I enjoy putting this list together of films I saw at the cinema every year but as with all these lists it's vaguely pointless and reductive and it's likely that if I did it next week it may be substantively different. 

All that said, here's my top 10 films of 2011 as of 10.50 on Sat 31 December. 

Top 10

Black Swan

The Great White Silence

Apocalypse Now

Kill LIst

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Drive

Warrior

Melancholia

Black Power Mixtape

Moneyball

 

Honourable mentions

 

Take Shelter

True Grit

Potiche

Captain America

Animal Kingdom

Kaboom

The Ides of March

13 Assassins

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Thor

Howl

 

The ones I enjoyed in varying amounts, at least partially

The Eagle

Source Code

Scre4m

Insidious

Hanna

Attack the Block

Blitz

X-Men: First Class

Super 8

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Final Destination 5

Shark Night 3D

Contagion

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Immortals

The Thing

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

 

The ones I really hated

 

The King's Speech

Submarine

Oranges and Sunshine

The Tree of Life

Beginners

Sarah's Key

The Skin I Live In

 

I'm forever lecturing, in a nice way, colleagues at Fabrica and others in arts organisations that I work with about the importance of quick and dirty communication. The idea being that if it's a toss up between spending 10 mins getting something down and out into the world or spending a month polishing a perfect piece of prose the former is better given that the likelihood is that you'll never find time for the latter and indeed the moment may well have passed when your perfect prose is finally ready.

The other day I went to see the Tracey Emin show at the Hayward and after I tweeted about it

This elicited the following response.

And my instant thought was then 'no - I'm too busy' Ridiculous, right?

So here, money where my mouth is, are my quick and dirty thoughts on the show. Which I'm giving myself no more than 10 mins to complete, 'cos at the end of the day I'm not a critic and 10 mins is enough.

This isn't a massive show but one that you could spend a lot of time with because Tracey Emin likes to write and there's a lot to read. My highlights were her quilts and the neons.

The quilts (I'm using that term though it may not be the right one) are patchworks of the artist's thoughts, sayings, slurs made against her - the sum of her life at a particular moment and that's what I liked. Quilting is/was seen as women's work, done alone in or in groups. Fears and hopes, loves and losses stitched silently and invisibly into the final work but Tracey Emin makes all those thing visible lays them and herself open for all to see and that's powerful.

I love neon used in art generally, I'm a big Dan Flavin fan, and being in a room full of them I find enjoyable of itself but also these are delicate, emotional, funny, quiet thoughts written in light. They play against the usual noise of neon for advertising, brash, unsubtle, ugly.

Those were my highlights but I also enjoyed the video work and much of the rest. I found her, because in the end it's all about her, hard to resist and that's how she won me over and turned me into a believer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking Digital Highlights

Dropped out of workshop involving soldering due to fears over inherent clumsiness and burning hot metal and attended State of social media panel instead. Ironically it took place in a bunker with no access to wifi and so no thoughts escaped. Day one highlights - Erica Mckean talking dictionaries and digital thinking, my new favourite word - skeuomorph (look it up) and in a Day 2 highlights flashforward, I chatted with Erica briefly and she gave me a notebook, which was cool. Conrad Wolfram and the computational document format, Newsweek reporter Dan Lyons talking Facebook and Google in a highly entertaining and gossipy way, Nicole Yershon with her semesters of learning, a practical thing to take away for my butterfly mind, Nancy Duarte on presentations and life, "don't get stuck in the middle of your story". Heather Knight + the joke telling robot and the importance of digital/tech collaborating with the arts. Day 2 Highlights - HelloFlower. Caspar Berry and the importance of embracing uncertainty, it's what makes us human. Tan Le working on the interface between brain waves and computers enabling wheelchair users to control their chairs through thought and Tom Scott with a sobering but highly entertaining and funny demonstration of the perils of an unsecured Facebook profile. Summary - 2 days of thought provocation, wonder, joy and thinking space. Thank you so much it was (please insert that word I said I wouldn't use).

Today's show will be focusing on Mesopotamian Dramaturgies by Kutlug Ataman showing at the Old Municipal Market in Circus St. There's an interview with the man himself as well as Honor Harger, Director of Lighthouse and one of the people responsible for bringing Kutlug Ataman to Brighton.

We'll also have the pick of the Fringe and the regular round up from Judy Stevens Director of Open Houses and the House Festival on what to look out for this year.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit the Lille Art Museum (LaM), which has a pretty impressive modern and contemporary art collection but the biggest amount of gallery space is given over to its Outsider Art (Art Brut if you must) collection. Outsider Art is a pretty broad term these days, applied to work made by artists who have little or no access to the art world, education etc. When originally coined in France in the 1940's the term more specifically referred to work made by patients in psychiatric hospitals. The collection at LaM is extraordinary with the materials used often pointing at the work's institutional beginnings. Toilet paper, cardboard, felt tip pens, crayons......and the work itself feels very raw, less knowing somehow, less filtered through someone's idea of what's acceptable as art. Though of course the irony is that any gallery collection is the product of selection, of weighing merit, ordering into themes. It is then, entirely filtered through a museum curator's vision. How much more amazing would it be if the artists had made those curatorial choices.

Maybe not possible in the case of LaM where the artists are pretty much long gone but it's one of the reasons I like a project like Outside In http://www.outsidein.org.uk/ which works with outsider artists rather than doing things with/to their work without their input.

Bit behind on this so here goes (that's not in word count) ((or that))

The Eagle = zero expectations but surprisingly I thought it was really enjoyable

Source Code = unlike Inception a high concept movie that isn't completely up its own arse

Cave of Forgotten Dreams = still love Herzog, still hate 3D

Ha! Made it.

Struggling with this one. It was nice and it was cute and quite funny had but no bite. That's all really. It was enough and that's all.

Saw this weeks ago and just realised I never did this. And now I can't remember much except that I liked it. I know, insightful right? All I really remember was that the mum was truly vile. Great performance '..and you've done bad things, haven't you sweetie?'

Dear angelheaded hipsters,

Obviously if I were smarter I'd write this in the style of the poem but you know what, it's not worth it, the film's just not that good. Franco is great as Ginsberg and his reading of Howl fantastic but oh that godawful animation. Why?

L

Looks amazing and has that real sense of lawlessness and venality with a thin veneer of piety and morality that is a common theme in American art. Society clinging on at the edge of the wilderness. That ol' frontier spririt done truthfully.