Marlene Dietrich is one of the most talented, intelligent, and iconic actors of all time, and not just because everyone from Madeline Kahn to Madonna and Suzanne Vega has invoked her image with staggering results. The ferocious screen icon and cabaret star is the very definition of a vision , a cutting and defiant actress with gusto and guts galore. On the occasion of her 110th birthday, let’s commemorate her finest work. Though she garnered an Oscar nod for her turn in 1930′s Morocco , there can be no mistaking Dietrich’s amazing, beguiling work in 1957′s Witness for the Prosecution . As the mysterious wife of an accused murderer (Tyrone Power, in his last role), Dietrich tears up the screen with dramatic testimonies, cryptic declarations, and the icy conviction of a Teutonic high priestess. Here’s the climactic scene, wherein she reveals her entire plans to the dumbfounded Wilfred Robards (Charles Laughton). What’s your favorite Marlene moment? Follow Louis Virtel on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Who’s excited for 2012? I said, Who’s excited for 2012? Oh. Well, it’s coming whether you want it or not, and Mayan doomsday predictions and a U.S. presidential election aside, there is stuff to look forward to. Get your calendars ready and read on for 20 dates worth saving at the movies alone. Jan. 6 : The Devil Inside becomes the millionth exorcist movie to open in theaters, thus netting a $3 million cash prize and earning the producers and 20 of their closest friends a free party and Dave and Buster’s. Jan. 15 : In a craven, ruinous grab for ratings, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association invites a suicide bomber to host the Golden Globe Awards. Jan. 20 : Coriolanus makes its official post-Oscar-qualifying debut in theaters. Take Stephanie and Louis and my words for it: You really should see it. Feb. 10 : Watch a Michael Caine paycheck role come alive as you’ve never seen it before — in the eye-popping 3-D family adventure Journey 2: The Mysterious Island . Feb. 26 : “Ziss ees for you, Uggie”: Jean Dujardin dedicates his Best Actor prize at the 84th Academy Awards to his criminally underrecognized canine co-star . March 2 : Holy shit, they really made Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters ? With Jeremy Renner, Gemma Arterton and Famke Janssen? Wow. OK. Anyway, this opens today. March 9 : Disney commences counting how much money it lost on the ultra expensive, roundly buzzless John Carter . March 23 : Fangirl civil war erupts as The Hunger Games makes its first incursion against the creaky, sparkly Twilight empire. The rest of us, faced only with the sad counterprogramming spectacle of A Thousand Words , flee to art-house refugee camps nationwide. April 27 : The crackerjack comic duo of Jason Segel and Emily Blunt Alison Brie and Jacki Weaver co-star in The Five-Year Engagement June 22 — Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter winds up a distressing month of predatorily-titled blockbusters including Snow White and the Huntsman , Jack the Giant Killer and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted . Which is fine, because you’re going to be watching the awesome-looking , June 8-opening Prometheus for the fifth time this weekend, anyway. July 20 — The Dark Knight Rises opens! To quote Bane, the film’s excited villain: “ Fghrlkdjhafskdfbldkbsj .” July 27 : Tyler Perry’s The Marriage Counselor reaches theaters, finally exposing audiences everywhere to the subtle dramatic charms of Kim Kardashian. I smell a Verge ! Or maybe it’s just Valtrex. Aug. 17 : Boldly leaping to the front of the Oscar-season line, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association moves up its awards-voting date to Aug. 20 after seeing The Expendables 2 . Sept. 28 : The year of Taylor Kitsch — previously comprising John Carter and Battleship — concludes with the only one of his films any grown-ass adult wants to actually see: The Oliver Stone pot-cartel thriller Savages , co-starring Beinicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, Uma Thurman, John Travolta, Blake Lively and Emile Hirsch. Oct. 12 : From Kevin James and his Zookeeper director Frank Coraci comes the teacher-turned-MMA moonlighter comedy Here Comes the Boom . I only bring it up because Jesus will weep so copiously that you might start filling and stacking sandbags now . Oct. 19 : Ryan Gosling. Emma Stone. Josh Brolin. Sean Penn. Gangster Squad . That is all. Nov. 16 : The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 concludes the billion-dollar franchise, instantly prompting millions of prodigious sobbing binges. But enough about Taylor Lautner’s management team. Nov. 21 : The visionary filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron returns with Gravity , which draws a robust opening-weekend crowd with its promise of showing Sandra Bullock shot into space. Dec. 19 : Kathryn Bigelow’s as-yet-unnamed Osama bin Laden movie — working title: Banned in Pakistan — reaches theaters. Dec. 25 : A very DiCaprio Christmas gets underway with Django Unchained and The Great Gatsby . Enjoy 2012, everyone! Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
I found 2011 to be a great, overstuffed year in film, though the sweeping trend of nostalgia that peaked during this awards season left me a little cold. Hugo , War Horse , The Artist , The Adventures of Tintin , The Help , even the self-aware looking back of Midnight in Paris — when it’s been such a turbulent 12 months beyond the movies, the comfort of evoking the past, especially the cinephilic past, is understandable, particularly with attendance down once again. But the features I really loved tended to be more prickly, vital affairs, about tragedy and life messily, stubbornly going on in its aftermath — ones that reminded us that film can not only be a great escape, but can also engage and reflect the outside world. 10. Shame Steve McQueen’s sophomore effort took flack from some who found it moralizing in its portrayal of sex addiction, but it’s not a film about a condition, it’s a film about damage. Michael Fassbender plays a man who’s left a traumatic childhood behind and has shored himself up in the city that never sleeps with an immaculate condo and a high-powered job that almost hide his underlying desperation and his inability to connect or open up to anyone on anything other than a physical level. It’s one of the loneliest portraits of urban living I’ve ever seen. 9. Warrior The neglected blockbuster of our Occupy Wall Street era, Warrior drapes Rocky trappings over characters and settings more immediate than you’d ever expect at a multiplex. Its two brothers, in what should have been star-making turns from Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, head to the cage after taking beatings elsewhere — one’s left the Marines on less than ideal terms after the death of colleague, the other’s upside down on his mortgage and unable to support his family on a teacher’s salary. Add to that the fact that the tournament in which they both compete was started by a former Wall Street type putting up the money to see “who the toughest man on the planet is,” and you have a rousing, violent fight film with a seriously bittersweet edge. 8. The Arbor Andrea Dunbar grew up in run-down Bradford council estates, drank heavily, had three kids by different fathers, wrote a trio of acclaimed plays about the life she knew and died at age 29. Clio Barnard’s documentary about the playwright brilliantly stages its interviews as their own performance, lip-synched by actors in the settings in which Dunbar and her children grew up and lived, and offering a piercing glimpse of how tragedy is taken up — her second work Rita, Sue and Bob Too was made into a film directed by Alan Clarke — and passed down, to her heroin-addicted eldest Lorraine. 7. Certified Copy It’s never clear which part of Juliette Binoche’s antiques dealer and William Shimell’s writer’s relationship is the pretense — are they strangers who play at being married, or a married couple playing at meeting as strangers? The thesis of Shimell’s book may or may not line up with that of Abbas Kiarostami’s film — the relationship between art and reproduction, original and copy — but the figuring out, and the slippery nature of the connection the pair on screen, is delicious. 6. The Tree of Life It’s a film about a family that stretches from the beginning of the universe to a possible vision of the afterlife — if it may not be wholly lovable, its ambition alone should earn respect. But it’s the evocative immersion on childhood that lingered with me after Terrence Malick’s more grandiose imagery had faded, the tactile sense of that Texas street, the house, the endless possibility, uncertainty and wonder of being young and new to the world, the flashes of memory — the offering of a drink to a prisoner, the caress of a baby’s foot, the goading of a younger sibling to touch a light socket — that break up the more iconic moments with startling specificity. 5. Margaret Messy, vivid and wonderful, Kenneth Lonergan’s difficult production has become a critics’ cause, in part because of how tough it’s been to actually see. It’s worth the trouble, and in some ways better because of the long wait in reaching the few theaters it did — it now looks less like a movie about post-9/11 New York and more one about the city in all of its anonymous, chaotic glory, about a teenage girl’s first horrific brush with mortality and about the strange places that life leads us. 4. Take Shelter Few films have attempted to capture our age of anxiety like Jeff Nichols’s drama, about catastrophic dreams that may be caused by mental illness, but seem just as much to spring from the sense of uncertainty with which we’ve all been infected. Anchored by a stunning performance from Michael Shannon, Take Shelter presents a look at quiet breakdown spurred on by a desire to protect one’s loved ones, and pairs it with frightening scenes of monstrous storms and shadowy attackers that rival any of this year’s horror movies. 3. Into the Abyss Trust Werner Herzog to find stories so strange and moving in a terrible small-town triple murder over an automobile. The Texas of this film is recognizable, but it’s also near-mythic — a place of universally broken families, sudden violence, prison reunions and hard-earned redemption. Taken alone, the interviews with Melyssa Burkett or Jared Tolbert would be enough to make the film. As part of a kaleidoscope of suffering and hope, they’re highlights in something dark, funny and expressly moving about the persistence of human nature in the face of loss. 2. A Separation A marriage falls apart over the decision of whether or not to leave Iran in Asghar Farhadi’s magnificent drama, and encompasses in its disintegration a snapshot of the fractured nation that’s so nuanced, empathetic and complex it quickens the heart. Certainly the smartest film of the year, both as a self-contained work and in the respect it offers the audience, A Separation is unadorned by a score or flashy camera tricks — it doesn’t need them. 1. Melancholia The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference, and in Lars von Trier’s film it’s the awesome force of Kirsten Dunst’s depression-fueled disinterest that exudes a gravitational drag on everyone around here even before the arrival of the destructive planet of the title. Before the breathtaking apocalyptic imagery appears — the object looming closer in the sky, the static sparking from fingertips — Melancholia is already a devastating look at an illness that leaves you unable to connect to what life has to offer, even on an extravagant wedding day that seems to compress half a lifetime into a night. But it’s that the film turns to offer a sympathetic eye to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s anxious sibling in the second half that makes it great, and that gives it a soul. As she struggles to hold everything together in the face of approaching disaster, even Dunst’s depressive is moved to offer her a conciliatory gesture as the world ends. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The key to a list of moviegoing disappointments is the element of expectation: I am prepared to say I watched more suicidally bad films in 2011 than in any other year in my life; to be merely disappointed suggests a certain relativity. For example, I found The Ides of March to be a tremendous let down, I think partly because my hopes were inflated. George Clooney’s high political tragedy is perfectly cast, and that early, loaded exchange of glances between rival campaign managers Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti goes off like a starter pistol. But The Ides of March is like that — it keeps threatening to start something interesting, right up to the point that it just… ends. I had the same issue with Good Night and Good Luck , another major disappointment and another film that played as if it were perpetually about to begin . The pleasures of Ryan Gosling’s performance as the fledgling spinmeister feel stingy — why tell us that he’s known to rock the microphone when we paid for the show? And Clooney’s Teflon governor is an empty, well-cut overcoat — perhaps the most glaring evidence of both the character and the director’s failure is that his one big scene with his golden boy star is the least exciting one in the movie. Given the improbable, stadium-rolling wave of appreciation that greeted The Artist , I expected much more than the mannered silent that Michel Hazanavicius and co. delivered. A mediocre movie with a couple of bright moments, The Artist also had too little to say about its chosen themes. Given the challenge of holding our attention across a silent film landscape, the music felt either too sparse or too sentimentally obvious, and the droopy patches felt twice as long as they needed to. The story of a silent film star left behind by the transition to sound was unconvincing when it needed to be clear and dolorous when it might have been lyrical. Similarly cranky friends have fixated on the issue of George Valentin’s (Jean Dujardin) refusal to speak on film—was it the accent? A principled stance? The fact that they were at all unsure points out a massive gap in the center of The Artist , one its title sews up too neatly. Any close follower of Werner Herzog’s career should know better than to bring expectations brewed from his last film into the next. Along with an auteurist consistency of preoccupations, Herzog shares with Woody Allen a prodigious output of wildly variable quality. The titles of this year’s Herzogian harvest — the sublime Cave of Forgotten Dreams and the slapdash Into the Abyss — seem interchangeable, but the latter felt to me like Achilles Herzog, a hot check of a documentary passed off as the real thing. Researched and assembled under extreme time constraints, Into the Abyss is an inquiry into the death penalty that gets by on artful narrative juxtapositions and moments of profound, almost invasive intimacy with its interview subjects. The reach for effect often feels more craven than considered, and the crime at the heart of the film is eventually clouded over for convenience. When a topic and a director — and a title! — of this magnitude collide, the viewer wants the Earth to shimmy; instead we had to settle for the Richter equivalent of a quick freehand sketch. I’ve watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy twice now and I still couldn’t give you a basic plot summary. Having felt like a failure after the first viewing, after the second I’m prepared to push the better part of the blame onto director Tomas Alfredson and his Let the Right One In editor Dino Jonsäter. It’s a film that seems designed for le Carré obsessives, which means the rest of us may have to sit through all 57 hours of the 1979 BBC production just to get the facts straight. It’s a shame, because the performances and the production design knocked me out, but of all the ways to sex up a retro-procedural, I’d put mincing it into incomprehensibility second to casting Young Jeezy as George Smiley. With The Iron Lady Meryl Streep re-stamps her all-access passport to human history, and proves once again that the only thing she can’t seem to defy are superlative clichés. There are no words left to describe the kind of work Streep does — even those who dismiss her as a mere impressionist have to admit that her Margaret Thatcher is uncanny in its near-total self-effacement. But the film built around that performance is in some sense designed to disappoint: The biopic is an inefficient delivery system for dramatic tension or even, paradoxically, the human arc of a lifetime. It’s the movie equivalent of a greatest hits package, and while I’m not crazy about the appropriation of the still-living Thatcher’s dementia as a dramatic device, for me the more broadly director Phyllida Lloyd played her hand — ruining every successful visual cue by repeating it three times, leaping from one familiar milestone to the next — the farther we move away from the potential of Streep’s performance and the uneven richness of Thatcher’s story, into the straight flush of political iconography. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The key to a list of moviegoing disappointments is the element of expectation: I am prepared to say I watched more suicidally bad films in 2011 than in any other year in my life; to be merely disappointed suggests a certain relativity. For example, I found The Ides of March to be a tremendous let down, I think partly because my hopes were inflated. George Clooney’s high political tragedy is perfectly cast, and that early, loaded exchange of glances between rival campaign managers Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti goes off like a starter pistol. But The Ides of March is like that — it keeps threatening to start something interesting, right up to the point that it just… ends. I had the same issue with Good Night and Good Luck , another major disappointment and another film that played as if it were perpetually about to begin . The pleasures of Ryan Gosling’s performance as the fledgling spinmeister feel stingy — why tell us that he’s known to rock the microphone when we paid for the show? And Clooney’s Teflon governor is an empty, well-cut overcoat — perhaps the most glaring evidence of both the character and the director’s failure is that his one big scene with his golden boy star is the least exciting one in the movie. Given the improbable, stadium-rolling wave of appreciation that greeted The Artist , I expected much more than the mannered silent that Michel Hazanavicius and co. delivered. A mediocre movie with a couple of bright moments, The Artist also had too little to say about its chosen themes. Given the challenge of holding our attention across a silent film landscape, the music felt either too sparse or too sentimentally obvious, and the droopy patches felt twice as long as they needed to. The story of a silent film star left behind by the transition to sound was unconvincing when it needed to be clear and dolorous when it might have been lyrical. Similarly cranky friends have fixated on the issue of George Valentin’s (Jean Dujardin) refusal to speak on film—was it the accent? A principled stance? The fact that they were at all unsure points out a massive gap in the center of The Artist , one its title sews up too neatly. Any close follower of Werner Herzog’s career should know better than to bring expectations brewed from his last film into the next. Along with an auteurist consistency of preoccupations, Herzog shares with Woody Allen a prodigious output of wildly variable quality. The titles of this year’s Herzogian harvest — the sublime Cave of Forgotten Dreams and the slapdash Into the Abyss — seem interchangeable, but the latter felt to me like Achilles Herzog, a hot check of a documentary passed off as the real thing. Researched and assembled under extreme time constraints, Into the Abyss is an inquiry into the death penalty that gets by on artful narrative juxtapositions and moments of profound, almost invasive intimacy with its interview subjects. The reach for effect often feels more craven than considered, and the crime at the heart of the film is eventually clouded over for convenience. When a topic and a director — and a title! — of this magnitude collide, the viewer wants the Earth to shimmy; instead we had to settle for the Richter equivalent of a quick freehand sketch. I’ve watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy twice now and I still couldn’t give you a basic plot summary. Having felt like a failure after the first viewing, after the second I’m prepared to push the better part of the blame onto director Tomas Alfredson and his Let the Right One In editor Dino Jonsäter. It’s a film that seems designed for le Carré obsessives, which means the rest of us may have to sit through all 57 hours of the 1979 BBC production just to get the facts straight. It’s a shame, because the performances and the production design knocked me out, but of all the ways to sex up a retro-procedural, I’d put mincing it into incomprehensibility second to casting Young Jeezy as George Smiley. With The Iron Lady Meryl Streep re-stamps her all-access passport to human history, and proves once again that the only thing she can’t seem to defy are superlative clichés. There are no words left to describe the kind of work Streep does — even those who dismiss her as a mere impressionist have to admit that her Margaret Thatcher is uncanny in its near-total self-effacement. But the film built around that performance is in some sense designed to disappoint: The biopic is an inefficient delivery system for dramatic tension or even, paradoxically, the human arc of a lifetime. It’s the movie equivalent of a greatest hits package, and while I’m not crazy about the appropriation of the still-living Thatcher’s dementia as a dramatic device, for me the more broadly director Phyllida Lloyd played her hand — ruining every successful visual cue by repeating it three times, leaping from one familiar milestone to the next — the farther we move away from the potential of Streep’s performance and the uneven richness of Thatcher’s story, into the straight flush of political iconography. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Yeah, I can’t get over Rooney Mara’s Dragon Tattoo getup. It’s so… dated? Swedish? Remarkably cliche? And yet entrancing? Anyway, it has alternative connotations, and that brings me to Movieline’s Christmas indulgence of the day: alternative women covers of yuletide classics. I couldn’t find an embed of Liz Phair’s recent “Baby It’s Cold Outside” cover with the band Wheat, please consider that the unofficial sixth entry on this list. Take us to the Grinch, Aimee Mann! The glorious and still-somehow-underrated Aimee Mann’s superior Christmas disc One More Drifter in the Snow contains a bunch of amazing covers, but the gnarliest one has got to be “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” Super droll, winking, and cool. As always for the Oscar-nominated Mann. Sinead O’Connor, perhaps the single most poignant voice of the past 25 years, has covered “Ode to Billie Joe,””Chiquitita,” and “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” with great success, but I’m particularly partial to her version of “Silent Night.” It’s the perfect forum for her childlike, yet commanding tone. Kate Bush. There is no other Kate Bush. In this ’79 Christmas special, she woos you with that ethereal voice that trilled about the plight of Cathy and Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.” Now that every hipster in sight waits eagerly for her new releases, acquaint yourself with the kooky wraith we first met on The Kick Inside . Tori Amos is an obvious heir to Kate Bush’s legacy of cooing vulnerability and mystical lyrics, but her cover skills are pretty singular. Check out her live versions of “Father Figure” and “Like a Prayer” for maximum intimacy, but this Christmas jam is also sufficient. Patti Smith’s brief cover of “White Christmas” is lovely. Since you presumably already know her covers of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Rolling in the Deep,” you’ll be refreshed to find tiny version of Irving Berlin’s classic.
A slumpy month at the box office showed little sign of abating on Friday, when the holdovers Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol , Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked fought off a trio of high-octane newcomers — including the abysmally performing We Bought a Zoo — to lead the early holiday-weekend competition. Your Friday Box Office is here. 1. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL : $9,740,000 ($42,175,000) 2. SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS : $6,785,000 ($65,539,000) 3. ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS: CHIPWRECKED : $5,400,000 ($42,340,000) 4. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO : $4,600,000 ($12,976,000) 5. THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN : $3,525,000 ($11,532,000) 6. WE BOUGHT A ZOO : $3,000,000 (new) [Figures via Box Office Mojo ]
Traditionally a “guilty pleasure” is something you’d be embarrassed for the world to know you secretly enjoyed or for your Facebook friends to see you clicked on, but you know what? Around here we embrace the bad-to-godawful movies we love, and besides; what the heck does it even mean to like something ironically, you insufferable hipster? Toss away your pretentious hat, sit down in the circle of trust, take a deep breath, and join Movieline in unabashedly celebrating the inane, misguided, off-the-mark, and downright B-A-D but nevertheless shamelessly entertaining movies of the year – the Top 9 Not-So-Guilty Pleasures of 2011 . Because we all love some terrible things, don’t we? 9. Nick Nolte in Zookeeper Maybe I just cribbed from everyone’s Worst Movies of 2011 list. Maybe Nick Nolte’s work as a TGI Friday’s-loving gorilla named Bernie in Zookeeper eclipses his shattering work in Warrior on the basis of its cringe-worthiness alone. And maybe I feel so bad that poor Nolte had to sing Florida’s “Low” in character as a gorilla opposite Kevin James that it’s endeared me to his scenes. Also: Primates instantly make any movie better. Everybody knows that. 8. The year in Armond White-isms Call for his head all you want, I’ll staunchly defend notorious film critic Armond White (The man who once coined the phrase “abortionhorny” and thought Lady Gaga would make for better Lisbeth Salander casting!) to the end, purely because his reviews are so goddamn entertaining. Add to that the iconoclast take on movies, supported by left-field arguments that are sometimes so crazy they make complete sense, and you’ve got an essential voice in contemporary movie writing. Even if he raved over Adam Sandler in drag; let that be an exception. 7. The Footloose soundtrack I have no fondness for Blake Shelton’s feeble country mimicry of a Kenny Loggins cover, but Movieline’s Louis Virtel was won over by the Footloose remake’s contempo-pop soundtrack of redos. They can’t all be Karen O-Led Zeppelin covers, I suppose. Let’s hear it for the art of pop homage done toe-tappingly well enough? 6. Gerard Depardieu PeeGate At first, it seemed like French acting legend Gerard Depardieu, to quote 2011′s viral sensation the Honey Badger, simply did not give a shit. But unlike the year’s other infamous celebrity incidents (Lars and the Nazi Joke Heard ‘Round the Word, Madonna’s HydrangeaGate), this one boiled down to one man’s humble humanity (and prostate issues). So ridiculous was the tale that Anderson Cooper broke his dashing resolve to giggle through his on-air report, but think of Gerard and embrace his moment of weakness; there’s no shame in acknowledging our fragile human vulnerabilities from time to time. 5. Season of the Witch / Drive Angry / Trespass (AKA A Good Year for Nic Cage) I wouldn’t call it a banner year for Nicolas Cage himself, but it was a great year to be a Nic Cage watcher. He started out 2011 with the medieval gift of silliness that was Season of the Witch , guzzled beer from his enemy’s skull in the genre pic Drive Angry , and (with the other Nic – Nicole Kidman) bequeathed us with Joel Schumacher’s Trespass , a film Movieline’s S.T. VanAirsdale loved, and laughed through, unapologetically. All one big set-up to watch him pee fire! 4. Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family My personal conversion to the church of Tyler Perry happened earlier this year when I found myself rolling in the aisles during Madea’s Big Happy Family . Is Perry’s Madea a cartoonish, hulking hurricane of a woman? Does she reinforce unfortunate cultural stereotypes even as she doles out totally reasonable life advice? All I know is Perry – the performer, the director, the check-cashing media tycoon (and sensitive man of the world) – is some kind of genius to have made an empire out of a wig, a muumuu, and an attitude, one that further allows him a pedestal from which he geniunely consoles and encourages his fans. Hallelujer, indeed. 3. Lonely Island’s “Jack Sparrow” All you need to know, if you don’t already, is that Jorma Taccone, Andy Samberg, and Akiva Shaffer – AKA Lonely Island – wrote an inspired ditty and snared icon of yesteryear Michael Bolton to sing the hook. Only ginormous film fan Michael Bolton turned it into a song about Pirates of the Caribbean , Forrest Gump , and all of his favorite movies — an ode to the cheesy, cliched movies we all love. Instant karaoke classic. 2. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Love it or hate it, the Twilight Saga is what it is. And when Robert Pattinson started chowing down on Kristen Stewart’s pregnant belly in the kooky denouement of Bill Condon’s vampire sequel, shit started getting so, so real. AND THEN THE WOLF GUY FELL FOR THE BABY AND OH MY GOD YES. 1. Abduction Speaking of Twilight , the universe that Stephenie Meyer created inadvertently led, in turn, to my number one most enjoyable film experience of the year: Sitting through the entirety of Abduction . Terrible line readings, second unit typos, Taylor Lautner’s posturing ’80s action-inspired swagger – it was all there, and it was all insanely terrible and great at the same time. Does this border on liking Abduction ironically? Maybe, but I couldn’t help it. Just know this: Every second of feeble-handed acting, directing, and writing held my attention rapt and engaged my senses; I came alive imagining the winding thicket of talent, dollars, and choices that could’ve churned out such a product. Was any of it intentional – was John Singleton just fucking with us all? Probably not, but still; this holiday season give yourself the gift of watching Abduction and soak in the glory of the ultimate Bad Movie We Love of 2011. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
In 2005, when Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published, Walter Kirn, writing in the New York Times Book Review , summed up the book’s “grand ambition” this way: “To take on the most explosive subject available while showing no passion, giving no offense, adopting no point of view and venturing no sentiment more hazardous than that history is sad and brutal and wouldn’t it be nicer if it weren’t.” Kirn couldn’t, at that point, have seen Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation of the book. But with that sentence, he pretty much wrote the review in advance. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tells the story of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a perpetually wan 9-year-old New Yorker struggling with his father’s death in the events of 9/11. Dad Thomas (Tom Hanks, playing a particularly insufferable kind of ultra-reasonable dadness) was a jeweler by trade, but only because he wanted to make a decent life for himself, his wife Linda (an efficient but bloodless Sandra Bullock) and young Oskar. In reality, he was a science-nerd know-it-all type who would send Oskar out on field expeditions to discover new things about the city, and, it turns out, to get him comfortable talking to people. Oskar is a bit awkward in that department — at one point he precociously announces that he was once tested for “Asperger’s Disease,” but that “the results were inconclusive.” But of course. Oskar is obviously traumatized by his father’s death, not least because in the last minutes of his life dad left several increasingly doomy messages on the family’s home answering machine, messages Oskar heard when he was sent home early from school on that fateful day. But he never tells his mother about them; instead, he turns inside himself, trying to hang onto scraps of memories of his father. Until, one day, rooting around in his parents’ closet he finds (and breaks) a vase. Inside is a small envelope, marked with the name “Black” and containing a key. Oskar takes it upon himself to locate every person named Black in the five boroughs, paying each a personal visit (on foot — the subway, along with most other things in the city, makes him anxious). He catalogs these names and visits meticulously, pasting mementos of his search in a scrapbook. He also scratches at his skin, lashes out at his mother, and indulges in a never-ending stream of obnoxious-whiz-kid quips and insights, including a breathless interior monologue about the multitudinous things in New York (people eating, sneakers wrapped around phone lines, and so forth) that give him the heebie-jeebies. Poor little Oskar! Such an adorable, pint-sized heap of neuroses. What better mouthpiece for an author, or a filmmaker, to use as a way of exploring the personal cost of a great communal tragedy. Do you get the idea that Oskar must emerge from his own teeny-tiny personal prison and, yes, embrace the world? Never has the tragedy of 9/11 been made so shrinky-dinked. Daldry has made a career out of taking acclaimed works of literary fiction ( The Hours , The Reader ) and transforming them into snoozy, self-congratulatory, assertively tasteful movies, the equivalent of book clubs that pride themselves on choosing only “quality” books. But he’s outdone himself with Incredibly Close ; there’s something cloistered and cushy about it, as if it were a movie made by Upper East Siders for Upper East Siders (the Park Avenue sort, not the 86th-and-Lex sort). Oskar isn’t supposed to be rich; though it’s not clear what his mother does, his father is a rather modest sort of jeweler. But the family does live in a building with a doorman (played by a gruff, grumpy John Goodman) and a big, clean, well-lit marble lobby — I don’t need to tell you what that kind of real estate generally costs in New York. And when Oskar is let out of school early on that horrific day, he seems to be far enough uptown that that mythical downtown, where all the terrible stuff was happening, really does seem miles away. You may also be interested to note that many of the Blacks Oskar encounters in his investigation are, yes, actually black. (Those would include Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright, playing two people who may or may not hold the answer Oskar is looking for. Their performances are as believable as possible, considering their characters, as written, are practically made of cardboard.) That means Oskar gets experience talking to actual black people , some of them from the lower classes. How wonderful! You can’t buy that sort of education at the Browning School. Mostly, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close isn’t even offensive. It’s too dull and spineless to get much of a rise out of you. Shot by Chris Menges, it does give us a lush, rich, patchwork-style view of New York. But even then, there’s something too novel about the workaday food-cart vendors and pedestrians who people the movie’s universe — it’s all a bit too sparkling, too easy. Alexandre Desplat gives us one of his scribbled-on-a-napkin scores, as opposed to one of his great ones: It’s timid and nice and tiptoeing, a lot like the movie itself. In fact, even though the subject matter is very different, the picture Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close most closely resembles is Peter Jackson’s botched version of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones . Like that movie, it offers a view of childhood that comes from an adult who’s constantly looking over his shoulder, rather than from a real — even a fictitiously real — child. The only bright spot in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Max von Sydow, as a mysterious, and mysteriously mute, older gent who, as Oskar tells us in one of his incessant voiceovers, lived in Dresden during the war and “went through some really bad stuff.” Like, maybe even 9/11 bad. If you’re the kind of moviegoer who ducks when you see an extremely loud metaphor headed your way, you don’t need me to tell you that that one is coming incredibly close. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There are times when too much of a good thing and not enough meet halfway and settle into a comfortable middle ground. That’s the case with Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin , which would be better if it had been made using more traditional animation techniques rather than that performance-capture nonsense and if 3-D weren’t one of its big selling points.
