Rest of the best
A year-end movie list always ends up being imperfect because it cannot make room for so many notable films that get left out of a top ten count. 
I thought it only fair, then, to talk about the other deserving movies in this follow-up column that includes the new December releases that came out only after everyone’s top ten lists had been published. Of the four just out blockbusters, the new Mission Impossible and Tintin are good fun. MI4 returns to brilliant form, and fans of Herge can’t ask for a better Tintin adaptation. David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is satisfying even if you have seen the Swedish original.
Spielberg’s Warhorse disappoints: it’s flat and unmoving and pales before Carroll Ballard’s beautiful The Black Stallion, which still remains the most poetic movie about a boy and a horse ever made. Spielberg should take a few lessons from Ballard about composition, lyricism, light and real tears.
Though the above four were left out of most year-end lists, none of them still make the grade — and so, even if they had been factored in, it’s unlikely any of them would top a best list (though I do feel a little partial to the grandly entertaining Tintin, in which Snowy has the most believable and lovable dog in cinema; all this tells me Spielberg should stick to matinee fare and cut out the sentimental Oscar dramas out of his CV). The three really noteworthy 2011 films that I missed mentioning in my earlier best of the year column are Take Shelter, an eerie, offbeat thriller, Lars Von Trier’s end of the world meditation, Melancholia, and the Iranian film sweeping all the critics’ best list: Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, a story of marriage in contemporary Iran. I’m yet to see any of these movies, but going by how they have impressed the film community around the world, I feel compelled to include them.
For me, personally, the most interesting movie of the year arrived at the tail-end: A Dangerous Method by David Cronenberg. A movie about Freud and Jung, their rivalry, and their separate breakthroughs in psychoanalytic methods. A Dangerous Method is about nothing less than the discovery of the unconscious mind, and the birth of psychoanalysis. Cronenberg directs this play-turned-into-a-movie-of-ideas with precision and passion. Set in Vienna and Zurich, and based faithfully on historical records of letters and journals, the film is centered on a female patient named Sabina Spielrein that Jung and Freud treated (read: sexually shared). Freud is played by Viggo Mortensen, Jung by the new and fast rising young star, Michael Fassbender, and Spielrein by Keira Knightly.
Driven by hysteria, Sabina checks into the Burghölzli Clinic where Jung is practicing. In the middle of her treatment, she declares that she too wishes to become a psychoanalyst. Jung and Sabina begin an affair. When problems arise, she goes to Freud. In his care, she offers her theories of the sex and death instincts. Freud is compelled to agree with her, and regards her with new respect and admiration. For something so heavy with dialogue and so cerebral in tone, A Dangerous Method is arousing and thrilling because it is about the eroticisation of ideas.
One of the biggest commercial and critical success of 2011 was an unusual film experiment: The Artist, a black and white silent film. Set in Hollywood in 1927, it is the story of a silent movie superstar suddenly faced with extinction: sound has just been invented, exposing his rather thick French accent. Inspired no doubt by Singing in the Rain where an adoring audience found out after the arrival of sound in cinema that their beloved silent movie era star had a squeaky voice! The Artist is charming and funny and the retro silent movie gimmick works nicely.
Paranormal Activity 3 deserves a special mention. As a sequel following a sequel, it didn’t qualify in most critics’ list, and this is a pity because it worked so effectively. I thought the second installment failed because it was too reticent and low key — promising something really scary around the corner, but not delivering. No.3 does both: eerily evokes and suggests the supernatural, and when you can’t wait in suspense any longer, makes you jump with fright. This is one horror franchise I’d like to see continuing.
For a lack of space in the last column, I could only mention in passing an unexpected favourite: Tarsem Singh’s The Immortals, a glorious and ravishing retelling of a Greek tale. About three years ago I chanced on The Fall, Tarsem’s second and most acclaimed film. (The first is The Cell). A friend and I were going through a pile of DVDs we hadn’t watched, and picked on The Fall for something offbeat to see. Fifteen minutes into the movie and we were stunned, and at the end, we were moved to admit that neither of us had seen anything as visually ravishing as Tarsem’s one of a kind movie. We later learned that when Tarsem proposed the movie, none of the big studios dared make it.
Tarsem believed in it so much that he raised most of the money himself. I kept checking the Net after this for news about his next project (Tarsem was the director who made the R.E.M ‘Losing My Religion’ video) but came up with nothing, and eventually forgot to update myself. And so it is with sweet surprise that I came across his new movie earlier this year. It had mostly picked up mixed reviews (critics idiotically kept comparing it to 300, an obnoxious racist blockbuster if I ever saw one) but yet again, just half an hour into the movie convinced me it was quite special. Yes, it wasn’t up there with The Fall, but it was still spellbinding and unlike any other Hollywood mythological epic. The ideas were so enchanting and what’s more, were executed enchantingly.
Tarsem’s The Immortals is better than any Hollywood epic I’ve seen in several years, and once again, I can’t wait to see what this visionary poet of the cinema will do next.
