Best of 2011: Visual Effects

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (RUSSELL EARL, ET AL.)
... because hokey or sleek, quick or sustained, every effect is plausible and each one has genuine personality, like elements of a zippy score;

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (JOE LETTERI, ET AL.)
... because I admire the prodigious technical achievement, staged across a variety of settings, even if I felt a little colder than I expected;

The Tree of Life (DAN GLASS, BRADLEY J. FRIEDMAN, ET AL.)
... because all the mitoses and mitochondria, the cosmos and the corpuscles, feel staggeringly true, thematically vital, and gorgeously abstract.

Runners-Up: I didn't see a lot of the movies that make the strongest plays for this category, so I'm cutting my list off at three, which also feels like the right interval between my top picks and my also-rans. Still, my single favorite effect of the year, in hilarious timing as well as spooky execution, is the sudden evaporation of a key character in Fright Night, which continues to be a fun effect in its later reprisals. The work in X-Men: First Class was sometimes very impressive, but I admit it bugs me that the films in that franchise always seem stuck in awkward cadences: "Are you ready, we're going to show you an effect now! Here, it's happening! That was an effect!" Some of the CGI in Immortals feels oppressively heavy-handed, as it does in the very different world of a cinematic immortal in Hugo, but the peaks in both movies are aesthetically impressive, and probably very difficult at the technical level. The booms, chases, explosions, crashes, stunt coordination, and (I assume) the CGI enhancement of all of this in Fast Five are traditional enough to seem almost unremarkable, but there's no way this is just point-your-camera filmmaking, so to everyone who made such a ridiculous story so engaging, in ways that involved a matte or a mouse-pointer or a digital overlay, congrats for making me believe almost everything you did. As low-fi as they are, the creepy alterations of reality and the impending planet of Melancholia really got to me.

Films I Hated to Skip Before Posting: Attack the Block, Bellflower, Captain America: The First Avenger, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Paranormal Activity 3, Super 8, TrollHunter

Films I "Hated" to Skip Before Posting: Real Steel, Thor, Transformers: Dark of the Moon

The Fifties for 2011: Drivers and Vehicles

We'll finish with the lead actors and actresses. But first...



Best Director
Patricio Guzmán for Nostalgia for the Light, for only seeming to force awkward metaphors, then slowly cajoling us into the full, conflicted logic of the poem he has written to his country;

Abbas Kiarostami for Certified Copy, for folding his usual fondness for metafilmic puzzles within a romantic plot and emotional throughline that feel as immediate as a fond caress;

Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life, for the warmth and immodesty of his daring, for seeing in a man a child, and in a child grief, and in grief and grace the origins of the world;

Mike Mills for Beginners, for making a film about a cartoonist, a kooky actress, a dying gay man, and a chatty dog that is not a sitcom but a roomy, melancholy valentine; and

Aleksei Popogrebsky for How I Ended This Summer, for using image, sound, edits, actors, tempo, and locale so electrically that story bumps don't matter, and the experience brims with energy.

Honorable mentions, filling out an irritatingly male-only roster, are Michelangelo Frammartino for Le Quattro Volte, Cary Fukunaga for Jane Eyre, Benjamin Heisenberg for The Robber, Steve James for The Interrupters, Lee Chang-dong for Poetry, Radu Muntean for Tuesday, After Christmas, and Michael Rowe for Leap Year.




Best Picture
Beginners: Tactful, tender, and generous, rich in humor and characterization. Joins the Junebug Hall of Fame for exquisite modesty;

Certified Copy: Disarmingly lived-in, even warm for a study of romantic skepticism and ambivalence. Concepty, yes, but rings with truth;

The Interrupters: An achievement fully comparable to Hoop Dreams, with some of the year's most indelible moments and characters;

Nostalgia for the Light: Even when forcing analogies a bit, a humbling blend of awe, empiricism, history, reverie, and mourning; and

The Tree of Life: A brother's grief kiln-blasted and glazed into a grand, restless, ecstatic lament for a living and dying world.

Honorable mentions, in order, to How I Ended This Summer, Poetry, Tuesday, After Christmas, Le Quattro volte, and The Robber.

Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes

No one works as hard as Gary Tooze, the DVD Beaver, to let the world know about imminent DVD releases, and to help us sort between the wheat and the chaff, down to the finest little decibel of audio quality and the slenderest little margin of image cropping. I'm not as exacting a DVD shopper as Gary, and I wouldn't even begin to know how to be as comprehensive as he is, but so much pure gold has been dropping on the market lately, with even more looming on the horizon, that I felt I needed to say something.

For all of you Barbara Stanwyck fans, or for anyone who wanted to believe my raves about Executive Suite but had no way of verifying them for yourself, Warner Home Video is dropping The Barbara Stanwyck Collection at the end of October. That's a while away—ask any academic, or any student, and we'll scream at you that the beginning of fall is still an eon from now—but it's never too soon to gear up for Barbara. I haven't seen any of the other films in the collection, but Robert Wise's thrillingly tense and sensationally acted boardroom thriller (that's not an oxymoron, if it sounds like one) doesn't pull any punches. Barbara helps, Fredric March is efficiently insidious, June Allyson comes vividly if briefly to life, and Nina Foch actresses at every possible edge, without once making a show of herself. Exquisite.

Even though I dislike their new logo and redesigned packaging (who picked Rancid Mustard for the color on the spines?), I must admit that the Criterion Collection has been exceeding even their own high standards of late. They've honored my three favorite Japanese directors already this summer, with deluxe editions of Mizoguchi's Sanshô the Bailiff (my rhapsodic review here), Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine, and a box-set of Hiroshi Teshigara masterpieces, so I can finally stop cruising used DVD stores in pursuit of the out-of-print Milestone imprint of Woman in the Dunes, one of the greatest films of all time. (Am I supposed to insert a personal qualifier here?) As if this all weren't enough, coming soon from Criterion are Mala Noche, the highly elusive debut of Gus Van Sant, and a director-approved re-release of Days of Heaven (original review and quick tribute after seeing the restoration in 35mm).

Auteur delights, or at least they delighted me: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which scared the bejesus out of me in cinemas all three times I paid to see it, arrives with even more scarifying footage on August 14th; and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (reviewed here) gets the 2-disc treatment it always deserved on October 23rd, as do several other Kubrick titles.

My two favorite films of 2007 so far, Ray Lawrence's unnerving and trenchant Jindabyne and Robinson Devor's courageously and compellingly cryptic Zoo, will both reach wider American audiences on DVD than they ever enjoyed in theaters; Zoo arrives on Sep. 16 and Jindabyne on Oct. 2.

On the other end of the historical spectrum, the archivists and the deep-pocketed among you will be ecstatic to hear that those unbeatable compilations of early-cinema rareties and esoterica, Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, shall be followed in October by the National Film Preservation Foundation's Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. The thematic rubric is new for this series (the other collections are purposefully and wonderfully eclectic), but there's still plenty of variety included in this new package, despite its pointed and fascinating emphasis on politics. I'll study up on How They Rob Men in Chicago, in case history ever repeats itself, but I'll be even more excited for Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl, the entire disc devoted to female suffrage and "The New Woman," and virtually every other snippet, sideshow, epic, and episode. Here are the full contents, and here's where you can pre-order at the greatest savings (though Amazon has a prettier page). The NFPF has already announced that they'll be hosting another theme party for next year's Treasures IV set, which will be devoted to the American Avant-Garde between 1945-85. (On that same page, you can watch selected clips from the first two anthologies; select Disc 1 to see a full minute of Watson & Webber's mindblowing The Fall of the House of Usher, and try to figure out how two amateurs made this in 1928!)

Finally, apologies for burying the lead, but if you've got a multiregion player—or even if you don't, because here's a reason to buy one—Chantal Akerman's legendary feminist opus Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has never appeared in any home format anywhere in the world, is now available as part of a French-Belgian DVD package called The Chantal Akerman Collection. "A woman in trouble" if ever there were one, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig, of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel and Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) is a Belgian housewife like countless others, preparing breakfast and cleaning her kitchen, and devoting her morning to countless other errands around the apartment...except that Akerman makes us feel the scale of these semi-mindless occupations, their essential fusion of tedium and fascination, by capturing these household tasks in huge 35mm and with unrelenting attention for almost four hours. Three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, in what would feel like three years in the life of the audience if Seyrig weren't so subtly and unpredictably entrancing, and if Akerman's political platform weren't so fully realized within clear, confident, brilliant aesthetics. And I haven't even said anything about the gentleman caller. Or the ———... because I don't want to spoil them.

See Jeanne Dielman... on a big screen if you ever get any opportunity in your whole life to do so; it makes sense, despite the intense frustration, that Akerman has withheld her legendary masterpiece for so long, because the hugeness of her images in relation to their subject is deeply essential to the project. Still, not everyone is going to have that big-screen opportunity, and those of us who have certainly want to revisit Jeanne Dielman... and figure out how Akerman, Seyrig, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and editor Patricia Canino pulled it off. If I know you love Todd Haynes' Safe, and by his own admission, that film, like so many others, is impossible without this one. I refer you again to my personal list of the greatest films ever made, and I insist (insist!) that, Treasures III and other anthologies aside, The Chantal Akerman Collection, which also includes the deliriously great Rendez-vous d'Anna and three other titles, is the DVD release of the year.

(Image from Jeanne Dielman c/o this Finnish-language bio of Chantal Akerman)

One Night in Heaven

If you're looking for a working definition of nirvana in 14 syllables, try this: "Days of Heaven in restored 35mm." I have never seen this film on the big screen before; in fact, I probably haven't watched my video copy in three or four years. I ask you then: is there any better feeling than seeing a vaunted classic that is also a treasured favorite, and discovering that it's even more august and haunting and layered and imaginative than you had recalled? From those opening rainwater arpeggios and the sere, sepia photographs that dissolve into each other beneath the serifs of the titles, the film is a masterpiece even by comparison to most masterpieces. My response to the film, my immersion in its images, sounds, and tensions, were things that I felt in my body, my fingers and chest. I literally pressed my toes into the rubber soles of my shoes when Richard Gere shoveled that first mound of coal into that belching, blazing stove, and then dug in my heels, too, as he accosted his foreman. The scenes of threshing the wheatfield and of fighting off the swarming locusts stirred me at an almost glandular level. It's that kind of movie, a sensory state into which you accede, entirely.

Moments before I headed into the 7:30 showing, I learned from an e-mail that by tomorrow morning, I have to generate a list of texts for a 20th-century American literature survey course I'll be teaching next Spring. This seemed like a tall order, but then watching Days of Heaven conjured every thought and feeling I've ever had about this country and its distinctive ways of remembering, tilling, loving, divorcing, stratifying, illuminating, and abandoning itself. The whole syllabus suddenly came to me in a flash, as did ideas for two other courses I'd never even considered. Funny how the creative vision of a genuine artist can awaken and elevate a dormant brain into such sudden and wide-ranging epiphanies.

Image © 1978 Paramount Pictures, reproduced here.

The Following Previews Have Not Been Rated

Post-Oscar, and faced with the dross of most January-April releases (The Pacifier??), it can start to feel like no movie is ever going to be good again. Thank goodness for the following 25, which are my biggest mouth-waterers for the coming months of 2005:

1. The New World
   The Thin Red Line is the best English-language movie of the last ten years (that is, since Todd Haynes' Safe). Malick has made three masterpieces in three tries; he's the only filmmaker I can think of, from any period or culture, who can say that. Colin Farrell and the John Smith/Pocahontas narrative in general wouldn't necessarily get my heart leaping, but this artist is impossible not to trust. And the trailer gave me goosebumps I can still feel.
   
   
2. The Holy Girl/La Niña Santa
   No one has confirmed that this movie will be released this year, but after racking up some rapturous reviews at last year's Cannes, it seems like the right time. I'm always rooting for breakout female directors, especially from abroad, and Lucrecia Martel of Argentina already has an ardent following after two movies. The Almodóvar brothers in the producers' chairs and the hilarious Theremin version of Carmen on the soundtrack augur for something weird and likable; the still photos remind me of Buñuel or Campion, and that's a huge turn-on.
   
   
3. Yes
   Joan Allen anchoring a movie by landmark feminist/formalist director Sally Potter (Orlando, Thriller), about a middle-aged woman's passionate sexual affair with a Lebanese exile, all rendered in iambic pentameter. I have always had nerdy tendencies, but films like this I just can't wait to see. Joan!
   
   
4. All the King's Men
   Robert Penn Warren's novel (read it!!) is so good that even after a well-above-par screen adaptation in 1949, I am eager to see a second take, and with the year's best cast for an American film—Sean Penn as Willie Stark, Jude Law as Jack Burden, Patricia Clarkson as Sadie Burke, Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, Mark Ruffalo, and James Gandolfini—lines should start forming now. Prestige screenwriter Steven Zaillian has proven to be a great director in both Searching for Bobby Fischer and A Civil Action, guiding more strong casts through complex stories, rendered with unexpected visual sophistication. Bring it, Steve. Set the Louisiana Capitol a'burnin'.
   
   
5. A History of Violence
   David Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors, bar none, although Spider didn't grab me the way a lot of his others have. This tale could be even more conventional, with grizzled men avenging their daughters (or something), but this auteur always commands attention, and Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen oughta help.
   
   
6. Manderlay
   Dogville didn't floor me across the board, though certain sequences, performances, and aspects were extraordinary. And I'm still a Dancer in the Dark disciple; in fact, even when I'm not into a Von Trier picture (see Zentropa or The Five Obstructions), I'm still piqued. So bring on this ante-bellum parable of American self-betrayal and fling modesty and artistic humility once more out the window, shall we? Payoffs could be major.
   
   
7. Savage Grace
   I can't tell whether the rumors that Clive Owen has been ousted from the cast are true; I hope they aren't. But there's plenty else going for this fact-based murder story set in '72: the return of New Queer Cinema director and mentor Tom Kalin (Swoon), another producing effort from the producer I most admire, Christine Vachon (Safe), and Julianne Moore working again in the post-New Queer niche where she's done her absolute best work. Shivers!
   
   
8. The Dying Gaul
   Could easily be one of those movies that only exists to indulge its tony cast, and friends at festivals haven't been raving, but when egghead sex symbols (and real-life sweethearts) Campbell Scott and Patricia Clarkson get together for a drama where they both bed Peter Sarsgaard as well as each other, you're not gonna dim my enthusiasm that easily.
   
   
9. Woman Is the Future of Man
   Of the recent Korean hits still making their way to these shores, this romantic comedy-drama that rocked the Cannes and New York Film Festivals in '04 is highest on my list. Close behind is Oldboy, which is rumored to be horrifically violent but formally impressive.
   
   
10. Howl's Moving Castle
    I'm not hearing that Howl's is the equal of Miyazaki's last film, Spirited Away, but I'm hearing that it comes close. Close would be enough: I haven't responded to a single other animé feature in any significant way, but Miyazaki may have the stuff to make me a believer.
    
    
11. 2046
    For some reason, I'm nervous that I'm not going to like this. I'm getting tired of the way Wong Kar-wai cultivates this rebel-hero persona with his perpetually delayed movies and sunglasses-only personal style, and I'm not as hyper-susceptible to either Tony Leung or Zhang Ziyi as some. Still, fetching actors in William Chang's swooning production designs (he's the one member of the Wong team who never, ever slips) offer plenty to be gassed about. And my hunch could easily be wrong.
    
    
12. Clean
    After Irma Vep and demonlover, it would be foolish not to be an Olivier Assayas fan. And Maggie Cheung: does this woman have more pure star charisma than any actress since Garbo, or is it just me? You can just sit and stare at her face, and infer all kinds of potential movies based on a single expression. And yet she's also a terrific actress, with a meaty part to play. Gimme, please.
    
    
13. Syriana
    Buzz around Hollywood for years has held that this long-completed screenplay marked a real attempt to characterize American-Middle Eastern relations and military frictions in mature detail, with genuine depth of character and political scope. Is that really possible, especially for a movie produced now? I certainly hope it is. I'm 10x more excited for this than for Sam Mendes' Gulf War film Jarhead, but I'm pulling for both of them to really have some ideas in their rucksacks.
    
    
14. Sin City
    I'm not generally one to get my knickers in a twist about comic-book or graphic-novel adaptations, but the trailers for Sin City are just too delicious for words (which, obviously, is exactly what screen images should be). For some reason, I'm not feeling this'll reveal itself as a Sky Captain-style tease; I'm banking on a genuine stylistic coup with some storytelling chops to back it up.
    
    
15. Proof
    I didn't love the play, and I still wish they'd cast Mary-Louise Parker, who instantly made herself synonymous with this role. But I'm a lover of American drama, which is so rarely done well (or done at all) on American screens, so I'm rooting for this. My man Alwin Küchler (Morvern Callar, Code 46, The Mother) is the lensman, so it might even look smart.
    
    
16. Kings and Queen
    I actually don't know a ton or even an ounce about the plot of this French drama, but lotsa critics I trust singled it out at last fall's NYFF, and director Arnaud Desplechin is an up-and-comer I haven't sampled yet. I give credit to those recent American dramas that have chased tragic grandeur, but a lot of them haven't wound up with much to show for it. (The Human Stain was what the title promised, instead of what the book promised.) Let's hope the French know how to do it better.
    
    
17. The Upside of Anger
    One of my straight-up Hollywood picks, and lookee, it's coming out in a week! Probably destined to be described as Joan Allen's stab at a Something's Gotta Give crossover hit, and who deserves it more? The trailer makes her look sensational (not just physically, but in terms of her performance), and it even augurs well for Kevin Costner, who may re-center his early gifts for comedy. The actresses playing Allen's daughters are a who's-who of the best teen girlz in the biz. I'm ready to buy my bucket-sized Coke and drink it all up. (Will Joan win the Golden Globe for Musical/Comedy? Between this and Yes and perhaps Off the Map is it Her Year?)
    
    
18. Paint
    I like the Altman movies that hit big (Gosford Park), the ones that don't (The Company), and even the ones that actively annoy a lotta people (Dr. T and the Women), so whenever this redundant-sounding "exposé" of mean tempers and schemes in the art world bows, color me eager.
    
    
19. The Fountain
    I had reservations about Pi and even more about Requiem for a Dream, but I still don't think we've seen Darren Aronofsky show his real stuff as a director: those two films felt like workshops toward what a true, integrated directorial vision will be like. The plot and tone of this one sound even more elliptical and challenging, and the cast is intriguing. Third time's the charm?
    
    
20. The Ring Two
    Considering that I liked the first American Ring just fine but not extravagantly, I'm not sure why I'm so psyched about this. Wait, yes I am sure. The teaser trailer was terrifying, and the new, fuller-length preview is comparably so. Jesus, I'm nervous now just typing this. (That trailer for the similar-looking Dark Water is kind of a chiller, too.)
    
    
21. Saraband
    Reports imply that Ingmar Bergman himself isn't fully pleased with his 30-years-later postdate on Scenes from a Marriage, and Bergman in DV sounds like a shame, but "A New Film from Ingmar Bergman" is a phrase you just can't brush off, whatever caveats are attached.
    
    
22. The Constant Gardener
    City of God was good enough to make me wonder what else Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles has up his sleeve, and I'm ever hopeful that lead actor Ralph Fiennes will reignite his career, which was so exciting in the mid-90s. Here's hoping this is the right project with the right people at the right time.
    
    
23. The Interpreter
    Director Sydney Pollack has been short-changing his talent for years, and maybe the trailer has already said it all...but doesn't that seem a little too obvious? Are there even more surprises in store? Even if not, isn't there already Sean Penn, Nicole Kidman, and Catherine Keener in a UN-set thriller with paranoid undercurrents, James Newton Howard on the soundtrack, and Darius Khondji handling the images? That'd be plenty, unless it all somehow gets garbled. We'll know soon enough.
    
    
24. Brokeback Mountain
    Speaking of crossed fingers, I'd love to believe that this is going to work, but the literary self-seriousness of The Ice Storm (also directed by Ang Lee) really didn't work for me, I haven't cottoned to what I've read by Proulx, and the Heath Ledger/Jake Gyllenhaal love story seems destined to be watered-down. Still, if the studio (Focus) really nurtures it, if Rodrigo Prieto keeps up his streak of gorgeous-looking movies, and if the greenhorns in the cast discover unforeseen charisma, I'll be clapping loudest.
    
    
25. Even Bigger Unknowns...
    Will Batman Begins be as solid a summer blockbuster as last year's Bourne Supremacy? Will Theo Angelopoulos find a US distributor for Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow? Will these two movies ever be jointly considered again? Is Thumbsucker a boring American indie or a hint of genuine new talent? (Either way, it's got Tilda Swinton.) Is Woody Allen really back with Melinda and Melinda? What else is looming that I don't know about, or that I'm forgetting? There's always more magic on the way than you realize.