The MacGuffin

I saw that everyone else was doing a top 10 for 2011 and wanted in on the fun, but then I realized I didn’t actually see all that many new movies in the theater last year. It turns out that I’ll see anything for a review, but when it comes to viewing for my own pleasure, I tend to stick to older movies or weird stuff. So, I’ve decided to create a top ten new-to-me list. These are movies that I saw during 2011 that I had never seen before that, for one reason or another, impressed the hell out of me. While I did have fun compiling this list, I need to keep better track of what I’m watching from now on. There was a lot of “What the hell did I watch last year?” going on. (I have started a spreadsheet for 2012.) What were your new-to-you favorites last year?

Another Top 5 segment from The MacGuffin. This time Allen and Brandi share their top 5 anti-heroes.

This segment is also available on Stitcher and iTunes. The audio version can be downloaded directly from here. After you’ve watched the video please vote in our poll and share which one you think is the best.

In Name Only (1939)

Wealthy businessman Alec Walker (Cary Grant) is unhappily married to Maida (Kay Francis), a schemer who married him for money, not love. He learned of her deceit shortly after they were married, but she has his parents and society fooled into thinking she is the perfect, loving wife. Alec has long decided to stop pretending he is happy, so Maida is trying hard to get his family and friends to control his behavior. While he is out riding one day, he meets Julie Eden (Carole Lombard), a young widow who charms him with her forthright and humorous nature. He begins to court her, but she pulls back when she discovers that he is married. Alec asks Maida for a divorce, and she pretends to acquiesce, but in the end, she refuses him, and informs Julie that she will not let him go without a scandal. Julie cannot risk exposing her daughter to a trial, so she asks Alec to let her go. All three characters struggle to get what they want, but only two of them are willing to address the moral ramifications of those desires. Who does Grant end up with? Watch and find out!

There are some films that have become so familiar to us that watching them again feels a bit like coming home. We know the characters, we know the sequences, and sometimes we can even say the lines of dialogue before they come. They are so a part of who we are that we associate the film with our own upbringing. That’s how I feel every time I see Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985). One of the essential films of the 1980s, I feel that it’s safe to say that just about everyone knows and has seen it, and for some of us, couldn’t fathom what growing up would be like without it. It does everything that you can expect out of pure entertainment—with names, places, and images that have lasted in contemporary popular culture. I’ve become so familiar with the film that I can’t remember the first time ever seeing it.

One of the most curious and difficult things about growing up just may be the collision of reality and preconceived notions. Our worldview is shaped by our experiences as children, from the education we receive, to the friends we keep, to the way we are treated by others. These things form the way we see the world, or, more importantly, the way we want to see the world. As we grow older and enter the proverbial “real world,” these views we’ve shaped growing up clash with the views the rest of the world operates under. This is at the heart of writer and director Kenneth Lonergan’s latest film, Margaret.

When you have Tilda Swinton’s face available to you for use as a storytelling tool, you employ it for all that it’s worth. Lynne Ramsay, in her new film We Need to Talk About Kevin, finally opening in the U.S. today, understands this truth. Swinton is Eva Khatchadourian, a woman who has been through some type of terrible trauma that the film takes its time spelling out. She wakes up alone on the couch in her small, untidy house, seemingly hungover, with the definite aura of someone for whom this is not an uncommon occurrence. Something in the light in the room is off; it dawns that this is because the sunlight streams through windows that have been splattered with red paint. The marks of a community lashing out against a pariah. And in Swinton’s face, weariness.

The common misconception about our society is that now we have iPods and antibiotics we are a more progressive, forward-thinking culture. But if we only look back into our inconveniently well-recorded history, we can see that might not have always been the case. When Americans think of Germany in the early-to-mid 20^th century, we tend to only remember Hitler, goose stepping, and The Rocketeer fighting that guy with the weird face on top of a giant red swastika blimp. The truth is, before the Nazi regime, Germany was one of the most important homes for forward-thinking Jewish filmmakers of the silent era. What they gave us was the Expressionist movement; dark, thematic, adult fantasies with a visual interest in jarring lighting contrasts and a kind of disorienting angular production design. Of these filmmakers, the name Fritz Lang has become iconic, as he made many emblematic Expressionist films, most famously the dystopian science fiction film Metropolis (1927). But before fleeing Nazi-occupied Germany in the ’30s to make genre movies in Hollywood, he made one of the most prescient and fascinating thriller precursors with M (1931), his moody indictment of the mob mentality. Living in a post-Psycho (1960) world of exploitation serial killer entertainment, we can only look at M and take it for granted, but even with this water being so thoroughly tread-upon, one can still recognize the complicated themes and characterizations as being anything but stock pulp archetypes.

Another Top 5 segment from The MacGuffin. This time Allen and Brandi share their top 5 death scenes.

This segment is also available on Stitcher and iTunes. The audio version can be downloaded directly from here. After you’ve watched the video please vote in our poll and share which one you think is the best.

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) is a film about a family enjoying their vacation lake home. They get set up in their home for a short stay and some friends of the neighbor’s come to visit. Things go south quickly.

Here’s what I’ve been watching recently: