There will be no sandbox Detrius 2011 thread.

He's a very mannered comedic actor who's appeared in a couple of fairly well known UK sitcoms (The IT Crowd being the most prominent). It is very Wes Anderson but it's a little bit nastier than he normally is. The shots of a perpetually gloomy Swansea are quite lovely

I think The IT Crowd has run on US cable, but I've never seen it.

Probably blowing off J Edgar screening (they sent a disc) so I can see A Dangerous Method tonight.

It is very Wes Anderson but it's a little bit nastier than he normally is. The shots of a perpetually gloomy Swansea are quite lovely

Submarine reminded me of what the Youth In Revolt movie should have been. I wish they'd been able to have a genuine 80s soundtrack instead of all the Alex Turner stuff. Noah Taylor & Sally Hawkins both superb as well-drawn parents.

Also features a Pink Floyd reference on a custom van, so it rules.

They actually made a pilot for a US version of The IT Crowd with Ayoade playing the same character. It pretty much sank without trace though

I liked the Alex Turner songs too. I think having a load of period pop songs would have been an Andersonism too far

Perhaps. I imagine that--along with budget restrictions--was part of the reasoning. Though it still bugs me that the dad gives the kid his mix tapes from his own youth to listen to and we hear Alex Turner pretending to be Nick Drake/Cat Stevens/James Taylor etc. instead of the real deal.

submarine was the most generic indie movie possible

for something with absolutely no trace of originality in story, concept, or style, it wasn't that bad - the teen actors were good

http://www.change.org/petitions/fox-searchlight-make-margaret-available-to-us-critics-and-other-pertinent-voting-bodies

that'd be nice, but a lost battle

The best kind.

It's arguably the kind of face value that's a secret to the filmmaker, like Tarantino's racism.

Hmm. I think Mike D'Angelo (who I don't often agree with) has the take that most closely aligns with my own:

Glodell clearly knows these guys are pathetic, in my opinion; that a certain amount of genuine adolescent wish-fulfillment creeps in only lends the film a fascinating tension. Journey from dorky sweetness to epic misogynistic self-pity is abrupt and bracing, beautifully aided by the sulfurous color scheme, ultra-shallow focus and grime-caked lens. Woodrow will now turn into Death Proof's Stuntman Mike.

I did not find the visuals anything beyond "cool" in rather familiar ways.

Liked the Croney! No classic, but worked almost all the way for me. Mortensen a surprisingly menacing daddy Freud. Fassbender's best of the 3 big turns this year.

Don't quite understand all the critical potshots at the twitches/ grimaces of Knightley (who has the toughest role). Maybe disturbed masochists don't squeal and bug out precisely that way, but baseball GMs don't fly to other cities to talk trade, either, and that drew no objections in Moneyball.

Yeah I thought she was really strong, and every single person I saw it with in Colorado thinks I'm nuts.

More Mark Harris spec:

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/37585/oscarmetrics-do-george-clooney-leonardo-dicaprio-and-brad-pitt-need-an-oscar

pretty much "nobody" likes J. Edgar, am I wrong?

just dropping into say fuck submarine, carry on. it was fine & funny & not even really insulted by 'minor-league rushmore', & the perfs were good. but yeah the soundtrack was awful & an awful idea, & its stylisms are good ambassadors for what's wrong with so much of that kind of gimmicky contemporary storytelling style, cf beginners, also; it all blunted the emotional affect of seeing any of the people in the film actually interact.

amy taubin <3d j edgar, fwiw - was almost enticed to go see on her rec

see I even thought most of the screwball-comedy aspects of Beginners played reasonably well, including the dog subtitles. It's not going to make my Top 20, but it probably would have in any of the last three lousy years.

what I meant re the Harris thing was DiCaprio ain't winning awards, is he? xp

Beginners is the equivalent of a drone rocket aimed at an American citizen.

^^ have no idea what this mean but agree 100% emotionally

I just can't even go there, the thing that sorta embodied what was wrong with it to me was the 'dramatic montage' scene of them arguing, either breaking up or reconciling, in the bedroom of a house, cut together w/shots of furrowed brows, angular stances, handed-hips, all set to piano music instead of actual dialogue, an emotional cinema born of sam mendes rather than john cassavetes. like that's what the film was meant to be about, & yet how they would function or communicate or miscommunicate in a relationship was so much less important than just the various compositions of them as pairing, propped in different modes and costumes, meaningful glances that i guess we're expected to just tether to our own and extrapolate outwards from.

there was a lot else about it that was awful: the didactic, bold & exclamatory 'THIS MAN IS THE PRESIDENT' kinda thing - like maybe I just misunderstand it & it wasn't meant to be an emotional film, but these just seemed like attractive, contemporarily appealing irrelevancies to me - as well as just the awful laziness of its dressing; the guy is a graphic designer, who doesn't even manage to be a graphic designer but who we're meant to feel for as he rejects the path of terrible conformity in fulfilling a commission as required.

i don't know i was on a plane recently and someone an aisle away was watching this, & seeing it peripherally & silently kinda renewed my bile for it. the parts w/the father were affecting. but even that kinda just felt like autopilot. i rewatched annie hall not so long ago & i feel like they're probably interesting touchstones for each other - there's such a deep dynamic analysis of the couple in AH, in addition to it being a funny, v varied film. beginners just seemed so slack and unambitious, an attractive-people-sad-romance film.

& in the interests of full disclosure i thought the future kind of a small masterpiece, so there's that

re: Beginners, the Plummer/MacGregor stuff is great, the MacGregor/Laurent stuff is spotty.

The Future didn't make me want to kill everyone around me. Small victories.

Haven't seen Beginners but The Future did make me want to kill everyone around me

it was so good
it was about "how we live now" (i know there is baggage to 'we' as white middle class college educated professionals &c&c&c&c&c&c&c but i still think it spoke for a lot of ppl)
it was so well rooted in routines & behaviours & flaws that i just haven't really seen in any other films

I'm with you, schlump. The movie was phony, mawkish, and hysterical (my review, if you're interested)

I don't agree with your Mendes-Cassavetes binary – Cassa made some hysterical, meretricious movies too!

Soto, just imagine that Beginners stars Cary Grant, Charles Coburn and Michele Morgan.

The Future, is that Miranda July?

Yes, she's married to Beginners guy. Oh to be a fly on the wall

http://0.tqn.com/d/movies/1/0/0/L/X/beginners-photo-goran-visnjic-christopher-plummer.jpg

remember reading & loving yr review when i was pedalling this cynicism on ilx, alfred, i enjoyed yr hostility

i guess i'm just lazily using cassavetes as a byword for that kind of confrontational tracking of conflict approach, of following an arc of tension the way we do seeing a woman under the influence. & invoking sam mendes because the guy could make a link wray biopic & score it with meandering piano slow jams. mills just didn't seem interested in anything other than weary or challenged seeming characters, pictured in various moods.

future is July yeah, & if it offers additional encouragement I wasn't crazy about her prev film, though amusing.

Plummer w/ gay Scout neckerchief. I didn't realize that was Goran Whatshisname til the credits -- I liked that the film didn't hate him even though he's kind of a pinhead.

I believe my current top 3 films of the year ran a total of 6 weeks in NYC. (And two of them I first saw before 2011.)

i am not a great listmaker but was paralysed earlier flicking through s&s & remembering that the portuguese nun was 2011, which makes my top 5, more for effort & singularity than for being solid, but which i enjoyed a lot.

six weeks in nyc doesn't seem terrible tbh ...

Will finally get to Incendies this weekend.

never heard of the portuguese nun , which even sounds like it will never open in NYC. Skolimowski's Essential Killing would be my #1 if VOD-only films were eligible.

Alfred, it seemed real obv to me that Beginners was set in LA, I think even before the "I went to Akbar" line. And do you know many men who came out age 50 or later? CP's performance seemed a fair representation of them to me (notice I did not say "real/istic" cuz fuck that).

The premise didn't offend me – it's slinking away from a situation of real dramatic interest by inserting a chickenshit hetero love story.

Plus, Plummer's been playing post-fifty closeted gay men for decades now; he's the least convincing of good hetero actors.

I also think Goran Visnjhvgc was a fair representation of aesthetically appalling gays, who are everywhere.

Mike Wallace is gay??

I'll be totally cool with Certified Copy running the table like Azealia Banks.

you mean in Indiewire / FC?

I'm not at all sure it will beat out the cosmos and flying Chastain.

I'll be fine with that too.

feeling guilty for skipping out of Incendies & essential killing, now, the latter bc i couldn't quite motivate myself to see something i thought was just gonna be a great performance - hadn't really heard anyone speak of it so highly.

portuguese nun is a v ""bressonian"", ie static, solemn film by french-new-yorker eugene green, who made a few other pics i haven't seen & a third of a film that i maybe even recall you mentioning on ilx morbs?, w/farocki & costa, 'correspondences', which section i liked a lot too (it was about email).

i should maybe try to catch our beloved month of august before the end of the year, also

speaking of clergy, Of Gods and Men would make my list.

yes, likely to at least make my Hon Ments. Too "middlebrow" for some people (ie it's about monks).

ah, I'm not real wild about Eugene Green.

I saw To Die Like a Man at NYFF 2010 but really wasn't impressed tho I like the director.

oh damn yeah that also, i did like it a lot (xp re OG&M) - i guess the argument against it/the competition would be that it feels like there have been v 'wide ranging' films of a similar feel this year, but yeah. there's actually a lil reverent spiritual run of pre-holiday screenings at the cinema, here, feat of gods & men (re: which, btw, has anyone seen the guy's other film?), as well as into great silence, which sounds interesting. still to catch mysteries of lisbon & a couple of other things this year, so maybe this will all get more complicated soon. (i wish this our still life was playing locally).

my top five, vaguely, fwiw, in no order is: the portuguese nun, the future, la quattro volte, archipelago & a separation. of gods & men bubbling under, & i also hope to see something like tron 3d to take the feeling of insularity from my top five. into the abyss, the tree of life, some others bubbling under.

No idea where this will show up (low low budget/promotion), but it's the best gay-themed American film I've seen in a long while:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-11-02/film/in-the-family/

this still leads all documentaries for me:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/petition/5236

you guys liked Weekend?