DVD Review: Hell and Back Again

Hell and Back Again ***
Directed by: Danfung Dennis.

Hell and Back Again is not the first, nor will it likely be the last, documentary to follow soldiers at war in Afghanistan, and then follow them home, where they have trouble fitting back into society. This has always been a problem, as living day in and day out in a war zone, under constant threat of being wounded or killed is so vastly different from life at home, at peace, in America, that soldiers have always had trouble readjusting to civilian life. Hell and Back Again suggests that perhaps it’s even harder for these soldiers coming back from Afghanistan – at least in past wars, you knew who the enemy was, and felt you were doing something. But as this movie shows, the Taliban soldiers Americans are fighting against may as well be ghosts – you never see them, even when their bombs and gunfire rip you to shreds. More frustrating still, the civilians they are supposed to be protecting spend most of their time bitching to American soldiers about dead farm animals, ruined crops, and poor living conditions – and telling them that they do not want them there at all.

The movie follows Nathan Harris, who a week before his tour is supposed to end, gets severely wounded. A bullet enters from behind him, ripping through his buttocks, and then travels down his leg, shattering the bone, before finally exiting. He has a metal rod in his leg now that holds it all together, and he is undergoing physical therapy to try and get full use of the leg back – although he’s told he will always walk with a limp, at the very least. This 26 year old soldier freely admits that when he signed up for the Marines at 18, he told the recruiter that he wanted to join so that he could kill people – and even now, seeing what he has seen, and going through what he has gone through, and continues to go through, all he wants is to go back to the Afghanistan and fight alongside his fellow Marines. He has gained perspective from his time, but being a Marine is all he knows. He has traded the frustrations of war in Afghanistan for the frustrations of life in North Carolina – full Wal Mart parking lots, fast food chains, taking lots of pain killers, that the doctors tell him he will become addicted to – and prefers the war zone.

Harris seems like a nice guy – you cannot help but root for him to get better, and feel sympathy for everything he has gone through. I almost felt sorrier though for his kind wife Ashley, who seems to have almost never ending patience with him. Nathan is not easy to live with, because he needs constant attention, and he understandably gets very angry at times. But Ashley loves him, and so far, will stand by him through anything.

What stood out to me about Hell and Back Again is how much medical attention Harris receives – and far too much time obsessing over his guns – that he lovingly caresses. He even plays a mock game of Russian roulette with one – not ever actually pulling the trigger, but sticking a bullet in it and spinning it, and then looking to see if he would killed himself – or someone else – had they been playing for real. Despite what he’s seen, he still spends hours on his PlayStation playing Call of Duty – and these scenes are intercut with scenes director Danfung Dennis – a war photographer embedded with troops in Afghanistan – shoots of Harris’ fellow soldiers in Afghanistan. The effect is chilling. Harris needs help – and more help than he is currently receiving.

 
Hell and Back Again is a deliberately paced documentary, cutting back and forth between the hell of Afghanistan, and the hell Harris is going through in North Carolina. As I mentioned before, we’ve seen documentaries like this before – but that doesn’t dull the power of this one.

Movie Review: Monsieur Lazhar

Monsieur Lazhar *** ½
Directed by: Philippe Falardeau.
Written by: Philippe Falardeau based on the play.
Starring: Mohamed Fellag (Bachir Lazhar), Sophie Nélisse (Alice), Émilien Néron (Simon), Danielle Proulx (Mme Vaillancourt), Brigitte Poupart (Claire Lajoie), Jules Philip (Gaston), Seddik Benslimane (Abdelmalek), Marie-Ève Beauregard (Marie-Frédérique).

I have grown weary of movies about kindly school teachers who come in and help turn a troubled group of students around. We seemingly get at least one of these movies every year – and they follow the same formula of an idealistic teacher, coming in to teach a bunch of kids that everyone else has given up on, and discovers that all they really needed was someone to believe in them. For a while, it seems that perhaps Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar, an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film from Canada – is going to be simply another one of those films. But the movie ends up going in different, unexpected directions – and while it does build to an emotional climax similar to those other films, this time it feels genuine.

Mohamed Fellag stars as Bachir Lazhar, an immigrant to Montreal from Algeria, who hears about the suicide of a teacher at a Montreal middle school. Not only does the teacher kill herself, she hangs herself in her classroom, and it is a student, Simon (Emiien Neron) who finds her there (as, perhaps, she knew he would). Lazhar comes in with his resume, tells the Principal that he taught for years in Algeria, and he can start right away. It seems that the Principal has little choice – no one else wants to teach in a classroom where someone has killed themselves, so Lazhar gets the job. But he is not quite who he appears to be.

Monsieur Lazhar has few delusions about the life of a teacher. The film knows that one teacher cannot alone change the lives of all of his students – some are unreachable, some are sticklers for the rules, some just don’t care. It also knows the inner workings of a school, and the hierarchy of the teacher’s longue, which can be as political as anything else, and the difficulties of reaching students who, as one teacher puts it, you have to handle like “toxic waste”. Touching them, either to discipline or show encouragement or kindness, is forbidden, lest it be taken the wrong way. Parents, like everyone else, can be assholes and be hard to deal with. And everyone has defined roles. After the suicide of their teacher, the school brings in a psychologist to work with the class. But other than her specified times for coming in, the kids aren’t supposed to talk it – and Lazhar is not supposed to bring it up. The dead teacher presence is still in the room however, and kid’s emotions don’t always coincide with the “schedule” of the psychologist.

I was impressed by much of Monsieur Lazhar – not least of which was the performance by Fellag in the title role. It’s not an easy role – he is a quiet, shy person, who doesn’t tell either his fellow teachers or his students everything that he himself is dealing with – and there’s a lot. But because of those experiences, he is perhaps uniquely qualified to deal with this class. There is one student in particular, Alice (Sophie Nelisse), who is going through a lot of emotions – not just about her former teacher, but also about her mother, and in Lazhar, she sees someone she can talk to – and who relates with her. This is contrasted by Lazhar’s relationship with Simon, who feels responsible for what happened to the teacher, but keeps it bottled up inside of himself – or lashes out in misplaced anger. Lazhar cannot reach every student, but he leaves an impact.

Overall, I think Monsieur Lazhar was a surprising heartfelt and genuine film. It easily could have sunk into broad sentimentality, but it doesn’t. It reminded me somewhat of Laurent Cantent’s excellent film The Class from a few years ago – which was also a more realistic portrait of the life of a teacher, and his students, than we normally get. Monsieur Lazhar doesn’t reach those heights – but it comes close.

Movie Review: The Interrupters

The Interrupters ****

Directed by: Steve James.

Most people join gangs so that for once in their lives they can feel like they belong to something greater than themselves. They often come from homes with abusive or absentee parents. They fool themselves into thinking that being part of a gang makes them important and tough. By the time they grow up, and realize what they were doing was stupid, it’s already too late for many of them. They are in jail or dead. Violence erupts on streets dominated by gangs for no real reason – someone insults you or a rival gang member walks down the wrong street and violence erupts, which simply leads to that other gang coming back and more violence erupting. It’s a never ending cycle of violence where too many young men and women in America are being killed for no real reason.

Steve James, who directed the magnificent documentary Hoop Dreams in 1994 (that film would still make my list of the 10 greatest docs of all time), returns to the streets of Chicago with The Interrupters. Based on a magazine article by Alex Kotlowitz, who made this film alongside James, it follows the year in the life of people who work for CeaseFire – a group of violence “interrupters” who work the streets of Chicago. These interrupters are former gang members who have done jail time – some very serious jail for crimes like murder. They know precisely where these young gang members are coming from, because they went through it. Now they are older and wiser – and see the error of their ways, and try to prevent others from making the same mistakes. They go out onto the streets and try to defuse violent situations. Often times, violence breaks out on the spur of the moment, and if they can just settle things down for a little while to give everyone a chance to think about their actions a little, then lives can be saved.

James and his small crew show no fear when making this documentary. They are right alongside the interrupters when they go to work – and step right into the middle of violent situations. If the young gang members even notice the camera, they don’t seem to care – they go about doing the same thing anyway.

Do the interrupters really make a difference? Somewhat, I’m sure. We do follow a few of the lives of the people the interrupters reach out to, and one man, named Flamo of all things, goes from wanting to kill someone when we first meet him, to having an actual job by the end. Another young girl continually gets angry and screws up her progress, and has to start all over again. But Ameena Matthews, who is the interrupter handling her, doesn’t give up. She’ll allow her to screw up again and again – because you cannot help people who won’t help themselves – but she’ll always be there when she calls and needs help. Still other young people we only see once in the movie and they say things to the interrupters like “You just don’t understand” or “Not everyone thinks the same way”. These are the ones who are going to do what they’re going to do no matter what. One interrupter calls what they are doing little more than band-aid for a crime epidemic in this country. If so, it’s still better than nothing.

What stands out most to me about the movie is the interrupters themselves. These are people who have led violent lives, and somewhere along the way, have decided to change their ways. Someone like Ameena Matthews has embraced religion – she’s Muslim – and is raising her kids up right, and wants to give others the same chance. Her father was one of the most famous Chicago gang members in history – still serving time in jail, where he’ll never get out. Cobe Williams, another interrupter, recalls when his son came to see him in jail, and never wanted to go through that again. Eddie Bocanegra spent 14 years in jail for murder, and while in jail found art, and no tries to help other express themselves that way. He is still haunted by the life he took – and one of the most powerful sequences in the movie is when he revisits the scene of the crime.

The Interrupters turns its camera on what is a national problem of gang violence, where young men and women are killing each other for little or no reason. The movie says that more people are killed by this sort of violence every year than the numbers of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. I remember when school shootings like Columbine made national headlines, and everyone was asking could be done to stop them, when the whole time more young men and women were being killed in the inner cities due to gang violence than would ever die in school shootings, and nothing was being done to stop it.

Are the interrupters just band-aids? Perhaps they are, as gang violence is still rampant in the streets of America’s major cities. But at least they are doing something, and some lives are definitely saved because of their actions. That’s better than sitting back and doing nothing.

Movie Review: Albert Nobbs

Albert Nobbs ***
Directed by: Rodrigo García.
Written by: Glenn Close and John Banville and Gabriella Prekop based on the short story by George Moore.
Starring: Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Mia Wasikowska (Helen), Aaron Johnson (Joe), Janet McTeer (Hubert), Brendan Gleeson (Dr. Holloran), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Viscount Yarrell), Brenda Fricker (Polly), Pauline Collins (Mrs. Baker).

Everyone agrees that Albert Nobbs is a good man. He is a waiter/butler at an upscale hotel in Dublin around 1900, and he does what all good servants do – blend into the background. He is always there, behind the scenes, making sure that everything goes okay. He knows everyone’s routine, their likes and dislikes, and ensures they have what they want. He is also smart, and has saved all of his money over the years. He keeps it under the floorboards, and keeps meticulous records of how much is there. He hopes to buy a business – a tobacco shop. Perhaps he’ll even take a wife to help him work the counter. No one suspects that Albert isn’t really a man at all, but a woman in disguise. Years before words like transgender existed, Albert has disguised himself as a man so effectively and for so long that when someone finally does find out his secret and asks him his name he responds “Albert”. When asked, no, your real name, he responds “Albert” again. Albert may have disguised himself as a man for financial reasons at first – men have an easier time getting a job – but he has gone for so long that way that he has started to believe it himself, somewhere down deep.

The movie was produced, co-written and stars Glenn Close, who has been trying to get this movie made for more than a decade. You can see why. Albert is a great role; someone who has repressed themselves for so long, so effectively given up who they are, and become so lonely that he barely knows how to function any longer. He clings to his delusion of becoming a tobacco store owner, and marrying the beautiful Helen (Mia Wasikowska), even though everyone else can see she is in love with Joe (Aaron Johnson) and is merely taking advantage of Albert. Albert does find a confidant in Hubert (Janet McTeer), who has lived the same way he has, for nearly as long, but has found a way to be happy. Hubert is even married – to a woman no less.

It must be said that Close, and for that matter McTeer who is Close’s equal here, are better than the movie itself. Directed by Rodrigo Garcia – who directed Close in Nine Lives – the film has the same sensitivity and concern for women that that film did (or for that matter, his follow-up film Mother and Child). Perhaps Garcia, who is a better writer than director, should have taken a stab at a rewrite of the screenplay as well. The film is so emotionally closed off, because Albert is, that at times it’s almost stifling.

But Close is excellent as Albert. Because we know Close well from her decades of great work, it is a little hard to believe at first that no one would question that she’s really a woman. But then again, think about it. If someone told that they were a man, and everyone else seems to go along with it, would you really question it? I don’t think so. And Close does such an excellent job navigating the difficult role that you barely care. McTeer disappears more easily into the men’s costume and makeup, possibly because she’s not as well known. It’s through Hubert, that Albert starts to get his hopes up – which of course, ends up being his downfall. The rest of the cast is quite good, but their roles aren’t as deep. The beautiful Mia Wasikowska seems to have been cast for her beauty more than anything else. Albert regards her as an object, because he cannot quite bring himself to see her for who she truly is.

Overall, Albert Nobbs is a fascinating little movie, with a wonderful central performance by Close. You can see why she worked so long to get this movie made. It’s her best work in years. If only the movie could have measured up to the performance, it could have been one of the best of the year.

2011 Year in Review: Worst Movies

Despite the fact that I saw fewer films this year than in the past, I still managed to see quite a few stinkers. Other than the films on my worst 10 list, you couldn’t pay me to sit through the following films a second time: Anonymous (Roland Emmerich), The Bang Bang Club (Steven Silver), Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebsman), The Beaver (Jodie Foster), The Change-Up (David Dobkin), Conan the Barbarian (Marcus Nispel), Cowboys and Aliens (Jon Favreau), The Dilemma (Ron Howard), Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (Troy Nixey), The Eagle (Kevin Macdonald), Final Destination 5 (Stephen Quale), Green Lantern (Martin Campbell), Hall Pass (Peter & Bobby Farrelly), The Hangover Part II (Todd Philips), Henry’s Crime (Malcolm Venville), Hesher (Spencer Susser), I Am Number Four (DJ Caruso), The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd), Kill the Irishman (Jonathan Hensleigh), Miral (Julien Schnabel), One Day (Lone Scherfig), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Rob Marshall), Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (Morgan Spurlock), Sanctum (Alister Grierson), The Smurfs (Raja Gosnell), Something Borrowed (Luke Greenfield), Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder), Super (James Gunn), Texas Killing Fields (Ami Canaan Mann), Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay), Unknown (Jaume Collet-Serra), Vanishing on 7^th Street (Brad Anderson), Wrecked (Michael Greenspan), The Woman (Lucky McKee).

The Bottom Ten

Despite all sorts of awful above, these were the 10 films that were the worst of the worst.

10. Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh)

This film is an empty shell. There is nothing beyond its admittedly beautiful surface. The story of a college student (Emily Browning) who works multiple part time jobs – and sometimes as a prostitute – who agrees to work as a topless waitress at fancy dinner parties, and then to be drugged so that men can do whatever they want with her unconscious body (not including penetration). Browning is a blank slate – there seems to be nothing going on behind her eyes, so the movie becomes an exercise in style, with nothing else going for. Painfully slow and dull, despite all the nudity.

9. Trespass (Joel Schumacher)

Joel Schumacher has taken a lot of lumps over the years for his films, but for the most part, they were at least competent. No such luck with Trespass, a film that went from having its premiere at TIFF to DVD in less than two months. I know why Nicolas Cage is in this – he needs the money. But what the hell possessed Nicole Kidman to be in this awful home invasion “thriller”. Incompetently directed, written and acted, Trespass is a movie best left forgotten.

8. The Future (Miranda July)

Some people love Miranda July’s follow up film to her indie hit Me and You and Everyone We Know. I am clearly not one of those people. I did like her first film, but The Future is about the two most annoyingly self involved people I can recall seeing in a movie. I mean, they let their poor cat get put down for Christ’s sake! The cat narrates the movie, and is counting down the days until they come and get him, and then they just let him die. The film tries so hard to be hip and cool, but I found it insufferable.

7. The Rite (Mikael Hafstrom)

This early in the year film tried to be a more serious version of The Exorcist, and failed miserably. A young seminary student starts to lose his faith, and isn’t sure he wants to go through with becoming a priest. His mentor decides to send him to Rome for a while to give a chance to think about it. And that’s when he meets Anthony Hopkins’ crazy, exorcist priest, who of course, will end up possessed himself. Thankfully, I have forgotten much of this film in the months since I have seen it. Hopefully, the rest will leave my mind soon.

6. Season of the Witch (Dominic Sena)

Dominic Sena had such a promising start to his career with Kalifornia – and since then, it’s been one crappy action film after another. This Medieval “epic” starring Nicolas Cage is perhaps his worst film. It isn’t scary, it isn’t exciting, and Nicolas Cage is perhaps even worse in this film than he was in Trespass. Borderline unwatchable.

5. Sarah’s Key (Gilles Paquet-Brenner)

The film tells an important story about a little remembered, shameful moment in French history, when in July 1942, French police rounded up over 13,000 Jews, including women and children, left them in a stadium for days and then shipped them to Auschwitz. Unfortunately, the movie undermines the story’s inherent power by focusing on an American woman in 2011 trying to piece together what happened to the family who used to live in her apartment. The movie is far more interested in her than in the roundup itself. Even the scenes from 1942 seem forced and phony. This was a tough sit – but not in the way the filmmakers expected.

4. Your Highness (David Gordon Green)

David Gordon Green’s debut film, George Washington, is a small scale masterpiece. His follow-up films – All the Real Girls and Undertow – are both excellent. Even when he moved onto the mainstream films, he made the wonderful comedy Pineapple Express. Then he made this film – which is quite simply God awful (he also made The Sitter, which came out late in the year and got terrible reviews – I’ll catch with it on DVD). I suppose this movie is trying to be something like Monty Python – with its ridiculous Knights of the Round Table epic crossed with stoner comedy, but none of it is funny. Why James Franco and Natalie Portman got involved, I don’t know – and Zooey Deschanel didn’t do herself any favors either. Once and for all, this film should prove that Danny McBride is a supporting player – not a leading man.

3. The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Briellent)

I have long since tired of French filmmaker Catherine Briellent’s films which mostly are provocations for provocation’s sake. Once in a while however she makes a wonderful film like The Last Mistress, which keeps me coming back to her films. Her version of the fairy tale The Sleeping Beauty is a sexually explicit, incoherent mess. Good God, I am sick of her scenes where a horrid boy talks an innocent girl out of her virginity. This could be her worst film.

2. Passion Play (Mitch Glazer)

I had the misfortune of seeing this at the 2010 TIFF, and I have never quite recovered. How could a movie starring Mickey Rourke and Bill Murray be this bad? Somehow it is. Rourke is a fading jazz musician, who discovers an “angel” – Megan Fox – who is really just a stripper with wings. Bill Murray is a gangster who wants to buy her from him. The movie is perplexingly stupid and has the most ludircious climax of any film in recent memory. The worst part is everyone takes it so damn seriously. The film was barely released in theaters, and then when straight to DVD – where is really where it belonged.

1. Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisener)

I know that some love Jason Eisener’s throwback to 1970s Grindhouse films starring Rutger Hauer, but for the life of me I cannot figure out why. The film is, as you expect, exceedingly violent, but it’s never disturbing because the violence is so over the top and cartoonish that it is ridiculous. The villains are laughably awful. I must give some credit to Hauer however – he delivers precisely the performance that the movie asks him too. Eisener won a competition run by Tarantino and Rodriguez as a marketing gimmick for their epic Grindhouse. Both of those filmmakers had fun with this exceedingly dumb genre of films. But Eisener takes this way too seriously. This is nowhere near the longest film of the year – but it felt like it to me. Simply horrible.

2011 Year in Review: Worst Performances

Worst Actor: Danny McBride in Your Highness – I think McBride can be funny in small doses, but when he is asked to carry an entire movie, his shtick wears thin quickly. In this film, he is not hip or funny, which he tries so hard to be, but simply annoying and unfunny.

Runners-up: Nicolas Cage in Trespass starts out trying to use the same clipped, nasal voice he used in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, but abandons that half way through, but no matter how he talks, he is still awful in the film. Nicolas Cage in Season of the Witch is perhaps an even worse performance, as he is completely unbelievable as a Medieval Knight in this groaner of a film. Mickey Rourke in Passion Play makes the mistake of thinking a movie that has Megan Fox with wings should be played completely seriously – this is the type of film I would expect him to make BEFORE his comeback. Anthony Hopkins in The Rite tries to go over the top, as he has so often before, but his crazy act grew stale a decade ago. Jason Momoa in Conan the Barbarian has little more than muscles to offer this updated Conan. Alex Pettyfer in I Am Number Four is a completely and totally blank action hero in this forgettable, would be franchise. Shia LaBeouf in Transformers: Dark of the Moon says his character arch through the three films is now complete – and the fact that he could say that with a straight is better proof that he can be a good actor than anything on display in this film. Keanu Reeves in Henry’s Crime is far too passive for a character that has to drive the entire plot of this awful bank robbery/comedy.

Worst Actress: Nicole Kidman in Trespass. I have often defended Kidman from those who say that her face is an expressionless mask, as normally I find her work to be wonderful and risk taking. But in Trespass, she simply gives more fodder to all of her detractors, and sadly, I have to be one for this film – her worst performance ever – by far.

Runners-up: Frieda Pinto in Muriel is completely miscast and perhaps proves that she is little more than a gorgeous face, as she can’t carry this role at all. Emily Browning in Sleeping Beauty and Sucker Punch is as empty and hollow as the movies she is in. Miranda July in The Future tries so very hard to hip and clever, and instead she is just really annoying. Megan Fox in Passion Play got dealt a horrible role, but still, she didn’t bring anything at all interesting to it. Kristen Scott Thomas in Sarah’s Key is so self serious and self involved and dour that it hard to watch.

Worst Supporting Actor: Cam Gigandet in Trespass again has me wondering how he continues to get work. I have yet to see him in a good movie – and he seemingly shows up in a ton of movies each year. In Trespass, I wondered the entire movie if his character was supposed to be mildly retarded or whether he was just plain dumb. I still have no idea.

Runners-up: Brian Downey and Gregory Smith in Hobo with a Shotgun made a truly awful father-son villain team – there is a difference between fun over the top acting and awful over the top acting, and these two don’t seem to know it. Ron Perlman in Season of the Witch and Conan the Barbarian was awful in two movies – he was great in Drive however, so perhaps we can forgive him. Colin Egglesfield in Something Burrowed was a romantic leading man completely and totally lacking in charm or a sense of humor. Harrison Ford in Cowboys and Aliens again makes me wonder why he continues to act, since he quite clearly doesn’t give a shit.

Worst Supporting Actress: Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in Transformers: Dark of the Moon replaced Megan Fox, and in doing so makes Fox look like Meryl Streep in comparison. She’s beautiful, sure, but there’s nothing else there.

Runners-Up: Olivia Wilde in Cowboys and Aliens once again has to play the “perfect” human, or at least some outside force’s idea of perfect, which must be getting tired for her. Kate Hudson in Something Burrowed was annoying and shrill, making me wonder how anyone in the movie put up with her for so damn long. Angela Bettis in The Woman continues to show that other than weird ticks, she can’t really do anything else. Vanessa Redgrave in Anonymous makes Queen Elizabeth I into a dottering old fool – and worst still, not a very entertaining one. Jordana Brewster in Fast Five proves why unless it’s a Fast and Furious movie, she doesn’t getting many acting jobs.

2011 Year in Review: Biggest Disappointments

There is some crossover here between this and my worst of list, but these films are necessarily terrible, or even bad. But none of them are as good as we should expect from filmmakers who have proven they have talent, or interesting ideas that are blown. I also could have included: Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebsman), The Hangover Part II (Todd Philips), Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh), The Mechanic (Simon West), Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (Morgan Spurlock), Red State (Kevin Smith), Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder), The Woman (Lucky McKee), but already at 15 films, I decided not to.

15. The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)

I love Pedro Almodovar, and I actually liked The Skin I Live In. But coming on the heels of Talk to her, Bad Education, Volver and Broken Embraces, The Skin I Live In proved to be underwhelming. This revenge story, as twisted as any seen in recent Korean films (and they are truly fucked up) is well made, but seems hollow, and Antonio Banderas is bland as the “evil scientist”. I liked The Skin I Live In, but I expect to love an Almodovar film.

14. The Help (Tate Taylor)

I felt I had to address one of the biggest audience hits of the year – which is an Oscar player this year as well – somewhere in my year end wrap up, and since I didn’t much like it, this seemed like the place. I must say, the performances by Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard and to a lesser extent Emma Stone are actually excellent. But The Help has such a retrograde view of race relations that it was off-putting to me, as was the fact that even in 2011, when Hollywood makes a movie about the Civil Rights Movement, it has to center on a kind hearted white person. This film doesn’t feel like it’s about the 1960s, it feels like it was made in the 1960s, when Sidney Poitier could still shock audiences by slapping a white man, or marrying a white woman. Also, how many times did the filmmakers need to completely and totally humiliate Howard’s racist house wife, as if she is the worst human being on the planet? Certainly not an awful film – and I do understand why some love it so – but to me it just wasn’t good enough.

13. Restless (Gus Van Sant)

Gus Van Sant has spent the last decade making films where death hangs over every frame – whether it’s Gerry with its friends lost in the desert, Elephant, with its high school shooters, Last Days with his Kurt Cobain stand in, Paranoid Park with his aimless skater kids or even the more mainstream Milk about a politician, his films lead to death. And Restless is no different, as it centers on a young woman with cancer and her first romance. But unlike those other films, Restless is a fantasy film, trying to make us believe that cancer really is like this, and while we may want to believe it, we don’t. Good performances, and great cinematography by Harris Savides, is wasted in this film that is far too lightweight – and tries too hard to be hip.

12. The Ward (John Carpenter)

I may the only person in the world who likes Carpenter’s previous theatrical film, Ghosts of Mars, but like it I did. After spending a decade languishing in TV work, he returns to the big screen with a film that seems right up his alley – a horror film set in a mental hospital inhabited by only beautiful young women. And yet The Ward seems so by the numbers and lacks Carpenter’s horror signatures. It’s like he’s trying to be Eli Roth, when Eli Roth can never even dream of being as good as Carpenter. If he’s not going to be John Carpenter behind the camera, than what the hell is the point?

11. Outrage (Takeshi Kitano)

In the 1990s, Takeshi Kitano seemed like the lone savior of Yakuza films, with great ones like Violent Cop, Sonatine and Fireworks. He kept the genre going when no one else seemed willing to. After a foray into comedy and samurai films, Kitano returned to the Yakuza genre after more than a decade. And while Outrage is appropriately violent, and is fairly well directed, I have to wonder why he bothered. Outrage is not any better than the myriad of copies of Kitano’s work that has sprouted up in the last 10 years. If he wanted to return to the genre, shouldn’t he have brought something better to the table?

10. Bad Teacher (Jake Kasdan)
Jake Kasdan has made some good comedies before – most notably the underrated Zero Effect – and the idea behind Bad Teacher is a good one. I, for one, am tired of seeing movies about saintly teachers who better their children, so I was looking forward to seeing a movie about a truly awful teacher. And, to be fair, Cameron Diaz really does seem to throw herself into the role. Unfortunately, there really is not a whole lot else here. The writing lets her down a great deal, nothing is quite as funny as it should be. It isn’t awful, but it isn’t very good either.

9. In a Better World (Susanne Bier)

I don’t share Lars von Trier’s feeling about Susanne Bier (if you recall, it was a joke gone awry about Bier that lead to Trier’s infamous Nazi comments at Cannes), but I have to say that I wasn’t all that impressed with her Oscar winning film In a Better World. The whole movie seemed so simple minded and clichéd – Crash in Denmark if you will – and the stuff in Africa felt completely out of place. Normally, Bier is a great filmmaker – see Brothers or After the Wedding or her underrated American effort Things We Lost in the Fire. But this film is her worst one, which makes it sadly ironic that she won Best Foreign Language film at last year’s Oscars.

8. The Beaver (Jodie Foster)

The idea of casting Mel Gibson as a bat shit crazy person was genius. The problem with The Beaver is that it never lets Gibson go far enough. It shoves his character – who starts talking through a beaver puppet of all things – into a clichéd dysfunctional family drama, thus blunting the films power. A truly off the wall, pitch black comedy about a suicidal Mel Gibson and a talking beaver puppet? Genius. This movie, nowhere close.

7. Cowboys and Aliens (Jon Favreau)

The idea of combing cowboys and aliens in one movie sounds like it should make for one of the most entertaining films of the year – especially with Jon Favreau at the helm, having made two damn good Iron Man movies. But this movie is surprisingly dull and lifeless. Why combine two of the most well known movie genres into one package unless you’re going to do something with it? Play with the genres a little? Or at least, make a decent guilty pleasure movie. Instead, we’re stuck with this one, which was just lame. Can someone tell Harrison Ford if he isn’t going to try anymore than he should give up acting?

6. One Day (Lone Scherfig)

Lone Scherfig made an excellent debut movie with An Education. David Schultz’s book One Day is a touching examination of friendship changing over time. Bring the two of them together and you get this thudding bore of a film, in which Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess have to age 20 years in less than 2 hours, have their complex characters stripped to the bone, and be forced into one cutesy routine after another. This one had so much potential that was simply squandered.

5. The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd)

Perhaps it’s my own fault for thinking that the director of Mamma Mia could make a competent movie, but I was highly looking forward to The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic starring Meryl Streep. Streep is, as always, brilliant in the lead role. But the movie itself provides no insights into who Thatcher was as a politician or as a person. It seems much more interested in showing her as an old lady losing her marbles than anything else she did in her life. This is not the biopic one of the most powerful and controversial women of the 20^th Century deserved.

4. Your Highness (David Gordon Green)

David Gordon Green was at one point one of the best young filmmakers in the world. George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow and Snow Angels were all great indie films. I assumed when he crossed over to Hollywood to make Pineapple Express (also wonderful) that it was to get himself more freedom to make the types of movies he wanted to. But he followed that movie up with this stinking turd (and apparently, the late year comedy The Sitter isn’t any better). Does he really not give a shit about anything other than money? Please, come back from the dark side soon.

3. The Future (Miranda July)

This one was truly disappointing because I thought that July’s first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, was so quirky and offbeat and charming. But this film is nothing other than navel gazing by self involved hipsters. Good god was this movie a pain to sit through – and I’m still pissed off about the damn cat!

2. Miral (Julien Schnabel)

Julien Schnabel is an immensely talented filmmaker as his first three films – Basquaint, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – can attest. Unfortunately, he tries to use the same technique that made The Diving Bell and the Butterfly so successful in a completely different story – and the style doesn’t fit. The Diving Bell was a subjective story, told almost entirely from the point of view of one man trapped in his own mind. Miral is a decades spanning, multi-narrator story about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The effect is off putting confusing. For all the controversy the films politics spawned, they are never really clear – as the film is little more than a jumbled mess. I have faith that Schnabel will make a great film again, but Miral was far from it.

1. Cars 2 (John Lasseter)

Cars 2 is precisely the kind of animated film that Pixar doesn’t make. It is loud, fast moving, action packed and pays little attention to character or story. Sure, it fits and starts, they film can be entertaining – and I am sure that little boys loved it to pieces – but when I go into a Pixar movie, I expect something more – something not just for kids, but something adults can enjoy as well. Although the original Cars was one of Pixar’s weaker efforts, there are still many things to recommend it – especially it’s nice sense of nostalgia. Cars 2 moves so damn quickly, and has such an inane plot, that it has no time for anything else. Far and away the worst film Pixar has ever made.