THE HELP - tate taylor - 3.2 / 10

When you get right down to it, The Help is a film about exploited people made by their exploiters for the enjoyment of the exploiters.  It makes a lot of noise about glorifying the struggle of the black Southern maids whom a third of the story revolves around, but by the end of the movie, all that’s left is the realization that the main white character used the lives and experiences of the black characters to learn something new about herself, grow as a person and move on to bigger and better things, the consequences for those she’s exploited be damned.

THE TOP TEN FILMS OF 2010

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

(and yes, i know we’re almost halfway through 2011, but the alien creature that now lives in my house has taken up a lot of my spare time of late.)

FAST FIVE – justin lin – 6.4 / 10

We seem to have reached a point with the big Hollywood summer blockbusters where as long as they aren’t failures on every level, critics will give them a pass.  The fanboy edict that a viewer 'turn off their brain' and just enjoy the film 'for what it is' seems to have won the day as that's become the de facto standard by which these sorts of movies seem to be judged.  Critics who give the same three-and-a-half-star rating to Fast Five as they give to something like The Social Network can't possibly be making the comparative judgment that the two movies are of similar quality.  And yet it's not uncommon for brain-dead films like this one to earn a similar (or higher) grade than films that by any reasonable standard are far more artistically successful.  The only conclusion that can be reached must be that the two films are not being judged on the same criteria.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS – francis lawrence – 4.1 / 10

It’s not terribly surprising that former music video director Francis Lawrence has, with Water for Elephants, made a handsomely mounted but ultimately superficial film.  It is surprising, however, just how perfunctory the film is.  There’s less going on beneath the surface of this film than there is even in something as brain-dead as Fast Five.  What you see is what you get and not a bit more.  And while the 1930s setting provides for a lot of pretty pictures and some nice art direction, that’s not nearly enough to sustain a two-hour film.

SAW III – darren lynn bousman – 0.8 / 10

Basically all this film is saying is, 'Hey, weren’t those first two Saw movies cool?'  It's not an advancement of the form in any way but rather a summation of what’s come before (loaded down with plenty of flashbacks which ruin the first two films on the off chance a viewer hadn’t already seen them).  Admittedly it’s hard to come up with new and ever more brutal traps for people to have to earn their way out of, but it seems to me that the filmmakers here fell victim to the pressure to keep adding new twists.  They bend and contort the story in service of the twists and in the process lose everything that was good about the first two films (not that there was very much, but you know what I mean).

TRON: LEGACY – joseph kosinski – 2.5 / 10

Make no mistake, TRON: Legacy is a terrible terrible film.  It’s staggeringly stupid, one of the most preposterous things I've ever seen.  The story makes no sense and is nearly impossible to follow.  The performances are uniformly terrible (even from the usually awesome Jeff Bridges).  And the damn thing is too long by half.  Yet, I didn't hate watching it.  I’m not rushing out to see it again or anything, but for as awful as nearly every aspect of the film is, the visuals and the score are so striking that I found it worth watching.  Hell, if the theater I watched the film in had somehow turned off the dialogue completely and just cranked Daft Punk’s terrific score instead, TRON: Legacy might’ve actually been enjoyable (although still far too long).

THE SOCIAL NETWORK – david fincher – 8.6 / 10

Forget all the hype about this being the first great movie of the twenty-first century or the film that defines a generation; The Social Network is just a really good movie told exceptionally well.  It’s not a film interested in critiquing the new ways in which people communicate with one another in the digital age.  It’s not trying to get at some universal truth about the millennial generation.  Instead, The Social Network is a piercing look at the many ways in which men (especially young men) are assholes.