The Velvet Café

Are you done talking about 2011?

I’m not. Not quite yet. In this post I’ve listed ten recollections from 2011, things to remember this year for.

1. The anticlimax of Bridesmaids

I caught up the buzz long before Bridesmaids opened. This was supposed to be the milestone in the history of women and movies. Never before had a movie featured so many female comedians at the same time, giving the male characters secondary roles. The screenwriters were women too, which was supposed to grant us something entirely different from anything else we’d seen. The biggest morning paper in Sweden did a huge feature article with a number of interviews. We were making history!

What we got in the end was a decent comedy, but nothing more. Once again we saw women who were obsessing over weddings, what to wear and how to meet Prince Charming. Women making cupcakes. Melissa McCarthy was pretty funny though and there was a poo scene that I won’t forget anytime soon. But it was an anticlimax, that’s for sure.

As a women I was far more inspired by Hanna than by Bridesmaids, that’s for sure.

2. The excellency of Michael Fassbender in Shame

Who deserves the title “actor of the year” for 2011? Among female actors, my vote goes to Carey Mulligan, appearing in three of my favorite movies – Never Let Me Go, Drive and Shame and excellent in each one of them.

For the male actors there’s a dead race between Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender. On average I think Gosling did a better choice of movies (Blue Valentine, The Ides of March, Crazy, Stupid Love and Drive as compared to A Dangerous Method, X-Men: First Class, Jane Eyre and Shame).

Some performances stood out to me. Among the women I think of Natalie Portman in Black Swan, Elena Anaya in The Skin I Live In and Kirstin Dunst in Melancholia, who oozed depression from every cell in her body and managed to look more sick than sexy as we watched her naked in a bathtub scene. (Such a shame that the Lars von Trier stole her thunder at the infamous press conference inCannes.) Among the men Christoffer Plummer in Beginners comes to mind, as well as the said Gosling in Drive.

But my number one acting performance this year was Michael Fassbender’s portray of the sex addict Brandon in Shame. I don’t know how he does it, but without saying a word he can tell the story of his life through a look or muscle twitch. He didn’t just expose a naked body; he exposed a naked soul through his eyes. It was amazing to watch.

3. The Norwegian success

The Swedish film industry has tried to launch the expression “The Swedish film wonder”. This is a bit of a joke considering the quality of most of the Swedish movies I’ve seen this year.

I’m a little bit reluctant to say what I’m going to say now, since there as you might know is a friendly competition between Sweden and Norway, like you have with your sister or brother.

But to tell the truth – Norway is on a roll. I watched four Norwegian movies during 2011: Oslo,  August 31st, Trollhunter, Turn me on, dammit! and Headhunters. They were all excellent and ended up on my extended top list of films from 2011.

I can’t but pout a little bit, envious of their success. They were already better skiers, had more beautiful mountains and the oil to make them wealthy eternally. And now they’re better film makers as well. Maybe it’s time to brush up the old idea of making a union?

4. The girl who knocked out her own tooth over the sink

Which film scene was the most troubling of 2011? With all the dark movies I watch there were quite a few to choose between. I hate rape scenes in movies and the ones in Incendies and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made me very uncomfortable.  The scene where they took away the scalp in Contagion was quite disturbing, as was the arm amputation in 127 hours and the swamp scene in Winter’s Bone. And who can forget the ultra violence in Drive? Now I know what it sounds like when someone is jumping on the head of someone else until it cracks. It’s not a sound I’d like to hear again.

But the scene in Dogtooth with the self inflicted damage in the bathroom  was the one that troubled me most. It was unbearable to watch and her strange, bloody, toothless smile made it even worse. I’ll never forget it.

5. The unsolved mystery that was The Tree of Life

Some movies are like straightforward novels, driven by plots that engage you and characters you care about and a way of storytelling that you feel at home with. Other are like poetry – fragmented, impressionistic, conveying moods states of mind, open for interpretation of the viewer. The Tree of Life is definitely a poem movie.

I admired it and I enjoyed parts of it a lot, the cosmic parts where we watched the birth of the universe accompanied by gorgeous classical music and whispering voices. I even enjoyed the so-hated-on dinosaur scene, which is supposed to have made people leave the theatres in wrath, demanding a refund for their tickets. But I couldn’t embrace the extended periods of scattered reminiscences from a childhood, Sean Penn looking pensive and a number of people walking around on a shore for an unknown reason. I respect it more than I love it, putting the blame of my lack of understanding on myself.

I’ve read dozens of thoughtful posts where people have analyzed The Tree of Life from various metaphysical perspectives, but for all their weight, for all the knowledge and enthusiasm they contained, they couldn’t help me to penetrate the mystery that was The Tree of Life.

6. The Tintin disappointment

I know I’m in a minority, but The Adventures of Tintin was the biggest letdown of 2011 to me. I think my dislike to great extent comes from that I grew up as a Tintin fan (I still am and I revisit my favorite albums once in a while.)

On an intellectual level I share the view that you shouldn’t compare a movie adaptation to the original work but judge it on its own merits. But in reality I can’t completely disregard of my feelings. I had thought I would feel familiar watching Tintin, but instead I felt lost. The heart and soul of the comic was gone, Haddock acted weirdly and the landscapes weren’t anywhere near as pretty or fascinating as in the comic books. For all the motion caption and 3D and advanced computer technology, the characters looked like plastic dolls, a little creepy and far less alive than if they had been drawn the traditional way.

The action scenes were drawn out, sometimes spectacular but strangely disengaging. For how weird it sounds, I got really, really bored. And that was the last thing I had expected from a franchise I love, staged by two directors who previously have made some of my favorite movies.

7. The farewell to Harry Potter

The launch of the final movie in the series marked the end of an era and the 20-something’s cried floods because they were taking farewell of their youth. It was an Andy-says-goodbye-to-his-toys moment.

I’m admittedly too old to claim that I grew up with Harry Potter, but I’ve followed the books as well as the films over the years, in company with my kids as well as for my own enjoyment. It’s one of those franchises that I don’t think of as a franchise but as a dear friend.

Not all movies in the series have been brilliant, but I think the final part was one of the best and gave it a worthy end. (I decide to forget about the very last extra scene at the railway station, which made the entire theatre burst out in laughter.)

8. The discovery of the world of short films

I attended the annual international short film festival in my city for the first time, watched sixty short films in a week and fell completely in love with it. Not every film was brilliant, so what when the next one is just a few minutes away? The box of chocolate from Forest Gump is a worn out image, but it’s really valid in the case of this festival. Every set of films contained at least one or two delicious pieces, my favorite one being Skallamann (Baldguy) from Norway (again!), a mini musical with a coming-out theme and a cheerful song that will stuck forever.

9. The Swedish encounter with Hollywood

While generally skeptic to remakes, especially one as soon and uncalled for one as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I must say that I’ve enjoyed the time we’ve spent with it the last couple of years in Sweden enormously. Never before has a Hollywood production of this size been made inSweden. It gave job opportunities to film workers, and it gave everyone else something to talk about. They placed held the press conference for international media in Stockholm, flying in all the stars from Hollywood one last time.

At the launch before Christmas the Swedish newspaper Dagens nyheter made interviews with a number of people who in one way or another  had been involved in the recordings. This quote from a site manager for one of the shooting places reflects a bit of our big-eyed fascination.

“When Swedes make films, we say that “if we are shooting in the direction we need to avoid including that modern lamppost or the ugly house”. The Americans think the opposite: “We must be able to shoot in 180 degrees, fix it!” So we had to remove forty lampposts and repaint the houses. Two hectares of land around Segersta were sealed off, school buses diverted and the church was temporarily closed. The committee was also to build a general store – in full scale, around100 square feet. The house is still standing.  There was no room to question it, we just had to seek planning permission and go for it. Working for the world director David Fincher was a bit like going to war – if you sign you have to make it work, there’s no room walk around moaning over stuff. Everything was so much bigger and with much higher standards. Terribly challenging, but above all great fun.”

I wrote previously that I wanted Fincher to do something better with his talent than wasting it on follow-ups of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But on the other hand, I secretly hope that they will make them. They gave us quite some show, didn’t they? It feels a bit empty now that it’s over.

10. The closing shot of Melancholia

It seems suitable to end my list of memories from 2011 with the most memorable movie ending of the year. There were a number of candidates: Never Let me Go, Dogtooth, The Skin I live in, Black Swan, The Ides of March, Of Gods and Men and Oslo August 31^st  to mention a few. But the undisputedly strongest image of the year, the one that I still can recall as if I just had walked out of the theatre, was the final shot of Melancholia. We knew what was coming, it had been established from the very beginning of the movie, and yet – when it happened it was quite a bit of a shock. I could have sworn they’d suddenly transformed my ordinary little theatre to an IMAX one with 4d effects. The entire place was trembling. And so was I.

And that was about it. I guess I’m ready to let go of 2011. Now bring me on 2012!

Cheers!