Tahar Rahim is So Alpha

This week has been wild with excellent movie news and today's getting off to another excellent start with the word that Raw and Titane director Julia Ducournau has lined up her next movie and it will star our boyfriend Tahar Rahim! It's to be called Alpha and it's described as the director's "most personal, profound work yet" but that's it, that's all they're giving us. Oh and it will co-star actress Golshifteh Farahani, who was in Jim Jarmusch's Paterson with Adam Driver and the Extraction movies with Chris Hemsworth and most importantly of all she was in Asghar Farhadi's fantastic 2009 film About Elly -- if you've never seen that one seek it out immediately. Farahani and Rahim have that in common -- he starred in Farhadi's film The Past, which was also wonderful. If you're gonna cast your movie casting it with Farhadi alumni ain't a bad way to go!

And Then A Hero Comes Along

I think this is the last big thing I'll have for you before dropping head-long into Sundance coverage for the next two weeks -- my review of Asghar Farhadi's latest film A Hero has gone up at Pajiba this afternoon! Go on over and read it here. Very good movie, per usual with Fardhadi, truly a master. The film is available on Amazon Prime this Friday, so you've got no excuses not to watch it. Not having Prime isn't a real excuse, because that particular Borg has swallowed every one of us up long ago, I know it. 

Just because here are four more photos of A HERO star Amir Jadidi pic.twitter.com/HDwZzZocqS

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) January 20, 2022

Anyway this is probably a good moment to mention the whole Sundance thing -- I'm off for a full week starting tomorrow as I'll be nestled up on my couch with five or so movies from Virtual Sundance per every damned delightful day of that. I will be reviewing things for both Pajiba and The Film Experience, and I hope to link to said reviews from here, but I make no promises -- you can definitely keep up with me on Twitter at least, and whatever I don't link to between now and the end of Sundance I will definitely round-up when I am back at my desk next Friday. I wrote up a list of movies I'm most looking forward to a few weeks back right here. Very excited for my second virtual trip to Utah -- stay tuned!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

A Separation (2011)

Nader: What is wrong is wrong, 

no matter who said it or where it's written.

I don't know why I had today written down today specifically as the 10th anniversary of Asghar Farhadi's masterpiece A Separation -- today is the 10th anniversary of its screening at Berlinale but that wasn't even the first festival premiere, it was the film's second, and it's not like I wind my clock by what Berlin does. (No offense, Berlin! I've always wanted to visit, and maybe take a Fassbinder tour!) 

Anyway I'd already started this post by the time I realized what I was celebrating so let's just run with it -- Happy 10, sort of, A Separation! Here is my brief review of the film from January of 2012, when I actually saw the movie, nearly a year after its Berlinale premiere. Anyway I saw it for the masterpiece it is right off the bat, so that's nice. Go Farhadi! Excited to see he's got a new movie called A Hero in post right now -- 2021, like every year, could use a new Farhadi.

Good Morning, World

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I haven't watched Jacques Audiard's film A Prophet with Tahar Rahim here in maybe ten years -- today it's ten year anniversary here in the U.S. but now that I think about it I actually think I saw it kind of late. I think I saw it on DVD when it came out. Anyway I never wrote a review, but I did give Tahar Rahim acting honors in that year's prizes, so I knew what was up. Any big fans of A Prophet? It's a truly great film, my memory banks tell me. (See more of Tahar in it, gratuitously gif-wise I mean, right here.) Audiard's gone on to make some of my favorite movies of the decade -- Rust and Bone and Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers, all great stuff. I wonder what's next for Jacques? 

Rahim's career on the other hand has been a little weird -- the thing he did right after A Prophet was play that mud-spackled so-called Seal Prince in The Eagle with Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell's weird-ass homoerotic slave love story; Rahim was probably the best thing about that movie, save the homoeroticism, but then I didn't see him again until Asghar Farhadi's film The Past (briefly reviewed here) a few years later. Since then it's been even more spotty (I did like his horror film called Daguerrotype, reviewed here) but I think this year might be a big one for him -- he's got Damien Chazelle's musical-set TV series The Eddy coming soon, which sounds interesting. It's about time somebody tap into this potential. Hit the jump for one more NFSW gif from this sequence...

Good Morning, World

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A happy 44th birthday today to Iranian actor Shahab Hosseini, who can currently be seen at a theater near some of you in The Salesman, the new film from A Separation director Asghar Farhadi. He even won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for the movie, and he is very very good indeed. I just reviewed this movie last week - read the review right here. If you don't follow me on Twitter you missed a co-exoration:

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PS another reason to see The Salesman
-- Shahab Hosseini is a super sexy beast pic.twitter.com/XRSXs3MF0C

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) January 27, 2017

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And obviously that's why we're here this morning.That said, good luck finding much more erotically charged out of Shahab than this Flashdance picture of him here:

I am somewhat blindly assuming this is a cultural thing -- but if anybody wants to correct my American ignorance please do -- that it's difficult to find even so much as a shirtless picture of this respected actor. Thinking back through the films of Farhadi and Abbas Kiarostami, aka the only Iranian directors whose work I have regularly gotten my eyes onto, I can't think of much if anything in the way of beefcake or the beefcake adjacent. What are the cultural norms regarding male beauty there? Anybody have any insight?

Strut & Fret Your Hour Upon the Stage

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In the first act of a well-made horror film - or hell, even in a shittily-made horror film, only more ploddingly so - the camera will always pan to The Tell, or more likely plural The Tells, aka the stuff that will become important later on in the movie when we are fighting war with The Killer. 

For some reason the first example that came to mind was Claire working in her great big glass greenhouse in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (maybe because I'd love to be watching The Hand That Rocks the Cradle right now) -- the location and its glassy glass-ness is established so when it comes raining down on Julianne Moore later on we're not confused, like, "Why oh why is the sky raining glass on Julianne Moore? She won an Oscar! Finally, anyway, after way too long of a wait. What a world!!! Glass on her!"

Another example - Claire has her asthma. God they love pushing her asthma in that movie. Inhalers are practically side-billed with Ernie Hudson in that movie. So when Peyton steals Claire's inhaler you're all - "The Asthma! Riiiiight." (Sidenote: I clearly have really got to watch The Hand That Rocks the Cradle soon.) 

These are the bombs under the table that Alfred Hitchcock talked about in his interview with Francois Truffaut - the movie will show you a gun (or, you know, a bomb under a table) in the first act so the audience is sitting there the whole movie thinking, at the very least in the back of their head while they're mostly distracted by all the movie stars being sexy meanwhile, "When is that gun (or bomb) gonna reappear anyway?" And then bang bang! And we laugh and have a good time and go home and eat and go to bed, living life and taking names.

People play with these Tells, of course - Hitch mastered 'em so much that he'd introduce them (think of the money in Psycho) as a sleight of hand to yank out from under us later. When Marion gets murdered in Psycho he slowly pans away from her dead body to the money sitting there and we're all, "Wait a second! The movie spent all this time setting up the money! What about the cockadoodie money???" And then Anthony Perkins comes in and tosses the money in the car trunk and sinks it into the muck because the money didn't mean a gosh darn thing - what mattered was we were thinking about the money while darker machinations were at work.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi is proving himself a master of these dark machinations. We watch his characters swat aside and ignore all of The Tells - the signs that Shit Ain't Right and It Ain't Getting Righter. His movies (see also About Elly and A Separation and The Past - no seriously you need to see all of these movies if you have not, immediately) are unbearably tense because his camera shows us what his characters cannot, or refuse to, see, and his camera says "Awwww hell no."

Usually his Tells are more of the emotional or political sort than the physical, the practical - like instead of an asthma inhaler Farhadi has in its place Smothering Religious Extremism, or whatever. But the effect is the same. We can't catch our breath!

Farhadi's new brilliant nightmare of a film The Salesman actually uses more of the practical physical signifiers than I remember his earlier movies using - here in The Salesman when Rana and Emad, the married couple at the center of the film, move into a new apartment it's because their previous one literally crumbled apart around them, the foundation giving way and enormous cracks shattering the plaster walls and glass windows. (Strangely this was the same kind of thematic intrusion into the real world that ruptured the other Iranian movie I have seen in the past year, the very fine horror flick Under the Shadow.)

Anyway that doesn't bode well for our couple. And later on when a climactic scene is set in the ruins of the old apartment, lined with cracks, well, you'd be forgiven for thinking of Julianne Moore at that moment. But there are lots of other prop and set based signals to Rana and Emad that they need to open their damn eyes and see the psychological serial killer stalking their peace -- there's the locked room full of the previous tenant's belongings, there's the bathroom light bursting in its socket all of a sudden, there's the actress having an outburst because her red raincoat (forced onto her by censors) is making a mockery of her hard work.

All of these external forces bear down upon us, one after the other, until we're suffocating - we're splayed out next to Julianne Moore's bloodied serious business lady haircut, out of air and flailing irrevocably as the nanny smirks in her own cold comfort; we're a strange man pawing at his coat pocket for heart pills in a crumbling stairwell. We are a marriage set on fire by circumstances, cruel and unusual and made monstrously, claustrophobically inevitable by every single force working upon and within us, a house of cards perched on a stage table with a a great big stack of dynamite strapped underneath.

Stop Calling Me Mr. Loman

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Howdy, folks! Apologies for the bump in regularly scheduled programming - I forgot to mention I had a screening this morning that had me otherwise. This isn't a review, I'll do that closer to its release in NY and LA on January 27th, I saw The Salesman, the new movie from director Asghar Farhadi, director of A Separation and About Elly and several other flat-out masterpieces, and so should you, See the movie, I mean. But then if you're a serious person about the movies you already knew that. Anyway more on that to come - here's the trailer in case you have not been keeping up:

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Oh and it's Iran's pick for Best Foreign Language Film this year and I think it's probably definitely making the final five, so there's another reason to see it, Oscar Geeks.
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MNPP's 15 Favorite Movies of 2013

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A blessed few of you noticed this and nagged at me last year about the great big bottomless pit that MNPP's annual awards The Golden Trousers (aka The Pantys) fell down - they actually literally fell down, since I fell on some ice and broke my arm in the spring right around the time I'd usually do them making extensive blogging next to impossible for about a month, and then time marched on and yadda yadda I never posted my awards for The Movies of 2013 at all. What a disaster.

Well now we're already behind on doing The Movies of 2014 and I'm afraid this problem's going to exacerbate itself into a gigantic weight on my face, and not the good kind, not the "Chris Evans sitting on me" kind. Just the smothering kind. So I'm just going to post my Top 12 Movies of 2013 right now and finally put 2013 behind me... just in time for mid-2015. I'm so timely! Okay let's do this. I'll even give you three runners-up, bringing us up to my Top 15: Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said, Adam Wingard's You're Next, and Asghar Farhadi's The Past.

And now our Top 12!

12. STOKER 

(Park Chan-wook)

11. CRYSTAL FAIRY AND THE MAGICAL CACTUS 

(Sebastián Silva)

10. STORIES WE TELL 

(Sarah Polley)

9. BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR 

(Abdellatif Kechiche) original review

8. THE BLING RING 

(Sofia Coppola) original review

7. THE ACT OF KILLING 

(Joshua Oppenheimer)

6. THE GREAT BEAUTY 

(Paolo Sorrentino) original review

5. HER 

(Spike Jonze) original review

4. 12 YEARS A SLAVE 

(Steve McQueen) original review

3. SHORT TERM 12 

(Destin Daniel Cretton) original review

2. STRANGER BY THE LAKE 

(Alain Guiraudie) original review

1. FRANCES HA 

(Noah Baumbach) original review

I haven't changed this list at all since I first wrote it up last year; I opened up the document today, scanned through it, and said to myself Yup, that looks right. It was a pretty much a given the moment I saw Frances way way way back the the New York Film Festival in the fall of 2012 that it would be my favorite movie of the year, so head-over-fucking-heels was I from first sight, and honestly my affection for it has probably quadrupled since then. A couple of these movies I should revisit (I would sit down and re-watch The Great Beauty right this second if I could)  but I stand by all of them. Anyway... that's done! Now let's try to get our 2014 Pantys done before 2017 then.

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The 12 Reviews of After Christmas

This has become my mantra as of late with regards to reviews, but I am indeed super behind with these, so I'm going to attempt a mean feat and write up thoughts on a dozen, yes a dozen, as in twelve, movies all in one big ol' opinion dump. I'm gonna work backwards time-wise, from the most recently seen to way back before the holidays. And fun was had by some!

Gloria -- I tweeted a bit while watching this trying to get a fix on who lead actress Paulina García is in Chile because hot damn is she impossible to take your eyes off of on screen. I hope this movie's success, as far as little foreign-language movies about the late-in-life sexual exploits of chipper divorcees go success-wise, gets her into more things that make their way this way. She's a pip. The movie around her's a lovely intimate character study too - keeping itself fixed on a modest point, it unravels endless, previously little-touched-upon dramas.

The Wolf of Wall Street - Oh bollocks. Bollocks to you, Male Pattern Baldness: The Movie. I got home from watching you (after an interminable time in that goddamned theater - see I can swear too! How edgy!) and spent the next two days in bed sick, and I blame you and your screeching, your ball scratching symphony, your love letter to landing strips and the men who punch them. You, Pubic Hair On a Coke Can: The Movie, you sapped my will to exist - not to live, but to exist, in any tense, past and future - I'd rather be wiped off the map. But it stirs up such passion, such conversation, such intestine-sucking moral furor, a bunch of somebodies slavishly devoted to Scorsese say - hey I mentally jerked off to Taxi Driver too, but the bucks, swiped and coke-snorted, stop here - where once we clamored for Tom Cruise to "show us the money," now I just wish somebody would step back and show me the goddamned cocksucking motherfucking point. Oh yes I could write a sentence that's just a bunch of swear words for three pages long too, Marty - standing to the side and snickering knowingly that that's what it is doesn't give it much in the way of purpose or meaning.

The Past - It was only about three-quarters through Farhadi's latest exercise in endlessly interconnected tensions that it dawned on me that I could relax my shoulders up a bit and stop being quite so tense while waiting for the horror to fall - that the breaking point for this story happened as the title says and this is all a walk through its ruins, up to a reconstruction of small sorts. And how. A haunting film, full of grace, or steps towards it at least.

The Spectacular Now -- I get why a lot of people dug on this movie's inversion of all the high school movie tropes, with its slow, reality-based take on How Teenagers Really Behave, but I just don't like watching Miles Teller or Shaileene Woodley enough to get consumed by their miniscule tribulations. They actually both as actors borderline creep me out. While it's safe to say I'd always rather be watching the Brie Larson version of any movie, even ones that don't have Brie Larson in them at all, I'd really have rather watched Brie Larson's character's story here. The Kyle Chandler part is wonderful, though.

The Butler - I wish I appreciated the final products as much as I did that director Lee Daniels somehow keeps getting to make his insanely weird in a very personal to him sort of way movies, but The Butler just kinda sits there for all its Gumpian weirdness. He's kind of beholden to all the seriousness of real world history, I guess - I kind of wish he'd have gone all Tarantino revisionist and had Oprah schtupping JFK or something. But I will give him this - if given the opportunity to frame a handsome man well, Lee Daniels will frame his camera so we can appreciate a man's beauty and not let anything stop him, slight inappropriateness be damned. I mean how damned good did David Oyelowo look in that see-through blue shirt and period slacks getting fire-hosed down?

Byzantium - Surprisingly something! Similar to what Jarmusch has got going on with Only Lovers Left Alive once that sees the light of day (get it - vampires, the light of day, ha ha ugh) in sussing out a reason for us to give a damn about vampires for a quick second again, I liked the way Neil Jordan weasels out a new kind of weirdness for them. And Gemma Arterton rustle up oodles of personality from somewhere - a deep dark cave of pretty, silly metaphor on the side of a mountain perhaps.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug -- Much more fun than the first Hobbit movie - there's actually some momentum and liveliness to it this go around, a sense of purpose that seemed blinked out in the first one, as if everybody was just stumbling around to re-find their footing and justify so very much bloat. I dug the new characters introduced (give or take having to deal with my complicated relationship towards Noted Homosexual Luke Evans), getting back together with Legolas was a trip, and that bobbing for barrels battle-scene was pretty eye-popping. But it all pales in comparison to the titular dragon, which was just a fucking phenomenal thing to behold in IMAX 3D - watching him boom around with some epic voice-work from Benedict Cumberbatch was the best spectacle this side of Gravity I saw in theaters all year. And a heart-stopping final moment that's up there beside the ending of Catching Fire for best give-me-that-sequel-right-this-second cliffhangers of the year.

Open Grave -- I really should remember more about a movie starring two of the top contenders for the sexiest foreign men of middle age calendar I should be photographing right this second - Sharlto Copley and Thomas Kretschmann, that is - especially only a couple of weeks after seeing it, but man this one's just flown the brain coop. A vaguely Cube meets Triangle whiff remains, with a dose of zombie essence sprinkled liberally on top, but not really nearly as good as either of those two terrifically cornball genre entertainments. From what I do recall, Open Grave - funny enough given its name! - kind of smothers itself with self-seriousness. Loosen up, buddy! There's fun in your onion-peel of a concept that you don't seem to be seeing.

I Give It A Year -- Opinions seem sharp on this one with it getting some love and some vitriol at the end of the year, but I was pretty much in the former camp - it gets goopy at times when it oughta be sharper, but any movie that has Anna Faris delivering molestation zingers is gonna be good by me. (See also: Observe and Report.) Also good by me: Rose Byrne, and Rafe Spall's penis. We were meant to be, really.

Kick-Ass 2 -- In an unlikely last minute twist that rivals me digging a Michael Bay movie this year, I will set aside my to-the-death grudge-match with whatsherface and type out her name - my name is Jason Adams and I kinda liked a Chloe Moretz movie. And not just any, either! I feel a little nuts about it - am I gonna get stoned for saying that I actually enjoyed this sequel? People seemed to really not like it; maybe I just went into it so prepared for scathing - I hated hated hated the original one - or maybe I just appreciated how very much of it kept Aaron Johnson in his spectacularly tight jumpsuit and his spectacularly tight assets prominently framed. Who knows? Maybe I have softened. We'll see when the Carrie remake comes out on DVD what happens then - perhaps 2014 really is a new year. (Ha ha right.)

All the Light in the Sky -- If you're like me (and I hope to all that's good that you're spared that suffering) then without being entirely conscious of it you've been holding your breath for years waiting for a nice little ninety-minutes of Jane Adams getting let loose to dig in deep with something worthy of her delicate charm. This is that! Small in a way that's reminding me, only because of juxtaposition probably, of Gloria, All the Light in the Sky is the ninety-minutes of Jane Adams getting let loose, in her delicate charming way, that we've been waiting to see. If you're not like me and, heaven forbid, you're so far immune to Jane's charms, this could maybe change your mind too, because while totally her, it's sort of unlike what she's been given to play around with before. Anyway, she's great, be like me, like her.

Labor Day -- I really have no idea what anybody was trying to do with this movie. Kate WInslet, I love you, but no. Peach pies just won't solve all the world's ills, no matter how stiff and hyper-masculine (yes sensitive!) the manly muscles that knead 'em. It's really just all so ridiculous (and borderline, or maybe past borderline, offensive) I couldn't find an in.

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I Am Link

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--- Devil May Care - The great great great 2010 Korean thriller I Saw the Devil, which was all over my end-of-the-year awards that year, is getting an American remake, says The Playlist. Yeah good luck with that, guys. No Byung-hun Lee equals flop!

--- New Past - Over at The Film Experience Amir got to talk to Iranian director Asghar Farhadi! I'm holding off on reading it until after I see The Past (probably not til next week, sigh), but this man's certified brilliant from all I've seen so far.

--- Lil Wizard - JK Rowling is working on a play that will tell the story of Harry Potter before any of the books, when he was a wee little orphan. I guess his early years with the Dorsleys living under the stairs then? Well that sounds totally depressing.

--- I Love Lex - I wrote up a few thoughts yesterday over at The Film Experience about the news that Joaquin Phoenix's name is being tossed out to play the villain in the Superman Vs. Batman movie, which everybody thinks is gonna be Lex Luthor. Post-Her I am pro-Joaquin, so it's complicated.

--- And Speaking of Her, here's an interview with Spike Jonze about the making of that movie, which is out in limited release right this very second oh my god why aren't I sitting in a theater watching Her right now you guys?

--- Frances On Down - Tis the time of year for Top Tens, and so I direct you to our pal Joe Reid's, because Joe is awesome, full stop. I love pretty much everything on his list, even if I think my final list when I get to it literally months from now (you know how I roll) will probably look pretty different. This was a good year, you guys! Also, Joe made a late change to his list, and so here he talks about the act of list-making.

--- Mutant Pride - Let's hope they can work their magic again - Bryan Singer's bringing back the team from the best X-Men movie by far X2, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, to write the next X-Men movie. Dougherty made Trick r' Treat, so he wins obviously.

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I Am Link

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--- Billy Smash - Slash/Film has some never-before-seen concept art for Hulks through the years that never got made, and the pièce de résistance is that shot of Billy Crudup there to the left (click to embiggen), who almost played the role in Ang Lee's movie, in the purple pants and standing alongside his jolly green giant sidekick.
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--- Heroes & Angels - Some "Joss Whedon's new TV show!" news to report - S.H.I.E.L.D. has gotten a new name, but instead of making it less cumbersome to type it's still got all those letters and periods and now it's got more words added on - now it's going to be called Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which they're saying makes it clearer what the shows about to non-geeks, which is ridiculous but whatever. I mean now's it's just cluttered. People would have figured out what the show was about once they looked at it for five seconds - did anybody know what a "Beavis" was once upon a time? I rest my case. Anyway there's more news at that link, including who's who and an idea of a plot, and also this great news - Gunn from Angel will be on it! Whoo!
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--- God Men - When I mentioned last week that Kellan Lutz is going to play Hercules for director Renny Harlin I totally forgot that The Rock is also making a Hercules movie with Brett Ratner - thankfully Nat did not and he takes on the suddenly popular strong man with some lovely pictures and a poll.

--- Thirteen Stuff - Also of significance over at The Film Experience, Nat gives us the presumptive release dates for all the movies that could get Oscar play (and some that probably won't) in 2013 - there is a lot of promising shit ahead, yo. I hope this year's as good as last year. And while I'm at it, Nat also took on the Carrie remake trailer, about which he and I are so on the same wavelength, which feels weird when it comes to horror!

--- Psycho Cannibal - Speaking of, over at Stale Popcorn Glenn tackles not just that Carrie trailer but also the bloodiest of genres as it stands on the television right now with a look at Hannibal and Bates Motel. He and I do not agree on the former, but I am starting to like the latter the further in we get. I've always wanted to like Vera Farmiga more than I ever do - she's totally devoted to making genre stories when she really probably doesn't need to, which I applaud and think is awesome, but she still kinda bugs me. But I'm digging what she's doing on Bates.

--- Fast Boys - I haven't watched this trailer yet and I'm sure if Chris Hemsworth takes his top off in it you can expecet to hear back from me upon it but here's the first trailer for Rush, that period race car driver movie he's in from director Ron Howard (blech). It co-stars Daniel Bruhl (not blech).

--- Fancy Boys - And speaking of trailers that I haven't watched yet here's a first real trailer for Steven Soderbergh's HBO movie Behind the Candelabra, the Liberace bio-pic with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. Again, once I watch it if there's any good gratuity (we mustn't forget that Cheyenne Jackson is in this) you'll be hearing back from me, no worries.

--- Iran's Best - Since I'm on a roll with this here's a third trailer I haven't watched yet! The new movie from A Separation director Asghar Farhadi is called The Past and it stars The Artist's Bérénice Bejo and A Prophet's brilliant Tahar Rahim and it's out in France in May (no word on when we'll see it) and The Playlist has the trailer. I watched Farhadi's 2009 film About Elly this weekend, and I will hopefully have something to say about that later so stay tuned.

--- Blood Rain - You obviously shouldn't watch this until you've seen the film, but here's twenty minutes of behind-the-scenes footage from the Evil Dead remake, with spoilers galore. What rhymes with galore? Gore. Indeed. Oh and I will most certainly be talking about this movie in a bit.

--- Monster Queen - I tweeted my bafflement about this over the weekend when I heard but here it is proper - Sally Hawkins has joined the ever-weirder cast of the latest Godzilla movie, alongside Aaron Johnson and Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen and Juliette Binoche. Monsters director Gareth Edwards is directing, and apparently he is somebody really good actors want to work with, so cool. I wanna see a Godzilla movie worth my time and theirs!
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TGT11: The Great Movies #10-1

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The 2011 Pantys are halfway over already! I hope everyone's been enjoying the wandering nonsensery. You can read what I had to say on the first half of this list of my favorite movies of the year, number twenty through number eleven, right at this link, but here's a simple list of them:

20. Margaret

19. Bridesmaids

18. 13 Assassins

17. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

16. Contagion

15. Weekend

14. The Muppets

13. Hanna

12. Beginners

11. The Future

And sans further ado, let us do MY TOP TEN!

Hugo (directed by Martin Scorsese - I don't think Hugo was even going to make this list a month ago. And then it came on DVD and I popped it in while folding my laundry and before I knew it I was laying on top of my laundry crying. Out of all the movies here it benefitted the most from me taking forever to make this list because time gave me, uh, time to fall more and more in love with it. And love it I do, like Marty loves Georges. An illicit and sexy amore! (original review)

Drive (directed by Nicholas Winding Refn) -- Okay I was kidding about the sexy Hugo thing, but I'll be goshdarned if Drive doesn't make me feel all hot under the collar. Right from the start with those Miami Vice-ready titles, the dark browns and reds and blacks undulating around Ryan Gosling's steady be-satined presence. Christina Hendricks in teensy hooves prancing across a pawn shop parking lot. Just describing moments from this movie turns me on. This shit is style to the Nth - half the world wants to be Drive and the other half wants to fuck it. (original review)

Poetry (directed by Chang-dong Lee) -- I have piles and piles of unwatched movies surrounding me at every given moment to the point where it's gotten exhausting to even choose what to watch. So sometimes you watch Soapdish for a 35th time. Or sometimes you snatch something at random, and sometimes it's awful, but sometimes half an hour later you find yourself quite unexpectedly sitting on your couch having entirely lost the outside world. I only knew that actress Jeong-hie Yun was supposed to give a good performance in Poetry - I did not know that come the end credits I was going to be so affected I'd have to sit in the dark for a couple of hours feeling shattered, emotionally spent. 

Young Adult (directed by Jason Reitman) -- Everything I wanted it to be from that time when the first trailer sent me into Charlize nirvana, and more. There's not much I sympathize more with than an unsympathetic hero - the more difficult the better, I say. Mavis, you are an MVP. Brutal and brutally funny, Reitman's film understands the beast and wedges us right on in there upending the entire romantic comedy genre in the process, turning its cutesy tropes into curdled horrors. (original review)

Shame (directed by Steve McQueen) -- I find myself facing a self-imagined wall of disbelieving boogeymen when I try to express just how deeply this film messed with me - "You only like it because of Fassy's dick being all over the place!" I hear them scream back at me. And lord knows I certainly didn't mind that. But much to my embarrassment since I was in public, I could not stop shaking after the movie finished. I found it to be a finely wrought expression of an endless emotional barrens - the fetid alleys and antiseptic lobbies of New York as hellish a purgatory as any ever dreamed. I know this New York - it's as real as any other expression of this place as I have seen. (original review)

Martha Marcy May Marlene (directed by Sean Durkin) -- I can't even wrap my head around the fact that this was Durkin's first film. It is so assured in every aspect - the visuals enrich the performances and they all plunk right down perfect tonally - that I'm a little bit in awe of him. What lucky folk we are to see what he'll come up with next. (original review)

Take Shelter (directed by Jeff Nichols) -- Another reason The Pantys got delayed this year, actually one of the main reasons, was I really wanted to see this movie a second time. I got curious comments over the past few months, wondering what my grade was for it since I hadn't reviewed it and it sat in my sidebar ungraded. So let it be said at last - this is a great film, a deeply troubling look into a mind coming unmoored, with Michael Shannon's best yet performance. There are moments herein that ripped me right up.

Certified Copy (directed by Abbas Kiarostami) -- I think Take Shelter and Certified Copy actually share some common ground, in that they both become a mind-game about what it is we're actually seeing happen. But how can I not give the slightest of edges to my most favorite of actresses Juliette Binoche giving what might be my favorite performance of hers ever?  By the time she's lounging in the half-light of that hotel attic I've just gone silly with renewed obsession. This film is so nimble and strange, following its own untrammeled path that it sucks me right in time and again, and just with words, glorious words, and they way these actors sell them. I love it so much I don't ever want any answers - I just want to roll the questions around on my tongue forever.

A Seperation (directed by Asghar Farhadi) -- Whereas Hugo moved upwards with time, I had a real struggle with my top two films switching back and forth and a month ago they would have been reversed I have no doubt. Technically I think A Seperation is a more perfectly made film - it really is as far as I'm concerned an indisputable masterpiece, not a single wrong step, and it was one of those where you can sense it from the opening credits, with those passports being xeroxed beside the titles. (original review) But there was one movie that just wrapped it's clammy hands a little bit deeper inside of me that wouldn't let go...

Melancholia (directed by Lars Von Trier) -- Other movies this year shook me, and other ones wowed me with their visuals and their performances, lord knows I've been rambling about them for three days now. But none coalesced into quite the perfect storm like Lars Von Trier's masterpiece of righteous depression did. To just think about this film literally gives me goosebumps, and think about it I have - it's hollowed out a little cave inside my head ever since I saw it in October. A little teepee of absently-yet-artfully-arranged sticks to save me from those times when it feels like the air is getting sucked right off the surface of the Earth. It's the end of the world, and I feel fucking fantastic. (original review)

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