Top 5 Films, 2011 Edition

Last year I watched a grand total of 53 films from a production year of either 2010 or 2011. What I should’ve done is spread them out fairly evenly, but inevitably I didn’t. The majority were watched in January, when I wanted to get a head-start on the project, and then in December, when I realised I had an awful lot of catching up to do.

Here are some of my favourites from this stupid challenge:

  • Black Swan (2010) - I’m not generally a fan of ballet, but it’s not like you watch Rocky for the boxing, or The King’s Speech if you’re into speech impediments. I’ve enjoyed Aronofsky’s films since 1998’s Pi and the surrealist style he showcased in Requiem for a Dream is back in spades in Black Swan. And there’s a scene where Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis lez up a bit.
  • Super (2010) - Premièring at London’s inaugural Kapow! Comic Convention, this was everything I was hoping Kick Ass to be. James Gunn has been a favourite of mine since Tromeo and Juliet. His involvement even made me sit through the first Scooby Doo live-action film. The remake of Dawn of Dead in 2004 was brilliant and if you haven’t seen PG Porn you definitely should.
  • Source Code (2011) - From the director of 2009’s Moon, this is probably the closest we’ll ever get to Quantum Leap: the Motion Picture - there’s even a cameo by Scott Bakula as the main character’s father. It seems Jake Gyllenhaal in time-travel movies can’t go wrong.
  • Attack the Block (2011) - From first time writer/director Joe Cornish, Lesbian Vampire Killers this is not. I attended a panel on the film and was excited by Joe’s huge list of filmic influences, as well as the glimpse we saw of the practical effects for the monster. The child actors aren’t annoying in the slightest and even Nick Frost is bearable in this. Incidentally I thought J.J Abrams’ premise-alike, Super 8, was terrible.
  • Arthur Christmas (2011) - I’m of the opinion that children’s Christmas movies are generally bad. I saw Polar Express just before this and, while I can never hold any ill will towards Robert Zemeckis after the Back to the Future trilogy, it was all a bit awful. Except the bell end. And by that I don’t mean Tom Hanks. Arthur Christmas, Aardman’s second foray into computer animation, is a bit of a Fist of Fun reunion; written by Peter Baynham, directed by Sarah Smith and with Stewart Lee and Kevin Eldon both providing voices.

And, for the record, here are five of my worst films from 2010/2011:

  • My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (2010) - An Alyssa Milano vehicle which portrays her character, at least for the majority of the running time, as the single most immoral exploitative woman since Zooey Deschanel’s turn in (500) Days of Summer.
  • The Inbetweeners (2011) - Completely unnecessary. It’s like the writers have run out of funny college memories and situations.
  • Never Let Me Go (2010) - I finally got through this after a few attempts where I fell asleep midway through. I’m not completely sure why this film is so bad - I love Kazuo Ishiguro’s original novel; Carey Mulligan is one of my favourite actresses; One Hour Photo, the last film from Mark Romanek was superb; and Alex Garland wrote the screenplay for Sunshine and 28 Days Later. So seemingly a recipe for a brilliant movie. Shame it’s so tedious.
  • Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011) - No idea why I watched this. Gross is an understatement.
  • Another Earth (2011) - What’s that? A duplicate Earth has appeared in the sky? Oh well, let’s ignore it for a few years. And don’t worry about any of the science, or any impact it might have on tides and meteorological conditions; here’s a boring mood story featuring characters you can’t get invested in instead.

“She [an extra] turned and said something really insulting to me … Sometimes, you just have to show people where they fall in the pecking order. So when the extras went to lunch in the NBC commissary, I grabbed her purse, took it into the restroom, and pissed in it. The punishment, I felt, definitely fit the crime.”

Dustin Diamond, Behind the Bell

Memories of Acton

Josie Long:
I used to live in Acton; it’s bullshit! You poor thing!

Me:
You've referred to it before as ‘Rapey Acton.’

JL:
It’s because I had to walk home from the train station, ten minutes. It’s really perilous, it’s on this estate that just felt really lonely and not policed and there was no people around. I’d walk home really scared and there was this fucking family on this estate that had this horrible pit-bull they just used to let run around. So I’d get there and it’d be there, maybe just on the street. I was really freaked out by it and I went away for a few days for Christmas, came back and I was a bit relieved and I was like, “I’m overreacting; it’s not that bad,” and there was this big sign saying “Serious sexual assault here” right by the station and I was like, “This is not cool. This is not a nice place.”

Me:
There are some shops I love around Acton that I’ll miss, there’s this 99p or More or Less shop. Opposite that is Omid Pizza and I really love their pizzas. I went in there and asked if I could speak to Omid. It turns out there’s not actually an Omid, it’s just meant to sound like “home made.”

JL:
That’s amazing! There’s no Omid, that’s so lovely.

Me:
And near the sports centre...

JL:
Oh yeah, I know it; swam there many a time.

Me:
There’s a place that sells chicken and they sell fish. What do you call a shop that sells chicken and fish? ChicFish.

JL:
In Stoke Newington there’s ChickPizz. It’s beautiful.

19

See the little phrases go,
  Watch their funny antics.
The men who make them wiggle so
  Are teachers of Semantics. 

The words go up, the words go round
  And make a great commotion,
But all that lies behind the sound
  Is hebetude Bœotian.

- Frederick Winsor

Top 5 Books, 2011 Edition

I don’t remember the first time I went into the loft at my parent’s house, but I do remember the method of entry. You’d start with one foot on the back of the chair which leant against the radiator while the other foot rested on the door handle to my parent’s bedroom. From there you’d lift the wooden panel and slide the loft open. Both hands then went on opposing sides of the hole and you’d haul yourself in, using the transom over the bedroom door to brace yourself. Then you’d realise you’d forgotten the torch and have to yell for another family member to throw it up to you or be forced to jump down and repeat the process. I think the fact that it was such a physical challenge made the whole endeavour seem more exciting.

Once you were in you were completely overwhelmed. Until my father installed some rudimentary shelving there were thigh-high stacks of books everywhere you looked. Carefully stepping across the beams, each pile was something to be looked through. When I’d exhausted the local library’s reserves of Just William collections, Famous Five books and Star Trek tie-in novels it was to my Dad’s stockpile of 1970s sci-fi I turned.

I was a voracious reader. Until my early teens I was permitted to read in bed until around 9pm. To get around this draconian rule I would get out of bed, cover myself with a duvet and read by the tiny amount of illumination offered by the hall light shining under my bedroom door until the early hours of the morning. I’ve a feeling this has heavily contributed to my myopia, but it meant I was a very well-read, albeit heavily exhausted, child.

In recent years this has waned somewhat. I still read a lot, but nowhere near the six or seven books a week I was devouring. This is at least partly due to my offloading the vast majority of my books and DVDs, which can be attributed to either my continuing spiritual development where I’ve renounced attachment to physical possessions, or merely a simple desire to make the packing/unpacking housemoving cycle easier to bear. Enter the Kindle.

I like books. I like the feel of them, the weight of them, the look of a haphazardly stacked pile of them and I like the smell of them (apparently grass, with a tang of acidity and a hint of vanilla). You don’t get that with an eBook reader but you do get the portability factor. There are some books I will never get rid of - those with sentimental value and those rarer ones with actual value - but the vast majority of my reading (as well as the vast majority of my books) is now on the Kindle I purchased at the beginning of 2011.

This tied in neatly with a New Year’s Goodreads Challenge to read 52 books in 52 weeks. It seemed an ideal opportunity to read more as well as make the most of my Kindle investment. I read just under 14,000 pages of 52 books, the longest being Stephen King’s collection Everything’s Eventual clocking in at 608 pages. Here are my top 5 of 2011:

  1. When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
  2. Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories, Mike Birbiglia
  3. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
  4. The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson
  5. Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), Carol Tavris

If I think back, each period of my life has a book genre heavily associated with it; mid-teens I identify with Biographies, in my early twenties I read an awful lot of Travel Writing.. so I guess my early thirties is going to be defined as Books That Have Been Featured At One Time Or Another On This American Life.