The best and worst films of 2011

Before I start, here's a list of all the films from 2011 I watched during the year (with IMDB links):

• 1911, China
• 50/50, USA
• Another Earth, USA
• Attack the Block, UK
• Battle Los Angeles, USA
• Boku to tsuma no 1778 no monogatari, Japan
• Blue Valentine, USA
• Bridesmaids, USA
• Captain America: The FirstAvenger, USA
• Cedar Rapids, USA
• Contagion, USA
• Crazy, Stupid Love, USA
• Drive, USA
• El Chico que Miente, Venezuela
• Er Conde Jones: the movie, Venezuela
• Fast Five, USA
• Friends with Benefits, USA
• The Guard, Ireland
• Guilty of Romance, Japan
• Horrible Bosses, USA
• The ides of March, USA
• Jodái-e Náder azSimin, Iran
• Love for Life, China
• Martha Marcy May Marlene, USA
• Melancholia, Denmark
• Midnight in Paris, USA
• Nana to Kaoru, Japan
• Our Idiot Brother, USA
• Puss in Boots, USA
• Red State, USA
• Reverón, Venezuela
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes, USA
• Samuel, Venezuela
• The Skin I Live in, Spain
• Sleeping Beauty, Australia
• Submarine, UK
• Super, USA
• Super 8, USA
• Thor, USA
• The Tree of Life, USA
• The Twilight Saga: Breaking DawnPart I, USA
• Último Cuerpo, Venezuela
• We Need to Talk About Kevin, UK
• X-Men: First Class, USA
• Your Highness, USA

There are many movies I could not get to see and really wanted to like The Artist, The Descendants, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, Winnie the Pooh and Shame. Perhaps the following list would've been way more different had I seen them. But either way, let's begin:

With the exception of Twilight, I mostly tried to stay away from bad films as much as possible this year (I did not watch Transformers 3 or any Adam Sandler films for example), but this one really caught me by surprise. Nana to Kaoru tells the story of two young childhood friends who find themselves connected by their S&M fetish.

Don’t get me wrong, I think sexual exploration of teenagers is a somewhat interesting subject, and many great films have been made about it. But this film gives absolutely no reason or depth to the characters so we end up not caring about their relationship at all, which is not helped by the one-note, cardboard cut-out acting. There’s barely any story to speak of, just being mostly a series of stupid moments after stupid moments.

It’s a movie that has absolutely no redeeming qualities;, it’s not sexy, it’s not emotionally interesting and it’s not funny enough to  justify itself as a comedy. It’s also really boring, even with its relatively short running time. It doesn’t qualify as anything but garbage. 

Maybe I’m being unfair because Taylor Lautner had so little to do in this movie, but the fact that even if he barely appeared he’s the most notable of the actors (not in a good way)speaks volumes of how truly terrible his performance is. His whole performance consists of being an ass-face and worrying about Bella, and Taylor Lautner pretending to be angry is just laughable.

And then there’s the imprinting scene, my lord, the fact that he’s so terrible in trying to be serious during the whole thing makes an already ludicrous scene even more stupid. In a movie full of terrible acting you have to be especially bad to be the worst, and Taylor Lautner is just that terrible.

After hearing so many things about how great and funny Attack the Block was it became one of the movies I was most looking forward to. When I finally got to see it I couldn’t help but being very disappointed. It’s not a bad movie; it does have some pretty fantastic action sequences. I just didn’t think it was funny, and considering most of the stuff was played for the laughs, it took away from the few things I thought were great.  The weed-based humor was pretty bad, most of the witty remarks don’t work and Nick Frost is absolutely terrible is his bit part, but that might be more attributed to the fact that I just don’t really like him as an actor.

I also think the filmmakers took a wrong approach with the characters. Not that I think that every alien invasion movie needs to have soldiers as its main characters but how am I supposed to root for or care about characters that totally deserve to die?  That kind of thing makes the great alien design and the well-done subtle moments of terror go to waste. Overall, I just didn’t think it was funny, exciting or entertaining.

The Fast and the Furious franchise has had a couple of terrible films and a couple of mediocre ones that are somewhat enjoyable the first time you see them, so naturally, there wasn’t much to expect from the fifth installment of the tired franchise. But holy cow did this one deliver. Director Justin Lin took the best elements from the four previous films, mixed them up and added The Rock and the result is an amazingly entertaining movie.

Don’t get me wrong, this movie is stupid, very stupid. But it knows it, and by not taking itself as seriously as the previous films did, it allows it to be incredibly fun. The cast is at its best, with The Rock being the stand-out and the action set pieces are incredibly well done. This movie entertained me more than I would ever suspect it would.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is my favorite actor right now. Not only does he seem like a genuinely nice guy but he is also incredibly talented. In 50/50 he plays Adam Learner, a young man who finds out he has a rare type of cancer. Levitt anchors the film and takes us through an emotional roller coaster by showing his amazing range and giving us both funny and heart-breaking moments. With the exception of Ryan Gosling in Drive (my second favorite performance of the year), no other performance felt so true to life. 

My top 11 films of 2011

Ok, before I begin, I just want to say that 2011 was an amazing year for movies and it was incredibly hard to decide just 11 films as my favorites. So honorable mentions go to Thor, The Skin I Live In, Fast Five, Bridesmaids, The ides of March and Reverón. All fantastic films that sadly, did not make the list. 

So without further ado, my top 11 films of 2011:

At first sight, Drive seems more like a regular Hollywood action flick, but there’s so much more to it than what one could ever imagine from watching the trailer or reading a synopsis.  It’s an action movie whose focus is not the action, but the characters. The fantastic performances from every cast member makes them feel more real and charismatic and since it takes its sweet time carefully developing them makes us care much more about them.

There aren’t many action scenes and there aren’t many conversations. The many silent, kind of awkward moments, combined with the incredible soundtrack and beautiful photography gives it an almost hypnotic quality. It’s a very subtle film, with a great story that grabbed me and never really let me go, which is why it is my favorite film of 2011 and one that I feel I’ll be able to watch years from now and still be captivated by . 

Cancer is not an easy thing to portray in film. Most films that try to be funny end up being downright disrespectful and the ones that try to be emotional end up being melodramatic. 50/50 strikes a balance between comedy and drama in a way that no other film since has. Writer Will Reiser based the film on his own experiences, which makes for a film that feels real in both the good and the bad moments.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s tour-de-force performance drives the story and connects the bits and pieces to make a complete beautiful experience filled with hope, sadness and memorable moments.

Woody Allen’s latest film is like the city it takes place in: magical. It has what one usually expects from an Allen film: A love triangle, lots of talk about mortality, many funny dialogues, eccentric characters and more. But the added sci-fi elements (which are cleverly left unexplained) make it his funniest and more original work since The Purple Rose of Cairo.

The story takes our daydreams about meeting and becoming friends with our idols (be it literary, musical, cinematic, etc) and falling in love with beautiful women in beautiful cities and makes them true. It’s absolutely enchanting.

Life, what is it? That’s the question Terrence Malick attempts to answer through the eyes of a man reminiscing his childhood and everything in between. It’s a movie about creation, evolution, death and existence; it shows us how time and space define us and how life is so full of beauty and ugliness.  

But what the hell do I know? I can’t really say what the message of this movie is because it’s so incredibly baffling. Like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Malick leaves everything open to interpretation; we get what we want to get from this film. There’s not an absolute truth about its story, just like there’s not an absolute truth about life.

It’s also, without a doubt, the most beautiful film that I’ve ever seen. Every frame, every scene, every shot is crafted with such care and attention that I just couldn’t take my eyes off of it. The cinematography is quite simply sublime.

This bold and remarkable Iranian film is the best of 2011, obviously not my favorite, but without a doubt the best. Divorce stories have been done many times in cinema, but this is the first one that I’ve seen that explores the consequences in such a way.  As it moves it goes from being a family drama to a criminal procedure of Rashomon-like proportions. Along the way, we get more involved with the characters and we can almost feel their emotional baggage.

It’s a very powerful, deeply human story that will resonate with its viewers regardless of their nationality or social background.  It’s one of those films that will be looked years from now as one of the great classics of cinema.

I don’t really enjoy romantic comedies all that much. With a few exceptions they tend to be cliché-filled, predictable and unreal. They’re also mostly made in such way that completely alienates men. Crazy, Stupid Love has a lot of that, but it plays around with romantic comedy conventions and adds more variety and the result is a refreshing, hilarious film.

Steve Carell leads the cast as a man trying to move on after his divorce. His ex-wife (Juliane Moore) divorced him after cheating on him with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) who she’s now seeing. The great Ryan Gosling plays a young womanizer who teaches Carell to get his manhood back by picking up women and Emma Stone plays Gosling’s love interest. There’s also a side story with the former couple’s young son who is in love with his babysitter. The film has better acting that what we could ever expect from the genre and manages to balance all the stories well and in the end they all converge into a hilariously absurd third act that has some of the funniest moments put on the screen last year. 

Melancholia is a tale about the end of the world, but it quickly makes us forget about that after showing us the destruction of our planet in the first five minutes. It works because by having us know that everyone is going to die we stop wondering if the characters are going to make it out alive and instead we focus our attention to what’s important: how these characters cope with their impending death.

Kirsten Dunts and Charlotte Gainsburg star as two sisters. Dunts is getting married, but she’s depressed, she knows the whole thing is going to be a disaster, Gainsburg knows it too but she wants to throw her a big party anyway. When Gainsburg finds out planet Melancholia is going to collide with earth she freaks out, she knows she can’t save herself or her family but tries to however way she can anyway. Like her sister, Dunt’s character knows she and everyone is going to die, but she accepts it, embraces it even. It’s both ends of the human spectrum and the beautiful story makes us wonder how we would react in such event. 

How far can a cult go to control every aspect of your life? This movie explores those ideas through the eyes of Martha, a young woman who escapes from a cult she was part of where she was known as Marcy May and tries to restore her relationship with her sister but fears the cult might be after her.

Elizabeth Olsen gives a fantastic debut performance, giving her character depth. Martha is depressed, she’s paranoid, she doesn’t know what’s good or bad anymore and we can see it in her eyes. Though the ending is rather disappointing, it’s still a haunting film.  

Sex, violence, Kafka. That’s Guilty of Romance in a nutshell. Avant garde director Sion Sono’s latest film is a story about repression, both sexual and social. As expected from him the story is bizarre and filled with social criticism that you can’t get with just one viewing.

This film is not pretty; in fact, it’s very, very ugly. It’s filled with sadistic, disgusting moments and there’s not a single redeemable character in it, but it’s oh so fascinating. 

Like Crazy, Stupid Love, Friends with Benefits is a movie with a lot of clichés but it is self aware so it barely even matters, plus the chemistry between Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake (both of whom do a fantastic job) more than makes up for it. It’s raunchy, hilarious and sexy. It’s a movie that will become part of my go-to films whenever I need a good laugh.

On a side note, this is the third movie on the list, after 50/50 and A Separation where the protagonist’s father suffers from Alzheimer’s.

Originally, this was going to be a top 10 list. But I just couldn’t keep this film out, it’s too good not to be mentioned.

Usually, when we watch or read news about school shootouts and see how many people get killed we think “poor guys, they had their whole life ahead of them” or in rare cases “I feel sorry for their parents, having to deal with that”. But we hardly ever think about the parents of the killer, after all, they also lost a child that fateful day. This is what We Need to Talk About Kevin explores.

Tilda Swinton is amazing as Kevin mother’s as she tries to deal with the pressure of knowing she raised a killer and the anger of the parents of the teenagers Kevin killed. We also get to see her memories of raising her hostile child through flashbacks,  we know there’s something wrong, she knows it too, but nothing is done until it all ends in disaster.

This film is scarier that all of the recent “demon child” films, perhaps because it’s grounded on reality. There’s a weight to it that is hard to explain, it’s a magnificent piece of filmmaking.

So there they are, my favorite films of 2011. Feel free to comment on my list or of posting your own and thanks for reading. 

   

Best to worst: The James Bond series

I’ve been a Bond fan ever since I was a kid; I love the movies, the books, the games and absolutely everything about the series. I just finished my yearly marathon of the 23 films and while I already had a ranking of best-to worse in my head, I decided to write it down because it constantly changes every time I watch the movies.

The movies are ranked in order of my personal best to my personal worst, divided in three groups:

• Green: The best of the best, perfect or near perfect movies. They are rated between 4 and a perfect 5 out of 5.
• Yellow: Not great, but not terrible. These are the average to mediocre films, have a lot of good things but a lot of flaws that keep them from being truly great. They are rated between 2.5 and 3.5 out of 5.
• Red: The bottom of the barrel, they’re the worst films in the franchise, rated between 1 and 2 out of 5.

 So without further ado, let's begin:

The Bride of Frankenstein review

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Dir: James Whale

Lately I’ve been re-watching the Universal horror classics and in thinking which was my favorite I came to an easy solution. Many of them have not aged too well. Bela Lugosi’s "Dracula" works better today as a sleep aid than as entertainment, "The Invisible Man" still impresses with its effects but it’s rather silly, "House of Dracula" is terrible and "The Wolfman" is too melodramatic to take seriously. The first three Frankenstein films, House of Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon are still outstanding and out of these, Bride of Frankenstein is the best.

The film directly follows the first, starting just a few moments after the end of the original. But not before subjecting the viewer to a terrible prologue in which Mary Shelley herself tells us that the monster survived the burning of the mill. It’s a really stupid moment and sometimes it is better to simply skip it and go straight to the story.

The story begins with Henry Frankenstein, who has abandoned plans to create living beings composed of body parts, only to fall back into temptation and ultimately be forced by the monster itself, which is under control of Henry's old mentor, Dr. Pretorius, to build him a mate.

The monster hasn’t had it easy, he barely survived the attack of the townspeople and from the beginning we can see just how brutal it has become, killing a man (the father of the girl it drowned in the first film) and his wife. Seeing the monster wiping out an entire family and that the movie is not afraid to kill off young people is something of a surprise considering the time it was made, but it’s these moments that make the monster more menacing.

However, as the story develops, the monster is given a lot more personality than in the first film. Here the talents of Boris Karloff are not reduced to grunts and screams, the monster becomes a much more compassionate and likeable character.

After the monster is attacked, burned, tied up and imprisoned, it escapes into the woods and finds an old blind man living in a cabin. This part is important because the man teaches it to speak (or at least express himself better), these moments are both comic and tender, making us more attached to the monster, something that rarely happens in horror movies.

Ernest Thesiger gives an amazing and daunting performance as the mad scientist, Dr. Pretorious. He easily steals the show by being more evil and fascinating than any other mad scientist in the history of horror movies.  His and Karloff’s are the best performances of the film. The rest of the performances vary from mediocre to just plain terrible. There are a few characters that barely do anything but annoy the living hell out of the viewer and most of the secondary cast tends to overact a lot, which takes a bit of the seriousness away from the movie. But this is easy to ignore.   

The ending is just excellent, one of the best in film history. The only really disappointing is that the bride appears for only a few minutes and doesn’t really do much at all, which is rare since the second half of the film is based entirely on search for her creation. Yet her presence is still iconic.

The production values are top notch, with huge, menacing sets, stylish camera angles, incredibly detailed makeup for both the monster and the bride, amazing special effects for its time and a musical score that is memorable and haunting.

It's not a perfect film, there’s dialogue that is completely ridiculous, secondary actors tend to overact and they are really annoying and the pacing and editing is a bit rough. Still, the decision to give the monster dialogue and an emotional side makes it more interesting and it’s entertaining from beginning to end. Quite simply a masterpiece.

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya Review

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (2010)

Dir: Tatsuya Ishihara/Yasushiro Takemoto

Even though I haven’t read the light novels upon which the series and this movie are based on I’ve got to say that the world and characters of the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise are my favorites alongside Evangelion, they’re wonderfully developed, ingenious and open to interpretation. This movie, while not without flaws, is no exception. 

Disappearance is based on the fourth novel in the series of the same name and it involves a lot of what we’re already used to see in the series, there’s time travel, some action, paranormal mystery and so on; but the true focus here is the characters, that’s what the franchise is all about. In a lot of ways this is just a very long tv episode, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The story is not awfully original or unexpected but it plays with our perceptions of time and space quite a bit more than it was done in the series and it’s also enjoyable enough that the two and a half hour running time is barely felt once the story picks up, the real problem is that it takes its sweet time setting everything up which drags the story a bit and makes the first few minutes rather boring. There are also some plotholes, confusions and inconsistencies but they’re rather expected with any story that deals heavily with time travel so they’re forgivable.

There’s a lot of great moments in the film that stand side-by-side with the bests of the series, some character interactions are enhanced and there’s a lot more focus on secondary characters, which is really great for every fan of theirs, especially Nagato Yuki fans such as myself because we get to see a side of her that is rarely (if ever) shown; this is a film that’s rich in characterization. All of these moments are made better by the performances of the voice actors, who bring their best and add a lot of emotional depth to the characters and situations.  

That’s not to say everything is great though, some parts of the film are overly melodramatic and not only is there an overuse of slow motion but whenever it is used it lasts way too long, which causes it to lose any dramatic impact it could have, becoming just tiresome. These few problems bring down an otherwise great story.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a fantastic looking show, boasting some of the best animation of any modern anime series. This is the reason I was rather disappointed with Disappearance’s animation, not because it’s bad, quite the contrary, it’s pretty good, but because it does not improve much from the show which is something one would expect from a movie; it does have some added depth and some nice looking effects but that’s about all, it’s still great looking but it left me with the feeling that it could’ve looked much, much better.

This is a movie with a lot of flaws but in the end it is still Haruhi and it still gives us what we want and expect from it: great characters in absurd situations that are just fun to watch, that’s what makes it a great film, beyond all the faults it still delivers a good experience. It’s not innovative and it doesn’t take the series into new directions but it doesn’t need to, its aim is just to give us more of what we want: the world of Haruhi Suzumiya and it does a great job at that.   

Love Exposure Review

Love Exposure (2008)

Dir: Sion Sono

How can I even begin to describe Love Exposure? It’s a film that feels very unique yet familiar. This four-hour epic masterfully combines Quentin Tarantino’s and Takashii Mike’s appetite for the bizarre and violent, Shunji Iwai’s dark touch and Akira Kurosawa’s humanity and social commentary.  It may also be the best movie to ever come out of Japan.

Writer/director Sion Sono builds a story that is as bizarre as it is human. The movie deals with the life of three young individuals living in the modern day Japanese society who have been emotionally and physically abused by their parents and find themselves in a love triangle that begins during a fateful street fight: Yuu, a Catholic boy struggling with the passing of his mother and his father’s ridiculous choices that lead him to become a worse and worse person just for the sake of it. Yoko, a misfit who finds every man disgusting and falls in love with a mysterious woman who turns out to be Yuu in drag and Koike, the leader of a cult and who manipulates nearly all the events through the course of the movie.

Sion Sono is a visual poet, as he has proven so many times before with his other movies, and this one is no different. Within its running time he manages to tackle issues like teenage alienation, religion and its various effects on people, fetishism, marriage and obsession. This added to the fact that each of the three main characters are developed individually before they finally connect makes for a dense and complex plot, but it’s made in such a way that it doesn’t feel hard to get and it never tires, it’s not a minute too long.  And while Sono expresses his opinions on these subjects very clearly through the course of the movie, in the end he leaves it to the viewer to decide what’s right or wrong.

With its four hours running time, Sono manages to develop absolutely every character, allowing the audience to build a connection with them as the story progresses. Very rarely do characters evolve in movies the way they do in this one, that’s part of the magic of it, the viewer cares about the characters, we care about their decisions and we care about what’s going to be the result of their actions, these feelings are something very few movies are capable of building. The story takes all sorts of different paths along the way, ranging from ridiculous to touching, from dark to funny, all of this with an incredible emotional balance, it’s also never predictable and it stays with you long after you watch it, these are the reasons why the script is so fantastic.

Even though it’s a very long movie it never bores, this is thanks to the amazing script but also to the editing, which keeps things moving at a steady pace without allowing us to miss anything. It’s also a marvel to watch as the cinematography is absolutely beautiful and stylized, taking full advantage of every location, sometimes it’s very unconventional but still manages to be great, meeting all the requirements from its story.

 While the acting might be rough in some places I found it to be overall pleasing.  Nishijima does and effective job as the lead in a great debut, though his delivery sometimes lacks impact it still satisfies. Sakura Andoo stands out as Koike, transforming herself into a love-to hate villain that is depraved, decadent, obsessed and borderline crazy; it’s a truly astonishing performance. My favorite performance of the three leads is Hikari Mitsushima’s, who shows the most range with her character Yoko, which is probably the one who changes the most through the story; she can be strong, crazy, in love, weak and more and can do everything amazingly well, her monologue during the last act has got to be the best performed and one of the best moments of the movie.  It also helps that she’s eye-bogglingly cute.  The rest of the cast also does a great job and al have memorable moments.

Another thing that is absolutely fantastic is the soundtrack, which is complements the action really well. The main theme is the stand out as it’s one of the most memorable in recent history. I can honestly say that this is my favorite soundtrack of all time and would not be out of place next to other classics.

Love Exposure is a lot of things: touching, dark, satiric, exciting, unpredictable, funny, bizarre, action-packed and more, it’s truly incredible how it manages to balance all these aspects and deliver a movie experience like no other. It’s a unique film, a masterpiece that remains memorable long after it’s over. It’s one of the best films to come out of Japan and I can go as far as saying one of the best of all time, it’s truly deserving of that praise.