2011: The Year in Movies

So, I’ve been planning on doing something like this for the past 2 or 3 years and I’ve let my laziness get the best of me. Not so this year. What follows is a list of movies released in the year 2011 that I saw, plus my assorted thoughts on each movie. I may update this post at a later date, since there are still approximately 20 or 30 more movies released last year that I want to see, but haven’t yet (listed at the end of this post). Also, as a bit of a bonus, I’ve included my favorite non-2011 releases that I saw last year and my least favorite non-2011 releases I saw last year.

Note: The movies are listed in order of when I saw them, not in order of their release date.

Bridesmaids

The year’s breakout comedy hit, everyone loved Bridesmaids and I’m no exception. Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph are friends in real life and their chemistry shines through onscreen. Sure, everyone’s going to remember the big shitting and vomiting set piece, and Melissa McCarthy’s character was (rightly) the breakout character that everyone was talking about, but without Wiig and Rudolph, Bridesmaids would have had no emotional center. It was great to see an honest female friendship in a movie that passes the Bechdel Test. Here’s hoping the inevitable flood of female centric gross out comedies don’t succumb to the idea that Bridesmaids was successful due to the raunchy gags and remember to ground their characters. (A long shot, I know.)

Also, Jon Hamm is just hilarious. “Heyyyy, fuck buddy.”

X-Men: First Class

Fresh off of his success with 2010’s Kick-Ass, director Matthew Vaughn was charged with re-booting the X-Men franchise after Brett Ratner Crotch Fondlebombed X-Men 3, and for the most part, he succeeded. It certainly helps that Vaughn had two very good actors in James McAvoy and Michael F. Assbender to play Professor X and Magneto, respectively. The movie has a few too many characters and too often it’s content to let most of them stand around while one shows off their (extremely convenient for the situation) mutant powers, but those are minor quibbles with an otherwise very good superhero movie. Now that First Class has set everything up, I’m eager to see where Vaughn will take the characters in the inevitable sequel.

Drive Angry

A movie I watched because I thought it would be schlocky good fun just turned out to be schlock. I don’t understand how you can take a movie about Nicolas Cage coming back from Hell to rescue his kidnapped infant granddaughter and make it boring, but that’s exactly what the makers of Drive Angry did. Cage is in autopilot the entire time and tries to lend gravitas to a movie that calls for over the top campiness. Amber Heard is completely wooden as his ass-kicking female sidekick and the whole movie just has the feel of everyone going through the motions. The only actor who seems to realize what a ridiculous movie he’s in is William Fichtner as the mysterious Accountant, who is hot on the trail of Cage’s character, determined to return him to Hell. Drive Angry was an all around disappointment.

Crazy, Stupid, Love.

I’m a sucker for a good romantic comedy, so I was cautiously optimistic for Crazy, Stupid, Love., especially given the cast. Check these names out: Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling (aka Baby Goose), Emma Stone (swoon), Marisa Tomei and Kevin Bacon. Crazy, Stupid, Love. hit all the right rom-com notes: touching, funny and sweet without being overly so. Crazy, Stupid Love. doesn’t subvert any romantic comedy clichés, everyone ends up with who you expect them to end up with and it basically coasts on the charm of its actors, but that’s okay. When you have a set of actors as accomplished as these, you give them some clever dialogue, roll the camera and get out of their way. Clocking in at nearly two hours, Crazy, Stupid, Love. is probably a bit long, but it’s still a lot of fun.

Cedar Rapids

Ed Helms plays a naïve small town insurance salesman who heads to the big city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa for an insurance convention. At the convention, he befriends fellow insurance salespeople played by John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. who all have much more “big-city” experience than Helms’s character and they all take him under their respective wings. Helms has pretty much made a career of playing earnest dorky characters, but there’s a reason for that: he is really good at playing these sorts of characters and Cedar Rapids is no exception. Reilly is hilarious in his role as a drunken loudmouth who tells inappropriate jokes to anybody who will listen and Heche is sufficiently sexy as the woman who makes Helms reconsider his “pre-engagement” to his 7^th grade teacher, played by Sigourney Weaver. I feel like a bit of a broken record, but, similar to Bridesmaids, what makes Cedar Rapids work isn’t the raunchy material, but the fact that these characters feel grounded and real. It’s a shame that Cedar Rapids didn’t get much of a wide release when it was in theatres, because it probably would have been a huge hit.

Rango

Johnny Depp plays a lizard named Rango who dresses like Hunter S. Thompson and eventually finds his way to the town of Dirt, an Old West town populated by desert animals, which is in need of a new sheriff. Rango assumes the post and adventure ensues. Rango is gorgeously animated, although many of the animals that inhabit its world are disgusting to look at, like the mole that looks like he has a penis for a nose and the bird with an arrow through his eye. Maybe my bar for animated movies is set a little too high by all of Pixar’s masterpieces, but Rango just never completely came together for me. It’s a worthwhile effort, but as much as I wanted to, I just was never able to fall under Rango’s spell.

Hobo with a Shotgun

Another movie that was schlock for schlock’s sake, Hobo with a Shotgun stars Rutger Hauer as a, you guessed it, hobo with a shotgun. Hauer is actually very good, but the material does him no favors. Another movie that should have embraced its campiness, Hobo with a Shotgun instead offers up gratuitous shots of gore for no real reason other than to max out the fake blood budget. Hobo with a Shotgun is grim, dark, way over the top, and takes itself too seriously.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

I’ve never read the Harry Potter books and never had any real desire to. I don’t have anything against Harry Potter or its legion of admiring fans, it was just never something I was interested in reading. The final chapter in the Harry Potter film series is quite good and was worth seeing for the legion of amazing British character actors that were cast to play the various Hogwarts professors and Harry Potter adversaries. The great Alan Rickman, in particular, stands out for his work as Professor Snape. Like I said, I’m no Harry Potter die-hard, but Deathly Hallows: Part 2 wrapped everything up quite nicely. I could have done without the epilogue, which used what I assume to be a combination of old age makeup and special effects to age Harry, Hermione and Ron about 20 years. Creepy.

13 Assassins

My full review of 13 Assassins is here. A very good samurai movie about 13 men trying to assassinate the extremely cruel brother of the Shogun before he is appointed to a position of power. The climactic showdown lasts for something like 45 minutes, but doesn’t feel overwhelming because director Takashi Miike knows what he’s doing. 13 Assassins is badass.

My Dog Tulip

A charming animated movie about an elderly gentleman and the relationship he establishes with his dog, Tulip. The movie is virtually dialogue free, with only the voiceover work of Christopher Plummer, who plays the old man, to provide the soundtrack. The dog doesn’t talk or get involved in any wacky adventures. She simply lives, is loyal to the old man, and dies. My Dog Tulip is a gem of a movie.

Paul

My full review of Paul is here. An homage by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg to Spielberg’s 80s alien invasion movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. The movie pretty much lives and dies on Frost and Pegg’s chemistry as two Comic-Con nerds who befriend Paul, an alien trying to make his way home. Paul is funny, lighthearted and very charming. One of my most pleasant surprises of 2011.

Drive

My full review of Drive is here. Baby Goose drives around in a muscle car, falls in love with his neighbor, wears an awesome satin scorpion jacket, and stomps some dude’s head into oblivion in an elevator, all while Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman are trying to kill him. If that doesn’t sound like a movie you’d want to watch, then I just have no idea what else to say.

Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

My full review of Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is here. It’s an enjoyable documentary about Conan O’Brien and his Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour, which he put together after he was summarily shitcanned by NBC after 7 months of hosting The Tonight Show. Nothing truly groundbreaking happens during the doc, but it’s still a fun way to spend an hour and a half, particularly if you’re on Team Coco.

Moneyball

I wrote more about Moneyball here, but here’s my condensed take: they took a non-fiction book that was very nuanced and forward thinking in its approach to how baseball players are valued and turned it into a movie about how Brad Pitt gets angry, throws chairs, smashes things with a baseball bat and has heartwarming conversations with his adorable moppet of a daughter. Hugely disappointing.

Win Win

Win Win doesn’t completely reach the heights of director Tom McCarthy’s two previous movies, The Station Agent and The Visitor, but is nevertheless a very good movie in its own right. Starring Paul Giamatti as a lawyer who moonlights as a high school wrestling coach, Win Win is a very good character piece that unfortunately gets interrupted by its plot. Like with Paul, I most enjoyed Win Win when the movie let me just hang out with its characters. Watching Giamatti, Jeffrey Tambor, Amy Ryan, Burt Young and Bobby Cannavale interact with each other is great fun. Alex Shaffer shows up about a quarter of the way into the movie as a kid with a troubled past who is a bit of a wrestling prodigy. He and Giamatti have some wonderful scenes together, and Shaffer is effective at playing a kid who is a bit withdrawn but gradually comes to emerge from his shell. When something happens that forces a wedge between Giamatti and Shaffer, the plot kicks into gear and the movie loses its way a bit. I understand that movies need to have a set up, conflict, resolution structure; it’s just that this happened to be the least interesting thing about Win Win. Still, the characters are well rounded and a pleasure to spend time with. There are worse ways to spend 106 minutes.

Hesher

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the titular character, Hesher is pure anarchy and I loved every minute of it. Devin Brochu plays a kid whose mother has recently died and Rainn Wilson plays his dad, who is battling a severe bout of depression. Brochu isn’t quite sure how to cope with his mother being dead and his father being depressed, so he sort of drifts though life aimlessly until he, uhh, “befriends” Hesher, who is a completely unhinged lunatic that moves in with the grieving family, parks his giant black van out front, lights everything on fire and smashes the remnants. Sporting ratty long brown hair, a scraggly beard and tattoos of a giant middle finger on his back and a stick figure of a guy blowing his brains out on his chest, Gordon-Levitt is clearly having the time of his life playing Hesher. Like Drive, I found myself laughing at the utter ridiculousness of Hesher, because if I let myself take the movie too seriously, I’d probably just end up in tears. Hesher (the movie) and Hesher (the character) don’t give a fuck, and that’s what I liked about them.

The Muppets

I really don’t know what I can write about this movie, because either you like the Muppets, or you don’t. I had a blast spending time with Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie and the rest of the gang. Jason Segel did a great job as co-writer and made a very charming leading man, Amy Adams is as adorable as ever as his girlfriend, and Chris Cooper made for a deliciously evil villain. The musical numbers are all great (particularly “Am I a Man or a Muppet?” and the chickens’ rendition of Cee-Lo Green’s “Fuck You”) and the movie doesn’t overstay its welcome. The Muppets is easily the most fun I had at the movies last year.

"Maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh!"

Cowboys and Aliens

Amnesia, too much CGI, and Harrison Ford mailing in his performance as the bad guy. Cowboys and Aliens is predictable and, even worse, boring. Nothing surprising happens at all and all of the characters are completely two dimensional. Jon Favreau made Iron Man, which is probably the best summer blockbuster of the past five years. With Cowboys and Aliens, he’s probably now made the worst.

Young Adult

Young Adult is a fascinating character study of an alcoholic woman (played by Charlize Theron) who returns from the big city of Minneapolis to her small home town of Mercury, Minnesota to win back her high school boyfriend, as she believes the two of them are destined to be together. The catch? He’s happily married with a newborn daughter. While in Mercury, she befriends Patton Oswalt’s character, who was the high school nerd and was involved in a gay bashing incident, despite not being gay. Theron and Oswalt are both great and the movie is not afraid to plumb the depths of Theron’s alcoholism for some very dark comedic moments. Too bad the ending is such a cop-out; otherwise Young Adult could have been truly special.

Hugo

Hugo is Martin Scorsese’s first family film, his first 3D film and his love letter to the history of cinema. Asa Butterfield is Hugo Cabret, an orphan who seemingly lives in the walls of a Paris train station and keeps the clocks running after his father is killed in a terrible accident. The movie takes awhile to get moving, but once the secret of the automaton he and his father have been working on is discovered and once Hugo finds out just who “Papa Georges” (played by the great Ben Kingsley) is, Hugo becomes pure magic. I don’t feel like I was completely able to fall under Hugo’s spell, due to the aforementioned 3D. I’ve now seen three movies in 3D, and every time I’ve been completely conscious of the glasses on my face, always adjusting them and fiddling with them when I should have instead been immersed in the movie I was watching. I have a feeling that when I am able to revisit Hugo in the comfort of my own home on Blu-ray, I’ll truly be enthralled with it.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

After directing three of the best animated films ever in The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille, director Brad Bird makes his first foray into live action filmmaking with the most recent installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise. And, holy crap, he knocks it out of the park. Ghost Protocol is one rollicking action set piece after another and rarely stops to catch its breath. If you think about the plot for more than two seconds, it falls apart, but who cares when the results are this much fun? Much has been made of the Burj Khalifa sequence, and rightly so. Seeing Tom Cruise scale the world’s tallest building on a giant IMAX screen definitely caused my sphincter to tighten up. Cruise is in movie star mode with his charisma cranked up to 11, Simon Pegg is his usual quirky charming self, Jeremy Renner is sufficiently steely as a badass who has a potentially damaging secret and Paula Patton sure knows how to fill out a blue dress. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol kicked my ass and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Favorite non-2011 releases I saw last year for the first time: When Harry Met Sally, The Red Shoes, Some Like it Hot, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance

Like I said above, I’m a sucker for a good romantic comedy, and When Harry Met Sally is the perfect example of the genre. The characters all feel like real people, the dialogue is smart and funny and Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan have great chemistry together. I’m kind of disappointed it took me this long to watch it.

The Red Shoes is just a gorgeous movie to watch. Shot in lush Technicolor, it’s about a ballet dancer who eventually becomes the prima ballerina for the company for which she works. She falls in love with the company’s composer, much to the chagrin of the man who runs the ballet company, who asserts that she can never be a great dancer if she allows herself to fall in love. The centerpiece of the movie is a 17 minute ballet sequence, which is masterful to behold. I was enthralled by The Red Shoes from the opening credits.

Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drag, Marilyn Monroe in full on sexpot mode and one of the most famous closing lines in movie history. Yeah, Some Like it Hot absolutely deserves its status as a classic.

I was lucky enough to see The Man who Shot Liberty Valance as part of Edgar Wright’s week long takeover of the New Beverly Cinema, where he screened movies he’d never seen before. Directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin, westerns don’t really get anymore classic than The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. It was a treat to see a classic like this, shot in gorgeous black and white, on the big screen with a bunch of other movie geeks. Wright also had director Peter Bogdanovich (who made a documentary about John Ford and his movies) on hand to introduce Liberty Valance. Honestly, I probably could have listened to Bogdanovich tell stories about John Ford all night and been completely happy. The Man who Shot Liberty Valance was a moviegoing experience I won’t soon forget.

Least favorite non-2011 releases I saw last year: Dinner for Schmucks, Deadfall

How do you make a movie with Paul Rudd and Steve Carell and have it be one of the unfunniest pieces of garbage committed to celluloid? Ask the makers of Dinner for Schmucks. Probably the most damning thing I can say about how unfunny Schmucks was is that I did something I rarely, if ever do to a movie: I turned it off before it ended.

My full review (and probably my favorite thing I’ve ever written on this blog) of Deadfall is here. Nicolas Cage in a bad wig with an even worse spray tan wasn’t enough to save this piece of crap.

Most Disappointing Movie of 2011: Moneyball

Worst Movie of 2011: Cowboys and Aliens

My 10 favorite movies of 2011:

1. Drive
2. The Muppets
3. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
4. Hugo
5. Hesher
6. 13 Assassins
7. Cedar Rapids
8. Bridesmaids
9. Paul
10. Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Movies I want to see, but haven’t yet, in no order of preference: Attack the Block, Super 8, The Tree of Life, Thor, The Guard, Hanna, Captain America, Horrible Bosses, Our Idiot Brother, Friends with Benefits, Fright Night, Midnight in Paris, 50/50, Contagion, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Meek’s Cutoff, Martha Marcy May Marlene, My Week with Marilyn, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Descendants, A Separation, A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, Shame, The Artist, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, We Bought a Zoo, among others.