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2011 Year End Movie Review
January 26, 2012

Aught-eleven closes down with an astonishingly low number of films seen in a theater - single digits, the lowest on record. Probably the lowest since I was old enough to sit upright. Reasons for the downswing are both abundant and obvious: theaters are too expensive, too quiet, and contain too many people sittin' in or around the "good" seats. I'm getting old.

The overall score for the year was 69. While slightly above average, that's a disappointing number. Far from the goal of two-per-weekend. Must focus on less work, more relaxing in '12.






Top Five: The Fighter, Harry Potter Deathly Hallows 2, Winter's Bone, Drive, and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (which should probably be unseated by The King's Speech, but sheer amount of fun we had watching Tucker and Dale must be recognized). Runner-ups include the Swedish Girl with the Dragon/Fire/Hornets trilogy, Super 8, Hesher (a "boy movie", the ladies tell me), Monsters, and No Regrets for Our Youth (super early Korusawa).

Bottom Three: In Time, The Hangover Pt. II (despite appropriately low expectations), and House (incomprehensibly bizarre Japanese horror from 1977). That ugly trio held off The American, Source Code, Arthur, and Bellflower (the independent movie that isn't nearly as good as you may have heard).

There was a hope we'd be polishing off the rest of the Akira Kurosawa portfolio in 2011. Dreams killed that hope. Mustering the desire to watch that film is proving insurmountably difficult. Still, we're down to the final two of thirty-two. Gonna power through it, and knock out the final movie - The Quiet Duel, which features Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune and is the only Kurosawa film not available on Netflix.

The most anticipated for 2012: Hunger Games (still need to read the books), Moonrise Kingdom (despite the over-the-top Wes Anderson-ness of it all), Dark Knight Rises, World War Z, and, to cap off the year, The Hobbit: A Highly Anticipated Journey.

Update: Somehow skipped Prometheus when assembling that "most anticipated" list. A horrible oversight, now corrected. That movie looks positively magical. Thanks, Erica!

See Also:
2010 Year End Review
2009 Year End Review
2008 Year End Review
2007 Year End Review
2006 Year End Review
2005 Year End Review
2004 Year End Review

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