by ·Comments Off on Favorite Classic Movies watched in theaters in 2011

1. Monika (1953, Ingmar Bergman)
Didn’t used to think I was a Bergman fan.

2. Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)
Didn’t used to think I was a big Polanski fan either, until watching this on the big screen at Emory.

3. Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)
Cheating: I had this same movie on the same list six years ago.

4. The Dead (1987, John Huston)
5. Knife in the Water (1962, Roman Polanski)
6. Bound (1996, Wachowskis)
7. The Lady from Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles)
8. Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
The previous eight films were all shown at Emory on 35mm, for which I am grateful.

9. The Gate (1987, Tibor Takacs)
One of these things is not like the others… a low-profile 80’s horror flick at the Plaza, an old fave from childhood HBO screenings seen for the first time on the big screen.

10. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Nicolas Roeg)

Bonus mentions to The Mark of Zorro (1920, Fred Niblo) for the nice presentation (including a live organ score) at the Fox, and to The Lion King (1994) for looking pretty sweet in 3-D and making my wife so happy.

by ·Comments Off on Favorite Shorts in 2011

I didn’t watch a ton of shorts, not like I did a couple years ago.
But these were all excellent.

1. The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1998, Sylvain Chomet)
This totally made up for The Illusionist.

2. The Chorus (1982, Abbas Kiarostami)
3. Toby Dammit (1968, Federico Fellini)
4. The House Is Black (1963, Forugh Farrokhzad)
5. The Way to Shadow Garden (1954, Stan Brakhage)
The only Brakhage I watched this year. I rented the second Criterion set but wasn’t sure if I should watch it or hold out for the blu-ray. Of course there’s no reason to delay ’cause I can always watch the films a second time…

6. Plastic Bag (2009, Ramin Bahrani)
7. Land Without Bread (1933, Luis Buñuel)
After reading about this for years, I felt like I’d seen it before I saw it.

8. Monsieur Fantomas (1937, Ernst Moerman)
9. Three by Agnes Varda: 7p., cuis., s. de b. (1984), Ydessa, The Bears and etc. (2004) and Le Lion volatil (2003)
10. Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001, Simonsson & Nilsson)
The short – not the feature, which was overbaked.

by ·Comments Off on Some 2011 Movies To Watch

2011 Movies I Obviously Need To See:

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
The Artist
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
Carnage
Contagion and Haywire
Crazy Horse
A Dangerous Method
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Remake
Harakiri
Into the Abyss
Insidious
Keyhole
Pina
The Rum Diary
Super 8
Take Shelter
This is Not a Film

2011 Movies I Need To See, according to many critics:

The Arbor
The Deep Blue Sea
Elena
Faust
The Guard
Le Havre
Kid with a Bike
Kill List
Margaret
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Nostalgia for the Light
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Poetry
The Portuguese Nun
A Separation
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
To Die Like a Man
Two Years at Sea and Slow Action
Tyrannosaur
We Can’t Go Home Again
We Have a Pope
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Weekend

2011 Movies I Need To See, according to a single, highly convincing critic:

Attenberg (Cinema Scope)
The Catechism Cataclysm (Grady Hendrix)
Confessions (Pamela Jahn)
Coriolanus (Demetrios Matheou)
Disorder (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Dreams of a Life (Peter Bradshaw)
The Forgotten Space (Sukhdev Sandhu)
The Future (AV Club)
Impardonnables (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
The Interrupters (A.A. Dowd & Ben Kenigsberg)
Kaboom (John Waters)
Kinyarwanda (Roger Ebert)
Margin Call (JR Jones)
My Joy (Nick Roddick)
Photographic Memory (David Jenkins)
Post Mortem (Frances Morgan)
Red White and Blue (Virginie Selavy)
El Sicario, Room 164 (Chuck Bowen)
Super (Grady Hendrix)
The Yellow Sea (Wendy Ide)

by ·Comments Off on 2011: The Movie Year in Review

Another good movie year. Lists to follow.

Progress on my massive must-see lists: I’ve now watched some 61% of the They Shoot Pictures list (up from 55 last year), approx. 50% of Rosenbaum’s list (46 last year), and about 57% of Criterion movies (was 54 and I watched a ton, but they just keep releasing ’em).

Normally I have a long list I’d made myself a year before of specific movies I intended to watch this year, and I can disappointedly point out how few of them I ended up watching, but I didn’t do that this year, so no disappointment!

Movies I only watched in part:
Late Spring – will surely try this again
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – we’ll pick this up again, too
Uncle Meat – meant to watch a half hour at a time, but never returned.
The Prisoner – meant to watch on treadmill, but working out is hard
Bells of St. Mary’s – still plotting to finish, but I fell asleep a half hour before Katy turned it off, so our resume-points are out of sync.
A Christmas Carol – The Jim Carrey motion-capture version. Not planning to finish this ever, since its one of the worst movies we’ve ever (half) watched – a mishmash of visual styles, all of them ugly.

Anyway… on with the lists!

by ·Comments Off on Burke and Hare (2011, John Landis)

Perfect example of a movie that works in theory, but lacks something essential. Strong performances by good comic actors (I was happily surprised by Andy Serkis), funny situations and dialogue, strong historical interest, and good energy. So why is it such an average movie? Blame Landis?

Simon “Burke” Pegg tries to buy the favor of feminist actress Isla Fisher, while Hare is content with his wife Lucky (Spaced star Jessica Hynes). The intrigue revolves around head doctors at competing medical schools – old-school Tim Curry, who gets the law on his side, and Tom Wilkinson, who resorts to hiring our heroes to provide him bodies on which to experiment (leading to the undignified death of poor Christopher Lee). Bill Bailey plays a narrating executioner and David Hayman is a gangster who wants protection money but ends up dead in the operating theater. Movie closes on a present-day shot of Burke’s skeleton, still preserved in Edinburgh – perfect ending to a historical black comedy.

I haven’t much to say, so thought I’d end by stealing a native Edinburgh perspective from Shadowplay, but damn it, they haven’t watched this one yet.

by ·Comments Off on Submarine (2010, Richard Ayoade)

As a rule, I don’t like movies about precocious, lovestruck schoolkids. But I like Richard Ayoade and this got good reviews and Rushmore comparisons, so I checked it out. Extremely well-done – funny and atmospheric, two things that rarely go together. It’s Wes Andersonian without seeming derivative.

Oliver Tate worries that his parents (Sally Hawkins of Happy-Go-Lucky and Noah Taylor, appropriately of The Life Aquatic) aren’t getting along, pines after a classmate named Jordana, and envisions his own life in that sweetly megalomaniacal manner that teenagers do.

Drama: Oliver gets the girl, then loses her when he panics and doesn’t come to the hospital on the day of her mother’s cancer surgery. And Oliver’s mom might be cheating with the next-door neighbor (new-age spokesman Paddy Considine). For a movie starring a kid, it works out its conflicts in a refreshingly mature way.

Oliver checks up on his parents:

Paddy Considine:

by ·Comments Off on L’assassinat du Père Noël (1941, Christian-Jaque)

An unexpectedly excellent Christmas movie (Katy was suspicious of the title) that turned out far better than Good Sam. The movie expertly sets up a series of eccentric characters in a secluded mountain town, building suspense as Christmas draws near because two major characters wear the santa suit and we know from the title that one of them will die. But instead a third santa is killed, plus the local church’s prize jewel is stolen from the nativity exhibit, and the movie becomes a somewhat lighthearted murder-mystery.

It’s just not Christmas without a crazy cat lady:

Cornusse (Harry Baur, star of Raymond Bernard’s Les Miserables, tortured to death by the Gestapo a couple years after this movie) is a globe-maker whose daughter Catherine (Renee Faure, star of Bresson’s Les anges du peche) suffers from Disney Princess Syndrome. A Baron (Raymond Rouleau) returns to his castle after a decade-long tour of the world, stricken with leprosy. Villard (Robert Le Vigan of Duvivier’s remake of The Phantom Carriage) is an athiest schoolteacher planning his annual fireworks assault on the church during Christmas services. Mother Michel (Marie-Helene Daste – wife of Jean, appropriate since the teacher/student rapport was bringing Zero de Conduite to mind) is a crazy woman who wanders the town asking about her long-dead (and stuffed) cat.

Globe-maker and daughter:

Villard is trying to win Catherine’s heart, but he’s too ordinary for her – she pines after the mysterious baron. She sneaks off to his castle while her father Cornusse plays Santa throughout town. When Santa comes to the castle looking for the three kids of the groundskeeper (one of whom is sick in bed and grumping about Christmas), the Baron lets him fall asleep then takes the suit.

Great scene: Villard whirls about in celebration with the other pub denizens, the camera whirling with him, alternating with shots rotating around broken-hearted Catherine

But when Santa shows up murdered it’s neither of the men – a stranger. Turns out Jean Brochard (of Diabolique and I Vitelloni) hired the man to steal the diamond, then killed him and planned to flee town alone. Mystery solved, jewelry returned, and the Baron never had leprosy (he’s just antisocial) so he and Catherine live happily ever after.

by ·Comments Off on Good Sam (1948, Leo McCarey)

This week Katy was envying cable TV for its Christmas movies and Leo McCarey marathons, so I grabbed us a Leo McCarey Christmas movie – his follow-up to The Bells of St. Mary’s, which we started watching and are having trouble finishing.

Good Gary holds the bus while deciding if he should see The Fugitive:

Good Gary Cooper (the year before he woodenly appeared in The Fountainhead) is married to Less Good Ann Sheridan (star of I Was a Male War Bride). She’s hoping to save for a house (they live in a rental), but Sam lends all their money to deadbeat friends, lends the car to a nearsighted neighbor (Clinton Sundberg), offers a bedroom to Ann’s post-traumatic brother, tries to save a suicidal coworker (Joan Lorring of The Verdict and The Big Night), makes friends with an insufferable mechanic (Matt Moore), pisses off his boss (Edmund Lowe) and gives an ex-neighbor (Todd Karns) the entire family savings to open a gas station.

Costumed Gary and Ann with grinning gas-station couple, and Ann’s brother at far right:

Cooper is a department-store salesman with a non-working wife and three kids – that he could afford a dream house is either movie magic or one of those mysterious 1940’s things. Plus, have I mentioned the family employs a maid/cook (Louise Beavers of Holiday Inn)?

Ann with Louise Beavers and the mechanic:

Things work out: the brother and the suicidal coworker fall for each other and move out, the mechanic’s wife is a realtor who finds their dream house, and the ex-neighbor sells his successful gas station and pays back Sam with interest. Nothing good comes of the nearsighted neighbor, I’m afraid. There’s some last-minute suspense when Sam is robbed of company charity funds and the house deal nearly falls through, but a banker decides to do the right thing (heh), thus happy ending.

Good Gary and Less Good Ann, insulting the neighbors for Christmas:

Cute movie, but more complex it might have been. For instance, it opens with a minister (Ray Collins: James Gettys in Citizen Kane) preaching selflessness and helping thy neighbor, but Ann comes to him later asking if he could convince Sam to perhaps be more selfish, or at least to think of his family’s comfort before helping strangers. Also, a regular occurrence is either Sam or Ann loudly insulting one of the people Sam has helped while the subject of their rage lurks awkwardly nearby.

by ·Comments Off on Final Television Round-up of 2011

Screenwipe season 3 (2007)

I think I watched seasons one and two all in a couple days, but put s3 aside for almost two years because I was afraid of Wire spoilers. But Charlie Brooker didn’t even mention The Wire in this one – it must’ve been between seasons. Instead, the one show he doesn’t slag off is Battlestar Galactica. I like that it’s not entirely about show episodes anymore – he has segments on commercials, being an on-camera presenter, people with menial jobs in the TV industry, the news, and deceptive editing practices on “reality” shows. Brooker’s attacks on poor Ken Russell in Celebrity Big Brother probably didn’t seem overly tasteless at the time, but it was slightly shocking for me to hear them so soon after Ken’s death – I’ll let that one go, since Brooker spent more of the segment attacking the other racist participants and the show as a whole. As usual I didn’t catch half the references, have never heard of half the shows, and as usual it was funny anyway.

Brooker:

Parks & Recreation season 2 (2009-10)

Finished this a while ago, but I forgot to mention. The first season was decent, but this one was even better than 30 Rock. Ann dates Mark Brendanawicz (who leaves the show at the end of the season to be in Water For Elephants), Tom gets divorced, Leslie develops into one of TV’s greatest characters (and dates Justin Theroux) and the Hole is trimphantly turned into a Vacant Lot.

Other shows:
I watch about an episode a month of The Larry Sanders Show. Watched the first episode of Louie twice and haven’t made it to the second. Never started on season 2 of Saxondale or The Thick of It, though I keep intending to, and I have no idea where I left off with The Sarah Silverman Show, Futurama or Metalocalype.