Take a look at a lot of the year-end summations that we all read which try to bring a little focus to the overall picture of the previous 12 months in movies, and oftentimes what you’ll see is a lot of verbiage dedicated to how this year somehow fell short of the banner year that was 19XX or 20YY. Personally, I never feel that I have the capacity to be so sweeping in my assessments as to be able to recall with any accuracy how last year measured up to, say, 1997, or 2003, without digging through a stack of notes and weighing the properties of each 12-month period like a mad chemist. Going into the last couple of months of 2010 I know I certainly felt as though this wasn’t going to be a year full of too much excitement as it all got summed up and the last of the year’s films, big and small, came trickling into theaters.
The thing I didn’t take into account, which I seem never to take into account, that is most certainly true, especially since I’ve been doing these late-arriving grand summations myself, is that so much of what constitutes the year I won’t even get a shot at seeing until December gets under way. Forget about the big awards-bait releases and family-oriented blockbusters; many of the films that I would naturally find fascinating I just flat-out missed during their inevitably brief runs in theaters six or so months earlier (if they even had such releases). The playing field has most certainly been leveled by the advent of Netflix, Vudu and all the different options one has for seeing movies on phones and other portable devices —suddenly everyone can see Sweetgrass or Dogtooth or I Am Love or any number of lower-profile films at their convenience, whether or not they are lucky enough to live in a city where there is a revival or second-run art screen devoted to playing such titles.`
Of course the big screen is always the best option—squinting out a viewing of Vincere or Top Hat or Once Upon a Time in the West on an iPod screen might be an acceptable last resort if you’re on an airplane, but it’s not the best way to access anything close to a movie’s full emotional effect. And yet critics as well as viewers have had to become a whole lot less choosy about when and where they see the films that matter most in a given year-- our viewing habits as a whole have undergone and continue to undergo radical shifts each year, it seems, as the movies which we’ve always had to make a concerted effort to seek out are suddenly coming to us, and right alongside the big dogs like Inception and Toy Story 3.which are practically impossible to avoid. So certainly, if we go off the beaten path and seek out some of these titles that may not pop up at the top of the “Most Watched” search engines on whatever service we happen to be using, our chances of broadening our experience during a given movie year brighten considerably, as do the chances that what might have seemed a mediocre movie year at first glance can morph into one in which there were more happy surprises than dull disappointments.
As I look over my own list I can observe that I managed to see, as of this writing, just about 100 movies that were released in the year 2010. (I will now pause for a brief moment to allow the full improbability of this achievement to sink in.) Of those 100, roughly 55 of them I saw in a darkened movie theater on a big screen. Just over half! That’s kind of a marvelous, weird and unsettling little statistic. But what’s more heartening is that only about 30% of that 100 are titles for which I have anything like serious reservations. To put it completely inelegantly, that means that I “liked” seven out of every 10 movies I saw that came out in the year 2010. I’ll leave that up to you, Dear Reader, to decide whether or not that makes me an easily appeased, popcorn-munching tool of corporate Hollywood and worldwide filmmaking conglomerates, or simply a very lucky moviegoer. (Something else that might also factor into your conclusion is that there are approximately 70 other movies released this past year that I haven’t yet seen, many of which could definitely be germane in any discussion of the year’s best.) Personally, while I don’t entirely discount the possibility that I’ve been happily duped on occasion-- I will talk somewhere in this post about a couple of movies I “liked” that most discerning, thoughtful people I know “didn’t like”-- I prefer to think that the results of my own attempts to be a little more choosy, not just about what I saw in theaters but what I saw, period, have simply borne unusually tasty fruit this year. And when I think about the close to 100 other movies I saw theatrically this year that were products of a time before January 2010, my enthusiasm for the year in movies really starts to spike.
So then this version of my annual year-end summation will be, perhaps more than the others, my attempt to try and express what the movie year meant to me, not only framed in terms of which of the year’s releases burrowed deepest into my heart and my brain, but also by my experiences talking about movies, seeing movies with friends, in particular places, where special things happened and unforgettable connections were made. What it will not be is some kind of all-inclusive overview of the year from the most complete and objective perspective, one which is simply not available to any critic, professional or otherwise—no matter your level of geekdom or erudite intent, no matter whether you have a life outside a darkened theater or whether movies are close to all you know, no one can see ‘em all.
A lot of very good things happened to me and to this blog in 2010, and as the year closed up I spent perhaps an inordinate amount of time concerned about the way the blog has changed since I started it in 2004; how it has been affected by Facebook and other social networking outlets; how its focus has been altered by the amount of time I’ve been able to devote to it; and whether or not I’ll have the kind of focus in the coming year to keep the creativity and the inspiration flowing in the way I’ve come to demand of myself. In a way, these are the kinds of questions I seem to start every year with. But for some reason I look out at the horizon past which the coming year awaits and I feel as much foreboding as heady anticipation. Maybe for the first time I’m looking toward this time next year without a clear idea of where this blog or its writer will be when the calendar comes back around again. That can be a frightening thing to contemplate—my mind turns to thoughts about basic survival and the constant process of evaluation that I put myself through regarding my worth and effectiveness as a father, husband and source of happiness and well-being for my family.
I think of the words a wise man, one of the first friends I ever made as a result of writing this blog, once recently told me, that it’s better to do what you can do, do it well and try to leave the worry about things you can’t control by the side of the road. That’s not quite the same thing as a kind of go-with-the-flow sentiment where we can just give up all responsibility and just let the waves sweep up onto whatever shore they choose. It’s an acknowledgment that the world is bigger than we are, but within our own sphere of influence what we do is important, even the stuff that can’t be catalogued in any obvious, practical way. It’s what makes me realize that it does matter if I start the day with a laugh or a joke because that affects the way my daughters and my wife see at least the start of their own 24-hour journeys. It’s what makes me realize that the work I do might seem like an uphill boulder-pushing contest at times, but it is work in which I can still take pride, that facilitates some of the smaller joys in my life and the chance to pursue bigger ones. And it’s what makes me realize that, even if I’m not knocking out seven posts a week, like I tended to do in the beginning, if what I write for this blog comes from the right place, then there’s the chance that it might mean something to someone else too, regardless of hit counts or length of comment threads or anything of those ancillary goodies. These are the things I can control, and if nothing else I hope that 2011, both the movies and the life contained therein, will give me ample opportunities to exercise good judgment and thought and enthusiasm that will somehow make the days richer for myself, my family, and for everyone this humble enterprise manages to touch.
As I have expressed, the year was a far richer one than a simple top 10 list, at least as far as my own limited capacity for such things goes, could ever express. It truly has been an exceptional year in terms of the movies released this year that I managed to see, and so I’ve had to rejigger my approach somewhat. Time (mine) and patience (yours) simply won’t accommodate 300-400 words on every 2010 movie I felt strongly about, but the desire remains to talk about the ones that would necessarily land outside the top 10 in some form or fashion, as a way of recommending further investigation (mine and yours) in the future. So I’ve decided to give lengthier attention to only the movies that managed to squeak into my top 10—these are movies, especially the bottom five, that, were it any other day, could just as easily be replaced by any of the 30 movies that will follow the top 10 discussion. These are movies for which the term “honorable mention” is simply inadequate—they too are among the best of the year, and had I been self-indulgent enough to go for it this list could and would be composed of my favorite 40 films of 2010. But in looking at the 30 films outside the Hallowed 10, I noticed, either through desperation or sheer coincidence, that they could be grouped thematically in ways that weren’t immediately apparent to me before, ways which might make discussion simpler and at the same time accentuate elements of each of the films that I felt were important. So the 30 films following the Hallowed 10 find themselves placed in one of six convenient categories that bring some unintentional unity to the year and give me a way of celebrating them as marvelous and challenging achievements in their own right.
On we go then to my 10 favorite films of 2010 as decided upon this day, February 26, 2011, the day before the Academy Awards are announced. Tomorrow those favorite 10 could be slightly or considerably different choices, or the same choices reassembled in a different order. This list, like most lists of this type, is a snapshot of a fixed moment in an ever-shifting perspective. At some point the little boy has to sit still and let the picture be taken. So here I go, sitting up straight, looking at the camera. Snap! Flash! Go!
10) UNSTOPPABLE (Tony Scott) One of the movies’ most reliably impatient filmmakers, Tony Scott finally finds the perfect subject for his motion-centric, hyper-caffeinated aesthetic—a runaway train— and rides it straight up the spinal columns of his audience like a spastic punk who without warning suddenly reveals himself to be a master entertainer. This 200-ton devil (identified with some wit as number 777) is set in motion by a simple blunder at the switching station, but other than a bit of derision at the expense of the bored fella whose inattention sets the beast loose Unstoppable is rooted in respect for its blue-collar milieu, particularly the two unlikely heroes (Denzel Washington, Chris Pine) who find themselves in what would seem a futile, perhaps fatal pursuit of the train. But that respect extends even to the dark green shadows of the Pennsylvania countryside, compressed by long lenses but never artificially smudged up or intended to represent the dingy landscape of the dead, never less than eerily beautiful yet still recognizably working-class, through which the monster threads its way at 77 miles per hour. Scott even gives the train itself a frightening personality that extends beyond its uncontrolled speed, imbuing it with some of the same mysterious existential rage that animated the truck in Duel. Unstoppable pinpoints its central appeal—relentless forward motion—as both a grim joke and a worthy pursuit in itself, but it isn’t exhausting or paradoxically listless in its hyperactivity, like Scott’s films have been in the past. This is the rare action movie that connects with its audience as much through a fluttering in the gut or the recognition of real life at its edges as it does through the sparked collision of muscular imagery, the relentless, animalistic howl of a raging engine or the shriek of screeching wheels on hot rail.
9) EASY A (Will Gluck) Almost any random minute of Easy A would qualify the movie for inclusion on this list for me, because almost every minute features Emma Stone as Olive Penderghast, North Ojai High's heiress apparent to the spirit, if not the legacy or fate of Hester Prynne. Olive, through a set of convoluted circumstances the likes of which will not be unfamiliar to connoisseurs of teen-oriented comedies, finds herself the object of salacious rumors, perpetrated in part by herself, which result in her becoming the go-to girl for unconsummated, wholly fictitious trysts meant to prop up the reputations of her supposed partners. When Olive, unable to stop the ball she herself has set in motion from rolling further downhill, embraces her nouveau-slutty persona, the results are predictably complicated but also rather unpredictably hilarious. Olive has a loving, supporting family (Stanley Tucci, Patrick Clarkson, and an adopted African-American brother played by Bryce Clyde Jenkins), one of those kitchen-centric, sitcom-derived units whose members never do anything but hang around the house and act as an unflappable sounding board for Olive’s increasingly complicated concerns. As such, they function as a refreshing rejoinder to the depiction of adults and family in the John Hughes universe, from which Easy A derives its primary template and context, as clueless and ineffectual or simply corrupt. In a very real way, Easy A is the best John Hughes movie ever made, better than any he ever made himself, even if it ultimately owes more in tone to the snap-happy universe of Glee than to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or even Amy Hecklering’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Easy A bests the Hughes model through its nimble, smart-aleck screenplay (by Bert Royal) and its invincible wild card, the exceedingly sharp, always endearing Stone. Here is an heiress apparent not to Prynne but to the madcap heroines of the golden age of screwball comedy. Were there a time machine to take her there I believe Stone could be dropped, as is, straight into 1930s Hollywood and competition against the high-speed royalty of the genre for all the best and brightest roles, with little doubt she could hold her own. She has the stuff real stars are made of. No flavor-of-the-moment sweetie pie, she’s a tart meringue who emerges from this unexpectedly rich teen comedy fully ready to take on all comers for now and the foreseeable future.
"I got a pocket, got a pocket full of sunshine..."
8) THE GHOST WRITER (Roman Polanski) Edited and finished while its director languished under house arrest in Zurich, fighting extradition for well-documented child molestation crimes committed here in America, The Ghost Writer is a remarkable movie in the Polanski canon not least for its urgency, expressed not by a restless camera or multiple planes of thematic distraction but instead by its seemingly implacable, fatalistic pull, an acknowledgment that even the puppet master may be dangling on strings of his own devising. The movie’s surface betrays barely a ripple; the thunder and anguish and slowly mounting dread, that very Polanski-esque sensation of sinister forces that may be lying in wait just around a corner, within a friendly distance, are expressed almost exclusively by what the characters swirling around the titular figure are most hesitant to reveal. That titular figure, known only as the Ghost Writer, is played with an appealing sheen of seen-it-all cynicism by Ewan McGregor, hired to ghost-write the memoir of an exiled Tony Blair-esque politician (Pierce Brosnan, never better) while the politician awaits word on whether he is to be indicted for war crimes committed while carrying out duties as a dupe of U.S. imperialist imperatives in the Middle East. The previous ghost writer has gone missing and his closer-than-usual ties with the politician’s family and staff, including the P.M.’s brittle and angry wife (Olivia Williams), powerful and slyly insinuating press secretary (Kim Cattrall) are only the tip of the iceberg McGregor finds himself in the process of slowly, inexorably revealing. His process mirrors Polanski’s own methods—both suspense and revelation are conjured and released through glances, atmosphere, set design, casual observations—and the result is a classically modulated, unnervingly funny, demonstrably sick joke in which the director, perhaps confronting intimations of his own legal and artistic fate, sets his own head back for the last, cruel laugh.
7) CARLOS (Olivier Assayas) This five-and-a-half hour historical epic (it’s not a biopic in any sense of the word with which we’ve become familiar) about the exploits of the mercenary assassin Carlos, the Jackal, gains its power through its unusually cogent amassing of both historical and dramatic detail and an outrageous sense of its own form. Carlos (brilliantly, arrogantly embodied by the Venezulean actor Edgar Ramirez, who first impressed me in Tony Scott’s diabolically unhinged Domino) embarks on his tour of international terrorism by fancying himself as a third-world revolutionary of the first order—he takes Che Guevara as his role model. But the fascinating portrayal which director Assayas has crafted, with the expansive canvas allowed him, ironically, by French television (for which the film was originally produced), is that of a man in thrall to image, whose own intellectual pretensions cannot carry the weight of his own impulsive tendencies, his own porous grasp of ideology and finally, his mounting and obsessive paranoia. Carlos is a movie of aesthetic and narrative extremes that seems naturally inclined, and may in fact be designed, to thwart attempts by both neo-con pundits who would condemn it for the simple fact of its existence (as if the undertaking of an explosively political subject such as this is tantamount to endorsement of its characters’ most foul and reckless actions) and those sympathetic to the philosophy of terrorism who will be dissatisfied with the movie’s refusal to ignore Carlos’ shortcomings, both as a terrorist and as a man, or play into the self-created mythology Carlos himself and his supporters so relentlessly promoted. Assayas’ attitude is weighty and grand here, but also surprisingly playful, especially with the film form itself, indulging in a jagged, piquant editing strategy and use of music in and out of the period for its emotional tenor that encourages the full five and a half hours to pass with minimum discomfort and maximum engagement. And the movie’s central set piece, Carlos’ misjudged and ill-fated taking of hostages at a conference of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna, is a virtuoso sequence that is riveting in its sustained dread, gallows humor and human horror, providing ample evidence, as the film does on the whole, that Assayas may be international cinema’s most adept practitioner of the epic cross-wired with the intimate. (For more on Carlos, please read Glenn Kenny’s outstanding, insightful interview with Olivier Assayas originally published by MUBI.)
Taking hostages at an OPEC summit; Edgar Ramirez in Carlos
6) THE KILLER INSIDE ME (Michael Winterbottom) Film noir has become an increasingly popular genre, especially for cinephiles but also for the broader audience of classic film aficionados. But as deep and dark as film noir has often gone-- Out of the Past, The Phenix City Story to cite but two examples-- The Killer Inside Me, adapted from Jim Thompson’s novel, may be one of the nastiest, darkest, most disturbing noir works ever produced, one to challenge the commitment of those only casually engaged with the form. Winterbottom’s brilliantly modulated filmmaking takes us to a place where there is literally no escape, a place where desire and rage coexist in their most irrational state. For the entirety of the film we’re deep inside the perspective of Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), a man with a badge and an outwardly genial psychopath whose murderous inclinations are the stuff of classic noir—an inability to not follow through on one’s most troubling impulses, the bad luck that often gets mixed in with those impulses-- but whose submersion in the consequences of those inclinations approach Shakespearean levels of horror. The key to Thompson’s vision (and Winterbottom’s adaptation) is fealty to seeing the world through this man’s eyes, and what he sees (and what we see through him) is not pretty. A film about “the killer inside me,” it was roundly criticized for following through on the most grisly implications of that first-person identification. But the film holds the line on Thompson’s notions of how easily the boundaries of mutual consent in matters of sexual desire can topple into brutality, and it offers none of the handy explanation of Ford’s psychosis to make the violence he perpetrates more palatable. Ford, as realized by Affleck and Winterbottom, may be one of the most terrifying figures in all of cinema, made all the more so by the emptiness we find inside him and the calm, implacable surface he presents to the arid, amoral world outside. The blows Ford delivers, with a kiss and whispered sentiments of sweet departure, hurt like hell, and they should, in a way that violence in the movies almost never does. (For more insight into The Killer Inside Me, I refer you to Jim Emerson who wrote most brilliantly and invaluably about it back in June.)
5) ANOTHER YEAR (Mike Leigh) The opening shot of Mike Leigh’s new film submerges us into the weary visage of a woman (Imelda Staunton) for whom life has yielded naught but sorrow and disappointment and is likely to soon stop yielding even that. Staunton gives up her face to the camera in a way that few actors do, or would be asked to do, in a series of close-ups that emphasize the degree to which this woman has been beaten down and brutalized by a life of no specified detail. Leigh’s unforgiving camera provides a probing metaphor for the medical exam the woman is enduring, and for the psychological therapy which will be recommended to her. And as we get to know Lesley Manville’s Mary, a depressed, clinging and desperate woman who remains tantalizingly outside the warmer confines of support and family exemplified by her friends Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), Staunton’s look of defeated pall lingers. Perhaps Leigh intends this woman to be a signifier, a glimpse of a possible future for Mary, herself bruised but not yet unwilling to at least try to bounce back from the disappointments, many of them self-generated, life continues to offer her. Or perhaps the director just loves the ashen contours of Staunton’s sorrowful face, its own kind of tattered beauty. (Staunton’s image and resignation here reminds me of a picture I once took of my own grandmother a year or so before she died; she was a woman creased and exhausted by the daily grind of her life and I swear I could see her in Staunton’s dimmed eyes.) The actress, a Leigh veteran Oscar-nominated in 2005 for the director’s Vera Drake, is seen in the film’s opening five minutes and never again, but her weary eyes and clenched jaw, hardly masking the crushing fatigue of her soul, are unforgettable. She frames the whole of Leigh’s serenely piercing, nonjudgmental and empathetic portrait of the contentment, power and limitations of friendship and family with the awful poetry found in the visible remnants of this woman’s wrung-out life.
Mary (Lesley Manville) meet's Joe's girlfriend, from Another Year.
4) MOTHER (Bong Joon-ho) The weirdly primal dance performed at the beginning of this exceptionally unsettling thriller by Korean actress Hye-Ja Kim, the film’s titular matriarch, is strangely beautiful, ethereally unhinged. There’s a communication with nature going on here, but the undercurrent of undefined emotion, perhaps buried too deep to be ever understood, ripple serious dread on the surface of the splendidly ghostly wide-screen images of this woman moving alone, laughing, glancing backward through a quiet rural landscape at (as we will find out) a most desperate expression of familial love. The movie itself consciously parries with the heavily Hitchcock-influenced history of overly protective figures of motherhood while never giving in to overt homage. The creature at the center of this film, created collaboratively by actress and director, is far too richly imagined to turn into a one-note joke. Kim’s singular horror at the thought of her slightly retarded son being put away for a crime she knows—as only a mother knows—he couldn’t have committed sends her on the trail of the real killer when the local constabulary, sympathetic to her fears, chooses to accept the circumstantial evidence and try the boy for the brutal rape-murder of a local girl. Bong’s visual sense is languid and thick, his compositions disorientingly seductive, drawing us in to the film’s mystery with a surety matched only by Kim’s increasingly desperate impulses. When she finally comes face to face with the truth, it’s not only the mystery that has become unraveled—the movie’s startling shift in perspective is like being carried down a placid river, aware of the roiling beneath, and straight over an unexpected waterfall. Kate Bush once wrote that “Mother stands for comfort;” listening to the song, it’s easy to suppose as to whom she was probably thinking. Bong Joon-ho understands the deepest extensions of the comfort Bush had in mind; his brilliant thriller brings into sharp relief, amplified by dizzying madness, just how far a woman can go toward expressing the shrieking, hysterical conviction of a mother’s love. Somewhere in a run-down house, along a deserted highway, a dehydrated corpse in a fruit cellar is spinning and rocking with envy.
3) TOY STORY 3 (Lee Unkrich) Despite, or perhaps because of, its utter mastery of the marketplace and the unalloyed joys of the first two Toy Story pictures, was there any more unlikely development in the movies of 2010 than the emergence of yet a third chapter in the ongoing (but apparently now completed) adventures of Woody, Buzz and the rest of the playtime denizens of Andy’s bedroom? The only cynicism that holds water in regard to this profoundly emotional movie, as eloquent an examination of how we represent our childhood to ourselves and what the past can mean to us even as we have to let it go, can be located in its use of 3D. Like the 3D conversions of the first two films proved, Toy Story 3 belongs to a series of animated films that already feel like they’re in 3D without the help of the latest technology or those unwieldy and expensive goggles. A movie this assured, this funny, this true to its characters which can still find room to bring on two more brilliantly realized portrayals into the fold (the hilariously metrosexual Ken, the ostensibly warm and jocular Lots O’ Huggin’ Bear whose sinister stuffed heart is revealed to be anything but inviting) is in no need of visual gimmickry; it already has far more dimensions than just three. In classic Pixar fashion the movie’s concerns are framed by an unusual spirit of playful detail—the machinations that get our toys boxed up and sent away are the stuff of perfectly pitched physical farce, and the realization of the day care facility in which they find themselves imprisoned is as rich a field of visual comedy as one could hope for, all of it leading toward a hilarious nod to The Great Escape. One of the differences between the Pixar approach to such material and, say, Dreamworks, is that for the latter the pop culture references (which date as fast as a gallon of milk) are the pot of gold. But in Toy Story 3 the escape leads to some heart-wrenching and serious moments which force the heroes to consider what they really mean to each other, while we in the audience do the same. Their final betrayal at the fluffy paws of the spectacularly unredeemed Lots o’ Huggin’ Bear, which results in the orange-lit clasping of hands over a fiery furnace that promises sure extermination, is the entire series’ masterful and respectful peak of storytelling. The fact that we know they will survive doesn’t matter—it’s entirely enough that they think they’re goners. It’s a mark of just how sure is Unkrich and company’s touch that such powerful emotion could override our own subliminal certitude that, nah, Woody and Buzz and company could never come to such a brutal end. The absolute glory of Toy Story 3 then arrives when we discover that, after our friends’ narrow escape, the truest tears have still yet to be shed.
2) LET ME IN (Matt Reeves) Critic Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for the Slate Movie Club last month, admitted that this version of Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 film Let the Right One In, itself an adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, had caused him to reevaluate what is practically a standard critical credo regarding remakes as irrefutable evidence of the greed of studios and the bankruptcy of pop culture. “The batting average of remakes is no better or worse than the batting average of originals,” wrote Seitz. “Musicians cover great pop songs without being condemned in advance. Filmmakers deserve the same privilege.” No film in recent memory has provided a firmer foundation on which to stand with such a conviction than Let Me In, the first production from the newly-revived Hammer Films. Some of the details have been altered slightly—the new film unfolds in the snow-encrusted courtyard of a Santa Fe housing project during the Reagan era rather than the previous film’s Swedish locale, and an aborted attack on a victim which rouses the fury of some heretofore placid housecats and ends in a horrific hospital conflagration benefits from Reeves' rather more sober-faced tone. But in essence, this story of the uneasy friendship between a bullied schoolboy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and the vampire who moves in next door (she looks like a 12-year-old Chloe Moretz on the outside, but inside she’s far older) retains the potency and ambiguity of the original film, equaling and at times besting the film’s examination of the chilled longing and undeniably wrenching implications of the relationship at its heart. Reeves, the director of the far more jittery (yet also surprising) Cloverfield, works masterfully in close-ups with his young cast, narrowing the depth of field to a sliver of clarity over their faces that hints at long-buried anguish, and he brings a welcome hush and stillness to the frosted nocturnal landscapes of urban New Mexico, which only heightens the jagged, exhilarating, sickening rush when the movie gets up and moves. (The clip below highlights one of the movie’s most disarmingly bravura sequences, an instant classic of disorienting quiet smashed up against disorienting motion which outdoes anything in the original or even the rest of the remake.) The unsettling implications about the boy that rise even before the arrival of his undead friend, and the agony surrounding the girl’s ill-fated assistant (here movingly, frighteningly realized by Richard Jenkins), both of which suffused the original film, survive here and perhaps resonate even more deeply. But it’s still the ambiguous reciprocal need of the relationship between the boy and the girl that propels this new classic, one which will reveal itself long after the film is over as a profoundly one-way street. The getaway ride that ends this film still leads to hell.
I got sick of listening to it automatically start up every time this page opened up, so I have replaced the embedded player with this link to a terrific interview with director Matt Reeves.
My sincere thanks, Vince. It means a lot to hear that people like you enjoy something like this as much as I do putting it together-- even if it takes close to forever to do! Great blog on your end too!
Here's the thing about the way movies are viewed: Contemporary cinema is judged by all the lousy movies that come out. Historical cinema is always judged by the best movies that came out. This is for one simple reason: Over time, people stop watching the lousy ones. Any accurate view of the movies coming out now will depend on looking solely at the good ones.
I enjoyed watching Michael Caine in Harry Brown so much that I stayed through Get Carter, which I hadn't planned on doing. (Not because I don't like Get Carter, but because generally I don't have double feature stamina these days. The tissues are tender back there.) This was at the New Beverly, of course. I did summon up double feature stamina for the one they just had of Cabin in the Sky and Hallelujah, which was something else. Did you make it to that one?
Robert: I was trying my darnedest to get to Cabin in the Sky/Hallelujah, but the workaday world (and my deadlines for the Film Noir blogathon) did not cooperate. I can imagine it was glorious. And I think you're right about the way we judged the history of movies. I'll never forget looking at a bunch of old calendars for my hometown theater circa 1950 or so, and my friend and I noted all these generic B-movies that we'd never heard of that were littering the schedules. He said to me, "Yeah, these are like the 1950 equivalent of stuff like Foul Play or Almost Summer or Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects-- nobody's gonna remember those movies either!"
Mike: Part of the reason I post those movies for which I have little or no remaining interest is the hope that someone will come out and say, "No, you gotta see that!" I've already been talked into giving Megamind a chance (for the sake of the children, as Haven Hamilton would have it). So if the man who introduced me to the pleasures of Fred MacMurray and Marjorie Main Murder He Says maintains that Micmacs is worth a look-- nay, the best movie of the year!-- then I will be on my way to a look real quick-like!
Larry, that's the Matt Reeves interview located at my review of the number two movie on my list, Let Me In. I don't know why it does that, but all you have to do to disable it is put your cursor on the video player and hit "pause." It's the first time I've ever seen one of these embeds do that, and I'll be damned if I'm techie enough to figure out how to stop the madness.
What an amazing post! I, too, have massive love for Harry Brown and Splice and wish that other folks had recognized those films for the brilliance that they possessed! And thank you ever so much for the kind words- they mean the universe!
I don't know how you have time for it all! You have a lovely wife, two gorgeous daughters, a full-time job, a fantastic blog and yet you still can find the time to see WAY more movies than me, a single person without kids or significant other. And you read books too! I'm in awe!
Just a few thoughts re your post. My friend Carol was heartened to learn you had selected Please Give as best movie on your list. It's hers too.
I am in total agreement with you re Black Swan. The main problem (but certainly not the only one!) for me was Natalie Portman, her acting and her dancing. I didn't buy her as a prima ballerina for a SECOND, yet that is what won awards for her, IMO. That and the months/years she spent training. Her dancing was passible only, and yet I was to believe she was so, so good.
And the performance. Oye! This may be the first time that someone won by looking worried for two hours! Hey, I can do that! She didn't make me feel ANYTHING for this character. I know the script didn't help, but she brought nothing to the role in her performance. I would really like to talk to someone who did like the movie and the performance that could possibly explain to me what I'm missing.
For me the best movie of the year was Toy Story 3. Nothing else came close.
2011 has gotten off to a slow start, moviewise, but here's hoping things will start looking up soon.
Sharon: Re 2011, well, Rango is getting good notices; the Sundance sensation Happythankyoumoreplease (edited by SLIFR's favorite film editor Michael R. Miller) opens today; and the movie that got great reviews at Cannes, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is opening at the Royal in West L.A. today as well. And then there's Drive Crazy (in 3D!) which, if we're lucky, will be this year's Piranha 3D! In other words, enough movies to make me fear missing them all for lack of time and money. So maybe, despite Sanctum, No Strings Attached and Gnomeo and Juliet and scores of other duds, maybe 2011 will shape up here real soon.
I know you've seen the Nicolas Cage movie. Admit it! What did you think?!
Sadly, Nick Cage and I have amicably 'broken up,' so I will not see his latest opus. :-) I haven't seen a movie in a theater since New Year's weekend, partly due to my ongoing cold and partly due to lack of interest. I did, however, 'see' Exit Through the Gift Shop thanks to the nice folks at Netflix streaming. I fell asleep... twice.
Last night when I got home from work, BBC America was showing Hunt for Red October. I watched it to the end, despite the bad edits because it was the best movie I've seen in long time! Sadly, there are only a couple of movies that I saw this year that I can imagine would have me stop down and watch them in 20 years.
At some point last year, I posted at Facebook about how surprised I was at my intensely positive reaction to "Friends With Money," the first Holofcener movie I'd seen. You commented, saying you were hoping to catch something by her soon. Guess that turned out well! "Please Give" was one of very few highlights from the first half of 2010. It ended up just missing my Top 10 for the year, but I bet I regret that when I watch it a second time.
Damn, and I thought my year end post was long. I thought the thing would never end - and I don't mean that in a bad way. Nice job. Good to see Let Me In getting some deserved notice - simply one of the best remakes I've ever seen.
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The thing I didn’t take into account, which I seem never to take into account, that is most certainly true, especially since I’ve been doing these late-arriving grand summations myself, is that so much of what constitutes the year I won’t even get a shot at seeing until December gets under way. Forget about the big awards-bait releases and family-oriented blockbusters; many of the films that I would naturally find fascinating I just flat-out missed during their inevitably brief runs in theaters six or so months earlier (if they even had such releases). The playing field has most certainly been leveled by the advent of Netflix, Vudu and all the different options one has for seeing movies on phones and other portable devices —suddenly everyone can see Sweetgrass or Dogtooth or I Am Love or any number of lower-profile films at their convenience, whether or not they are lucky enough to live in a city where there is a revival or second-run art screen devoted to playing such titles.`
As I have expressed, the year was a far richer one than a simple top 10 list, at least as far as my own limited capacity for such things goes, could ever express. It truly has been an exceptional year in terms of the movies released this year that I managed to see, and so I’ve had to rejigger my approach somewhat. Time (mine) and patience (yours) simply won’t accommodate 300-400 words on every 2010 movie I felt strongly about, but the desire remains to talk about the ones that would necessarily land outside the top 10 in some form or fashion, as a way of recommending further investigation (mine and yours) in the future. So I’ve decided to give lengthier attention to only the movies that managed to squeak into my top 10—these are movies, especially the bottom five, that, were it any other day, could just as easily be replaced by any of the 30 movies that will follow the top 10 discussion. These are movies for which the term “honorable mention” is simply inadequate—they too are among the best of the year, and had I been self-indulgent enough to go for it this list could and would be composed of my favorite 40 films of 2010. But in looking at the 30 films outside the Hallowed 10, I noticed, either through desperation or sheer coincidence, that they could be grouped thematically in ways that weren’t immediately apparent to me before, ways which might make discussion simpler and at the same time accentuate elements of each of the films that I felt were important. So the 30 films following the Hallowed 10 find themselves placed in one of six convenient categories that bring some unintentional unity to the year and give me a way of celebrating them as marvelous and challenging achievements in their own right.
14 comments:
Bravo. An exhaustive, exhilarating post with a dandy 10-best list.
My sincere thanks, Vince. It means a lot to hear that people like you enjoy something like this as much as I do putting it together-- even if it takes close to forever to do! Great blog on your end too!
Here's the thing about the way movies are viewed: Contemporary cinema is judged by all the lousy movies that come out. Historical cinema is always judged by the best movies that came out. This is for one simple reason: Over time, people stop watching the lousy ones. Any accurate view of the movies coming out now will depend on looking solely at the good ones.
I enjoyed watching Michael Caine in Harry Brown so much that I stayed through Get Carter, which I hadn't planned on doing. (Not because I don't like Get Carter, but because generally I don't have double feature stamina these days. The tissues are tender back there.) This was at the New Beverly, of course. I did summon up double feature stamina for the one they just had of Cabin in the Sky and Hallelujah, which was something else. Did you make it to that one?
Dennis, I need to talk you INTO seeing MICMACS. Possibly the best movie of the year, certainly the most original.
Robert: I was trying my darnedest to get to Cabin in the Sky/Hallelujah, but the workaday world (and my deadlines for the Film Noir blogathon) did not cooperate. I can imagine it was glorious. And I think you're right about the way we judged the history of movies. I'll never forget looking at a bunch of old calendars for my hometown theater circa 1950 or so, and my friend and I noted all these generic B-movies that we'd never heard of that were littering the schedules. He said to me, "Yeah, these are like the 1950 equivalent of stuff like Foul Play or Almost Summer or Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects-- nobody's gonna remember those movies either!"
Mike: Part of the reason I post those movies for which I have little or no remaining interest is the hope that someone will come out and say, "No, you gotta see that!" I've already been talked into giving Megamind a chance (for the sake of the children, as Haven Hamilton would have it). So if the man who introduced me to the pleasures of Fred MacMurray and Marjorie Main Murder He Says maintains that Micmacs is worth a look-- nay, the best movie of the year!-- then I will be on my way to a look real quick-like!
D, every time I call up your site, some audio DVD commentary starts playing...
Larry, that's the Matt Reeves interview located at my review of the number two movie on my list, Let Me In. I don't know why it does that, but all you have to do to disable it is put your cursor on the video player and hit "pause." It's the first time I've ever seen one of these embeds do that, and I'll be damned if I'm techie enough to figure out how to stop the madness.
Congratulations on your new novel. Is it available in hardback for $19.95?
Joke attempt #2:
When your 10 best list started out with Unstoppable at #10, it instantly became unreadable.
Later I recovered from that baffling inclusion and have been flipping through these long pages!
But seriously, great work, man, this is very exhaustive. Clearly a man who is resisting the Twitterization of the World!
What an amazing post! I, too, have massive love for Harry Brown and Splice and wish that other folks had recognized those films for the brilliance that they possessed! And thank you ever so much for the kind words- they mean the universe!
I don't know how you have time for it all! You have a lovely wife, two gorgeous daughters, a full-time job, a fantastic blog and yet you still can find the time to see WAY more movies than me, a single person without kids or significant other. And you read books too! I'm in awe!
Just a few thoughts re your post. My friend Carol was heartened to learn you had selected Please Give as best movie on your list. It's hers too.
I am in total agreement with you re Black Swan. The main problem (but certainly not the only one!) for me was Natalie Portman, her acting and her dancing. I didn't buy her as a prima ballerina for a SECOND, yet that is what won awards for her, IMO. That and the months/years she spent training. Her dancing was passible only, and yet I was to believe she was so, so good.
And the performance. Oye! This may be the first time that someone won by looking worried for two hours! Hey, I can do that! She didn't make me feel ANYTHING for this character. I know the script didn't help, but she brought nothing to the role in her performance. I would really like to talk to someone who did like the movie and the performance that could possibly explain to me what I'm missing.
For me the best movie of the year was Toy Story 3. Nothing else came close.
2011 has gotten off to a slow start, moviewise, but here's hoping things will start looking up soon.
Sharon: Re 2011, well, Rango is getting good notices; the Sundance sensation Happythankyoumoreplease (edited by SLIFR's favorite film editor Michael R. Miller) opens today; and the movie that got great reviews at Cannes, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is opening at the Royal in West L.A. today as well. And then there's Drive Crazy (in 3D!) which, if we're lucky, will be this year's Piranha 3D! In other words, enough movies to make me fear missing them all for lack of time and money. So maybe, despite Sanctum, No Strings Attached and Gnomeo and Juliet and scores of other duds, maybe 2011 will shape up here real soon.
I know you've seen the Nicolas Cage movie. Admit it! What did you think?!
Sadly, Nick Cage and I have amicably 'broken up,' so I will not see his latest opus. :-) I haven't seen a movie in a theater since New Year's weekend, partly due to my ongoing cold and partly due to lack of interest. I did, however, 'see' Exit Through the Gift Shop thanks to the nice folks at Netflix streaming. I fell asleep... twice.
Last night when I got home from work, BBC America was showing Hunt for Red October. I watched it to the end, despite the bad edits because it was the best movie I've seen in long time! Sadly, there are only a couple of movies that I saw this year that I can imagine would have me stop down and watch them in 20 years.
At some point last year, I posted at Facebook about how surprised I was at my intensely positive reaction to "Friends With Money," the first Holofcener movie I'd seen. You commented, saying you were hoping to catch something by her soon. Guess that turned out well! "Please Give" was one of very few highlights from the first half of 2010. It ended up just missing my Top 10 for the year, but I bet I regret that when I watch it a second time.
Damn, and I thought my year end post was long. I thought the thing would never end - and I don't mean that in a bad way. Nice job. Good to see Let Me In getting some deserved notice - simply one of the best remakes I've ever seen.
Mat
p.s. - love the name of your blog
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