Best of 2011: #5 Win Win

Remember what I said about Alexander Payne and his perfect, Pixar-like record?  That he was as reliable as Christopher Nolan?  Well, it's late at night, I'm tired, and I'm suffering from a minor case of writer's block.  Now, I'm wishing that I had saved that description to talk about Thomas McCarthy, the director of Win Win.

But, I don't want to plagiarize myself.  So...let me start over.

Best of 2011 #6 Melancholia

How does one explain such a strange movie? I suppose you start with the title.

The word "melancholia" is defined in the dictionary as "a mental condition and especially a manic-depressive condition characterized by extreme depression, bodily complaints, and often hallucinations and delusions."

In the movie Melancholia, the word is used in two separate contexts.  First, it describes the state of depression described above by Merriam-Webster.  :It is also the name of a planet on a collision course with Earth, threatening to obliterate the world and every living thing on it.

Yes, you read that correctly.  

Best of 2011: #7 Rango

This was a strange film. 

Let me try to describe it for those who haven't seen it.  Imagine that Coen Brothers took over Pixar, then watched a bunch of Clint Eastwood movies while eating some bad pizza and then wrote down the plot to the dreams they had that night.  The movie resulting from this hypothetical dream-script would likely resemble Rango.

Best of 2011 #8 Warrior

Gavin O'Connor's Warrior could be a case study in bad movie marketing.  Here is a movie with huge potential for mass appeal and box office.  Its story is timely and well told and it's about mixed martial arts, a sport rapidly growing in popularity.

Yet, it never found an audience.  It's perplexing.

Part of that could probably be blamed on the trailer, which all but gave away the ending before anyone got a chance to see it.  But, really, I don't think that's it.  The studio just didn't make a strong enough push to promote the movie, and that's a shame.  Instead of highlighting what should have been star-making performances by the two leads and awards-bait acting in a supporting role, the few of us that saw it can only beg our friends and family to rent it on DVD.

Best of 2011: #9 Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I remember when I first read that they were making Rise of the Planet of the Apes -- must have been just over a year ago.  I scoffed at the idea, as I'm sure most people did.  It seemed like the prequel that no one was asking for.  No one could have predicted that this was rich territory for anything other than a quick buck, particularly after the abysmal Tim Burton/Mark Wahlberg Apes movie from a few years back. 

Okay, I'm sure someone somewhere predicted that there was a good movie to be made here, because, here we are.  Still...

Best of 2011: #10 (tie) The Artist

I'll get this out of the way quickly.  The Artist is a silent film.  It has virtually no audible dialogue and, for 99 percent of the film, the only thing you hear is music.  It's also entirely in black and white.

I think a good chunk people will lose interest right there.

Best of 2011: #10 (tie) The Descendants

Alexander Payne is as reliable as Pixar and Christopher Nolan, but he's not quite as prolific and he works on a much smaller scale.  His track record as a writer-director is virtually flawless, with a filmography that includes Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, and, in 2011, The Descendants.

The only unfortunate thing about Payne's work is that there's not enough of it.  Those five movies are the sum total of the features he's directed in his 15-year career.  His last movie before this one, Sideways, came out nearly eight years ago.  I have to admit, before the trailers for The Descendants started showing up online several months ago, I had kinda forgotten about him.

His movies tend to circulate around less-than-heroic figures, below-average Joes whose troubles are common and familiar and, more often than not, self-inflicted.  Most of his protagonists tend to middle-aged men -- or, in the case of About Schmidt, a older-than-middle-aged man -- who are coming to terms with the disappointing lives they've created for themselves.  While this is hardly a unique approach for modern cinematic storytelling, Payne's sincere affection for each of the schlubs he's created, even when they don't deserve it, is always refreshing.  It's easy to create a loser just to make fun of him.  But, that's not how Payne works.

The Descendants is a dramedy staring George Clooney as Matt King, a 40-something lawyer with a wife in a coma who is also a descendant of one of the first white land-owners in Hawaii.  As the story unfolds, King is forced to deal with the shortcomings of his relationships with his wife and two daughters as well as decide for his extended family whether to sell their last tract of land to a developer.  These two trials, while seemingly unrelated, become entangled in one another until, in the end, it becomes clear that they are, in fact, one in the same.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.