All in all I've had a great year sitting in the dark. And sometimes I went to the pictures. I probably saw more films this year than any other and while there were a few films that were grand but I couldn't comprehend why people went crazy over them, like Hugo and Drive, there very few things I thought were absolute drivel, like The Guard,(THE GUARD - 'hurry up, I'm tumescent' for feck sake), or Battle Los Angeles ('Maybe I can help, I'm a veterinarian') it was surprisingly simple to pick out a top ten.
So I did.
10 Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
I’m half scarlet and hugely surprised that this made the top 10 but honestly, it’s very good! Maybe I was influenced by bringing my pregnant friend Aoife who was convinced it would drive her unborn child feral. Forget Franco, no, seriously, lets forget him totally in 2012, it was all about Caesar the ape. The moment where he grabbed the stick from Draco Malfoy (if he didn’t want to be typecast he could at least have dyed his hair a less Slytherin shade) and shouted ‘No!’ really shook me and made me hope new baby Isla WOULD grow up to lead an army of monkeys across San Francisco. They’d be welcomed with open arms in the Castro.
9 Blue Valentine
I really didn't think I was going to like this, it just sounded like a mountain of pretentious wank and Michelle Williams always comes across as a pissy bitch in interviews. Well I had me mouth shut up, didn't I now.
It shows the meet up and break up of a couple and does a bang up job of showing both sides of the argument with your loyalties swinging from one to the other. Ryan Gosling, who manages to be really touching and annoying at the same time, is far better in this than in Drive, this was the one he should have got all the attention for. That Grizzly Bear song with the end credits is lovely. Speaking of credits, the bloody names coming up on the screen is the best thing about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
8 Black Swan
Ah, nutty Natalie. Did Black Swan live up to the huge expectation I had for it? Unfortunately not, it couldn’t possibly have. It didn’t even live up to the poster. What I DID love though is the fact that for a film that was a huge success, nominated for Best Picture and won Best Actress, it was as mad as a bag of cats. From Natalie doing the five knuckle shuffle unaware that her mother is dozing on the armchair beside her bed to Winona Ryder shrieking ‘You stole my things?!’ and stabbing herself with a in the face with a NAIL FILE!! Excitement. It also lead to a deluge of Halloween costumes and a Brown Thomas window. What’s the last film where a ballerina gets eaten out by a figment of her own imagination that managed that?
7 Tyrannosaur
As depressing as the Christmas episode of Eastenders , this Brit flick began with a drunk kicking his dog to death and went downhill from there. Although it largely consisted of nothing you hadn’t seen before, grey British streets, a psychotic Eddie Marsan and a drunken, dribbly, screaming Peter Mullen, it also had something you hadn’t seen before, a revelatory performance from Olivia Coleman as a battered wife. Previously written off (by myself) as a forgettable sitcom actress, she is heart breaking. There is one scene where she comforts her husband when he tearfully apologises for beating her, he hides his head in her lap and she strokes his head, telling him it’ll be ok while the life and soul visibly drain from her face.
It actually might have made it farther up my list but mortifyingly, I totally didn’t comprehend the revelation of a shocking act, until my friend Trish explained it to me 10 minutes later, I might as well have been watching a completely different film. It reminded me of the time me and my friend Cully brought my Mam and my slightly deaf aunt, Maro, to see The Sixth Sense and as we headed home I asked my aunt what she’d thought about the twist that Bruce Willis was dead all along. ‘He was DEAD?!’, she replied.
6 Bridesmaids
Take one woman in a wedding dress having a shit in the middle of the road, add Kristen Wiig having an argument with a teenager that ends with ‘Well, you’re just a little cunt’ and yet another woman taking a shit in a sink. Rinse and repeat. This was the long overdue moment when Wiig became a star and showed the charmless idiots from Hangover how it’s done.
5 Rabbit Hole
In the interests of transparency it should be admitted that any film starring Nicole Kidman is practically guaranteed a place in my year end top ten (ah she was funny in Just Go With It, shut up everyone). It must be said, anyone who boos this choice and gives her stick obviously hasn’t seen her work in Rabbit Hole. She is simply stunning as a mother dealing with the death of her young son who strikes up a bizarre relationship with the teenager who accidentally killed him. It is however the speech given by Dianne Wiest as her mother, the most insightful and honest description of grief I’ve ever heard , that rattled me.
True story - a friend actually had dinner with a member of the film’s production team who described Nicole as ‘Odd to the point of autism’. That made me love her even more!
4 Snowtown
At a certain point during this film, my friend Maeve had her hands over her eyes, her fingers stuck in her ears and was rocking in her seat. ‘Never tell me what happened in that bathroom’, she said afterwards. No, I didn’t have a tempest in a cubicle, it was actually a torture scene in this shocking true story about an Australian serial killer who moves in with a family and slowly begins to influence one of the sons.
There was such an amazing sense of place and time, every shot, prop and actor were totally convincing, you could really believe it was a window into this world instead of a screen and it was terrifying. It was so disturbing that of course my friends and I did impressions of the worst bits – ‘Turn to the side. Drop your underpants’. Gas craic we had.
3 The Fighter
This was brilliant. Big surprise. You’d think the sporty true story comeback kid thing was played out but between this and to a marginally lesser extent Warrior, just like the leading men there was still some life in the old fighter yet. While it was his co-stars who were nominated for awards, with Christian Bale and Melissa Leo winning Oscars for their trouble, it was Mark Wahlberg, in the least showy role who was the real standout, subtly grounding the film with a great little performance as a no rate boxer, with the most entertainingly awful family, who gets a shot at the top.
There were some great lines like ‘I heard she’s into threeways’-‘Yeah, like those MTV girls’ or ‘It’s not fuckin’ ladylike to be shoutin’ in the street’!’ or the part when Mark’s sister picks up for him against his mother and she says ‘What are you doing opening your mouth in my kitchen? You owe me $200. I don't want another word outta you’.
Ah they are great lines, shut up.
2 Super 8
Finally, the kids of today have their very own equivalent of The Goonies. This is a lovely little film. Although it runs out of steam towards the end, and the monster eventually disappoints, how can you dislike a movie that goes out of its’ way to entertain and try and recreate the wonder of those 80s classics? The kids are utterly brilliant, Joel Courtney is simply perfect in the lead and Elle Fanning reveals a level of depth and lack of precocity in her acting that makes Dakota’s dream of an Oscar seem like a mirage in the desert.
1 Take Shelter
If you simply can’t think of a present for the man who has everything, how about slowly picking apart his sanity and stability and family until he has nothing left? Then just get him a cd or something.
A creeping dread permeates every minute of this unsettling and original film. By the mid point I felt sick with the tension and the expectation for something that might actually never come. Michael Shannon gives the performance of the year as a man plagued by visions of a monstrous storm who slowly begins to prepare for it as his wife and friends look on in disbelief. The audience are also witness to his visions until we aren't sure of what is real and what is a dream. The highest compliment I can give it is that I’ve never seen anything like it.
From the sublime to the scutter - this was easily the worst thing I endured in 2011. While other films may have been crap, this one seemed to go out of its' way to offend. Ah, I'm raging even remembering it.
Sucker Punch
Holy lantern God, this film was disgraceful. So much for girl power, it should have been called Attack Of The Crying Baby Prostitutes. Basically, a dozy young one shoots her sister instead of the step father molesting them, is sent to a madhouse for sexy women, which must have been roasting because they all walk around nearly in their nip. In order to figure out how to escape with her gang of fellow simpletons, she has to hypnotize dirty men with a sexy dance and IMAGINE she's any use at anything by chopping up dragons.
All the lead group of young ones end up crying at some point, their plan is foiled when the bad fella turns the blackboard they've written their secret plan on AROUND and reads it. Then they just stand there and get shot. Oh, and a lobotomy. All the while changing in and out of costumes that would look over the top at a Thai ladyboy extravaganza with the front of their heads almost tipping them over with the weight of the make up trowelled on to them.
I've made this sound great. But it's not. It is utterly rotten. There's not a shred of it that's slightly well made, exciting or intentionally amusing. I was absolutely raging leaving the cinema.
I actually wouldn't mind watching it again right now.
PUTRID DUNNE
Here Here!! nice post!!!! ;)
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