Brian's Best and Worst of 2011

It is, once again, almost time for the Oscars!  While I am not the biggest fan of the Academy Awards, I do like having some sort of quality barometer in Hollywood, even one that is skewed, political, and often rewards career achievements instead of current ones.  Since so many high-profile films come out at the end of the year, looking to cash in on Christmas vacationers and still make year-end best-of lists, I never get a chance to watch the most critically acclaimed films before the year's end.  But...if Hollywood can wait until the end of February to rate the last year of cinema, so can I, right?  I know, I know...what a jerk I am, stealing Hollywood's thunder!

I don't like doing Top Ten lists, though.  That's too cut-and-dry, and it completely ignores all the truly awful stuff I run across every year.  I like to break the year down into several best and worst categories, and "best" and "worst" are probably more accurately defined as "most favorite" and "most hated" by me.

So exactly what films did I watch in time to consider for this list?

Abduction.  The Artist.  Battle: Los Angeles.  Black Death.  Blitz.  Captain America: The First Avenger.  The Code.  Conan the Barbarian.  Contagion.  Cowboys & Aliens.  The Descendants.  Drive.  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  Faces in the Crowd.  Fast Five.  Fright Flick.  Fright Night.  Green Lantern.  Hanna.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.  The Help.  Hobo With a Shotgun.  Horrible Bosses.  Hugo.  I Saw the Devil.  The Ides of March.  Insidious.  Ironclad.  Kill the Irishman.  Killer Elite.  Limitless.  The Mechanic.  Mega Python vs. Gatoroid.  Midnight in Paris.  Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol.  Moneyball.  Ong Bak 3.  Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.  Red State.  The Resident.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  Season of the Witch.  Shark Night 3D.  Source Code.  Sucker Punch.  Super 8.  Take Me Home Tonight.  13 Assassins.  Thor.  Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  The Tree of Life.  Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.  War Horse.  The Ward.  Warrior.  X-Men: First Class.

I wasn't able to review all of these in time for the Oscars, but I did watch them.  There are some noteworthy absences from that list, though.  Here are some of the movies I wanted to see, but failed to in time:

The Adjustment Bureau, A Dangerous Method, 50/50, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Guard, Hesher, Shame, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,  and most of the stupid comedies of the year.

Let's start of with some of the more overlooked moments in film this year, shall we?

Best Bit Character
You know those roles that are very amusing, but aren't substantial enough to actually be called "supporting"?  I love those!  They are sadly undervalued in modern cinema, but not by me.  While I was amused by the Blue F'n Lights in Super 8, I have to give credit to Adrien Brody for his Salvador Dali impression in Midnight in Paris.

And for flicking off Owen Wilson

I normally dislike Brody, but his oddly-enunciated, rhinoceros-obsessed few minutes onscreen amused the hell out of me.  As an added bonus, from what little I know about Dali at the time, the impression seemed pretty accurate.

Best Supporting Actress
This is typically a tough category for me.  I don't watch many "chick flicks," and the films I choose to watch usually don't have well-developed female characters.  This year, though, I found a handful of actresses impressive.  Elle Fanning (Super 8) and Saiorse Ronan (Hanna) were both surprisingly mature, and Octavia Spencer was the prototypical sassy black woman in The Help, which is naturally pretty awesome to watch.  However, my favorite supporting performance this year was definitely Shailene Woodley in The Descendants.

Note: embed flattering photo here

I think she did the best job with the most complex character, at least from the movies I caught.  Granted, that character was a bitchy, rebellious teenager (not exactly avant garde), but I thought she handled the role perfectly.

Worst Supporting Actress
I'm going to go with Marianne Faithfull in Faces in the Crowd.  What makes her any worse than, say, anyone in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, or Melissa Leo's horribly over-the-top performance in Red State?  Well, like the prison food mentioned in The Blues Brothers, they're all pretty bad.  Faithfull just had the least believable character --- a deaf therapist that gives no indication that she is deaf whatsoever --- out of the group.  Plus, she provides some of the worst exposition I saw on film this year.

Best Supporting Actor
There were, as always, a lot of supporting actor roles that stuck out to me this year.  Colin Farrell (Fright Night) and Michael Fassbender (X-Men: First Class) were pretty bad-ass in some potentially silly roles.  Tom Hardy (Warrior) and Paul Giamatti (The Ides of March) gave surprisingly powerful dramatic performances.  Andy Serkis (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) once again gave a spectacular motion-capture performance.  My favorite supporting performance by far, though, definitely belonged to Albert Brooks in Drive.  He was just so deliciously merciless --- he is definitely my favorite villain of the year.

Not the tools of the trade you might expect from Brooks

Worst Supporting Actor
As tempted as I am to crown Tom Felton for being terrible in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, this is a prize that was won with teamwork.  My winner for Worst Supporting Actor is the supporting cast of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  I don't care if you want to focus on Ken Jeong's idiotic character or John Turturro's embarrassing cash-in role, John Malkovich's bewildering presence, or if you just hate Kevin Dunn's "why hasn't he been stepped on already?" turn as Mr. Witwicky --- this movie sucked, and there were simply too many awful performances to not win this award.

A well-placed Autobot foot could have made this so much better

On a related note, Patrick Dempsey is a crappy evil villain, especially when you compare him to giant killer robots.

Best Actress
There wasn't much competition for this, given the films I watched.  Even without any other real contenders, Viola Davis was excellent in The Help.

As manipulative as the film is (and I would qualify it as "very"), Davis did a great job balancing contradicting emotional extremes.  The only reason The Help is up for a Best Picture Academy Award this year is thanks to its excellent acting, and Davis was the film's anchor.

Worst Actress
This was a tight race.  As deserving as Tiffany and Debbie Gibson were in Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, Lily Collins was even worse in Abduction.  And as terrible as Collins and her eyebrows were, they cannot compare to the hatred I have in my heart for Emily Browning in Sucker Punch.  The whole movie was handled poorly, but Browning was on screen the most, and alternated between a pouty face and a vacant stare. 

Go to Brian's movie jail.  Do not collect go, do not collect $200

I honestly don't know if anyone could have salvaged the train wreck that was Sucker Punch, but it takes a unique talent to confuse and anger me while playing a rape victim.

Best Actor
I went through most of 2011's films without witnessing an excellent lead acting performance, but that has changed over the last month.  I thought Min-Sik Choi was positively chilling in I Saw the Devil.  I loved Ryan Gosling's extremely peculiar work in Drive.  I loved George Clooney's subtle and complex work in The Descendants.  The performance that I enjoyed the most this year, though, was Brad Pitt in Moneyball.

This is a film that could have easily been deadly dull (to non-statistical nuts like me), but Pitt carried it with consistently good timing and a whole lot of staring and looking worried.  Was it a better performance than Clooney's or Jean Dujardin in The Artist?  Maybe not.  But I responded more to his character than anyone other this year.  Besides, my beloved Cubs will be atrocious in 2012, so I need to enjoy baseball any way I can.

Worst Actor
This race boils down to who I hated more this year: Shia LaBeouf in Trannies 3 or Taylor Lautner in Abduction.  Man, this is a tough one!  Shia was insufferable as an entitled dick in T3, but Lautner was offensively bad.  I think Lautner barely squeaks this one out, but only because he can be out-acted by shadow puppets.

This is his "reading" face

Best Director
I'm going to go with the only director that truly impressed me with his style and competence this year: Nicolas Winding Refn, for Drive.  The only other director that even came close for ballsiness and frame composition was Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), but Refn embraced noir, awkwardness, and extreme violence and made it all work in a taut thriller.

Worst Director
Part of me wants to go with John Singleton for doing absolutely nothing right in Abduction.  Another part of me wants to slap David R. Ellis for not changing his style for Shark Night 3D, despite its PG-13 rating.  But those are just two very small parts of me; 98% of me hates Zack Snyder for Sucker Punch.  My dislike for his recent work is almost Biblical; I wish I could salt the proverbial earth of Snyder's career.  As gorgeous as his films look, Sucker Punch was a confused, soulless rape fantasy, poorly disguised as some sort of extended "girl power" metaphor.  How do you screw up having dragons, steam-powered soldiers, and gundams?  Watch Sucker Punch.  No, wait...don't.

Biggest Disappointment
Runner-up goes to John Carpenter's return to directing, The Ward.  Too bad it was terrible.  I was prepared for that, though, because Carpenter has had his share of misses over the last thirty or forty years.  I was most disappointed by Green Lantern.  It had a lot of promise --- and the space scenes were actually pretty cool --- but the story was horribawful.  I didn't need this to be good to have fun with it, but I would have appreciated less boredom and fewer stupid humans.

Biggest Surprise
I had a few mild surprises this year.  Marcus Nispel made a decent flick for a change (Conan the Barbarian).  Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a clearly unnecessary film, wasn't terrible.  I didn't vomit bile when watching Matthew Lillard in The Descendants.  I would be a liar, though, if I said there was any bigger surprise than the extended Discovery Channel acid trip during The Tree of Life.

Love it or hate it, you cannot honestly tell me that you expected that movie to make that choice at that time.  I'm pretty sure I spent most of this sequence with a confused look and my mouth half open.

Bottom 5 Movies
I could pick on the made-to-suck horror movies I watched this year (Fright Flick and Mega Python vs. Gatoroid), but I didn't expect them to be anything close to good.  These five are bad and have earned my ire.
5. The Ward - Have you ever wanted to watch a really bad version of Identity?  Have you ever wanted to watch a movie like that while feeling sorry for the director?  Well, do I have a movie for you!  You want to know how bad this movie is?  Here's the best scene in the entire film:

4. Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Here's what it takes to make an awesome Transformers movie: have giant robots fight each other.  It doesn't have to be smart.  It doesn't have to do anything except look cool and have a simple plot.  Somehow, that message never reached Michael Bay.  There were too many humans, too many "jokes," and too many interchangeable robots in this clusterfuck of a blockbuster.  And the Witwicky family still refused to die!  The only reason I can imagine anyone liking Trannies 3 is for putting Rosie Huntington-Whitely in high definition.  Well guess what, teenagers?  She's an underwear model.  You don't have to watch this movie to ogle her, there's a great big internet just waiting for you!

3. Season of the Witch - I don't know what the worst thing about this movie is.  It could be the fact that Nic Cage actually underacted, given how ridiculous the story is.

Stunning, I know

Maybe it is the hilarious parallels it invites to classic films.  Both are good reasons, but I think the biggest one is the complete lack of witches in this movie.  Not even zombie monks could save this.

2. Abduction - I've already touched upon how inept this movie is, but this is truly one of the worst movies I have seen that was widely released.  The hair clogging your shower has more talent than Taylor Lautner.

1. Sucker Punch - Despite looking like it should be made of the dreams of horny teenage boys, this was drab, dull, and rapey.  Maybe that's your cup of tea.  If it is, I assume you are already in prison for committing violent acts against humanity and good taste in general.

More like a donkey punch

Top 10 Movies
10. Hugo -I have a soft spot in my heart for characters that are struggling to find their place in the world, and I believe in the magic of cinema, so Hugo was right up my alley.  Scorsese's direction, while fun to look at (even in 3D), pandered a bit too much toward young children for my tastes, but it was still touching and adorable.

9. Hobo With a Shotgun - Rarely does a movie meet my every expectation.  Hobo... delivered on the promise of its title and added Robocop-quality acting and Troma levels of violence.  Sadly, it was snubbed by the academy this year.  I wonder why?

8. The Artist - Jean Dujardin is charming and is a gifted physical actor.  Who needs to hear him speak?  Along with that talent, director Michel Hazanavicius made an extremely clever film with superb cinematography and (not terribly subtle) symbolism.  It was cute, it was different, but it didn't strike any particular emotional chords within me.

7. Midnight In Paris - I didn't expect to enjoy this one, but I was pleasantly surprised.  Instead of wallowing in nostalgia, like so many acclaimed films this year (Super 8, The Artist, Hugo), Woody Allen made a film that realized the folly in Golden Age thinking.  I imagine that your appreciation for the film only deepens with your own knowledge of the art and literature scene in 1920s Paris, but even if you are clueless, the supporting cast is extremely enjoyable.  And every word out of Corey Stoll's mouth is pure gold.

Have you ever shot a charging lion?

6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 - Eight movies in ten years, and all of them were good.  I'm going to miss the Harry Potter series, but this last chapter paid off the setups of the past few films nicely.  It could have been more visually imaginative, and there were a literal ton of characters in the film to pay attention to, but this was a quality send-off to an excellent series.  Plus, it didn't have, like, six endings, like Lord of the Rings.

5. X-Men: First Class - Given the debacles that were X-Men 3 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I didn't have high hopes for this one.  Thankfully, Matthew Vaughn saved my favorite comic franchise from movie production hell.  The real credit goes to Michael Fassbender's awesome performance as Magneto.  We need more of that, and soon.

Michael Fassbender face IS...Magneto's Crotch

4. The Descendants - A possibly gut-wrenching concept gets a whole lot easier to handle and more interesting through Alexander Payne's treatment and George Clooney's excellent performance.  It's about as uplifting a film as you're going to see from a movie about death and infidelity.

3. Moneyball - This movie simply should not have been fun or interesting to watch at all.  On paper, it sounds as entertaining as balancing your checkbook, but I was drawn into Moneyball.  I enjoyed Brad Pitt's Robert Redford impression and actually liked Jonah Hill for once (I disagree with his nominations, though).  What I liked most about this movie was its sense of timing, which I suppose means that I liked its editing.  Whatever.  This is a sports movie that can appeal to the non-sports fan because the heroes don't play sports.  That's brilliant!

2. I Saw the Devil - It's hard to find a genuinely disturbing horror movie, so I like the acknowledge them when I find 'em.  Taking the typical premise (bad guy kills my people, I must take the law into my own hands!) to a logical but somewhat surprising end, Jee-Woon Kim crafted a brutal and unnerving film.  I like it when heroes are not heroic, and this movie delivered.

Pretty.  Disturbing.

1. Drive -By far, this was the most peculiar and enjoyable film I saw all year.  It was weird, it was painfully awkward, it was violent, and it was oddly touching.  Better than all that, it was suspenseful.  As awkward and unrecognizable as the Driver was as a human, there is a simple sweetness underneath that amazing scorpion jacket.  Of course, his character is also a psycho waiting to erupt, but that's the price you pay for being so damn cool.

Sucker Punch

I typically don't have to think much when reviewing a movie.  I watch, I ponder briefly --- often as I type --- and share my judgement with a disinterested world via this blog.  I had a hard time with Sucker Punch, though.  It's not the first time I had difficulty accurately capturing my thoughts on a screen, but unlike Ingmar Bergman's Persona, this wasn't because I was confused by the film.  To better illustrate my difficulty, I would like to present you with the plot, complete with my reactions to the first twenty minutes of the film (my reactions are in bold):

Five minutes in

So, Baby Doll's (Emily Browning) mom dies, leaving her and her sister with their (presumed step-) father (Gerard Plunkett), who likes to leer at his daughters, especially when other people are present, like at a funeral.  Why have there been multiple slow-motion shots already?  There's been no action to justify them.  When dead mom leaves everything in her will to the kids --- which I assume is supposed to be a significant amount, although it is never again referenced in the film, despite it being a key motivating factor --- molester dad decides to molest his kids.  When Baby Doll fights back, he locks her in her room and goes after the sister.  Baby Doll breaks out, starts a house fire, steals daddy's gun, accidentally starts a gas leak, and shoots daddy.  He doesn't die.  The sister does.  The police show up and take Baby Doll to the insane asylum.  What the hell kind of police action is that?  You can prove prolonged sexual abuse, even on the sister-corpse, and the cops let the sister's death get pinned on Baby Doll, despite it not being a gun-related death?  And what was the point of showing the gas leak, if there was never an explosion?  Fire and gas leaks don't play well, especially in films, and yet Sucker Punch decides that it is above little nuisances like exploding houses.  By the way, the plot and cinematography in these scenes felt like a mash-up homage to the music videos of Korn and Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun".  Cheery stuff.  What a great way to start a movie that is supposed to be an action-fantasy movie with hot chicks in it.

To be fair, thigh-highs and guns are on the way

Ten minutes in

Baby Doll is being walked through the insane asylum, accompanied by molester dad.  While walking through, the camera holds on specific items as Baby Doll passes.  I wonder if these seemingly commonplace items will be important later on?  Subtle!  In the asylum, we meet Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac), an asylum orderly or something like that.  He and daddy discuss (in a room filled with people, and it's not like they are whispering) their plan to have Baby Doll illegally lobotomized (in front of Baby Doll, mind you) by a doctor who will visit the asylum in five days.  Meanwhile, Baby Doll shares a glance filled with meaning (or homo-eroticism, I can't tell which) with Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), from across the room of crazy folk.  Fast-forward five days, and Baby Doll is in the surgery chair, with an ice pick-looking thing milliseconds away from being nailed through her eye socket.  Well, at least we have something not-at-all-depressing to look forward to: a happy ending for a victim of sexual abuse and police mis-investigation.  I bet the deleted scenes show forty minutes of her being object raped by Blue Jones.  But wait!  Everything changes!

Twenty minutes in

Baby Doll has entered a fantasy world, one where she is an orphan (what a shitty fantasy) and has been more or less purchased by a gangster to work in his whorehouse/dance club.  But she's not going to have sex yet!  Of course not.  That would make sense.  Instead, she is awaiting the arrival of the High Roller, to whom she and her virginity will be sold.  All the other girls from the insane asylum (or at least the attractive ones) are in this fantasy world as dancing prostitutes. 

They do look happy as hookers

For a fantasy world, though, their lives all kind of suck.  Aside from the whole being-forced-to-have sex-for-money thing, they are often victimized by whorehouse employees and can be killed for misbehaving.  Baby Doll knows that she must escape before the High Roller arrives, so she hatches a plan to steal certain items (perhaps the ones that were slow-motion-ed earlier?  Subtlety pays off!) that will help her and the others escape.  The key to the plan is for Baby Doll to distract particular men by doing her sexy (and nudity-free) dance, which has the ability to mesmerize any audience.  Except the film's audience, because we are never privy to a single moment of Baby Doll dancing.  And when Baby Doll dances, everything changes again!  Now, we are in a fantasy world where the whores are essentially the heroines of an action video game, fighting off orcs, dragons, robots, samurai demons, and steam-powered German zombies.

Because normal action scenes were too realistic

Sweet!  Now we have a ridiculous fantasy within a crappy fantasy, with an assured lobotomy awaiting when we leave these fantasy worlds!  It's like a Russian nesting doll, only one that is made of crap!

What a depressing movie!  All the promotional work for Sucker Punch promises high-octane action and elaborate fantasy --- the tagline was "You will be unprepared" --- and yet we are shoved into a film where innocent women are repeatedly victimized by evil, evil men.  I suppose the tagline was right.

The acting in Sucker Punch is hard to gauge.  It is certainly not good, but the script is beyond wretched, so it's hard to completely blame the cast.

Literally one million times better than Sucker Punch dialogue

The ladies fared better than most of the guys.  Emily Browning got to deliver dead-eyed cliches, Abbie Cornish had strong opinions until she suddenly didn't, Jena Malone balanced some decent horror-stricken scenes with some numbingly dull lines, and Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung stare vacantly in the background of scenes.  Carla Gugino gave her very best Natasha from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle impression.  While these women certainly didn't "wow" with their acting, I will admit that they struck cheesecake poses quite well.  The men of Sucker Punch were pretty terrible.  Oscar Isaac is the lead male, and he's about as subtle as a Disney villain; I'm shocked that his mustache wasn't long enough to twirl.

But he looks so understanding!

Scott Glenn shows up as the advisor to the super-heroines of the video game-ish fantasy world.  He basically acts like a lesser Charlie to their Angels, and his last line in each scene begins "One more thing..." followed by something nearly impossible.  I won't begrudge an old man acting with young beauties, but it was a dumb role and he can do better.  Jon Hamm also has a brief appearance, but his dialogue is so wooden and unnatural that it felt like he was reading off cue cards for his three minutes of screen time.

While there are many problems with Sucker Punch, most of them can be laid at the feet of director/co-writer Zack Snyder.  This was Snyder's first attempt at adapting an original screenplay, and that took on even more importance after the criticisms he received for being too devoted to the source texts for 300 and Watchmen.  This was his chance to show off what his imagination could do without the restrictions that come with staying true to a source story.  And the result was an overcomplicated plot about women being victimized?  I would not have guessed that.  Sure, Snyder was probably trying to show these women as empowered, because they fight back and the bad men are all eventually punished; too bad that concept never actually reached the script, much less the big screen.  And here's a tip: revenge against abusers by the abused is not the same thing as empowerment.  It boggles my mind that this film was green-lit.  Who is the target audience?  It is a PG-13 movie with no gore or nudity that focuses on sexy ladies in action scenes.  It tries to incorporate music in the same way Moulin Rouge did, only without any explicit significance to the plot.  And what was with all the rape?!?  It's like Sucker Punch was made for internet-deprived video game enthusiasts who love musicals, but hate sex and violence, and want to masturbate to rape fantasies.  Maybe Snyder watched I Spit On Your Grave and thought to himself, "That was great, but how can I sell this to a wider audience?" 

Answer: Sailor Moon outfits

Zack Snyder also failed as a director in Sucker Punch.  This movie is full of scantily-clad women and ridiculous action sequences in fantastic worlds, and it still feels really, really boring.  The pacing is just atrocious.  It doesn't help that the plot is obvious and predictable, but Snyder has developed a style where he plods forward with his stories and randomly throws in slow-motion scenes, regardless of appropriateness.  Nothing ever happens quickly in a Sucker Punch, especially the action.  That was an interesting choice that glorified the violence in 300; without an R rating, all that style provides in Sucker Punch is a longer running time.  Speaking of the rating, for a movie that clearly wants the audience to ogle its women, I found the lack of nudity or consensual sex astonishing.  If there is a way for Snyder to show off cleavage or an ass in a slow-motion shot, he makes it happen.  And yet...PG-13.  No sex, no violence...so what the hell was I suppose to look forward to, once the plot was obviously terrible?

One of the few ass-free camera shots

Even the soundtrack was annoying.  Each song was sung by a female artist and they were mostly cover versions of songs made famous by male singers.  That would be fine, I suppose, but the songs are all used in the same manner (to vaguely describe the actions in the video game fantasy) with the same sound (breathy vocals and faux electronic rock production).  Do I really need a trip hop version of The Stooges' "Search and Destroy"?  No, I do not.  Bjork's "Army of Me" was remixed for the movie, and it serves as Baby Doll's sexy dance song, despite having a strange beat and absolutely no sexiness in the song itself.

I wasn't expecting a whole lot from Sucker Punch.  I was hoping for either a cool visual experience or something ridiculous enough to make me laugh.  This movie featured a gundam with an angry cartoon bunny face on it, and I was still bored stupid.

At this point, I didn't even care...and there were fifty minutes left!

 The action, which should have been awesome, was boring and routine.  The villains didn't put up a fight and with no gore, there were no shocking moments.

The absolute worst thing about Sucker Punch is that it is not completely inept.  If this was made by an amateur filmmaker, it would certainly be more palatable (although I would still wonder about all the rape).  Zack Snyder provides some very cool images and ideas --- like the steam-powered zombies --- and still managed to make an unwatchable film.

Cool-looking is rarely a solid character trait --- sorry, Boba Fett

The gorgeous images serve as a constant reminder that the rest of the movie absolutely sucks and will probably try to pee in your mouth if you fall asleep in front of your television.  It's one thing to make a bad movie and know it's bad.  I might not enjoy your movie, but I will respect the goals you set for your film.  But I have no idea what Sucker Punch was attempting.  I can't even argue that it aimed for the stars and simply fell short, because the story and script are so bad that they cannot be pretentious.  This was just a complete failure on every artistic level, save for the visuals --- and even those could have been better and more imaginative.  I felt insulted and cheated when this movie ended.  Sucker Punch, indeed.

The half star is for the visuals, particularly the idea of steam-powered villains in World War I.  And here's Bjork's video for "Army of Me," which is infinitely more creative and weird than Sucker Punch could ever hope to be.
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