I've been catching up on some 2011 movies I've missed:
I quite liked
Drive, even if Carey Mulligan is far too good to be wasted in roles like this. But Gosling and Brooks are excellent, and I love the deceptively slow-cooking feel of it - the bastard lovechild of Michael Mann and Jim Jarmusch. Violent without ever being cartoonish, calm without ever being safe, dreamlike with intense flashes into nightmare... Liked it a lot, actually.
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Dogtooth is the sort of ultra-bleak/black comedy that brings to mind early Dogme stuff; A mother and father have kept their three children locked in the house their entire life, systematically cleansing their language of every reference to something in the outside world, protecting them from everything up to and including their own individuality and adulthood... ending up with three 20-something gradeschoolers, who are polite, respectful, and utterly psychotic. All of it shot almost like a home movie, with long takes, odd angles, uncomfortable silences, no music. At turns hilarious and disturbing, even if your milage will probably vary a lot on exactly what it wants to say.
Soderbergh's
Contagion is one of the most serious disaster movies I've ever seen - trying to give a realistic depiction of how a world-wide epidemic might play out in 2011, with people dying by the millions and conspiracy theories (anti-vaxxers won't like this movie) brewing everywhere while the people trying to solve it are actually, lo and behold, trying to do the best they can under impossible circumstances. Doesn't quite manage to walk that thin line between focusing on the characters and focusing on the worldwide disaster, but does it better than most movies I've seen in the same vein, and the camera and the actors do a fine job of covering when the script occasionally falls short.
Hesher seems to want to be
My Life As A Dog meets
Beavis And Butthead; young boy on the poorer side of a midwest town effectively loses both parents when his mother dies in a car crash and his father crawls into depression, but instead gets - very much against his will - a would-be big brother in the form of Hesher, a violent, potsmoking metalhead who likes to set fire to things. Promising premise, nice cast (Rainn Wilson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Natalie Portman, Piper Laurie), but the script doesn't really know where to go, stumbling between comedy and drama before betting everything on a typical heartwarming indie ending that almost works.
Meek's Cutoff is what you call an anti-western. How anti, exactly? It's shot in 4:3, specifically to make the open plains look like a claustrophobic trap rather than a wide-open field of dreams. A small wagon train heading west in 1845 take up with a lone tracker, who probably has no idea where he's leading them, but is happy to scare them with tales of bloodthirsty injuns. So there they are, lost in the desert, water running out, paranoia rising, the Men taking charge for no other reason than the fact that they're Men, only knowing they have to keep going
somewhere... Very slow and meditative, possibly too slow and meditative for most. Recommended to fans of
Dead Man, such as myself.
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