You are about to read (or ignore) the first in my series of autopsies on 2011 film. As I have for the past few years, I kept a fastidious spreadsheet of every film I watched. Then I ranked the films and added explanations. You probably don’t care.

That’s fine. Believe it or not, I normally devote a lot of attention to audience and purpose—I censure myself to an unbelievable degree—but I write this series of columns for myself. I have an obsessive, completist personality, and I have to catalog the things I care about. I’m aware that no one wants to read capsule reviews of a hundred-plus movies. But to move onto 2012 (and, hey, look, we’re halfway through its first month), I have to produce something that contextualizes the past year with detail. This writing is the final step in something that gives me a lot of joy. Sorry it’s self-indulgent.

I saw 111 new films last year, which is way too many for a person who doesn’t get paid a living wage to watch movies, and way too few to be considered a legitimate critic. My overall viewing was up 26% from the year before. I hope to watch far fewer movies in 2012.

Anyway, I always divide the films into six tiers: garbage, admirable failures, flawed but still likeable, good movies, great movies, and instant classics. In between those write-ups, I’ll present little lists of other 2011 curiosities (favorite trailers, older movies that I saw for the first time, etc.) Feel free to just read the great movies and instant classics, feel free to read everything, feel free to read nothing.

GARBAGE

111. Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press)- I seem to be the only person to actively hate this film and what it represents in the world of documentaries. Here you have a subject who stands for a decaying world of old New York, slowly being outmoded from his job and phased out from his neighborhood. Despite a lack of formal training, he has been influential in his field and lives a simple life blissfully, even with a bit of vexation over the conflict between his Catholic faith and his latent homosexuality. What I have just described is way more interesting and developed than the malformed suggestions that we get here. Nothing is explored in-depth. This smug rough draft should have been abandoned as soon as the filmmakers realized that their subject refuses to make any concession for the camera or explain—in any way—what supposedly makes him so interesting. Whenever a question is posed to him, he just shrugs and giggles. And what makes it so much more painful is how self-satisfied the whole affair is. Rarely have I seen a film so convinced of its own greatness but so unwilling to justify that greatness to the audience. 

110. Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder)- In trying to make the least misogynistic film he could, Snyder accidentally made the most misogynistic film he could. There’s a problem when the most exciting moments are only happening in a character’s head, and there’s a bigger problem when, despite the bells and whistles, those moments are boring. In the second of five action setpieces, I was already checking my watch.

109. Kaboom (Gregg Araki)- This mess confirms that Mysterious Skin was an aberration in a career of bullshit. Rather than develop any semblance of consistent character, Araki cobbles together cliches and drips on sex that, rather than being transgressive or intriguing, is bland and matter-of-fact. If that’s the point, then I don’t know why that point is being made within the context of the film. While he’s obviously not going for a realistic college experience, I doubt Araki has even talked to a college kid in ten years. Even at his worst, he used to be able to produce some lasting imagery, but even the visual style is bankrupt. You know that phrase “all of the money was on the screen”? Yeah, the opposite of that. What is at stake is the literal end of the world, and I couldn’t have cared less. 

108. Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasekathul)- For this one, I know that there’s a lot of context about Buddhism and the history of Thailand that I simply don’t know, and, because of my own ignorance, I didn’t get much from the film. But knowing what I was missing didn’t make this garbled, over-long pretension easier to sit through.

107. Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay)- Aside from the knock on the visuals, since this is honestly the most sumptuous 3-D feast I’ve seen since Avatar, I could copy-and-paste what I just wrote for Kaboom here. The characters feel like an afterthought, and anything resembling plot, conflict, or theme is so muddled and fast that it’s reduced to incoherence. I would have been irritated after watching this, but I was too exhausted. I felt assaulted in all the worst ways.

106. Hall Pass (Peter & Bobby Farrelly)- The Farrellys have never been known for subtlety or detail—and this is perhaps their least subtle or detailed work—but I can at least laugh a few times at their movies. As hard as it tries, Hall Pass is simply not funny, wasting a cast that should have been able to get the material across.

105. Scream 4 (Wes Craven)- The fourth Scream has no idea what it wants to be. It fails as a reboot, an homage, and a faithful representative of the original series. It just fails. The final moments have the potential to shake up what we’ve just seen, but then, predictably, they succumb to the same half-hearted compromises that characterized everything that came earlier.

104. The Hangover, Part II (Todd Phillips)- The first film was one of my favorites of 2009, so I was as disappointed as everyone else to see a sequel that tried, to its own detriment, to recreate every single moment of the original, but with none of its illicit pleasure or novel suspense. It’s a case study for what goes wrong with sequels that assume bigger and louder is the same as better.

103. Rubber (Quentin Dupieux)- I don’t mind exploitation pictures; I do mind exploitation pictures that pretend to be something more when they aren’t. Rubber’s prologue actually shows promise and teases interesting ideas that never actually get explored in the film proper. Instead we get a one-joke movie that wears its welcome out quickly.

102. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog)- I didn’t see Into the Abyss, but I hear that’s the 2011 film that Herzog devoted his full attention to. This certainly wasn’t. His 3-D documentary on the Lascaux caves would have made for an engaging twenty-minute Imax short. It’s unfortunately ninety minutes long. I was also turned off by Herzog’s belaboring of the restrictions placed upon him in the cave. It was as if he was apologizing for the film as he was making it.

101. The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry)- I can recall two moments of Michel Gondry’s exhilarating brand of surrealism, (And two moments is better than zero.) but they’re respites in an otherwise bland superhero tale. Seth Rogen and Stephen Chow have no chemistry, and it feels as if Cameron Diaz is slumming. What’s worse, there’s barely any action until the convoluted final act.

100. Cars 2 (John Lasseter)- Pixar’s luck had to end sometime, and it’s here at the unnerving, lowest-common-denominator sequel to a movie no one liked to begin with. What makes Cars 2 especially condescending is that it not only doesn’t improve upon the original, it erases any of the goodwill established therein. The Radiator City that was so exalted in the first film for being a welcome oasis from busy city life? Spend five minutes there, then fuck that shit. We’re going to Tokyo. It’s cloying and superficial in all of the ways Pixar used to stand against.

99. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)- Critics fell all over themselves to excuse and praise this film—I guess because Reichardt’s other movies are admittedly good. Oh, it’s slow? No, it’s deliberately paced. Oh, the ending is an unsatisfying shrug? That’s because Reichardt ran out of money. It’s not her fault. (It isn’t?) Oh, it sells itself as a revisionist western when it doesn’t really update or offer a new perspective on any of the Old West myths? No, you don’t get it. The Native American literally doesn’t get a voice. And it takes Michelle Williams a really long time to load a musket. Sorry that I don’t have anyone to impress.

98. I Am Number Four (DJ Caruso)- You could do worse than this anti-climactic origin story—it’s not as offensive as some of the other entries in this tier—but it still feels like a copy of a copy of a copy offered up like a sacrifice to potential franchises everywhere.

97. No Strings Attached (Ivan Reitman)- While I appreciate the film’s attempt to show people in their twenties acting like people in their twenties, (No one talks on the telephone. Finally.) it lays on its characterization too thickly, and there are about five too many best friend sounding boards. I didn’t care at all about the Ashton Kutcher screenwriting subplot either. Lake Bell has a dexterous comedic performance here though.

96. Bad Teacher (Jake Kasdan)- I think this idea could have worked, but Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake were miscast. There are a few laughs, but I felt as if the Diaz character existed in a different film from everyone else. For this to work, she has to be a bit more cartoonish, or all of the other characters have to be a bit more realistic.