My 10 Favourite Female Performances of 2011.

Here we go again with a little 'nostalgia' (I guess we can call it that). With this list, I wasn't really aiming for the 'normal Oscar crew' - these are lady performances which I just loved, despite the fact that they didn't get as much love as they should have. And no, you won't be seeing any Meryl Streep here. Without further ado, my favourite women of 2011 who totally rocked on screen...

Honourable mentions: Juliette Binoche - Certified Copy, Lubna Azabal - Incendies, Hayley Atwell - Captain America: The First Avenger, Vanessa Redgrave - Anonymous, Emily Browning - Sleeping Beauty, Vera Farmiga - Higher Ground, Berenice Bejo - The Artist, Emily Watson - Oranges and Sunshine, Elena Anaya - The Skin I Live In, Helen McCrory - Hugo, Mary Page Keller - Beginners, Rachel Weisz - The Whistleblower, Michelle Williams - My Week with Marilyn, Evan Rachel Wood - The Ides of March, Carey Mulligan - Shame, Jennifer Ehle - Contagion, Leila Hatami - A Separation, Sareh Bayat - A Separation, Shailene Woodley - The Descendants, Glenn Close - Albert Nobbs, Janet McTeer - Albert Nobbs, Viola Davis - The Help, Octavia Spencer - The Help, Kristin Scott Thomas - Sarah's Key, Kristen Wiig - Bridesmaids, Liana Liberato - Trust, Mia Wasikowska - Jane Eyre, Eva Green - Perfect Sense.

10. Saorise Ronan as Hanna in Hanna.

Maybe this comes out of pure envy. Saoirse Ronan is around the same age as me, and all I can think of when I see her is "how the heck does she do it?" She's such a talented performer, always lighting up the screen in whatever she's in. However, there is something truly terrifying about her performance in Hanna. First of all, she kicks ass. Second of all, she puts on this perfect accent - which is pretty hard for someone like myself to do (any European accent just sounds Indian if I do it). Third of all, she brings this strange fish-out-of-water aspect to it, wandering around her surroundings with such amazement and wonder. You can't help but feel sorry for poor Hanna, but then you remember that if you got on the wrong side of her, you wouldn't come out the other side all that well.
Key scene: "I just missed your heart."

Young Hearts Run Free.

Film: Like Crazy
Year: 2011
Director: Drake Doremus
Written by: Drake Doremus and Ben York Jones
Starring: Felicity Jones, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence, Charlie Bewley, Alex Kingston, Oliver Muirhead, Finola Hughes, Chris Messina.
Running time: 86 min.

Unless you're counting famous people, I guess you could say that I've never been in love. So when Like Crazy came knocking on my door, I didn't know whether I'd consumed with the tale of two young people who fall hopelessly in love with each other, only to be torn apart. Luckily, I had adorable people like Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin playing young lovebirds Anna and Jacob. Also playing to my advantage was the fact that this isn't your typical Hollywood love story. It isn't the kind filled with dreadful pop songs and half a tonne of sugar. It doesn't even fit into the twee-romance-between-two-hipsters-indie category. Writer and director Drake Doremus based the film off his real life experience with a long-distance relationship. Added in with a considerably low budget of $250,000 and the fact that basically all of the dialogue was improvised (which makes me wonder why there were two writers, but anyway...), Like Crazy tells a raw story of love, the hard way.

AAN: Gotham, NYFCC and Spirit Awards

Well, I think we can officially kick Annual Awards Nerdism off. For those of you not in the know: Annual Awards Nerdism is my version of awards coverage, but I do it in a fun-ish way. When we get down to predicting the winners for the Oscars, I put them into poems. Now, you don't see that every day. Check out last years coverage here. Today I'll look at the winners of the Gotham Independent Film Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle winners and the Independent Spirit Awards nominees...

Gotham Independent Film Awards Winners

Best Film: Tie between The Tree of Life and Beginners
Best Documentary: Better This World
Breakthrough Award: Felicity Jones for Like Crazy
Breakthrough Director: Dee Rees for Pariah
Best Ensemble Performance: Beginners
Best Film Not Playing in a Theatre Near You: Scenes of a Crime

What does this mean for Oscar? The tie between The Tree of Life and Beginners is interesting, seeing as a tie has never happened for this award and these films are completely different. But I think between this and the Palme D'Or at Cannes, we could see The Tree of Life becoming a lock in the Best Picture race. Beginners I'm not so sure about...it's a brilliant film, but I can't see it sustaining the momentum until Oscar time as a film. Christopher Plummer will probably be it's only chance at Oscar glory. Also, I was kinda surprised about Felicity Jones winning the Breakthrough Award. I don't doubt her talent, as I'm secretly hoping that maybe she'll get a few more awards, but everyone has been going for Elizabeth Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene and Shailene Woodley in The Descendants to be nominated this year. I wouldn't read too much into it; I think Jones' film is perhaps a little too small and it has seemed to pass by without many people noticing it. But I think people campaigning for Like Crazy should definitely push Jones even more.

NYFCC and Independent Spirit after the jump...

Reviews Round Up: The Tempest, The Trip, Trollhunter

I kinda stopped doing these 'reviews round ups' when I stopped reviewing every film I saw, but since I have run out on inspiration and movies that I can actually give a full review, here are my quick takes on The Tempest, The Trip and Trollhunter. A diverse range of movies, indeed.

The Tempest

Admittedly, I am quite the fan of Shakespeare. I am familiar with the large majority of his plays (I was quite the Shakespeare nerd when I was 13 years old). But one play I'm not quite familiar with is The Tempest, which I guess wasn't the best thing when I was watching this new version from Julie Taymor (Across the Universe). With her new vision on the story, she decided to change the lead character, Prospera, into a woman, with the great Dame Helen Mirren taking on the role. Now, many people love Mirren and would watch her do anything...but would anyone really watch, and love, The Tempest? This film is bizarre. And surprisingly, that has little to do with the already bizarre source material from Shakespeare. The film is bizarrely stagey. This is actually quite jarring because one minute, we have wondrous special effects that work particularly well in conveying the character of Ariel (Ben Whishaw), which feel right in the film. We also have an exquisite location that looks pretty damn unreal - also, a good thing to have in a film. But the way this film is shot and directed is so bizarrely stagey. Just the way the actors move around, and the camera doesn't make any effort to liven up the action...it just follows the actors, or it just sits there for extended amounts of time. Which is surprisingly extremely annoying, and definitely lets down the rest of the film. The acting is okay - pretty stagey - but okay. We all love Mirren, and she's pretty good. Felicity Jones is lovely, but this isn't really her film. I actually quite enjoyed watching Russell Brand and Alfred Molina play Trinculo and Stephano...they were rather entertaining. Djimon Honsou was pretty good, too, and his (Oscar-nominated) make-up was quite impressive. Otherwise, do yourself a favour and see this on the stage. If you can get to the Ralph Fiennes version that's going on at the moment, then that would be cool. This film version is just plain exasperating.

What I got:

The Trip

The opening movie at the New Zealand Film Festival made it's way into the preview drawer thanks to Madman. The Trip is a fabulous comedy starring both Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, who are essentially playing themselves - but maybe they are fictional versions of themselves. I don't quite know what I was expecting from The Trip, as I only knew it had a little to do with the culinary adventures of Coogan and Brydon and it was directed by Michael Winterbottom, whose last film, The Killer Inside Me, was not one that I particularly liked. The Trip had surprisingly very little to do with the culinary adventures of the two. Yes, the basis of their week-long trip was to have Coogan go to several different restaurants to write about their food, with Brydon being his tag along. But what we get from their trip is a collection of conversations between the two and quite an insightful look into their lives that feels real. They talk and talk, Coogan often becoming impatient around Brydon, but they also worry about themselves as they're heading for mid-life crises...maybe Coogan is more upfront about it all. However, while The Trip is not the most engrossing film, it has some extremely funny moments, which are mainly the two impersonating several movie characters/actors (James Bond being one of them). The funniest moment is near the very beginning, where the two compare their Michael Caine impersonations. The duelling Michael Caine's is definitely one of the funniest things to hit the screens all year, and is worth the price of the ticket, or the rental, alone. That, and a pretty interesting and unflattering look at fame.

What I got:

TrollHunter

Dannevirke is a largely Scandinavian town, as back in the day when this place was a huge bush the Scandinavian settlers came here and made their village which turned into the place where I live today. About 10-20 minutes away from here, there is a town called Norsewood, which is a cute little town where a few of my friends live, and it is particularly proud about one thing: trolls. There used to be fake trolls everywhere, until people stole them because that's apparently what you do in Norsewood. So as a kid growing up in such a Scandinavian place with Norsewood being a prime spot for many class trips, I acquired quite the knowledge about the fictional creatures that are trolls. TrollHunter is a Norwegian film abotu trolls, which joins the ever-growing list of 'found footage' horrors which is both quite effective and too long...like most of it's kind. As a group of young 'uns try to make a documentary about some mysterious bear killings, they discover that trolls are indeed very real and they're out to get everyone that comes into their isolated area in Norway. It's all pretty exciting stuff, as the origins and the world of the trolls is explained in quite a bit of detail that I'm actually starting to wonder if maybe there are trolls in Norsewood and somebody is not telling us about them. However, like most of these 'found footage' horrors, it's clunky and far too long for it's own good. Yet, I think it's more effective than those bloody Paranormal Activity movies, in a weird, folklore sort of way.

What I got:

So, have you seen any of these movies? What did you think?

DVD--Cemetery Junction

or: Coming-of-age, Britain, 1973

One word to sum it up: Light

Out of the four movies which I endeavoured to watch last week, I was least looking forward to watching Cemetery Junction. However, out of those four movies, Cemetery Junction was definitely the best. For anyone who has doubts about Ricky Gervais trying to make his way into the film industry, then watch this one. His previous efforts, The Invention of Lying and Ghost Town left little to be desired, and marked a failure on the usually funny man's part. However, taking a more serious turn and co-directing with Stephen Merchant, Cemetery Junction is his success. And what a success it is.

It's 1973 in Cemetery Junction, a Reading suburb. Three working class lads, best friends, are coming of age. Freddie (Christian Cooke) wants to rise above his station, taking a job selling life insurance, wearing a suit and tie. Snork (Jack Doolan) works at the railway station and wants a girlfriend some day. Bruce (Tom Hughes) talks of leaving but seems on track to work at a factory, drink and fight, and become like his dad, in front of the telly with beer on hand; and he's trying the patience of the police officer who gets him out of jams. Freddie's job leads the lads toward a few small changes. He runs across a childhood friend, Julie (Felicity Jones), his boss's daughter who's engaged to the firm's top seller. Can the lads break out?

I did have a feeling that I had seen a film like Cemetery Junction before, as it adopted several cliches usually seen in a coming of age film. However, it's the clear dedication from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant which tops everything else. The script is quite serious, but has the added humour from Gervais coming through which helps make the movie flow. Any child of the 70s, or anyone who is growing up, will understand this movie. It's a poignant tale, but really engages in the theme of following your heart. No, it doesn't get too soppy. Instead, I couldn't help but feel somewhat liberated after watching it.

The three main characters, Freddie, Snork and Bruce, all represent different aspects of growing up. Freddie wants to be someone, even if that means selling life insurance to people who don't need nor want it. He's the epitome of someone who wants to be good, but just can't be good enough, because of the people surrounding him. Snork, on the other hand, just wants a girlfriend. He's the kind of character you could see in real life, perhaps without that rather disturbing tattoo. Bruce, is the thug, with a sort of detached relationship with his father, which all of us can relate to in one way or another. I think his behaviour comes out of being so in need or attention, which seems to be the case these days. Using the three characters to portray becoming adults was not only a good choice, but a clever and very realistic way to tell the story.

Along with the three young leads, Cemetery Junction has an appearance from Ricky Gervais. Ralph Fiennes, however, steals the show with his scintillating and fierce performance as Freddie's boss. Matthew Goode is like his little shadow. Felicity Jones, the fragile and cute faced up and coming actress, is perfect as Freddie's love interest. If anything, Cemetery Junction is a largely character based dark comedy which has the 70's downpat. The costumes, set design and soundtrack produce a fantastic backdrop to a very enjoyable movie. Doesn't demand too much, but it made me really happy in the long run.


THE VERDICT: A fantastic job by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Delightful and poignant, I'd definitely go for this one again.

8/10