My 10 favorite films of 2011

[Note: In a different form, this was supposed to run in LGBT Weekly last week, but it was cut for space.]

Before you read through the list of my 10 favorite movies of 2011, I want to provide you with a disclaimer. I haven’t seen every movie that came out this year. Yes, part of the reason is that many of the movies that are probably going to be nominated for Oscars only open in New York and Los Angeles before January 1, and they won’t open in San Diego for weeks. However, there are also some movies that have opened in San Diego that I should have seen but haven’t had the time or something was preventing from getting to the screening. For example, I ran out of gas on the 15 on the way to see Tintin. (I didn’t see until after it had been out for three weeks.) Some other big movies that I haven’t seen that could have made this list include War Horse, Take Shelter, Melancholia, A Separation, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. However, the reason Hugo, The Descendants, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Shame aren’t on the list that I just didn’t like them that much. And I really liked Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, but not more than the other ten in this list.

With all of that in mind, here are my favorite movies of the last year.

10. The Help. I could not resist the easy morality of this story of a quiet revolution waged by black housekeepers in early 1960s Mississippi. Viola Davis’s quiet suffering is almost agonizing to watch, while Octavia Spencer is funnier than anyone in Bridesmaids. But most of the white characters are nearly as interesting or layered. (On DVD.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ajv_6pUnI

9. Albert Nobbs. It doesn’t open in San Diego for several weeks, but I managed to see a DVD screener of this quiet and intense drama about gender politics in Victorian London. Glenn Close’s uncanny and deeply moving portrayal of the sad, scared butler Albert Nobbs is the one of the great performances of 2011.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-BF1YE9BEM

8. Bridesmaids. Easily the funniest movie of the year, Bridesmaids is not just about female friendship, but also class warfare, gender politics, and food poisoning. Melissa McCarthy steals every scene she’s in as the bizarre butch future sister-in-law. The film’s jokes are neither cruel nor racist, as they were in the movie I hated more than any other last year, The Hangover, Part 2. (On DVD.)

7. Heartbeats. Barely anyone saw this stunning French Canadian story of a bisexual love triangle. Written and directed by Xavier Dolan, who also starred in the film, it’s gorgeous, avant garde piece of art that seems impossible to have come from someone only 21 years old. (On DVD and Instant Netflix.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znpU_Aup-Bg

6. Beginners. It’s a gay movie made for straight people – it does little too much Homosexuality 101 – but as Ewan McGregor’s father who comes out after turning 70, Christopher Plummer is as sweet and giddy and confused and awake as a kid in a candy store. Mike Mills, who wrote and directed the movie, uses some brilliant editing and witty voiceover to make something extraordinary, moving and funny. (On DVD.)

5. Drive. A violent, searing, and ultimately gorgeous homage to 1980s LA noir films like American Gigolo and Blade Runner, Drive is also Ryan Gosling’s best performance of the year, and that’s saying a lot. Taciturn, serene, and dressed a bit like Steve McQueen in Le Mans, as the Driver Gosling is the new ultimate example of cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe6eOqheva8

4. The Artist. A silent movie about the silent movies, and as good as the best silent movies made at their height, The Artist is an exquisite, perfect film that features a performance by Jean Dujardin that is so charismatic and sexy that when the movie is finished, you want to watch it all over again just to stare at him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK7pfLlsUQM

3. Moneyball. How could a movie about baseball statistics be so enthralling, even exciting? The answer is Brad Pitt, who plays former Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane when he revolutionized baseball recruiting. Pitt is funny, arrogant, nervous, sly, and sexy; it’s a marvelous movie star performance.

2. The Tree of Life. The winner of the Cannes Film Festival, Tree of Life divided audiences, half of whom thought it was pretentious nonsense, and half of whom thought it was a masterpiece. I’m in the latter camp; I cried in awe during the film’s montage of the history of the universe. A meditation on family, anger, creation, and memory mostly set in 1960s Texas, the film still haunts me six months later. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain will be rewarded for other movies this year, but is in The Tree of Life that they did the best work of their careers. (On DVD.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXRYA1dxP_0

1. Weekend. I will just repeat what I wrote in my review three months ago: “It is about what it is like to be gay and in love now. It is an immediate, intimate, and honest examination of love, sex, and longing in 2011. It’s also gorgeously shot, sensitively acted, and sexier than any gay film I can remember. Andrew Haigh’s sensitive direction and editing and Urszula Pontikos’s cinematography turn what is basically a two-person parlor play into an intense, almost epic work of beauty.” It’s my favorite movie of the 2011. (On Instant Netflix.)

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I’m not running. I’m choosing.

This review isn’t going to run until next week (if it runs), but the movie is out now, and I want y’all to see it.

Pariah
Written and Directed by Dee Rees
Starring Adepero Oduye, Pernell Walker, and Kim Wayans
Rated R
At Landmark Hillcrest

As it turns out, 2011 was a really great year for independent queer cinema. I’ve mentioned multiple times over the last few months my love for Weekend, one of best gay movies ever made. And now San Diego is getting to see Pariah, one of the best lesbian films I’ve ever seen, which has won awards at Sundance and other festivals and is nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards. That Focus Features, the distribution company that puts out such highbrow star-vehicles like Brokeback Mountain and Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, would get behind a gritty first feature with virtually unknown actors and a lengthy scene about a strap-on dildo is testament to how affecting Pariah is. They know that the word-of-mouth on this movie will be great. Let me add to the praise.

The title of the film refers to someone who is an outcast, usually someone stigmatized but sometimes someone who just chooses to live outside of the community in some way. The most obvious pariah in the film is Alike (pronounced uh – lee – kay, and played by Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old African-American lesbian who is closeted to – if suspected by – her family, but a bit too green and unsure of herself to comfortably fit in with the young lesbian social world where Alike’s butch best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) is so at ease. But Laura is a pariah, too, since she has been kicked out her home by her disapproving mother and subsequently quit school to make enough money to live with her sister. And Alike’s mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans), is a pariah in her home, where she has alienated both her husband and her oldest daughter, and at work, where she is visibly prickly at the thought of interacting with her more boisterous co-workers.

While the title is apt, I found it a bit too extreme. When I think of pariahs, I imagine ragged lepers or mentally ill hermits. And as hard as these women have it, their plights don’t quite compare; there is too much love and hope and humor in the lives of the characters Dee Brees has created in her flawless script. Even in the most intense conflict, between Audrey and Alike, is based on motherly love, even if the mother is damaged and her priorities are disordered. Audrey wants Alike to have the perfect life, so she makes her husband Arthur (Charles Parnell) work overtime as a police officer to pay for the house in Fort Green and the designer clothes for Alike and her sister. This also means that Alike needs to be the perfect girl, wearing pretty clothes, dating boys, and not hanging out with Laura. Audrey is the antagonist of the film, but she is not a monster. She simply does not have the ability to deal with what life has brought her.

Alike, however, has the self-possession of the smartest and coolest girl in school. She is nervous about finding a girlfriend and playing into the butch-femme role-playing that seems to govern the lesbian culture she and Laura hang out in. But her bravery, not only in her poetry but in her willingness to give up everything she knows for freedom, is inspiring. Oduye has a rich role to play, and she does it with naturalistic, nervous toughness that reminded me, at times, of both Claire Danes in My So Called Life and Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight. As Laura, Walker is similarly striking, effortlessly switching from wise to scared, sensitive to rough. And Wayans, known best for her insane impersonation of Whitney Houston on In Living Color 20 years ago, gives the kind of fraught but controlled performance that in a bigger movie might earn her an Oscar nomination. You can only achieve these sorts of performances with a great director, and Brees proves that she is just that.

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Yes, it’s a silent film.

Okay, I totally dug The Artist. My review, which can also be found in LGBT Weekly:

Usually, I do a little bit of research about a movie before I see it. At least, I’ll scan the entry on IMDb.com, just so that I have an idea about what I’m about to see – some plot threads, the resumé of the actors or director, and the like. Though I won’t read anyone else’s reviews if I am planning on reviewing it myself; some critics are too good at their job and their arguments cloud mine. But I was very busy the day I saw The Artist, and I went in only knowing that it had been named by the New York Film Critics Society as the best movie of the year. I didn’t even know that the movie was silent, or that it was in black and white.

When I realized about 15 minutes in that both its black and whiteness and its silence were going to last for, probably, the whole film, I thought back to it being named the best film of the year by groups of critics, and I thought, “Well, there must be some avant-garde twist – it’s going to be colorized, or the sound will come in halfway through, or it will turn into a cartoon.” And I waited, and it didn’t happen. No, The Artist is a silent black and white movie, and that’s all that it is.

But it’s an amazingly entertaining black and white silent film, as skillfully made as any movie released this year. The only thing that makes the film modern is the plot, which is meta enough to be called post-modern: It’s a silent film about silent films. It tells the parallel stories of super star silent film actor George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), whose career and life fall apart with the advent of talkies in 1929, and up and coming ingénue Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), whose movie career starts after a chance meeting with Valentin and then sky rockets after sound changes the industry.

The plot is somewhat reminiscent of A Star is Born, but it has very little of the pathos or melodrama of any of the versions of that classic. George’s decline is sad and dark, but silent film, especially one using the style of film of the 1920s, does not lend itself to the sort of subtle realism that contemporary moviegoers expect from their emotional dramas. Instead, the Belgian writer and director Michel Hazanavicius uses bold but not heavy symbolism, expressive and almost mime-like facial expressions, and chiaroscuro cinematography that reminded me, at times, of the shots of Busby Berkeley, Fritz Lang and Orson Welles. With a rollicking, pitch perfect period score by Ludovic Bource, the film really feels as if it was snatched from the late ’20s.

And Dujardin could have been a matinee idol in the 1920s, and if he had been, he would have rivaled either Douglas Fairbanks or Rudolph Valentino, who George is clearly modeled on. Dujardin is not only almost inhumanly handsome, but his ability to emote without a single word and with such gorgeously choreographed gestures and expressions makes his presence on screen simply tantalizing. As sweet and perky as Bejo is as Peppy, whenever Dujardin was gone, I yearned for his return. It’s a stellar performance.

I was surprised by how much I liked The Artist. It is a perfect film. But I am somewhat perplexed by it. Why make a silent film almost exactly as it would have been made in 1929? (I say 1929, not 1928, because there are a few moments of non-musical sound, and that wouldn’t have been possible until the last year of the 1920s.) As I watched The Artist, I wondered whether it was the greatest film school exercise of all time. Then I realized that Hazanavicius was simply paying homage to a period of history and period of art that has been forgotten, and he does it with skill that rivals if not surpasses his idols..

MOVIE REVIEW
The Artist
Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius
Starring Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo and John Goodman
Rated PG-13
Opens Dec. 23
At Landmark Hillcrest

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A dirty shame

Yet again, I am in the distinct minority on a movie. My review of Shame can be found, of course, on the website for San Diego LGBT Weekly, and I’ve pasted the whole thing below.

Shame, Steve McQueen’s dystopian tale of compulsion and sibling conflict, is the most sexually explicit movie I’ve seen since John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus but it is not nearly as interesting, inventive or sexy as Mitchell’s movie. In fact, Shame is about as sexy as taking a cold shower, clothed, while your grandmother sits on the toilet seat and tells you about her dentures. To be fair, Shame is not meant to be sexy, or at least I don’t think it is. In theory, watching the chiseled, intense Michael Fassbender get blown in a gay sex club and have a ménage à trois with two burlesque dancers should be hot, or at least really titillating. But by the point in the film when these scenes arrive, Fassbender’s Brandon Sullivan has shown himself to be so cold, angry and self-hating that McQueen could have sent him running through a field of daisies singing “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning,” and I would have still been depressed.

Brandon works in finance and has a white, spare apartment in a fancy building in the middle of Manhattan. He has sex with every vaguely beautiful woman he meets, and he masturbates all of the time, even at work. His life resembles that of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, except that Brandon feels – wait for it – shame. When his computer at work is taken in for repairs, he immediately fears what will be found on the hard drive, and when he gets caught masturbating by his sister, he becomes enraged. When he tries to have sex with a woman he actually likes and can’t get it up, he’s mortified. I’ve seen articles about Shame that state that Brandon is a sex addict, but this seems like a misreading. He has sex compulsively and with strangers, but when he doesn’t have sex, he doesn’t go through withdrawal. He seems to have sex in order to punish himself; he shows no pleasure in it, not in the hunt, nor in the kill. If he’s addicted to anything, it’s repression.

What Brandon is punishing himself for is never clear, though it has something to do with his younger sister, Sissy, played with ecstatic rawness by Carey Mulligan. The film opens with Brandon playing and deleting Sissy’s answering machine messages, and when she lets herself in and invites herself to stay while she’s in town singing at a couple clubs, he is greatly irritated. She is impulsive and flighty and needy and her arms are covered in scars from cutting herself, but when she sings “New York, New York” slowly, almost as a lament, it’s clear that Sissy is much more in touch with her emotions that Brandon is. Brandon is so unhinged by Sissy because of something from their past, but aside from the reference that they “came from a bad place,” this past event is left to our imagination.

That McQueen and his co-writer Abi Morgan refuse to provide us with the big reveal is probably a rejection of the clichéd plot structures of most psychodramas. This seems ironic to me, because Sissy’s character, Brandon’s self-flagellation and making gay and group sex akin to an addict’s rock bottom are as clichéd as the phrase “done to death.” As beautiful as McQueen’s visuals are and as well as he directed the cast, the film just isn’t as profound and moving as Brandon’s final breakdown indicates it is supposed to be.

That said, when Fassbender commits to an emotion, he is mesmerizing; he’s a third Lawrence Olivier, a third Al Pacino, a third Christian Bale. Even if Brandon is the least attractive character he’s played this year (I’d take his Rochester in Jane Eyre, thank you very much), it is the most striking and the bravest performance. He has been widely tapped to receive his first Oscar nomination for Shame, and it will be deserved.

Shame
Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by Abi Morgan and Steve McQueen
Starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, and James Badge Dale
Rated NC-17
At Landmark Hillcrest

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Why don’t I like Scorcese?

My latest review is up at San Diego LGBT Weekly. If you can’t be bothered to click over, I’ve posted the whole thing below:

I may lose all credibility as a film critic by admitting that I am not much of a Martin Scorsese fan. Aside from The Departed, I’ve never actually enjoyed one of his films, even if I’ve respected them. There’s no doubt that he is a technical genius – his scene settings and camera work are visionary and sometimes thrilling, and he’s directed some actors to some great performances – but his stories tend toward either the violent or the extravagant or extravagantly violent. Scorsese does not believe in subtlety, and I don’t like to be bombarded by my art. I understand why his fans are his fans, but he just doesn’t make the kinds of movies that move me. Perhaps this is why I was in awe of his latest film, the extravagant Hugo, but I am not in love with it.

Hugo has been described as his first children’s film, and it is based on the Caldicot Award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written by Brian Selznick, who is gay and lives in La Jolla. The story follows Hugo, an orphaned boy (Asa Butterfield) living in the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s. He spends his time tending to the station’s many clocks, stealing food, and avoiding the station’s inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), who gets his kicks catching children and sending them to orphanages. He also is trying to fix a robot-like “automaton,” which his father (Jude Law) had found in an attic of a museum before he was killed in a fire. When a very grumpy toy shop owner named Georges (Ben Kingsley) catches Hugo trying to steal a wind-up mouse, Georges takes Hugo’s notebook, which is full of drawings Hugo’s father did of the automaton. For some reason, the notebook profoundly upsets Georges, and Hugo’s quest to retrieve it leads to a friendship with Georges’s goddaughter (Chloë Grace Moretz) and to, well, an adventure. It’s a movie for children, after all.

Except that I can’t imagine very many children being entertained by Hugo. The beauty of the art direction (by the great Dante Ferretti), the truly great 3-D cinematography, and Cohen’s slapstick comedy, particularly during the many chase scenes, will widen some children’s eyes. But the plot is a very slow build, and neither Butterfield nor Moretz are particularly charismatic or well directed. That the story ultimately revolves around rehabilitating the career of a great silent film director doesn’t help. For Scorsese’s fans, the film within a film and the numerous homages to some of early cinema’s most iconic moments will lead to him being called genius, yet again.

Hugo is a rather good movie. Its technical brilliance is the main reason, but the performances of Kingsley and Cohen are the other. Kingsley is incapable of a bad performance; his seriousness of purpose, his deliberateness and his ability to communicate five or six complex emotions when he is just silently sitting on a stool. And Cohen’s physical comedy has never been doubted, but this is the first time I have seen him subdued enough to be truly likeable. Perhaps, this is where Scorcese is actually subtle, in turning Borat into someone a little bit like Charlie Chaplin.

Hugo
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by John Logan
Starring Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley and Sacha Baron Cohen
Rated PG
At your multiplex
In 3-D

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