My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011)

Probably the worst film of 2011 that I have seen. One of the most cliched male-fantasy's of all-time. Every cliche of a romantic-comedy is present. Every single one. Anyways... from the beginning we are introduced to the great, honest Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) (in terrible voiceover I might add) and throughout we see him perform some heroic feats, including: 1. get in bed with Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams), 2. help her with her endless troubles (presented here as some sort of silly hysteria), 3. lead her to her most popular performance (in Hawks' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) (made clear by the epilogue), 4. and even get the girl he wanted from the start (of course only after he is betrayed by Marilyn), to end up with that pitch-perfect happy ending. Oh, and of course his involvement in the production also leads Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) to his most popular performance (that brilliant epilogue again). Another massive problem is its relationship with cinema. It seems to be a hate-letter to the medium; by the end Olivier realizes real art lies in theater and film is a more superficial art, concerned more with transcendent beauty, like Monroe's, than actual talent (which she is never portrayed as having in this film). Her acting abilities are treated as some sort of ridiculous, magical happenstance. She never gets anything right but sometimes she gets it half right and everybody, for some miraculous reason, thinks its completely brilliant. A film that somehow does manage to fail at every level. The only scenes that end up being watchable are the most cringe worthy; simply because at that point the film begins to seem like a parody and produces some laughter.

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PS. The Golden Globe nominations seem like a joke: