A Year in Review: 2011 Movies

I'm just not the type of person who can put together a top ten list, or choose a favourite. A perennial fence-sitter, where decisions come slowly, diplomatically and if possible, never at all. My friends and I have touched on the subject a few times, where a movie can be classified as a Top Ten or even a Top Five movie, but truth be told your Top Five could contain thirty movies or more. It's more a classification system, to give you a vague idea of how much one enjoyed a movie. Another little rule of mine that was defined mainly for buying movies, was to never buy (or fall in love with) a movie that is less than a year old. You see, sometimes you take a movie in from the theatre, get home and are just pumped about it. Then you promptly forget about it, until the home release and those precious memories of theatre popcorn, two liters of root beer and a hundred people coughing, sneezing, sniffling all come back. You buy the movie, bring it home and with all those elements gone, you discover that the movie wasn't that hot to begin with.

Somehow, in July of 2010 I decided it would be a great idea to keep track of every movie I saw, which would go really well until the following July, where I inexplicably stopped recording this. I thought it would bring about a couple of interesting tidbits, like how many movies I actually watch in a given year, and also an avenue to remind me what movies were my favourites, making the writing of this type of article that much easier. The answer to the first cannot be said with concrete: from July to July I watched about 130 movies. This year from January to July I watched 77 movies, so it's safe to assume I would watch about twice that in one full calendar year. You would think with those numbers, it would be easy to pick out ten of them. But I won't.

Over the past week we went to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Not the original, European, but the "remake" directed by David Fincher. All I can say, is that Fincher is a genius behind the camera. Best movie of the year? It's very tempting to label it that, and I can see why "Academy" movies come out in December. It's fresh in your mind, but I don't want that to detract from how much I enjoyed the movie. Not really knowing what to expect from it, I went in fairly blank - only knowing that there is some brutal sexual scenes (and there were) and Daniel Craig's pearly blues (which were muted). What I got was an extremely interesting mystery, evenly paced and beautifully acted by everyone involved. The transformation that Mara went through to play the title character is astonishing, and should live on in the history of notable actors to change themselves for a role (she really did get all those piercings).

Really, aside from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, nothing else is coming to mind. I watched Tron: Legacy four or five times, and got into a few classics. I see in my list that I watched The Royal Tenenbaums and gave it a perfect score of ten. 127 Hours scored highly, although that seems like cheating since it came out in 2010. As it is though.

2011 in terms of movies for me, would mark a deluge of forgettable - yet entertaining - sequels and comic book movies. Thor, Captain America, Transformers, and the Harry Potter movies were all standouts, but none really struck a nerve with me. Going a few years down the road will determine how good those films were.

In other movie terms, I did a lot more home viewing. Theatre visits would decrease in the past few months and Netflix usage would skyrocket. In fact, I thank Netflix (and DNS entries) for really getting their act together and making the service more compelling; I've certainly discovered a few hidden gems in there, and look forward to the service more. This year would also see me finally joining the 1080p bandwagon with the purchase of a new plasma set (well, technically two but I'm not going to get into that - I'm an idiot). Blu-Ray prices continue to come down for older movies, and I've taken joy in buying the odd one here and there, although tougher criteria is in place.

So for 2012? There are more comic book movies: The Dark Knight Rises, a remake (?) of the Spider-Man and The Avengers. Ridley Scott's Prometheus, a new Tarantino film and all the sequels you can handle, including a new Men in Black. Let's hope we get some original, compelling stores in there. In the meantime I'll continue to get caught up on everything I've missed. But as for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Highly recommended. If you like movies, you owe it to yourself to see it.