Best Movies I saw in 2011

Best Movies I saw in 2011

Movie	Grade	Find the review archived in 2011: Month/Day
Machete	A	1/5
RED	A	1/29
You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger	A	2/19
Welcome to the Rileys	A	2/20
Revolucion	A	3/1
Jack Goes Boating	A	3/19
Fair Game	A	4/18
The Man Who Wasn’t There	A	6/5
My son, my son, what have ye done	A	6/20
Midnight in Paris	A	6/27
Rango	A	8/9
The Beaver	A	8/28
Driver	A	11/5
The Mill and the Cross	A	11/14
The Turin Horse	A	11/14
Melancholia	A	12/6
The Social Network	B	1/14
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work	B	1/31
Howl	B	2/1
Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity	B	2/6
For Colored Girls	B	2/11
The Last Circus	B	3/8
The Last Three Days	B	3/12
Conviction	B	3/12
The Secret in their Eyes	B	3/17
Mock Up on Mu	B	3/26
Please Give	B	4/24
Cave of Forgotten Dreams	B	5/29
Rabbit Hole	B	6/6
The Company Men	B	6/19
Small Town Murder Stories	B	8/23
Bridesmaids	B	8/23
Source Code	B	8/23
Moneyball	B	11/5
Dream Home	B	11/14
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life	B	11/25
Inside Job	I	6/5

The Smell of Success: Grade C

C

The Smell of Success (2009)

Billy Bob Thornton, Tea Leone, Ed Helms, Kyle McLachlan; Co-writer and director: Michael Polish.

This is a silly trifle of a movie, but I wanted to review it because it has been so thoroughly ignored, despite having some hidden virtues. It is about a group of salesmen in Kansas, led by Thornton, who work for Rose’s Manure, and sell the stuff to farmers. Old Man Rose dies and his daughter (Leone) from New York City, takes over the company, with the aim of pumping up sales then selling it.

The film is an example of screwball comedy, a genre characterized by witty repartee, usually a romantic relationship, a satirical emphasis on social class distinctions, with farce and slapstick. It was a style of movie popular in the 1930’s during the Depression, so ordinary people could watch the upper crust get their comeuppance and have a laugh at their expense. Perhaps the filmmakers thought it was time to revive the genre during the current Great Recession.

That intuition might have been right, but they made two critical mistakes. One is that the manure theme is pitched too low to be socially or politically satirical, or even, really, very funny. Most of the gag lines are pretty obvious: “Rose’s Manure: We’re number one in number two!” And worse, much worse. I admit, some of the joke lines made me laugh anyway. When the beautiful and sophisticated Tea Leone, in frustration, calls one of her salesmen “Shit-For-Brains,” I laughed, not because it is an original epithet, but because of the way she said it. But the relentless poop jokes wear you down, and even if they do make you chuckle, you realize there isn’t going to be any artistic point to the humor.

Secondly, the relationship between Thornton and Leone just isn’t. They are the romantic leads, and they even go to bed together (just wrestling, no sex). But there is no suggestion of a romance. Why not? Even if the movie was aimed at children 5 to 8, (and I don’t think it was), that should not rule out a romance. Maybe the omission was a far-too-subtle reference to the censorship codes of the 1930’s that forbade portrayal of any kind of sex. If that was the intent, it failed.

The film does have strong redeeming virtues. The cinematography is excellent, as are costumes (the period seems to be early 1960’s). The bluesy music is attractive. The artistic direction is distinctive, with a kind of sepia palette, reminiscent of O Brother Where Art Thou, that is perfect for the surrealistic scenes. And those are fantastic. The competitors, a chemical fertilizer company, parachutes crates of their product, and themselves, into cornfields and the imagery there is stunningly surreal. A kind of World War II theme emerges, and although it is not developed, it is a very creative twist. Acting: MacLachlan and his team, dressed like Men In Black, do a fair parody of evildoers, though not arch enough. Ed Helms is an inherently funny guy. Leone, I’ll watch in any movie. Same for BBT. So this movie has plenty of virtues and deserves to be seen, by adults, even though, as an overall artistic effort, it falls short.

Melancholia: Grade A

A

Melancholia

Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Alexander Skarsgård, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling; Writer-Director Lars von Trier.

This film is perfection of the art in every respect except one: editing. Its 2 hour, 15 minute runtime is not justified by the material. Not that I was ever bored, because the visuals took a grip on my eyeballs from the opening scenes and never let go. But the first half, focused on an elaborate wedding, verged on repetitive and tedious.

In the first half, Justine (Dunst) marries Michael (A. Skarsgard) in her sister’s home, so luxurious it would make royalty blush. Throughout this long segment, Justine is withdrawn and melancholy and finds no happiness in the wedding. But she is there, after all, in the appropriate costume, so she is conflicted. She arrives 2 hours late, then during the festivities, disappears to take walks on the grounds, retires to take a nap, and even takes a bath. She finds no pleasure in the social rituals of dancing, drinking, cutting the cake, exchanging the vows. Is it because she is clinically depressed? Maybe, but it is more like she just doesn’t see the point of the ridiculous ceremony. Her mother (Rampling) is explicit about contempt for all aspects of marriage, but Justine seems ambivalent. She can’t decide if she wants to be a member of the social community, with all its stupid, contrived rituals, or whether she is an existential monad, alone in the world, finding her own meaning. Her vacillation goes on far too long. I wanted to scream at von Trier, “Okay, we get it!” But I think he was trying to make the viewer feel Justine’s conflict, the endless, intellectually empty tedium of well-worn social ritual, and attraction to fabulous costumes, bright lights, fine food, and excellent music. I felt it, though I didn’t need such a long dramatization.

In Part 2 the story focuses on Clair, Justine’s sister, married to Jack (Sutherland). Justine stays on with her sister’s family after the wedding because she alienated her new husband on the wedding night and he left in confusion. Claire is worried about a new planet, called Melancholia (get it?) hurtling toward Earth, threatening total destruction. Jack assures her that all the scientists predict it will miss, and that “Melacholia will pass us by.” In other words, Justine’s rejection of the social rituals we live by will not hurt us, and death itself will pass us by, because we are together. Justine tells Claire however, that we will all die because the Earth is evil. Her melancholic diffidence now seems like stoic acceptance of humanity’s inevitable fate.

The themes in the film are thus the most fundamental existential questions facing us, the inevitability of death, the meaning of society, the vagaries of fate, and the survival of the planet, making the movie intellectually and emotionally engaging, much more than mere eye candy. Acting by Dunst is phenomenal, and von Trier takes advantage of her beauty in some stunning, if gratuitous, shots. Acting is also very strong from the other main characters, especially Rampling. Sets, costumes: superb. CGI: perfect. Directing: flawless. It’s a masterpiece.