There will be no sandbox Detrius 2011 thread.

Lot of true-blue detritus showing up in people's top 10s this year. Crix feeling comfortable with the action this year -- Fast Five, Source Code, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

I liked both Source Code and Apes, and neither is close to my top 20 now; fallout from the bounty of foreign/doc stuff that ran in NY this year.

Apes is probably gonna manage my as-of-December-31st top 10.

I watch The Help tonight to see if it's as racist/stupid as our colleagues claim.

"action" scene

Yeah, it is, let me know if you've seen a better one this year.

I was joking along the same lines as ALS there, as I only just now caught it. (It's good, though a lot more ... um, "even" than I've come to expect from Spielberg movies as of late. People probably won't be arguing much over this one.)

I gotcha. Frankly, the ordinariness of the plot bummed me out.

Just hit Eject after 55 minutes of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Egad.

I'm as perplexed by the massive backlash against that one as Mike D'A is over the backlash to (the truly awful) Martha Marcy Mae Marlene.

In other words, isn't the narrator supposed to be somewhat unreliable? The flashbacks all seem, to me, compromised by the fact that they're emanating from a self-blaming person committing active self-harm.

Not that I'd expect people who aren't frequently on the razor's edge of being in that psychological state to understand.

I was in the same boat as most of the backlashers on Kevin until I considered the use of perspective, esp. taking the last scene into consideration. I got to ask Ramsay and Swinton about that at a Q&A and they confirmed yr reading. (I just got my screener for that one and I'm eager for a rewatch.)

I think the key to the whole movie is noting not just the acceptance of damnation that Tilda shows to those Jehovah's Witnesses, but the fact that's she's downright gleeful about it.

I just thought Ed G was otm on the poisonous Alan Ballism of it all. Yechhhh.

Just hit Eject after 55 minutes of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Egad.

word, this was one of those things that i kinda just wanted to leave after five minutes in the cinema.

cool that you got to catch tilda at the cinema, simon, she always comes across v interesting to me. i love that essay she wrote to her child about film.

just as an indulgent aside, regarding that essay, i think i read it in fairly close proximity to catching kevin & felt it served in part as a weirdly apposite noose or lens through which to view/indict it:

How I long for documentary, in resistance - for unpowdered faces and unmeasured tread - for the emotionally undemonstrative family scene - for a struggle for unreachable words, for the open or even unhappy ending? The occasionally dropped shoe off the heel, the jiggle to readjust; the occasionally cracked egg; the mess of milk spilt. The concept of a loss for words. For a State of Cinema - as the state of grace that it affords us - in which nothing much happens but all things are possible, even inarticulacy, even failure, even mess...

how thunderingly linear & pointed & loaded & directional kevin was frustrated me & sorta limited the occasions on which one might have had some kind of emotional link w/the characters, to me. like even the scene in which the kid seemed to display some sort of momentary contrary-to-plot complicated response to TS was inevitably flipped to further contribute to its movement.

I don't care that the reason for the one-dimensional sledgehammer approach was that we were in Mom's head! I WANTED OUT.

Nonfans really beating Kevin with the MJ stick, as in Gleiberman's "Niranda July directs The Omen."

with that, Brody's #1 is The Future:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2011/12/richard-brody-the-best-in-film.html

Oy, now there's a movie I never want to see again.

I thought "it didn't make me want to kill everyone" was a thumbs-up!

No, clearly I like movies that advocate killing everyone.

Got a We Were There screener. Let's see if John Waters thinks maybe I should be dead.

jeez i just saw shame, i can't believe mcqueen made such a bad film! awful. it reminded me of home alone in its depth.,

the tagline should have been HEY IT'S THE NINETIES

I hope they used SWV in all the sex scenes.

sexy wintergreen vaseline?

Man, I am seeing a bunch of mediocrities that aren't coming close to my top 20. The Artist might be entertaining if you've never seen a silent film (IT'S NOT ONE, btw) or Vertigo.

god, 'the future' was so awful and pointless

Ides of March - kind of nothing
Sleeping Beauty - too obscure
Weekend - pretty amazing
Putty Hill - really liked it a lot more than I thought I would
Attack the Block - good fun!

oh yeah, and

The Future - fuck off with this shit

Pretty much on the same page with all 5 that I saw from those 6. (Unless you didn't mean the Catherine Breillat Sleeping Beauty.)

encouraged by this wave of hate for The Future

new Almodovar is minor and kinda fucked up

btw you can find a renegade ILXor in the S&S poll if you look closely.

and now I sit down to Contagion.

(Unless you didn't mean the Catherine Breillat Sleeping Beauty.

I meant the Julia Leigh one, though I guess my opinion of Breillat's would be about the same - maybe less so.

ugh I didn't like the Almodovar, and it seems like people are really overstating how fucked up it is. (this might be a by-product of covering a big genre-film fest every year.) Struck me as really plodding and weirdly boring considering the subject matter.

but then I didn't think too much of the last two either, so, as ever, ymmv.

i thought broken embraces was total trash but liked this one pretty well. because i was engrossed, maybe, & it felt like as good a delivery on his premise as we were promised.

I've never liked Banderas much when he has to kinda act.

geez Contagion was pretty good! cept for the parts that reminded me of Traffic's weak points, like some of what Jude Law was doing.

yeah I liked Contagion. I like that it was basically an elaborate reearch piece disguised as a blockbuster. also, y'know, Paltrow brain.

*research

Bleh -- the new Almodovar.

well, I'm done. For now.

Best thing I saw all day was the 30-minute climactic samurai battle in Miike's 13 Assassins, the busiest, bloodiest, muddiest ever. The rest of it is professional classicism.

The director's cut (2.5 hrs) of that was a fest highlight earlier this year.

Think I'm going to blow off the pile in favor of the first episode of Fanny & Alexander.

13 Assassins was good.

In my one poll I might vote for Brad Pitt and Michelle Williams... for other movies.

http://www.bostonfilmcritics.org/content/current-winners

a music award for The Artist! Cannibalizing Vertigo pays off.

bravura best actress pick from LA critics: Yun Jung-hee, Poetry

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2011/12/lafca_is_delibe.php

YES!

Poetry is at the moment my film of the year.

ugh on Christopher Plummer, who looks like a shoe-in for a nod now.

racist/xenophobic assholes predictably complaining

xp