THE FIGHTER – david o. russell – 5.9 / 10

It’s all Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro’s fault.  I’m not positive that they originated it, but ever since they popularized it in Mean Streets, the good-for-nothing screw-up hoodlum sidekick has become an archetypal character in gritty movies about blue-collar guys from the wrong side of the tracks.  Johnny Boy, DeNiro’s character in Mean Streets, may not have been the first such character, but he was certainly the most indelible.  And ever since that movie, in any film centering around a group of male friends struggling to get or keep their lives on track, that character is bound to turn up.  Scorsese even went back to that well a couple times (with Joe Pesci’s characters in Goodfellas and Casino).

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART. 1 – david yates – 6.1 / 10

That Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is the first half of a two-film finale to an eight-film series makes it clear that this isn’t a movie that can be judged completely on its own.  Nor can it even really be understood outside the context of the larger film / book series.  If you sat down to watch Part 1 with no idea what came before, you’d be hopelessly lost within fifteen minutes.  That doesn’t make it a bad film, per se, but it does make it a very difficult one to critique since by almost all standards normally used to judge a film, this one is a complete failure.  It does very little to establish characters or even to advance their stories.  It has no real resolution.  And it certainly doesn’t follow any familiar story structure.  Nonetheless, the seventh film in the Harry Potter series is one of the more interesting blockbusters to come along in quite some time.  Even if it’s not exactly a good film, it is a very provocative one.

UNSTOPPABLE – tony scott – 6.7 / 10

At this point, if you buy a ticket to a Tony Scott film, you ought to know exactly what you’re getting: a serviceable thriller, probably starring Denzel Washington as a put upon father or husband looking to repair his relationships with the women in his life, some frantic and totally unmotivated camera movement, lots of garish greens and blues, plenty of explosions, some groan-inducingly awful one-liners (‘It’s not a train; it’s a missile the size of the Chrysler Building.’) and a far too pat ending.  Unstoppable, of course, fulfills all of those criteria, but it does so in a much more entertaining fashion than most of Scott’s recent movies (The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Déjà Vu, Domino, etc.).  It’s as good as a film as we’re likely to ever see from Tony Scott.  And though that might only be slightly above average when compared to all other filmmakers, it’s nonetheless encouraging that Scott has reversed the trend his career had been taking.

127 HOURS – danny boyle – 5.8 / 10

With every successive film, Danny Boyle’s style has become more frantic and aggressive.  Trainspotting, made fifteen years ago, was fast-paced and full of quick cuts, but always in the service of the story.  28 Days Later, released in 2002, featured even faster cutting and introduced the swooping, shaky, handheld aesthetic that would become Boyle’s signature visual style.  But as with Trainspotting, this was largely justified by the story the film was telling.  In 2008, Boyle amped up his jittery, washed-out style even more for Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most aggressively in-your-face films ever made.  Though the story hardly seemed to warrant it, Slumdog Millionaire pulled every annoying trick in the book, turning the whole thing into a garish disaster.  It’s hard to imagine a more frenzied, hectic film.  Hard, that is, until you sit down to watch 127 Hours.

LET ME IN – matt reeves – 6.4 / 10

As much as I like Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film on which Let Me In is based, I think there could be some value in remaking it with a bigger budget for mainstream American audiences.  The film is rife with thorny ideas about the perils of childhood and the thrills of first love that beg to be experienced by as many people as possible.  And if it has to be remade in English for that to happen then so be it.  But Matt Reeves’s new version, while managing to hit just about all the same notes as the original (even doing a few of them better), doesn’t hear the music and the whole becomes much less than the sum of its parts.

THE TOWN – ben affleck – 8.1 / 10

Though it’s a fairly conventional film in a genre that’s been done to death (Michael Mann’s Heat being the most obvious reference point), The Town, Ben Affleck’s second outing as co-writer / director is nonetheless a very satisfying film.  It’s a solid, sturdy heist movie, constructed with great care and careful attention to detail.  And though it doesn’t quite rise to the heights of Affleck’s previous film (the excellent Gone Baby Gone), The Town is about as good as this type of movie can be.  Its ambitions may be modest, but it more than achieves them.

LOST: SEASON SIX – 5.2 / 10

After intercutting events on the island with flashbacks for three seasons, flashforwards for one season and between two separate timelines for one season, the Lost writers decided, in the sixth and final season, to intercut events on the island with so-called flash-sideways to what at first appears to be an alternate timeline and is finally revealed to be a sort of purgatory.  It’s a decision that makes sense insofar as the show’s creators had tried everything else so why not?  But this structure, and especially the decision not to reveal the nature of the flash-sideways universe until the finale, ends up fatally crippling what should have been the series’ triumphant victory lap.

THE AMERICAN – anton corbijn – 4.1 / 10

With very few exceptions, almost every film about a hitman tells one of three stories: the hitman falls in love (usually with the target), the hitman wants to retire after one last job or the hitman becomes a target himself.  The American manages to squeeze all three of these overused tropes into one film, creating a sort of hitman cliché amalgam.  The filmmakers also toss in some teeth-grindingly obvious symbolism and a couple of the stalest stereotypes going (the priest with a tragic past and the hooker with a heart of gold) in what appears to be some sort of weird attempt to create the most cliché hitman film possible.

LOST: SEASON FIVE – 4.5 / 10

After the creative resurgence that was season four, I had high hopes going into the fifth season that Lost was really going to be something special in its last couple seasons, that it would finally become the show everyone seemed to think it was.  But dear god, season five might be the worst of the bunch.  If not for the return of badass John Locke (who, of course, isn't really John Locke), the season would’ve had no redeeming moments whatsoever.

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD – edgar wright – 4.8 / 10

Though it’s not nearly as offensive or misogynist, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is Twilight for hipster nerds.  Like Twilght, Scott Pilgrim is wish fulfillment for an audience already predisposed to like it.  To someone not in its narrow target demographic, however, Scott Pilgrim, like the Twilight books / movies, is so impenetrable it might as well be speaking a foreign language.  It bears no resemblance to anything one might call reality with no characters behaving like actual human beings and nothing happening in it that makes any real sense.  Unfortunately for Scott Pilgrim’s financial prospects, where Twilight’s target audience is millions and millions of young girls ready and willing to be pandered to, there just aren’t all that many hipsters nerds (thank god) and most of them don’t particularly like being kowtowed to.

LOST: SEASON FOUR – 8.1 / 10

After the mind-blowing three-part finale of season three that saw the introduction of recurring flashforwards as an ongoing storytelling device, Lost seems to have undergone a creative resurgence that has propelled it through what is easily the series’ best season thus far.  No longer constrained by the rigid structure of the series first two and two-thirds seasons, the writers have discovered a whole new world of stories to tell.  And the show has improved dramatically because of it.

LOST: SEASON THREE – 6.5 / 10

Three seasons in and a pattern has begun to emerge in both the individual episodes and the seasons as a whole: they start off strong, with a solid cold open or a few good episodes, meander in the middle, getting bogged down with all manner of trivialities that no one cares about, then make a triumphant return in the last few minutes or episodes.  Season three typifies this pattern more than any season thus far.  It opens with Jack, Sawyer and Kate imprisoned by the Others, a potentially fascinating development that goes pretty much nowhere for half the season until Jack strikes a deal that allows Kate and Sawyer to return to their camp, facilitating the terrific three-episode conflagration between the Others and the castaways.

LOST: SEASON TWO – 4.9 / 10

It becomes clear about two or three episodes into Lost’s second season that the writers have little to no interest in the survival aspects of the show.  By introducing a hatch with a couple of beds, a shower, a kitchen and all manner of other amenities as well as palettes that fall from the sky with enough food for everyone for months (even though they were ostensibly only meant for the two people who were living in the hatch), they take away all exigency to the characters’ fight to survive on the island.  No longer is anyone worried about having enough food or finding suitable shelter.  Instead they’re free to focus on everything else around them, though, curiously, not on finding some means of escape.  This is present in smaller details too, like the fact that the cast’s clothes, despite always being covered in sweat and dirt, are constantly changing and usually fit pretty well.  There’s also always a tarp available whenever a new person comes to camp (even though you’d think those would be precious commodities in a situation like that).  Lost’s writers clearly don’t find the struggle to survive on a (mostly) deserted island all that interesting.  And while this takes away a lot of the urgency of the characters’ existence, it does free the writers up to tell stories that have nothing to do with figuring out where the next meal is going to come from.  Unfortunately, in the show’s second season, the writers just weren’t up to the task of telling interesting stories outside of mere survival.

DAWN OF THE DEAD – zack snyder – 4.8 / 10

There are some really inventive, really interesting things going on in this film.  And there are also some incredibly stupid, incredibly annoying things in it as well.  In the latter category, there’s the fact that the people in this film appear to have never heard of zombies nor seen any zombie films.  If they had then they would've known that the bite of a zombie is contagious.  I find it very hard to believe that ten average people in modern America have no idea how to deal with zombies (a problem cleverly circumvented in the far superior Zombieland).

THE LAST AIRBENDER – m. night shyamalan – 1.9 / 10

As easy as it is to hate on every Shyamalan film since Unbreakable (Signs, The Village, The Lady in the Water, The Happening) there’s always at least one moment in every movie that makes you sit up and take notice, one moment that makes it clear that despite his inability to string together two coherent lines of dialogue, Shyamalan nonetheless has visual style to burn. In The Last Airbender that sequence is a fight scene, shot in a single take, that depicts an occupied village rising up as one and throwing off the chains of oppression. It’s a powerful shot both because of what it represents (the single unbroken take has the effect of uniting the villagers in their struggle, bringing them all together to reveal their true potential) and because it’s just really cool looking. Unfortunately that shot only lasts one minute; the other hundred and nine are a complete mess.

LOST: SEASON ONE – 6.9 / 10

When Lost first began airing in the fall of 2004, I thought it was sure to be critical hit but a commercial failure that would end in a year (or less) but find some sort of cult status as a misunderstood classic (a la My So-Called Life).  But for some reason (owing much, I think, to our collective post-9/11 mindset), it became a runaway success.  As far as I was concerned, that was great.  I was enjoying the show so I was glad its success guaranteed it’d be around for a few more years.  But towards the end of the first season I started to realize that the creators of the show had the same initial opinion about its prospects as I did.  They clearly didn’t know where the hell they were going with all this craziness (polar bears, magic numbers, smoke monsters, etc.) but figured they’d never have to explain it.  They figured the show would be cancelled quickly and they’d never have to come up with reasons for the stuff they were doing.  So when the show became a hit, they were left grasping at straws.

INCEPTION – christopher nolan – 9.1 / 10

Every once in a while a director makes a couple of movies that earn so much damned money that the studio will do whatever the director wants in order ensure that he continues to work for them.  Usually this entails the studio agreeing to finance an inordinately expensive pet project that would never see the light of day under any other circumstances.  That’s why, for instance, after the Lord of the Rings trilogy earned a few billion dollars, Peter Jackson got Universal to give him $250 million to remake King Kong.  That’s why, after making billions with Titanic, Fox agreed to fund James Cameron’s Avatar despite clearly having no idea what the hell they were spending their $300 million on.  And that’s why, because he made two Batman movies and they want desperately for him to make a third, Warner Bros. agreed to fund Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE – david slade – 2.1 / 10

The word on the street is that the third installment of The Twilight Saga is the best yet. And that’s true as far as it goes, but calling Eclipse the best of the Twilight films is like saying you’re the skinniest kid at fat camp. While it might be technically true, it’s still nothing to get excited about. Because even though there are a couple moments of actual humor in the film and a couple action sequences that aren’t patently absurd, there are still five or six other action scenes that are laughably ridiculous and the short moments of levity are far overshadowed by the hours of ponderous dialogue and wooden acting.

THE KARATE KID (1984) - john avildsen - 7.1/10 THE KARATE KID (2010) - harald zwart - 4.5/10

That The Karate Kid (1984) is even a halfway successful film owes almost nothing to the craft (or lack thereof) employed in creating it. In fact, the movie succeeds very much in spite of itself. The terrible (and terribly dated) music undercuts the action and emotion of the film at every turn, directly commenting on the onscreen action in the most ludicrous and annoying manner possible (with the worst example being, of course, the montage at the All Valley Karate Championship scored with ‘You’re the Best Around’). Then there’s the horrible sounding ADR that persists from the opening shot through to almost the very last one that makes the whole thing seem incredibly cheap. And the constant use of single takes for the duration of a scene (usually a hallmark of a good film and a strong director) somehow manages to make many scenes that should be resonant feel flat (the confrontation between Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita, the best thing in the movie) and the Cobra Kais’ sensei, for example, or the long scene of Miyagi and Daniel (Ralph Macchio) celebrating Daniel’s birthday).

DIE HARD – john mctiernan – 7.5 / 10

Why doesn’t anyone in this film believe anyone else?  All interactions start out antagonistic and every once in a while resolve themselves to being civil (but only sometimes).  When we first see Sgt. Al Powell he’s buying Twinkies for his pregnant wife but the store clerk doesn’t believe him.  When John McClane calls dispatch for help, they think he’s a crank caller.  When Powell suggests McClane might be trying to help, his boss says he’s probably just a bartender.  Even smarmy asshole reporter Thornberg is met with disbelief when he tells his boss there’s a terrorist attack underway.

SEX AND THE CITY 2 – michael patrick king – 1.1 / 10

At this point, after six seasons on HBO, countless reruns on TBS and a feature film, you know what you’re getting with Sex and the City 2. And it’s tempting to just say this sort of thing isn’t for me and ignore it (or, more accurately, pretend it doesn’t exist). But by making claims of feminism and female empowerment, Sex and the City demands a closer examination. If these films (and the TV series) are as important as the people involved in making them seem to believe they are, we’re in a lot of trouble. Because the truth is that Sex and the City’s view of women is as vapid and patronizing as anything you’ll see in a Michael Bay movie.

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE – amy jones – 2.5 / 10

This film fits the slasher movie blueprint to a 't,' almost as if it were constructed with that as the goal.  To wit: there’s some tragic event in the past that comes back to haunt a bunch of young women left all alone with no one in authority.  And then they’re hunted by a madman and picked off one by one.  Whatever merit there is in being able to paint within the lines, this film achieves it.

 

ROBIN HOOD – ridley scott – 6.0 / 10

The latest in Ridley Scott’s long list of staggeringly mediocre, perfectly acceptable but nonetheless occasionally visually striking films, Robin Hood is, as all Scott’s films are, overlong, tedious and curiously devoid of passion and emotion. This is, of course, completely unsurprising since Ridley Scott hasn’t made a genuinely good film since 1982’s Blade Runner. But he also hasn’t made an outright bad film since then either. He just makes absolutely pedestrian movies, of which Robin Hood is merely the latest.

IRON MAN 2 – jon favreau – 5.5 / 10

Do you love Robert Downey, Jr.? If you do, if you’d be content watching him read the proverbial phone book for two hours, then you might enjoy Iron Man 2. If, on the other hand, you merely like Downey (I can’t imagine anyone outright disliking the guy, he’s just too charismatic), Iron Man 2 is going to be something of a bore. Because make no mistake, this is the Robert Downey, Jr. show; and if you don’t find his portrayal of Tony Stark endlessly fascinating, you’re going to find an awful lot of this film to be incredibly tedious.

THE TOP TEN FILMS OF 2009

my list of the ten best films of the year along with a few honorable and dishonorable mentions.

(and yes, i know it's almost may but it took me a little longer than usual this year to get caught up on everything that was released in 2009.)

KICK-ASS – matthew vaughn – 7.0 / 10

Though it’s being touted as some sort of critique or satirization of the comic book-based superhero blockbusters that have taken over the multiplex in recent years, Kick-Ass, perhaps unsurprisingly, wants to have its cake and eat it too, to be both a satire and a straight-up superhero movie. And for a while, when the critique is confined to the half of the film featuring Kick-Ass and the superhero stuff confined to the half of the film featuring Hit Girl and Big Daddy, this tactic sorta works. But, inevitably, Kick-Ass, the ‘superhero’ alter ego of uber-nerd Dave Lizewski, despite spending the first two-thirds of the film proving just how stupid the idea of donning spandex and fighting crime really is, ultimately saves the day and in the process completely undercuts anything interesting the film was trying to say.

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS – ryan murphy – 3.1 / 10

I guess the book this film is based on must be pretty good.  How else to explain how all of these demonstrably talented people got snookered into being in this film.  It’s no secret that I love Ryan Murphy’s series Nip / Tuck (the first couple seasons anyway).  And his direction and writing on that show are often exemplary.  The direction of this film (his feature debut) is workmanlike but serviceable, mostly getting out of the way of the ‘hilarious’ and ‘heartbreaking’ events of the film.  It’s the writing that fails him.  In the special features on the DVD, Augusten Burroughs, the author of the ‘personal memoir’ upon which the film is based talks at length about Murphy’s determination in pursuing this project.  That leads me to believe that Murphy feels some sort of personal connection to the weirdness on display here.  And maybe that’s why he misses the mark by so much.  Maybe he thought that other people would connect to the story as he did.  Maybe he just took for granted that the story was compelling on its own.

 

THE BEST ALBUMS OF THE OO'S

Before we get into the list proper, a word about how I determined the order of the twenty albums below. In order to be as scientific as possible, I compiled three separate lists. For the first list, I determined the average number of plays per song on each album (since iTunes keeps track of the play count and I only ever listen to music on iPods, this was as simple as adding up the total number of plays per album and dividing it by the number of tracks). For the second list, I determined the overall rating of each album (adding together the number of stars (out of five) I’d given each track and dividing that by the total number of possible stars (the number of tracks times five)). The third list was simply a ranking of where I thought the albums would place if I was being unscientific.

I then took these three lists and averaged out the albums’ placement on all three to arrive at a final score. I arranged the albums according to that final score (with certain allowances for the fact that I didn’t have iTunes (and hence the ability to keep track of play counts) until late 2003) to arrive at the final list of the twenty best albums of the 2000s.

Why go to all that trouble? Well, without taking into account factors like the total number of plays per album, it would be easy to convince myself that albums I admired more than liked should place higher, that, say, Fennesz’s Endless Summer should place higher than The Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow. But by being as scientific as possible, I was able to (hopefully) eliminate any bias I might have had.

All right, then, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, on to the list.

FOOD, INC. - robert kenner - 6.0 / 10

Lately there’s been an increase in what you might call social commentary documentaries. Traditionally relegated to the back of the book store, these sorts of polemics (often liberal and always one-sided) have, since An Inconvenient Truth made $50 million and won an Oscar, more and more begun to morph into documentaries. In and of itself this isn’t cause for alarm. But when they aren’t filmed or edited with any particular grace or style, offer no real narrative throughline and clearly leave one side out of the debate, they can become quite tedious.

PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF – chris columbus – 2.9 / 10

The director of such insipid middlebrow fare as Bicentennial Man, Mrs. Doubtfire and I Love You, Beth Cooper as well as the man responsible for almost killing the Harry Potter film franchise before it started (having directed the first two terrible entries before Alfonso Cuaron came in to save the series with the third film) returns with a mishmash of Greek mythology that possesses one of the oddest and most pernicious messages of any film I’ve ever seen aimed at kids.

CRAZY HEART – scott cooper – 2.5 / 10

Even before his celebrated turn in Crazy Heart, it was well established that Jeff Bridges was one of the best actors working today. He disappears so completely into every role that it seems as if he must, in real life, be exactly like the character he’s playing. When you watch The Big Lebowski, for instance, you believe that Bridges is exactly like The Dude, the aging hippie he plays in that film. Similarly, when you watch The Contender, you completely believe that he’s as thoughtful and confident in real life as the President he plays in that film is. Of course, since those characters are so different from each other, what that really means is that Bridges is just damn good. His work appears effortless. You can never catch him acting.

SHUTTER ISLAND – martin scorsese – 6.5 / 10

The reason that there are so many films about World War II has, I think, a lot to do with the Holocaust. A filmmaker can easily piggyback on the horror of the death camps as a sort of emotional shorthand. A few shots of emaciated corpses and grief-stricken loved ones and the film gains an instant amount of emotional credibility. Similarly, filmmakers so often give their main characters tragic pasts (dead wives, dead children, both in the case of Shutter Island) because it allows them to easily and without any real effort make the audience care about and feel for their protagonists. This tactic is clumsy and cheap but it’s undeniably effective.

THE BEST FILMS OF THE 00'S

my picks for the fifteen best films of the decade.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE – paul thomas anderson – 10 / 10

Even before the film begins, it’s abundantly clear that Punch-Drunk Love is something different. It’s a relatively short film from Paul Thomas Anderson, a director known for making very lengthy movies. And it’s a drama starring Adam Sandler, an actor known almost exclusively for his sophomoric comedies. Then the film begins and it becomes clear just how different it really is. But in this case, different is wonderful. Punch-Drunk Love bears almost no resemblance to any love story you’ve ever seen. Despite that or, perhaps more accurately, because of it, the film is able to evoke the joy, pain, unpredictability and volatility of love better than just about anything else out there.

IT’S COMPLICATED – nancy meyers – 0.7 / 10

Make no mistake, It’s Complicated is porn for middle-aged woman. Jane Adler (Meryl Streep, in shrill Mamma Mia mode) is the walking talking embodiment of everything a fiftysomething woman could possibly want. She’s the chef / owner of a successful restaurant. She has three grown children who are all beautiful, well adjusted and well on their way to being successful. She has a group of friends who fall all over each other to tell her how great she is. She’s got a fabulous home complete with a huge garden (both of which seem to magically require no upkeep). The architect designing the addition that she’s planning (which will double the size of her house) is head over heels in love with her. And now her ex-husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin, happily reveling in his physical shortcomings), even though he’s remarried to a hot thirty-year-old, finds her irresistible. The dialogue in the film is pretty much an unending stream of compliments to her and everyone seems to appreciate and respect her. Who wouldn’t want to be Jane?

THE HURT LOCKER – kathryn bigelow – 7.8 / 10

There are a few pieces of advice you often hear in relation to movies. One of them that’s undoubtedly true is that a good ending forgives a lot. A film that has a solid ending leaves the audience walking out of the theater feeling good about the movie and thus more likely to talk positively about it. You might call this The Sixth Sense effect. The reverse is also true. A great movie that ends poorly cancels out all the good will it’d built up to that point and leaves the audience feeling unsatisfied. You could call it the Unbreakable effect.

THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – paul greengrass – 9.3 / 10

As anyone who’s talked with me (or, more accurately, listened to me talk) about movies for any length of time can tell you, I generally hate movies that employ a shaky handheld camera aesthetic. In fact, I even disliked it pretty severely in The Bourne Supremacy, this film’s immediate predecessor. The look is meant to convey immediacy and a you-are-there sense of documentary realism. But for reasons I’ve detailed elsewhere, that never works for me. It succeeds only in making the film in question seem cheap and slapdash. Mostly it just makes we me want to send the director a gift certificate for a tripod. But then along comes The Bourne Ultimatum, the exception that proves the rule.