LITTLE ROCK — This is the 15th year I’ve written an end-of-the-year movie wrap-up for this newspaper. By now you’d think I’d have figured out a way to do it without apologizing for my sources and methods. Maybe next year.
I made the Top 10 list a couple of weeks ago. To be precise, I made it on Dec. 12 about 11 a.m., when I e-mailed my ballot to the Southeastern Film Critics Association.
To create this list, I didn’t spend much time looking back at the reviews I’d written over the course of 2010. I certainly didn’t compare the grades I’d assigned when I reviewed those movies, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that the movie I’ve put in my No. 1 spot wasn’t graded as highly as some other movies. I can and regularly do change my mind, and the lists that follow are merely snapshots of my thinking at the moment I made them.
The first Top 10 is as close to being in order of preference as I could make it. The second Top 10 is in no particular order. The honorable mentions are all films I enjoyed that could have made the second 10. No doubt there are movies that I’ve forgotten about. No doubt there are a few I haven’t seen that merit inclusion. But this is the best I could do, given the limitations I’ve embraced.
For me, it’s far too soon to draw any conclusions about the year now passing - although there did seem to be a lot of independent, tough girls on the screen, from Kick-Ass and Winter’s Bone to True Grit.
And metafiction took hold in quasi-documentaries such as the Casey Affleck/Joaquin Phoenix stunt film I’m Still Here, Catfish and Banksy’s brilliant, provocative piece of guerrilla art, Exit Through the Gift Shop.
Animation was down in 2010 - How to Train Your Dragon is no Up, and I honestly didn’t care that much for Toy Story 3 despite its obvious technical excellence. (Toy Story 3 is like Inception in that way; I recognize its quality, but don’t feel any human warmth there.) I wish I’d seen The Illusionist - the latest from Sylvain Chomet, director of The Triplets of Belleville - but sadly no screener arrived in time for this piece.
On the other hand, I can’t remember a year with so many fine documentaries. There were enough to justify a separate Top 10 list, which you’ll find later on, and that’s without the aforementioned faux docs.
Finally, old-fashioned Hollywood values abided in handsome movies like Randall Wallace’s underrated Secretariat and the Coen brothers’ warmly received True Grit. Ed Zwick’s nudie throwback Love & Other Drugs kept fading hope (barely) alive for the romantic comedy genre.
In a similar vein, critical favorite The King’s Speech seems to me the very embodiment of what Manny Farber called “white elephant art” in that it fairly hums with the “gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.” But what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?
With all that out of the way, I’ll just remind you to keep your hands and feet inside the cart at all times, that flash photography is dangerous to our performers, and that this exhibition is for entertainment purposes only - no wagering please.
THE TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2010
1. Winter’s Bone - The best thing I saw at this year’s Little Rock Film Festival turned out to be the best movie I saw all year. Like Mattie Ross, the young girl at the center of Charles Portis’ True Grit, 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is forced to take on adult challenges when she goes in search of her bail-jumping, crank-cooking father. A tough, unstinting look at contemporary rural life in the meth-infested rural Ozark Mountains of Southwest Missouri, not far from the Arkansas line, Winter’s Bone has the power of contemporary myth, along with a scary deep-running supporting turn by John Hawkes as Ree’s murderous Uncle Teardrop.
2. The Kids Are All Right - Lisa Cholodenko’s sexy “family comedy” is a wonderful thing, intelligent in the ways of human foible and generous with sinners. There is a compelling warmth to the film as well as moments of genuine wit and one heartbreaking scene that will feel familiar to everyone who has ever felt the bottom drop suddenly out of their life.
3. Biutiful - I don’t know what inspires the critical animosity toward director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel). I think he makes inexpressibly sad, gorgeous movies tinged with a kind of minor key hope. In Biutiful, Javier Bardem stars as a dying criminal in Barcelona, trying to atone for his misspent life and secure a future for his children. It’s a heart-strangling performance.
4. Exit Through the Gift Shop - A provocative, comic maybe-documentary that manages to subvert received notions about the commodification of art and the artists’ role in society, while simultaneously inspiring and entertaining its audience. In other words, it’s like Jackass 3D, only with aerosol cans.
5. True Grit - It’s a little surprising that the Coensdidn’t make it darker, but the key to the movie (and to Portis’ book) is the stilted (but ever elegant and precise) voice of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld).
6. Carlos - Oliver Assayas investigates the pathological narcissism of the infamous terrorist assassin Ilich (“Carlos the Jackal”) Ramirez Sanchez in a film that is savage and funny. It comes in two versions - I saw the 5 1/2-hour one; the one that will hit most U.S. theaters in 2011 will be closer to standard theatrical length.
7. The Social Network - While I’m not ready to call it, as some have, The Great Gatsby for our times, The Social Network is an impressively nuanced cautionary tale, even if it isn’t exactly a true story. Like all of David Fincher’s movies, the devil is in the details here.
8. Inception - There is more art than heart to Inception. And though it’s a lot more deserving of the hype than most overhyped pop moments (by all means see it, twice if you like), it wasn’t the genuinely great film some have declared it to be. (It blew your mind? Really? To me it seemed like a smart video game.) Still, cut a half hour out of it and you’d have a smart and snappy thriller.
9. Lebanon - Claustrophobic and surreal, Samuel Maoz’s semi-autobiographical first feature gives us some of the immediate rawness of war by embedding us with an Israeli tank crew on the first day of the 1982 Lebanon war. But for a couple of scenes, the outside world is glimpsed only through a telescopic gunsight. Yes, it’s stagy and perhaps a little precious, but it’s also a stunning debut.
10. Another Year - British director Mike Leigh serves up yet another remarkable, ostensibly mild comic slice of bittersweet life with this chronicle of a year in which hardy dysfunctionals orbit about a slightly daft but unshakably committed marriage. Coming to Arkansas - and most of the United States - in 2011.
A SECOND 10
1. The Town - Time to start taking Ben Affleck seriously again.
2. The King’s Speech - Oscar-seeking filmmaking in the Merchant-Ivory tradition, with impeccable performances from Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush.
3. Fair Game - See it for Sean Penn and Naomi Watts’ nuanced portrayal of a couple under siege rather than for its politics or news value.
4. The Secret in Their Eyes - The Argentine film that won the foreign-language Oscar earlier this year is something like a romantic procedural, in which two old friends who could - and maybe should - have been more to each other reunite to reconsider a mystery they thought they’d solved some 25 years before, in the bad old days of the “Dirty War” of military-government oppression.
5. A Prophet - Unsentimental and amoral, French director Jacques Audiard’s gangster/prison thriller nearly lives up to the flattery - critics have compared it to The Godfather and GoodFellas - it has received since it won the Grand Prix at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. A more sober evaluation might be that the movie marries the gleefully violent excesses of Brian De Palma’s Scarface with the deliberative, faux journalistic methodology Jean-Pierre Melville employed in his ’60s crime films. In other words, while the movie is pretty good, it has its slow bits and at times it veers toward sensationalistic - if deadpan - bloodletting.
6. Rabbit Hole - While I had the feeling I’d seen the movie before (tonally it’s reminiscent of Little Children, Revolutionary Road and especially the misbegotten Reservation Road), Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest and Aaron Eckhart all turn in exceptional performances.
7. How to Train Your Dragon - The pick of the litter among this year’s animated features.
8. Mother - South Korean director Joon Ho-Bong’s Mother is a strange and unsettling film that veers dangerously close to melodrama and slows to a crawl near the 50-minute mark. It’s also one of the best horror films I’ve seen in a while - beautiful and funny and oddly plausible.
9. Solitary Man - Michael Douglas elevates this otherwise ordinary story of a Gordon Gekko-ish fallen angel.
10. The Ghost Writer - Unsettling and occasionally ridiculous, The Ghost Writer is an enjoyable transposing of a Robert Harris pulp political thriller to the screen. It is elevated by director Roman Polanski’s trademark tone of vague and nagging menace.
Honorable mention: Secretariat, Blue Valentine, Micmacs, Four Lions, The American, Cyrus, Conviction, Greenberg, Animal Kingdom, 127 Hours, Unstoppable, Ondine, The Father of My Children, Despicable Me, Toy Story 3, Vincere, Fish Tank, The Company Men, Welcome to the Rileys
BEST DOCUMENTARIES OF THE YEAR OF DOCUMENTARIES
1. A Film Unfinished
2. Inside Job
3. Restrepo
4. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?
5. Waking Sleeping Beauty
6. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
7. The Tillman Story
8. Waiting for “Superman”
9. William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
10. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Honorable mention: Racing Dreams, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Countdown to Zero, Independent for Governor: An Idealist’s Grueling Run, The Art of the Steal, The Lottery
PERSONAL DISAPPOINTMENTS
(These are films that, while not necessarily lousy, weren’t all I hoped they’d be.)
1. The Fighter 2. Chloe 3. Black Swan 4. The Karate Kid 5. Get Low 6. Cairo Time 7. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World 8. Please Give 9. Iron Man 2 10. Mother and Child
WISH I’D SEEN
Dogtooth, The Illusionist
ONES THE CRITICAL ESTABLISHMENT HAS WRONG
Toy Story 3, Welcome to the Rileys
ONES I MAY HAVE WRONG
Toy Story 3, The Killer Inside Me
ONE I CAN’T BRING MYSELF TO CARE ABOUT
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One
WORST MOVIE I SAW ALL YEAR
The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It
NOW SHOWING AT THE HELL 16 CINEPLEX
1. Eat Pray Love 2. Marmaduke 3. Yogi Bear 4. Killers 5. When in Rome 6. Grown-Ups 7. Dinner for Schmucks 8. Mac-Gruber 9. The Switch 10. Jonah Hex 11. Letters to Juliet 12. Prince of Persia 13. The Last Airbender 14. The Bounty Hunter 15. Sex and the City 2 16. Eat Pray Love E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 49 on 12/26/2010