The idea of this movie is so straightforward it’s distinctly expressed in its four-word title. A couple (Jason Segel and Emily Blunt) falls in love and gets engaged, but before they can tie the knot, life gets in the way. You’ve seen conceits like this before. Hundreds of times, probably.
The problem is that the way the movie deals with their engagement undercuts the premise of the movie. A “five-year engagement” implies waiting, and I don’t mean in just a prudish sense – it denotes unfulfilled commitment. But how much more committed could these two people be? Segel and Blunt’s characters already live together at the start of the movie, and when Blunt gets a promising internship in Michigan, Segel quits his job as an up-and-coming San Francisco chef and moves with her. They get a house and settle in, delaying their wedding until after the end of the internship; which naturally keeps stretching out longer and longer, putting constant strain on their relationship.
But the wedding, of course, doesn’t mean anything. The movie pretends that its central premise has some importance when in fact it has almost none. The couple is married in all but name, and what we’re watching is not a long-unrequited love story, but a struggling young marriage. Their wedding, as an event, is just a symbol. Even if it happened midway through the movie, these people’s lives would be exactly the same.
I liked the movie just fine as a dark, somewhat wandering romantic comedy, but it’s a film caught between two ideas – one a bright, happy will-they-or-won’t-they love story, the other a dark, Blue Valentine/Revolutionary Road story of dying dreams and quiet unhappiness. The movie is too serious to have too much fun but too scared to go dark. Defter hands might have made the balancing act go a little smoother, but instead it’s a comedy that doesn’t know if it wants to be fantasy or reality. It ends up being neither.
First off, I know a lot of people would argue here for The Hobbit. Ignore them. They can call up Mario Lopez*, cause those people be haters. Also, we’ll get to The Hobbit later.
*got that pop culture reference in just under the gun. What’s that? Missed the window entirely? No one ever watched “H8R” anyway? No one reading this has any idea of what I'm referencing? Well, "H8R" was a CW show where celebrities went to yell at fans who said mean things about them on the Internet and... you know what, just forget it. This isn't worth saving.
Sometimes, I’m disappointed with a movie but it’s for me hard to understand exactly why. There’s just a vague sense of malaise, a low waw-waw playing somewhere in the distance. Actually, sometimes I don’t even realize it myself. I remember coming home in high school after seeing Men In Black II and my dad saying immediately, “I guess you didn’t like the movie, huh?” That was the first moment I realized I had not.
That’s not the case with Brave. The movie’s flaws are glaring: a half-baked storyline, underwhelming characters, and a strong example of what Ebert always refers to as “the idiot plot” (that is, a problem that could be fixed instantly if the characters acted even slightly logically). If you haven’t seen it, I won’t reveal here what is, in fact, Brave’s best trick: an abrupt right turn in the story halfway through that takes the movie in a fun new direction. It’s just as soon as it does take that turn, the movie’s two main characters abandon all reason and crash wildly, aimlessly, through the rest of the story.
That a children’s movie has a few story flaws shouldn’t be news, except that Brave comes from Pixar, the gold standard of animation and a company that made its name on story and character development. Even as Dreamworks and their own parent company Disney scrambled to catch up, every year Pixar has been laughably ahead of the game in this regard. If we give them a pass on the insisted-on-by-Disney cash grab that was Cars 2 (which everyone’s been very understanding about), this is the first movie that Pixar’s handed us where animation trumped imagination.
Here’s why they should know better: early on in Pixar’s run, they began expanding their moviemaking department so that they weren’t just cranking out one film at a time (a schedule that would give them a film every three years or so). The team that made Toy Story was working on A Bug’s Life, while their B-team began work on Toy Story 2, which was conceived as a direct-to-DVD movie. But Toy Story 2’s storyjust wouldn’t come together, and as the movie got further and further into development, it became more and more of a mess. At the same time, Disney decided to bump Toy Story 2 from a DVD to a theatrical release.
Fortunately, the creative team working on A Bug’s Life finished and were able to come in and rescue Toy Story 2. In a weekend, they’d reconceived the whole movie, and a frenetic nine months later, released one of their most critically acclaimed films (it has a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes to this day). And they promised themselves that they’d never make another movie where they didn’t put their top creative talent in charge.
Until Brave, they kept that promise. Look at the list of writers and directors on Pixar films up to this point, and Pixar’s top names can be spotted on every film: John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Lee Unkrich. And then we get to Brave and… Mark Andrews? Brenda Chapman? Who are thesepeople*?
*it turns out Mark Andrews was a Pixar story supervisor (a story supervisor is a writer who gets paid extra), and Brenda Chapman directed The Prince of Egypt, a movie that was considerably more successful than I remembered.
I get that Pixar’s top players are going to have to hand over the reins at some point. In fact, one of their greatest successes was bringing in acclaimed-but-forgotten director Brad Bird, so you have to cut them a little slack here. But I think they’re going have to be a little more careful next time they try to pass on responsibility, because I’ve lost a little faith that someone’s really watching the store.
5. The Artist Hey, we made it to the Best Picture winner already! This is flying by.
I should mention early on that I don’t have any problem with The Artist winning Best Picture last year. Making a silent black-and-white movie in modern Hollywood is a ballsy thing, and the film is chock-full of energy and pathos in a way most modern films aren’t. I mean, sure, it’s a little like watching Singin’ In the Rain with the sound turned off and the chroma turned down, but honestly, most Hollywood films are much worse than watching Singin’ In The Rain with the sound turned off and the chroma turned down.
That said, this movie won’t age well. We’re not even a year past its big Oscar win, and it’s already all but forgotten. Director Michael Hazanvicius and star Jean Dujardin won their Oscars and returned to the screen again this year in The Players, and no one noticed. All the blathering about what a star-making turn it was by Berenice Bejo, and how we’ll be seeing her in everything shortly, has died out. They’re French stars, they returned to making French movies, and we’ll never hear from them again.
Still, I’m glad that The Artist won the Oscar. It was a fun movie to watch and a fun movie to talk about, and since our Oscar conversation this year is going to be dominated by the role of torture in movies about modern warfare, I’m glad that we got a small break of levity. I haven't seen Zero Dark Thirty yet, but there's no doubt it could be improved by the presence of a small, well-trained dog that mimics all the main character's actions.
4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo I don’t enjoy horror movies. Not a bit. And particularly not slasher movies. I don’t enjoy the experience of deliberately causing myself fear, nor the sadomasochism of watching torture or pain. I’ve skipped dozens of Friday night movie invites (okay, this is an exagerration so you believe I am much more popular than I am) because I didn’t want to watch whatever the latest Eli Roth flick is. Not my thing.
But no matter how dark David Fincher goes (and in Dragon Tattoo, he ventures pretty far down the well), I always find it worth tracking with him. He doesn’t just take you to the darkness of the human mind, his films sit there and study it, waiting for you to accept what you’re seeing as part of the reality of human behavior. I thought I was prepared for this movie by his previous ventures into the minds of psychopaths (Seven, Zodiac), but the violence here is absolutely brutal, and on a number of levels, both mental and sexual. I generally prefer my films much less rape-y than this, but Dragon Tattoo was a film worth squirming in my seat through.
I know there’s been some Rooney Mara backlash since the picture was released, but it’s not based on her performance, certainly. The fresh-faced intellectual we met in Fincher’s Social Network is gone completely, and the transformation isn't just the physical mohawk-and-piercings that all the magazines gushed over. She disappears into the role, even varies her speaking cadence to match that of Swedish English speakers, a dedication that Daniel Craig doesn’t even pretend to bother with.
I’m a big fan of Craig’s, and he’s very good here, but he does that thing that drives me, as a former glasses wearer, up the wall. He’s wearing thick black glasses to try and knock down some of his Bond sexiness (unsuccessfully), and he responds to this new prop by fiddling with his glasses every waking second. You know, like people who wear glasses do.
Look, Craig: they’re eyewear. They go on your face. You forget about them. You don’t take them off and dangle them from one ear when you’re looking at something. Speaking of which, make a character decision and decide if you’re nearsighted or farsighted. Then, you can wear glasses to see things close up, or far away, depending on that disability. Don’t just wear the glasses “when you’re thinking about something.”
And for chrissakes, STOP DOING THIS.
These acting choices alone dropped this film two spots.
3. Moneyball
It’s sort of funny, when you think about it, that Moneyball ranks this high on my list, and that it made such a strong Oscar run. Because Moneyball is such a small film.
Sports movies tend to be big – outsized, really. They like last-second dramatics, and the children of disabled small-town coal miners winning championships, because that’s the sort of sports movie we want to watch. But Moneyball is a sports movie with almost none of that. It’s the story of exploiting loopholes in conventional thinking to put together a baseball team a little better than the one they thought they could. That’s it.
It’s this lack of grandiosity that actually makes it a joy to watch on screen. It’s appropriate that Aaron Sorkin was snagged to do a rewrite on the script, since Moneyball is essentially “The West Wing” of baseball movies. It’s a couple guys in an office, tugging at strings behind the scenes, and waiting with bated breath to see if the world changes.
A quick Wikipedia search will tell you the answer to that question, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that it both does and it doesn’t. But it doesn’t really matter if it does or not. It’s enough fun just watching the dream.
2. Bridesmaids I don’t know what I could say about Bridesmaids that hasn’t already been said. I do know that I don’t want to run myself into the “can women be funny?” argument that seems to spring up basicaly every time an article about Tina Fey has a comments section. It’s a boring, infuriating argument and it goes nowhere.
Because Bridesmaids, as you know, is raunchy and loose, just like movies that men make - whoa! Whoops, sorry, slipped up and turned into Entertainment Weekly for a second. I meant to talk about the movie on its own merits, for a change.
I really like Bridesmaids. It’s funny – wildly funny, in parts – and it’s honest and sharp. It probably didn’t deserve the Oscar nom it got for Best Screenplay, but I’m glad it landed it all the same. I think sometimes people think these movies’ dialogue just appears out of the ether, because everyone’s improving their brains out in comedies now (and you know it’s your fault, Judd Apatow).
And I’m glad it exists just because I was getting worried about Kristen Wiig. She was wrapping up her SNL run, and she seemed like she was about to become the sort of performer who everyone agrees is talented and funny but no one can ever find a good part for. There’s dozens of these comedians floating about (for example: Rob Riggle, Will Forte, and the entire cast of “Up All Night”) and a lot of them are SNL alums who disappear once we don’t see them on our TVs every night. Often the only way these types break out of it is to make something for themselves that actually fits their gifts. I mean, look at Louis C.K., for pity’s sake.
Now that she’s made what is arguably – maybe even undeniably – the funniest movie of the past few years, some studio will give her $30 million to do whatever she wants. And that makes me happy to think about.
1. The Descendants
I don’t know if I have a unique angle to discuss The Descendants. I liked the movie (well, obviously), but there’s not much I could say about it that couldn’t be covered by copying over the description in Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. It’s a small movie. It’s about grief. George Clooney almost won the Oscar for it. Frankly, George Clooney should have won the Oscar for it, but he still gets to be George Clooney, so there’s not much to get worked up about there.
It’s a movie by a director that film critic-types love: Alexander Payne. He’s directed one film that I like and admire (About Schmidt), one film that was praised to the skies that I thought was decent (Sideways), and one film that’s considered hip to call your favorite Payne movie that I deeply, deeply hate (Election). So I wasn’t expecting to like this movie as much as I did.
But all the things that Payne’s done in his movies to keep the audience at arm’s length – the way he makes his characters do more and more unlikable things, the constant sabotaging of their own happiness – those things have disappeared. Or, maybe he’s just softened them: whenever he introduces new, bizarre, unlikable characters (which happens every ten minutes in this movie), he then works to make you understand them enough until you come to root for them. Some critics felt like he’d lost his edge. Me, I like this new, gentler Payne much better than the old one.
Sure, the movie’s wrapped around a pointless what-are-we-to-do-with-this-valuable-land? plot that’s well-nigh as obvious as Avatar’s, but it was comforting and familiar and I didn’t mind it. I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes it’s just best to give the people what they want.
Every year, I do a top-ten list of my favorite movies, and at some point, on a lark, I expanded it to include every movie I’d seen that year. It seemed fun at the time, since it meant I could write reviews of the movies I’d really been appalled by, like Red Riding Hood, or Gnomeo & Juliet, which are the fun ones to do.
A month and a half later, it’s mid-February and I’m on my 11th favorite movie of the year, and just hating myself.
Maybe I should just write a “Ten Worst” list every year. I bet I could knock that out.
So this year, I’m keeping the spirit of the thing alive, but eliminating the busy-work element of it. I’ve assigned every movie I saw a “prize” of some kind – Most Unintentionally Hilarious, Movie Most Unnecessarily Savaged By Its Fans, Best Movie Where One of the Leads Was A Digital Tiger (spoiler alert: it’s Lincoln), etc. – and I’ll write up a brief piece about whatever that was. Some chunks will feel like full reviews, some will be brief paragraphs. I’ll start with the ones that seem the most fun to write about, rather than going in order. And if I haven’t gotten this done by the time the Oscars is broadcast, I’ll post my full film list, in order, on that Sunday (February 24th), and be done with it.
Of course, now it’s time to face the elephant in the room: I never finished my movie reviews from last year. How can you possibly trust me this time if I failed so conspicuously last time?
I’ll have to do them all now. So, here we go, the thirteen (oh, man, I missed by thirteen last year?) best movies I saw in 2011.
13. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spyand12. The Adventures of Tin-Tin I checked my computer and discovered that I did manage to write reviews of both these films, just not to post them. My recollection was that I’d written so many reviews at that point that they’d lost any and all creative spark. However, I skimmed them, and they aren’t bad. I’ll post both right before I post this, so just scroll down after you finish this article.
11. X-Men: First Class I’m a sucker for X-Men movies, and Bryan Singer’s first two movies in this series hit the sweet spot for me. Singer’s a gay Christian, and most of his films have characters who have “outsider status” all but branded on to them. This proved a good match for the X-Men mythos, even if he perhaps landed a touch too on-the-nose at times (the scene where one of the mutant teens is cast out by his family because they thought he “chose” to be a mutant looks a touch hacky in retrospect). But then Brett Ratner came along and ruined everything, the way that he does.
The brand seemed dead, until Matthew Vaughn was brought in to resurrect the franchise. He very ably directs this origin story, which frames the whole X-Men story around the Cuban Missile Crisis, a curious but surprisingly effective strategy. The realism gives a nice bit of grounding to what is unquestionably a silly concept, and as The Dark Knight has taught us, a little realism can sell even the silliest bat-voice.
The real credit goes to casting, though. The top-line cast – James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, Nicholas Hoult – is miles better than you’d expect for a film like this, and the interplay between McAvoy and Fassbender is so strong that it makes me excited that Lawrence became such a huge star that now they have to do a sequel.
10. Midnight In Paris I have an idea: for fun, let’s do this review without talking about Woody Allen’s films as a whole! Wouldn’t that be exciting? Wouldn’t that be so novel?
I actually don’t even know if such a thing is possible. After all, most reviews are trying to tell you what a movie is like, and what Midnight In Paris is like is other Woody Allen movies. People are neurotic. They talk all the time. They wander city streets, looking for purpose. They find a dream girl, obsess over her, and usually don’t end up with her. The good ones feel crisp and the bad ones feel navel-gazing. You know what you’re getting into here.
Actually, the best part of the movie is watching people frantically Wikipedia-ing the historical characters that pop up in the film and then pretending that they understood all the references as they appeared. I’m not ashamed to admit that I followed all the Cole Porter and Pablo Picasso bits, and adored the Ernest Hemingway portions, but was totally unfamiliar with everything that Alison Pill was doing as Zelda Fitzgerald. I lack Woody Allen’s earnest longing to return to 1920’s Paris, if for no other reason than I’m much less convinced than him that everyone would speak such excellent English.
That said, the film is a gentle, sweet meandering back in time, and paints as lovely a picture of Paris as anyone has attempted. I’m enjoying this long European hiatus Allen’s been taking the past few years, and if we can keep landing films like this or Match Point, I don’t think he ever needs to head back to Manhattan at all.
Linking to Hemingway's monologue instead of the trailer, because the trailer's sort of a snooze.
9. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol Even just a year later, this film’s only lasting legacy is that now “ghost protocol” means to walk around with your hood up. But who cares? This is an action film, and a good one. It doesn’t need a legacy.
I don’t know what else you’d want from a film like this, frankly. It succeeds in precisely the manner it tries to: it’s fast, fun, and instantly forgettable. Tom Cruise drives cars off ledges and climbs one of the world’s tallest buildings in the middle of a massive (and incredibly well visualized) sandstorm. Paula Patton and Lea Seydoux, both in slinky dresses, fight to the death in hand-to-hand combat. Simon Pegg says cheeky things. Jeremy Renner grunts and looks mysterious. What more could you people want?
More of this, fortunately. Mission Impossible 5 is scheduled to come out 2015, with Jack Reacher director Christopher McQuarrie at the helm. I’m already looking forward to this.
8. Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Part II I said from the moment it premiered that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I is the strongest film of the HP franchise, and a couple years later, I stick by that assessment. Still, Part II is a fitting end to a journey that spanned 11 years, 8 movies, and the entirety of poor Rupert Grint’s awkward adolescence.
The movie opens a touch shakier than expected, as Harry and his friends’ escape from the bowels of a goblin bank never quite gels into the action set piece the creators were hoping for. That’s problematic, since early chunks of the movie descend into the complicated backstory-hunt that dominates the second half of Rowling’s last novel. If it bogged down the novel a hair, the transition to celluloid has not helped it. Here it drags and baffles, and only a real Potterphile is likely to grasp all the pieces as they pass by.
But no matter. In short order, the gang is back inside Hogwarts for the climactic battle scene, and while director David Yates has made some missteps in his tenure in charge of the Potter films, here he makes none. The fighting sizzles, and each character is given due attention as the battle rages. By the time Snape has passed along his memories for our last (and most moving) trip to the past, the film has done precisely what we asked of it: it gave us a fully fitting last goodbye to these characters we’d spent so much time rooting for.
7. The Muppets Like most people over the age of 7 who attended this movie, I grew up on the Muppet movies as much as someone who lived in a house with no TV possibly could. If my affection was perhaps slighter than that of the film’s obsessive main characters, I was equal in my longing to see the whole gang back together.
While perhaps too much time has passed for someone to be able to truly resurrect the simple joy of the original films, Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller give it a game try. They’ve written a movie that is, if possible, ironically unironic. “We’re playing it straight here,” the movie seems to wink at us. “But we don’t have to.” Despite having been the one creating this whole endeavor, Segel’s the one who struggles to play it straight-yet-funny. Fortunately, he’s the only one with any difficulties. Amy Adams, naturally, remains as effortlessly wide-eyed as ever, and Chris Cooper is flawless as the hammy villain. Better still is Jack Black, who for all his trouble finding roles that fit his manic style, is an absolute shot to the arm here.
Ultimately, it’s a fitting and endlessly rewatchable trip back to the world Jim Henson created so long ago – one I would have assumed was unreachable now.
Oh, and I promised Margie after she accompanied me to the film last year that that she’d be a part of this review, and I’m a man of my word. Though I’m honestly appreciative, since it’s tough to find someone to trek to a Muppet movie with who can make it through without a knowing sneer. Innocence is, sadly, dead.
Posting my favorite of the parody trailers, one which will only make sense if you've seen the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trailer it's aping.
6. Super 8 Kid actors are tough. If you’ve ever watched a film or a TV show with kid actors, you know that we’re forced to hold them to different standards. They can play funny, or upset, or possessed, but we get only broad strokes, no shading. Generally, we can’t ask much more of them than precociousness. Sometimes, that’s enough: “Modern Family” has done a top-notch job of wringing every possible laugh from their younger cast by playing to each kid’s strength. Perhaps it’s the director, or the set, but generally young casts manage to deliver their lines and the general sense of emotion, but nothing else.
That’s not the case here. The kids at the center of J.J. Abrams’ extremely Spielbergian alien movie (Spielberg himself is a producer here, and his stylistic choices are all over the film) are sad and scared and brash and uncertain all at the same time, and the shades they manage to convey – leads Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning in particular – would be remarkable in an actor three times their age.
The movie does their performance justice – it’s both a taut, dark mystery and a moving coming-of-age story, and if the film lets its foot off the gas pedal just a hair at the end, but that’s not nearly enough to justify the way the movie’s disappeared from the public consciousness. More than worth a rental or a download if you’re looking.
I got in a debate with a junior high student earlier this year over whether or not Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen was an “awesome” movie or not. The battle raged loudly for a minute or two before it occurred to me that there was little, maybe nothing I could say that would mean anything to this poor kid. He liked the second Transformers movie for all the reasons you like a Transformers movie, I’d hated it for all the reasons you don’t. And, in my defense, there’s a twenty-minute section where an old plane explains the mythology of the Primes, which remains a stupid thing no matter who you are.
The argument echoed the conversation I occasionally have with people who are bewildered by the attention I pay to movies. “Can you ever just, like, watch a movie? For fun?” They ask. I give my standard answer, the answer every film student and movie critic has ever given: delving into movies doesn’t decrease my enjoyment of movies, it increases it. Does it make me a touch superior and condescending? More than a touch? No doubt. But I love diving into a good movie, or a bad movie, and if I spend thirty minutes afterwards on the drive home complaining about camera angles and plot holes, well, that’s part of the fun for me. If you don’t like it, go see Marmaduke with someone else.
And then, we come to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a movie it may be possible to like only if you are like me. It is unrepentantly old school, a film for people who love and miss the slow, taut pace of 70’s thrillers. People gaze off into the distance for long periods of time, and the director contents himself with a wide shot, not bothering to give us a the visual crutch of a close-up. What is the character thinking? Who can tell? Guess! We spend much of the movie watching the back of Gary Oldman’s head. If I hadn’t read the book prior to seeing the film, I doubt I would’ve had the faintest idea what was going on.
Oldman plays George Smiley, who despite being in the British secret service, is a sort of anti-James Bond. He does everything slowly, methodically. He spends much of his time on paperwork. All his legwork is done by other people. He lives a life of the mind, sitting back and watching the chess pieces move about the board, trying to deduce their strategy. There’s no glitz to his spy game, it’s a deliberately plodding movie, so that you pay attention to every detail that swings across the screen. I’ve never been so mentally conflicted about a film while watching it, I was simultaneously fascinated and bored out of my mind.
What kept my attention, though, was Gary Oldman’s performance. I’ve long been a staunch fan of Oldman’s, who’s made a career of bringing gravitas to every project he touches (both The Dark Knight and Harry Potter benefitted greatly from his appearance), no matter how silly (this is a man who was in Red Riding Hood, The Fifth Element, and Lost In Space, after all). Here, his performance is center stage, the camera permanently fixed on him, and Oldman takes that mantle and does… nothing at all. He pulls back, keeping all emotion shrouded, making you watch him carefully the whole movie, waiting for the gaps and breaks that you know have to appear at some point. It’s a credit to the Academy that a performance this subtle won an Oscar nomination, there’s nothing Oldman does this whole picture that ever feels like acting.
Which, I suppose, is a pretty great compliment when you think about it.
The idea of this movie is so straightforward it’s distinctly expressed in its four-word title. A couple (Jason Segel and Emily Blunt) falls in love and gets engaged, but before they can tie the knot, life gets in the way. You’ve seen conceits like this before. Hundreds of times, probably.
