2011, A Year in Film- Top 5

Our Cultural Editor Nick Huffington-Paint takes a look at this years highlights and lowlights from the world of cinema.

In Part One, We list the top five films of the last year.

Top 5:

No. 1-’Disability’
15 certificate

13th february 2011

Synopsis:
Harrowing romantic drama starring Daniel Day Lewis in a career defining role as a man so retarded he doesn’t even know what love is. Cate Blanchett is his emotionally distant nurse who gradually falls for the man behind the disability. Facing off against social pressures, Blanchett’s nurse- Grace Patience- tries to teach Day-Lewis how to love.
No dice.

Tagline:
Love is retarded
Notable quote:
Grace: Ah need to tell you something Henry. Ah need to tell you that I don’t care what the doctors call you. Ah don’t care what you have. I don’t care about the rest of it, what’s on the outside, your ‘condition’. Because,well, I’ve got a ‘condition’ too. And like yours, it stops my brain working right, it’s changed my life and it’s turned my world upside down. That condition is love, Henry, love for you. Simple and pure and plain. And even if you can’t understand me, even if you can’t comprehend the words, I needed to say it. Just once. I love you and I always will.
Henry: SAUSAGES!!

No. 2- ‘Y Tamba tu Loripori Fagina Caca (Whispers from my Shattered Vagina)’
18 certificate

2nd november 2011

Synopsis:
This is the story of Katya a young Serbian girl living with a sexually abusive father, desperate to protect her innocent younger sister Angel from his nigh-constant raping. After her father throws her out onto the grim streets she descends into the world of sex trafficking where she is raped in warehouses then dosed with heroin. However, after a police bust she is arrested and accidentally transferred to an all male prison where she is also raped quite a bit. On her release she is kidnapped by a wealthy banker who turns out to secretly be a rapist who keeps her in his converted panic room to be raped, however after he rapes himself into a heart attack and dies on her mid-rape Katya is finally free. Taking the dead banker’s riches she tries to re-assemble her life and decides to get a sex change operation so that she can never be raped again. Now a man, she tries to romance a chaste young woman she finds herself drawn to. Frustrated and drunk one night, Katya becomes what she hates and ends up raping the young woman he/she’s pursuing. The young woman turns out to be Angel

Tagline:
Discover if a pure spirit can take a lot of rape
Notable Quote:
Katya: Please stop raping me, mister, my spirit can’t take all this rape

No. 3-’Four’
15 Certificate

16th June 2011

Synopsis:
Gritty re-imagining of Marvel comics’ Fantastic Four, wherein a team of intrepid astronauts exploring space get subjected to cosmic rays. These rays affect each of the astronauts by inflicting on them fantastic amounts of cancer. Each character is struck down with a radically different mass of tumours and, high on pain medication, we follow each of their intertwining dream lives as they imagine their return home as super powered heroes who can fly and stretch and be telepathic instead of pissing blood into bedpans and hammering away on a call button for a nurse to bring more morphine. In their inspiring, action-heavy dreams they fight with the dastardly Doctor Chemo Von Evilstein and his army of robot bastard lieutenants

Tagline:
This year the real superpower is not having cancer
Notable Quote:
Mister Fantastic: Set course for that glowing nebula cloud over there. I’ve got a good feeling about that one



No. 4- ‘Vengeance Sonata’
18 certificate

12th December 2011

Synopsis:
Mild mannered Oh Dae-Su (Min Sik Choi) is a happily mild mannered accountant with a young and heavily pregnant wife Ji Tae Yu (Woo-jin Lee). Disaster strikes, though, when a brutal low level criminal, Dae-han Ji (Ving Rhames) robs and then brutally murders Dae-su’s wife, framing him for the crime. Spending fifteen harsh years in prison, mourning for his wife Dae-Su hones his body and mind into a machine with one pure intention: revenge. The only question is; will one man’s quest for ‘justice’ drag him down into a moral quagmire, making him no better than the man who murdered his wife? Will battling a monster turn a good man into a monster in the process? Nope. The plan goes off without a hitch and Dae-Su goes on with the rest of his life, retaining the moral high ground and his soul.

Tagline:
Sometimes revenge works out just fine
Notable Quote:
Dae-han Ji: Look at you! You think you’re better than me? Look at what you’ve become! And you call me a monster? ME?! Can you honestly say we’re different now?
Oh Dae-Su: Yup
Hae-han Ji: Oh.



No.5-’Shadows of the Future Past’
15 certificate

7th august 2011

Synopsis:
Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier completes his audacious America trilogy he began with Dogville and Manderlay with this symbolist tome of a movie. In this stark deconstruction of the cinematic aesthetic we follow in real time the actions of a horse on a soundstage populated only with a chalk outline of the state of Washington D.C and a statue of Hitler carved out of a block of gammon. As the horse bumbles around looking befuddled the intent of the film remains unclear. Whether we choose to see it as an attack on the capitalist system, a deconstruction of the american values system or a direct challenge to Hollywood’s sensibilities is left entirely to the audience and the director’s avante garde style is sure to enrage as many as it engages. However, few can question the power of Von Trier breaking the fourth wall to set a fire on the stage causing the horse to panic and kick over the only camera. The overriding question we seem to be being ask remains: Who’s the real horse?

Tagline:
Somewhere between a horse and hitler lies truth
Notable Quote:
Him: (whinny)

C4’s ‘Top 100 Moments of 2011’ Replaced with Mournful Strings

Channel 4’s upcoming seasonal look back on the past year has been pulled from broadcast, it has emerged, and is scheduled to be replaced with three hours of solemn string music, since the original programme was deemed by Ofcom to be ‘too bleak’

The original programme, following a long tradition of C4’s propensity for very long list shows and retrospectives was set to be a marathon look back through the last twelve months interspersed with witty bought asides from Hugh Dennis or Michael McIntyre. However Director General Marcus Fenix has been forced to replace the programme at the last minute when the television regulatory board deemed the resulting broadcast ‘more tragic and gruelling than fifty three consecutive showings of Schindler’s List’.

One of this year's lighter moments

“We thought there would be some light in all of that. But no.” Fenix told us, “ When we got the tapes from the edit and reviewed them it was far more harrowing than we usually expect from our list shows. Banking crisis, war in Libya, mass unemployment, tsunamis, Paul McMullan’s dead eyes, strikes, even the latest Call of Duty was disappointing and I’m pretty sure there was some big war that I’m forgetting. You try making a cheery list show out of any of that.”

“What happened this year? Steve Jobs died. Pretty sad. Well that was our number 3 top moment of 2011! That was the third best thing that happened. Numbers 78-69 were just statistics of different groups of people who had died this year. Number 70 was children who had been killed by landmines and our test audience agreed that that was our funniest bit. Our number one best moment of 2011 was that viral video of a woman ramming a cat into a bin. It was going to be that one of the panda shitting on the other panda’s head but we didn’t want to end the program on that strong of a metaphor.”

2011's comic side

“There were highlights, I suppose. Two mass murdering lunatics were shot to death and pictures of their corpses were loaded onto the internet. That’s a win. But you try having Russell Howard make a hilarious observation about that. As uplifting news goes, that’s a bit of a phyrric victory for us. No. Sombre strings is what we’re putting up. I won’t be responsible for more misery this year.”

The replacement program- described as evocatively dour arrangements from the National Orchestra’s String Quartet over a static black and white photograph of an upturned pram in a concrete stairwell- is billed as a ‘lighter alternative to the other shows that would try to cast a wry eye on the howling void that was this year’

Following suit, BBC3’s new year list programme ‘Celebs wot you should hate’ has been replaced with a more supportive and uplifting list show; ‘People Who Have Kept it Together in the Face of Really Tough Times, Because it Hasn’t Been Easy, Has It?’.

Meanwhile the New Year celeb Panel quiz Show ‘The Big Fat Quiz of the Year’ is set to be replaced by two hours of Jimmy Carr and David Mitchell gently assuring the viewers that 2012 can’t be any worse and telling a series of their favourite knock-knock jokes over pan pipe music.

Felix Prenderghast