Press+1 now gives you the Top 10 Best (and Top 5 Worst) Films of 2011

Written By Adam A. Donaldson

So now we come to the part of the year end recap where we recount the Top 10 Movies of 2011 with a bonus Top 5 Worst Movies of the Year segment. As always, the year in movies was better than might have been advertised, and coming up with a list limited to 10 really great films was exceptionally difficult. (And if you haven’t already, check out the 10 Honourable Mentions of 2011 in film.) So without further ado, let’s do the Top 10 Films of 2011.

The Best of 2011

10. Moneyball

So what we have here is a movie about baseball. And math. And it clocks in at over two hours in length. Yet despite the three strikes rule, Moneyball is a smart, engaging and fascinating film that, like almost every sports movie that’s come before, is an underdog story about a man that believes the impossible despite the odds. The man in this case is Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s at the turn of the century. Faced with having to compete with numerous teams with much deeper pockets, Beane did the unthinkable and used math and statistics to get the players that would give him the most bang for his buck. Director Bennett Miller does an admirable job making all the discussion of stats and percentages sound real without being too esoteric, which is helped along by a solid script by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. Pitt is at his charming best, and he has surprisingly great camaraderie with Jonah Hill as math whiz Peter Brand. Given the pedigree, we shouldn’t be surprised at how good this movie is, but we still are.

9. The Ides of March

Writer, producer, director and star George Clooney bounces back from his Leatherheads sophomore slump with this crackling politico drama about an idealistic campaign operative (Ryan Gosling) that learns the man he’s put so much faith and ambition in doesn’t live up to expectations. A brilliant dissection of modern American politics, based on the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, Clooney sets up the film as an inspirational struggle of a politician trying to secure the Democratic Party nomination for President (like Barack Obama), but the whole thing turns sour when Gosling’s Stephen Meyers discovers an unsettling character defect in his man (like John Edwards). But aside from modern political allegory, the theme of the film is as old as storytelling: the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions.

8. Margin Call

It’s now been over two years since the financial implosion that caused the current recession, so its no wonder that with the turnaround time of most feature films that 2011 should be the year that we get a lot of movie versions – both dramatic and documentary – about where it all went wrong. But while most of those films tell you who to blame and why they’re guilty, Margin Call is the only one that takes you inside the minds of the instigators. Featuring a great cast including Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Simon Baker, Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci, the film focuses on 24 hours at an investment bank when several key figures and employees realize that the mortgage-backed securities they’ve been making a mint (or several mints) on, are about to implode. If Wall Street preached “Greed is good,” Margin Call is its total opposite advocating the destructiveness of greed unchecked, and how the lust for money created a proverbial hot potato nobody wanted to be left with when the music ended, and nobody noticed until the very end of the song.

7. Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen has his on years and his off years, but when you’re as prolific as Woody Allen that kind of inconsistency is rather inevitable. But 2011 was an on year for Allen, and the latest addition to the filmmaker’s catalogue is Midnight in Paris is a wonderful ode to the desire in all of us to take a walk down the street, hop in a car, and end up in the time and place you’ve always wanted to end up in. Owen Wilson is a surprisingly spry and engaging choice as the Allen Sub, bring a bit of California surfer to the spastic, nervous routine. A great supporting cast including Marion Cottilard as Wilson’s 1920s Parisian dream girl, and Tom Hiddleston, Alison Pill, Corey Stoll and Adrien Brody as Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Salvador DALI! respectively, are fantastic. Not only is Midnight in Paris Woody Allen’s best since Vicky Christina Barcelona, but it may rank as one of his best period.

6. 50/50

I can imagine the pitch meeting: “We want to do a movie about a twentysomething radio producer that gets serious back cancer, but, you know, have fun with it. Like how his buddy tries to get him to use his cancer to get laid!” But director Jonathan Levine is very sly with how he balances some very “I-can’t-believe-they-just-did-that” laughs with some incredibly moving and powerful moments of drama. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen make a great on screen team with Gordon-Levitt doing his best straightman, while Rogen goes all out Belushi for most of the film. You realize though that 50/50 isn’t just a frat comedy about cancer when near the end, before going in for complex back surgery, Gordon-Levitt’s Adam finds a marked up book about helping a friend cope with cancer in the bathroom of Rogen’s Kyle after they have a drunken fight. Adam’s quiet realization in that moment almost brings you to tears. In the grand oeuvre of stories about people dealing with cancer, 50/50 is an act that won’t be repeated.

5. Edwin Boyd

In what was a really great year for Scott Speedman as an actor, was our mutual gain as the audience. Speedman’s talent and charm were on ample display in Edwin Boyd, a true-life story of notorious 1950s Toronto bank robber Boyd who one day walks off his TTC bus and into the history book as one of the most accomplished criminals in Canadian history. In his first feature, Nathan Morlando does amazing work reigning in Boyd’s infamy in order to tell the human story, as well as doing a convincing job of bringing 1950s Toronto to life on a budget. But about half the credit goes to Speedman who shows Boyd as a man probably shell-shocked from the war, and turns to bank robbery as not just a path to financial independence, but as an outlet for creative aspirations and desire for adventure, and, perhaps, as a way of reclaiming his lost youth. Complexity aside, Edwin Boyd reminds us that there are a ton of vivid characters from Canada’s history just waiting to be adapted; Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada during World War II, used to commune with the spirit world and hold séances to speak to his dead mother… Hint, hint.

4. Hugo

An interesting number of films this year have been about filmmaking, and more importantly, they’ve been about the stars and styles of filmmaking’s past. The past and the future of film are brought together in a way that only a master like Martin Scorsese can in Hugo, an engrossing family film from the man that gave us Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Departed. With what maybe the best use of the 3-D format since Avatar itself, Hugo brings 1930s Paris to vivid life, with a cast of colourful characters led ably by Sir Ben Kingsley as pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Asa Butterfield as the orphan Hugo who winds all the clocks in the Parisian train station, and Chloë Grace Moretz, and his new friend Isabelle, who is Méliès’ goddaughter, are perfect as the two young kids at the heart of the story. Through Scorsese’s eye, Hugo is a both a delightful ode to the imagination and creativity of the early film masters, and for the younger kids it’s a thrilling and atmospheric adventure in its own right. How rare it is that families can enjoy a film together without nattering childish humour or pop culture references only the adults will get.

3. Afghan Luke

The term “From the director of The Trailer Park Boys” never seemed more bizarre, and out of place, but if you can give Mike Clattenburg credit for anything it’s doing the unexpected. Certainly what was unexpected about Afghan Luke was just how affecting it turned out being. Watching the film, it’s a surprise when it turns out to not be some kind of ad hoc commentary on the Afghan War, but a fairly sharp political satire in the vein of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and David O. Russell’s Three Kings. The cast, including Nick Stahl, Stephen Lobo, Steve Cochrane, Nicolas Wright and Vik Sahay, are all outstanding and form one of the most compelling ensembles of the year. The interesting thing about Afghan Luke isn’t that it tries to assign blame, it’s that it tries to understand, and all the while it points out that there’s really no way to understand Afghanistan so why even try. And that’s probably the most intelligent comment anyone’s made about the war in the over 10 years it’s been fought.

2. We Need to Talk About Kevin

This is a bizarre film to keep coming back to when considering all the films I saw this year. I remember catching this at a press screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, and leaving the screening, sitting down at the nearest café and just pondering this work I saw. Based on the novel by Lionel Shriver, co-writer/director Lynne Ramsay tells a stark, depressing, haunting and human tale of personal tragedy. The focus isn’t on the victims, but on the person who’s least likely to get sympathy, the mother of a boy that massacres several of his classmates at a suburban high school. Living life in the shoes of the town pariah isn’t easy, especially when you see how her son Kevin grew up, when you see the warning signs and when you see Tilda Swinton’s Eva struggle with the suspicion that there are some truly dark things going on in the mind of her son. But the real gift of We Need to Talk About Kevin, aside from Swinton’s heart-wrenching performance, is the way Ramsay plays with narrative, making you doubt certain things you already know you know. The film features amazing work all-around and was definitely the most potent drama on the big screen this year.

1. The Artist

Who would have guessed that in the year 2011, as most Hollywood films race to have the biggest action, the most realistic effects and the more dazzlingly 3-D, that one of the best films of the year would have been silent? It’s probably safe to say that no one’s been this excited about a silent movie in 85 years, and that speaks volumes about the talents of filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, and an audience used to being over-stimulated to the point of mental fatigue enjoying the simple pleasures of an old-fashioned, Hollywood love story. The Artist could have come across as a mere novelty, but it’s a vibrant, comedic, and romantic romp that manages to be both fun and poignant. When the film starts reintroducing sound at the end you almost forget that you live in a world of sound, and that you’ve been deprived the whole time. Now that’s movie magic.

The Worst of 2011

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

It took only four films and eight years for all the joy and originality to be zapped from the character Capt. Jack Sparrow and his franchise Pirates of the Caribbean. Now Jack feels like an often used stock character from Saturday Night Live, and talented actors like Geoffrey Rush, Penélope Cruz and Ian McShane look rather out sea in this entry, as if saying to the director off-screen “How am I supposed to react to this?” Really, it’s more disappointing than truly terrible.

Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked

This probably would have only escaped the Worst Of… list if the screenwriters had used the notion of The Chipmunks being stranded on a desert island for a Lord of the Flies-inspired send-up. Instead we get the millionth joke referencing the volleyball with the hand print from Cast Away. Nobody excited about seeing Chipwrecked was even born when that movie came out… 10 years ago!

Jack & Jill

It’s a sad pattern that when a comedians get long in the tooth, they try cross-dressing. Martin Lawrence did it for three Big Momma’s Houses, Eddie Murphy did it several times over in the Nutty Professor films and Norbit, and Shawn and Marlon Wayans made White Chicks together. For double-punch fun, Adam Sandler plays his usual infantile buffoon, and the baffoon’s annoying twin sister. With Al Pacino playing a variation of himself who falls in love with the sister, the circle of cheese is now complete.

Mr Poppers Penguins

Studio Executive: “Hey! You know that scene in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective when we see Ace’s apartment and it’s like Noah’s Arc in there with all the animals? Well, imagine that, but with penguins. You’ve seen those Madagascar movies, people love penguins!” Maybe, but Jim Carrey is far from his banner days, and Mr Poppers is no Ace Ventura. It’s another movie where Carrey tries to prove that he can still get silly with the best of them. Or not.

The Rite

It’s Hannibal Lector as a priest meets The Exorcist. ‘Nuff said.

Written by :

Adam