My watches and rewatches from the past week, with each film’s rank on The Big List.

In Old Arizona – 14, 1928
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang – 7, 1932
Captain Blood -12, 1935
A Star is Born – 13, 1937
The Devil and Miss Jones – 21, 1941
The More the Merrier – 13, 1943
Objective: Burma! – 9, 1945
The House on 92nd Street –  22, 1945
All the King’s Men – 29, 1949

Along the Great Divide – 18, 1951
The House on Telegraph Hill – 27, 1951
The Bad and the Beautiful – 13, 1952
Marty – 32, 1955
Gigi – 17, 1958
Oliver! – 17, 1968
Midnight Cowboy – 14, 1969

Now that the Oscars are done with, it’s past time I release a best Films of 2011 list.  This is even more preliminary than usual this year, as I haven’t had much chance to see new movies and I missed the Vancouver Film festival for the first time in several years.  Thus, I’ve only seen 24 films from 2011 so far, but that will change and this list will be updated as it does.  I’ve included links to reviews of the films I’ve written about.  Eventually there will be something for everything, but that’s a long-term project.

It’s once again time for my annual highly mediocre, guaranteed to finish in the top 5 but definitely not win your pool Oscar Predictions.  As always, my guess are paired with my own personal award for each category, The Endy.  The Endys follow different rules than the Oscars because only actual 2011 films are eligible, which excludes such luminaries as Certified Copy, Meek’s Cutoff, Carlos, Mysteries of Lisbon, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and many others which all first saw release in 2010.  This year was an unusually light one for me movie-wise, as the Best of the Year list (to be posted this evening) will attest, and some of the Endy categories (I haven’t seen any 2011 foreign language films!) are a bit lacking.

I really enjoyed this and I’m not sure why it doesn’t seem to be as popular as it should.  I fear it’s because Tintin isn’t a typical Hollywood hero in that he doesn’t have some kind of psychological crisis he overcomes through his adventure.  Capt. Haddock has his addiction arc, but not a whole lot of melodrama is wrung out of that, and Tintin’s relation to it is simple disapproval.  Tintin doesn’t have a “character” that “develops” in the way we’re used to seeing, even kids’ movies invariably have some lame redemption or parental anxiety story grafted onto them.

This is, I think, why it hearkens back to the first Indiana Jones film as much as in Spielberg’s brilliantly designed action set pieces.  Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn’t have character to speak of: Indiana Jones and Marion are types out of 40s Hollywood (the first a combination of Bogart and Flynn, the second a classic Hawksian woman) and their rudimentary romance merely serves to break up the action sequences.  They don’t develop, they are entertainment devices that are run through a plot in the manner of classic serials and adventure films.

This, then, is the truly old fashioned Spielberg film of 2011, not the thoroughly modernist War Horse.  The two films make an interesting pair, as inevitably happens when Spielberg releases two films in the same year, always opposing versions of himself (Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park in 1993, Munich and War of the Worlds in 2005, Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can in 2002, Amistad and The Lost World in 1997, Always and The Last Crusade in 1989).  In almost every one of those years, I prefer the Genre Spielberg to the Prestige Spielberg.  2005 is pretty close: both Munich and WotW are very good movies with really awful scenes near the end.  War Horse has more greatness in it (the last hour or so), but also more terribleness (the first hour or so).  Tintin is consistently good throughout, but it feels like it’s missing something.

It’s the work of a master, with beautifully conceived and executed action sequences and it is always entertaining.  Formally, the film is a wonder, not just in managing to (barely) overcome the inherent uncanny valley issues of its medium.  Spielberg creates some of the most clever and beautiful dissolves seen in years, and there’s a visual motif of reflective surfaces (mirrors, glass, water, etc) that is unmatched in any animation I’ve seen.  To what end I’m not sure: why is Tintin hounded by so many distortions of reality?  Is it merely because it looks really cool?  I think so, and that gets to what I think the film is missing.  It’s a well-told story that is all surface; it lacks the inspiration, the edge, the danger of genius.  It’s a more accomplished film than something like Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Carribean films, but I prefer the crazy energy of those films, the willingness to go completely off the rails to risk making a great movie.  War Horse comes close to that, Tintin plays it safe.

1. The Cook in Trouble – A trick film from Georges Méliès, much less ambitious in scope than his epics of the previous two years, with only one set (albeit a lovely one) and no real narrative to speak of.  It’s more a fun diversion than anything revolutionary.  A cook is mean to a beggar asking for food.  The beggar is a wizard in disguise who curses the cook, inflicting him with demons that terrorize him, jumping in and out of his pots and crawling out of his oven in a devilish swirl of stop action photographic effects.

Mysteries of Lisbon – 2, 2010

This is the first real showcase in the series for Stan Laurel.  He was pretty good in Duck Soup, but he and Oliver Hardy were together in almost every scene there and in was their interactions that made it work.  They both appear in this film, and again have some great comic moments together, but Laurel is also given a solo showcase where he gets to display the physical comedy talents that made him a star in the first place.

The film is a star vehicle for Priscilla Dean, a major star at Universal in the late-teens and early 20s who had faded into two reelers for Roach by 1927.  Laurel and Hardy are the next billed, followed by Herbert Rawlinson, an actor whose career began before World War I and ended with Ed Wood in the 1950s.  It’s a fairly typical farce scenario where Priscilla hires Laurel’s paint salesman to help her make her husband (Rawlinson) jealous. Hardy plays the butler who takes an immediate dislike to Laurel.  Most of the comedy is built around Laurel mistaken a family friend for the husband, and thus doing all his flirting when the husband isn’t looking.  The highlight scene for Laurel is when he’s asked about his latest novel (he’s posing as a famous author) and he demonstrates the story of Samson and Delilah.  Laurel started out in British music halls (he was for a time Charlie Chaplin’s understudy, when Chaplin toured America for the first time, Laurel was part of his troupe) and he here gets to display a Chaplinesque pantomime skill, an ability I didn’t know he had before watching these movies.  I assumed his genius was more for the construction of anarchic comedy sequence, slow burns to chaos, but he shows here a real talent for the more balletic forms of comedy as well.