An Idiot’s Best of 2011

Boiling an entire year down into a numerical list is something akin to masturbation of the highest caliber. Think about it: hundreds of films released, and a majority of critics–depending on location–only consider those which played for a week in a dingy spot at the Laemmle 5 or Quad Cinema to be valid. Honorable Mentions:

Battle Royale

This 2000 adaptation of Koushun Takami’s novelistic ode to wrestling’s battles royal never saw a proper US release until this year at theCinefamily in Los Angeles. It’s amazing that a film with the cult status it has–inspiring two manga sequels, a (lacking) film follow-up, the entire plot of The Hunger Games–never got a seven-day run in New York, despite selling out at the New York Asian Film Festival when screened.

The Man From Nowhere

When we had Grady Hendrix come visit Grassroots Tavern, we asked him to describe the recent trend of Korean revenge films. His answer: “Karenge.” If that doesn’t sum up The Man from Nowhere, I’m not sure what else would. Though not nearly as dark as I Saw The Devil, from savage bon mots (“How many gold teeth do you have? I’m a pawn shop owner and I want to know which to rip from your mouth”) to bathroom knife fights and a bittersweet ending, this sums up exactly what the Karenge genre boils down to: you can take revenge and kill everyone, but ultimately it will kill you.

A Seperation

Not optional.

Waiting for the Dead of the World

If nothing says “post-apocalypse” better than an undead monkey’s uncle, then dagnabbit there’s something there to this whole zombies metaphor. Especially when it comes to the explosion of the theme in gaming over the last decade, from the sandbox comic-horror of the Dead Rising franchise to the survival-horror that evolved into Bruckheimer-horror of Resident Evil.

And then came the teaser for Dead Island:

So, why is The Last of Us so gosh-darn different?

Long Live The Old Flesh: A Dangerous Method

Michael Fassbender feeling shame--an all too common issue this year.

The exact point when “body horror” became one of the defining critical tropes around David Cronenberg’s work is hard to place. Ok, it isn’t (Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Shivers etc) but it’s a welcome shift in A Dangerous Method that the horror is kept in a subdued tone compared to, say, if Carl Jung’s dreams were brought to life on screen.

Ok, maybe it isn’t that subdued. Paralleled by carriage rides, Method opens on a hysteric Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) being signed into  Burghölzli hospital where she picques the interest of Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) into trying out the fabled “talking cure” of Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Jung struggles between his dislike of the military (“I just look at cocks all day!”) to analyzing his dreams as he takes Sabina under his wing as an assistant while coaxing out the nature of her “humiliation.”

In The Age of Spiritual Meme-chines: Shut Up! Little Man

The Internet is serious business, or at least that’s how the online adage for folks lurking around the chans and message boards go. Fun with audio and video alike is the content beast that churns out BuzzFeed‘s feeds and gave us mash-ups, crossovers and fan art to go along with an ever-evolving creative culture based on what’s already there.

Shut Up! Little Man is one of the found (audio) footage holy grails since it goes all the way back to the days when recording via  a make-shift boom and tape deck were the best two punk roommates on the Haight in San Francisco could accomplish. Those two idiot savants, Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchel D., happened to strike gold thanks to their sociopathic alcoholic neighbors (Peter J. Haskett and Raymond Huffman) who couldn’t go a night without drunkenly attacking each other either verbally or physically.

An Ode To A Grecian Speed Ramp: Immortals

When your film requires an opening quote about truly being immortal before launching into the type of audio assault not seeneardInception, it brings to question just how much is your mortality worth? Not in the “Will I die a legend and thus live forever” way, but more a “my ears can’t take much more of this, when do we get to the pretty people in gold clothing smashing shit up like the trailer promised us” way.

That’s kind of forgivable for Immortals, the third feature from director Tarsem–now with an added middle and surname in his credit–who previously overstuffed our eyes with The Cell and The Fall. Electing out from referring to this as a potential noun phrase trilogy, Immortals is a mash-up hybrid of the tales of Thesus and Hyperion into a dimly saturated (if you’re going 3D, which you shouldn’t due to this being post-conversion) series of deserts and kind of stunning set pieces including a shining watering hole surrounded by white sands to a really dark subterranean cave “that’s like a maze” where he battles a “minotaur.”

Great Moments in Zombie Hunting

The Walking Dead took in seven million eyes when it premiered on Sunday (“shattering records” according to Deadline, which also regularly uses the phrase “Toldja!” and “I’m going to sue you”) isn’t that big of a surprise when factoring in key points that:

• It’s October.
• People love zombies and zombie killing.
• Norman Reedus.

Great, Ali G’s Ghost: Attack The Block

dir. Joe Cornish Theatrical It is a superlative to say Attack The Block is the best film of the year–if not the Summer; but that’s coming from quite a few people. I mean, a lot of people. Attack the Block is probably one of the year’s most positively seen genre odes that opened last March at SXSW on massive buzz and then even people afraid of the “Scott Pilgrim Effect” (e.g. too many free fan/critic screenings would deter from the film’s box office). It opened last weekend against fellow sci-fi flick Cowboys & Aliens on 8 screens to a low six-figure. It is, for all intensive purposes, the underdog of the summer that folks are clinging with to prove word-of-mouth and grassroots campaigns can work this time for Edgar Wright and company in the ashes of Pilgrim. Except that it really doesn’t.

X-Men First Class

dir. Matthew Vaughn

Theatrical

Jet-setting mutants and alterna-Cold War history sound like the perfect combination, doesn’t it? And yet Matthew Vaughn’s take on the X-Men franchise, produced by Bryan Singer, is a combination of great concepts mixed with the boredom of rebooting a franchise that is now popular. The logistics of which can be summed up by this New York article: Kinberg’s X-Men: First Class is a more tangible case of casting downward while maintaining a healthy brand. It centers around the familiar characters of Magneto and Professor Xavier, which justifies its marketing under the X-Men brand, but it’s a prequel, which means it stars all new actors, mostly up-and-coming. They won’t strain the budget, let alone take a piece of the gross.

Which is an unfortunate thing to consider when Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon and James McAvoy–even if he does constantly remind one of a British Zach Braff–are welcome additions to a tonally different franchise. Here it’s more like “Fun With History” than a straight adaptation of the actual “X-Men: First Class” series.

…that’s it.

The Mechanic (2010)

Dir. Simon West
Theatrical

Despite the promise of a long-haired Jan Michael Vincent, I opted to stick with Simon West’s remake of The Mechanic as my first foray into the world of a moralistic hitman whose sole regret is he doesn’t have a real friend. In fact, it did rather poorly in wide release. And yet, it does something impossible: it turns Ben Foster into a bad motherfucker.

This is much harder to accomplish when you’re paired up with Jason Statham, especially in a post-Crank/London world that has accomplished a dual goal: Jason Statham as immortal video game character and, to a noticeably different viewer, impotent drug addict so self-aware of his plight that he must engage in eternal violence. Let’s not overlook the other important point: Jason Statham looks cool shooting guns, taking down random Red Shirts and spouting off zen-like one-liners so casually that he already outshines his forefathers of Van Damme, Seagal and Norris. But it’s unfair to compare those to Statham, since he really does have a lot in common with the original lead, Charles Bronson.

Both Bronson and Statham have given the moral gunslinger a new definition in their definitive time periods. For Bronson, he was an impotent vigilante in a hyper-corrupt Manhattan, a fucked-up snow globe that begged for Giuliani. Statham? An amoral gun for hire that hints of past deeds being so evil that all he can do is kill worse people before he inevitably shacks up with someone’s daughter or a stripper…or a stripper’s daughter and learns to train her like a stripper to love her? Ok, this is getting too intertextual for its own good.

Which let’s us come back to The Mechanic. A remake of the 1972 film of the same exact plot (“mechanic” is slang for a hit man with a heart of gold, said mechanic is tricked into killing long-time friend/partner, long-time friend/partner’s scrappy son wants revenge and ironically goes to mechanic for a degree in the homicidal arts, friendship formed, but then…) so why bother recapping it?

Instead, the partner is by far the most fascinating part. Ben Foster has the type of quiet on-screen rage that he’s seldom allowed to let out. It goes from a type of infatuation (3:10 From Yuma) to devotion (30 Days of Night) and here it is this unsettling combination that forms a third role: the bad motherfucker. It could be argued lazy plotting by Simon West, but to allow Foster the chance to be “more brutal” than Statham is a fascinating choice. Here we have true rage, not even the quiet storm that Statham hides with a quip and blur of movement: for his first kill, Foster’s character chooses to brutalize a man he’s supposed to poison while posing as a vulnerable twink.

It’s rare to see someone hold a screen presence that actually rivals and threatens Statham’s own–i.e. War, which has the single lamest twist ever just to get him on a bus poster with Jet Li. And this remake of The Mechanic isn’t really horrendous, if anything West is keen with dispensing action and sex frequently enough that any PG-13 kid should be giddy looking back on the Tomb Raider films and recently with Human Target on Fox. But even the most oblivious fanboy probably would feel a twinge of confusion when they wonder why Foster isn’t the hero of this updated revenge/fuck fantasy.

An Appreciation of Takers on a Vanity Device

I’d apologize for the previous image, but let’s face it–a test’s a test and when you’re exploring life on the go with nothing but a thin keyboard and a overpriced vanity gadget iPad, experimentation is the name of the game.

Well, “shit, I have no wireless” is the actual title. Followed by silent curses.

In any event, the image above is from Takers, which I don’t think I’ve ever really gone into with much depth. Which is surprising, since it’s one of the tighter heist/revenge films to be churned out for a B-audience last year. Even more surprising? Tons of silly interplay (the brothers’ surname? Attica) mixed with charmingly one-dimensional tropes that are figuratively led by their recently released ex-partner (T.I., excelling here leaps and bounds by what a lucky one could glimpse in Killa Season).

There’s also an entire sub-plot featuring Matt Dillon reprising his Factotum persona as a grizzled LAPD detective who knows there’s a secret group of professional thieves but has never proven it (spoiler: there are). He’s losing his daughter, he’s lost his wife and ultimately he acts as this albatross showcasing that a just life pales in comparison to smoking cigars, kicking ass and doing what you please. Ultimately it’s a forsaken parallel, but an interesting one since the cop character has no redemption, no morals and serves as nothing more than proof that this elite team of cocky young villains could get away with their grandiose plans.

That’s about it.