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ianungstad wrote:... and Stephen Frears (Lay the Favorite), The Assassin (Hsiao-hsien Hou), Words with Gods (Emir Kusturica), The We and the I (Michel Gondry) are some other goodies slated for next year.

Thanks, Ian. I'd forgotten about the Frears and hadn't heard about the Gondry at all. I assumed that The Assassin fell apart a couple of years ago -- I don't think it ever started filming.

I forgot to include Frederick Wiseman's Crazy Horse, which hits the U.S. next month.

The Coens' Inside Llewyn Davis starts filming next month and could potentially be on tap for the end of the year.

The information is sketchy but this is what the Playlist and a few other blogs had reported about The Assassin last fall. :

According to a report from Taiwan’s Apple Daily, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Shu Qi will play husband and wife in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s long rumored, since 2007, martial arts fantasy film (The Assassin). The cast also includes Chang Chen and Tadanobu Asano and begins low-key shooting in Nara, Japan

Certainly there hasn't been much news about the film since, so this tidbit from Apple Daily could be bogus.

domino harvey wrote:You are the only one furthering the fiction that this has been a bad year for film

F'real - this has easily been the best year since 2007, and I didn't even like The Tree of Life or The Descendants!

mfunk9786 wrote:

domino harvey wrote:You are the only one furthering the fiction that this has been a bad year for film

F'real - this has easily been the best year since 2007.

Really? I can't think of a single film I saw this year that would have made my top five for either of the past two years (and I wouldn't even say that those years were exceptional either).

Maybe you should see more movies. Between Le Havre, Melancholia, The Future, Drive, and you probably don't like any of these great movies do you? Did you ever think that maybe the problem isn't the movies?

Diff'rent strokes - but I've been knocking films off my top 10 like crazy this year to make room for new ones, and that does not happen too often outside of a few year-end prestige pics. There's been a lot of great stuff in my opinion. I don't know if we'll have another 2007 anytime soon, but I'll gladly take a few more 2011s

knives wrote:Maybe you should see more movies. Between Le Havre, Melancholia, The Future, Drive, and you probably don't like any of these great movies do you? Did you ever think that maybe the problem isn't the movies?

I saw all of those except Le Havre (which I wanted to see but never got around to it). Drive was the only one I was able to appreciate, but I didn't love it either way.

You do know that just because you call something "great" doesn't mean it's "great"? It's "great" to you, and it may be "great" to me, but there's nothing wrong with the person who didn't find it "great". Speaking in absolutes doesn't make anything more absolute, especially with a subjective medium.

I guess I'm at fault too for making a claim as blanketed as "bad crop" in regards to the year at hand. This year's just really been lackluster for me, personally.

Any year with Meek's Cutoff is good enough for me.

Looking at my top ten lists for the last three years, this seems very much the strongest and most interesting- though it makes a significant difference for me if you shift Certified Copy back to last year. And I still have maybe half a dozen movies I suspect I will love that need watching. I would agree that, for me at least, this is the best movie year since 2007.

James Mills, serious question: How many 2011 releases have you seen? If the number is less than, say, 50, wouldn't your time be better spent continuing to seek out those films that appeal specifically to you rather than acting dumbfounded that a lot of people liked films that you didn't? I mean, when I also say that I think 2011 has been a "great year," I have a particular set of films in mind that may bear little resemblance to the ones that mfunk or matrix or anyone else are thinking of. (And if watching that many of this year's releases doesn't sound appealing to you, why are you posting in the New Films section of an internet message board devoted to movies?) zedz said it best:

zedz wrote:

J Adams wrote:[2011] is definitely the worst year in the history of cinema.

Anybody who says this is always wrong. Keep looking.

Telling James Mills he shouldn't post here has just become a redundant exercise in getting yelled at by Mr Sausage

I wouldn't tell him he shouldn't post here, just that his perspective seems willfully narrow.

It's one thing to forge out a spot as the board's resident contrarian; it's another to try over and over again to convince everyone else that your opinions are fact

mfunk9786 wrote:It's one thing to forge out a spot as the board's resident contrarian; it's another to try over and over again to convince everyone else that your opinions are fact

I said that nobody's opinions are facts. That is the opposite of what you're claiming I do.

swo, what you're writing is also somewhat irrrelevant to what I stated. I wasn't at all "dumbfounded that a lot of people liked films that I didn't," I said that claiming a certain film is great is merely an opinion, not a fact. Because, as you so wisely quoted zedz of stating, anybody who says something as blanketed as "the worst year in the history of cinema" or even "the best year in the history of cinema" is always going to be wrong, just as I was wrong in saying that this year was a generally "bad crop". It's really not that simple.

And to answer your serious question, I doubt that I've even seen 30 films of 2011. But, just as you suggested I do, I have seen many more films from previous years that are more keen to my taste. That doesn't mean I can't contribute to a thread that involves new films in the genres that we all care so deeply about. I don't understand why mfunk (and perhaps a few others) is so adamant about bantering with someone that is in full support of the same cinema as them. I'm not here to be disputatious, honestly. If anything, I compromise my own beliefs too much on these boards in attempts to be better understood and, to some extent, accepted.

I think the issue here is pretty simple - if you've only seen 30 or so films from this year, you don't have a strong basis for your claim of this year being a "bad crop", in your own words. Flippant remarks like this are what antagonize people; it's thread crapping. Apologizing for it now is fine, but if you want to stop causing arguments, try to make more constructive posts in the first place. I highly doubt anyone wants you to "compromise [your] own beliefs" in order to fit in - I would hardly accuse the prolific posters here of conformity of taste.

To try and steer things back on track, my most anticipated 2012 film right now is Cabin in the Woods. When checking it out on IMDB I came across something bizarre - it looks like The Avengers might not be the only Whedon-helmed film coming out next year. He also made a feature adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing - the cast is filled with regular collaborators. Normally modern, low-budget Shakespeare would make me cringe, but so would modern, low-budget musical and Dr. Horrible was a pleasant surprise, so I can't help but be optimistic.

It's always so hard for me to judge "years in film" because of the way I consume cinema. I was able to quickly catch Le Havre in theaters this year, but I mostly watch foreign films on DVD and usually later when I can pick them up for relatively inexpensive cost. I can't count how many times I saw my "favorite film of 200X" several years after its release. This is why I feel ill-equipped to respond to the Top 10 list for each year.

Matt wrote:Sarah Polley is adapting Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace as her third film.

Wasn't there a planned adaptation 10 years ago, that was going to star Cate Blanchett?

Apparently so. I think I'd much rather see Polley's version, even without Cate. Or maybe she's still interested, in which case... bonus!

Polley seems determined to film a story by every great contemporary female author from Canada. Damned if I know who comes after Atwood and Munro.

Kaufman's Frank or Francis which starts shooting in a few weeks has filled out it's cast rather nicely.The film has Steve Carrell, Nicolas Cage, Jack Black, Kate Winslet, Kevin Kline, Elizabeth Banks, Catherine Keener, Paul Reubens on board. The film sounds delightfully nutty. I hope it's ready for a fall festival debut.

ianungstad wrote:Kaufman's Frank or Francis which starts shooting in a few weeks has filled out it's cast rather nicely.The film has Steve Carrell, Nicolas Cage, Jack Black, Kate Winslet, Kevin Kline, Elizabeth Banks, Catherine Keener, Paul Reubens on board. The film sounds delightfully nutty. I hope it's ready for a fall festival debut.

"Despite certain reports, THR can confirm Kate Winslet is not in the cast."

Normally I hate anthology films but this one has quite a number of great directors attached. :

Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki passed through Rotterdam on Friday. He was booed by some when he turned up late and dishevelled at the Q&A before his film Le Havre but the film itself was very warmly received. Kaurismaki told the local press that he will soon be joining forces with Manoel De Oliveira, Jean-Luc Godard, Pedro Costa and Victor Erice on a film to mark the status of Guimäres in Northern Portugal as European Capital of Culture in 2012.

You could have just written Erice will be giving us something new and I'd be fawning in anticipation.