My favorte movie of 2011 was Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Also, I really wasn't that crazy about the other MI movies and only thought that they were fair, but this time they got it right.  :-)

It occurs to me that I did not know what year it is. Actually with the ready availability of stay-at-home methods to see movies, I find that I increasingly fail to see the releases of the past year, or, to put it another way, among my favorite movies of 2011 was Suddenly Last Summer with Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift. When Taylor died , my friend and I did our own mini film festival of her work, because I so enjoy introducing young people to Tennessee Williams’ homophobic alcoholic nightmares--“Cut this hideous story out of her brain.” My friend didn’t know what a great actor Taylor was. Her artistry seemed to increase in conjunction with her girth. How I love her grossness in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. I am happy to report that for the past six months everyone in my family has been doing the dance George calls “Monkey Nipples,” and complimenting each other with, “You have ugly talents, Martha.” I have noticed that police officers do not really find that line a compliment.

I find that I have only seen a minority of the films on the 2011 best lists. I would definitely put The King’s Speech toward the top of my list because there is something gratifying about seeing royalty portrayed as muttering imbeciles who have to be whipped into shape by commoners. Also toward the top of my list is The Mill and the Cross, with Rutger Hauer, Michael York and Charlotte Rampling, a film that is a painting come to life, more a multi-layered interaction between symbols than a plot with characters. I decided I do not want to die by being buried alive, or tied to a wagon wheel on top of a pole where the crows eat your eyes. Brush up on the work of Bruegel the Elder before seeing it. I hate it when I cry over paintings. Hugo is also a beautiful fantasy. I am eager to see Terence Malik’s Tree of Life. Days of Heaven is one of my all-time favorite films. Sometimes I still float down that river between vertical canyon walls, and I am like Theodore Roosevelt in his African delirium reciting the lines of Kubla Khan. I will definitely be renting Midnight in Paris. I hope it has lots of jokes about lines in the works of the writers, like Shakespeare in Love did.

This past year I also enjoyed Robert Redford’s Conspirator, a historical drama about Mary Surratt, the only woman charged in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy and the first woman executed in the US. I enjoyed it less for the production value than for learning about the intricate story, many of the details I did not know. It spurred me to do a little research afterward. The trial itself--in front of a military tribunal of hand-picked judges guaranteed to provide a guilty verdict--raises a plethora of legal issues and was certainly a mockery of justice. But what else could one expect under such circumstances? In the end, the film manages to suggest Surratt’s innocence of conspiracy to assassinate, not for her admitted involvement in the plot to kidnap Lincoln. Perhaps the moral of the story is that if you plan to only kidnap, not kill, the President, you still might hang. What is known is that the Surratts were formerly wealthy slave-holding Confederate sympathizers; that the Surratt farm (a little town) in Maryland was a hotbed of Confederate espionage and the moving of cash and contraband across enemy lines; and that Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse in D.C. was where the kidnapping-turned-assassination plot was perfected. In my opinion, the only way Mary Surratt could have been ignorant of the assassination plot was if she were an idiot, which I don’t think she was. She talked with and interacted with these men regularly, if not daily; she sent her daughter out of the room when she met with them; she lied about where they were; she received from and delivered to them packages of guns and binoculars. Certainly the charges against Mary--aiding, abetting, concealing and harboring the other defendants--were bait to lure out her son, who had not been arrested at the time. Her son was aware of her arrest and trial, but he did not come out of hiding to save her neck. The most incriminating testimony against Mary was quite possibly paid for by the government, but even without this testimony there was still ample evidence to convict her, even in a proper venue and proper trial.

One of the more interesting aspects of the story, not well covered in the movie, concerns Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Stanton was Lincoln’s closest adviser and probably the most powerful man in the US at the time. To a large part, he was responsible for the Union’s success in the war. It was he who ordered the inconsolable Mary Lincoln out of the room where Lincoln lay dying. He was a “radical Republican” who hated slavery, hated the secession of the Confederacy, and after the war wanted to ensure the civil rights of former slaves in Confederate states as a condition for re-admission to the Union. When President Johnson tried to have him removed from the cabinet, the House impeached Johnson. Stanton was essentially the architect of the military tribunal to ensure the conviction and execution of the conspirators. Apparently he was even responsible for ordering the horrible mistreatment of the conspirators while in prison. It seems a odd choice to cast Kevin Kline in the role of Stanton, who, according to photos, looked somewhat like an overgrown leprechaun.

Redford invariably shows himself to be a capable director, capable of telling a story, capable of arranging a scene, capable of eliciting capable performances from actors, and sometimes even better than capable performances. But he seems to have little directorial originality. His films (the ones I’ve seen) seem to be totally lacking in irony. He’s a very somber young man. He may outgrow it.  

Speaking of this film of historical events brings to mind another of my favorite films of the past year, Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the prehistoric wall paintings in Chauvet cave in France. Prior to discovery in 1994 the cave had been geologically sealed for ten thousand years. The cave is now closed to the public for the protection of the paintings. The paintings have been carbon-dated as at least 30,000 years old (this dating has been disputed by some), and apparently occurred in two different phases separated by 5,000-8,000 years. You can see photos of the paintings all over the internet, but none do justice as Herzog’s film does. The artistry of the paintings is stunning. The animals depicted come to life along the bulbous contours of the cave walls. The lines of perspective in some paintings are highly sophisticated, and apparently such principles of perspective were not more fully developed for tens of thousands of years. Herzog, along with two crew, was allowed a total of six hours in the cave on six different days. Without a light source, the paintings are deep in the black recesses of the cave. Tree roots give off toxic levels of carbon dioxide and radon, limiting the amount of time one can spend in the cave. The galvanized aluminum walkway and stairs leading down into the numerous chambers, beyond which no one is allowed to step, is of a more recent era than the paintings. Mysteries abound as to the purpose of the paintings and the use of the cave. The skull of an ancient bear was placed neatly on a rock podium, seeming to emit a message that no one can decode. The film enlightens that human history is richer than we imagine. One comes away secure in the knowledge that art was the first profession. It’s pure art that humans would crawl down into a cave to scratch on the entrails of the earth this undulating theatre of animals in motion, visible only by torch, and if you stay too long you die.

Dec 30, 2011 -- 5:53PM, solfeggio wrote:

And 'Source Code' was excellent as well.

I haven’t seen it. I’m glad you recommend it. Of course I wonder how anything with Jake Gyllenhaal could be an unpleasant experience. I just now see that Source Code is directed by David Bowie’s son?

stardustpilgrim -

I was glad to read your remarks about the Woody Allen film, as I'd been reading so much about it that I was really looking forward to seeing it.  We have to wait for a few weeks, though, as it hasn't been released on DVD here yet.

If it is the best Allen film since 'Manhattan' that would really be great, because we've felt that his work in the past ten years or so wasn't particularly good.  We liked 'Everybody Says I Love You,' and 'Deconstructing Harry,' but that was about it.  And neither of them was anywhere near as good as 'Manhattan.'

I would say that 'Crimes and Misdemeanors' and 'Manhattan' were his best work, but 'Radio Days' is a sentimental favourite in which he does a good job of evoking a lost era in American history.

I saw Hugo a couple of weeks ago. I plan to go back and see it in 3-D (I've never seen a 3-D movie). Quite moving, I'd highly recommend. It's not really a kiddie movie.

I just went through Roger Ebert's list (don't read the Hugo review, he gives away a spoiler).

Also saw Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's best film in years, (maybe since Manhattan).

Also saw Drive, good, but pretty violent. I liked the main character. You don't usually see main characters who don't talk much. I went to see it mostly because I love Carey Mulligan.

Forgot about Another Earth. Also definitely don't read the review by Ebert. He gives away a very big spoiler which gradually unfolds throughout the movie. You begin to realize what happened to the main character............what the whole movie is about, I'll stop there. ........It is slow-moving, has the look and feel of an independent movie, but was highly significant for me. I see it is out on DVD. I'll have to buy eventually......

Another earth appears in the sky. Eventually, over the period of a couple of years, we learn that it is actually a parallel world, exactly duplicating the people and events of our earth.

I also saw Moneyball, pretty good.

Saw Contagion. I'll have to pass on it. It had the look and feel of a documentary, can't recommend...............    

sdp