Print Best and Worst Films of 2011
Originally broadcast on Sounds of Cinema, here are Nathan Wardinski’s picks of the best and worst films of 2011 with abridged arguments for each film. For further information, including full arguments for each film and lists of honorable mentions and trends from the past year, click here.
Best Films of 2011
1. Margin Call
One of the recent trends in movies has been the subgenre of recession cinema. Margin Call dramatizes the panic at a fictional investment bank on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, and this picture succeeds in ways that similar films like Too Big To Fail or Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps fell short. Although Margin Call is not as in depth as those films in terms of the financial details, Margin Call does its job as a dramatization far more effectively. The film presents a group of characters at various levels of the bank’s hierarchy, from risk analysts up to the bank president, and within the twenty-four hours in which the story takes place these people are confronted with serious ethical challenges in which greed, integrity, ambition, and loyalty come into play. Margin Call is ultimately about the relationship between individuals and financial institutions, and the arbitrary way those individuals might be rewarded or destroyed based on little more than circumstance. The film's layered and sophisticated portrait of corporate culture and its intelligent and complex ethical subtext makes Margin Call one of the most impressive films about capitalism in the post-TARP era and the best film of 2011.
2. Shame
Movies about sexuality are tough to get right. Even well intentioned films often fall into traps set by deeply entrenched storytelling traditions and portray sexuality in a pornographic way or indulge puritanical condemnation. Shame attempts—and succeed—at doing something much more risky and confrontational. The main character suffers from sex addiction and when the media deal with addiction, they often make the addict a fool who the audience ridicules. Shame makes the addict a figure of empathy and actor Michael Fassbender gives a fearless performance, exposing himself both physically and emotionally. As the film explores why this man can go on sexual binges but cannot maintain an emotional relationship, Shame’s portrayal of sexual dysfunction makes a lasting punch. This isn’t a film appealing to our inner-scopophiliac; Shame suggests that contemporary life has rendered all of us a little like Fassbender’s character, seeking temporary relief from the emptiness of our lives through endless stimulation.
3. The Artist
The year 2011 had a large number of films that were self-reflexive or made sport of the filmmaking process. One of the most successful at this was The Artist, which uses the format and style of silent era motion pictures. By doing this, the filmmakers draw attention to how technology shapes the way we experience the world. Although that sounds like something only a viewer with a degree in film theory would appreciate, The Artist is accessible to a wide audience because it possesses something a lot of 2011's summer tent poles films lacked: a heart. The Artist is much more satisfying than a lot of special effects pictures because of its sense of fun and coherent narrative. The Artist is, like its main character, very charming and likable. That it also manages to be a bold experiment in cinema form and technique makes it among the most exceptional films of 2011.
4. Melancholia
There were a number of avant garde films released in 2011 that attempted to make broad existential statements, such as The Tree of Life and Life in a Day. The trouble with those films is that as they were often shapeless or directionless. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia has certainly the most depressing take on the existential truth but it is also tells a coherent story while doing it. At the center of Melancholia are two key performances by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Gainsbourg’s character attempts to control everything while Dunst’s character recognizes the futility of it all; she has the depressed perspective of a wise philosopher as she recognizes the impermanence of everything. As nihilistic as that sounds, Melancholia has a soothingly meditative quality about it. This film may not qualify as a feel good movie, but Melancholia is a smart film and viewing it is an extraordinary cinematic experience.
5. Hanna
Hanna is more than a shoot-‘em-up picture. This film takes the spy thriller and combines it with a travelogue and a coming of age story, resulting in a picture that manages to be simultaneously sweeping and personal. As the title character goes on the run, she travels through various cultures and encounters the amenities of civilization for the first time. Because of her feral upbringing, the character sees technology, manners, and traditions with fresh eyes and the audience is able to experience that newness with her due to some interesting choices on the part of the filmmakers and because of the performance by actress Saoirse Ronan. Despite the extraordinary stunts and set pieces, Hanna remains a real character and although she is on a mission she is also learning about the world and about herself. Hanna’s adventures make this not only a satisfying action picture but also a story about a girl becoming a woman.
This gritty story about an illegal immigrant and his son trying to survive is one of the most provocative portrayals of the American Dream in a motion picture in recent years. This is a very good piece of filmmaking; the story is told briskly with some powerful visuals and it has a pair of great performances by Demián Bichir and José Julián as an immigrant laborer and his son. The way the story casts the relationship between Bichir and Julián’s characters is heartwarming but in an authentic way and the lessons that the young man must learn about life and about his father are tough but genuine. What A Better Life does by its end is to reimagine the immigrant story, which is one of the essential American narratives, and in the process offer a contemporary vision of those on their way in and what that means for those of us who are already here.
7. Page One: Inside the New York Times
Timing is crucial in the making of certain kinds of documentaries and the filmmakers of Page One benefit from being in the right place at the right time. This documentary is ostensibly an examination of the way in which the Times conducts its business but the filmmakers find themselves making this documentary at a moment in which the entire media landscape is being uprooted and long established institutions such as the New York Times face an uncertain future. That uncertainty gives this film the drama that makes it an exciting, dramatic, and insightful piece of filmmaking. What this documentary captures is an important moment not only for the employees and readers of the New York Times but for the culture as a whole. As goes the Times, so goes the rest of the traditional news industry and Page One is able to raise many of the relevant questions about what that means for all of us.
8. 50/50
Cancer is one of the most obnoxious Hollywood plot devices because filmmakers often use the disease as a cheap hook to gain audience sympathy and actors in these films are often encouraged to indulge in a lot of ostentatious sentimentality. That tendency by Hollywood filmmakers to exploit cancer makes 50/50 all the more exceptional. Rather than a melodrama, this film exists somewhere between a dark comedy and a coming of age piece as 50/50 finds humor in the patient’s experience. This isn’t a film about dying, it is film about living. What bothers the main character is not that he might die but the randomness by which that death sentence is meted out. 50/50 is ultimately about the main character acknowledging what is within his control and taking responsibility for it and that turns it from a story about illness and into a film about how people learning to appreciate life.
9. Hugo
Hugo is terrific meld of the technical filmmaking craft and humanistic sensibilities. Technically, Hugo is distinguished for its effective use of 3-D. Hugo short hands the history of cinema, reminding the audience of the form’s roots as a sideshow attraction, and the 3-D effect complements the love and appreciation that the story has for the marriage of stagecraft and technology that cinema embodies. The mechanical qualities of Hugo are balanced by its excellent performances. Young actors Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz lead the cast and Ben Kingsley is also impressive as a filmmaker-turned-shopkeeper. The combination of the technical filmmaking craft and organic human qualities makes Hugo an impressive synthesis of and meditation on what filmmaking can and should be. Whether emboldened by the prospect of making family film, inspired by the new filmmaking technology, or enchanted by the subject matter, Scorsese’s has made Hugo his best film in over a decade.
10. Warrior
Warrior is the best fight film since Rocky Balboa hung up his gloves. That comparison is apt because this film has a lot in common with the best elements of the Rocky pictures; most importantly, the filmmakers understand that the fighting is not an end in itself but a way to dramatize the struggles that each man has to overcome. This is a picture about men and their families, the struggle to survive, and reconciliation. Of course the main attraction of a fight film is the fights themselves and Warrior’s scenes of combat are brutal pieces of showmanship. The cinematography and sound pick up on the violence of mixed martial arts but they also capture the spectacle inherent when men come to blows. Warrior’s combination of fights and human drama might strikes some viewers as reminiscent of other films (including some that have won Oscars) but few have done it this well.
Worst Films of 2011
Although there were a lot of really awful films released in 2011, Jack and Jill represents the very bottom in a deep barrel. Other pictures that were similarly bad cannot touch Jack and Jill because, for the most part, the filmmakers behind those films at least appeared to at least try. Jack and Jill does not look like a film. It doesn’t even look like a Saturday Night Live skit. Jack and Jill is a commercial break disguised as a motion picture in which Adam Sandler, in a dress, hawks products placed none-too-subtly. Even though this year has seen a lot of pictures that were clearly motivated by commercial interests none of them showed such a contempt for the audience as Jack and Jill.
Your Highness is intended to parody the fantasy genre but it does not appear as though anyone involved actually bothered to watch any of these films. The humor of Your Highness consists of nothing more than dropping foul language into the dialogue. The film is a loser, the performers involved know it, and James Franco, Natalie Portman, and Zooey Deschanel sleep walk through their roles, presumably dreaming of the paychecks that they netted for being in this film.
The most accurate assessment of The Hangover Part II was made by Richard Roeper, who observed that viewing this film is like laughing at a great joke and then someone telling the same joke right after that. Both Hangover films are about being a chauvinistic pig and getting away with it, but this second film attempts to turn sexism, homophobia, and racism into comic virtues. This is an ugly picture whose filmmakers cynically think the audience is too stupid to realize they are being fed a recycled script.
4. Priest
This year had plenty of mediocre, disappointing, or outright bad fantasy and comic book films but Priest is the worst. Priest is a third and fourth generation copy of visuals and techniques from genre classics and perhaps to conceal how derivative it is, Priest lights its settings as darkly as possible and edits its scenes so sloppily that the action is impossible to follow. The incompetent filmmaking is matched by an impossibly convoluted script. This film doesn’t even manage to be a guilty pleasure. It is just a bore.
Sleeping Beauty views like something a first-year film student would make. It is such an ill-conceived, under written, vacuous, and pretentious piece of nonsense that it is a stretch to even call this a motion picture. Even trying to appreciate Sleeping Beauty in terms of art house values is fruitless. What the film has to say about men, women, money, and sex isn’t original and even interesting and its handling of the topic is as clumsy and amateurish as its filmmaking.
6. Bad Teacher
Bad Teacher focuses on a lead character that is superficial and unsympathetic and her bad behavior is the gag that is supposed to sustain the film. This sets up Bad Teacher with an inherent problem: for the story to sustain its comedy the character has to change for the better but to make that change, the character loses the very quality that makes her interesting to watch. Bad Teacher shows no imagination and fails even as a bawdy comedy. It isn’t funny or even shocking, just stupid.
Films attempting to be meta-textual, self-reflexive, or just clever were common in 2011, providing some of the year’s best films but also some of the worst. Road to Nowhere attempts to merge the crime stories of the Coen Brothers with the unsettling absurdities of David Lynch. This comes to an incomprehensible mess. When a film manages to foul up its execution so thoroughly that The Human Centipede 2 looks brilliant by comparison, it’s a sign that something has gone terribly wrong.
Mr. Popper’s Penguins follows the familiar format of a neglectful parent who realizes that there is more to life than work. But Mr. Popper decides that the penguins are actually more important than his children. This movie also suggests that divorced parents will get back together just as soon as the father shows compassion to a flightless bird, encouraging false hope in the children who are likely to see it. That makes Mr. Popper’s Penguins not just a poor family film but also a dishonest one.
30 Minutes or Less is one of the more aptly titled films of the year. Although it only runs eighty-three minutes, the story runs out of momentum after the first half hour. Aside from the script problems, 30 Minutes or Less is also miscast with Jesse Eisenberg, the lead of The Social Network, cast as a pizza delivery man. Whatever comic potential is left over from the slapdash script and the miscasting is sucked up by Danny McBride’s ever obnoxious shtick.
10. Sucker Punch
Director Zach Snyder’s technical faculty is beyond dispute but Sucker Punch proves that he has no other filmmaking credentials. This film is a disaster and Sucker Punch stands as the prime example of Hollywood spectacles trying to cover for a lack of story by piling on special effects. But the last straw on this film is that it purports to be some kind of statement on women’s empowerment. It isn’t. Sucker Punch is PG-13 pornography that manages to be lazier and stupider than Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
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