5 Off My Head - What's Half of Eleven

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July 1st marks the halfway point of the year, and so I figured I'd do what I usually do and take a quick look back at the five movies I've enjoyed the most so far this year. Looking at the movies that open between now and then that I'm most curious about all there seems to be is Super 8 and Green Lantern - it that really it for June? - and I don't foresee either of those topping any of these at this point. (Prove me wrong, JJ Abrams!) There are a few duking it out, I could want something else in five minutes, but let's just roll with this.

Certified Copy (dir. Abbas Kiarostami) - Since seeing it back in March there kind of hasn't been a day that's passed where I haven't wanted to watch Certified Copy again. What baffles me looking back is I never wrote a proper review! I wrote a post telling y'all to remind me to write a review, and obviously you all failed me. Your fault! Anyway now I have a reason to watch it ASAP so I can write up some properish thoughts. There are visuals from this movie that accost me all the time. A slipping bra-strap or a boy following his mother or a sad bride.

Hanna (dir. Joe Wright) - my review - Okay okay so I've said enough about Eric Bana's wet longjohns at this point in the year, probably. There are other things! Wonderful things. Joe Wright making an action movie sort of feels like what would happen if one of those giant-headed bug-eyed aliens beamed down into your living-room and you told it to go and make you a peanut butter sandwich. This is that alien's peanut-butter sandwich. Strange and stranger.

13 Assassins (dir. Takashi Miike) - my review - I'm so glad to have another movie from Takashi to love - he makes more than it's possible to keep up with from this side of the world and the few that have trickled over have seemed more like emblems of his lack of concentration than, you know, coherent films. Not so with 13 Assassins, which is an astonishingly old-fashioned slow-burn to madness for the maestro of mayhem.
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Jane Eyre (dir. Cary Fukunaga) - my review - It's all there in that scene in front of the fireplace with Rochester and Jane sizing each other up - Mia and Fassy scouring each other's faces and dragging us along for the ride.

Insidious (dir. James Wan) - my review - Lawd knows I have plenty of issues with plenty of Insidious, but at the same time I had such a hoot jumping out of my seat that I'm willing to overlook a lot of silliness. It packs enough bang for your buck. Good old fashioned spook-sanctioned fun.

So what've been your favorite movies of 2011 so far?

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Casting Karenina

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I really really really liked Hanna, if you recall. And not just because Eric Bana wore soaking wet longjohns! (Not that it hurt.) No, it was a terrific movie-time all around. So I'm on a high with regards to its director Joe Wright, where once upon a time my distaste for his film Atonement would've colored such enthusiasms. So I actually click on links having to do with him, and by making such monumental efforts I learn splendid things, like this:

"Keira Knightley and Jude Law are seeking a son, while Matthew Macfadyen and Kelly Macdonald would like an instant brood of five.

These are the screen relationships that will make up one big happy (or rather not-so happy) family in the film version of Anna Karenina that will shoot in Britain and Russia from September. ... Aaron Johnson will play Anna’s lover Vronsky.

... Olivia Williams, who was so good in Wright’s thriller Hanna, will play Countess Vronskaya, Vronsky’s mother. Saoirse Ronan, who appeared with Keira in Atonement and had the lead in Hanna, will play Kitty, Dolly’s sister.

The fast-rising Andrea Riseborough has been cast as Princess Betsy, who always knew how to have too good a time."

That cast, y'all. Holy shit that cast.

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Little Girl Bossed

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There are a lot of things that I want to share my love for with regards to Joe Wright's Hanna - Cate Blanchett's teeth-sucking mama goblin; The Chemical Bros' ear-jangling score; the surprising revelation of Eric Bana in dripping wet long-johns (which yes, the moment I can screen-cap this spectacle believe me I will be all up on it); Tom Hollander's Fassbenderian little piggy performance which overjoyed me at every turn - but for once instead of jumping all over the side-shows I want to give center-stage its due. 

Cuz ya know what? Saoirse Ronan is the real deal. I know, I know, where have you been, JA? She's been knocking it outta the park since day one. It's not that I've ever disliked her in anything - she's terrific in the horrible Atonement, and centered the mess that was The Lovely Bones as much as she could with palpable heartache. But what she gives us here is so different, so odd and playful and terrifying, and yet so still and very very sad all at once, that now I'm paying attention where before I was sort of indifferent. Where this could've easily drifted off into the facile camp of Kick-Ass she and Wright keep it grounded even amongst the Grimm-riddled oddities. Who'd have thought that the middle section, relatively action-free, with Hanna getting to see what a real family unit is like would end up the highlight, the passage you don't want to let go off? And yet of course that's what it ought to be. (Having Olivia Williams at the center certainly helps making it something to yearn for.) 

Alright so let's get back to the fun freak-show stuff, of which this movie indulges itself mightily. Why do I adore Tom Hollander so much? I do, I just do! Ever since he romped around in his red underpants in In The Loop I've been nursing a crush on him and now he had to go and add an insane queer creep who hangs out with hermaphrodites and costumed dwarfs in some underground club that would've scared Rainer Werner Fassbender away and dresses in Funny Games tennis whites (looking quite dashing in them short shorts too, I might add)? I'm putty in his tiny creepy hands.

And then there's Cate Blanchett, looking like the most gorgeous prop skeleton you've ever wanted to play dress-up with, flicking her teeth with her tongue and striding with haughty purpose in pencil skirts, her Southern drawl licking the consonants of her German... oh what a monstrous joy worthy of seventeen run-on sentences of this sort.

And then there's Eric Bana, who gives a fine sturdy performance as Hanna's pops but god I don't want to talk about that, I just want to swoon over the sight of him undressed, multiple times. Multiple! And yet they keep us in the dark about such matters. I had no clue going in! Don't you think I would've been there first thing if I had? All these wasted days without such sights burned into my brain. Shameful.

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