Best Body of Work: Ryan Gosling
"It all began, innocently enough, with him being a fresh-faced kid in the Mickey Mouse Club back in the early-to-mid-nineties. Within two decades, he'd turned into a guy in a Scorpion jacket who could conceivably stomp the mustard out of some thug in an elevator. Canadian-born Ryan Gosling has become both a heart-throb (just Google "Hey Girl") and a serious actor (I personally believe his turn as a drug-addicted teacher in 2006's
Half Nelson was one of the best male performances of the aughts). It's the kind of career Robert Pattinson, for one, wished he had, if he wasn't so busy not washing his hair and not sparkling so damn much.
2011 proved to be a landmark year for Mr. Gosling, as he was able to produce three standout mainstream movies:
Drive,
Crazy, Stupid, Love. and
The Ides of March. The three films required three separate emotional registers -- in
Drive, he was taciturn and protective but capable of horrendous violence; in
The Ides of March, he was demanding, idealistic but full of inner conflict over his ideals and the real world of evil political maneuvering; and in
Crazy, Stupid, Love. he was an impeccably-mannered womanizer who tutored Steve Carell on how to be a whoremaster just like him before falling under the spell of kewpie-doll Emma Stone. He looks just as comfortable chatting in bed with Stone as he does storming away from a crime scene in
Drive; in interviews he's careful with how he answers questions and never seems to say a bad word about anyone. In real life he's been known to bust up fights after leaving the gym. When asked if he's dating anyone, he says he's in a relationship with Disneyland. He gives just enough to let you hang there; it's in the eyes and the sheepish grin.
Exactly what will the future look like for the amorphic and ambiguous Gosling? I can honestly see him, as he gets older, turn to directing (which, coincidentally, is something James Dean probably would have done). I just get the feeling he has the insight and sensitivity into human affairs that would make him perfect for it. But before that, in 2012 he's filming two for the bros: he's re-teaming with Derek Cianfrance (of
Blue Valentine notoriety) to play a motorcycle stunt rider and he's going to reunite with Emma Stone for
The Gangster Squad, where he's going to play a sergeant for the LAPD. And when he's not doing that, he's going to be on
Ellen giving the audience free Snuggies. Or he'll be back in Disneyland. But trust me on the director thing. You can just picture him standing by his faithful cinematographer: 'Hey girl, could you step to the right six inches because you're not in the frame? And can you give me a little more fire in the eyes? Thank you so much.'" -
Matt Lotti
Best Ensemble: Margin Call
"If your idea of a great film noir is a tight, compelling story about a bunch of characters who speak their own language while gathering in the dead of night to discuss how to make a killing at the expense of a lot of other people who never did them any harm, then
Margin Call is the film noir of the year. It is also, almost incidentally, the best of a number of attempts to dramatize the economic implosion of the past decade and the moral corruption that led to it, and that has a lot to do with the fact that it's the only one that dares to challenge audiences to spend some time inside these weasels' heads instead of judging them from safe moral ground. As in any good crime movie, it lures you into complicity with their way of thinking, so that some part of you feels their terror, the better to understand that it has less to do with having all those millions of dollars somehow taken away than with the fear of being seen as ridiculous. It's a great opportunity for the actors, and there are actors here who live for these opportunities: Kevin Spacey (proving again that he is a star so long as he thinks he's being a character actor), Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker, Penn Badgely, and Jeremy Irons (parachuting in at the start of the third act, just to show that Oliver Stone cast the wrong Englishman as
Nixon) are all first-rate while coming together to create a perfect working machine that digs its own hole. The one prominent woman in the cast, Demi Moore, isn't in their league, which is too bad. But that's not a crippling flaw in a movie about a toxic boys' club." -
Phil Dyess-Nugent
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, Hugo
"One of the many wonderful things about
Hugo, perhaps the thing I value most about the film, is the fact that it does not feel like the work of a 67 year old man.
Despite its themes of nostalgia, regret and loss,
Hugo is a film made by someone who still is galvanized by the possibilities of his art and the act of making movies. Moreover it’s the work of someone still excited by the possibilities of the medium they have mastered. And I think some of the credit for that must go to Robert Richardson. Scorsese has delivered some of the most visually innovative films of the last half century, but there is no doubt that he is also a creature of habit. Thelma will edit, DeNiro, DiCaprio or some other member of his trusted stable will star and if the film is not set in ancient Jerusalem or 1940’s Tibet the Rolling Stones will factor in. I would argue that none of his frequent collaborators pushes him the way Richardson does.
Their collaboration began with
Casino (and to see what Scorsese brings to their partnership, compare the look of that movie to Oliver Stone’s flailing, Richardson-shot, desert noir
U Turn), but it’s really
Bringing Out the Dead, my pick for the most underrated film of Scorsese’s career, that crystallized the tenor of their creative partnership.
Bringing Out the Dead is a film that feels fueled by Benzedrine, making even Henry Hill’s famous meltdown at the climax of
Goodfellas (which is really more a feat of editing) seem staid by comparison. Robertson delivers some of the most stunning images of Scorsese’s career: Nicholas Cage’s “grief mop” pulling the souls of those he’s failed to save out of the pavement; the various trips through the hospital that feel only marginally less traumatic than the one in
Jacob’s Ladder; the unforgettable shot-in-reverse attempted resurrection of Rose, the snow flying up into the sky, juxtaposed in front of the hanging carcasses of meat. It's an almost assaultive, surrealist depiction of failed grace.
And unlike, say, Robertson’s work with Stone, such aggressive amped-up imagery does not come across as empty flailing but very much of a piece, and it’s not as though aggression is his only trick. Indeed, in
The Aviator it’s Robertson’s command of Classicism that seems subversive. By sticking to an early Technicolor palette where the shade of grass and the peas and the flow of light through water look utterly alien, Robertson creates a mood that is positively dreamlike, an environment as removed from ours as is the privileged world of Hughes. Yet even in this elegant film, Robertson’s brute force comes through in the spectacular plane crash in the center and the subsequent mental meltdown. Every Scorsese film is about suffering, physical, mental and spiritual, and
The Aviator shows Robertson meeting him beat for beat on all three.
Shutter Island dove further into the nightmare, creating a look that can be described as “Val Lewton on steroids.” The carnivorous shadows, locked-down tracking shots and details barely glimpsed in the corners of the frame helped create one of the greatest works of cinematic paranoia this side of Polanski.
The point is that Robertson is able to deliver imagery that is both quintessentially Scorsese and innovative enough never to risk becoming stale. He’s the perfect DP for a film that simultaneously manages to embrace cinema’s past and future. From the opening cross fade, overlying the image of the great clock at the film’s center delivered with the depth of field provided by 3D, the entire film walks a balance between old and new. So we get impossible CGI tracking shots next to scenes of almost Tati-like remove as Hugo observes the “parts” of his train station. The Stroheim-like “masked” montage of Chloe Moretz’s fall at the train station and the chilly expressionism of Papa George’s front walk is juxtaposed with the simple unfussed-over warmth of Hugo’s nest. The film’s aesthetic is perhaps best summed up by the climatic restaging of
Safety Last!: an old thing done in a new way.
In doing so, Scorsese, a director who could never really be called fanciful, draws a direct line between himself and Melies. I have suggested elsewhere that Hugo is a kind of alternate autobiography for the filmmaker. It’s tough to remember after a decade of unbroken success that Scorsese’s career was in a very different place at the turn of the millennium. His films weren’t commercially successful before
The Aviator. It’s all too easy to imagine that if Michael Mann had directed that film as was originally intended, if Scorsese’s creative partnership with Leonardo DiCaprio had not been sealed and he had instead followed up
Gangs of New York with another costly underperformer, the state of his career would be much more like the late career of his contemporaries Coppola (reduced to making smaller, ever more hermetic works) or De Palma (struggling feebly at the edge of the system) or his mentor Michael Powell (marginalized).
But there is another fate that can befall the filmmaker in the late period, one that’s far more insidious. Commercial success is no insulation against simple fatigue. Not that older directors aren’t capable of great films, but we all know the list for every
Ran there is a
Family Plot, for every
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance a
Rio Lobo. Just as it is depressingly easy to imagine a marginalized Scorsese it’s easy to imagine a Scorsese no longer interested in the experimentation that has defined his career for the past two decades. Thanks to the collaboration of the likes of Richardson, this seems unlikely. I’m as excited about the prospect of
Silence as I’ve ever been by a Scorsese film, and if Richardson should be the one to shoot it, so much the better." -
Bryce Wilson
Best Screenplay: Abbas Kiarostami, Certified Copy
"Whereas some of 2011's finest films had elements to them that clearly — or at least noticeably — superseded others in terms of quality (the aesthetic wonder of
The Tree of Life taking precedence over its screenplay being a popular example),
Certified Copy's moving parts all work together in harmonious unison, one rarely overstepping or obscuring the other. The film's sterling screenplay and unassuming compositions in particular are irrevocably entwined, with one reverberating off the other in any given scene; each serves to compliment the other, and each is just a fraction of Abbas Kiarostami's heartbreaking vision of two people forging a connection.
Indeed, both script and visuals help to define one of the film's principle motifs: the nest of warring perspectives that surrounds the fragile human bond at the film's center. Kiarostami's camera cuts in and out of Juliette Binoche's car or coyly fixes its gaze on what seems to be a quarreling couple across the square but soon is revealed to be a man talking animatedly on his cell phone with his wife simply standing nearby. All the while, we're privy to the sparring, musings, and reflections on art, love and life, all of which finds our central two characters, played by Binoche and William Shimell, at fascinating verbal odds with each other. Thus,
Certified Copy is largely about differing, constantly shifting perspectives, which its screenplay, also by Kiarostami, is constantly reinforcing; the way the characters converse in three or more different languages throughout the film, sometimes within a given scene, is an arresting expression of their patchwork of clashing opinions and ideologies, never coming across as some sort of self-aggrandizing cosmopolitan front. It's tragic too, evoking a kind of loss of connection or breach in understanding between Binoche and Shimell, a relationship partly lost in translation or complicated and distorted by the forces of gender, generation, change, location, and many more.
Certified Copy is, in fact, a study in temporality and change punctuated by stunning emotional turbulence. Kiarostami is fascinated with the way the emotional dynamics of a given scene can shift, swerve, or be altered altogether, triggered by a memory or instance of reflection or a single phrase or line of dialogue. A kind of tragic impermanence reigns supreme over the film, and many of the characters spend much of its duration trying to hold on to what is clearly slipping between their fingers, a devastating emotional texture conveyed ably via Kiarostami's wistfully-tinged words.
Another major, effective theme Kiarostami's screenplay pushes is that of simplicity - surprising given its somewhat cryptic, puzzle-like qualities.
Certified Copy could almost be read as an advocation of the most refined, simple pleasures in one's life, a strand reflected in the screenplay, which continuously highlights Shimell's fixation with those who are able to take life and its offerings at face value and appreciate the most basic of gestures. This central rumination on simplicity comes to a devastating head in the film's final stretch, where we realize the conundrum that seems to command any discussion of the movie - namely, whether or not Binoche and Shimell are indeed a long-married couple or merely two strangers meeting for the first time as the film begins - doesn't actually matter, at least in regard to emotional payoff. No matter how you come at it, no matter what perspective you approach it from, in its final minutes, the film is distilled into its most basic, elemental and undeniably moving core." - Charles Lyons
"When you watch The Tree of Life, you’re seeing a vision of a family’s life experienced with an other-wordly, unfathomable sense of perspective. Writer/director Terrence Malick’s latest film is elusive, engrossing and just all-around big. There are discernible leitmotifs that run through the film, like the intrusion of chaos into order, the gentle realization that form does not always conform to essence, and the fleeting presence of radiant, context-free hopefulness.
