The 13 Best Movies I Saw in 2011, with Qualifiers

An expanded version of my top-10 list for The Oregonian. Links go to my reviews. 

MY 'TOP 10' (which is really more of a 'Top 13')

1. "Drive" -- This insanely violent, oddly beautiful neon-noir thriller is the best 1980s Michael Mann movie that Michael Mann never made, right down to the soundtrack. (And yes, I know it also owes more than a little to Walter Hill's "The Driver.") Director Nicolas Winding Refn brilliantly juxtaposes wordless sequences with terse conversations fraught with unspoken meaning. Albert Brooks should have been playing smiling psychopaths for years.

 

2. "13 Assassins" -- Turns out Takashi Miike is an absolute expert at making an old-school men-on-a-mission samurai flick that builds patiently to a stunning 45-minute battle scene. Who knew?

 

3. "Vengeance" -- This first screened in PDX this year, so I'm including it here: Genre master Johnnie To explores his obsessions with food, criminals, male bonding, loyalty and the arrangement of four or more guys in a film frame in this bizarre thriller about a senile chef (French pop star Johnny Hallyday) enlisting a gang of hit men to help him deliver a payback he's in danger of forgetting. The family-picnic showdown is one of To's finest set-pieces.

 

4. "Hugo" -- A fable, in which Martin Scorsese somehow talked a studio into letting him use the world's most expensive digital 3-D tools to make the world's most gorgeous essay on silent-film pioneers. The best 3-D I've ever seen, and the only 2011 film to make me cry.

 

5. "The Tree of Life" -- Boy, if you're going to recontextualize 1950s human regret by juxtaposing it with the epic creation of life on Earth, go all 200-percent with a Kubrick-scale digression like Terrence Malick did here.  

6. "Bellflower" / "Martha Marcy May Marlene" / "Young Adult" -- Three disturbing, terrific little movies that constitute a sort of unofficial trilogy: Each film crawls inside the worldview of a mentally damaged person, gets incredibly uncomfortable and cruelly rejects a satisfying conclusion. "Bellflower" is handmade outsider art, "Martha" stays with you for days afterward and "Young Adult" finds tiny, horrifying, pitch-black laughs in deluded narcissism. 

7. "Attack the Block" -- Writer/director Joe Cornish's urban alien-invasion flick cleverly riffs on John Carpenter -- and makes the bold choice to pay attention to the criminal punks who usually get killed first in these sorts of movies. So well-made, the fact that the aliens look like inky fanged Cookie Monsters is totally not a big deal. 

 

8. "The Artist" -- Michel Hazanavicius' feather-light but deceptively simple "silent film" actually uses sound selectively and cleverly, and creates several fun meta-moments -- as when you're in a multiplex silently watching a silent actor (Jean Dujardin) silently watch another audience silently watch a silent film in an 1920s movie palace. Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo embody classic movie stardom (and if you like them in this, seek out their spy-movie spoof "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies").  

 

9. "Rango" -- Gore Verbinski's unhinged Western spoof probably gets closer to Chuck Jones' eye-flick comic timing than any computer-animated feature I've seen.  

 

10. "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" and "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol" -- The two great big-studio popcorn action flicks of 2011, and two very pleasant surprises. Andy Serkis and his chimpanzee "digital makeup" worked together to create one of the most affecting performances I saw all year (really). Meanwhile, director Brad Bird made the best and brightest of the "Mission: Impossible" movies -- staging set-pieces in the IMAX film frame the way Hitchcock staged set-pieces in VistaVision in "North by Northwest."

 

MOVIES THAT MIGHT HAVE MADE THIS LIST IF I'D HAD SOMETHING DIFFERENT FOR BREAKFAST

"Moneyball," "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," "Submarine," "Source Code," "I Saw The Devil," "Win Win,"  "Super"

MOVIES I ENJOYED (OR AT LEAST ENJOYED SELECT MOMENTS OF)

"Shaolin," "X-Men: First Class," "The Robber," "Boy," "Contagion," "Captain America" / "Thor," "Midnight in Paris," "The Trip," "Bridesmaids," "Fast Five," "The Adjustment Bureau," "The Green Hornet," "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2," "Limitless," "American: The Bill Hicks Story," "Fright Night," "Arthur Christmas," "In Time," "Tintin," "Troll Hunter," "Hobo With A Shotgun," "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," "Melancholia" (stunning opening sequence and non-Dunst moments only), "Margin Call," "Our Idiot Brother," "Cowboys & Aliens," "Cars 2," "A Somewhat Gentle Man," "The Revenant," "The Mechanic," "Hood to Coast," "Circo," "Bad Teacher," "Horrible Bosses," "Paul," "Super 8" (first 2/3 only), "Paranormal Activity 3," "Drive Angry 3D,"  "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" 

THE LAMEST CRAP I SAW IN 2011

"Tower Heist," "Real Steel," "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides," "The Hangover Part II," "The Sitter,"  "Another Earth"

ERRATA 

Worst Film I Saw This Year -- "Tower Heist," which ignores heist-movie fundamentals so completely as to become total nonsense (and squanders an Eddie Murphy comeback attempt, to boot)

Movie Person of the Year -- Andy Serkis, who (from Gollum to Caesar to Capt. Haddock) has established himself as the Lon Chaney Jr. of digital-avatar thespians, only with vastly superior acting chops.

Y'all Must be Crazy -- "Another Earth." Seriously. I can't believe people bought what indie-darling-for-30-seconds Brit Marling was selling.

I Must Be Crazy -- "Fast Five." What? I always wanted Vin Diesel and The Rock to team up in an action movie. Best entry in the series. Love the botched-train-heist set piece.

Please Sir, I Want Some More -- Smart, relationship-driven sports movies like "Moneyball" and "Warrior"

 

MOVIES I REALLY SHOULD HAVE SEEN BEFORE WRITING THIS

"Even The Rain," "The Arbor," "Meek's Cutoff," "Rubber," "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," "The Perfect Host," "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," "Insidious," "Rapt," "Poetry," "Hesher," "Beginners," "The Beaver," "The Debt," "Tabloid," "The Future," "Terri," "Friends with Benefits," "Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest," "Hanna," "The Rum Diary," "Take Shelter," "50/50," "The Guard," "The Skin I Live In," "The Descendants," "The Ides of March," "Puss in Boots," "The Muppets," "Shame," "War Horse," "In The Land of Blood and Honey," "A Dangerous Method," "Elite Squad: The Enemy Within," "A Separation," "We Need to Talk about Kevin," "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas," "The Mill and the Cross," "Cedar Rapids," "The Lincoln Lawyer," "Burke and Hare," "Carnage," "The Interrupters," "Weekend," "Certified Copy," "Higher Ground," "Project Nim," "Tuesday, After Christmas," "Tyrannosaur," "Corman's World," "Public Speaking," "I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You," "Kung Fu Panda 2," "Season of the Witch," "Hall Pass," "Winnie The Pooh," "The Devil's Double," "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," "Killer Elite," "Red State," "Margaret," "The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)," "Footloose," "Immortals," "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1," "My Week with Marilyn," "Iron Lady," "Jane Eyre," "Sucker Punch"
________

THE OREGONIAN FILM TEAMS's COMPLETE YEAR-END MOVIE COVERAGE:

• Shawn Levy intro
• Shawn Levy's top 10
• Mike Russell's top 10
• Marc Mohan's top 10
• Stan Hall's top 10
• Assorted listicles

Comments

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[Rob]

I noticed that Rubber was on your list of movies you didn't see. It's on Netflix Instant, and you should see it. At only 80 minutes, it might not be a Top 10 pick, but it's well worth your time. If you like fun little meta-movies as much as I think you do (I'm a longtime C&FB listener), then you will enjoy the hell out of Rubber.

[The Human Centipede 2]

You REALLY REALLY should have seen the HUman Centipede 2. Read my review on my blog, I explain why I believe that it is a heartwarming tale of triumph against the odds