Why Go To The Movie Theater? Our Favorite Movies Of 2011, Part 2
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 20, 2011 7:40PM
My favorite movies are the ones that give me new eyes. I mean the ones where, if only for a few minutes, the world I encounter when I leave the theater seems different from the one left to go in. This feeling of heightened awareness to the textures of the world, of its variety of soundtrack, at the great fortune we are all sharing it together, is like a drug.
Anyone addicted to this effect will tell you that the big screen is the place to get your fix. Here are my top cinematic encounters of 2011 which took place not on a DVD screener or rented blu-ray, not streamed online, not in multi-part YouTube installments, but in the best way: in a theater.
Le quattro volte This single 90-minute film starring an old man, a kid goat, a tree, and a pile of charcoal, revealed more elemental beauty a year’s worth of filmgoing typically does. Riveting and philosophically dense while using almost no words, it is as defiant of adequate description as a symphony or a painting. After I watched this film in June, I walked out of the Music Box to find storm had blown limbs down all over the city, dropped a downpour, knocked out stoplights, and hacked twenty degrees off the temperature. Talk about feeling like I had walked out into a different world.
Tree of Life The 800-pound gorilla of the 2011 art house doesn't need a description from me, but can we talk about the soundtrack for a moment? With apologies to Alexandre Desplat's score, nobody wants an official soundtrack that omits the most mind-melting collection of concert music chosen to situate such a visually ambitious film since 2001: A Space Odyssey. Watching this film with two friends expecting their first child was heavy enough, but since art cinema dealer Terrence Malick doesn't cut his dangerously potent, 100% pure product with anything at all, without these strains we might have all O.D.'d before the CGI dinosaur appeared.
Meek's Cutoff Kelly Reichardt's western may be my favorite reinvention of that genre since McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and the lovingly detailed universe it constructed found me absolutely transfixed. Though its telling is as oblique as its protagonists progress, the story has deceptive alacrity, like a swift animal that seems to be composed of only gristle and bone. That it stuck with me so closely for weeks afterwards was remarkable enough, but when months later stills from the film encountered unexpectedly in a Portland coffee shop brought back the whole film back in a rush as though it were my own experience, I knew this one was going on my list.
Bridesmaids The bar for Hollywood comedies is so low that hype almost always scares me away. When an featured SNL player makes the leap to the big screen, who among us doesn’t take that grain of salt and add to it a whole shaker’s worth? There is nothing like laughing uncontrollably among a bunch of strangers. Bridesmaids had a sold-out theater wiping tears from its eyes, including not only me but an actual bride and her mother and sister with whom I went to see it. One of my top moments, let alone movies, of 2011.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Movies need mystery and magic. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's dream-like tale had me wondering what I was looking at, as well what I was meant to understand by it. In a good way. I loved nearly everything about this movie, from the first second to watching the final credits roll in that beautiful Thai script which seems to my ignorant (and admittedly condescending) eye, like magical runes.
Shoah The 25th Anniversary of this landmark document on the Holocaust was an opportunity I could not let pass and an experience I won't forget. A funerary aspect inevitably descended on the theater while enduring this 9 1/2-hour film with a group of strangers as we shared in our grief, horror, and shame, along with a lot of feelings that are harder to name. As much time has now passed since Shoah was created as had elapsed between the events and the filming, and many of the people and places it captured are gone forever. This essential act of witnessing, however mediated it was, changed me forever.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams Leave it to swaggering Werner Herzog to drag the idea of 3D spectacle across the mountain of commerce and into the safe bosom of the art house. I may have been skeptical when I put on the glasses, but Herzog showed me things I could not have been seen without them. Such genuinely unique cinematic experiences are few and far between. Even Mr. Over-the-Top's narration could not end the spell his cast by this one. In fact, it's always good for sparking a few hours of bad impressions afterwards.
Contagion It wasn't so much Steven Soderbergh's pandemic disaster movie itself that thrilled me, though I think the glide of its machine-tooled hull through the shoals of the disaster movie, around the bay of post-apocalyptic horror, off the coast of the zombie flick, skirting the horn of conspiracy yarn and into the safe harbor of the the old fashioned thriller will look more worthy of commendation as it ages. No, it was the singular experience of suddenly noticing every cough, sniffle and wheeze in a movie theater full of other people, who became mere diseased bags of pathogens to me within the first ten minutes. Any movie that so rattles its audience that none of them want to touch the door handle on the way out of the theater has done something interesting.
Certfied Copy There's more than talking to the Before Sunrise-meets-middle-age vibe of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami's clever film. There is too much gorgeous cinematography, performances too subtle from its stars, and a sound design that imperceptibly brought me right into its beautiful Italian setting for that playing field to be level. Kiarostami never quite cuts through onionskin of fantasy and reality he builds up, but there is poignant insight at every level. This was the quintessential date movie of 2011, to be watched before a very long discussion over dinner.
Nostalgia for the Light Some movies are meant to distract us from reality. Others put it under the microscope. Patricio Guzman's haunting and beautiful documentary puts reality at the business end of a telescope, searching for answers to the mysteries of the heavens and the mystery of our souls. Through a humble collection of beautiful images, inspired interviews and some poetic narration, Guzman's light touch with moral and cosmological matters dropped my jaw as much as the stunning shots of our celestial enivons.
Honorable Mention: It won't do for me to wrap this list up without mention of Chicago's film of the year, The Interrupters, even if I saw it on DVD and not in a theater. This was the film that had all of us talking, and the only one I needled everyone I knew to see.