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.)

10. THE LOSERS
Blame it on Christopher Nolan and his Batman Begins and The Dark Knight if you want to, but it seems that any film based on a comic book these days has to be portentous, serious and full of dread.  But comic books, like any other medium, offer a range of styles, genres and attitudes and The Losers is one film that acknowledges this by being true to the book's goofy sense of fun and action without insulting the audience's intelligence.

09. TOY STORY 3
Pixar's weakest effort since Cars is still worlds better than just about anything else out there.  Hinging too much on a never-in-doubt climax in a junkyard incinerator and featuring an ending even a five-year-old couldn't fail to see coming, the middle section of Toy Story 3, which plays like an extended homage to The Great Escape, is nevertheless full of the kind of moviemaking magic for which Pixar is rightfully famous.  If the rest of the film isn't up to their usual standards, it at least offers some closure for this cast of much-loved characters.

08. WINTER'S BONE
The genius of Winter's Bone is that it takes a novel though seemingly predictable premise (teenage girl must find her delinquent father who skipped out on bail before the state takes the family home) in directions you never see coming.  That it's also extremely well-acted with a pitch perfect sense of place is a nice bonus.  (Side note:  I'm almost positive Jennifer Lawrence won the role of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games solely because of the scene in this film where she skins a squirrel.)

07. EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP
Wunderkind street artist Banksy turns the whole idea of the biography documentary on its ear.  Is this a movie celebrating Thierry Guetta, Banksy’s would-be documentarian turned street artist Mr. Brainwash, or condemning him?  Is anything in this movie to be taken at face value?  Despite his central role in the film, Banksy remains an enigma throughout, and not just because he disguises his voice and keeps his face in the shadows.  At the end of the day, Banksy seems to be content with the film-- like his art-- speaking for him.  And since he's one of the rare street artists whose work actually deserves the term, that's fine with me.

06. THE TOWN
Ben Affleck's sophomore feature is a solid, straightforward, highly entertaining crime thriller.  Though it doesn’t scale the heights of his debut (Gone Baby Gone), it's not aiming to.  There are dozens of crime thrillers much like this one released every year and rarely are any of them as well-thought through and executed as this one.  If the role Affleck took for himself is a little too noble, well, when's the last time you can remember something that kind being the worst thing you could say about a Ben Affleck performance?

click here to read the full review

05. GREEN ZONE
Unfairly overlooked for its oversimplification of the complex quagmire that was Iraq post-invasion, Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon's latest collaboration is worth seeing just for the daring feat the filmmakers attempted, namely turning a convoluted game of political maneuvering into an action thriller.  That it's also well researched, viscerally engaging and even a little heartbreaking elevates it beyond an interesting exercise.  Yes, it's obvious from the outset that Matt Damon's character was never going to find WMD in Iraq or blow the lid off the reason why he didn't.  But to my mind, that doesn't make the film predictable; it makes it tragic.

04. FAIR GAME
The invasion of Iraq was, it seems, fodder for plenty of tragedy, none more misunderstood than that of Valerie Plame.  Once her CIA cover was blown in an attempt to discredit her husband (who vehemently disagreed with the Bush Administration's evidence for going to war), pundits on both sides of the aisle attempted to use her situation for their benefit.  In the process, all sense of the person at the center of the story was lost.  As someone who never followed her story all that closely when it was front page news, I was startled to learn that just about everything I thought I knew about her was at best an extreme exaggeration from one side or the other.  Fair Game is a potent warning that we should look a little closer before we decide to condemn or canonize someone we've never met.

03. TRUE GRIT
The wonderfully evocative period dialogue spoken by the characters in this film is such a revelation that on first viewing the sheer wonder of it overtakes just about everything else.  On second viewing, it gradually dawns that this is probably the Coen brothers' most deeply felt film.  The detached distance so common in much of their work is absent here, allowing them to show some genuine compassion for their central characters.  In a career full of curveballs, the Coens' latest weird detour is to take a Western and play it straight.

02. THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Leaving aside the (pointless) questions of how closely the film's Mark Zuckerberg resembles the real one, The Social Network's central character is a self-centered asshole who sees the women in his life as lesser beings who should fall at the feet of his massive genius.  Unfortunately, the world (and the women in it (particularly Mara Rooney in the film's exhilarating opening scene)) don't treat him as the genius he so clearly thinks he is.  So he sets out to remake the world into a place where geeks like him are top dog.  And even though he does succeed in changing the world (or at least the way we communicate in it), he still finds himself in more or less the same place.  It's a devastating portrait (excellently played by Jesse Eisenberg (the poor man’s Michael Cera no more)); one that lingers long past all the overheated praise of this film as the first great movie of the twenty-first century or the first film to capture our digital age or whatever nonsense critics were showering all over the film upon its release.

 click here to read the full review

01. INCEPTION
Every once in a while, a film comes along that just blows the doors off your expectations.  It's a rare occurrence, especially for someone like me who sees just about everything, but at its core it's the reason we go to the movies in the first place, because they can surprise and delight us.  Inception may not be the best film ever made and its pleasures may diminish with repeat viewings, but the surprises and delights it offers are unlike just about anything else I've ever seen.  It's a high-wire act of a film that manages to pull it all off without seeming to break a sweat.  It's a delirious film and I mean that in the best possible way.

click here to read the full review



HONORABLE MENTION

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON
I think we can all agree by now that 3D is an overrated gimmick that does little besides give the viewer a headache and make the movie you're watching twice as dark as it should be.  That said, How to Train Your Dragon is the one film I've ever seen in the medium that I think would've suffered in two dimensions.  Not sure what that means for its home video shelf life, but the film does show the potential of a medium that has rarely shown any otherwise.

EASY A
There's an awful lot of affection out there for the films of John Hughes.  But having never seen them as a teenager, I simply can't understand it.  This film, on other hand, is everything people claim a Hughes’ film is without any of the racist, misogynist crap his movies are saddled with.  As an added bonus, it features probably the most wonderful inter-family dynamic ever put on film.

ENTER THE VOID
A bit bonkers and probably existing only to indulge director Gaspar Noé's formalist experiments, Enter the Void is worth a look for the gonzo title sequence alone.  Starting off shocking and ending up somewhere close to brilliant, the title sequence achieves that rare thing of being wholly original and artistically successful.  That the rest of the film never quite lives up to that promise doesn’t detract from it in any way.

THE KING’S SPEECH
A film tailor made to win Oscars ended up, of course, winning an armload.  But as these sorts of films go, this is one of the better ones.  There's not a whole lot about it that's remarkable, but it's a handsomely shot and acted film that manages to turn a guy giving speeches into drama, which in and of itself is rather impressive.



DISHONORABLE MENTION

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD
Before this film was even released, a cult had built up around it that absolutely would not entertain even the slightest criticism of it.  The film itself is only marginally bad, but the immediate fetishization of its cult status signifies a disturbing trend amongst film fans (see also: Kick Ass, the Twilight series): loving something just because it's made for them regardless of its worth as a film.

click here to read the full review

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE
At this point, three films in, what is there really left to say about the terribleness of these films?  Yes, they're misogynistic, stupid and completely ignorant of the rich genre histories upon which they're built.  Yes, they indulge the worst tendencies of middlebrow filmmakers lavished with huge budgets.  It's really only tragic because of its popularity.  Like Scott Pilgrim, the fans of the Twilight movies walk in knowing they’re going to love it, which, as far as I can tell, is the absolute worst way to get Hollywood to make good movies.

click here to read the full review