REEL DEAL; Movies that Matter TOP 25 Narrative Films 2011
Here is my list of the top 25 narrative films of 2011 https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1g5tE9y2s15Zjhqaa_2ip4wG4y9Wwav_2IVfyNQqHBBc
REEL DEAL: MOVIES THAT MATTER
TOP 25 FILMS of 2011
Descendants Director Alexander Payne
A small
miracle of a film that herald’s the debut of a promising new director
Patrick Wang who soars above first film pit holes and resonates Abbas
Kiarostami, Kelly Reichard and John Sayles sensibility in cinema
language. Wang, a theater actor uses the camera to tell a complex story
of loss, grief and justice. Set in a small town in Tennessee, the plot
is two men, one a Chinese contractor and the other a Christian white
professional recently windowed wh o meet, fall in love and begin to make
a life and a family for the mother-less six year old Joey. Creating a
life of normalcy in a small conservative Southern town is challenging.
No activists, these two men just want to create family in the way any
two people in love do. When Joey’s dad is killed in an automobile
accident, his other dad remains committed to making a family for Joey
who he has bonded with as he grieves the loss of his partner, Joey’s
biological dad. Homophobia which has been shoved under the carpet with
Southern politeness and racism slithers out. Joey is court mandated to
his birth dad’s sister and her husband. Most people turn away as his
chosen dad seeks to get his son back. Until a retired married Southern
patriarch played by seasoned theater actor Brian Murry offers his legal
services pro-bono. Sounds like a LOGO afternoon special but what Wang
has created is a complex film of human drama that through the use of
camera technique and understatement allows the reverberations of emotion
to be played out without being hammered verbally home. Like the best
of Kiarostami work what is seen on the screen is what moves the story
and not the written narrative. Those human moments that speak through
silence, physical gesture and reflection. Reichard’s and Sayles
influence is seen in the subtle unfolding of the story without dramatic
high tension moments. Wang lets ordinary peoples actions reveal how
this community acts. In the Family was
written, directed, and produced by Wang also who plays the lead
character on a minuscule budget. It is a remarkable achievement and a
gem of independent film making that will speak across difference to any
one who has loved a child and/or lost a partner. Or who cares about
creating a modern definition of what was called traditional family In the family trailer
Meek’s Cutoff
The Whistleblower
REEL DEAL: MOVIES THAT MATTER
TOP 25 FILMS of 2011
jim fouratt
Best Narrative Films 2011
Best
of lists abound at year’s end. I hav seen close to 400 films this
year between festival going and press screenings and even paying (yes! I
like to see films in movie theaters with a real audience. Nothing like a
dark room full of strangers watching a light flickering across a screen
and illuminating a story.) So instead of pitting a $100 million +
budget feature against a less than $500 thousand film I will get a few
big pictures out of the way. Scorsese’s HUGO, Spielberg WAR HORSE and 8mm, David Fincher’s GIRL with the DRAGON TATTOO and Terrence Malick’s TREE OF LIFE are each beautifully crafted spectacles and each deserves to be see on the biggest screen possible. Note: Scorsese’s HUGO
is not a 3D kids film but a movie about the director’s love of film
that like Miracle on 34th St will cross generations in it’s appeal and
become a classic. TREE OF LIFE is almost pure cinema. The story is told in hypnotic visual exposition with the sparse but will acted script secondary. GWTDT would
have been best served as a black and white noir film. The Fincher
version looses much of its narrative tension in full color blow up but
remains an enjoyable spectacle of craft. Instead I an going to list
films that I suggest be my idea of programing an at home REEL DEAL: Movies that Matter Film Festival. Some you may have heard of and many most likely not. So visit the video store, search for streams or make your REEL DEAL: Movies that Matter netflix Festival list.
You will also be able to see commentary on each film. Most have
trailers on the Internet that you can usually watch on YOUTUBE. Just
goggle them: name of film and add the word “trailer”. If you google the
film’s website you can search to see if it is available either on
streaming or dvd. Don’t forget to invite friends over, put out the pop
corn, pretzels and beverage of choice. And remember to leave time for
post-festival discussion. Not a film on this list is just entertainment,
but should entertain and stimulate the viewer. Movies that matter are
not “fast food” and deserve digestion and discussion. Your feedback is
always welcome at reeldealmovies@gmail.com.
REEL DEAL’s Top 25 Narrative Films of 2011
in alphabetical order
A Few Days of Respite
A Sundance World Narrative discovery, A fifty-ish academic and a 30 something Algerian man fleeing Iran secretly cross the border between Italy and France where a local woman,
French actor Marina Vlady, sensing their predicament, shelters them
until one is picked up and these two lovers are sent back to Iran where
homosexuality is forbidden and punished by a choice between death or an
imposed sex change. A beautiful reverie of romance, pleasure, kindness
and fear.
Director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation normalizes
Iranian people caught in the very universal drama of white lies and
their consequences as a couple struggle to protect
their
child. Universal human situations : parental aging and the burden it
presents to adult children; Deciding where and how to raise a child. A
narrative film that is so specific in capturing the human condition that
it flows like a complicated documentary.
BEGINNINGS director Mike Mills
What
happens when as an adult you discover your now dead mother and your
father in his 70’s had a secret that they kept from you all your life.
Could it be the reason you are having such a hard time maintaining an
adult relationship with a person of the opposite sex? Why is your
best relationship with man’s best friend your little dog? These are some
ot the questions Ewan McGregor begins
to ask himself when his 74 year old father comes out, gets a younger
lover and as played by Christopher Plummer has the time of his
life. Director Mike Miles’ smart and tender comedy looks at a
father/son relationship and suggests how nothing may have been be as you
remember it . Through flashbacks we the audience see a child well
behaved but somehow lost .. as he is as an adult. Mills keeps the humor
human and forgiving. Doing so he has lifted the lid off some of the
questions children rarely get to ask their parents. Plummer steals the
movie … but that is ok. No it is not a “gay” movie but a movie about
honesty and courage and what a son can actually learn as an adult from
his father Beginners trailer
Cedar Rapids Director Miguel Artete
Under-rated director Miguel Artete (Star Maps is
a hidden treasure) turfs out Coen Brothers’ mid-America to tell a story
of how the small town values are eroded away when greed and cronyism
replace integrity and honesty in business. With a level of comedic
tension worthy of the best of the OFFICE
a fine cast including Ed Helms, Anne Heche and John C. Reilly tell a
story of an insurance salesman who goes to a convention in the big city
and find himself like a fish out of water gulping for air while everyone
else parties on. Preston Sturges humor tinctures the clever written
script and rescues the story from falling into the gross and vulgar
humor peppering so many HANGOVER genre box office hits.
Coriolanus director Ralph
Fiennes
Ralph
Fiennes and screen-writer of the moment John Logan sets Shakespeare’s
play some where to the right Hurt Locker in time and place and makes
Will as relevant today as he was centuries ago . Fiennes and Gerard
Butler sizzles as warrior rivals heating up the screen in brutal passion
and homoerotic rivalry that makes one think of football or hockey
players on the playing field and in the locker room. Vanessa Redgrave
delivers her best performance in years as the martial infected,
authoritarian Queen-Mother.She makes Barbara Bush seem like a pussy cat
in comparison. Emotional incest has never been so naked on the screen.
Sideways/Election/Citizen Ruth director
Alexander Payne again mines the contemporary US psychic through a prism
of dysfunctional relationships that look good on the outside but are
festering inside. A tragedy jump starts change and the exquisite
ensemble cast make poignant rather than sensational the crisis. George Clooney’s best performance ever in a Hawaii setting that is less
paradise than anywhere America.
Drive
the sleekness of a Maserati soundlessly driven full throttle on a European autobahn, Drive manages
to take the action genre and make it into an art film that pleases the
eye, tingles the senses and never stoops to gratuitous violence or Tarantino misogyny to hammer home its POV. Ryan Gosling delivers the
ultimate action film, mystery hero performance as if he was in a Prada
sports commercial playing a Samurai messenger or an Armani styled
contract killer. The soundtrack is to die for!
Extremely Loud and Very Close Director Stephen
Daltry
A film that makes 9/11 finally emotionally accessible as did Judgement of Nuremberg the
Holocaust, without overwhelming the viewer’s subjectivity. Dir Stephen
Daltry (the Hours) artistically navigates a quite desperate story of a
family in grief. Sandra Bullock’s restraint as the mother of a 13 year
old boy trying to come to terms with the death of his father at the
World Trade Center while he holds in a big secret, is central to the
success of the film. We journey with the boy in a hunt to unravel the
clues he has about his dad and in doing so meet a cross-section of NYC
humanity personified by a stream of class A character actors including,
the remarkable Viola Davis, Zoe Caldwell, Max Von Sydow and downtown
legend Lola Pasalinkski. Not since Brandon de Wilde in SHANE has a child actor navigated with such insight and sensitivity the world of
loss in a way that allows all of us to grieve and heal. Eric Horn plays
the boy, who feels guilty coming to terms with the loss of his father.
His Academy Award alert performance manages to both keep the film from
falling into sentimental bathos as it universalized the story.
Ides of March
George Clooney
directed. Seemingly torn from a liberal politician’s nightmare of
self-destruct. Will feel familiar but it has the moral conflict of a
Green drama mashed up with Ayn Rand selfishness. Ryan Gosling proves he
is capable of playing just about any kind of complicated young white
male. Rest of ensemble is pitch perfect with Philip Seymour Hoffman,
Jeffery Wright, Marisa Tomei and Paul Giametti indelible.
In the Family
Letters From The Big Man
Director Christopher Munch has made 5 features including Sleepy Time Gal and Harry + Max that have an uniquely and unforgettable vision and rightly so has become a film festival favorite. Letters From the Big Man is
set in the North West where a government hydrologist walking out of a
relationship and wanting to be alone while sorting out her feelings and
her future. But she is not alone. This is Big Foot land and he smells
her as does a hiker dude. This is not a horror tale but it is a story
you have not seen before and will find hard to forget. Lily Rabe holds
each frame with the spirit of a young Katherine Hepburn and the self
reliance of a young Barbara Stanwyck. And the Big Man does appear.
London River
Rachid Bouchard specializes in telling human stores that illuminate large contemporary events (Outside the Law). London River is set in April 2005 when terrorists blew up inner city London subway cars and buses causing over 60 civilian deaths. Less a political thriller or a docudrama expose, London River is the human drama of two very different people looking for their missing child. Accomplished British actor Brenda Blethyn plays a military widow farming on the Island of Guernsey whose only child living in London is missing. Sontigui Kouyate plays an African inmmigrant living in Paris who left a six year old son Ali with his mother in Mali 15 years ago who also is missing. What brings these two together is that their children unknown to either of them were lovers living together. The confrontation of class, race and grief is foregrounded in the narrative and how they find what it is they have in common is the story line with all the politics alive today submerged into a human transformation that templates possibilities for many of the transitions of history today necessitates. Two time Academy Award nominee Blethyn delivers once again a heart wrenching performance that Kouyate matches in complexity. London River trailer
Margin Call
How
greed trumps morality in the 24 hours Wall Street collapsed seen
through the eyes of two young traders to be. Kevin Spacey and Jeremy
Irons ethics tango is a sight to behold. The entire superb ensemble cast
stuns. Director/screenwriter J. C. Chandor’s remarkable debut heralds a
major new Director/Writer talent.
Kelly
Reichard with now four low budget, critically acclaimed features is
considered by many in the world cinema community an American Master.
Screened mostly in Festivals with short theatrical runs Reichard’s work
has had as much influence thanks to streaming distribution on young
filmmakers today as has had Quinton Torrentino and Jim Jarmish. Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy showed
up on critics best list when released. Her work is on the opposite end
of Hollywood spectacle. Yet her story telling and scripts have attracted
first class actors. Meek’s Cutoff
is a Western directed by a woman with an eye for small detail and
authenticity. Her cast including Michele Williams, Bruce Greenwall,
Shirley Henderson and Will Patton who populate a small moving covered
wagon caravan led by a braggadocio who is at a loss as to how to problem
solve and will not admit it. Meek’s Cutoff shows
how men and women deal differently with adversity, hardship and the
unknown. It is a powerful study in how different men and women handle
the same situations. This is no feminist track, gender roles are very
defined. But it is the small moments of crisis that we see how theses
people interact as men and as women. Surprisingly there is sensibility
in this low budget western that resonates John Ford and Howard Hawks in
the composition of framing and the respect for simple people handing
complicated circumstances which are out of their experience.
MY WEEK WITH MARILYN;
Simon Curtis’s delicious truffle of a film. With drawing room
lightness, sophistication and an Oscar deserving performance by Michelle
Williams as Marilyn Monroe, Williams shows how MM drove men crazy be
they Sir Lawrence Olivier or a 19 year old movie set gofer
(exceptionally played by Eddie Redmayne) who is assigned to be at her
beck and call for a week. Williams’ ability to bring to the surface
the
three Marilyns is remarkable: public MM, the working MM manufacturing
the public MM and the rarely captured in most MM characterizations, the
private MM which was both what essentially captivated men and caused her
to ultimately feel inadequate. Williams does not mimic MM in the way
Meryl Streep does Margret Thatcher in IRON LADY. Ultimately her MM is more alive on screen than the acceptable but surface Streep’s Thatcher. Williams should be Oscar bound.
Pariah
Dee Rees had a Sundance short and was encouraged to expand it into a feature. At the Sundance Institute she gestated the project through all the opportunities offered and finally birthed her first feature PARIAH proving
how important the Institute is in bringing through its various
workshops an almost impossible story to sell to success. A black
teenager finds herself attracted to girls and her Christian lower middle
class mother freaks and her cop Dad simply ignores. No hood tale: this
is black domestic life far removed from the sentimentality of Tyler
Perry. Cast and director/writer Dee Rees while telling a specific story
universalizes the emotions in a way that invites all kinds of viewers to
sit together in a dark room and feel touch by the journey of this one
teen exploring her AG gender expression (butch masculine female
identity) and her desire for and love of women.
Poetry
South Korean director Chang-Dong Lee’s insight
into how art (poetry) makes an impossible life situation livable.
Indelible performance by older actress Jeong-hie Yun transcends culture
and location and is unforgettable.What director Matthew Porterfield has
accomplished on a small budget is makes one think of Botticelli or
Caravaggio and their celebration of that luminous glow that emanates
from post-adolescent skin. Anxious to see what he does next.
Punture Complicated advocacy films with high drama stories are rare today. But Puncture which
world premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival picked a hot subject:
clean needles ...not in the hood, but in the hospital, cast superstar
Chris Evans as the lead, a committed attorney with a bad coke problem
who takes on busting the medical supply industry and its price fixing
monopoly and callous putting profit over health. Evans proves he is far
better an actor than the eye candy superstar roles he usually gets cast
in. With a script that avoids the pitfalls of most dramatic movies with
good intentions and a cast up to the complexities that make good
intentions more complicated, Puncture succeeds
in exposing greed and the wreckage of addiction. Based on a real life
attorney, this film mic checks the heath care supply industry.
Putty Hill
Every
so often a film comes a long that is so visually beautiful that it
seduces the eye and makes one forget traditional forms. Putty Hil,
a SXSW Film find, is such a film. It feels generational and suggests
how a hippie detoxed of all politics would be like today. It’s ennui is
at the opposite end of Larry Clark’s vampire lust for youth vitality as
it celebrates youth and beauty and nature. Death is not a part of being
young and the central tension in Putty Hill is dealing with the death of ‘one of us.” What
director Matthew Porterfield has managed to do visually on a small
budget reminds one of the beauty and celebration of youthful sensuality
that both Botticelli and Correggio captures on canvas. What Porterfield
does next catches my breath
Tomboy:
Hot
topic nature vs nurture sidesteps theory and GAGA’s its way to how real
life rains down on a loving family when nature takes on nurture. Told
as a simple story of a child growing up in a binary policed gender world
whose gender expression fools other children and the freedom and fun
the child has until the real world of order demands conformity. How a
sensitive but confronted mother helps bring her child into adolescent
without outrage while worrying about her child’s future. Crafted with
the aesthetic rigor of a Bresson film, Tomboy shows how the challenge of good parenting butts up against a child’s sense of ‘why not.
Take Shelter
With Michael Shannon (HBO Broadway Empire, Revolutionary Road )
delivering the best actor’s performance to beat as the sort-of-hero in a
frank look at mental health issues and biblical threats. While neither
overtly political or religious director/writer Jeff Nichols’ story
telling in this low budget gem centers on the tension between spiritual
crisis, reality check, and fear of the unknown without dressing it up
in religious tropes. Unsettling and provoking this is indie film making
at its finest.
To Die Like a Man Controversial and provocative Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues best know for his visually stunning, erotic study of masculinity, the narrative feature O Phantasma returns with an equally provocative look at the hot topic gender identity vs gender expression and raises questions in art that would not be allowed in current popular discourse. An aging queen and former ruling professional gender illusionist has to face up to v age, v need for love and a body in revolt. This man-made women has a body rotting with cancer. Is it from years of silicon injections and synthetic hormonal ingestion? We are never told. Despite being a drag queen he fathered a son who has been traumatized as a n adolescent by the life of his father. The current lover is a 22 year old junkie sex toy with larceny on his mind. Rodrigues raises many serious questions about gender and body, but not in a mocking or judgmental way. This makes the film much more confrontational as he gives the Queen a great deal of dignity as v’s world falls apart. Visually exciting and peopled with unforgettable characters. This is no Priscilla of the Desert...or maybe it is 30 years later.
To Die Like a Man trailer
Weekend
Two
young people hook up at the beginning of a weekend and over it discover
despite the casualness of the encounter deep feelings and impossible
possibilities. A perceptive look at a contemporary relationship, one a
smart working class lifeguard and the other a sassy queer theory damaged
artist. Weekend feels
like a Mike Leigh film but director Andrew Haigh has subtly shot it like
an art film. So frame by frame it is seductive to the eye. Weekend trailer
Based
on the true story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a cop from Nebraska who became a
‘peacekeeper” in Bosnia who discovered that fellow peacekeepers were
protecting know sex-traffickers of underage Eastern European girls in
return for free use of the their services . These peacekeepers were
formally employed by the UN. Director Larysa Kondracki skillfully
reveals the complicated web of political intrigue, exploitation,
profiteering, diplomatic neutrality and desperate circumstances moving
the action like a political thriller. Rachel Weisz brings a sensitive
resiliency and engaged outrage as she attempts to intervene and
discovers that in the world of international diplomacy a different
standard of morality sometimes take precedent over justice. Vanessa
Redgrave plays a professional diplomat who fails to share Bolkovac
outrage for political reasons. Monica Bellucci makes complex a woman who
tricks the girls into prostitution. An interesting meditation on the
role of “peacekeepers”, mercenaries and “contractors” and raises the
question, relevant to today’s Iraq with 16,000 contractors replacing the
returning troops, under what order and law do these soldiers of
fortune operate in the name of freedom. Weisz is terrific as a
peacekeeper raising hell.
Young Adult
Again the combination of Director Jason Reitman and screen writer Diablo Cody as in Juno centers
a story on a “post-feminist” woman who seemingly has it all and
disrupts all kinds of politically correct feminist stereotypes. And that
exploded in the lobby post screening I was at. Scary . Charlize Theron
is the small town high school girl with the most cake: prom queen,
football hero boyfriend, most likely to succeed who goes from small town
celebrity to big city fame only to wake up 15 years later alone and
hung over. With unbridled, politically incorrect obsession she goes
back home to reclaim her high school sweetheart. His being married and a
new father does not even give her pause. She is use to getting what she
wants. A horror story festering with female hormonal passion and egg
harvesting hunger. Not pretty but riveting with Theron fearless in her
character building. Diablo is also fearless and guaranteed to again
provoke an uproar from feminist critics who reject the patriarchal
theory that female is biologically determinate claiming that it
produces female enslavement. This dialectic is core to the YOUNG ADULT as it was in JUNO.Theron
matches Michelle Williams’ MM and off to the Best Actress races for the
both of them. Outstanding also is sit -com comedy actor Patton Oswalt
who takes the serious part of a disabled ‘nice guy” and runs with it
straight to the Oscars nominations for Best Supporting.
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