Blake’s Top 20 of 2011: Picks 10-1

10) A Separation
Yeah, this movie is pretty devastating, but it’s also a clever kind of memory game for first-time viewers that had me constantly second-guessing what I had seen in its crucial scene. That the questions are all answered and tidily sorted out is as understandable as it is disappointing, but for script and acting alone, this is could be the year’s most well-crafted film.

9) Margaret
This ‘big movie that couldn’t’ might actually top A Separation for ensemble acting and script, but you’d never know it because the Kenneth Lonergan’s second time behind the camera has been virtually erased by a nagging lawsuit; it will certainly go down in history (beside Touch of Evil, Ambersons, and Blade Runner, to name just a few that come to mind) as one of the most tragic studio butcherings of a potential masterwork.

8) Tuesday, After Christmas
A far simpler film than A Separation, narratively and formally, and probably not as devastating in the end. What does elevate it slightly above Farhadi’s film, though, is Radu Muntean’s graceful last shot. Taking care to preserve their daughter’s illusion of a reality capable of fantasy and happiness (i.e. Santa and loving parents), it’s the first time we see the true connection that this couple shared, and still shares.

7) The Future
And then here is a film that is all about connection. Miranda July gets a lot of flack for some reason that is entirely lost on me – I can see it, like Paw Paw and the 30 Dances in 30 Days ambition, but these things don’t really matter in the themes or her films. Anyway, there is a fine line between having a connection (Internet, relationships, awareness of and participation with the state of the world, etc.) and losing that connection. This film is about the psychological and emotional trauma that can occur at the moment(s) of disconnection.

6) Meek’s Cutoff
I couldn’t make heads or tails of Kelly Reichardt’s third film on a first viewing, then I checked it out again eight months later and understood that its strangeness lies in its utter rejection of convention. As informed by the history of movies, this particular narrative, strictly adhering to realism, could not have been told in a more enigmatic way than it is here. It’s a movie designed to haunt on a purely unconscious level, expertly eliding any detail or event that could break its spell.

5) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Weerasethakul’s most overtly political film is also his most accessible, at least in some degree. Ironically, it’s also the only film of his that I cannot make sense (logically, emotionally, et al) of its final reel. There is probably not a Working filmmaker, though, who I feel more of a connection with in terms of sensibility.

4) Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Herzog marries the oldest found record of human representational Illustration with the most technologically advanced method we have today (i.e. 3D); it’s the strange emotional wallop upon seeing the film’s final image – a hand sketched on a wall – that hasn’t left me, as it somehow brought all of history into a single shared moment together.

3) Certified Copy
Best last line of a movie this year: “J-J-J-James.” It’s the moment when He and She’s entire relationship became ‘real’ to me instead of some afternoon play time, while at the same time further confusing past events (the stuttering sister?) and baring 15 years worth of bitter-sweetness.

2) Melancholia
Lars makes another depression movie, and along the way spits in the face of the empty, bourgeois rituals that have absorbed the happiness out of life. The Danish provocateur here establishes that he is cinema’s biggest advocate for spontaneity.

1) House of Tolerance
I wasn’t really aware of how important this film is as a film until my third viewing of it, which was from an online on-demand service. Not only does the photography benefit from the color depth and added resolution from celluloid, but the 35mm format is but another of the film’s sly anachronisms. The film posits that things change slowly, but – watching this on the last day of this year’s digital-heavy Cannes festival – nothing has felt more rushed than the disappearance of film prints in our theatres. My, how foreign that occasional 35mm felt this year.