Top 10 Best Films of 2011

I don’t like making top 10 lists because it makes me seem like a film snob. But I am a film snob, and somehow I still dislike making top 10 lists! Can't win them all... So seeing that almost everyone else out there has compiled a top 10 (or 20) list, here is my list for the best 10 films of 2011:

10. The Adventures of Tintin

What can I say? It's Spielberg to the rescue! And not only is this a great animated film and a great head start for the Tintin franchise, it's also a great Spielberg film. Although entirely motion captured and rendered within a computer, the cinematography of the film showcases the "classic Hollywood" style of filmmaking. From the framing to the dialogue to the exhilarating action sequences, all the character from the pages Tintin, and their universe have found their North American market (finally! and it only took slightly over seven decades!) and the end result is exciting and nothing short of spectacular.

09. Rango

Gore Verbinski’s Rango is hilarious, smart, inventive, and, most importantly unique. It’s ILM’s (Industrial Light and Magic) first 3D-animated film (shot and presented only in 2D, and thankfully!) and the reason for its great success is that it doesn’t pretend to be an animated film. It’s shot like a real film and sometimes even looks live-action (much like Tintin above). The story, heavily borrowing from Chinatown (1974) is recreated in a refreshing way, containing a terrific sense of humor and outstanding voice and emotion-captured performances. This is a jewel of a film, a contemporary animated classic and, ultimately one of the year’s best films.

08. Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s best film since Match Point (2005). It’s remarkably original (well, it won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar), a breath of fresh air, and it was shot entirely in the digital medium (Woody was experimenting with digital to see whether he’s want to shot in that format from then on and as a result, it's a very pretty looking film). It also boasts terrific performances all around. Most importantly, it's managed put a smile on my face right from its start and the smile remained until the very end of the film. Also, Midnight in Paris doesn't get old with repeat viewings.

07. The Tree of Life

I love every film that Terrence Malick has made and The Tree of Life is an exceptional experience. It not only utilizes Malick’s unique storytelling methods of a none-linear approach to traditional narrative but even dares to go back to the beginning of time. That’s right! The film starts in the 1950s, flashes to the beginning and the creation of our universe (for a sequence that's more than 15 minutes in length and is breathtaking and achingly beautiful) and then comes back around to continue the story that it began telling. It’s uplifting, magical, beautiful to look at, contains amazing performances, and is Malick’s most ambitious film to date. It needs to seen and our senses need to be challenged. And its cinematography is magnificent. See it; experience it.

06. Melancholia

I detest all of the Lars von Trier films that I watched in the past, but that all stopped when I watched Antichrist (2009). Then, with Melancholia I was on board the von Trier train. Melancholia, depicting depression as harshly as it possibly could has its protagonist in such a terrible state of mental and physical that during the magical night of her wedding, she summons a giant planet (named Melancholia) that’s on a collision course with the Earth. The film is breathtakingly gorgeously shot, powerful, remarkable, and maddening. It examines the ideal of existence and nothingness and as a result it’s quite the emotionally involving and draining experience. But in a highly positive way.

05. Drive

Drive is my favorite film of 2011. Director Nicolas Winding Refn won the Best Director award at Cannes, and rightly so. Here, his take on the mythology of a superhero is harrowing yet brilliant. What we think a hero would be like in real life is embodied within a sociopath (Gosling), one that has psychotic tendencies and who likes to drive around at night for no apparent reason except that he likes to drive around at night. He is the shadow of a man, without real emotions or connections to other human beings and when he makes contact with another lost soul he ends up destroying everything that's worth anything, including a potential relationship.

It’s not a story depicting self destruction; it’s about an isolated spirit that wants to be a part of someone else’s life but cannot, for he is, as aforementioned, a sociopath with psychotic tendencies.

Did I mention that he’s largely mythological and that the film is gorgeously shot and is hugely stylized? Well, there you go.

04. Hugo

Hugo is one of Martin Scorsese’s best films of the last couple of decades. Here we have one of the greatest living directors, a living legend who tackles the quasi-semi-autobiographical (yeah, I split it into thirds) story of the later years of the wizard of the cinema: Georges Méliès.

This is the most competently shot, lit, edited, and photographed film of the year and every single frame of it is littered with the beauty that can only come from a master on par Scorsese’s caliber. It's Scorsese’s first attempt at 3D filmmaking and as a result it puts every 3D film ever made to shame (even James Cameron admitted that Avatar’s been put to shame!), and on every level. If it’s still in theatres and in 3D, I highly recommend that you watch it. And this is coming from a person that abolishes the advent of 3D films.

Hugo and the following three films are some of best films that I have seen in many years.

03. Take Shelter

A harrowing portrait of a man who may or may not be suffering from schizophrenia is told brilliantly here, not with a grand buffet of special effects and CGI but with subtlety and masterful acting performances. It centers on a man who, through increasingly unpleasant and bizarre visions believes that a storm is approaching, but one that seems more supernatural than normal; as if an apocalypse is to come with the storm. Michael Shannon plays the man, Curtis and his performance is all powerful and nothing short of astounding; groundbreaking even.

The film never actually tells us what’s going on, whether Curtis's terrible visions are real or are just part of his psyche that's playing tricks on him and Shannon brings forward his best performance to date. He’s only at the start of his career and already he’s on an A-list caliber.

The direction and cinematography are subtle and the film’s style and pacing is a deliberate slow burn; tension is raised from the start and never lets up, and this film is a true masterpiece.

02. A Separation

A Separation has the best screenplay of 2011. It starts with the separation of a man and his wife, living in contemporary Iran, and we follow the man more as his life tumbles out of control. The film’s focus is on Iran’s legal system, which is remarkably strict and yet simultaneously broken; religion, and how we can actually hurt others due to our strong religious beliefs; taking care of a parent who suffers from Alzheimer's; and living with parents that are separated.

After what transpires in the first 20 minutes, which I won't ruin, the rest of the film depicts several lives that spiral out of control and a snowball tumbles downhill at an alarming speed. The domino effect is also an accurate depiction of what happens in the film and this is masterful complex, and brilliant storytelling.

01. Shame

Writer/director Steve McQueen (Hunger, 2008) delivers a straightforward, no holds barred account of a man, Brandon (Michael Fassbender) who suffers from sex addiction. Unlike any other film or television series that's centered on the concept of sex addiction, Shame makes the experience almost unbearable to watch.

Brandon needs to ejaculate several times a day in any manner possible (at home on his own, or at work, with prostitutes, one night stands, etc); it's become a compulsion, seeing that it's an addiction. He hates that his life has turned into a boring pit of nothingness, filled with hundreds of porno magazines, paid sex websites, and prostitutes galore. He hates that he cannot take pleasure in his own sexual acts and that he hasn’t any feelings, or more correctly emotions towards others. He can’t live with other people, can’t hold an actual relationship, and can't get married. It's a tough life and seeing that Brandon is a successful, wealthy New Yorker shows that this can happen to anyone. Here is a man that has it all: money, looks, and sex appeal and he can't even go on a normal date with a co-worker.

Shame is a harrowing, painful, and brilliant depiction of a damaged human being that at most times is terribly hard to watch but is ultimately a very rewarding experience. This is the best drama that I’ve seen all year and one of the toughest films that I’ve ever watched.

Shame is the best film of 2011. And remember: if you want to stop watching the film at any point out of utter disgust or out of sadness, then Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender have done their jobs.

Immortals (2011)

I am a fan of Tarsem Singh’s cinema, for the most part. His first film, The Cell (2000) is a brilliantly conceived and executed film that deals with one’s inner demons while existing almost entirely inside the mind of a serial killer; visually gorgeous, gory, and heavily symbolic The Cell is a masterpiece that barely anyone had watched. His second film, The Fall (2006) is an even more gorgeous looking film; one of the best looking films that I’ve ever seen. And unlike The Cell, it contains almost no CG. It was shot on 26 different locations and in 18 countries, and it took somewhere between 4-5 years to shoot, due to budgetary restraints. The end result is a gorgeous, fantastic and melancholic film that contains unforgettable imagery and is Tarsem’s second masterpiece.

His third film Immortals is a shallow, boring, ugly, and terribly paced mess that contains buckets of graphic CG blood and gore and worst of all, it has nothing to do with the mythological story that it’s based on.

Immortals, not based on Greek Mythology, tells the tale of King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), his hatred for the Gods, and the fact that he wants to release the titans in order to kill them all. The titans, imprisoned within Mount Tartarus eons ago by the Gods above are also types of Gods and therefore, are the only ones able to kill the Gods above. But when the oracle Phaedra (Freida Pinto) envisions that a mortal named Theseus (Henry Cavill) will challenge Hyperion and either embrace or destroy him, she makes it her mission to find him and send him on his destined course; with hopes that he’ll kill Hyperion.

A magic weapon lays in wait between both Hyperion and Theseus, as they each race to find it and claim it. It’s a magic bow, the Bow of Epirus that materializes arrows whenever its string is pulled and those arrows can travel any distance and destroy or kill anything and anyone. Theseus gets to it first with the help of Phaedra, a thief named Stavros (Stephen Dorff), and a few other Greek warriors. They race towards Mount Tartarus in order to meet Hyperion there and destroy him before he sets the titans free. But Hyperion needs the bow in order to free the titans and he does so, using treachery and he frees the titans and an epic battle ensues.

The thing that I like about Greek mythologies, the tragic ones in specific, is that in them, characters never second guess themselves. It’s a rule of thumb. When one gets a certain idea in their mind, they stick to it whether it kills them and that’s why so many Greek stories and mythologies transform into tragedies.

In the popular Theseus mythology, he, a mortal born of man, was sent by the Gods to slay a minotaur. He was instructed to raise a certain flag on his ship’s mast upon his return in order to signify that he’d accomplished his task. Theseus slays the minotaur and as he heads home, he forgets about raising the flag. His father sees his ship arrive without the appropriate flag raised, believes that Theseus had failed and was probably killed, and commits suicide. That’s the gist of a Greek tragedy and what had happened in the story of Theseus that we’re familiar with. In Tarsem’s reinvention of the Greek mythos, Theseus, a mortal born of Zeus (in his mortal version he’s played by John Hurt), bumps into one of King Hyperion’s minions, a man wearing a minotaur shaped helmet, and slays him. Then he proceeds to find and kill Hyperion almost like the previous fight had never happened.

Now onto a more pressing matter: Tarsem’s visual style and cinematography. His style is unique; not because he was a director of commercials but because his style simply is unique. One only needs to watch The Fall in order to understand why Tarsem’s visuals are so gorgeous, why his compositions are brilliant, and why the costumes are “out of this world”. The same goes for The Cell. But in Immortals, the art direction is similar to that of Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006), another tale based on a famous battle between a relatively small Spartan army and an army of Persians numbering close to or more than 10,000. The film is based on a comic book written and drawn by Frank Miller and history was thrown out of the window in order to make the violence bloodier, and the story more character based than it should have been. Seeing that it’s a Zack Snyder film it was chock full of slow motion segments, most of the film to be exact, it was tinted in gold and had a terrible digital grain, and looked and felt like a video game.

Immortals is more of the same; its action sequences are shot mostly in slow motion segments and it was shot digitally and always with green screens, but it looked digital and the green screens are mostly visible. The film’s graphic, gruesome violence is entirely composed of CG and tons of CG blood flies here and there in the film’s third act. But maybe that’s due to the fact that the film’s budget was only $75 million.

The costumes, mostly of the Gods, are unique looking but they induce the awkward, random chuckle; they’re more strange than they are beautiful. Actually, they're damn awkward. And aside from the city in which Theseus grew up in, one embedded within a mountain (it did actually look nice) the landscapes throughout the entirety of the film are gigantic, barren, and square. Imagine a giant desert. Now place a gigantic wall in the middle of it. Now enact a battle consisting of thousands of CG warriors on one side of the wall and keep the battle going for more than half an hour. Pretty boring to look at, right? Well, there was also the corridor inside that giant wall in which most of the battle took place, but it was cramped and the bodies that fell and died seemed to have disappeared rather clogged up the corridor, resulting in either a stalemate or a victory for one of the sides. Moments like that in films irk me, and especially when they’re in a film that I’ve been waiting for over a year to watch.

Disappointed doesn’t even begin to cover it. I like nothing about this film. I watched it in 2D because, it was shot in 2D and the visuals always look fake. The sets are small; small rooms, small (and thin) corridors, thin mountain passes, and the rest of the film’s aesthetics contain wide open, barren landscapes that contradict and contrast the “small” insert shots of the indoors. The film is also paced terribly; I was straining to remain awake. The first hour contains insignificant dialogue and the final 40 minutes had slow motion, gory, CG violence. I wag my finger at you, Tarsem.

Tarsem may have been bedridden while shooting this film and if he was, that’s an excuse that I would gladly accept over this actually being the final product that he’d honestly wanted to have.

Sucker Punch (2011)

Writer/director Zack Snyder started his Hollywood film career by directing Dawn of the Dead (2004), an unnecessary remake of the original George Romero classic that lacks the fun and social commentary that the original has; 300 (2006), a slow motion riddled, overly homoerotic throwback to the tale-telling of muscular men who are outnumbered and still fight off a horde of freaks; Watchmen (2009), a slow motion riddled, glossy, and violent take on a classic graphic novel but one that fails because it’s hyper-stylized and it takes its subject matter too seriously; and The Legend of the Guardians: the Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010), a slow motion riddled, gorgeous looking, character and story lacking 3D-animated film that features Kung Fu fighting owls. In case one still can't tell, I don't like a single one of Zack Snyder's films, thus far.

Now comes Sucker Punch, a slow motion riddled, female empowerment film that does the opposite of what it sets to do because (and this is only one reason) it dresses all of its female protagonists as burlesque stars/prostitutes.

The following is not made up. This is the actual film's story:

Baby Doll (Emily Browning) and her younger sister are orphaned and are soon-after sent to live with their abusive father-in-law. She ties to protect her younger sister and accidentally ends up shooting her instead of the monstrous father-in-law that was attacking her. Baby Doll is then sent to a mental asylum and there she fantasizes that the mental asylum is part prison and burlesque house, because every 20 year old girl that is institutionalized secretly wants to dance in a burlesque house. The dances are not even shown in the film, rather when Baby Doll is about to dance the camera closes in on her eyes and she then finds herself in yet another fantasy land, one belonging to a next-gen consoled video game.

In order to escape the facility, Baby Doll needs to find four items: a map, a lighter, a knife, and a key. In order to retrieve said item she recruits the other inmates of the asylum: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), her younger sister Rocket (Jena Malone), raven-haired Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung). Baby Doll dances and the five of them enter a fantasy world, like WWI trench warfare; ancient Japan, where Baby Doll fights 40-foot tall samurai that are armed with bazookas; and an unspecified medieval time period where the group battles a mother dragon with a helicopter and a Mech. Upon a successful mission, the girls manage to, in the burlesque house, steal an item from the list and hopefully get the next one.

There’s not much of a story in this film or even a good moral to tell because closing one’s eyes and wishing that one was in a fantasy land, generated by every 13 year old boy’s puberty-based fantasies is not the proper way to face reality. Also, the end product can only be enjoyed by the typical 13 year-old boy because the girls in the film, even though dressed like prostitutes, also look like beautiful young adults who are made up to look like whores; and so anyone over the age of 18 would feel rather awkward watching this film.

The special effects in the film are, for lack of a better phrase, just a lot of special effects. Almost every scene in the film is shot with green screens, just like in 300, and the audience always feels detached from the characters and their actions; and the CGI is not very good, either. It resembles pre-rendered cut scene footage from Playstation 3 and Xbox360 games, much like James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) did.

Lastly, there’s a whole lot of slow motion used in this film, I’d say that a good 70 percent of the film is shot that way so it could have been a 35-minute short. Zack Snyder, apparently doesn’t read criticism about his films and so he doesn’t realize that almost everyone who’d watched his films, thus far wishes for him to stop utilizing the technique of slow motion outside of its proper use. For learning how to use slow motion in films the right way, watch Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. There’s a lot to be learned from watching that film.

Sucker Punch is one of the worst films that I’ve ever seen. Nothing in it is coherent, especially the way that the third act shifts from the second gear straight onto the fourth gear and also it shifts into someone else’s narrative, which is a big no-no when we were following one person’s narrative for nearly 100 minutes. The action sequences are entirely inconsequential and, therefore superfluous, because they mask what happens in the real world (or burlesque house level of reality) and because this film believes that it’s a drama, it should have strayed away from the fantasy world altogether. The performances in the film, also, are lacking energy and conviction and the entire time I felt like I should not have been watching the film at all. For simply watching the film I was a sucker that was repeatedly punched in the face with terrible, clichéd allegories and I didn’t enjoy a single minute of. But I did watch the entire film and here I am, writing to you good people in hope that no one makes the mistake that I did watching this film after the whole world told me not to. I took one for the team so that the team wouldn’t have to.

Oh, and there’s also a cheat ending if the movie wasn’t already bad enough.

Fast Five (2011)

As a car enthusiast I'm not a fan of the first film, The Fast and the Furious (2001); it didn’t seem to know much about cars and the underworld racing culture isn’t interesting to me because drag racing is about as intense as fly fishing. I hate the second film, 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003); I love the third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), which is a standalone film; and I hate the fourth film, Fast & Furious (2009).

Fast Five, I kind of like.

There is a story embedded somewhere within this film but it’s not interesting or important, and nor does it really need to exist. There just has to be a reason for random things to happen between one action sequence and the next. And no one really needs to watch any of the other F&F films in order to enjoy this one.

But for the sake of tradition…

Fast Five takes place exactly where the fourth film had ended, in which Dom (Vin Diesel) was escorted via prison bus to serve a 25-year sentence without parole. His best friend and his sister, played by Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster break him out by flipping the bus over (magically without hurting anyone on it!) and they all take off to live in Rio de Janeiro (hopefully they didn’t drive there). Once there, Dom and the gang meet up with his brother, who’d been absent since the first film, and immediately they team up to pull off a job where muscle cars are extracted from within a moving train. It’s implausible and improbable but the film, from its first opening minute, announces its hatred for anything physics related and breaks every rule in the universe. The end result is that it’s fun. Who cares when it’s fun, right?

Dwayne Johnson leads a team of special ops in the US and is called to Brazil to apprehend Dom and the gang. That’s’ really all there is for him to do. Aside from a Parkour chase in the slums and a good ol' fashion fist with between him and Vin Diesel, there’s not much for him to do.

There’s another story involving the biggest crook in all of Rio and in order to destroy him, the entire cast from every single F&F film joins the current cast and they form a team, turning the second half of this film into an Ocean’s Eleven repeat. But it’s still a fun repeat.

There is no acting power in this film. I know, from the bottom of my heart that Vin Diesel and Paul Walker cannot act and this film is further proof of that, but in order to combat the obvious, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges and Tyrese Gibson offer terrific comic relief, thankfully throughout, and the return of Han (Sung Kang), in a strange alternate universe “the third film will always be the last film in the series” is a nice welcome.

I like the character of Han. He’s actually the only character that I’d ever liked from all five films. In the first film, all of the protagonists were thieves by day and illegal street racers by night. The real hero was an undercover FBI agent who befriended the criminals and eventually they became best friends. There was absolutely nothing to like about any of them; and Dom spouting gospels about family and loyalty got very old, very fast. Han, he’s mellow. He races for fun, for skill, and, obviously for women. But he’s a very nice guy. Clearly he doesn’t belong in this film series but having him in the third film, playing mellow and cool, and bringing him back to this fifth installment is a very nice touch.

There is plenty of action in this film, as absurd and physics defying as it is and, thankfully, almost no racing. There is a short drag race in the middle of the film that doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t need to exist either, but I have a feeling that without it fans of the series would be upset. The pacing of the film is decent, even though the film is over two hours in length, and there is plenty of humor to be found.

This is a film that's almost entirely designed for fanboys of the series. If you liked the first four films, or any of them you will love this film. If not, this is still an improvement over the first, second, and fourth films put together. Within the first thirty minutes I had a rating of 3 stars in mind; within half of the film I lowered it down to 2 stars. By its end, the film received a solid 2 1/2 rating. It’s almost a pass. But remember: check your brain at the door, along with your cell phone.