2011 Movie Wrap Up: The 10 Best Films of the Year
By Edward E. Chapman, CinemaDeck Head Film Critic
As usual, the Academy and I didn’t see eye to eye this year. Their list included the Oscar baiting, emotionally shallow and manipulative Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and mine…didn’t. I also did not include Best Picture nominees War Horse or The Help, both of which, like Extremely Loud, swung for the fences with sentimentality while leaving out anything that might make those stories, let’s say, deeply interesting. I am well aware how many fans those movies had, and in many ways they are well crafted, entertaining movies. They are not, however, among the best, in my humble opinion. Which movies are we still going to be discussing next year? What about twenty years from now? What films actually showed us something exciting – about movies or about ourselves? Not all of the films on my list were the most critically lauded, but all of them set out to tell a story and every one of them acquitted themselves admirably. In no particular order, here are my choices for the best of the best of 2011.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
While I think that this movie is skillfully assembled, surprising, and very entertaining, it is, to me, as notable for the movie it is not as the movie it became. In a year where other former music video directors gave us Sucker Punch, Transformers 3, and Tower Heist, David Fincher has fulfilled the promise of the adventurous new medium that began on MTV so many years ago. He exhibits all the style that Snyder, Bay, and Ratner wish they had mastered, while moving beyond smash cuts, flat characters, and CGI into smart, economic genre storytelling.
Moneyball
Moneyball brought us a baseball movie that isn’t really about baseball. It’s not about the love of the game, and it’s not about the triumph of the players, it’s about the invisible restrictions that surround the participants in America’s favorite pastime. The less caustic little brother of The Social Network, Moneyball showed us another smart outsider who managed to find a way to game the system, and its ending is a complicated mix of reaffirming and heartbreaking.
Shame
Shame is a bold and uncompromising look at a monstrously difficult subject, and it is handled perfectly. I have never seen a movie that has made me feel like this one has, and I watch movies for a living. Shame showed me something that I wasn’t sure movies could do, and after the lights came on, I wasn’t sure I could stand up. The movie’s story is a slow buildup of tension and stress that explodes into destructive chaos, all expressed through masterful story construction and flawless acting. I could have watched the movie with the sound off and still thought that Michael Fassbender deserved a Best Actor nomination.
The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life is an equally bold stroke of storytelling, from one of the cinema’s most distinctive voices. Terrence Malick really seems to think in film, exploring the boundaries of what the medium can do for narrative. The Tree of Life expands the film language in the same way that Shakespeare expanded the English language, and whether you liked it or not we can all admit that this is an attempt that the medium needs to see from time to time.
Drive
Drive is a brilliant exercise in deriving a maximum of story information and emotion from a minimal amount of material. Ryan Gosling creates an iconic character out of a handful of sentences, a few hard to read looks, and one bad ass outfit. Refn does a great job in crafting a sleek world around the driver, utilizing a fantastic soundtrack.
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Rounding out the category of “hard to watch complicated films with ostensibly unsympathetic but really interesting protagonists that didn’t get nominated for an Oscar” is We Need to Talk About Kevin. Like Shame’s sex addict main character, Tilda Swinton’s mother who hates and fears her son is a hard character to wrap your mind around. But she manages to inject the character with enough depth to carry this difficult and daring film. It is filled with visceral imagery and spiteful events, but it manages to come through being unexpectedly fulfilling and rewarding.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Director Brad Bird proves that he can make live action filmmaking as dynamic and exciting as his animated features. Ghost Protocol was the most fun I had at the movies all year. Its breathless action sequences and compact plotline drive like a turbocharged engine, and its 139 minutes fly by at a sprint. And who would have thought that someone who has made their living from animation would prove the value of practical stunts in such an enterprising way?
Midnight in Paris
A romance comedy that is actually both romantic and comedic is a rare find – and one that doesn’t pander is even harder to come by. Midnight in Paris is most of all about the romance that evolves between a person and a place. It is sweet without being saccharine, and wonderfully fulfilling.
Hugo and The Artist
It was a banner year for stylistically inventive movies that paid homage to silent film classics. The love that Scorsese and Hazanavicius have for these old films could have translated into grating and sentimental love notes, but instead becomes infectious. The unique ways both Hugo and The Artist were shot avoided gimmickry to become something that truly added to the films’ meanings. The way these pictures look truly adds another layer to the story. Scorsese shooting in 3D does wonders to increase its appeal to serious film watchers who have harbored justified reservations about this new addition to the medium. It will be interesting to see where the cultural conversation about silent films takes us now.
And that, readers, is the list. Questions, criticisms, rants, agreements, death threats? Don’t bother me with them. If you haven’t seen these movies, I recommend them. They were all great in unique ways, and each one contributed something different to the year as a whole. As film years go, we’ve done a lot worse than 2011, so thank you to all the directors, screenwriters, actors, and everyone else who helped put together the films on this list and many more.
- Edward E. Chapman