genuinely funny, so why does he find himself in these cakewalks time and time again? Since Judd Apatow’s admirable Funny People, he has starred in this and Grown Ups. His next film is Jack & Jill, in which he plays both a male and female character. This, ladies and gentlemen, was a genre I thought we left behind in the ’90s.
4) No Strings Attached (review)
If there’s ever been a film that can be described as “dead on arrival,” it is this one. It’s one thing to be a formulaic romantic comedy, but it’s another to take almost no chances en route to the painfully obvious ending. Worse yet, there are more laughs in the average shampoo commercial. If this film has one thing going for it, it’s that it came out before this month’s Justin Timberlake/Mila Kunis vehicle Friends With Benefits, so it will seem slightly more original. The bad news: I’ve already seen Friends With Benefits, and it is significantly better. Not great—not even very good—but better. This one just does nothing right.
5) Your Highness (review)
I’m sure no film this year was more fun to shoot than Your Highness. Unfortunately, it’s hard to take a raucous on-set atmosphere and translate it to the finished film. You can tell the actors in this film are just trying to crack each other up, but that does little while the audience is trying to engage. What should have been a stealth sequel to the hilarious Pineapple Express (both were directed by David Gordon Green), becomes a laugh-less trip through a minefield of obvious sophomoric humor. In a way, Your Highness is a testament to how hard it is to make genuinely good comedy. Everyone involved with this film thought the laughs would come naturally.
Miscellaneous “Distinctions”:
Most Overrated: Thor (review)
While I was watching Thor, I found it reasonably entertaining. Perhaps that is why critics and audiences seemed to like it so much. Yet within an hour of seeing the film I began to realize that for a superhero origin story, the entire ordeal was unforgivably slight. My initial review was not positive, but if I had to write one now it would be even less positive. When contrasted with a film like X-Men: First Class—which is the best superhero movie of the year so far—you realize just how mediocre the plot of Thor is. It doesn’t really try for anything substantial, and it ends up being one of the more frivolous films of its kind in recent memory. Yes, Green Lantern was a failure, but more happens in that than in Thor.
Most Underrated: Bad Teacher (review)
It may be more easy-breezy than many expected, but the Cameron Diaz vehicle Bad Teacher is funny enough without the excess raunch. The film is similar in many ways to Bad Santa—and it suffers by comparison—but when viewed as its own thing it’s got plenty of laughs to go around. Everyone in the cast is great, and what the film lacks in the plot department is more than made up for in the character work. I wouldn’t argue that it’s revelatory, but I had far more fun with it than most anyone else.
Most Fascinating Trainwreck: The Beaver (review)
You can’t say The Beaver isn’t ambitious, but that wound up backfiring in the end. Most of the blame likely falls on Jodie Foster, who chose to play the film straight down the middle, and that was precisely the wrong decision. There’s too much done right here—particularly the performance of Mel Gibson—to dismiss it, but holy crap is this film a mess. I’m not normally one to promote modesty in a film, but toning down the second half of this film wouldn’t have been a bad idea. Let’s face it: you can only expect people to take a premise like this (depressed man speaks through beaver puppet!) seriously for so long.
Most Dumb Fun: Fast Five (review)
When the year began, Fast Five was likely toward the bottom of my list of most anticipated films. I haven’t seen a Fast and Furious film since the original—which I did not care for—so imagine my surprise when I heard the fifth installment was actually kind of awesome. I sat down a skeptic, but I came out of Fast Five a true believer in the macho ridiculousness within. This film not only has some of my favorite action sequences of the year, but also enough ridiculous lines of dialogue to keep it entertaining even in its slower moments. Fast Five is a film that knows what it’s good at, and it never lets up from beginning to end.
Worst Ending: The Adjustment Bureau (review)
I argued in my head whether to give this distinction to this film or Source Code, but ultimately I think I hated the ending to The Adjustment Bureau more. Perhaps this is because the film which came before was so compulsively watchable, and the chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt was so genuine. As a result, when the film decides to take the quickest, easiest way out, it’s all the more disappointing. The premise is great, the actors are great, but the screenplay feels like it was given a last-minute re-write which completely removed all its teeth. And its brains.
Yes, I Actually Saw This: Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (review)
When Justin Bieber: Never Say Never initially came out, I wouldn’t have seen it for a million dollars. (Well, maybe.) Then I started to hear strangely positive things about it; how it was a fascinating little piece of Bieberist propaganda that well-documented the fervor around the young superstar. Well, I chose to see it, and the results were indeed fascinating. As a factual documentary, it’s full of crap. Yet the filmmakers behind are so skilled that they were able to turn the finished product into something so manipulative that it had even me engaged in its storyline. The film currently has a 1.4 user rating on IMDb, but that’s just a result of ALL U HATERZ DISSING ON JUSTIN. BIEBZ 4 LIFFEE!!!111!!!
Yes, I Actually Kind of Liked This: I Am Number Four (review)
I hate everything about I Am Number Four, except the film itself. It was produced by Michael Bay, and it’s based on a book co-authored by James Frey which was published only so the movie rights could be sold. Yet, director D.J. Caruso was able to make a reasonably fun film out of the dire material. It’s ridiculous and without artistic merit, yet I found myself smiling throughout. In fact, the stupider it got the more I was genuinely enjoying myself. I shan’t recommend it to anyone, but it’s the rare purely commercial product that seemed to embrace its own trashiness. Though—I’ll admit—it probably just caught me in a good mood.
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