Haywire

I immediately left the country after seeing this (note correlation does not imply causation) so my motivation to write a lot has fallen. As always here's the onion review if you want a plot recap.

I actually enjoyed haywire quite a bit, and liked the matter of fact manner in which it was executed. In particular the fight scenes (though not completely realistic) weren't needlessly drawn out and seemed appropriately brutal. Still at this point is does seem like Soderbergh's kind of just screwing with us. First he makes a film starring a porn star that features no sex (The girlfriend experience), then a seventies style disaster film just so he can market it around Gwenyth Paltrow dying (Contagion), and now he uses a MMA star with no acting experience to make a compelling spy thriller built entirely around her (and it works). When you next consider his next project is a fictionalized account of Channing Tatum's time spent as a male stripper, it just seems like he wants to show everyone he can do whatever he wants (and once I heard that this last project will star Matthew Mcconaughey as Tatum's mentor you know its going to great) and make it work. If it came out that he was going to make etch a sketch the movie, starring snooki, and it turned out to be entertaining I wouldn't be shocked.

So yeah, go see haywire.

Tintin, and the 'Best of 2011'

Tintin is watchable if forgettable. But it did lead me to realize just what a string of mediocre films I saw this year. Really even the stuff I liked didn't really blow me away, and the film that stuck with me the most (Tree of Life) may have just been a bunch of pretentious nonsense I still can't decide. With all that said here's the 'best' of 2011 in no particular order. As always this is just based on films I saw during the calendar year not when they were released. As a result The Artist didn't have a chance not to end up on it.

Take Shelter

Midnight in Paris - I'm a Woody Allen sucker what can I say

Another Earth

Moneyball

Drive

Your Highness - This is more of a screw you to everyone who crapped on this film. Its obviously not a great work of art but it made me laugh...a lot.

Tree of Life - Like I said earlier, it may not be good, and I still can't decide if its amazing or ponderous, but it definitely caused me to think more than any other film this year so that has to count for something.

And just for the heck of it, here's the other films I saw this year that I liked enough that I might actually consider watching them again, at least as TNT saturday afternoon viewing if Ace of Cakes isn't on:

Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Parts 1&2

Drive Angry

Fast Five

Thor

Captain America

Warrior

The Muppets

X-Men first class

The Lincoln Lawyer

And just because here's the return of Wooderson.

The Artist

As promised here's the avclub review for the salient plot points.

I don't have much to say about this (famous last words). Its a generally fun little film, that's able to hold your attention even though its silent. Its definitely not the best film of the year (even though the word is its going to win), but whatever, not everything can be Crank 2.

The one thing I will say is that its got a few surprisingly dark moments - specifically two suicide attempts including one self-immolation. The second one is even played off as a joke and completely ignored by the person who saw the main character re-create Rigg's first scene From Lethal Weapon. So that's cool. I guess what I'm saying is go see The Artist if you think suicide is a joke.

Young Adult

Alright I've decided to stop even bothering to do a plot recap in these things (unless of course there's something I want to mock). I'll just include a link to the AV club review and then write my drivel.

This film really hasn't been that well received, and I sort of get why. The mechanics are a little clunky, and the characters aren't particularly likable, but I think it might be a satire, and if so, then it might be kind of genius. Basically the film follows a borderline insane alcoholic (Charlize Theron) who leaves the big city (Minneapolis) to go back to the small town where she grew up and try to get her ex-boyfriend back. In any other film of this type she would go through some not-too damaging hijinks, before having an emotional epiphany, learning an important life lesson, and inevitably deciding to stay in the small town with all the real people. This film doesn't do this. Everyone around her treats her behavior in an appropriately disturbed manner, and just when she's about to learn the lesson and make a decision to change her life, the film pulls her back and she decides to go back the the big city and stay just as self deluded as she was before. So like I said, if this was intended as a genre send-up then its kind of interesting. However the fact that I'm not completely sure that was the intention does point to some execution problems, so maybe I have no point.

And Patton Oswalt is really good in this.

Hugo

Yeah, yeah, its Martin Scorsese doing a 3-D kid's film about the wonder of cinema, lets all line up around the block and pay homage. Snark aside, the film is fine, though not as monumental as some of the hype (but not the box office) would suggest. It does try a little too hard to generate whimsy at times, and the Sascha Baren Cohen character is just a distraction, but overall its watchable, though I don't see it becoming an enduring holiday classic along the lines of Die Hard 2 or Rocky 4.

That said the film trotted out one trope that just annoys me every time I see it. At the very end one of the main character gets up to get a speech at an event meant to honor him. Now this event (a hog-tying ceremony) is attended by hundreds of people who undoubtedly paid a lot of money to go, so they have a reasonable expectation of some sort of coherent remarks. What they actually get is one of those speeches that exist solely in films, where the character gives a speech not only directed at one other character in the audience, but delivers it in such a manner that everyone else who hadn't been intimately involved in the plot for the last two hours would have been completely lost and have no idea of what he was talking about. It was basically something like this:

"Well I wouldn't be here tonight if it weren't for the courage of one person who did that one thing with the thing and then made a end around this other thing event though he wanted this thing. Now come and Dream with me.'

This is of course greeted with rapturous applause even though nobody there would have any idea what he was talking about. Its perfectly possible to give a speech thanking individual people while still being entertaining (as an example do not watch the Academy Award acceptance speeches). Just once I'd love a crowd in a movie to give ones that don't the tepid responses they actually deserve.

Melancholia

Alright before I get into the review I need to be perfectly clear that I was really not in the right mood to see this kind of film. I went in distracted, and really only went because its been on a bunch of best of lists and I wanted to get it in before it got pulled from the theatres. I wholeheartedly acknowledge that my reaction might change if I see it again in a better frame of mind.

Okay now that the preliminaries out of the way lets get to it. Melancholia is an incredibly bleak film. And not 'wow that was intense' bleak, but tediously bleak. It opens with the titular planet destroying the earth in super slow motion, and then jumps back in time a few months to lead us back to that moment. The rest of the film focuses on four characters (two sisters, a husband, and a son) in one location - a manor in some indeterminate location. We then get two hours of watching a mentally ill woman (Kirsten Dunst) act really sad, and then everything ends. Plus the main point seems to be that everything is meaningless so just accept our destruction (and yes I'm being intentionally flippant). That's not my issue since I've seen other films powerfully make this same point, but they did it in a much more engaging manner. I had at least six indiglo moments during the runtime, and spent the rest of the time fidgeting (granted that can probably be attributed to the meth, but still).

Now its not a worthless film. I liked the matter a fact way it approached the end of the earth, and the performances, such that they are, are good (I would go so far to say this is Dunst's best performance since Bring it On). Still I can't get past the fact that it was just really pedantic and tedious, which ended up overwhelming its positive elements.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

TTSS (see what I did there) is an incredibly mannered film. Almost to a fault. It takes great pains to tell this story about the search for a Russian mole in the British Intelligence Service in the most calm and deliberate manner possible. There aren't any histrionics, very little action, and almost no raised voices. This is all fine, but as a result it takes about an hour to get going and almost falls over the brink into complete tedium. Thankfully the performances keep that from happening, and once the story gets moving the film coalesces into a reasonably engaging spy thriller. It doesn't reinvent the genre, but its worth checking out. Just with the proviso that the first half is really slooooow.