I guess I’d better do this before it’s too late. Here’s my
Top Ten List for 2011.
As my title suggests, it’s a tentative one. I usually don’t
consider my Top Ten list finished (not that it ever is) until I file one for the
Skandie Awards in February; so I’ve actually got a couple more months of 2011 left
to go, lucky me. I’m not even going to begin to tell you what essential 2011
films I haven’t yet seen. Life’s humiliating enough.
I was going to wait until I wrote up a review of A
Separation before I posted this, but, well, that didn’t happen. In cases where
I wrote something pertinent (a review, or whatever) about a given film, I’ve linked to it. The excerpts below the
titles…um, not sure how to explain those. Some are from my reviews. Some are
from…other things. Sorry if they sound pretentious, but I'm pressed for time over here.
Okay, that’s enough throat-clearing. Onward.
1.) The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
2.) Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
3.) A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
“Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the
Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High,
the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have
borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential
structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and
seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself,
just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed
one way or the other.”
4.) Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
5.) Psychohydrography (Peter Bo Rappmund)
“A premise that is simple, yet curiously hard to
describe. Rappmund charts the journey of
the water in the Los Angeles River from its origins in the Eastern Sierra
Nevada mountains, on through the L.A. Aqueduct, and finally to its emptying out
into the Pacific. The film is composed of a series of static frames. But each
frame is also a series of stills – thousands of them, creating a time-lapse
animation of what little movement (if any) is onscreen…It unifies the whole even
as it fragments the particular…And so the film’s attempts to harness natural
effects echo its depiction of man’s attempts to harness those same phenomena in
real life…[T]his harnessing gradually becomes a kind of mediation, and by the
time the water reaches the ocean, we’ve truly entered a different world.”
6.) Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
“Her hands when she is very old: those worn hands that once
held so much that was dear to them, that once he could take and hold as tightly
and for as long as he wished. Soon he must lose her, too, with all that he
loves.”
7.) Poetry (Lee Changdong)
“To write poetry is
To remember mother’s hands,
Joint swollen,
Washing the white rice
At cold dawn during winter solstice.” (from the film's Cannes presskit)
8.) The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg)
“Few artists used the physical stillness of the comic frame
as well as Herge, and few filmmakers have used the movement of the film frame
as well as Spielberg. So now the characters zip past us, constantly in motion.
Maybe something has been lost in the process, but dammit if it doesn’t
sometimes feel like Spielberg has liberated them as well.”
9.) General Orders No. 9 (Robert Persons)
“It begins with a hand quietly contemplating objects from
the past – the skull of a bird, a coin, something that looks like a bullet, a
single die -- and then drifts into a deeply personal rumination on community
and place, and how they have become disjointed in the modern world… [N]ature
bends methodically and gently towards a kind of social organization. This world
still has roots, it is still definably a place, with a center…Later, however,
that sense of order is overwhelmed…[T]he almost soothing progression of
counties and towns on the map of Georgia becomes, as it spreads out across a
map of the U.S., a nightmarish contagion of jigsaw-puzzle-like fragmentation.
What once were carefully drawn boundaries now look like a thousand cracks
across a nation made of glass.”
10.) We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)
“We never remember things as they were, but rather the way
we want them to have been, or the way we fear they were.”
10-11, maybe.) Potential Dark Horse (har har), pending a second viewing: War Horse (Steven Spielberg)
"If War Horse seems old-fashioned at first, that’s
because it has to be. It’s about how the old world was torn to shreds by the
new -- which is, after all, the ultimate story of World War I."
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