Best of 2011: Male Performances

5. Brad Pitt, "The Tree of Life"
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As a temperamental, disciplinary father trying to raise his family in rural Texas in the 1950's, Brad Pitt's performance in many ways provides the backbone to Malick's odyssey on family, loss and creation. Both disquietingly menacing and vulnerable, Pitt fleshes out his capricious father figure with but a glance or a grimace. 
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4. Gary Oldman, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"
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As the muted, determined Mr. Smiley, Oldman's internalized central performance as the retired spy is in many ways the perfect compliment to the icy, cold precision of Tomas Alfredson's immaculately-crafted spy thriller. Though he hardly puts on a show, Oldman subtly, expertly portrays Smiley's redemption as he attempts to uncover the mole atop British Intelligence and recover his scandalous marriage and sullied career. 
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3. John Boyega, "Attack the Block"
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As Moses, Boyega transformed Joe Cornish's bass-bumping action film into a surprising tale of redemption. The mysterious leader of a petty street gang at first, Moses is hesitantly forced to play hero as he comes to realize that he's partly responsible for the attack. 
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2. Bruce Greenwood, "Meek's Cutoff"
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Kelly Reichardt's beautiful, spare anti-Western concerns the tumultuous, haggard journey through the Oregon terrain of a small group of settlers. Almost unrecognizable under a bushel of facial hair and a whiskey-growl, Bruce Greenwood - as the titular Stephen Meek, the group's cynical, ignorant frontier guide - is a revelation.
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1. Ryan Gosling, "Drive"
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Turning in what I believe to be his greatest performance, Ryan Gosling, an actor stuck on terrific, brooding, method performances ("Half Nelson", "Blue Valentine") pulls off one of the trickiest turns of the year in Nicolas Winding Refn's grime-and-chrome muscle-car crime drama, "Drive". 
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Almost mute, Gosling takes a perilously under-written character and fills in the rest, turning the unnamed 'Driver' into a smoldering, violent romantic with a wardrobe to die for. 
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Honorable Mentions:
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Tom Cruise, "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" - Nobody can pull off the physical, charismatic stuff he does here, much less at 49. 
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Alex Shaffer, "Win Win" - Nobody is talking about his contribution to that excellent ensemble. His introverted, blank blonde-haired wrestler Kyle was a wonderful debut.
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Brendan Glesson, "The Guard" - Gleeson's irreverent, foul-mouthed cop in the dry, winning Irish action-comedy was a one-man show. 
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Jean Dujardin, "The Artist" - No joke, his performance is so full of wit and non-verbal charisma, he's practically a silent star re-incarnate. 
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Michael Shannon, "Take Shelter" - Jeff Nichols' film is quite good and it doesn't work without Shannon's desperate, manic, but more importantly, sympathetic lead turn. 

2011: The Worst Films of the Year

I've pretty much exhausted what 2011 has to offer and with a viewing of Steven Spielberg's "War Horse" some time this weekend, that will make it 113 films seen this year - some bad, some good, but as we all know, mostly bad. 

However, out of those mostly bad films I sat through this year, these ten were surely the worst. So before I get to the good stuff (Top 10 list coming later this weekend), here are the ten turds of 2011:

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#10
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"IN TIME"
Directed by Andrew Niccol
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Aside from its impeccable timeliness (no pun intended, I assure you), Andrew Niccol's "In Time", a sci-fi Occupy Wall Street allegory in which money is currency and two outlaws rob from greedy corporations who fund their immortality and give to the poor who literally live second-to-second, was one haphazard treatment of an admittedly promising conceit.
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The production design is stale, the performances are stiff and pretty soon the film devolves into a bunch of clean-cut 25 year-olds running and staring at their wrists. 
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#9
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"COLOMBIANA"
Directed by Olivier Megaton
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Revenge thrillers would appear to be an easy commodity to produce reasonably well, especially when you're Luc Besson ("Leon", "La Femme Nikita") but "Colombiana", the writer/director/producer's latest thriller with a slinky, female assassin, doesn't even produce guilty thrills, it's too sullen for that.
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#8
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"JUST GO WITH IT"
Directed by Dennis Dugan
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Not sure if Brooklyn Decker could look any better, but her film debut in this misguided romantic triangle couldn't have been in service of a more toxic affair. The fact that Sandler expects us to buy that his character would send both she and Jennifer Aniston into a fit of jealous hijinks is perhaps the best joke in the film. 
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#7
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"HORRIBLE BOSSES"
Directed by Seth Gordon
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Mean-spirited, misogynistic and terribly one-note, "Horrible Bosses" brought significant pedigree with its mix of young up-and-comers and wily veterans, yet the result - a series of misadventures surrounding the proposed deaths of their workplace bullies - was a shrill shreik of nonsense. 
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#6
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"THE ROOMMATE"
Directed by Christian E. Christiansen
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I don't know what was more humorous, the film's curious, derivative interpretation of what appear to be thrills or its otherworldly portrait of freshmen supposedly in art school. Either way, this laughable CW version of "Single White Female" takes a shoddily riveting 90's thriller and not only makes it arid and dim, it makes it worst of all, dull.
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#5
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"KABOOM"
Directed by Greg Araki
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Among the many films this year which either potently or haltingly set their principle story against the backdrop of the impending apocalypse, Greg Araki's "Kaboom" was the most uselessly realized. A poxy science-fiction mystery set in the middle of a sexual revolution amongst college students, the film is as ineptly executed as it was conceived.
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#4
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"WATER FOR ELEPHANTS"
Directed by Francis Lawrence
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Sara Gruen's bestseller took to the screen earlier this year in Francis Lawrence's glossy, passionless adaptation, a circus melodrama that's so baselessly unromantic and prosaic that it exposes Gruen's novel as the animal activist propaganda that it is. 
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#3
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"THE CONSPIRATOR"
Directed by Robert Redford
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Fatally rudimentary, Robert Redford's historical drama "The Conspirator" has a dusty, musty odor that permeates both visually and dramatically, nestling this Civil War-era tale of injustice surrounding the assassination of President Lincoln somewhere between old-hat and a corpse. 
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#2
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"REAL STEEL"
Directed by Shawn Levy
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Although Shawn Levy's blue-eyed cheek-pinch of a film attempts to make clever juxtapositions between human and machine, I always found its conceit - a sentimental father-son drama set in the world of robot boxing - rather bizarre (a feat the film's inconsistent futureworld does little to squelch). That being said, the biggest transgression against the film is its blubbery, overpowering sentimentality. "I want you to fight for me. That's all I ever wanted." Oh boy.  
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#1
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"BATTLE: LOS ANGELES"
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman
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 There wasn't a tougher sit this year than Jonathan Liebesman's soldiers-in-distress alien invasion actioner "Battle: Los Angeles". Derivative grunts-in-the-trenches action scenes are one thing, but the film's atrocious emphasis on characterization and its loutish emotional confrontations are truly unforgivable.

Thoughts on "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2011)

Without question, David Fincher's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is a much more accomplished, taut and ornamented adaptation of Steig Larsson's runaway bestseller than that wretched Swedish-language adaptation of a few years ago. 
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Anyone claiming differently is either someone I don't like or cinematically inept. Fincher's film is carefully composed, meticulously arranged and accented, and the performances around the horn (including that of the film's composers, the impeccable duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) are significant improvements. 
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The only question that arises is whether masterful compositions and flawless filmmaking can completely mask what a terribly ugly, boilerplate novel Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is, creating a fascinating disconnect, disparity between construct and material. 
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Boorishly violent and clumsily plotted, even Fincher can't hide the fact that the climax of the novel's bass-line murder mystery (or hell, the majority of the second-half of the film) feels like, at times, a CBS procedural. 
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Yet, like the true filmmaker that he is, Fincher turns this second or third-rate boilerplate stuff into something that is (although flawed) undoubtedly a work of his own. From the opening credits (which frankly, probably belonged in another film) it's clear that this is his show to run, and run with it he does - at least as far as he could go. [B-]

Thoughts on "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" (2011)

The production design on Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows", from the costume department to the art direction to Hans Zimmer's now-familiar score is, I must say, first-rate stuff - eye-popping, transportive, even soothing in its period detail, the sawdust in the air, the splintering of wood, the slush of mud in the street, etc.
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But beyond the film's rapturous facade, its welcoming, grimy-yet-lovely recreations, is the sneaking, inevitable feeling of weariness. Weariness in the film's aimless set-pieces, its over-plotting, its bloated runtime, its mumbling, shuffling gape from scene-to-scene, from clue-to-clue. 
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And in some way I almost respect and acknowledge Ritchie and his team for keeping the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle formula of slow clue accumulation followed by after-the-fact exposition and a climactic resolution, discovery and explanation of these facts, but after two films, the only resounding feeling to be gained from these middling, half-curious action-mystery hybrids is one of faint exhaustion. 
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I'm partly blaming the film's writers, who fail to justify their unruly length and roundabout storytelling and partly blaming Ritchie, who, although bizarrely flexing his slow-motion, camera-mount muscles during a second-half treeline escape, fails to wring tension or humor out of scenes that should otherwise bring nothing but. [C+]

Thoughts on "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" (2011)

Brad Bird's "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" is such a feat of high-tech globe-trotting spy-movie extravagance that it takes nearly the majority of the film's running time to reveal itself as a frivolous, hoary nuclear arms showdown. (Among the film's drawbacks, convolution is certainly not among them.) 
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Not that most - included myself - are complaining, because the kind of propulsive, glossy, high-wire stuff that this film is selling is delivered with minimum pretense and maximum exuberance. Trust me, one glance at a decidedly spry 49 year-old Tom Cruise clinging to the side of the Burj Khalifa (a 160-story skyscraper in Dubai) and frankly, you'll be willing to forgive its shortcomings.
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And this level of exemplary agility - the jaw-dropping stunt-work and the nerve and frequency of which it's on display - is more admirable and more intoxicating than anything seen this year in cinema's girth of mega-budgeted live-action behemoths. In fact, the first 90 minutes of the film work so well that you can almost overlook the rote, perfunctory and borderline-satirical action-climax that proceeds them. 
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But Cruise, whose wattage as a significant on-screen draw seems dimmer (at least in this country) with each passing day, nevertheless proves (in a way far more convincing than last summer's flimsy "Knight and Day") that when it comes to these kinds of physical, charismatic, suave action roles, nobody does it better - cue Carly Simon. [B]

Thoughts on "Shame" (2011)

I'm not entirely sold on Steve McQueen's "Shame", but this immaculately cold and detached portrait of a Manhattan sex addict is a real work of art. Every frame of this film appears calculated and carefully composed, as if every second was a still photograph hanging in a gallery, each contributing to a collective theme. 
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I'm not sure that McQueen isn't exaggerating considerably at times here (especially in the opening and closing scenes), but overall, the film paints an emotionally convincing portrait, not only of sex addiction, but of any unspecified addictive behavior - the need to be alone, the feeling of being trapped, cutting off ties with loved ones, the inability to communicate, etc. 
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Michael Fassbender, who can literally do no wrong at this point, is predictably sensational (as is his co-star Carey Mulligan), who along with McQueen, create moments of staggering clarity, which makes a few keys missteps all the more tougher to swallow. [B+]

The Playlist's Best Scores of 2011

I look forward to this list every year. The Playlist, a movie blog with a deceiving background as a music-in-movies specialty, released their list of the best scores/soundtracks of the year. Some are quite unsurprising ("Drive", "Attack the Block"), while others are delightful, less-than-expected inclusions.
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I personally don't think it gets much better than Cliff Martinez's stunning work on "Contagion", and kudos to Steven Soderbergh for allowing his pulsating, monotone electronic work provide the backbone to his chilling disease control procedural. 
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And I love the inclusion of Alex Turner's (of the Arctic Monkeys) work on "Submarine". Lovely acoustic tunes.