As we head into the movie awards season, many critics have compiled their best and worst lists for 2011.  Due to the subjective nature of the selections, one critic’s gem is sometimes another critic’s dud.  Who is to say what is truly best and worst?  It’s really all a matter of opinion.  I prefer, however, to focus on what and why some films are unforgettable to me as opposed to ranking them.  Here is my countdown of 2011’s most memorable movies – for reasons ranging from good to bad to notorious:

11. The Tree of Life – Two hours of my life I’ll never get back; convoluted and overrated.

10. Jumping the Broom – This should have been a movie on Lifetime – great looking cast, but shallow and predictable.

9. The Help – Imitation of Life meets Steel Magnolias.  That’s all.

8. The Skin I Live In – Not my favorite Almodóvar film, but a thought-provoking examination of identity.

7. J. Edgar – This eagerly anticipated Eastwood/DiCaprio collaboration proved to be a major disappointment.  How?  By favoring flashbacks over a linear narrative, safely skimming the surface in regards to the extent Hoover’s constitutional violations destroyed lives and movements, and therefore missing the opportunity to draw parallels to current domestic and foreign policies.

6. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol – Fifty is the new 35. Thanks to the physically fit Tom Cruise and his daring stunts, I now look forward to turning 50.

5. Trust – Though much is borrowed from Ordinary People, this film about an online sexual predator is a must-see for all teenagers and parents.

4. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 – Taking in a Friday matinee with a theater full of truant teenagers was the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a very long time.

3. Incendies – A wonderfully told, haunting story that stays with you long after the last frame.

2. Kinyarwanda – Though specific to the Rwandan genocide in 1994, its themes regarding forgiveness and unity are universal and timeless.

1. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 – Ironically, my most memorable movie moment of 2011 was courtesy of an Angela Davis interview from the 1970s. Davis’s insightful response resonated deeply in my soul as she articulated what I am often too emotional and/or frustrated to clearly express.  In doing so, Davis held up a mirror through which we can see ourselves as we truly are.  For that I am grateful.

Angela Davis: The Black Power Mixtape (excerpt)

What are your most memorable movies of 2011 and why?  Please share. 

Happy New Year!

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Dir. Denis Villeneuve
(2011, R, 130 min)

Incendies – a 2010 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, representing Canada – begins as the story of adult children who only learn who their mother was after her death, but as it wears on it loses sight of that strong central theme and gets caught up in its own melodrama, introducing complications upon complications upon complications, which then double back around to make new compound complications. Complex math equations are used as a metaphor, but the film itself represents a mathematical paradox: that of a whole less than the sum of its parts.

Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are mild-mannered French-Canadian twins, the children of Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), who has recently died and left them bizarre instructions in her will: they must locate their father, whom they believed was dead, and their brother, whom they never knew existed. Simon is incredulous, but Jeanne accepts the mission and travels to an unnamed Middle Eastern country to investigate her mother’s past.

The early stages of the film are moving in how they show Jeanne uncovering secrets she had never imagined; she never really knew who her mother was, but now that she is an adult herself she can begin to understand. As Jeanne conducts her investigation, the film shows Nawal’s life in flashbacks, from her exile from her family – she was Christian, but fell in love with a Muslim refugee – to the search for the son she gave up to protect her family’s honor. That would be enough for any film, but this one turns the dial to eleven, throwing in freedom fighting, massacres, imprisonment, and torture, which the children discover with the help of their mother’s notary, who takes his job as seriously as the secret agents from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

With its overabundance of plot twists, the film at last crosses the threshold beyond which tragedy becomes absurdity; I laughed in places I definitely wasn’t supposed to laugh, including one late scene in which the siblings ponder one plus one (to explain the context would spoil the film). The incidents themselves begin to strain credulity, but the coincidences break the camel’s back. For the plot to assemble itself in this way and produce the results it does requires a confluence of events so perfectly improbable that I just didn’t believe it; I didn’t feel like I was watching a story but rather a writer playing tricks on his characters. Denis Villeneuve directed the film and also wrote the screenplay, adapted from a play by Wajdi Mouawad, and his tone is so serious – reasonably so, given the subject matter – that the contorted plot is an uncomfortable fit. The characters get lost in the shuffle of a protracted scavenger hunt to solve the equation of their lives. When they find the answers, we start to wonder if maybe they should have taken up fine arts or basket-weaving instead of math.

Catching up on some high profile winter titles made list making extra difficult this year.

Perhaps because of style over substance in some cases, no one movie jumped out as the year defining movie that no other could touch.

And although critics uniformly rallied behind “The Tree of Life” as the consensus favorite of the year, this year found critics getting behind just about anything as their number one choice, and they could often find at least someone to back them up.

It’s even made for an interesting Oscar race with no clear frontrunners.

But 2011 was a year for looking back. Veteran directors trumped newbies with nostalgia projects (“Hugo,” “Midnight in Paris,” “War Horse”) and grandiose epics (“Melancholia,” “The Tree of Life”). A few indies and up-and-comers stepped forward, but they made timeless statements (“Weekend,” “Beginners,” “Super 8,” “The Descendants”) rather than 21^st Century relics, with a few exceptions (“Margin Call,” “Moneyball,” “50/50”).

Last year I assigned titles to each movie for what they stood for in the year, and there was one clear winner. This year no such labels exist, and just about any could be my favorite.

I’ve done my best to mention films that need mentioning and forgotten the rest. (Most titles are linked to subsequent reviews on my website.)

1. Drive

The Driver is in a plain silver sedan parked underneath a bridge as a helicopter passes overhead. He sits silently and does not make a bold getaway, and yet this is one of the more exciting scenes in the most invigorating and intense motion picture of the year.

“Drive” is a finely tuned expression of minimalistic filmmaking, but it’s also an elegant example of bloody pulp stylization. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn may value style over substance, but his precise pacing makes for his rapid shift to hyper violence all the more engaging.

Ryan Gosling in the nameless anti-hero role is sapped of his charisma and charm, but he delivers a strictly focused and immersed performance to embody his brooding and complex character. He meets his match in the menacingly nebbish Albert Brooks as a gangster out to kill him, and the resulting noir is a darkly perfect thriller. (Ran in the IDS WEEKEND on Dec. 7)

2. Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen’s fantastical journey to Paris in the 1920s is a joyous and infectious delight. Allen has made his best film in two decades, and it’s a hilarious and clever romp that indulges in literary, art and film history and yet is nothing but whimsical. Owen Wilson is a great Allen surrogate, and Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway is a riot.

3. Hugo

Martin Scorsese has surprised us all with this mystical children’s fantasy that doubles as a stunningly beautiful love letter to the birth of cinema. The art direction in “Hugo” is bathed in color and light, and the 3-D special effects are a wonder that begin to define what the technology is and can do. (Ran in the IDS WEEKEND on Dec. 7)

4. Certified Copy

We often admire the copy of a work of art because all art is a representation of something. “Certified Copy” is filled with such academic and poignant conversation. But the miracle of Abbas Kiarostarmi’s film is in the seamless transition between realities that test this theory of art and life. Juliette Binoche and William Shimell give powerhouse performances in this deep romance.

5. Melancholia

Few films have captured the gravity and majesty of the end of the world better than Lars von Trier does here. “Melancholia” is rife with stunning visuals; von Trier’s vision of the apocalypse is as bleak and perverse as they come, and yet no less elegant. This film is literally earth shattering.

6. The Skin I Live In

Leave it to Pedro Almodovar to make a genre bending revenge sci-fi that is at once sexy and queasy. “The Skin I Live In” is alive with alluring, lush color and painterly beautiful cinematography. But this surrealist story is so deep and shocking that is radically unlike any still life artwork.

7. Incendies

The two stories of this French Canadian epic drawing from Greek tragedy include a mother searching for her long lost son and her two twins continuing her quest after she’s passed. Although “Incendies” is at times horrifically artful and devastating, its monumental twist provides such an engaging and memorably entertaining experience.

8. Weekend

A simple story about two gay men who do nothing but meet, have sex, talk and fall in love is this year’s most honest, intelligent, and heartwarming romance. Tom Cullen and Chris New have wonderful chemistry as Russell and Glen. Their universal goal for openness and honesty provides some lovingly affectionate and authentic pillow talk.

9. Super 8

If there were many great “films” in 2011, “Super 8” was the best “movie.” J.J. Abrams has not only made a love letter to Steven Spielberg but has made a technically perfect action, sci-fi and suspense thrill ride full of wit, scares and tears. Not to mention, the exploding train sequence is the most awesome movie moment of the year.

10. Beginners

The best American indie of the year discovers a way to communicate free of the symbols and histories assigned by older generations and society. Ewan McGregor gives a wonderfully understated performance as a loner struggling to adapt to his father (Christopher Plummer) finally coming out as gay. A film with many subtleties, “Beginners” is eloquent and beautiful in its quiet.

Honorable Mention – The Tree of Life

I desperately wanted to find a place for “The Tree of Life” on my list, and yet without revisiting it before deadline, it has carried the burden of being the most fervently loved and loathed film of the year, along with all the thought provoking discussion that has come with that honor.

Yet “The Tree of Life” is a purely cinematic experience. Watching it has been deemed a polarizing challenge for most audiences, but the fundamental human emotions Terrence Malick conveys through visuals and style above all else are ambitious themes befitting of a masterpiece. In doing so, his film worships the gift of life itself.

Granting it an honorable mention is my way of saying that in finding a place for this important film on my list, it could be first and it could be last.

(Portions ran in the IDS WEEKEND on Dec. 7)

11-20 Place (alphabetical)

50/50

This dark comedy is surprisingly modern and genuine in the youthful, cynical sensibilities it uses to address cancer. It’s also hilarious.

The Arbor

This experimental British doc tells a harrowing story of a Yorkshire playwright by lip-synching testimonial to actors placed in mesmerizing social tableaux.

The Descendants

Like “Beginners,” Alexander Payne’s family drama tearjerker finds a wonderfully offbeat George Clooney rediscovering himself through his family heritage.

Into the Abyss

Werner Herzog’s touching documentary examination of death through the eyes of a man on death row is also the most morose.

Margin Call

“Margin Call” is the much-needed humanizing dramatization of a few Wall Street investors on the day the market died. It’s the best fictional film on the modern economic crisis to date.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

This debut feature by Sean Durkin is a twisted and immersive psychological drama set in a bleak Americana landscape. Elizabeth Olsen (the Olsen twins’ sister) gives a bold dual personality performance.

Moneyball

Despite being a cold, calculated and cynical sports movie, Bennett Miller’s drama still proved to be a terrific crowd pleaser. Brad Pitt too is excellent.

Poetry

A woman suffering from Alzheimer’s struggles to find the right words both in her poetry class and in dealing with her grandson accused of rape. This Korean drama is heartbreaking.

Tabloid

Errol Morris’s devilish and insanely fun documentary is quite literally too good to be true and yet too absurd to be fake.

War Horse

No film was as magnificently old fashioned as Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse.” Try not to get big soppy horse eyes just watching and looking at it.

10 other great movies in 2011

“13 Assassins,” “The Artist,” “Attack the Block,” “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” “Contagion,” “Jane Eyre,” “Rango,” “Senna,” “Win Win,” “Young Adult“

The 15 Best Movies of 2011 I Haven’t Seen Yet

“The Adventures of Tin Tin,” “Carnage,” “A Dangerous Method,” “The Interrupters,” “Margaret,” “The Muppets” (I’m gonna call right now I’ll probably never get around to seeing it), “Pina,” “Project Nim,” “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (please don’t make me see this. I seriously don’t believe anyone in regards to it, but it’s on so many Best of the Year lists), “A Separation,” “Shame,” “Take Shelter,” “Tyrannosaur,” “Warrior,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin”

(Update: My list is starting to resemble something somewhat respectable. Sure, there are many ‘highly acclaimed’ 2011 films that I haven’t seen, but I’m beginning to get a list I can stand behind and defend. It’s still ‘mainstream’, but less so. And mainstream isn’t a bad thing, but…)

For some that didn’t quite make my Top 10, check out my list at the bottom of the page (of the films that I’ve seen from 2011). They’re roughly in descending order from the best film to the worst.  You can see my Worst 10 Films of 2011 here…

Now on with the Top 10 (Updated).

(Bumped) Don’t be Afraid of the Dark (Not a perfect film, but fun for horror fans… Some critics were trying to compare this to Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” mostly because Del Toro produced this, but that’s an unfair comparison. This is strictly a horror/haunted house story, but a very good one.)

(Bumped) Hanna (A pure action flick boiled down to the bare essentials of the genre. Saoirse Ronan is surprisingly believable as a child assassin).

(Bumped) Incendies ( A spiraling, twisting tale about identity, family, societal pressures and of course, the troubles in the Middle East. Review pending.)

Hugo(Surprisingly… Bumped. An unusual departure for Martin Scorsese in some ways, but still centers around what the director himself is in love with:film. Hardcore fans of movie history will probably enjoy this more than your general audience. Will probably win a bunch of Oscars.)

Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows (Bumped. The rare sequel that exceeds expectations. It might center a little too much on the Holmes/Watson relationship and the action, but still fun.)

10 Rango (Another strong foray into the world of CGI animated films by Dreamworks. References many films without stooping to re-enact them as the worst of the CGI animated flicks do. Depp is the headliner, but I liked many of the peripheral performances, most notably Isla Fisher as Beans.  Review pending.)

9 Trust (A very well done film dealing with tough subject matter. Never announces what’s happening in the story. TRUSTs that the audience is intelligent enough to follow along.)

8 The Adventures Of Tintin (The first of two from Stephen Spielberg in my top 3. A little convoluted, but does justice to the comic strip series it’s based on while leaving the director’s fingerprints all over it.)

7 Tucker And Dale Vs Evil (I had to debate whether or not to put this as my number one film… It’s one of the best horror comedies I’ve seen in a long while. My heart says put this at #1, but my head won out. Still, a great film.)

6 Source Code (The second flick from director Duncan Jones. While not as poignant/meaningful as “Moon”, Source Code is far more fun. I guess that’s the kinds of films I gravitated towards this year.)

5 Senna (Another late addition to my list. It’s hard to figure where to put documentaries on my lists. It’s comparing apples to oranges, really, fiction and non-fiction. This was not nearly as depressing as most documentaries are, even if this one does involve tragedy.)

4 Moneyball (Another late entry to my list. Early on, the film seemed a little too explanatory. Conversations seemed to be directed at the audience instead of at the other characters onscreen. Once it got past feeling the need to educate non-baseball viewers, the film picked up steam. Brad Pitt’s really good in this, as is Jonah Hill in a very low key role (for him… I don’t think he said one ‘F’ word the entire duration of the film… He should get an award for that alone.)

3 War Horse [Unadulterated and unapologetic Spielberg. You may know where the film is going at times, but that's not what's importatant here. No one milks emotion out of a given scene like Speilberg. No one can cut through to what is important to a given scene like Spielberg. He knows how stories work and he's maybe the best director out there at taking recognizable archtypes and presenting them to the audience (in a gift wrapped box gleaming in a lone beam of sunlight). War Horse is a great film and is pure storytelling. It's why I go to the movies.]

2 Drive ( A movie all to its own that pays tribute to a number of films from the past. It has a unique style. It looks like  one of these self proclaimed ‘edgy’ films with ultra slick cinematography where everyone in the film poses for 2+ hours, but the difference here is that it’s got a great film.. And there’s no posing. It’s (somewhat) rare when I watch a movie, sit through the credits and as soon as they ended I immediately hit play again. It whizzed by so fast the second time that I thought I had accidentally hit the ‘skip’ button. Great cast. Great story. Great film… I’ll have to seek out some of the director’s other films now.)

1 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy  A film that’s both quiet and mind blowing. Director Tomas Alfredson last directed the critically acclaimed ‘Let The Right One In’. This film is seemingly much more chaotic in its storytelling, but it does have a structure to it. There are a couple of scenes that the film always returns to as well as one charcter that bookends the film (and it probably won’t be the character that you think it will be going in). It’s not straight forward, jumping all over  in the sequence of events while leaking information to the audience what’s going on. It is a great film, though, about what’s hidden and uncovering what’s hidden with the Cold War serving as the backdrop. Or is it about loyalty and trust… Or maybe it’s just about spies. Whatever. It’s a great film, that surely will clean up come Awards season… except maybe at the Oscars. they probably won’t want to give all of the awards to a British film two years in a row, even if it deserves the accolades.)

It’s the final week of 2011, so we’re sharing with you, once again, our end-of-year lists. This was originally published on December 22, 2011.

That’s all she wrote. The end is nigh. And despite what Lenny Kravitz might sing, it is indeed over. 2011 is rapidly coming to a close, and after having sat through almost 250 films, I have selected a top ten (plus 20 honourable mentions) to put forward as recommended viewing. It’s a near impossible task, and the final product will be something I am sure to disagree with almost as soon as I hit ‘Publish’. But isn’t that half the fun? We compile our favourite movies of the past twelve months, and they act as a lovely little time capsule of the motion pictures that made the biggest impression on us during this highly-specific period. Even if history ends up being unkind to these films, what’s most important is that we thought they were good ‘now’. These lists act as a document of the movies we loved during the crazy year in which dictators were overthrown, Osama Bin Laden was killed, Wall Street was occupied, Italy undid the EU, and Rebecca Black unleashed ‘Friday’ an unprepared universe. It was a weird one. Here are the films I felt defined it.

Honourable Mentions: Beginners, Bridesmaids, Certified Copy, Contagion, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Guard, How to Die in Oregon, Hugo, Incendies, Jane Eyre, The Kid with a Bike, Kill List, Moneyball, The Muppets, Rango, Senna, Super 8, Tabloid, The Trip, Young Adult.

10. Warrior

Honestly, any of those honourable mentions could have slid into this number ten spot (especially Young Adult and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, though I may have seen them too recently to judge with proper distance). I laboured over it, got emotional, and then remembered that lists are mostly arbitrary and fleeting and we should probably all chill out about them. So, I thought a) Which of these pictures would I like to rewatch right now? and b) Which one isn’t getting the end-of-year love it truly deserves? The answer to both of those questions is Gavin O’Connor‘s Warrior, a classic sports drama about MMA-fighting brothers (Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy) who compete for a much needed, multi-million dollar purse. Ain’t nothing exceptional about the story, but the execution is supreme, and it proved to be the most emotionally-satisfying crowd-pleaser that unfairly didn’t find a crowd to please. Here’s hoping people discover it sooner rather than later.

9. Midnight in Paris

This seemed to be the year for filmmakers to get all nostalgic about the legends of the past, with such celebrations of cinema and showmanship as Hugo, The Muppets (kinda), and The Artist (unseen) hitting screens. Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris saw a wannabe-writer (Owen Wilson) transported to the roaring 20s, where he was offered the dream-like opportunity to rub shoulders with iconic authors, poets, directors, models and more. But Allen also had the good sense to be a little critical of those who look back only with rose-tinted glasses – including himself! – and delivered one of his sweetest, most effervescent, and affecting films in the process.

8. Meek’s Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt‘s Meek’s Cutoff tells of a group of settlers on the Oregon Trail blindly walking towards a supposed ‘promised land’, led by an unwavering but ultimately untrustworthy tracker (Bruce Greenwood). When the picture opens, the pioneers – including Michelle Williams and Will Patton – are considering killing their “leader” for delivering them to certain death. As the film progresses, their situation only gets worse, culminating in the best ‘lump-in-your-throat’ finale of the year. A truly upsetting parable about the dangers of religious zealotry.

7. Martha Marcy May Marlene

Speaking of religious zealotry… Martha Marcy May Marlene continued 2011′s trend of films about sex cults and depraved fanaticism (keep ‘em coming, I say!). Elizabeth Olsen stars as Martha, Marcy May, and Marlene; three sides to the one fractured girl, who is seduced by a creepy cult and their charismatic leader (John Hawkes). A startling thriller that ratchets up the dread-level incrementally, until you feel as if you’re about to suffer a nervous breakdown like M herself. (Martha Marcy May Marlene opens in Australian cinemas January 19, 2012. It played at the Melbourne International Film Festival and Sydney Film Festival.)

6. Win Win

One of the warmest ensemble comedies of late, and what proved to have one of the most lasting effects on me as the year wore on. Paul Giamatti stars as a struggling lawyer who takes in a troubled youth and trains him to fight on the high school wrestling team he coaches. The set-up may sound clichéd, but the gentle guiding hand of writer-director Thomas McCarthy, and the talents of its priceless players (including Amy Ryan, Bobby Cannavale, and Alex Shaffer) made this beautiful movie hilarious, humane, and just gosh-darn-lovable.

5. Drive

On first watch, Nicolas Winding Refn‘s ice-cold Drive is an expertly-composed thriller about a getaway driver (Ryan Gosling) who finds himself in over his head with some gangsters while trying to protect the women he loves (Carey Mulligan). On the second, it’s a deeply thoughtful character piece about a conscientious psychopath whose mask of sanity slips when confronted with the concept of real human connection. I can’t wait to see what the third viewing unveils. Either way, Drive provided a memorable movie-watching experience. Sharing that elevator scene (you’ll know it when you see it) with an audience was a truly delightful and horrifically gory gift.

4. Submarine

There’s no film I watched more this year than Submarine. It’s a dark coming-of-age comedy about a teenager who thinks he understands the world far better than he actually does, and must first suffer clumsy sexual advances, schoolyard beatings, rebuffed proclamations of love, the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, and even flirtations with death before he can even grasp what this whole ‘life’ thing is really about. Director Richard Ayoade‘s (Moss from The I.T. Crowd!) feature debut is affectation-heavy, but undeniably unique. Feels like a future cult classic.

3. A Separation

Asghar Farhadi‘s divorce drama A Separation has perhaps the most heartbreaking finale of any picture on this list, which is saying something (especially when you see what #2 is). Married couple Nader and Simin love each other, but simply can’t stay together because of the complications of everyday life. She can’t bear to live in Iran any further, and he can’t abandon his Alzheimer’s-ridden father. Caught in the middle is their young daughter, and eventually, the family of their housekeeper, who is struck by tragedy half-way through the picture. A Separation is about decent, well-meaning people whose little white lies have disastrous results. It could have just as easily been my number one, if it hadn’t been trumped by the following sensory cinematic experiences. (A Separation opens in Australian cinemas early 2012. It played at the Melbourne International Film Festival and Sydney Film Festival.)

2. Melancholia

Oh, Lars. 2011 belonged to you for so many reasons, not all of them good. If any other filmmaker had jokingly uttered the phrase ‘I’m a Nazi’ at a press conference, they would have a hard time reminding people to focus on their movie and not their silly, misguided declarations. But Melancholia is hard to overshadow. Kirsten Dunst stars as a deeply depressed bride who endures a seemingly endless wedding-from-hell, only to be offered a hint of relief when she discovers the world is going to end via collision with rogue planet Melancholia. Charlotte Gainsbourg – as her loving, frustrated, terrified sister – prays the giant blue ball won’t actually hit Earth, but will instead pass right by, no doubt just like the hereditary mental disorder that afflicts both her sister and their mother. A devastating drama about mental illness with a closing shot for the ages.

1. The Tree of Life

Perhaps the most divisive flick of the year, and unquestionably the most ambitious, Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life captured the essence of existence and the power of the pictures in one bite-sized 138-minute package (hey, it’s shorter than Transformers: Dark of the Moon!). No written synopsis could do it justice, but it’s – basically – about the history of the universe told from the perspective of God (that old chestnut). We briefly stop and spend some time with a family in the 1950s, headed by an ethereal mother (Jessica Chastain) and an oppressive father (Brad Pitt), who jointly represent the two ways of living: The Way of Grace, and The Way of Nature. Even that distillation of events feels inaccurate. The Tree of Life is the experience of watching The Tree of Life, whatever that might mean to different viewers. It could easily be read as a movie that seeks to prove the presence of a higher power in the world, or as a movie that flatly denies anything but the random chaos of evolution as our steering force. That Malick’s movie could raise and explore these questions thoughtfully in its relatively miniscule running time is impressive. That it could, to my eyes, provide answers is a miracle.

Previously:

The 10 worst films of 2011

The 10 best female performances of 2011

The 10 best male performances of 2011

The 10 best Australian films of 2011

Discuss: OK, what did we miss?

Incendies
2010

Género: Drama
Idioma: Francés
Subtítulos: Español
Duración: 130 min

Reparto: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz, Allen Altman, Mohamed Majd, Nabil Sawalha, Baya Belal, Bader Alami, Karim Babin, Yousef Shweihat
Director: Denis Villeneuve

4.08 / 5
puntaje

0 de 3441 ranking

0 de 3441 popularidad

Título original
Incendies
Sinopsis
Jeanne y Simon Marwan son dos gemelos cuya madre, que lleva mucho tiempo sin hablar, está a punto de morir. Pero, antes del fatal desenlace, les da dos cartas que deben ser entregadas a un padre al que creían muerto y a un hermano cuya existencia desconocían. Ambos emprenderán un viaje al Líbano para localizarlos y encontrar respuestas a su existencia. Basada en una obra de teatro de Wajdi Mouawad.
Reparto
Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz, Allen Altman, Mohamed Majd, Nabil Sawalha, Baya Belal, Bader Alami, Karim Babin, Yousef Shweihat
Dirección
Denis Villeneuve
Guión
Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne, Denis Villeneuve
Producción
micro_scope

descargarlinkpeli4101

subtitulopeli4101_ES.rar

Incendies
2010

Género: Drama
Idioma: Francés
Subtítulos: Español
Duración: 130 min

Reparto: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz, Allen Altman, Mohamed Majd, Nabil Sawalha, Baya Belal, Bader Alami, Karim Babin, Yousef Shweihat
Director: Denis Villeneuve

4.08 / 5
puntaje

0 de 3441 ranking

0 de 3441 popularidad

Título original
Incendies
Sinopsis
Jeanne y Simon Marwan son dos gemelos cuya madre, que lleva mucho tiempo sin hablar, está a punto de morir. Pero, antes del fatal desenlace, les da dos cartas que deben ser entregadas a un padre al que creían muerto y a un hermano cuya existencia desconocían. Ambos emprenderán un viaje al Líbano para localizarlos y encontrar respuestas a su existencia. Basada en una obra de teatro de Wajdi Mouawad.
Reparto
Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz, Allen Altman, Mohamed Majd, Nabil Sawalha, Baya Belal, Bader Alami, Karim Babin, Yousef Shweihat
Dirección
Denis Villeneuve
Guión
Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne, Denis Villeneuve
Producción
micro_scope

descargarlinkpeli4100

subtitulopeli4100_ES.rar

Incendies
2010

Género: Drama
Idioma: Francés
Subtítulos: Español
Duración: 130 min

Reparto: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz, Allen Altman, Mohamed Majd, Nabil Sawalha, Baya Belal, Bader Alami, Karim Babin, Yousef Shweihat
Director: Denis Villeneuve

4.06 / 5
puntaje

0 de 3440 ranking

0 de 3440 popularidad

Título original
Incendies
Sinopsis
Jeanne y Simon Marwan son dos gemelos cuya madre, que lleva mucho tiempo sin hablar, está a punto de morir. Pero, antes del fatal desenlace, les da dos cartas que deben ser entregadas a un padre al que creían muerto y a un hermano cuya existencia desconocían. Ambos emprenderán un viaje al Líbano para localizarlos y encontrar respuestas a su existencia. Basada en una obra de teatro de Wajdi Mouawad.
Reparto
Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz, Allen Altman, Mohamed Majd, Nabil Sawalha, Baya Belal, Bader Alami, Karim Babin, Yousef Shweihat
Dirección
Denis Villeneuve
Guión
Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne, Denis Villeneuve
Producción
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Incendies
2010

Género: Drama
Idioma: Francés
Subtítulos: Español
Duración: 130 min

Reparto: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz, Allen Altman, Mohamed Majd, Nabil Sawalha, Baya Belal, Bader Alami, Karim Babin, Yousef Shweihat
Director: Denis Villeneuve

4.06 / 5
puntaje

0 de 3440 ranking

0 de 3440 popularidad

Título original
Incendies
Sinopsis
Jeanne y Simon Marwan son dos gemelos cuya madre, que lleva mucho tiempo sin hablar, está a punto de morir. Pero, antes del fatal desenlace, les da dos cartas que deben ser entregadas a un padre al que creían muerto y a un hermano cuya existencia desconocían. Ambos emprenderán un viaje al Líbano para localizarlos y encontrar respuestas a su existencia. Basada en una obra de teatro de Wajdi Mouawad.
Reparto
Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard, Abdelghafour Elaaziz, Allen Altman, Mohamed Majd, Nabil Sawalha, Baya Belal, Bader Alami, Karim Babin, Yousef Shweihat
Dirección
Denis Villeneuve
Guión
Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne, Denis Villeneuve
Producción
micro_scope

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subtitulopeli4100_ES.rar

WORST

TVangie:

#5: Source Code (Jones, 2011)

#4: The Adjustment Bureau (Nolfi, 2011)

#3: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (Condon, 2011)

#2: Your Highness (Green, 2011)

Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Your Highness was probably in theatres for all of two weeks, and I had happily banished the entire experience from my consciousness until I was tasked to pick the worst films of 2011. Then (unfortunately) this film quickly came flooding back to my memory. Absolutely nothing in this film works. Nada. I didn’t laugh once. Not even a chuckle.

It’s a stoner comedy set in medieval times, where evil wizards, minotaurs and princes going on quests to save damsels in distress are rampant. Throw in some horrendous English accents akin to high school students doing Shakespeare for their drama classes (oh yeah, the gloves are coming off) and a couple of self-indulgent screenwriters and you’ve got Your Highness, or as I like to call it, everything wrong with Hollywood today.

Despite what you may think, I’m really not adverse to popcorn movies, but there’s absolutely nothing entertaining or redeeming about this film. And it’s not like this film didn’t have the potential. There are some great actors in the cast, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel, Justin Theroux, but given a script as bad as this, there’s not much that can be done. Furthermore, the special FX and costuming are right on par with any period film.

But ultimately this film is just an exercise in how commercially successful poor taste can be. The film is filled with what teenage boys would consider funny amidst a cloud of pot smoke, complete with mean-spirited homophobic jabs (which particularly irked me) and even shades of child molestation.

I just have one piece of advice with regard to this film – AVOID.

Cinephilactic:

#5: Super 8 (Abrams, 2011)

#4: Horrible Bosses (Gordon, 2011)

#3: Green Lantern (Campbell, 2011)

#2: Sucker Punch (Synder, 2011)

Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures

Loud. Frustrating. Long. Unnecessary.

These words describe Zach Synder’s 2011 “female empowerment” (please note sarcastic quotation marks) opus, Sucker Punch. The film, about a group of girls attempting to escape from a mental institution, is visually rendered in a series of fantasy battles and can be summed up in two words: not good.

I’ve been a fan of Synder’s since he made waves with his stylish remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004. His next film, 300 was an exercise in style over substance, but to dismiss the film simply as a visual stunner overlooks the political machinations at play (consider who the Spartans represent and who the vaguely Middle Eastern antagonists resemble). Watchmen is a complicated and challenging piece, not altogether successful, but interesting and worthwhile nonetheless. On the whole Synder has a solid resume of visually ambitious films, so I was eager to see the finished project when I heard about Sucker Punch.

And then the reviews began coming in and it was clear that Synder’s excess had finally overwhelmed his narrative sensibilities. I’ll be honest: the film is gorgeous. The visuals – whether it’s grimy hospital interiors or medieval castles – are audacious and spectacular. There’s always something to look at, down to the smallest detail. And therein lies the problem. There’s nothing else beyond the surface; it’s all topping and no substance. The characters and their problems are less than paper thin – they’re tropes. The talented group of actresses are little more than stand-ins, designed to move the film forward from action sequence to action sequence. These sequences are the imaginary representations of a series of thefts by the main character Baby Doll (Emily Browning) to secure different objects required for the break out. In this way, the most mundane of plots (grabbing a map, a key or a knife) become twenty minute action sequences featuring an excess of non-human carnage. Side Note: These sequences feature no human adversaries so that the film’s rating could be kept at PG (since killing humans nets you an R rating).

The film is like the teen girl equivalent of Saw: ciphers stand in for characters in series of action sequences that were seemingly plotted before anything else. Even if we look beyond the problems in narrative and characterization and examine the film purely on the basis of the action and the visuals, the film still doesn’t work. The samurai, steampunk Nazis, dragons and trolls and robots are impressive, but after the first few action sequences it all becomes a repetitive blur. By the time the girls hijack a train and blast hundreds of robots to smithereens, the film has become a yawn inducing pointless bore because we ultimately don’t know these girls or care about their plight. There’s clearly no tension if the girls get offed and all you can say is “which one is that?”

Ultimately the film is not about female empowerment (the school girl skirts might as well be sponsored by the Pedophiles for Statutory Rape club). And it’s also not an action film worthy of screening in its entirety. If anything, this film is an argument for big screen TVs and Blu-Ray players: watch a movie like Sucker Punch in the comfort of your home…with the remote in hand to get to the good shit.

BEST

TVangie

#5: Margin Call (Chandor, 2011)

#4: Bridesmaids (Feig, 2011)

#3: Win/Win (McCarthy, 2011)

#2: Biutiful (Iñárritu, 2010)

Courtesy of Focus Features

My pick for second best film this year goes to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a fan of Iñárritu’s other films. I find the eventual joining of seemingly disparate plotlines (a signature in all of his previous films – Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) to be too gimmicky and convenient for my liking. But Biutiful is a winner for me because the focus is instead placed on one man’s life – Uxbal, played exquisitely by Javier Bardem.

Uxbal, a single father on the edge of poverty, learns he is dying from terminal cancer. The film follows his difficult plight to ensure that his two children will be taken care of when he’s gone. Although the film portrays a somewhat predictable narrative structure, at its heart is Uxbal’s love for his children and is what makes it worth seeking out. Uxbal desires to do good, but with the clock ticking on his life, his choices are not as well-thought out as they should be. These choices result in some truly gut-wrenching scenes, punctuated by Iñárritu’s signature style. Emphasizing how humanity is inextricably connected, regardless of boundaries like class, race or even time, Iñárritu‘s tales unfold amidst challenging situations. The emotions are as austere as the barren environments in which they are presented, demanding that we perk up and pay attention. This film is no different, but rendered more potent as it omits the clever narrative devices which disuaded me previously.

One scene in particular skyrockets this film into my top two – where Uxbal says his final goodbye to his daughter Ana (Hanaa Bouchaib). I’m tempted to link the scene here, as I believe it still maintains its emotional impact as a standalone.  But ultimately, it’s even more powerful when seen in the context of the film as a whole. The scene is utterly heartbreaking, and if I didn’t have a heart of stone, I’m sure I would be weeping uncontrollably. But take care as it doesn’t do so through manipulating tactics. There are minimal edits and almost no dialogue, yet the raw emotion speaks volumes. This scene has left a permanent mark on me – I still remember it with such clarity even months after of seeing it.

The power of this film lies in Iñárritu’s desire to show us the beauty of duality. In his juxtaposition of contrasting elements, he brings out what we wouldn’t normally consider beautiful. This film strips away anything unnecessary, almost as if to say that it is the only way we are able to see true human nature. Poignantly beautiful, this film stayed with me long after I left the theatre, and that’s why it earns a spot in my top two.

Cinephilactic

#5: Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)

#4: 50/50 (Levine, 2011)

#3: Bridesmaids (Freig, 2011)

#2: Incendies (Villeneuve, 2010)

Courtesy of micro scope

It’s been almost a year since I saw director Denis Villeneuve’s Best Foreign Film nominated Incendies, his first film since the stark and captivating Polytechnique about the mass shooting at L’ecole polytechnique in Montreal. This film is no less powerful, despite the less familiar subject. In fact when I discovered that the film screened in January and I could include it on this list, I was ecstatic. I dumped those Bridesmaids bitches to the curb and slotted Incendies in at number two – just one removed from my favourite film of the year (and even that was a tough decision).

I’ll try my best to keep this spoiler free because virtually no one saw this movie and everyone must. The film is divided between two narratives: the first is a story about fraternal twins, a brother and sister, and the other, about their mother. The film opens when the twins discover that their mother has left them two letters to deliver as her will. One letter is for their father, who is dead. The other letter is for the brother that they did not know existed. And so the film takes the search for the truth as its story, jumping back and forth in time between the efforts of the children (primarily Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin’s Jeanne) in the present and the truth about their mother, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), in the past. To say that they are unaware of just who their mother is and what her life was is an exercise in understatement.

The hook is just the beginning, though. Makes no mistake: this is a brutal, epic film about war and terrorism and there are some deeply disturbing scenes. But the performances and the sheer beauty of the film elevate it above the bleak, sombre war stories that can feel like a chore. Incendies is never boring, or safe, or conventional, despite treading familiar territory with the slate of recent war fuelled films. To say that this is a film driven by love sounds cliche, but once you’ve seen it and begun to process the twists and turns, you come to realize that that’s the truth. Love is both the instigator of a series of absolutely terrible events, but by the film’s end, when the truth about just who Nawal Marwan is and what happened to her comes out, it’s clear that love is also responsible for the best parts of the story.

Yes, I’m being deliberately vague. It’s because I don’t want to explain to you what happens, or even why you need to see it. I want to tease you into seeking the film out yourself and uncovering its mysteries. At the end of the film, when everything comes together, I shivered because I was horrified and so completely satisfied because I had just screened a masterpiece. I couldn’t stop thinking about this film for weeks.

Even now, as I write this and re-watch the trailer, I still get the shivers.

Watch the trailer here.

—-

We’re almost at the top! Tomorrow we reveal our absolute best and total worst films of the year as the first week of the Bitch Awards comes to a close. Be sure to join us tomorrow to find out what we’ve chosen, and let us know what you think of our picks.

My goal to catch up with the year’s best films has started earnestly. Today I offer you two reviews that touch upon films that are, in different measures, both successful and entertaining. Although Incendies was officially released overseas late last year, its incursion into American cinemas did not happen until this year. For that reason, the following films will be considered, in my view, as 2011 movies.

Incendies (Denis Villeneuve- 2011)

The critically-acclaimed Canadian film directed by D. Villeneuve, is a harrowing drama of epic proportions that encompasses several countries and generations of a tragic family history.

As a tale, the film offers us plenty. It shifts elegantly from the 1960s and 70s to modern-day Lebanon. The yuxtaposition of eras certainly enriches the cinematography, combining the harshness of the war, with the far more orderly, though still scarred, Lebanon of today. The story is also one of great improbability set against a context that feels powerfully real. The duality, however, is not altogether bothersome because it allows the characters to embark on a journey that rivals the scale of a big-budget film filled with mystique and cultural richness.

Among the film’s most powerful elements is its very emotional ending. It comes to us as a surprise that is revealed to us slowly and indirectly so that we get a sense of it with almost the same intensity as those playing the part on screen.

The film does drag a bit before it takes off, owing a great deal of its success to the restrained yet fiery performance of Lubna Azabal as Nawal Marwan. The Belgium-born actress portrays a woman of will who reacts to the unfortunate circumstances she’s confronted with again and again, until it finally breaks her as an older lady, once the ultimate tragic turn is revealed. Her cool demeanor as a woman who survives it all is certainly one of the most realized tragic figures a film has offered in recent years.

Rating: 4 out of 5 (very good)

The Help (Tate Taylor – 2011)

One of the biggest box-office hits of the year also happened to be one of the best films of 2011.
Emma Stone stars as Skeeter Phelan, a wannabe journalist who, after getting a job in the local paper of a small town in Mississippi, decides to interview the African American women who worked as maids for white families, otherwise known as “the help”.

Viola Davis captures the spotlight as she once did in her breakout role in “Doubt” as the polite and soft-spoken Aibileen Clark who, after being a victim of racism for most of her life, finally decides to set free by agreeing to talk about her tragic experiences as a maid in the South.

It should come as no surprise that the film became such a big draw given its controversial subject matter that remains a relevant part of the American dialogue. Unlike recent less successful films that have explored racial relationships in America, “The Help” portrays the injustices derived from racism without overdoing it, showing a willingness to explore the black experience by seeing the virtue of their endeavor and how much of a positive effect they had on the families they worked for.

There are, however, a few moments in which “The Help” feels compelled to state the obvious, not letting the images speak for themselves. There are also a few minor detours in the story that don’t seem to add much, making the film feel unnecessarily bloated. There is, for example, the brief romance between Skeeter and an out-of-town businessman. Its inclusion in the story seems to respond a Hollywoodesque checklist that requires a female lead to have some sort of romantic interest, instead of making of it a vehicle that adds more depth to an otherwise powerfully crafted script.

Overall, “The Help” is an inspiring and compelling piece of film-making set in the midst of the civil rights movement in America that is definitely worth watching.

Rating: 3.5 out 5 (good)

Stay tuned for my next post in which I will be reviewing “Submarine” and “Win Win”.

Niels

That’s all she wrote. The end is nigh. And despite what Lenny Kravitz might sing, it is indeed over. 2011 is rapidly coming to a close, and after having sat through almost 250 films, I have selected a top ten (plus 20 honourable mentions) to put forward as recommended viewing. It’s a near impossible task, and the final product will be something I am sure to disagree with almost as soon as I hit ‘Publish’. But isn’t that half the fun? We compile our favourite movies of the past twelve months, and they act as a lovely little time capsule of the motion pictures that made the biggest impression on us during this highly-specific period. Even if history ends up being unkind to these films, what’s most important is that we thought they were good ‘now’. These lists act as a document of the movies we loved during the crazy year in which dictators were overthrown, Osama Bin Laden was killed, Wall Street was occupied, Italy undid the EU, and Rebecca Black unleashed ‘Friday’ on an unprepared universe. It was a weird year. Here are the films I felt defined it.

Honourable Mentions: Beginners, Bridesmaids, Certified Copy, Contagion, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Guard, How to Die in Oregon, Hugo, Incendies, Jane Eyre, The Kid with a Bike, Kill List, Moneyball, The Muppets, Rango, Senna, Super 8, Tabloid, The Trip, Young Adult.

10. Warrior

Honestly, any of those honourable mentions could have slid into this number ten spot (especially Young Adult and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, though I may have seen them too recently to judge with proper distance). I laboured over it, got emotional, and then remembered that lists are mostly arbitrary and fleeting and we should probably all chill out about them. So, I thought a) Which of these pictures would I like to rewatch right now? and b) Which one isn’t getting the end-of-year love it truly deserves? The answer to both of those questions is Gavin O’Connor‘s Warrior, a classic sports drama about MMA-fighting brothers (Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy) who compete for a much needed, multi-million dollar purse. Ain’t nothing exceptional about the story, but the execution is supreme, and it proved to be the most emotionally-satisfying crowd-pleaser that unfairly didn’t find a crowd to please. Here’s hoping people discover it sooner rather than later.

9. Midnight in Paris

This seemed to be the year for filmmakers to get all nostalgic about the legends of the past, with such celebrations of cinema and showmanship as Hugo, The Muppets (kinda), and The Artist (unseen) hitting screens. Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris saw a wannabe-writer (Owen Wilson) transported to the roaring 20s, where he was offered the dream-like opportunity to rub shoulders with iconic authors, poets, directors, models and more. But Allen also had the good sense to be a little critical of those who look back only with rose-tinted glasses – including himself! – and delivered one of his sweetest, most effervescent, and affecting films in the process.

8. Meek’s Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt‘s Meek’s Cutoff tells of a group of settlers on the Oregon Trail blindly walking towards a supposed ‘promised land’, led by an unwavering but ultimately untrustworthy tracker (Bruce Greenwood). When the picture opens, the pioneers – including Michelle Williams and Will Patton – are considering killing their “leader” for delivering them to certain death. As the film progresses, their situation only gets worse, culminating in the best ‘lump-in-your-throat’ finale of the year. A truly upsetting parable about the dangers of religious zealotry.

7. Martha Marcy May Marlene

Speaking of religious zealotry… Martha Marcy May Marlene continued 2011′s trend of films about sex cults and depraved fanaticism (keep ‘em coming, I say!). Elizabeth Olsen stars as Martha, Marcy May, and Marlene; three sides to the one fractured girl, who is seduced by a creepy cult and their charismatic leader (John Hawkes). A startling thriller that ratchets up the dread-level incrementally, until you feel as if you’re about to suffer a nervous breakdown like M herself. (Martha Marcy May Marlene opens in Australian cinemas January 19, 2012. It played at the Melbourne International Film Festival and Sydney Film Festival.)

6. Win Win

One of the warmest ensemble comedies of late, and what proved to have one of the most lasting effects on me as the year wore on. Paul Giamatti stars as a struggling lawyer who takes in a troubled youth and trains him to fight on the high school wrestling team he coaches. The set-up may sound clichéd, but the gentle guiding hand of writer-director Thomas McCarthy, and the talents of its priceless players (including Amy Ryan, Bobby Cannavale, and Alex Shaffer) made this beautiful movie hilarious, humane, and just gosh-darn-lovable.

5. Drive

On first watch, Nicolas Winding Refn‘s ice-cold Drive is an expertly composed thriller about a getaway driver (Ryan Gosling) who finds himself in over his head with some gangsters while trying to protect the women he loves (Carey Mulligan). On the second, it’s a deeply thoughtful character piece about a conscientious psychopath whose mask of sanity slips when confronted with the concept of real human connection. I can’t wait to see what the third viewing unveils. Either way, Drive provided a memorable movie-watching experience. Sharing that elevator scene (you’ll know it when you see it) with an audience was a truly delightful and horrifically gory gift.

4. Submarine

There’s no film I watched more this year than Submarine. It’s a dark coming-of-age comedy about a teenager who thinks he understands the world far better than he actually does, and must first suffer clumsy sexual advances, schoolyard beatings, rebuffed proclamations of love, the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, and even flirtations with death before he can even grasp what this whole ‘life’ thing is really about. Director Richard Ayoade‘s (Moss from The I.T. Crowd!) feature debut is affectation-heavy, but undeniably unique. Feels like a future cult classic.

3. A Separation

Asghar Farhadi‘s divorce drama A Separation has perhaps the most heartbreaking finale of any picture on this list, which is saying something (especially when you see what #2 is). Married couple Nader and Simin love each other, but simply can’t stay together because of the complications of everyday life. She can’t bear to live in Iran any further, and he can’t abandon his Alzheimer’s-ridden father. Caught in the middle is their young daughter, and eventually, the family of their housekeeper, who is struck by tragedy half-way through the picture. A Separation is about decent, well-meaning people whose little white lies have disastrous results. It could have just as easily been my number one, if it hadn’t been trumped by the following sensory cinematic experiences. (A Separation opens in Australian cinemas early 2012. It played at the Melbourne International Film Festival and Sydney Film Festival.)

2. Melancholia

Oh, Lars. 2011 belonged to you for so many reasons, not all of them good. If any other filmmaker had jokingly uttered the phrase ‘I’m a Nazi’ at a press conference, they would have a hard time reminding people to focus on their movie and not their silly, misguided declarations. But Melancholia is hard to overshadow. Kirsten Dunst stars as a deeply depressed bride who endures a seemingly endless wedding-from-hell, only to be offered a hint of relief when she discovers the world is going to end via collision with rogue planet Melancholia. Charlotte Gainsbourg – as her loving, frustrated, terrified sister – prays the giant blue ball won’t actually hit Earth, but will instead pass right by, no doubt just like the hereditary mental disorder that afflicts both her sister and their mother. A devastating drama about mental illness with a closing shot for the ages.

1. The Tree of Life

Perhaps the most divisive flick of the year, and unquestionably the most ambitious, Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life captured the essence of existence and the power of the pictures in one bite-sized 138-minute package (hey, it’s shorter than Transformers: Dark of the Moon!). No written synopsis could do it justice, but it’s – basically – about the history of the universe told from the perspective of God (that old chestnut). We briefly stop and spend some time with a family in the 1950s, headed by an ethereal mother (Jessica Chastain) and an oppressive father (Brad Pitt), who jointly represent the two ways of living: The Way of Grace, and The Way of Nature. Even that distillation of events feels inaccurate. The Tree of Life is the experience of watching The Tree of Life, whatever that might mean to different viewers. It could easily be read as a movie that seeks to prove the presence of a higher power in the world, or as a movie that flatly denies anything but the random chaos of evolution as our steering force. That Malick’s movie could raise and explore these questions thoughtfully in its relatively miniscule running time is impressive. That it could, to my eyes, provide answers is a miracle.

Previously:

The 10 worst films of 2011

The 10 best female performances of 2011

The 10 best male performances of 2011

The 10 best Australian films of 2011

Discuss: OK, what did we miss?

There is no way I will be posting the much-required “best films of 2011″ without watching some of the movies that have been branded by critics as some of the best of the year. Due to my professional responsibilities and my IMDB top 250 challenge, I have not managed to keep up with some of the most attractive offerings at the multiplex this year.

The following weeks will definitely be dedicated to doing some catch-up. I am awaiting the arrival of the very well received “Submarine” and “Incendies” by mail this week. I will also be sneaking some time in my crazy schedule to catch Michael Fassbender’s talked-about performance as a sex addict in “Shame”.

Right after I am done with those, I will be getting “Win Win” with the underrated Paul Giamatti and the critically acclaimed period drama “Meek’s Cutoff” starring Michelle Williams.

Even after all of this, I still need to catch up with films like “The Artist”, “Bellflower” and “The Tree of Life” just to name a few.

At this moment, my favorite film of 2011 continues to be “Moneyball”.

What can I say? Christmas will be all about the movies !!

Niels

In any case, the Boston Society of Film Critics announced Sunday that they voted Incendies best foreign-language film of the year. So kudos to Villeneuve who made the Oscar short-list in the same category.

Last year the Boston Society of Film Critics gave Juliette Lewis the Best Supporting Actress prize for Conviction. It’s nice to see they’ve kept their originality in a few categories this year. But check out the love for Margaret! Unfortunately there was only one screening of the film and lots of the voters missed out on it. Hopefully this will change come January?

Check out the full list of winners below:

Best Use Of Music:

Tie: The Artist and Drive

Runner-up: The Descendants

Best Editing:

The Clock

Runner-up: Hugo

Best Cinematography:

The Tree Of Life

Runner-up: Hugo

Best New Filmmaker (David Brudnoy Award):

Sean Durkin – Martha Marcy May Marlene

Runner-up: J.C. Chandor – Margin Call

Best Supporting Actor:

Albert Brooks – Drive

Runner-up: Max Von Sydow – Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Best Supporting Actress:

Melissa McCarthy – Bridesmaids

Runner-up: Jeannie Berlin – Margaret

Best Actor:

Brad Pitt – Moneyball

Runners-up: George Clooney – The Descendants and Michael Fassbender – Shame

Best Actress:

Michelle Williams – My Week With Marilyn

Runner-up: Meryl Streep – The Iron Lady

Best Ensemble:

Carnage

Runner-up: Margaret

Best Screenplay:

Moneyball

Runner-up: Margaret

Best Director:

Martin Scorsese – Hugo

Runner-up: Michel Hazanavicius – The Artist

Best Documentary:

Project Nim

Runner-up: Bill Cunningham New York

Best Picture:

The Artist

Runners-up: Hugo and Margaret

Best Foreign Film:

Incendies

Runners-up: A Separation

Best Animated Film:

Rango

Drive has inspired this provisional attempt at asking what different types of movie violence exist, how they can be categorised, and what meanings each might have.

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all” – Oscar Wilde

Wilde’s defence of the Aesthetes is never far behind any justification of excessive violence in cinema. As a defence it has only one drawback, it’s not remotely true. Art can be deeply immoral. I direct you to Triumph of the Will. Quite often film historians will rave about the innovation or dazzling techniques employed by its director Leni Riefenstahl, and then snap back into their conscious minds, realise just how far down a  particularly crooked garden path they’ve gone, and hastily backtrack with a “BUT of course it’s a terribly evil film….” Films do not exist in a vacuum. They’re part of our lived experience, and if we have any sense of right and wrong surely films are implicated in it in more than a three-act Hollywood good defeats evil structural sense.

I reviewed Paranoid Park for InDublin and was appalled at the bisection of an innocent security guard by its unlikeable hero that was the pivot of the film. But I was stunned to see one American critic summon the courage to dub that moment deeply immoral. We’ve been inured to think about screen violence only in terms of effect, technique, structure, but there are different types of violence and morality cannot always be parked at the door as Wilde would wish. A man getting his head stomped on by Ryan Gosling till bone-dust floats in front of the lens inhabits a different universe than a lengthy sword-fight between Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn ending with Rathbone’s death. Cinematic violence can be divided into a number of types, and the most obvious type is spectacle. A swordfight is violent, a cowboy duel is violent, a shoot-out is violent, a suspenseful Spielberg action sequence is violent, the lobby scene in The Matrix is violent – but it is the violence of spectacle. Hugh Jackman said that his musical theatre training was helpful in preparing for boxing in Real Steel because fight choreography is just choreography. When action is spectacle, what you’re really watching and enjoying is the choreography.

“Art is art because it is not nature” – Oscar Wilde

Can violence that is not seeking to appeal to the audience’s admiration for good choreography ever truly be aesthetic? Drive depicts a woman’s head exploding from a shotgun blast in anatomically accurate detail. Scorsese realistically depicts the explosion of a body dropped from a roof when it hits the ground, spraying Leonardo DiCaprio with blood, in The Departed. Why do film-makers engaged in depicting violence which is not spectacle usually go for such extreme verisimilitude? For every Kill Bill touch of blood spurting 30 feet there’s multiple instances of something like a gangster being bashed in the head by a shovel in Miller’s Crossing or a gangster being bashed in the head by a baseball bat in The Untouchables. Wilde’s dictum, if taken seriously, implies that 1950s cowboys keeling over dead without any blood being spilled after being shot is more artistic than R rated violence, because it is so obviously not nature but rather an artistic convention. Spielberg at least acknowledged that he was going for extreme authenticity in Saving Private Ryan to traumatise the audience rather than for his usual purpose of using violence – scaring/entertaining them, we’ll label all such uses of violence as catharsis to make life easier. Violent film-makers though seem to enjoy rendering violence in extreme detail not for reasons of catharsis but because they just like depicting bloody violence.

Can violence detached from the spectacle of choreography ever be aesthetic and nothing else? I doubt it, given that we seemed to have reached a point in cinema history where violence must be very realistic (whether fully depicted or screened from view) or it defeats the verisimilitude of its context. A more important question is just why is violence so important to cinema? Raymond Chandler quipped that whenever he got stuck he simply wrote a guy with a gun walking into the room. I’ve hammered LOST before for exactly this sort of laziness in which violence is used as a cheat, a jump-leads to make a scene tense and raise the dramatic stakes without bothering to write escalating conflict, character based tension, or biting dialogue. But this idea allows us to provisionally divide violence into four categories: spectacle, catharsis, function, sadism – suffering is the key to noting the last as well as a certain monolithic quality of the film as violent film and nothing else. It is also the only one that raises moral qualms, as opposed to seething dissatisfaction at lazy writing and distaste at a high water-mark of violence becoming the norm for ignoble reasons of sheer functionality. The fight in the subway at the end of The Matrix is all about the spectacle of dazzling wire-assisted choreography. By contrast the fights in Batman Begins are a total blur in which Batman wins, because Nolan very deliberately shoots too close to the action so as to shift the focus away from the spectacle; it doesn’t matter how Batman beats people up, what matters is that he can beat people up – it’s a question of function and character, not of aesthetics and spectacle. Functional violence is now the grease on the wheels of the three-act structure in many instances. At the climaxes of films, as villains get their desserts, it often overlaps with catharsis.

Catharsis is obviously an ancient legitimisation for extreme violence, and indeed Incendies will probably be my film of the year because it used shocking violence to purge the emotions of its audience with pity and fear to such powerful effect that the entire cinema sat in a stunned Aristotelian silence for some minutes at the end of my screening before shuffling out feeling somewhat mind-blown. But there is a fine line between catharsis and sadism, even in the greatest works. Oedipus gouging out his own eyes when he discovers the truth of his actions is not the same as Titus Andronicus informing his enemy exactly what was in the pie she just ate. ‘Shakespeare was really violent too’ is therefore not a carte blanche excuse for grotesque violence, though it’s often used in defence of extreme screen violence. Yes, Shakespeare was a bloody nihilist in King Lear and Titus Andronicus; in performance everything in Lear can seem mere build up to Cornwall gouging out Gloucester’s eyes, while Titus is simply a catalogue of grand guignol horror from start to finish. But Shakespeare also wrote the frothy feather-light follies Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing where you’ll look in vain for any eye-gouging or cannibalism. Shakespeare had range with a capital R. The problem with Tarantino’s spawn is that they specialise in violence to a worryingly monolithic extent, and their violence often veers towards the Titus approach rather than Lear – audiences do not cry with pity and fear for what they have just witnessed and feel emotionally purged, they moan in revulsion and disgust at what they have just witnessed and feel emotionally contaminated.

“Just keep telling yourself, it’s only a movie” – Last House on the Left tagline

Sadism – the true differentiator. Violence as spectacle, function or catharsis doesn’t provoke the same shudder. Incendies was deeply shocking in its depiction of violence, but, crucially, it wasn’t shocking because of graphic depictions of that violence, but because of the connections between who was committing the acts and who they were victimising, on both an individual and societal basis. Sadism does not have that concern which elevates catharsis. It is concerned with depicting suffering for its own sake. Hostel auteur Eli Roth wants you to see a man lose two fingers on both hands as he breaks his bonds and then keep going in his quest to escape the deadly hostel, leaving his fingers behind him. I’ve written about Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen, noting that the theatrical cut showcased all the most obnoxious moments of his director’s cut: Big Figure cutting the arms off his henchman when Rorschach ties them to the cell-bars, the hand of Veidt’s secretary exploding when he’s attacked by an assassin, and Rorschach hatcheting the child murderer. Why shoot the secretary in the leg, as in the comic, but then blow her hand off – ending her employability as a secretary? Why cut off a man’s arms with a power-saw and leave him to die in agony when Alan Moore’s script slashes his throat for an instant death? I said previously that Snyder was adding sadism to an already nasty story, but now I note he’s changing the category of violence – from function to sadism. He wants you to see people suffering, and that is a sensibility I find deeply troubling, not least because it seems to be shared at certain times by celebrated directors like Refn, the Coens, Tarantino, Scorsese, Burton, Haneke and Miike. I won’t say that what these film-makers do with violence at their worst moments is immoral, but it is deeply troubling, and it’s time to stop meekly accepting their cod-Wildean ersatz-Shakesperean defences and ask just why it is that they apparently get off so much on depicting violence in gory detail with an emphasis on suffering.

Drive didn’t perturb me because it was a film purely of sadistic violence; the first outbreaks of bloodletting are all about function and catharsis, while the ominous killing on the beach is violence as both spectacle and catharsis. No, it’s taken me a long time to fathom what lies behind my feeling that Drive really was a film of two parts; the first of which I loved, the second of which I despised. And this is it. A film makes a contract with the audience, and for me Drive broke that contract – I didn’t expect that sort of violence to develop from the first part of the movie, and I don’t appreciate being told I’ve seen equally graphic violence in films that signed a different contract and delivered the goods as agreed. Spielberg and Hitchcock are pranksters, asking you where the line is repeatedly, to establish it in their minds, and then crossing that line for fun. Robert Rodriguez, in Machete or Planet Terror, establishes his ground rules for schlocky violence in the opening minutes. Saying I shouldn’t attack Drive because I enjoyed Wanted ignores the different contracts that they proffered regarding the nature of the screen violence to expect, and is akin to this:

BORIS: A 0-0 draw. Great. What a riveting football match…
JOHNSON: What are you complaining about? Have you forgotten that 0-0 draw last week that had you enthralled?
BORIS: What, the one with the 2 disallowed goals, 3 sendings off, 4 shots off the crossbar, 5 off the post and 60 shots saved?
GODUNOV: The very one.
BORIS: (beat) I think that was a bit different. How many shots were there tonight?
JOHNSON: What, on target?
BORIS: No, at all.
GODUNOV: Um… None. It was 90 minutes of 22 men on their own goal-lines.
BORIS: Yeah, it was 0-0 and so was last week’s match, but this one was excruciating.

As Enda Kenny used to bellow (but not at Nicolas Winding Refn, though he’d stand hearing it) “Sign the Contract!”

From the producers of the Academy Award nominated film “Incendies” and winner of the Best Canadian Feature Film award at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, “Monsieur Lazhar” is being considered for Best Foreign Language Feature.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Luc Déry & Kim McCraw

http://www.awardsdaily.com/FYC/gallery/2011-12/photo.php?id=2490

Where am I at?  Persevering.  Oh there’s some greatness in my life, that’s for sure.  But you know, artistically, it can be a strange path.  Sometimes the best thing to do is simply perserve through the strangest of times.  And for reference, do you literally want to know where I’m at?  I’m fixed atop this small plot of land on the curvilinear chest of the North American continent.  Find North America.  Find its five Great Lakes.  That lowest one is Lake Michigan.  Scroll down some fifty or sixty miles south of its southern tip, careful not to leave the Illinois border for Indiana, and you’ll just about find me.  Here I am!  I’m at my table, typing this blog entry.  I’ll stop to wave out the window.  Can you see me on Google Earth?!

I don’t assume I’m widely read.  As a matter of fact, you might be the only person reading right now.  You might have drifted here on your own, astronautically all by yourself through the worm holes of the Internet to “here.”  Welcome.  Let’s say this is a moment of conversational intimacy.  We hear one another, right?  Let me tell you that I don’t want to kill you.  I also don’t want to see you killed in a war.  I’ll tolerate your way of life if it isn’t harming me.  I don’t want to invade the place where you live.  I’m sorry about the fact that my lifestyle demands resources from foreign lands.  I know the resources that fuel my lifestyle are oftentimes obtains in unjust manners.  I want you to know I research to make better choices and I speak up and out about the harm my Western lifestyle causes others.  I just want to live in peace, and I wish the same for you. 

This conversation is decidedly one-sided, you see, because I’m typing, and you’re reading, and there’s no exchange because this is a static document.  I’ll pretend that you’re interested in what I have to say, and that you’re going to keep reading.

The following report is about two books, a foreign movie and an American band.  This is where I’m at.

• VONNEGUT

My mom gets catalogues in the mail which sell clearing house books, warehouse overstock and university press titles.  She’s a huge reader too.  She’s got a wide reading taste.  She’s bought, read and passed along several great books, including one called The Wheatgrass Mechanism by Canadian poet and educator Don Gayton; a book of essays that recount the wilderness of upper North America; most recently she finished and loaned me a book of posthumously published Vonnegut stories.  His voice is perfectly let-me-assert-myself American; his paragraph structures are short and he often weaves pages and pages of two and three sentence paragraphs; I’m almost through with the stories in Look at the Birdie and let me tell you, I got transfixed in a few of them, enough so that I could sit on the couch and read while about me went on cooking, questions and handstands.

• THE PIRATES OF SOMALIA

The story about the Somalian pirates, let me tell you, is unbelievably interesting.  Some weeks ago, after I finished reading his latest manuscript, the contemporary American writer David Jarecki and I met for lunch.  Somewhere in our drifting dialogues David brought up the Somalian pirates.  I thought I knew the basic story because I had read about them in the BBC from time to time and in some American dailies, but it turned out I didn’t know anything, and what David knew completely enthralled my intellectual curiosity.  After reading much about them online, I ordered Jay Bahadur’s book from the Kankakee Public Library, The Pirates of Somalia.  Today I got through the prologue and some of the first chapter and I plan on devouring the text.

• INCENDIES

It’s my rule, because I am a public school teacher and under the scrutinous eye of Ole’ Man Public, to not cuss in my blog entries, but after getting the new release foreign film Incendies from the Kankakee Public Library and watching it, all I can say is: “Wholly Fuck.”

I’m serious.  I can’t remember when any movie gripped me and insisted on my emotional engagement as hard.  The mother’s perseverance throughout the life she lived in this film made me question everything I know about our species.  The characters may have been portraying people foreign to me, but this is really an “every person” story.  The scene where the mother wakes up on the bus to encounter one faction of her country’s warring parties and what happens next?  Our species is ridiculous.  The entire last hour of the film?  The ending which I didn’t possibly expect but happened none the less?  You’ll seriously need to put aside 2 uninterrupted hours some night before bed to watch this one.

• WILCO.  THE WHOLE LOVE.

I’ve been a Wilco listener since the release of Being There (1996) which is essentially when I first encountered them.  Then yes, I searched backwards and found A.M. (1995) and I went backwards to Uncle Tupelo and along the way I bought a Son Volt album, but before long it was just Wilco and what they put out next.  I view Jeff Tweedy, as do many others, as an “artist’s artist.”  He puts his talent out front, which obviously comes with its own hitches and requires a lot from him, but he puts it out front like many artists want to do.  I liked everything up until Wilco (The Album) (2009).  I’ll take the blame.  Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for it. 

But then came Wilco’s newest album, The Whole Love (2011).

After a 22 mile mountain bike ride at the Kankakee River State Park, Steven Kramer and I stopped at Starbucks of all places, because I promised Amanda I wouldn’t stop for a beer, as we had been doing after our rides.  It seems those “one beer” stops had started to lead to two and three and four… Sunday afternoon beers.  So we were at Starbucks.  I was waiting for my coffee and there was the new Wilco album so I bought it.  I can honestly say I’ve listened to The Whole Love some 1 or 200 hundred times in the last 50 days or so; sometimes it’s just one or two or three songs on the way to work and back from work, but my listening’s been steady, and each continued play of the songs continues to satisfy me.  The album offers so much diversity; it’s ecologically balanced and the varied styles and speeds connect to many different parts of my own artistic temperament and musical preferences.

Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions… He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried.

Both metaphors present the process of historical detection as a voyage into territories unknown. Today, these metaphors ring hollow through a combination of over-use and changing attitudes to the wider world. These days, the world is a village and no two parts of the village are ever more than a plane-flight away. However, in the days of Hartley and Freud, the world was a much larger and scarier place. Were one to update Hartley’s dictum for contemporary usage one would most likely say something like “the past is an oceanic trench: who knows what lies buried in the dark?”

Nowhere is the past’s peculiar edge more evident than when it protrudes from the wreckage of a life recently concluded. When a parent dies, the children move in and sort through their things. This process of sorting generally uncovers all kinds of facts from the actively forgotten to the merely mislaid. People lead complicated lives and these lives are seldom fully encapsulated by the short amount of time that people know each other. To look into a loved-one’s past is to uncover things about them that we would rather not know, things that force us to confront unpleasant truths about ourselves. Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies is a film about a voyage into the past and the changes that such a voyage can bring to otherwise blissfully ignorant lives.

Simon (Maxim Gaudette) and Jeanne Marwan (Melissa Desormaux-Poulin) are twins. Born to a difficult and complex woman named Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabel), the pair grew up in Canada where the heat of their mother’s unpleasantness forged a profound bond of filial devotion. However, despite their closeness, the twins react very differently when their mother dies and the executor of her will reveals her final wishes. The will begins by explaining that youth is a knife buried in one’s throat in so far as it is difficult to remove it without dying in the process. This mysteriously poetic statement constitutes a mystery that can only be solved when Simon and Jeanne travel to Lebanon in order to track down their long-lost father and Nawal’s previously unmentioned son. Simon reacts with outrage and refuses to help; his mother was difficult her entire life and this latest eccentricity is deemed to be nothing more than a ghoulish attempt at capturing the pair’s attention from beyond the grave. Jeanne, on the other hand, remains true to her background as a mathematician and expresses an uncanny eagerness to solve the mystery of Nawal’s eldest son. Incendies chronicles the twins’ journeys through Lebanon and into their mother’s astonishing past.

Based on the play Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, Villeneuve’s film uses two dovetailing narratives. The first tells the story of Nawal’s youth and the second tells the story of the twins’ attempts at uncovering this youth.

Nawal begins the film as naïve Christian peasant who falls in love with one of the Palestinians seeking refuge in Lebanon. Fully aware that her Maronite family will not tolerate her involvement with a Muslim refugee, Nawal decides to elope but she is rapidly tracked down by two of her male relatives who shoot the Palestinian in the head for the sake of family honour. Prostrate with grief and secretly pregnant, Nawal agrees to surrender her child for adoption in return for permission to leave the village and receive a proper education in the city. Hopeful that Nawal will one day return and reclaim her son, Nawal’s grandmother places a tattoo on the infant’s heel, a sign of his true heritage and of the bond of affection that ties him to his real family.

Once in the city, Nawal proves to be an intelligent student and she soon finds herself being employed in one of the student newspapers supporting Lebanese Christianity against the rising tide of Nationalism. When civil war finally breaks out, Nawal decides to leave Beirut and go in search of her son. However, along the way she gets caught up in the fighting and witnesses an atrocity that not only deprives her of her faith, but forces her into the arms of a Muslim warlord who sends her to spy on a right-wing Christian politician. For months, Nawal works as a governess who teaches French to the politician’s children. Then, she receives the call and calmly walks downstairs and shoots the politician in the head. Jeanne is understandably perturbed by the revelation that her mother spent years of her life incarcerated as a political prisoner, but the meat of the film lies chiefly in the twins’ reactions to what happened once Nawal arrived in prison.

Simon and Jeanne have different reactions to their mother’s final request because the narrative requires the opening of a second front. Reluctant and still largely hostile to his mother’s eccentricities, Simon boards a plane and arrives in Beirut only to discover that a local notary has been hired to do the investigative legwork. Indeed, now that Nawal is revealed to be a prisoner, the facts of her life are a matter of administrative record. Her fate is bound up with that of the Lebanese state and those agents who would influence it.

This may sound like hyperbole, but Simon and Jeanne soon discover its fundamental truth as Nawal is revealed to be something of a Muslim folk hero: a Muslim woman who sang through years of torture at the hands of tyrants, a woman who never broke until the very end of her life when she saw something that could not be forgotten or understood.

Incendies is very much a detective story and as such, to reveal the ending would be to unravel the entire plot of the film. Normally, I do not bother with spoiler warnings but the intensity and power of the twist in this film’s tale is such that I cannot deprive potential viewers of its visceral impact. Indeed, the fact that so much of this film’s power hinges upon its final twist is something of a weakness as Simon and Jeanne never really come across as anything other than narrative devices allowing Villeneuve to structure his narrative in a clever manner. We never fully grasp why it is that Simon and Jeanne react so differently to the truth about their mother and when the ultimate truth is revealed, the impact on the children is glossed over in a rather disappointing manner. The force of Hartley’s dictum lies not in the simple fact that the past is not home but in the subjective experience of that visceral foreign otherness. These are two kids from modern-day Canada thrust into 1970s Lebanese politics, politics that continue to shape and reshape the Middle East with every passing year. Incendies contains some wonderful moments of culture shock when the Canadian kids come face to face with their family heritage, particularly wonderful is the scene where Jeanne turns up on the doorstep of the Marwan family only for the mood to cool the second the exact nature of her familial ties become apparent. Similarly superb is the scene where Simon is called upon to feel his way into the political orbit of an ageing warlord. Never has a lot of tea-drinking and shoulder-shrugging seemed so tense and meaningful. However, while Incendies tries to communicate the twins’ sense of shock at discovering the truth about their mother, their lack of depth as characters makes the discovery somewhat generic. Indeed, we are moved by the story of Narwal but not by that of her children. Their outrage is simply too understandable to be meaningful, they are empty vessels for our own discoveries.

What elevates Incendies above both its historical tourism and detective genre trappings is the elegance of the script (credited to Villeneuve but based of Mouawad’s play with ‘script consultation’ by Valerie Beaugrand-Champagne) and the beauty of the camerawork. As you can probably see from the screen-captures, Incendies is a film that is composed with an astonishing amount of care. The film’s direction is neither stylised nor complex, Villeneuve simply dots the narrative with images of astonishing beauty. This beauty also pervades the script as characters lapse into heart-rending poetry that seems both utterly contrived in its theatricality and utterly deserved in its power to capture mood and communicate ideas. Though far from flawless, Incendies is a thoughtful and alluring film that captures all the pain and joy that can come from laying someone to rest once and for all. Its ending is a deluge of bittersweet energy that is so perfectly judged that it leaves other weepies in the shade. So much sadness and savagery, so beautifully conveyed.

(스포일러 있습니다)

캐나다 감독 드니 빌눼브의 네번째 영화이자 희극을 원작으로 한 영화라고 한다. 베니스, 선댄스, 토론토등 각종 영화제에서 화제를 모았으며 부산 국제 영화제에 소개되면서 국내에서도 작은 파장을 일으킨 것으로 알고 있다. 국내 개봉 당시 제목은 <그을린 사랑>. 원작은 불어로 화재 혹은 방화를 일컫는 단어인데 이게 명사에서 온 건지 동사에서 온 건지는 모르겠다. 아무튼 원제가 활활 타오르는 불길을 뜻한다면 국내 개봉명은 그 불이 다 꺼진 후에 남는 것을 묘사하고 있다는 점에서 퍽 흥미롭다. 영화는 두시간 내내 활활 타오르다가 마지막 5분동안 그을린 사랑에 대해서 이야기하고 있다. 그렇다면 이 영화를 본 한국의 수입 배급사 관계자들은 한국 관객들이 그 마지막 5분에 더 집중할 것이라고 생각한 것일까. 궁금하다.

나는 유희열의 라디오 프로그램에 출연한 이동진이 언급한 이후 언제나 한번 볼까 생각하고 있다가 땡스기빙을 맞아(?) 아이튠즈에서 다운받아 아이패드로 봤다. 아이패드로 영화를 보는 것은 처음이었는데 두시간동안 집중하기에 그리 나쁘지는 않은 디바이스같다. 화면은 작지만 그만큼 화면과 가까운 거리에 있으니 별 문제될 것이 없고, 해상도 역시 크게 불만을 가질 정도는 아니다. 아무튼,

영화의 충격적인 반전과 다중 교차 내러티브 방식의 꼼꼼한 구성, 그리고 곳곳에 숨겨 놓은 상징들은 영화가 말하고자 하는 주제와 끈끈하게 얽혀 들어간다. 구성은 상당히 촘촘하고, 초반에 등장한 상징들은 후반에 반전을 두차례 겪으며 새로운 의미를 부여받는다. 예를 들어 영화의 오프닝신에 등장하는 분노에 가득찬 한 아이가 비극의 한 가운데 있게 될 것이라는 사실은 영화가 끝나기 10분전까지 눈치챌 수 없다. 영화를 다 본 이후에도 각 장면들에 대해 계속 생각해 보게 만든다는 점에서 최소한 나쁜 영화는 아닌 것이다. 주제 의식도 그만하면 훌륭한 편이다. -레바논으로 강력하게 의심되는- 중동의 한 국가의 종교 분쟁이 평범할 수도 있었을 한 가정의 삶을 어떻게 파괴하는지 보여주는 방식은 전달 측면에서 효과적이다. 그러니까 아프리카의 한 아이가 굶어 죽어가는 사진을 보여주는 쪽이 1년에 몇명의 어린이가 아프리카에서 죽어가는지 통계 자료를 통해 보여주는 것보다 모금 방식에서 훨씬 효과적인 것과 같은 이치다. 아마도 이 영화를 본 사람들은 중동의 피비린내나는 참극에 대해 고개를 절래 절래 흔들게 될 것이다.

하지만 그렇다고 해서 이 영화를 ‘좋은 영화다’ 라고 말할 수는 없을 것 같다. 충격적인 반전을 차치하고서라도 말이다. 오이디푸스적인 근친상간 자체를 혐오하는 것에서부터 이 영화에 대한 비판을 시작하는 것은 온당치 못하다. 그건 영화에서 굉장히 중요한 장치였고 그 장치로 인해 한 가정의 비극을 생생히 전달할 수 있었다. 때문에 그 두번에 걸친 반전은 영화의 주제와 완벽히 맞아 들어갔고, 나는 그 점에서 많은 사람들이 아마도 역겨워 할 그 부분은 굉장히 올바르게 쓰였다고 생각한다. 그리고 영화의 형식적인 측면에서 봐도 후반으로 갈수록 교차 편집이 기술적으로만 쓰일 뿐 주제 의식과 점점 동떨어져 가는 것을 알 수 있는데, 이건 첫번째 반전 이후부터 도드라져 보인다. 첫번째 반전과 그 이후 이어지는 가빠지는 호흡이 기술적인 결함을 압도해 나가는 형국이다. 엔딩 부분에 다다르니 까지 관객은 잔느-시몽 남매와 시선 및 호흡을 같이 하게 되는데 이게 일종의 면죄부처럼 적용될 수도 있을 것 같다. 그러니까 이 부분 역시 짚고 넘어가고 싶지 않다는 것.

이 영화에 대한 비판은 그보다는 오히려 그 비극으로까지 한 여성을 끌고 가기 위한 장치들이 너무 작위적이고 인위적이었다는 데에서부터  시작해야 하는 것 같다. 수많은 우연들이 겹치고 겹쳐 이 가여운 어머니는 아들에게 강간을 당하게 된다. 아들이 어머니에게로부터 떨어져 고아원에서 길러지고 그 고아원이 가톨릭계 집단에 의해 테러를 당하자 무슬림 집단으로부터 훈련을 받게 되고, 그 이후 뛰어난 스나이퍼가 되어 공적을 세우지만 체포되는데 또 죽지는 않는다. 하필이면 고물 기술관으로 다시 재창조되어 우연히고 자신의 어머니가 수감되어 있는 감옥으로 보내지게 된다. 어머니는 또 어떠한가. 어떤 이유에서인지 무슬림과 사랑하게 되고, 또 어떤 이유에서인지 학생 운동에 가담한 뒤 암살 계획에 동참하게 되며, 임무를 무리없이 수행한 뒤 15년동안 감옥에서 모진 고문을 이겨낸다. 그곳에서 아들을 만나고, 강간을 당한 뒤 조직에 의해 캐나다로 보내져 고문관의 자식이자 자신의 자식인 쌍둥이와 캐나다에서 공증인으로 삶을 마감한다. 이 쌍둥이 남매가 어머니의 흔적을 찾아 나가는 과정은 또 우연의 연속이자 비논리성의 연속이다. 공증인은 처음부터 이들을 진실로 인도할 수 있었음에도 이 남매에게 스스로 역사를 찾아 나서기를 강요한다. 남매는 각기 다른 방법으로 서서히 흔적을 발견해 나가게 되지만 이 역시 이들에게 그냥 ‘주어지는’ 것이다. 그것도 아주 기적적인 확률을 가진 것처럼 적재 적소에 어머니의 흔적을 알려주는 사람이 나타나는데, 이 모든 것은 공증인의 도움으로 이루어진다. 왜 하필 이러한 방법을 통해 쌍둥이는 어머니의 과거를 알아야만 했고, 자신들의 아버지이자 형제인 사람에게 어머니의 편지를 전달해야만 했을까. 그리고 대체 어머니는 어느 순간 용서를 결심했단 말인가. 수영장에서 아들의 뒤꿈치를 본 이후? 아니면 그 이전부터 생각해 오던 것? 쌍둥히 남매가 어머니를 위해 결국 비석을 세우고, 그 비석앞에 서 있는 한 남자의 모습은 그래서 굉장히 어색해 보였다. 이거 뭐야, 뭔가 뒤틀린 것 같은데? 하는 불편함이 엔딩 크래딧과 함께 찾아 왔다. 결국 어머니와 그의 첫번째 아들, 그리고 그 첫번째 아들이 어머니를 통해 낳은 쌍둥이가 겪어야만 했던 모든 과정들은 감독이 주제 의식을 전달하기 이해 억지로 창조한 것이고 그것들이 구성상의 미덕으로 인해 다행스럽게도 잘 짜여져 있을 뿐, 사실 그 어디에도 고개를 끄덕거릴 만한 개연성은 존재하지 않은 것 같다.

희극이 원작인 이 작품은 생각보다 빈틈이 많은 영화다. 그리고 그 빈틈을 치밀한 구성과 충격적인 반전으로 잘 가리고 있다. 이 영화에서 나는 불쾌감은 그리 크게 느끼지 않았고, 다만 진심을 읽지 못했을 따름이다. 말하려고 하는 주제가 뭔지 잘 알겠고 이리 저리 짜임새도 무척 좋은 것도 잘 알겠다. 그리고 마지막에 생뚱맞게 “우리 모두 용서하고 이 사슬을 끊어 버리자” 라고 말하는 것도 그래 대충 이해할 수도 있을 것 같다. 하지만 그 모든 과정에서 단지 흥미를 위해 이 영화를 만든 것은 아닐까 하는 의구심을 지울 수 없었다. 나는 <칸다하르> 를 본 이후 중동 문제를 다룬 그 어떤 영화에도 뜨겁게 반응할 수가 없었다. 단순히 내부자의 시선인가 외부자의 관찰인가의 문제는 아닌 것 같다.

Here is what I watched this week.
Incendies (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2010)

After their mother’s death, Jeanne and Simon are given two letters – one for their father who they believed to be dead and one of a brother they didn’t know existed. They go their mother’s ancestral homeland, an unnamed Middle Eastern country, to learn the secrets of their mother’s past. Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2010 Oscars, Incendies is a fascinating and entertaining film that is mysterious, shocking, and ultimately moving.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (dir. John Ford, 1949)

Few things are more entertaining than a John Ford western starring John Wayne.

J. Edgar (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2011)

J. Edgar is the kind of biopic where you are waiting for the title character to die; it’s boring. J. Edgar Hoover is an endlessly fascinating man and Eastwood’s film didn’t capture that. Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, and an underused Naomi Watts do the best with the material they are given but J. Edgar is a disappointment.

The Mortal Storm (dir. Frank Borzage, 1940)

James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, and Robert Young play childhood friends who find their ideals clashing as the support for Nazism grows in their small Bavarian town. The Mortal Storm is an anti-Nazi Hollywood film released before the American entry into World War II and its release led to MGM films being banned in Nazi Germany. This alone makes it a film worth watching.

Take Me Home Tonight (dir. Michael Dowse, 2011)

This movie is a fun throwback to the best John Hughes’ movies. Set in 1988, recent graduate Matt (Topher Grace) is working at the mall and drifting through life. When his high school crush Tori (Teresa Palmer) walks into the store, he pretends to work at Goldman Sachs. She invites him out to a party and one crazy night follows. Anna Faris and Dan Fogler are hilarious in supporting roles as Matt’s sister and best friend. Take Me Home Tonight wasn’t readily praised when it was released but I think as more people see it, this movie will get its fair due.

The Yellow Handkerchief (dir. Udayan Prasad, 2008)

William Hurt, Kristen Stewart, and the kid who spends a week with Marilyn go on a road trip through the South to find Maria Bello. It sounds like the set up for a bad joke. Except its not. The Yellow Handkerchief is a satisfying independent drama with William Hurt delivering a fantastic performance as a recently released convict.

Limitless (dir. Neil Burger, 2011)

Did I watch this honor of Sexiest Man Alive Bradley Cooper? I’ll never tell.

The Children’s Hour (dir. William Wyler, 1961)

I have been meaning to watch this adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play for years. Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn star as Martha and Karen, teachers at a private girls school. After a student tells a malicious lie that Matha and Karen are lesbians, their reputations are destroyed and the women become outcasts. MacLaine, who plays the more tragic of the two women, is absolutely incredible in this movie. As is Fay Bainter, in her final screen appliance, as the student’s grandmother who actively condemns the women. (Bainter was nominated for an Academy Award.) Directed by William Wyler, The Children’s Hour is an exceptionally well-made drama and the portrayal of homosexuality, especially the community’s reaction to it, holds up today.