The MacGuffin

Awkward.

Near the end of 2011 I started perusing top ten lists to see if there was anything that I hadn’t heard of that might be interesting. On a TV list I had I saw Awkward., a show about a young teenage girl named Jenna (Ashley Rickards). Now, my first instinct was that this was simply a slightly more mature teenage show, still in the vein of teen shows on Nickelodeon or Disney Channel. In many ways it is, but a big difference is it actually addresses real issues.

With 2011 officially in the books, it’s time once again to look back and reflect on some of the best films that have come out in the past year. As with all movie writers, coming up with a list like this is usually expected, but also damn near impossible. To me, reading and writing these types of articles are only beneficial in spreading word about titles that really had an effect on me, while stirring up debate between those who strongly agree with my choices, or vehemently disagree. No one list is ever truly definitive; what is considered great to one may not register the same way to another. The only real truth is that 2011 had a wide range of very interesting and fascinating films, and just like every year, there’s always a good handful worth noting.

In modern society, technology has made privacy something of a rarity. Even if you choose not to participate in the hubbub of social networking and other various internet activities, chances are something about you is somewhere online. Privacy is something society has cherished for a long time. The option to intermingle with others but be able to always retreat to where one is not seen by anyone is to some societies just as important as it is an enigma to other societies. In privacy is where we can be who we feel we really are, without the judgment of others; where we can indulge the desires we feel might be deemed shameful by the people around us. In artist-turned-director Steve McQueen’s latest film Shame, he turns the camera’s eye on this concept and what happens when the privacy we rely on to indulge ourselves is stripped away.

“His friends call him Mr. T. His enemies call for mercy!”

In the summer of 1971, the seminal action film Shaft smoothed its way onto the silver screen and exploded at the box office. Made for a budget of one and a quarter million dollars, the movie grossed over twelve million. By casting an African American male as the lead, John Shaft—a private investigator hired to find a crime boss’s missing daughter—and centering the story in the predominant African American neighborhood, Harlem, the filmmakers signaled the agency of an as yet untapped market, and inspired a new generation of filmmakers, most of whom made their movies outside of the Hollywood system, and yet reached a distribution level that established a new genre. It was the following year, during the fall and winter of 1972, that a group of films were released marking the birth of the Blaxploitation movement. Most of these films—Trouble Man, Across 110th St., Super Fly, and Hit Man, just to name a few—not only heavily borrowed from Shaft, but also from each other.