And What Didn't Make the 2011 List

Every year when I write my Top Ten lists, I also write a companion piece to discuss some of the other major films that garnered attention from the critics and awards folks that year, to give some context to my own choices and to give a sense of where and how my opinions diverged. I will not be discussing films that appeared among my honorable mentions, such as "Drive" and "Melancholia," or films that were hyped up, but had little actual support that I could suss out, like "J. Edgar" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." This year several of the major favorites, including "Midnight in Paris," "The Artist," "The Tree of Life," and "The Descendants" did end up among my Top Ten, but there were several others that didn't even come close.

Let's start with Martin Scorsese's "Hugo," which I liked when I saw it in the theater, but grew less and less enchanted with the longer I thought about it. I loved everything involving Georges Melies, but the rest of the story is pretty labored, and it doesn't help that the dialogue for the kids frequently falls flat. The trouble with "Hugo" is that I didn't care about the kid. Asa Butterfield did a fine job overall, but there are a couple of scenes where he looks completely lost, and I don't think it was his fault. And as with "The Adventures of Tintin" there were a lot of overly-busy, complicated visuals that often got in the way of the immersiveness. I wish that Scorsese had spent less time on the spectacle and more on his storytelling.

There was nothing wrong at all with Spielberg's "War Horse," except that it was a film of the 1930s produced about eighty years after its time. It wasn't nearly as cloying as those early trailers made it out to be, but the sentiment was still laid on pretty thick. I think this might have worked better as a smaller, sparser film, instead of something so grand-scale. While "War Horse" was certainly impressive, it wasn't very entertaining, and this is the kind of feel-good fable that really should be more worried about being entertaining than being something epic. Now "The Help" had the opposite problem, in that it was very entertaining thanks to a bushel of great performances, for which it was rightly rewarded. Unfortunately, it was also a remarkably shallow film with a lot of problematic messages, and painted a picture of 1960s race relations that left me cringing.

Some films were simply not to my taste, like "Moneyball," the baseball film starring Brad Pitt. This was not your traditional sports movie, but really more a character piece about Oakland A's general manager Billy Beene, and frankly I found him to be a bore. It took me a while to work out that my mixed feelings on "Bridesmaids" did not mean there was anything wrong with my sense of humor. It's a decent comedy with some good impulses, and I understand why it was so popular and so widely embraced, but it is in no way a great film. And then there was David Fincher's adaptation of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," which was doomed from the start. I liked it fine, and I liked Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, but there was no way in hell it was ever going to get out from under the shadow of its popular Swedish predecessor, released barely two years earlier. It didn't help that while Fincher's version was slicker and more polished, it didn't really seem to get the point of the "Millennium" books.

Perhaps the most disappointing film of 2011 was "Martha Marcy May Marlene," which was a very promising debut feature from Sean Durkin, but made some choices that I found unsatisfying and, honestly much too easy. I walked away feeling a bit cheated. I had similar feelings towards "The Ides of March," which had so much potential with all the names involved, but tread an all-too familiar path. There's no shame in doing something safe when you do it well, but it's not going to get you top marks either. One of the lower profile, but highly praised titles that some of my favorite critics championed was Mike Mills' "Beginners," the one Christopher Plummer won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for. I did not connect with that film on any level, and found it pretty slight.

Finally, it was a pretty poor year for animated films, and the consensus was that the best of the lot was "Rango," Gore Verbinski's reptile western for ILM. I thought "Rango" was gorgeous, that it had great ambition, and managed to find a style and a look that was different from what everyone else was doing. It was a little sick and very weird, which I fully support. That said, the imposter story has been done to death, and "Rango" hardly offered much of a variation on it. Also, I wish studios would stop booking Johnny Depp for animated films, because he's not very well suited to the job. I ended up spending most of "Rango" wishing I were watching the live action reference footage that was shot featuring the primary actors.

All in all, 2011 was a perfectly good year for the movies. Some of the bigger, more anticipated titles crashed and burned on arrival, but there were plenty of gems if you were willing to go looking for them.
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