I’ve culled this list down to the best thirteen films:

Red Dog

The filming of Red Dog in North-Western Australia was kind of incredible in itself. There is a monument erected by the people up that way of a famous red dog that befriended the miners. It’s a film that will make you laugh and cry… very Australian… very much an experience that will be popular around the world because the story told is about common humour, love and humanity. A great family film.

Griff the Invisible

To be honest, when I ordered Griff the Invisible it was a bit of a punt… but it was another really strong Australian movie. This is a light hearted story about a suburban superhero as much as it becomes a movie about states of mind and the question of shared versus individual realities. If you haven’t seen or heard of Griff the Invisible… another great family film.

Hanna

Kate Blanchett and Eric Bana are a formidable duo in Hanna. This is a non-stop action flick with great acting and an equally impressive script. At the end you sit in your chair and just think WOW, if only I could forget it all and watch it again. This is a classic story about the government breeding a super-killer and then losing it. Beware psychopaths in government… right?

Brighton Rock

Anything with Helen Mirren gets a special star for class but Brighton Rock may well have been the best film I watched for the last few years. If you like 1960s British gangster films with fantastic acting, a bit of the old brutality and some impressive script writing.

The Warrior’s Way

I’m not sure anybody else liked The Warrior’s Way as much as I did but that surreal kung-fu genre certainly rocks my boat. An invincible swordsman hiding from his clan among a misfit bunch of outcasts in the American west. You might be surprised and like it, too.

Paul

I’m not sure why Paul isn’t appearing on people’s top movies of 2011 lists but there are a ton of full belly laughs in this slightly spoofy but totally crazy family film. Yes it was puerile. But so am I. Leave grumpy poos at the door and have some alien fun. Great jokes.

Bridesmaids

Comedies of the year were often a little under-charged but one other exception was Bridesmaids… it was incredibly funny. I thought it would be some lame girly movie because it did so well at the box office but nope… laugh out loud, pull your teary eyes from the back of your cheek cramped face funny. When it wasn’t funny I kept thinking myself saying “The Bitch!”. Watch it and deny those thoughts.

Snowtown

I really wasn’t going to watch this Australian film about the Snowtown serial killers. It’s really the story of how poverty allows evil to enter our homes given enough neglect by wider society. It’s the story of how a vulnerable kid got roped into being a part of one of Australia’s most brutal murder sprees. It follows the tradition of Australian true crime based films like Animal Kingdom.

22 Bullets

Jean Reno is a retired hitman in 22 Bullets and I have a weakness for Jean Reno films where he’s a hitman. There is something so very believable about him as an assassin. This film was a real standout for the year and shows the calibre of foreign films hitting the market.

The Firm

Set in the 1980s when football hooliganism was a British sport in its own right, The Firm is a glimpse into the subculture of violence.

The Sinatra Club

I’m a sucker for a great true life gangster film and The Sinatra Club is that in spades. It’s another Goodfellas and touches on that same era of organised crime when a young John Gotti was poised to take control of the mafia. If you’re a mafia movie buff… there you go, heaven.

Super 8

Billed as a bit of a kid’s movie, I was absolutely taken into the Super 8 world while I watched this film. I kept thinking what a fantastic opportunity I missed as a young man living in an industrial town where nobody suggested a future not working for heavy industry. Wow, I wish that I had discovered film as a teenager instead of getting into trouble. Wow, when you watch the back-story about how these guys who made the film were shooting Super 8 film. A really great family film that happens to be about a group of kids.

Water for Elephants

For pure romantic drama this year it’s difficult to go past Water for Elephants. By the end of the movie you want to grab the circus owner’s stick and beat the living crap out of him… so the ending will make you feel a lot better than watching that bastard be cruel to the elephant. But it was a truely great film.

Other Notable Mentions

As this list can’t go on forever I could recommend several Korean films including I Saw the Devil and The Man from Nowhere. There was also True Grit, The Adjustment Bureau, Friends with Benefits, The Next Three Days and Assassination Games.

Overall, I had a pretty good year for watching films and could have made a longer list given more than my memory. But it was mainly because I was subscribed to an online service for a change. Anyway, you might find something worth watching out of that list. Enjoy.

If you’ve watched Quentin Tarantino in Sukiyaki Western Django you are likely to recognise the genre of surreal-kung-fu-western. Super saturated colour in the scenery, parts of the film that become almost cartoonesque in their overpowering artistic vision and a disregard for the physics of the real world. For example, in Sukiyaki Western Django one character mows down huge numbers of people with a hand held gattling gun. You won’t be too shocked to see the gattling gun in The Warrior’s Way.

But unlike Sukiyaki Western Django the script hasn’t been overtaken by an escalation of violence to the ridiculous. The script remains credible. The script provides a revelation of character and backstory in The Warrior’s Way that adds to the stream of ninja-kick-arse-mother-fuckers who find their unfortunate souls rheemed by Dong-gun Jang’s sword. While the computer graphics take over in these scenes it’s achieved in a spectacular way that made me regret not catching this on a big screen somewhere.

The cinematography in this film is jaw dropping and pays homage to the Chinese kung fu movie tradition from an endless stream of kung-fu movies that employ demons and monks and fantastic flying fight scenes for the highest stakes. All I can really say is nicely executed, mind the pun.

Meanwhile, The Warrior’s Way pays homage to the classic Trinity style western where a lone killer is all that really stands between good people and evil gunmen. And characters are never entirely how you expect them. The grungy style very much reminded me of Carnivale.

The beauty of this film in its execution is that it pulls both traditions together in a commercially amiable way that awes, impresses and embosses the viewer with brilliant performances. Particularly the endearing smiles of the baby at the centre of everything.

If you’re really looking for something special to watch this weekend you might want to pick this one up. It was awesome.

Fracking: Drill down 8000 feet all over the countryside and pump vast quantities of fresh water mixed with over 500 chemicals to fracture the underlying rock and release gas deposits. No, I mean VAST quantities of fresh water (in a world suffering rising water shortages) and I mean a soup of 500 chemicals (including a large number of serious carcinogens and other killers). Half that soup rises to the surface and the other half becomes a part of your countries long-term geological water supply.

The second insidious part of that business model is that contaminated victims have to prove the harm was caused by the fracking AND they have to fight it in court AND the corporation, if found at fault, simply pays out the last man standing. And where are the environmental regulators on all of this? They’re gagged by governments who pass special laws that allow these large energy companies immunity to our existing environmental safeguards. Where does it ever make sense to give multinational corporations immunity to pollute without being monitored?

A rational person would think the President of the United States of America would watch this documentary and hit a red fucking button and the world would stop on it’s what-the-fuck axis. But no… apparently Power comes in an idiot suit and Presidents are less powerful than corporate lobby groups. And now this insidious cluster-fuck of environmental ass-pumping has arrived in Australia. To the echo of ‘almost silence’. The only sad faces bleeting on our doorstep are the farmers who stand to lose their businesses to the corporate onslaught.

I don’t want to get into a synopsis here… if you watch Gasland you’ll see how water faucets can be ignited, how animals and land are contaminated and how devastating these greedy industrialists are being with the world’s future. It’s all about short-term cash. It’s also about chasing the fallacy that everything in the world is an economic problem – the High Lord Economics is as flawed as the sacrifice of virgins to a Sun God we now know to be an insentient ball of gas on the horizon.

So this makes me mad. This is exactly why I went through the MBA program – to understand globalisation, corporations and the true enemy of life on this planet. And at some point we’re all going to have to stand up and say ‘Stop the fuck here, bastards.’ If they aren’t fracking our water into poison or chugging the rainforests for cheap hardwoods then they’re scooping the oceans with their lucky dip mentality.

But the really crap part about all of these HUGE issues is that the corporations (a) have people willing to work for them to achieve these goals, and (b) know that by dividing and conquering and using the law against us then they win by the default of centralised power. How does the average community fight against hundreds of millions of dollars to sweet talk and cajole our politicians? Power corrupts.

And with Australia being swept up in this insanity where are the Australian Greens? We have voted these bastards in with numbers they’ve never seen before in national politics and for the life of me I can’t see any more than a small mention of gas fracking hitting their agendas. OK let me ask Australia this: ‘If the Murray Darling Basin were contaminated, what are our fallbacks?’

At a time when a douchebag like Donald ‘Squirrel Top’ Trump is trying to make his way into the United States Presidency why can’t we collectively see that chasing the bottom and buying into the religion of the High Lord Economics is a bizarrely insane strategy. For fuck sake, what’s the point of gas fracking to push up employment numbers and improve GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the short-term if we’re going to be shot-duck third-world economies in as little as ten-to-fifteen years.

People think I’m joking when I compare the High Lord Economics with a Peruvian Sun God. Watch Gasland… watch the virgin get sacrificed and think about those parallels. Every civilisation falls and one of the underlying reasons is their inherent belief it can’t happen. Without fresh water and healthy land we even risk joining the mass extinction.

However, True Grit is also the story of two diametrically opposed lawmen who set out to hunt Chaney down in the Indian Territory – the hard drinking “one eyed fat man” US Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and the incessant talker of refined upbringing Texas Ranger LeBoeuf (Matt Damon). Unlike the original True Grit movie, which earned John Wayne his only Oscar, the Coen brothers breezed past a lot of the underlying contention between Cogburn and LeBoeuf. So it’s worth revisiting to better understand their relationship within the narrative.

LeBoeuf and Cogburn had fought in the American Civil War for the Confederate Army. LeBoeuf’s war was that waged by the West Point trained officers who waged it with what they saw as honour, integrity and valour. Cogburn’s war was served under the guerrilla fighter William Quantrill who gained a Confederate commission as captain of partisan rangers. Quantrill, dead at 27 from a gunshot wound to the chest in an ambush, was reviled by the West Point officers for the barbarity of taking no prisoners, the murder of women and children and his propensity for hit-and-run raids. Quantrill’s men were responsible for the infamous Lawrence Massacre of 1863.

Notable real life outlaws who rode under Quantrill were Jesse James, Frank James, Cole Younger and Jim Younger. These were the breed of men that would have fought beside Rooster Cogburn only a decade earlier.

That explains the uneasy tension between the two men hunting Tom Chaney through the Indian Territory of the 1870s. The Civil War was recent history and a time of lawlessness as parts of America readjusted to the Union victory. The further contention between the men was LeBoeuf’s incessant talking and high handed attitude as a Texas Ranger. Even when LeBoeuf nearly bit his tongue off he found it impossible to hold silence.

Some found Matt Damon’s interpretation of LeBoeuf as abrasive but when consideration is given to the level of maintenance the Coen brothers gave to authentic language the portrayal of LeBoeuf made sense. LeBoeuf was a man of the defeated South, he was a man of the West Point mentality, he was proud of being a Texas Ranger and what that stood for, and he was a man who probably wasn’t bright for our time in history but was comparatively bright in his own. Much of our uneasiness comes from the difficulty we have listening to LeBoeuf in the stilted language of the 1870s. He’s the veritable man who could talk underwater (thus the tongue… Matt Damon held his tongue doubled back with a rubber band for the second part of the film to generate the affected speech).

There are many layers to True Grit that are going to make this a modern classic of the genre. True Grit may at first pass appear a shallow western of the John Wayne and Glenn Campbell era but don’t be fooled by its appreciation of roots to the original. The question is whether John Wayne or Jeff Bridges make the iconic Rooster Cogburn come to life? That’s a hard one you’ll have to go to the movie to figure out for yourself.

I watched the original True Grit on the cusp between primary and high school… John Wayne is impregnated into my cultural roots with long-standing reverance. However, this was Jeff Bridges at the peak of his career playing a man he truely understood. It boils down to the line “Fill your hand you sonofabitch.” Made all the more potent because John Wayne, at the time, had lung cancer. Somehow, when I imagine that scene where Cogburn rides both guns blazing with reins in his mouth, I see John Wayne and Jeff Bridges super-imposed.

If you don’t like the western genre then you might find this movie a little laborious in places… but give it a go. Awesome performances, great back-story to research… and a little bit about the many forms of justice – Texas Ranger justice by the book… Rooster Cogburn justice via Quantrill’s influence… or Mattie’s pure revenge on the man who killed her father for two gold pieces. Loved it… I’d give it four stars.

If you want a three dot-point review of The King’s Speech then go no further – captivating, entertaining and deeply affecting. There is no denying this is a good film by either reputation or the class act that it puts on the screen. But I have more to say about it than “this was a good film.”

The King’s Speech is a film maker’s film… a film connoisseur’s film… a film lover’s submersion into character, context and the shift between watching film and experiencing internal dialogue. Because that’s what defines a true film from a mere movie: a film transports you through the mystical something of story into an experience that refuses to stay on the screen. So, rather than being unimpressed by a movie without guns or boobs, it was a film that took to me like the sunshine on a ducks arse at feeding time. The word I’m trying to pull out of my half-eaten hat is “immersive”.

This is the story of Bertie, the second son of George V who came to the throne when his brother Edward abdicated to marry a twice divorced American woman named Wallis Simpson. With a stammer and the responsibility of Britain on his shoulders, Bertie had to find the ability within himself to make that historic speech to the British public when war broke out in Europe. The film explores the complex lifelong relationship that developed between Bertie and the unconventional speech therapist Lionel Logue.

The cinematography was flawless and engaging, the sublime craft and believability of Colin Firth as Bertie (to become King George VI) and the incredible talent of Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue combine to pull the filmgoer along a path of events, places and people that became etched into history. There were simply no lulls in the storyline and no character defects that were left to second guess their motives. This is an insight into The Royals of that era transitioning from distant figures into public entertainers at the hands of radio.

But what I found most incredible within the context of watching The King’s Speech was the level of inner conversation that it sparked in my own mind about my personal insecurities and relationships. The inner dialogue about my life was somehow embedded within the story – and that is the wonder of film at it’s absolute best. Because if you don’t walk away from a film with that extra residual something beating inside your soul then it would, after all, be just a movie.

There are going to be other good movies in 2011… and a few of them will be brilliant films. But I’m already sure that The King’s Speech will stand in the top two or three for this year. I tip my hat to this one and say “Thankyou”.

So it turns out I won a pack of eight Australian movies for answering the question: What is your favourite Australian movie of all time and explain why? My answer was Ghosts of the Civil Dead for being the most authentic Australian maximum security prison movie of all time.

OK now to the Christmas loot VideoEzy gave me as a prize:

1. South Solitary (2010) starring Miranda Otto and Marton Csokas
2. Blessed (2009) starring Frances O’Connor, Miranda Otto, Deborra-Lee Furness, Victoria Haralabidou, William McInnes and Sophie Lowe
3. The Black Balloon (2008) starring Rhys Wakefield, Luke Ford and Toni Collette
4. Little Fish (2005) starring Cate Blanchett, Sam Neill and Hugo Weaving
5. Oyster Farmer (2004) starring Alex O’Laughlin, Jim Norton and Diana Glenn
6. Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) starring Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Kenneth Branagh
7. Two Hands (1999) starring Heath Ledger, Bryan Brown and David Field
8. Black Robe (1991) starring Lothaire Bluteau, Aden Young and Sandrine Holt

Animal Kingdom captured a little of that unpredictable raw bogun testosterone reality I saw in The Boys (1998) – still the bar for bogun if you’re into authenticity. The only difference being that Animal Kingdom was definately focused on being a cinematographic experience, whereas The Boys took that rawness one step further and made it a palpable cud resonating in the back of my memory. A lot of my life was spent living around exactly that type of psychopath… and some might have played me in the same dimensions.

The movie made me a little uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong I thought Animal Kingdom resonated through the cinema as one of those profound shared experiences – or maybe that was just my past talking back through the storyline. However, the one thing I didn’t expect from the film was the close parallel to Melbourne’s infamous Underworld family (the Petingill-Allens) under the iron-fisted control of matriarch Kath Pettingill. The revenge shooting of two police officers ambushed in suburban Walsh Street, the murderous Dennis Allen killing people in his living room (Kath’s memoirs said 27, if memory serves)… the real late 1980s early 1990s executions of underworld figures – mainly associates of the Pettingill-Allen clan. The police used a tactic through those years of two dead crims for one dead cop – true story.

So I kind of wondered with such a powerful story – and I know it wasn’t biographical in the true sense, particularly the ending – if they might have actually packed that little extra punch into the film by sharing that with the general audience. Perhaps they didn’t want to share a dime with Kath and crew… if any of them still breath air in freedom.

That being said… and probably that isn’t a negative at all… Animal Kingdom captured a lot of what lamer Australian crime series have been working around in a glossy advertising driven format for the last few years. I think it sits neatly into the Australian cultural heritage between The Boys and Ghosts of the Civil Dead (1988) – undeniably the most authentic Australian maximum security film experience to make it onto film. Take my experienced word on that claim… oh Nick Cave has a great role in that one.

And full credit to the cast for authentic performances. Guy Pierce as Detective Senior Sergeant Leckie (probably the last honest cop left in Melbourne); Jackie Weaver as the cold blooded sociopathic (rare for women) matriarch; Ben Mendelsohn as ‘Pope’ Cody (based more than likely on Dennis Allen); and, James Frecheville as the young Joshua. You know when you’re a computer person and you see rubbish that destroys the believability… well these guys were authentic as crooks and detectives.

The most likable character Joel Edgerton as ‘Baz’ Brown, a family friend and cohort, falls to the war in a shopping centre carpark (based on fact, by the way). At that point it’s hard not to sympathise with the Cody’s and their own version of the rational truth… a brilliant storyline that drags you all the way back to seeing what bastards they were all along.

The facts run so close to these real events that I’m even a little worried about hurting people’s feelings by saying it out aloud. Maybe the logic was just not to get dumped in the trashy can with Underbelly?

Also as an aside… to see a real taste of the matriarch in action check out this news article from 2002 where she’s talking about evening up the score over the execution of Victor Pierce, one of her sons. She’s lost a few along the way.

Its far from a secret I’m no fan of globalisation or the sole goal of enterprise being the maximisation of shareholder wealth. Greed isn’t a healthy paradigm to base our entire civilization around.

A few days ago, I watched an interesting address to the Australian National Press Club from counter-terrorism expert and author of The Accidental Guerilla, David Kilcullen. I won’t go too far into what he was discussing but he mentioned the period after World War 2 when, in retrospect, we had wars against colonialisation as countries pushed back against dominating forces. Similarly, when we look back at the current wars we’ll see them as wars against globalisation – people pushing back against the tide of world wide Americanisation and globalised culture.

Being anti-global has somehow been attributed recently to being racist. Maybe that’s a bit of a corporate ploy to direct the cause and effect away from third world exploitation and the globalisation losers out there. The Yes Men are long time heroes of mine, I hope you enjoy their movie. Everybody – start asking questions. Always. Why? Because the maximisation of shareholder wealth has litte interest in providing you with the unsolicited truth. Food for thought.

Its partly why I’m doing an MBAS (Master of Business Administration with a Specialisation in Journalism and Media Studies) rather than further specialisation in the computing profession.

For example from Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Clean Drinking Water to the World (also available as a free PDF download>) – 1.1 billion people, that’s one in six, do not have access to clean drinking water. And 50% of the world don’t have access to the quality of water available in Rome 2,000 years ago. There are 1.8 million children dying of water-borne diseases yearly, one every 15 seconds.

So that’s what I really liked about Slumdog Millionaire. We need to understand that real people rise out of these slums and that corruption and crime are real obstacles to their survival and success. As westerners we really do look the other way about the plight of others. I’m not saying we should all give everything away but I am saying we should accept that we’re a global community and poverty is a global issue. Where do you think people who strap bombs on themselves are being bred and nurtured? If we want to win a war against terrorism, for example, we need a world of opportunity and justice. Torturing someone just makes a pool of people motivated to hate you / us / them.

The movie itself is excellently crafted in the fashion of a real cinematic experience of India – not a 2 hour gloss over and thanks for your ticket, sir. The best cinematography I’ve seen for a long, long time with rich colour and creative camera angles. You’d have to go and see it for that sentence to do it justice. If you haven’t been yet, check it out. Best movie in a long, long time. Very impressed.

Brutally gritty, it’s a movie I watched several days ago that keeps revisiting me (for my own reasons). Some classic lines – “the loud one’s never last, Kath” and “there’s not a lot of old men in my game”. Great punk music, too.

Trailer and YouTube short. Was it the most brutal crime in British underworld history? Probably far from it. But a bloody good story.