2011 can be considered a good year in film, if you take a view that makes a few glaring omissions. While Hollywood stumbles on with its incessant remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, sequels, prequels, threequels and adaptations vibrant and vital filmmaking continues to come from other avenues.
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Wuthering Heights is Andrea Arnold’s (and co-writer Olivia Hetreed’s) pseudo-radical re-imagining of Emily Brontë’s novel about passion and unrequited love. By transposing her trademark documentary style and mix of unprofessional and seasoned actors from Fish Tank to this adaptation, Arnold creates a version of the book that may divide fans of the book despite making perfect sense.
BY MATTHEW MCKERNAN
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is both the tirelessly faithful adaptation of the John le Carré novel and the next film by Tomas Alfredson, who had critic’s falling over themselves to come up with new superlatives to describe the admittedly somewhat messy Let The Right One In. Boasting a fantastic cast and much critical kudos, does Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy see the mainstream arrival of a new talent?
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It’s been a good year for Lucy Walker with two of her documentaries seeing wide releases. The Waste Land won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Her second this year, Countdown to Zero, is a didactic film championing nuclear disarmament.
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Incendies, by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, losing out to Susanne Bier’s In A Better World. Set in and around the Israeli conflict, the film, not unlike Samuel Maoz’s fantastic Lebanon, considers the human effects of the conflict over the conflict itself.
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‘Julia’s Eyes’ is the second Spanish horror film to come with the ‘Presented By’ label from Guillermo del Toro, following the huge success of fantastic gothic chiller ‘The Orphanage’, which also starred Belén Rueda. ‘Julia’s Eyes’ is a suspense-thriller with something that many recent horror films don’t have: characters.
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‘Kaboom’ is the tenth feature film from fiercely unconventional filmmaker Gregg Araki. Being involved in the New Queer Cinema movement, his films defy categorization just as his characters defy rigid sexual identities. However, the film merely adds credence to the idea that American cinema cannot be arty without being mind-numbingly irritating and completely devoid of meaning.BY MATTHEW MCKERNAN Continue reading