My 10 Favourite performances of 2011.

The only year of my backlog left to go. The force of playing favourites in this list is strong!

 10. Jennifer Aniston, Horrible Bosses

A nympho boss from hell, but Aniston's clearly had  blast taking on the role and the fun of that made for a very fun performance. And I never thought I'd see Rachel from Friends say such filthy things!

09. Jessica Chastain, The Help

I also loved Jess in Tree of Life which came out the same year, but as that's my second most despised movie ever after American Hustle, I listed her for this. Jess (I call her that because I like to pretend to myself that I'm BFFs with her) is a freaking chameleon!

08. Saoirse Ronan, Hanna

Obligatory mention of the best young actress around, whom I've been a loyal fan ever since I watched her as meddling Briony in Atonement. Here, she teams up with Atonement's director again to give a chilling portrayal of a girl who's been trained to be an assassin from birth. 

(Pointless trivia that only I find interesting: the director in question, Joe Wright, was engaged to Rosamund Pike (who he met on the set of Pride and Prejudice, where she played Keira Knightley's nice sister Jane, until Joe dicked her about. From interviews, Rosamund appears to have taken this in her stride and gotten on with her life. I'm disappointed she didn't Gone Girl him tbh)

07. Jonah Hill, Moneyball

As the shy Yale-educated economist who introduces Brad Pitt to the statistics behind baseball, Jonah Hill won plaudits from film critics, his first Oscar nomination, but most importantly for him, I'm sure, I started taking him seriously as an actor. In Moneyball, Jonah leaves behind his usual drunken frat-boy persona to inhibit an altogether more soft-spoken presence,  a subtle screen presence that lets Brad Pitt do all the heavy lifting.

06. Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids

A brilliantly cringe performance in a brilliantly cringe film. Line-readings on point, especially when she puts the awful customer in the shop in her place.

05. Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids

A bold, audacious performance of great confidence and exuberance. In the photo above, she's seducing her real-life husband. Who doesn't want it. Melissa and Kristen's sick comic timing is ensured 2016's Ghostbusters was anything but a flop in my eyes!

04. Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Mary May Marlene

I never knew what her character was thinking. After everything that Martha went through, I think that's apropos. 

03. Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Fierce A F. Following in Noomi Rapace's footsteps was a formidable challenge, but my Queen more than rose to the task. Her commitment to her role, and the element of relish and bite in that revenge scene is some of Rooney's finest acting. 

02. Viola Davis, The Help

Every piece of acting Viola touches turns to gold (she did a lot with underwritten characters in both Suicide Squad and Ender's Game). But in The Help she's given a role and a script where she can flaunt the true extent of her acting talent, and brings us a woman who's outwardly strong and maternal, inwardly vulnerable. She's the emotional core of The Help, and completely breaks your heart.

Trivia: Viola and Jessica, both on this list for The Help, both attended Juilliard Drama School. And both are astonishingly good actresses. Stay in school, kids!

01. Alan Rickman, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

... speaking of heartbreaking, for me, one of the most pathos-injected performances of all time is Alan Rickman as Professor Snape in the final Harry Potter film. Whilst the casting of the Harry Potter series has, shall we say, been variable in quality (Emma Watson seems to think wiggling her eyebrows earnestly equates to acting. Bye Felicia), Rickman was everything I imagined as Snape and more. Snape's stony face hid years of bottled-up love for a girl he still feels guilt for his part in losing. 

The finest part of J.K. Rowling's saga was this Big Reveal, and in conveying how much the secret meant to him, Rickman has crafted one of the most memorable Byronic heroes. R.I.P. to a great talent.

The shot above is a scene that still lingers in my memory.

Stats and Shiz, because it's not like that's what my PhD is in or anything
Gender
Men: 2 (haha)
Women: 8
... but this is the first time (going backwards from 2015) I've listed a fella in the prestigious top spot.

Playing favourites (previous appearances)

Jessica Chastain: 6th in 2011 (Zero Dark Thirty), 10th in 2014 (A Most Violent Year)

Jonah Hill: 7th in 2012: (21 Jump Street), 9th in 2013 (Wolf of Wall Street), third in 2014 (22 Jump Street). 

This makes Jonah Hill the only actor to be in my 10 favourite performances of the year four years in a row. Dunno if you can tell but... I'm a fan.

Rooney Mara: 6th in 2013 (Side Effects), 2nd in 2015 (Carol)

Melissa McCarthy: 8th in 2013 (The Heat, from the same director as her entry in this year's list)

Saoirse Ronan: 7th in 2009 (The Lovely Bones), first in 2015 (Brooklyn)

^^^ this may give you an indication of who my favourite actors might be

And of course.... by BBFC rating (gives you a rough indication of grittiness of the film from which the performance came)

12A: 5

15: 4

18: 1 (the 18 in question being The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And boy did it earn that 18 certificate!) #RevengeRape

Horrible Bosses (Seth Gordon, 2011)

Childhood friends Nick, Dale and Kurt, once known as the “three musketeers” are still friends into their adulthood, and meet up on a daily basis for a drink and meal at their local bar. Trouble is, whilst their friendship thrives, their work lives leave a lot to be desired. Nick (Arrested Development’s Jason Bateman) works in a corporate environment, with a psychotic boss Dave Harken (played by Kevin Spacey) whom gets arsey if he is so much at 2 minutes late – after 6am. In one scene, Harken entraps him into necking scotch – at 8 in the morning. Nick despises his boss, but puts up with his bullying, knowing – or thinking – that if he takes the shit for a while longer, he will receive the promotion to VP that he has so hardly worked for. That hope, we later find out, turns out to be completely misguided.



Elsewhere, Jason Sudeikis’s Kurt is an account manager at an environmental firm. He enjoys his job, the easy banter he has with cute delivery girls and his rapport with his kind-hearted boss, Jack Pellit (Donald Sutherland, in a role much like his in The Italian Job in more ways than one). The only downside to his job is his boss’ cokehead dipshit son (played by an almost unrecognizable Colin Farrell). Luck not being on his side, his boss has a heart attack near the start, leaving the firm in the less-than-capable drug-taking hands of Bobby Pellitt. And finally, and most hilariously, we have Charlie Day as Dale, a dental assistant who’s loving relationship with his sweet fiancée bordering on schmaltz, having to deal with his nympho dentist boss Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston), who spends far more time trying to fill her own cavity than those of her patients.

The premise sounds funny but flaky, but the three beleaguered leads make it work. Jason Bateman is no stranger to awkward comedy, having led Arrested Development for many years, but he of the three is probably the one who “plays it straight” the most. Charlie Day has all the energy and hyperness of a hamster on acid and is by turns lamentable, annoying, and likeable. Jason Sudeikis is given some brilliant one-liners, which he delivers with glee. But just as important – if not more so, are the eponymous bosses. Kevin Spacey’s evil boss is an amalgam of his Keyser Soze as well his sadism in Se7en, but with a terrifically subtle darkly comic side. Colin Farrell’s transformation into his role – hair slicked back, constantly sniffing due to his drug addiction is what characterizes his performance more than any acting he really does. But Jennifer Aniston is superb. I quite liked her in Friends, although considered the other five of the cast all better than her, and have been less-than-impressed with her film CV so far, but in Horrible Bosses, her dedication to her role as the crazy bitch sex addict is second-to-none. In one scene, she traps poor Dale in her office, where she is wearing nothing more than panties, suspenders, and her dentist’s uniform. Dale tells her that her lack of clothing/nudity is crossing some kind of line. Julia argues otherwise. “Can you see my pussy?!” In another scene, she brags who she masturbated so furiously to gossip girl’s Penn Badgley that “[she] broke a nail.” It’s a fair cry from the clean-cut Rachel Green that we’re still used to thinking of Aniston as, but without a shadow of a doubt, it’s the best film performance she’s given to date.

There are laughs to be had elsewhere. As the three men get increasingly riled with their ridiculously horrible bosses, the idea is banded about of killing them off. At first, it’s in the name of banter, but as their working lives becoming escalatingly awful, they realize they are left with little option. So they go to a dodgy part of California, wherein they are introduced to Jamie Foxx’s “hitman”. Foxx himself is a revelation; we’ve seen him excel in the serious supporting role (Any Given Sunday, Collateral), and take the lead exceptionally too (Ray), but here, as surly criminal Motherfucker Jones, he is a joy.

Horrible Bosses has overtones of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, played for laughs, and with lots of dirty sex jokes along the way. Unlike the majority of films which attempt to amalgamate the comedy and crime genres, only to fail miserably, Horrible Bosses is a roaring success. Much of this owes to the glittering A-list cast and their not being embarrassed to look stupid on stage, but the writing is also excellent, and I received more than one surprise at the plot development of the film (one scene, so out of place, so sudden, and so shocking, surprised me so much in a way that I hadn’t been so taken aback since *that* scene in 2005’s Cache.) Clever nods to pop culture and a brilliant reverse-product placement gag at Toyota are littered around the film, leading me to feel it really is smarter than the majority of critics have written it of as The film takes dark issues such as murder, rape and blackmail and makes a gigantic joke out of it all. Some have not been impressed by this approach, but I found the film an unparallel treat; and was chuckling from start to finish. My favourite film of 2011 so far.