Rajorajorajo | 28 Dec 2011 | 457 Views | 3 Likes | 0 Dislikes

Mike's Top Ten for 2011!

I don’t think there’s going to be too many surprises in my (or anyone else, really) top 10 list this year – 2011 is gonna go down as a movie year marked out by desperate safe-playing. We had a another whole great big whack of superhero movies, most of which were on the god-awful to pretty bad spectrum (Green Hornet, Green Lantern) which thankfully at least served to lower expectations enough that the mediocre-to-OK ones seemed more enjoyable (Thor, Captain America). If there’s any theme to what I liked this year, it seems to be films that are driven by interesting young actors taking risks, themselves, to get challenging material made. Well, that and some new classics from established directors like Alexander Payne, Lars von Trier and Polanski. Anyway, enjoy and let me know if you think I'm retarded.

- Mike Cameron

1. Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

Ryan Gosling cemented his position as most interesting actor out there by taking what could have been a sexy-cool star-turn and instead working with cult hero director Refn to create one of the subtly weirdest and most viscerally shocking genre films in years. Audiences expected action picture goofery and were instead rewarded with Gosling’s autistic cool-guy thug covered in brains gurning in a motel bathroom while just off-screen Albert Brooks was completely reinventing himself as a terribly good bad guy. Not just the best film of the year, in my opinion, but also my favourite. (Mike's Drive review here)

2. Meek’s Cutoff (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

Ryan Gosling may be the most interesting actor working, but Michelle Williams is the best, a stone-cold mortal-lock fact she proved again in this year’s alt-western Meek’s Cutoff. Director Kelly Reichardt goes way against the grain in this grim western set early in America’s push west along the Oregon trail, replacing the rootin’ tootin’-eyness of the cowboy genre with a political Agatha Christie story of survival, pride and betrayal in the desert. (Mike's Cutoff? Two minutes...)

3. Contagion (dir. Steven Soderbergh)

The year’s best and most terrifying horror film, oddly, starred Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow. Steven Soderbergh’s work as director and the absolutely incredible job done by editor Stephen Mirrione wring pure sweaty fear-juice out of what should maybe have been a lame-duck premise, a bird-flu update of Outbreak with an all-star cast. Instead it’s legitimately unsettling, perhaps because of the omission of the monkey. (see the Contagion-related WTI here)

4. Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier)

Von Trier explains what it’s like to have depression in this out-of-the-blue, autobiographical end of the world tale. He’s pretty far removed from the Dogme ’95 days here, replacing “available light and no music” with “a CGI planet impacting with and completely cosmically shredding the earth leaving no survivors”, but remnants of his earlier style remain in the camera-work and oddball snatches of oblique storytelling. Kirsten Dunst as the profoundly depressed von Trier stand-in is great, and cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro rings all the beauty he can from a good looking cast and the great old-new castle on a golf course location. (Melancholia reviews here and here)

5. Carnage (dir. Roman Polanski)

One of two films eligible to be called comedies on my list this year is Polanski’s version of the hit play, Carnage. Four well-to-do, polished Manhattanites rip each other up like stones bouncing around in the rock tumbler that is one couple’s downtown apartment, where they’re hosting the other couple to discuss a violent incident that’s occurred between their sons. The chance for real actors to do their thing is coming more and more frequently, it seems, in soppy, well-meaning heart-warmers, and the chance to watch Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet barf on each other and ruin each others’ lives is too good to pass up. (Mike's views on Carnage here and here)

6. Rubber (dir. Quentin Dupieux)

One of the few true surprises for me this year was Rubber, the profoundly weird, Brechtian story of a tire, animated by forces unknown, that goes on a telekinetic killing spree across the southwest, and the audience that is assembled on a hill to watch said tire do said killing through binoculars. It’s the Jackass of weird experimental genre films: folks tired of its goofy, put-on stupidity will dismiss it after 15 or so minutes, but I genuinely think there’s some seriously smart, transgressive stuff happening, especially in the scene where the tire takes a shower. (Mike's original Rubber review)

7. Win Win (dir. Thomas McCarthy)

Sports as a metaphor for teenage angst retains it’s colossal goofy power even in small-budget character pieces starring Paul Giamatti, who plays wrestling coach and newly-fraudulent lawyer Mike Flaherty in Win Win. The wrestling scenes work because they were smart enough to cast a wrestler (Alex Shaffer) who just I guess by luck also managed to turn in what’s clearly one of the best performances of the year. (Mike on Win Win)

8. The Descendants (dir. Alexander Payne)

It’s not Alexander Payne’s work as director and co-writer (though it’s good) or the script (though it’s good) or the performances from Clooney and Shailene Woodley (though they, too, are good) that made The Descendants into one of the neatest films of the year – it’s that all of those folks decided to do good work in a film about a Hawaiian family. For once that state is used as something other than a Sandlerian vacation background or eerie threatening jungle place, and is instead treated as a real place, where real people live their complicated lives. Clooney plays a father who must help his two daughters deal with the death of their mother who, it turns out, was cheating on him before he died, all while deciding what to do with a huge parcel of untamed beachfront property deeded to his family a hundred years earlier by one of the last relatives of King Kamehameha. It’s moving and funny and well acted, but more than that, perhaps, it’s interesting – and that’s something you can’t say about many films from this year. (Here's Mike's WTI on this one)

9. Attack the Block (dir. Joe Cornish)

The little British aliens-invading-a-council-estate movie that could is yet another example of smart people doing with no money what Hollywood can’t with more money than God. It’s the best sci-fi flick (other than the very different Melancholia) of the past five years, and it got that way by pulling the classic ‘80s “kids alone against a terrifying but kind of cute threat” thing into C21 and making the kids kind of scary themselves. (Mike's original review)

10. Fast Five (dir. Justin Lin)

The best modern b-movie franchise reasserts itself with a return to its roots in the fifth Fast and Furious movie. It’s the best action movie of the year (maybe the best in a couple years) and it more thoroughly and completely achieves its stated goals – to be a sexy, thrilling thing-on-fire-flying-through-the-air movie – than many “smarter” movies that came out this year. (And here's Mike's WTI about Fast Five)

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