It's true that the stated purpose of this blog is to comment upon, and recommend, movies that were nominated for Oscars, and I'd like to stick to that purpose, if not exclusively, then at least, you know, predominantly. It's also true that the last time I checked in here I began to write a lengthy, detailed reading list, to accompany the Oscar-related recommended viewing list I've already posted.
But the end of a calendar year recently rolled over and past us, and as I have no other venue in which to write about my favorite movies of the past year, I'll have to do it here. (Besides, I happen to know that that last entry I posted, enticed that reader who requested that reading list, into taking a shot at reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, so she ought to be occupied with that, for a while, and require no further recommendations, any time soon.) (Um, unless she has as much trouble getting into that book, as I did.)
I'm inordinately excited about this, because I haven't had a chance to write about my year's favorite movies, for three whole years, now, though I have been keeping lists. (I did get as far as posting lists of titles, without additional comment, on my Facebook page, at the end of 2009 and 2010; but the gravity of my medical condition, at both those times, prevented me from following up with any notes at all. While I do expect my friends to generally appreciate my taste in movies, I don't think I can rightly expect many or any of them, to go around watching titles from one of my eclectic lists, without any indications as to why they should, in any specific instance, in any particulars. I wouldn't, if I was them, or you, or anyone else.)
(What's that you say? I've already posted a long list of recommended Oscar titles, without saying a word about any of those? Um, right. Right, I need to catch up with writing some notes, here, about those movies, too...)
My year's end best lists are chosen from all the movies I personally happened to see for the first time, during that year. My health doesn't allow me to keep up with theatrical releases in such a way as to effectively cover the same "year's best" material that everyone else does, for any given year; and if I did, I'd probably name seven or eight of the same movies every other critic named, anyway. This blog is about recommending movies, in a truly useful way; so I'm recommending the best movies I happened to see between January 2009 and December 2011, regardless of when those movies happen to have been originally released. Certainly at least some of them will be "new," to you.
I, like many another serious movie geek, track a few generic "big Hollywood" directors, because I find them occasionally interesting. I was running way behind when, in 2009, I caught up with the 2007 Antoine Fuqua thriller SHOOTER. I went out of my way to see this slick and fashionable A-list Hollywood political thriller/action movie, because I track its director, Antoine Fuqua; I track Fuqua out of admiration for TRAINING DAY, a corrupt cop thriller starring Denzel Washington, that was so much better than that kind of movie usually turns out to be, it was almost an instant classic. SHOOTER wasn't a major hit of its season the way TRAINING DAY was, but it is almost as good, which means it's well worth seeing.
Adapted from Stephen Hunter's novel Point of Impact, SHOOTER tells the story of former USMC Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, played by Mark Wahlberg. A brilliant sniper, Swagger/Wahlberg gets disillusioned in the line of duty, and so becomes a bitter, paranoid recluse, living alone in a cabin in the woods, avidly tracking Internet conspiracy theories. A group of renegade Feds (led by Danny Glover, cast against type, here, as a creepy villain, with limited success) trick him into coming out of retirement to plan the assassination of a visiting African politician, for reasons and by means it would be unnecessarily spoiling to explain here in detail; Glover and his people plan to frame Wahlberg for the crime he never knew they intended to commit, and they also plan to kill him, too, immediately after the assassination, but Wahlberg, of course, turns out to be much more resourceful, dangerous, and vengeful than the people using him ever suspected. Wahlberg spends the rest of the intricately plotted movie eluding police and government agents, while figuring out who set him up and why, and then hunting them down, working his vengeful way up the crooked chain of command to the power behind Danny Glover, a sitting U.S. Senator (played with heavy accent and gruesome relish by Ned Beatty).
Leaving all its carefully crafted detail out of a description of SHOOTER, like I just did, makes it sound like cookie-cutter formula stuff; it's in those details, and in the careful attention paid them by the filmmakers, that SHOOTER really proves itself to be a movie too fiercely determined to entertain, to dismiss out of hand, out of disgust for its intermittent reliance on cliche. SHOOTER is richly scripted, heavily and artfully plotted, filled with interesting supporting characters and diverting minor incidents, given to carefully researched technical detail. Most importantly, SHOOTER, like TRAINING DAY, feels genuinely committed to its political message; in fact, it's essentially the same message, in both movies, and so it seems safe to attribute that message, and that sense of commitment, to their common director, Antoine Fuqua. What Fuqua seems to be determined to tell us, by unwieldy way of these his best big studio genre movies, is that power and money are intrisically corrupting influences, in any system that runs by or on power and/or money; and that the only hope for combating creeping corruption, be it among cops or among politicians, lies in good men of principle acting, when necessary, to exploit the decadence and weakness corruption always engenders, to destroy those who are so corrupted, even if and when that requires fighting violence with violence. Perhaps Antoine Fuqua sees himself and his work reflected in this message; that is to say, that Antoine Fuqua using his career as a big studio director, devoting his wit and skills to making shallow fun genre hits, to get this message across, is akin to the renegade heroics of his movies' protagonists.
That's pretty heavy talk, I know, for describing a pretty standard studio A-list action thriller, and that's the thing about SHOOTER; it may arrive as yesterday's news, in some respects, but even as it satisfies genre conventions on a mass market level, dealing in overly familiar storytelling terms and tropes, SHOOTER is also, undeniably, a smart and thoughtful movie, made for smart and thoughtful audiences, clearly intended to fuel meaningful conversations about politics and about society. SHOOTER is also irresistibly engaging, a fast paced, tightly controlled machine of a movie, carefully designed and engineered to entertain a large wide audience, in a serious intense way. In all of this, SHOOTER is, again, closely comparable to TRAINING DAY, and while I guess I'd recommend you see TRAINING DAY first, I enjoyed SHOOTER almost as much.
