Movies 2011
I might as well do what I did last year and round up the movies that I saw this year. I’ll comment on each with about three sentences or less, unless I really liked it or I decide arbitrarily to break the rule.
Here is the list of the movies I saw released in 2011. The list goes by release date, which is pretty close to the order in which I saw them, with a few exceptions.
For comparison, this list has 39 movies on it, while last year there were 38 (and 2009 was 40. I’d better step it up next year).
The Green Hornet
The Way Back
The Eagle
Cedar Rapids
Cold Weather
Hall Pass
The Adjustment Bureau
Take Me Home Tonight
Jane Eyre
Paul
Insidious
Source Code
The King’s Speech
Hanna
Your Highness
Thor
Bridesmaids
The Hangover Part II
Kung Fu Panda 2
X-Men: First Class
Super 8
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2
Captain America: The First Avenger
Another Earth
Crazy, Stupid, Love.
Attack the Block
Our Idiot Brother
Contagion
Warrior
Drive
Moneyball
Red State
The Ides of March
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas
The Descendants
Young Adult
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
We Bought a Zoo
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
One more thing: These reviews may be a little bit terse. I have been writing this off and on for a while and I have deleted several of these blurbs to rewrite them—not because I think I can do it better, but because lately I’ve been feeling like my opinion on movies is so unqualified, and the things I write about them are so boilerplate, that it’s pretty much forced. BLURBS WITH SPOILERS WILL BE MARKED WITH ASTERISKS. For the sake of posterity:
Didn’t Like:
The Way Back:
I don’t know why this movie failed to entertain me. On paper it looks great, but…I don’t know. Something about it was just boring, and not engaging. I’m confused about why I didn’t like it.
Take Me Home Tonight:
The first 10 minutes were good, the rest of the minutes weren’t.
Insidious:
Rose Byrne is so pretty. The first five eighths of this movie were good, too. But then it felt rushed and sloppily explained.
Your Highness:
There weren’t many actual jokes in this. I was hoping to like it, since I love Eastbound and Down, but it was just lame. It seemed like there were no effort in the jokes, just “This is medieval and we’re talking about weed isn’t that hilarious?”
The Hangover Part II:
Probably my most hated movie this year. It was a near-duplicate of the first movie with all appealing or novel things stripped away.
Kung Fu Panda 2:
I’m going to apologize for not liking this—I did not see Kung Fu Panda 1, I had little context, but I was pretty bored.
We Bought a Zoo:
The title was uttered like four times during the movie. And it was really saccharine. But I laughed inwardly pretty hard when someone in the movie said something like “That was when you still believed in the Easter Bunny” and I heard some kid in the theater say “What’s he talking about Mom?”
Okay/Liked a little:
The Green Hornet:
I don’t really remember much about this. I enjoyed myself though.
The Eagle:
I basically give this points for Channing Tatum’s good acting but it was a little bit boring.
Cold Weather:
It’s good-looking and has unexpected plot developments but it’s sort of heavy-handed and I get annoyed at main characters like this movie’s. The guy who’s like “I’m neurotic and meek but I turn into a hard boiled juggernaut if you cross me about this arbitrary thing.” It’s audience pandering at its worst; the unfortunate truth is that in real life, if you’re meek and neurotic 99.99% of the time, it’s pretty likely that you’re going to be meek and neurotic that last 0.01% of the time, but everybody who is meek and neurotic thinks “If I just had the justification, I could be so strong.” Well, it’s probably never going to come. If there’s a more wasteful excuse for weakness or inaction than waiting for a dare-to-be-great situation, I haven’t excused myself with it.
The Adjustment Bureau****:
(REALLY BAD SPOILERS) Here’s the message of this movie: “You think you can have it all? You can’t have it all. You can’t have it all. You can’t have it all. You can’t have it all. YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL. Fine, you can have it all.”
Paul:
Pretty funny. My expectations were pretty high for this though.
The King’s Speech:
BECAUSE I BLOODY WELL STAMMER! Yeah, it was competent entertainment.
Thor:
I got my usual big-budget movie headache at this but not before a couple of funny scenes, and then all the explosions started.
Super 8:
Too high expectations struck again. If you’ve seen E.T., Invaders from Mars, and The Iron Giant (good movies, I mean) then you don’t need to see this.
Captain America: The First Avenger:
I would have loved this when I was like 10 or so, but it’s like the superhero version of The Mummy from 1999, just okay.
Attack the Block*****:
I think that the thing that bothers me about this movie shows how I’m missing the point, but I’ll (EXTREMELEY spoilerily) explain it anyway: space aliens come and this thief picks a fight with it (when it wouldn’t have done anything to him otherwise), stalks and murders it, and then gets a bunch of innocent people killed because of what he did. The cops think he’s responsible for all the violence (which indirectly, he totally is) but they don’t believe the alien invasion stuff. So the thief and the group of underparented hoodlums fight back by wielding violence more cleverly than a bunch of space monkeys. I think that I would have been fine if the movie hadn’t ended with this heavy-handed lesson about how we shouldn’t prejudge these keeeeeeeeeds. We just saw them massacre a totally new form of life in cold blood! The heroes exhibit the exact same kind of xenophobia the movie accuses the audience of! The movie had some funny one-liners, though, and it was well-paced.
Moneyball:
The most interesting thing about this movie to me was how this ultra-logic-based, economic method of who to draft and who not to was actually portrayed as the good guy. In almost any other movie, the human-driven, intuitive selection of baseball players (triumphing over the cold computer calculation) would be the folksy hero side. Not here, and I think the only real reason is that the computer selector saw merit where the intuition people did not. I’ll bet that eventually, when enough time goes by, there’ll be a movie where the new coach bucks the unfeeling computer selection system and leads his team to the world series with pluck and heart. Brought to you by Carl’s Junior.
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas:
Too high expectations, I liked Guantanamo Bay more. I’ll still see the next one though.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol:
Too high expectations. Not as good as M:I 3. I’ll see the next one though.
Solid:
Cedar Rapids: There was one really creepy part where one character sings to another, but aside from that, I really liked just about everything in this movie. The brightest spot, in my opinion, was John C. Reilly, who played his role well and made it likable.
Hall Pass:
Nobody else really likes this movie but I laughed a lot.
Jane Eyre:
I have a soft spot for resilient but physically weak characters, which Mia Wasikowska does really well, but the story was also well-paced and presented with an appropriately dark tone.
Source Code**:
I wish Duncan Jones had been a little bit more purposefully stylish with this movie (his last one, Moon, was my favorite movie of 2009), but the story was very neat (after some suspension of disbelief) and it had murky moral implications at the end.
Bridesmaids:
I liked the jokes and the frank girl talk about sex from a woman’s perspective, and also the way jealousy manifests in a close relationship; few movies acknowledge this so satisfyingly. I saw this by myself in the theater, among a few large groups of girls. I felt a little weird.
X-Men: First Class:
I don’t care about movie spectacles, or super powers. They’re boring. I don’t care about them unless they are used to reveal character in interesting and new ways. That’s the point of fantasy, sci fi, et cetera—to explore humanity with a different, speculative toolbox. This movie painted in broad strokes, but mostly muted the mutant stuff until the end (which I found by far to be the least interesting part of the movie). I believe I’ve said this before, but this movie’s special effect smorgasbord at the end makes it worth restating: I’d gladly see a movie some time in which the climax happens somewhere that is not two thirds of the way through the movie’s third third.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2:
I saw this and it was a Harry Potter movie, as I expected.
Crazy, Stupid, Love.:
Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling were good in this, I liked their scenes together, and Emma Stone has an attractive face and personality and I laughed hard at the best jokes.
Our Idiot Brother:
This was pretty fluffy but it made me smile.
Warrior:
Except for the fact that it was too long, and it was sort of hanging on to these (good) over-the-top performances (Nick Nolte most intensely) for too long, this was solidly acted, written and directed.
The Ides of March**:
Solid, but a couple of plot turns were a little bit implausible and overly theatrical.
Red State:
I was pretty disturbed and surprised at parts of this movie.
Young Adult:
I have some experience with Charlize Theron’s character type in real life—this movie dragged in spots, but the last 20 minutes more than made up for it; they were almost perfect.
Drive:
Initially I expressed disappointment with this movie, but I watched it again free of expectations and it delivered very solidly. And if I won’t admit that it’s excellent, the forensic evidence, nevertheless, points to that opinion—after this I watched both Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Ides of March. Also, I actually (for a moment) considered buying a replica of the jacket that he wears in the movie. Steve. Come on. Get it together.
Favorites:
Hanna:
I was totally caught by surprise at this movie. Granted, I liked Joe Wright’s version of Pride and Prejudice and also Atonement (although that might have been influenced by when I saw it), but this seemed like it was going to be a pretty standard unbelievably-strong girl power movie. It was actually a weird blend of fairytale, black comedy, and secret agent movie. (The weakest part was the secret agent backstory stuff). I had a great time watching it.
Contagion:
It was scientifically accurate enough for me to not be able to pick out any technical holes and the movie’s consequence chain makes me think of it as a neat little machine. Matt Damon’s performance was just right, and I liked Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet here more than in any other movies I’ve seen them in.
Another Earth********:
I originally exclaimed out loud (to no one, in my apartment) “Oh come on!” after the last shot of the movie, but after thinking about it, I am happy with the ending. Brit Marling, with her sort of weird pronunciation of some words, her apparent real-life back story* documenting mathematical talent, either somehow her unawareness of or her ability to hide her awareness (likely the second, I’m not that naïve) of her good looks, and her faith in her (formidable) acting and writing abilities, pretty much sold me on her as the protagonist. In this way it’s a little unfair to judge the movie’s direction, narrative, editing, et cetera, without feeling biased. But she’s part of the movie so here the movie is on the list.
* (she apparently turned down a job as an economic analyst [after graduating as valedictorian] to make movies)
The Descendants*****:
My favorite movie on this list. The beginning lights a dramatic fuse (I still am trying to decide whether that’s a cheap move, but I’d say no, it isn’t), and that makes everything that happens after it all the higher-stakes. The way the fuse burns (figuratively) changes as the movie goes on, and it sort of induces an evolution in how you regard what’s happened before and what you hope will happen. And what is at stake to the characters plotwise is mirrored by the usual narrative’s being at stake to the audience. That’s a convoluted and sort of frivolous way of saying that the movie plays with your expectations very skillfully.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:
After the first 15 minutes I was ready to fall asleep, and then things…got…less boring. Then they became fascinating. By the end, I was rapt.
