The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

I did the math. I used the Wikipedia page, I used the movies I’ve reviewed, the reviews I didn’t post, and the movies I watched but didn’t care enough about to review (don’t judge me. I had a lot on my plate when I saw Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Water for Elephants), and everything I saw that was released in 2011. Hitting the counter with one of my most anticipated films of the year, I have seen 100 movies that were released in 2011. And the 100th movie I saw that was a 2011 movie was The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, or just The Adventures of Tintin, if you prefer the North American title (which I don’t, but currently I am in North America, so I’m using that title for this review). And having that be my 100th 2011 film, all I have to say is: good decision-making, me.

Based off of the comics by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), The Adventures of Tintin takes its story from the comics The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham’s Treasure. This mashed (but completely organic) story involves journalist Tintin (mo-cap and voice by Jamie Bell) and his trust dog Snowy who, when paired up with Captain Haddock (mo-cap/voice by Andy Serkis), has to find two more scrolls hidden inside models of the ship Unicorn, as they lead the way to finding the old treasure of the Haddock line, of which our Captain Haddock is the last. The competition for finding the treasure is Sakharine (mo-cap/voice by Daniel Craig), who is trying to restore order with his ancestors as well. And even though I probably said too much right there, I will say no more from that, because much like with many other great films, there are so many little great surprises that will either leave you in stitches or leave you amazed.

The Adventures of Tintin, despite how it was made, was sold as a silly kid’s film. THIS IS NOT A KID’S MOVIE. Just like Hugo this year, The Adventures of Tintin is just a movie that involves kiddy themes, but it is helmed in such an adult and brilliant way. There is a single roughly five-minute adventure scene in here, that is one singular shot. My heart was in my stomach the entire time because this is such a brilliant shot, and even though it is animated, you can see the talent and skill radiating from this scene, and from this entire film. At its heart, The Adventures of Tintin is a pure action adventure film, and very well could be the best adventure since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It sure as heck is a better Indiana Jones film than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
9/10

My Week with Marilyn (2011)

As I said in my review for The Devil Wears Prada, which is actually a completely unrelated movie, Michelle Williams very much deserved the Oscar for Best Actress, which she lost in the 84th ceremony to Meryl Streep. Williams will win it one day, having been nominated for the award two years in a row, but that was not this past year, sadly. But despite the Academy being completely wrong once again (it’s gonna take a lot of right decisions to get me to bury the hatchet on Drive’s snubs and this isn’t helping), this film is still getting a decent amount of traction in the public eye due to its nomination and the public’s infatuation with Marilyn Monroe, which I think is a wonderful thing, because this is the type of movie that film junkies talk about and recommend to others that just sits on the shelf for months without being touched (and yes, this is a thinly veiled saying that those of you who are holding onto my DVD’s and Blu-rays: Watch them, or just give them back. Because I re-watch stuff, especially the stuff good enough to own and recommend, and ya’ll are not helping one bit), and instead, regular normal people are actually going out of their way to see an art house comedy, which is a beautiful thing.

Based off of the memoirs The Prince, The Showgirl, and Me, and My Week with Marilyn, both by Colin Clark, this movie tells the story of Clark’s (Eddie Redmayne, someone who is a perfectly fine actor, but is completely overshadowed in this film) time that he spent fulfilling his dream of working in film, here being the third assistant director for Laurence Oliver’s (Kenneth Branagh) production of Marilyn Monroe’s (Williams) The Prince and the Showgirl, and Clark’s relationship with Monroe, as she begins to open up as a person with Oliver’s cruel direction and the pressure of being Marilyn Monroe, the most important human being on the planet (when you ask someone to say who they thought was the biggest person of the 50s, they will say Marilyn Monroe. Heck, I don’t even know who was the President in the 50s without the help of Wikipedia), and her personal problems with her marriage and just a thousand different shades of pressure. And even though this is a very well-made film, with a great script, sharp direction, and a really good cast (Branagh’s also Oscar-nominated Supporting Actor role is something worth seeing this movie for as well), My Week with Marilyn is truly a film built around Michelle William’s performance as Marilyn Monroe. Granted, it’s a lot of talented people based around Michelle William’s performance as Marilyn Monroe, but it still is that (I’m saving everybody’s time by not typing that a third [and probably fourth or fifth] time around). She is perfect in this film, as she is balancing the tightrope that few actors can pull off of a real person in that it has to seem other than she’s doing an impression. And also with the fact that Williams does not look like Monroe, she has many barriers to cross with her performance, which could have sunken the entire ship. But she walks that tightrope like a champion, and pulls off what is truly the best performance of an American actor or actress this year.

In the end, while it really doesn’t boast the outside barriers it deserves, My Week with Marilyn is a charming, constantly funny, sweet, and honest movie that delves into a small piece of time in the life of an icon, and while it does have a very wonderful performance by Gilderoy Lockhart, the movie deserves to be seen just for William’s performance, which I don’t think I really can go into much more detail without just gushing for a few more paragraphs, but truly: she is perfect in this movie, and she did deserve every single award she was nominated for, and if there are any, any she did not.
8.5/10

ATM (2012)

ATM is actually released in theaters on April 6th, but it was available for a pre-release rental on iTunes, and I had a bus ride with nothing to do, so I decided to watch it. Just keep that in mind that most of my reviews are months or years after the DVD has been released, so this should balance it out a little bit.

Directed by newcomer David Brooks, ATM stars Alice Eve, Brian Geraghty, and Josh Peck (yeah, the other guy from Drake and Josh is in a horror movie now) as three friends who, at about 12 o’clock at night, is forced by Corey (Peck) stop at an ATM to get money for food, much to the chagrin of David (Geraghty), who is trying to have his last chance with Emily (Eve) before she leaves the city. While in the ATM (which in New York is apparently in a phone-booth-like box in the middle of a parking lot), a man in a parka appears outside, standing there ominously. They stay in the booth, just waiting out the creepy guy, but suddenly the entire situation turns fatal when the man kills a passer-by walking his dog. After that, it seems to be standard knowledge that they stay inside of the dang box. The rest of the movie is them conflicting with each other, trying to find ways of getting out alive, and the man trying to flush them out of the booth. Despite the obvious fact that this feels like a very thin premise, and it is, but it is still played out in such a way to where even though it isn’t really that scary, the movie sure as heck is entertaining. I enjoyed watching the dynamics of these people disintegrate, and watching them fight against a guy in a parka with a knife.

Even though the film does have its flaws (thankfully the characters only make one really stupid decision, but they still make it), and the acting can be a little better at times, ATM is a nice little thriller that will surprise you, but it by no means a great terrifying masterpiece, even though it does have a twist ending that would make even the masters like Hitchcock nod in approval.
8/10

Like Crazy (2011)

Writing this review right after writing my review of The Notebook, it feels like I’m working on two different sections of the romantic drama spectrum. Because where The Notebook feels like a story of how romance is supposed to work out, and it has a very sweet look at the perfect American love story. Like Crazy works a little bit differently as a film. Because where The Notebook is a story about love conquering all, Like Crazy is a story about how love actually works in the modern world. The Sundance Film Festival awarded this film the Grand Jury Prize the year it was in, and despite the fact that I’m pretty sure this was the year the fabulous Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil was at the Festival, I’m still very much behind this decision.

Starring Anton Yelchin (someone who I am 100% sure is going to be an A-list actor in a few years’ time if he still is doing wonderful films) and Felicity Jones (whose acting ability is as wonderful in this film, but this is the first thing I’ve seen her in, so it’s still up for grabs), Like Crazy is the tale of Anna and Jacob, two people who meet in college. Anna is a British exchange student, and as she falls in love with Jacob, she decides to overstay her visa so she can spend the summer with him. But when she goes back to Britain for a family engagement, she is banned from re-entering the US for overstaying her previous visa. But with her being gone, their relationship is heavily strained, to the point where they both agree to take up separate romantic relationships, Anna’s with a fellow Britain (?) named Simon (Charlie Bewley) and Jacob’s with one of his co-workers named Sam (Jennifer Lawrence, who is wonderful in this film for five minutes. And also, with her being in two different movies in the same year where she is romantically paired up with Anton Yelchin here and the magnificent The Beaver, the two of them have to be pretty darn good friends at this point). But with later insane complications, involving them having to break it off with their respective significant others and them being forced into a marriage, the entire film just sees two people trying desperately to have their The Notebook and just keep failing.

In the end, even though it does have some script failings (which Jones said the entire thing was improvised…I call bull. This movie was too well-made to be improvised), the movie just feels so painfully real. And that is what I really love about this movie, is how real it feels. It doesn’t feel artificial (most of the time), it just feels real. The two leads work wonders together, and it’s movies like this that give hopeful one-day filmmakers like me the hope that we live on. So kudos, Like Crazy. Kudos.
8.5/10

The Notebook (2004)

The Notebook, based off of the novel of the same name by Nicolas Sparks, was released in 2004. As soon as I was old enough to truly understand movies, it immediately popped up on my radar. And I avoided it for eight years. I ran from this movie like it was the Black Plague. And now, due to the fact that with Drive and Crazy Stupid Love. my hero for 2011 has become Sir Ryan Gosling, I buckled down and watched the movie that made him and the wonderful Rachel McAdams unbearable famous.

Nicolas Sparks, the mastermind behind such evil plots as The Last Song, became famous with this little book, published eight years prior to the movie. He seems to be one of the more famous money-makers behind the relentless pulp novel section, that one very much has to weed through (consisting of romance, supernatural romance, and pointless thriller) to find a decent book (for me today it was A Game of Thrones-I’m very excited). But here, this story follows a modern day elderly man (James Garner) who is reading the story of a notebook to one of his fellow female patients (Gena Rowlands), who is suffering from dementia, to whom the story has a special meaning. The story goes back to the 1940s where a man named Noah (Ryan Gosling) meets and falls in love with a girl named Allie (Rachel McAdams), and the rest of the film chronicles their love, as they fight, recoup, live, love, and do all of this against the class system which is doing its best to pull the poor boy away from the rich girl. With a very classy supporting role by the wonderful James Marsden, the movie, even with its flaws (and God only knows there are many of them), becomes a very nice and enjoyable romance film, one that shows that love does actually conquer a good bit.

The film does have some very cheesy dialogue, there are a good bit of scenes that make you want to slam your head against a door, and that is my main complaint for the film, but the film is shot beautifully, the two leads have wonderful chemistry with one another, and the film retains an underlying sweetness that is essential to every single romantic movie’s success. And that lack of sweetness is something I see far too often in both romantic comedies and dramas, so it’s good to see a movie that just wants to tell a story about a boy and about a girl.
7/10

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Meryl Streep is a brilliant actress. I think that is something we’ve all figured out. I know that she is one of the best working actresses today. And keeping all of that in mind, I think she is still one of the most over-rated actresses working today. She is a wonderful actress, one with a legacy behind and in front of her, but she is put on a pedestal and is portrayed as a goddess. As I am reviewing this, I am watching the fantastic My Week with Marilyn, and personally, I think Michelle Williams completely deserved the Best Actress Oscar, even more than frontrunner Viola Davis for The Help, and yet, Meryl Streep won for The Iron Lady, a movie that barely even existed. But let’s get beyond the actress, we need to see the film that gave her the resurgence in popularity.

Based off of the novel of the same name by Lauren Weisberger, who wrote it based off of her experiences as assistant to Vogue editor-in-chief (and totally crazy) Anna Wintour, the film follows Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway, in what is probably her breakout role) as she tries to break into journalism by being the second assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep, in an Oscar-nominated role), a psychopathic editor-in-chief for Runway, a fictional magazine that apparently possesses all the power in the world. Also helping Andy in her endeavors are Miranda’s first assistant Emily (Emily Blunt) and the art director of the magazine Nigel (Stanley Tucci, who is a giant walking ball of awesome), as they all work together to try to possibly survive in a world where their boss can cost someone $300,000 just by pursing her lips.

While I don’t entirely agree with it, I found a lot of amusement in reading Roger Ebert’s review of this film. He compared the entire film to a series of books that were around when he was a kid, and it was completely fantastic. This film is a bit like that review. You really don’t expect how smart it is, but to the very core of it, there’s just something that withholds it from living to its full potential. There it’s my disagreement with it, here it’s something a little less definable. But still, while The Devil Wears Prada is lacking as a film, as a satire of the fashion industry, it’s a good bit of fun.
7.5/10

Anonymous (2011)

Something very important is to remember when reading my review for Anonymous-I hate Roland Emmerich. I think he’s a pointless filmmaker who makes pointless films for dummies. He has made one film that I have watched and enjoyed, and that film was Independence Day, a film I am scared of re-watching for finding I hate it and my Blu-ray is just taking up empty space now. He has made pointless disaster movie after pointless disaster movie, movies that I just see as big-budgeted script-less globs. The first Emmerich film I ever saw was 2012 when I was eleven. Even then I saw it as dumb, pointless, and stupid. And this is coming from a huge John Cusack fan.

Expanding on the idea that Shakespeare actually never wrote any of his plays, and that it was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the film stars Rhys Ifans (de Vere) and Vanessa Redgrave (Queen Elizabeth I), and was a film that suddenly, a few weeks before its release, was unexpectedly pushed down from 3000 or so screens to a measly 265 in the USA, Canada, and the UK, a number that is much smaller than it looks. The film was re-created with some very good CGI technology that re-created the entire atmosphere of old England. Honestly, the best thing about this film is the atmosphere, how it is created, how the costumes look, and how the performances are, this entire film just feels like old England from the first frame. But then you hear the first lines, and then the plot kicks in. It states that de Vere was the actual writer of the plays, because of the class system that everybody was so deathly afraid of back then (I am so happy I live in the 21st Century), and with the help of Ben Johnson (Sebastian Armesto, who performs as one of the few truly likable characters in the film), puts the plays on an often-drunken actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall). I still really don’t know how Queen Elizabeth fits into the main plot of the story, she really seems to function as a side-plot, but that seems to not be terribly important here.

As both a Shakespeare fan and as a film fan, this movie is just nearly insulting. The film is extremely convoluted in its time-jumping script, and with that, the boring lines that go along with it. And putting aside my personal feelings on how the subject matter lives, what I’m concerned with is how it’s portrayed. Shakespeare is the foundation of how most films today are made, and I will appreciate him forever for that, and seeing him so ignorantly written here seems both ironic and offensive. But really, there’s nothing to be angry about here. There’s nothing to care about here. Anonymous just ends up being a lazy and convoluted drama that had a very good costume design, a very good set design, some good actors, and a script that seemed like someone threw words at a wall and picked out sentences.
3.5/10

Easy A (2010)

The one important thing that I learned from Easy A is that I could watch Emma Stone talk for hours and never get bored. I mean, in any movie she is in, she just bleeds charisma out of her ears. She is easily one of the single most charming people working in modern cinema today, and with The Help, Zombieland, Crazy Stupid Love, and a lot of projects on the horizon, it looks like (to my joy) that she won’t be going away anytime soon. But what is arguably one of the single best works of her acting is Easy A, the movie that got Stone a Golden Globe nod for Best Actress, something that she will win in the future when she finally starts to make movies that are truly the best of the year, and not just good movies where she is the best thing in that movie.

Based off of the novel that you may have read if you ever took a high school literature class, The Scarlet Letter, but doing so in an extremely self-referential way, Easy A is the high-school tale of Olive Penderghast (Stone) who after a fun night of listening to the song “Pocket Full of Sunshine” over and over again, is grilled about it by her friend (Aly Michalka), who was told by Olive that she was going on a date subconsciously. The rational (sometimes the only one in the movie) Olive tries to sway her friend’s interest by telling a little white lie that seems to make her happy-that Olive seemed to have lost a little something over the weekend. Of course, this goes completely out of proportion which sends Olive into a system of being a faked tramp for the losers, something that ends up involving Olive’s parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, who will now go into the modern movie awesome parents hall of fame along with Juno’s), the marriage of her favorite teacher (Thomas Haden Church) to his unfaithful wife (Phoebe Buffet/Regina Phalange…I mean…Lisa Kudrow), and a psychopathic religious nut (hilariously played by Amanda Bynes striking every single note that I have with the crazy hyper-religious typed who try to force every single thing they believe on other people (they’re the same people who got Seven Days in Utopia and Courageous made), no matter what, to pure brilliance. These characters all come together in a gigantic wonderful film, one that I truly do love.

This movie has some extremely funny people behind it, including Will Gluck, who went on to make Friends with Benefits a year later, and is rising onto the comedy scene. I have a funny story about Easy A. The first time that I ever saw it, I saw it with my mom and my best friend. After the movie, me and my friend agreed that it was a really good film. My mother was horrified. “I…I thought it was about school and grades!” Well mom, in a sense, it was.
8.5/10

Jack and Jill (2011)

[Before film] It’s been a long time since I did the review-while-watching, so I decided I would do it again with what is arguably my single most dreaded film of 2011 (probably after the day when I get old enough to succumb to Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star, but that’s neither here nor there), Jack and Jill. My iTunes download is coming in as I write this. It is 11:16 PM. Pray for me. [30 seconds in] Wow. Even the Happy Madison logo brings back painful memories of Happy Gilmore. And the entire logo of that “company” is just trashy. This is gonna be a long review. [2:58] Oh God protect me. We’ve gotten into the baby fart jokes and butts that were enhanced by CG. Why? [5:05] *Sigh* [5:32] There was actually a funny joke in this film, but it was so anti-Semitic I feel guilty. [6:34] Are you there God? It’s me, Davey. Could you do me a favor and wipe the image of Adam Sandler in drag from my memory, and while you’re at it, just hit him with a lightning bolt or something? [7:40] There is a bird. Named Poopsy. [8:17] Why is a little Amish girl doing karate? And why is this family so racially unbalanced? [9:50] They just knocked out two different product placements in one sentence. Awesome. [11:21] That’s it. I’m not gonna be typing more for a while. It just hurts too much. [16:14] This is one of the most painful experiences I’ve had this year. I quit for tonight. [1:16:05] Yep. Al Pacino is singing.

Well, I bailed on my attempt to speak while watching, because it was just too much. So now I have finished Jack and Jill, and I pray to you, as a decent human being, to wipe this movie from my memory. I actually counted the decent jokes or just good parts in the film. There were nine funny joke in the film (only in very small chuckles), and one mildly touching moment, so that makes ten moments I didn’t want to strangle myself. The movie is 90 minutes long, so once every nine minutes, something decent happens. That’s not a very good record. Now let’s try to get into the “story” of a film of this caliber. Adam Sandler stars as Jack, an advertising worker who every year, dreads the coming of his twin sister Jill (also…played by Adam Sandler), who is basically a giant obnoxious ball of annoyance. That Jill is an entirely unlikable and dreadful character seems to be the one thing Adam Sandler and I agree on, because there is nothing here to give me any sympathy for anybody here, especially Al Pacino, who somehow was blackmailed or something into this movie, and even though he has most of the few funny lines in this movie (after Jill breaks his Oscar-“Well, you probably have others, right?” “You would think, but, no.”). But Al Pacino is in an Adam Sandler film. The Mayans were right.

In the end, Jack and Jill is such a painfully unfunny film that begs you to hate it, because it has to be intentional in its terribleness, because this is the guy who made The Wedding Singer, a really funny comedy. Adam Sandler has to just be trolling all of us at this point.
1/10

Dream House (2011)

Okay. My computer keeps crashing (death to Windows 7) so this is the third time I’ve been reviewing Dream House, so this review will not be pleasant. What I hate the most about Dream House is that you can see the small little chunks of a good film seeping through the cracks of this studio hash of a film. When it first came out, one would hear stories of how Universal took this movie straight out of the hands of Jim Sheridan (the director) and went all Edward Scissorhands in the editing room, slicing what should have been a longer and better film and turning in…this. In short, I see Dream House like one of my closest friends (and my arch-nemesis) sees Contagion, a film that I praised extremely heavily against just about everybody-that it was a great three-hour movie that had a studio throwing scissors at it.

Starring Daniel Craig (who cannot pull off an American accent to save his life, and also, as a personal note, I can never buy him not only as not James Bond, but not as a family man especially, because he looks so angry, that I’m afraid he would just break into a fit and punch a hole in my face-actually, he might be a father-in-law, but not an actual parent or family man) as Will Atenton, a man who, when he quits his (seemingly pretty awesome) job to go and spend more time with his wife Libby (Rachel Weisz) and two kids (with apparently no financial aid what-so-ever), but they all begin to see strange things happening in their new house relating to a recently-released murderer from the house named Peter Ward. Helping Will try to keep his family safe is his neighbor Ann (Naomi Watts). And that is just about the most I can say without spoiling this film, because even when the TRAILER spoils it, I don’t.

Yes, the trailer for this film spoiled the big half-way mark in the middle of the film. When I saw that trailer, I was infuriated, because that was the big twist of the film, and now it’s just there to mock anybody who dared to go see it. And anyway, the film just gets into a completely ridiculous aspect after a while. Dream House is about eighteen different films that were spliced into one semi-coherent story, and most of its negative criticism stems from its terrible marketing and trailer (honestly, I might have liked this film a little bit more without that trailer. So, honestly, I don’t put the fault of how terrible this movie is on the director, the screenwriter, or the actors. I put the fault behind Dream House on the big rotating planet in the sky, on Universal Studios. Adios.
3/10

J. Edgar (2011)

I think J. Edgar is the worst-reviewed movie on my current ‘Best of 2011’ list. Granted, it’s at 20th place (out of 20), and will probably leave when all the movies I missed come out on DVD, but for now, it’s right up there. Directed by Clint Eastwood, this new biopic of FBI director (and possible closeted homosexual) J. Edgar Hoover divided critics extremely, with a meager 44% on Rotten Tomatoes, has been awarded with both rave reviews and horrific bashings. Personally, I love this movie, and I think that this is a truly great film. A characters study through and through, J. Edgar, at its core, becomes a Man Vs. Self story, as this character fights against everything he knows, almost like a condensed slightly watered-down version of The Aviator, which also stars Leonardo DiCaprio, who is amazing as Hoover in this film, and I strongly believe he is one of the best actors out there. Now that’s gone on long enough, let’s get into what you came here for-shall we?

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, J. Edgar concerns the man who rebuilt the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. Telling Hoover’s story from the Palmer Raids onwards, the film chronicles the Lindbergh baby case, the arrest of John Dillinger, the deportation of anarchist Emma Goldman, and many other cases that made the man famous in his lifetime. Along with him, the film also chronicles his relationship with his secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), and his relationship with his protégée Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), which was the subject of much speculation by others and Hoover himself during and after his lifetime. While that is one of the main subjects of this film, it never gets too deep or falls into rumors, something I really appreciate about this film. It chronicles Hoover’s life as a man under incredible pressure with a goal-eliminating radicals, and his inability to do that, along with all the other stress of life. Right now I’m probably doing this film too much justice, because as the film coasts, there are some very slow parts, and some parts where I almost fell asleep, but the film is never poorly-made. It’s not very well-lit, and there are some cheesy moments in the film, and it takes itself way too seriously, but this is a truly good film.

What I like best about J. Edgar is that it never feels like propaganda. J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood (who does a very good but un-noticeable job here), and Leonardo DiCaprio (who is amazing, because he is DiCaprio and can play anything) are not trying to make you have an opinion about J. Edgar Hoover. They just give you the facts and let you decide for yourself.
8.5/10