Got kinda lazy writing about the stuff I didn't like, but I'd already started so I didn't exactly stop. Uh, guess 2010 was also The Year I Enjoyed Writing About Stuff I DID Like More Than Stuff I DIDN'T.
Top Movies I Liked In Theatre 2010:
01. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Inexplicably euphoric. A disaster of badly written, and occasionally offensive, jokes wedged between moments of grin-inducing goodness and with, in my opinion, Edgar Wright's wittiest and most clever visual dynamism so far. A movie that both makes me want to make movies and drives my neuroses to the absolute brink with the realization that I could never make a movie this good-looking and beautifully edited. I could watch an entire movie of these briskly flowing match cut jokes. Rented the Blu-Ray the day it came out, watched it, later watched the commentary with Wright and Bill Pope (only one of two commentaries I watched all year), then watched the whole movie again the next day. While it still suffers in the end in redeeming Scott Pilgrim too far, it does manage to say quite a bit about the silliness of dating and creepy, recessively adolescent tendencies of the modern 20-something nerd. The fight scenes work better conceptually than physically (as a metaphor for male possessiveness and insecurity w/r/t girls' ex-boyfriends) and the movie's first fight scene actually halts what was an almost-perfect (well, maybe almost-amazing) comedy dead in its tracks -- an awkward dead end from which it never completely recovers. But despite this, and many future stumbles (mostly during the fights, which range from, at best, sorta-funny to mostly not-at-all funny), Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a movie I wouldn't mind watching right now and then again tomorrow and probably again the next day, so densely packed is it with clever ideas and just plain gorgeous shots (it helps, too, that in the spirit of comic book paneling, Wright almost never repeats shots, resulting in something like 2500 camera set-ups in just under 2 hours).
02. Jackass 3D
There's something weirdly comforting about Jackass movies. It's just the right amount of prurient interest, plausible camaraderie and distillation of both narrative and stunt work into a kind of essence. Each sequence consists of three parts that function something like a narrative, yet with no fat: first the set-up, when they explain what's going to happen and give it an arbitrary name that is usually a totally non-clever, borderline literal explanation of the act itself (this somehow makes it funnier than if they did try to use puns or other wordplay); the part right before it happens, which is the real meat of the movie -- two movies + a TV show have given them plenty of experience with stretching the expectation of the event to the breaking point without feeling like phony, manufactured drama ala reality TV elimination processes; and then the actual event itself, which serves as both a gratifying release from part 2's suspense and as a hideous (and hilarious) punchline to the preceding events. Somehow it is almost always worse than what you expected. Only the few sequences of attempting to prank real-life people keep the movie from being even better, as they are all mostly atrocious and no amount of good will created by the previous hilarity can keep the laughs coming. I'm honestly surprised they survived the focus group process, as the whole theatre went from eye-watering belly laughs to near-crickets chirping at each one.
03. Cremaster 3
I walked in anticipating hating this. I'd seen Cremaster 1 & 2 earlier in the week and was only intermittently impressed, as 1 lacked the euphoria I would expect from an artsy ode to Busby Berkeley and 2 seemed like exactly the kind of endless, obtuse, indulgently symbolic and artsy nonsense that I'd imagined when I heard the words "avant-garde" and "cinema" together. Fortunately for me, Matthew Barney took the lessons learned from 2, got a big enough budget to afford a pristine HD digital camera, and set to work crafting some seriously beautiful and absurd images. It was like suddenly everything I'd disliked about 1 and 2 made more sense as a way of working through ideas to get to this culmination. The archly comic seriousness of American ritualism and backroom dealings as it relates to building a monument to the myth of capitalism struck an unexpected chord with me, even despite the aforementioned jabbering ladies in the audience. The second chunk was less successful, though I admit a lot of this could be lack of concentration due to distraction after The Event. Regardless, it felt like a semi-turning point in my movie-watching life. Like, hey guys, you were right and I was wrong -- maybe art is pretty cool after all.
04. Taboo
The first Nagisa Oshima film I've seen and it was something it took me quite a while to get a handle on. Right away I noticed the rather clever visual commentary on war and war training, as most of the film focuses on men practicing fencing with wooden kendo sticks and the camera follows the action with a detached, dispassionate steadiness, but as soon as the same men are thrown into a situation with actual swords and two guys trying to kill each other, the camera becomes a handheld, stumbling chaotic member of the fray. Like Full Metal Jacket, it suggests that no amount of training can prepare someone for the reality of war (though unlike FMJ, it only takes a couple of scenes to do so). The rest only came to me in pieces, later, and I still don't know if I made complete sense of the thing. I thought I was gonna watch a movie about gay samurais, but it felt more like a treatise on sex as a reflection of patriarchal possessiveness (sorta like Scott Pilgrim, but less sympathetic and more explicit) and status. Of the way hierarchies inspire power worship and the abuse of innocents for power grabbing. I never know how or where to rank movies that I walk out of feeling confused, but end up liking more as I think about them. Suffice to say it was enough to bump Oshima's early work up to the near top of my queue and I intend him to be the first director I investigate this new year.
05. (The Complete) Metropolis
This is a movie I feel like I have more problems with than nice things to say about, yet the awe that is inspired when I think about some of those great, monolithic sets compels me to say that it is a movie I appreciate, albeit with some major caveats. Firstly, let me just say that I think the film's soft, expressionistic lighting and sexual ambiguity was co-opted and then made much more potent by Howard Hawks in Scarface. I'll have more to write on that subject when it comes time for me to write my big, ambitious top 25-ish movie thing for the new year. Anyway, there's something very hypocritical and sanctimonious about Metropolis. The film begins by showing Froeder reveling in an Eden-like sanctuary of fruit trees and barely clothed women, gazing without much compunction at the scandalously visible nipples and curves of women vying for a chance in the hero's bed, only to later villify the wild seductress robot counterpart to the main heroine's chaste, virtuous school teacher. A million lascivious, prying eyes (an admittedly amazing sequence) don't do enough to gender balance the idea that in her eventual fate she gets not just what she deserves, but what she wants, as only the deathly fire seems to satiate her sexual lust. Awkward. Still just as awkward is the eventual ending, with Froeder serving as the metaphorical Heart that connects the Hands (the underground laborers who make Metropolis possible) and the Head (the cultivated, intellectual upper class who live in the lavish penthouses and Eden-like gardens) in peaceful harmony. It all seems weirdly patronizing and not at all in the supposedly socialist spirit of what they're getting at, as it still clearly divides the classes into people who are the Brain and people who are decidedly Not The Brain.
06. Resident Evil: Afterlife
This one is pure confectioners' sugar -- a sticky slow motion gun blasting bit of Wachowski-inspired cotton candy. Along with Jackass 3D, the only 3D movie I saw that felt as though it used 3D for its intended purpose. I am likely never going to buy that 3D is not a gimmick; that seeing something in 3D will somehow enhance the experience of watching a movie from a thematic or emotionally engrossing angle. It can be pretty, and goofy, and fun, and dizzying and will thus serve its purpose well for summer entertainments of this variety, but unless the technology grows by leaps and bounds very very quickly, it will continue to be something that enhances my distance from the piece I'm observing rather than its purported use of drawing me in further. But back to Resident Evil. Paul W.S. Anderson appears to have a pretty huge problem with a movie's mid-section. As in the first RE (and the only other one he personally directed), it opens with a fantastic and sustained bit of action filmmaking before spinning its wheels for several large intervals in the center only to whip out the figurative and literal big guns for the finale. The good outweighs the bad, the exciting outweighs the dull and the Matrix-y fights, while perhaps too close to their inspiration, are the first ones I've seen that expand on what worked about that movie 11 years ago, while cutting out all the stuff that didn't (like bullet-time -- seriously, it's really boring I don't know why it was a big deal other than nobody thought to do it before)
07. Despicable Me
To be honest I don't even quite remember what I liked about this movie (and for those who follow my numerical rankings, it just barely qualifies as a positive score with a 5.0), but here it is sitting at #7 on my list out of 40 movies seen in the theatre in year 2010. I guess there was something charmingly anarchic about the Looney Tunes-esque one-upmanship of the characters, as well as the kind of needless but a little bit sweet commentary on overbearing parents and childhood feelings of inadequacy and the desire for validation. It's certainly nothing new or unique, but in a year that saw me straining to eek whatever enjoyment I could out of most features, I did find myself almost never bored and certainly having to strain less than most.
Bottom 10 Theatre 2010:
10. The American
A waste of talent, as Clooney is clearly trying his serious best for a bid at Acting Recognition and continues to wear the hell out of a suit at all times, not to mention the three action scenes spaced out between a lot of fluffy sobriety are all legitimately exciting, proving that Corbijn could've made a pretty sweet action movie if he hadn't been all caught up in straight-faced art with a capital A. In crafting an ode to Melville Corbijn appears not to have noticed that, whatever its qualities, Le Samourai is a pretty damn silly movie and not at all without a sense of humorous detachment from its subjects. Nor would Antonioni ever trifle with as silly a metaphor as that butterfly shit.
09. The Expendables
Ugly, ugly, ugly. I didn't buy the revamped Rambo as anything but exploitation masquerading as anti-war sentiment and neither do I buy this as any kind of fun, go-get-em return to the heyday of '80s/'90s action. Only Terry Crews' big gun scene has any of the weird chutzpah mingled with self-aware winking that I kinda hoped the whole movie would be. The rest is just a weird series of people throwing, shooting, or otherwise attacking shit and then cutting to a guy who has popped out of nowhere for the sole purpose of dying. The movie has no idea how to film an environment and make it feel as if people are actually existing in it and moving through it. And even the worst '80s/'90s actioners at least let the audience know what was happening during the scenes, as this combines the worst of that era's careless body counts and awkward politics with this era's hideous editing and handheld camera.
08. Inception
Nearly everything about this movie irked me. From almost the first shot I felt as though the editing was going just a shade too quickly, as each shot seemed to cut at a rhythm that felt forced and unnatural -- just, weird and unpleasant. I was constantly distracted. Then people kept talking, basically forever. Explaining every aspect of every piece of every plot thread and seam to make sure even someone spending half the movie texting his girlfriend could still follow the action. Also, I didn't get what the big deal was with the rotating gravity hallway fight. Like every Nolan fight scene ever it was splotchy and borderline incomprehensible and hey I'm not gonna lie, I like the ending of The Transporter 2 with its spinning airplane cabin fight about a million times better. The snow bit, which everyone else seems to hate, was the only part that finally had my attention and made me wish the whole movie could be more video game-y and exploit having all 3 levels of dream world going on at once and each influencing the other. That's a good idea, but by the time it gets to that the whole heist is basically over and we get stuck with more boring Leo + wife drama.
07. Cremaster 2
Nearly kept me from even seeing Cremaster 3 (and did, at least sort of, cause me to skip 4 and 5). Everything that is good about 3 is sorta terrible about 2. It feels exactly as ponderous and artsy and wanting to look more beautiful than it actually ends up being as I feared the Cremaster cycle would be 7 years ago when it last played as a whole in Portland and was why I skipped the hell out of it then. Repetition that feels mostly for its own sake, as well as a looooooong and sloooooooow movement of ideas and events that is also mostly showyness rather than an attempt to entice contemplation.
06. Fred
I feel sorta bad putting this one in here, as it is a low budget short film that's the pet project of one of the claymation animators who worked on Coraline (pretty good movie). But I've had to suffer through it twice, as it was playing for a while at Portland's Living Room Theaters before their features, and suffer I did. I originally had it lower on the list, but I don't know that it's actively offensive like most of the lower categories -- just inept and dull and kinda depressing (titles before the film declare it a ten year labor of love, which just makes me feel bad -- like a jerk for hating it so much, but also just a weird and uncomfortable feeling of pity for the creators that they spent ten years making something so terrible (which I know is condescending and then I feel bad about that)).
05. Never Let Me Go
Do I remember this well enough to hate it (or, at least, intensely dislike it)? I remember spending the entire movie waiting to feel anything but apathy bordering on self-righteous indignation. I remember thinking they wasted three exceptionally capable actors on nonsense about our status as clockwork oranges in a horrible, cannibalistic society. Like Romanek set out to make the most boring version of The Island possible. Both movies are ideologically cringe-inducing, but at least one of them knows the best way to make people ignore squicky political views is with crazy car chases and beautiful, clean interior design -- not somber English countrysides and voice over narration.
04. Centurion
Previous to seeing this, it likely would've been Jonah Hex occupying this spot as the film that most felt like watching nothing, but Centurion heftily trumps that film, which at least had the weird part where he talked to his dead brother. This film is like a black hole of cinema, a place where you can go to watch and feel an endless void staring back at you. It is as if Neil Marshall hit a high point with The Descent and, like a roller coaster, decided now was the time to take a plunge back into awfulness with as much speed and force as possible. It makes me doubt even that film's qualities that the same person thought this scattershot hodge-podge of every sword & sandals cliche that never amounts to any feeling of viscera or pathos would ever be worth the time of a paying public. Not to mention, by far the worst offender of the teal & orange color scheme all year.
03. Dinner for Schmucks
The ultimate having cake and eating it comedy, as the titular sequence alternates asking us to laugh at the aforementioned schmucks before switching roles to feel sympathy for them and laugh scornfully at the dickhead rich people who have them over, it's The 40-Year-Old Virgin for eccentrics but without any of that movie's occasional insights into male stunted adolescence. Also, I do not get Zach Galifinakis' appeal at all. A waste of all the other more-talented cast members.
02. Piranha 3D
By far the ickiest and most depraved of all the movies I saw this year -- it feels almost like a cultural landmark that something this mercilessly cruel and hideous could be so highly praised by the collective critical body. Aside from Jerry O'Connell as the only person trying to turn all this macabre meanness into something that resembles an actual comedy, there is literally no reason to recommend this to anyone. It is hateful and, for a French director, embodies all the worst aspects of American horror puritanism and misogyny, alternately revelling in the flesh of nubile female bodies before eviscerating them in increasingly unnecessary ways. I now have a relative approximation of what it would look like to see a woman get her hair caught in an onboard motor and have that motor rip her scalp and the top of her face off. There was absolutely no reason at all ever to have this. Exhaustively depressing.
01. Enter the Void
Alternately depressing and aggravating, Gaspar Noe's treatise on the tragedy of wasted youth, love for your sister's and/or mother's supple mammaries and, of course, how awesome Kubrick's 2001 was. Abandoning actual mise-en-scene for 3 gimmick camera angles (POV, bird's-eye and a weird shot looking at the back of a head, forcing the audience to look around the head at the periphery of the image to make sense of the situation), he forgets that removing, or tightening to the point of breaking, one aspect of filmmaking gives increased importance to all the other parts. Unfortunately, mise-en-scene is not the only thing he abandons, as all the actors speak in halting monotones and utter pseudo-profound banalities contrived to sound, at least by Noe's estimation, like actual humans talking. So we have no characters, no dialogue, no acting and no composition -- only a film that feels like a prank. If it is a prank, well, congrats I guess? You got a seriously large amount of people to believe your movie is not a horrible piece of shit. Kudos? I don't know, this is the kind of movie that made me realize I can still get uncontrollably angry watching movies. So there's that.
Top 10 1st Time Viewings 2010:
01. Earrings of Madame de...
02. Stagecoach
03. 42nd Street
04. Man of the West
06. Gold Diggers of 1933
07. Snake Eyes
08. Osaka Elegy
09. The Tall T
10. The Naked Spur
Bottom 10 1st Time Viewings 2010:
10. Centurion
09. Youth in Revolt
08. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
07. Six-String Samurai
06. Suspect Zero
05. Dinner for Schmucks
04. 2012: Doomsday
03. Piranha 3D
02. Punisher: War Zone
01. Enter the Void
(At Reuben's Request) All Movies Of 2010 Ranked (more or less) In Order Of Preference:
*Note: I didn't exactly follow my numerical rankings, as numerical rankings are kind of a bullshit completely inexact science and for many I just went with my gut about how I think I feel about the movie right now.
Movies I Liked (or, at least, remember liking at the time):
Spider-Man 2
Munich
Earrings of Madame de...
Touch of Evil
Ugetsu
Torque
Rebel Without a Cause
The General
Stagecoach
42nd Street
The 400 Blows
Scarface
Street of Shame
Carrie
Man of the West
Singin' in the Rain
Gold Diggers of 1933
Snake Eyes
Hi, Mom
Osaka Elegy
The Tall T
The Naked Spur
The Beyond
Bend of the River
Cowards Bend the Knee
El Dorado
Blow Out
The Furies
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Dames
Day of the Outlaw
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Drums Along the Mohawk
Jackass 3D
The Island
On Dangerous Ground
Sisters of the Gion
Doppelganger
Saturday Night Fever
La Ronde
Twilight
Crank
Cremaster 3
The Red Balloon
Citizen Kane
Footlight Parade
Taboo
Blood Simple
What's Your Raashee?
Duel
Coraline
Pump Up the Volume
Spider-Man
Mission To Mars
Winchester '73
Joint Security Area
Sisters
The Lords of Dogtown
Patriotism
Jurassic Park
In a Lonely Place
Decision at Sundown
The Birds
A Serious Man
Paradise Now
Seven Men From Now
Empire of the Sun
The Lady From Shanghai
Metropolis
Le Plaisir
The Gold Rush (w/ Narration)
Gold Diggers of 1935
The Guard from Underground
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Bigger Than Life
RocknRolla
Trouble the Water
Resident Evil: Afterlife
Thirteen
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
The Weather Man
Anjaana Anjaani
Crank 2: High Voltage
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Hold You Tight
Ponyo
The Heart of the World
Charisma
Macao
Mad Max
Fiddler on the Roof
Border Incident
The Fury
The Bachelor & The Bobby-Soxer
Transformers
I Shot Jesse James
Role Models
Despicable Me
Movies I Had More Problems Than Not With, But Still Liked Certain Aspects Of:
Reign of Fire
Spider-Man 3
Mississippi Mermaid
An American Tail
Where the Wild Things Are
Gamer
I Can Do Bad All by Myself
Dirty Harry
Toy Story 3
Women of the Night
Election
Wallace & Gromit in 'A Matter of Loaf and Death'
Takers
Resident Evil
They Live by Night
The Quick and the Dead
The Kid
The Fugitive
True Grit (2010)
High Noon
Sansho the Bailiff
District B13: Ultimatum
Murder a la Mod
A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop
Bad Boys II
Repo Man
The Aviator
Aguirre, The Wrath of God
Chungking Express
Mary and Max
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
North by Northwest
W.
Act Da Fool
The Fall of the Roman Empire
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
The Alley Cats
There Will Be Blood
Women Without Men
Notebook on Cities and Clothes
The Flight of the Phoenix (2004)
From Paris With Love
Flow: For Love of Water
The Stranger
Easy A
The Best Of The Worst:
Step Up 3D
Confessions of a Shopaholic
To Live and Die in L.A.
Synecdoche, New York
Clash of the Titans
The Baron of Arizona
Life During Wartime
Danger: Diabolik
Cremaster 1
The Social Network
The Town
Bottle Rocket (Short)
The Road
Date Night
Sherlock Holmes
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
The Dentist
Friday Night Lights
Star Trek
Around a Small Mountain
Wall Street
You're Never Too Young
The Punisher
The Loveless
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Hard Times
Killers
Jonah Hex
Eleven Minutes
Bandidas
State of Play
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Spies Like Us
Unstoppable
Four Brothers
Monsters, Inc.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Paranormal Activity 2
Catfish
The American
The Expendables
Inception
Surrogates
Zombieland
Everything Else:
True Grit (1969)
Cremaster 2
The Counterfeiters
Brick
Crossroads
Broken Arrow
Rosewood (2009)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Book of Eli
Heartless
Eagle Eye
The Girl Who Played with Fire
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
An Unfinished Life
The Proposal
Never Let Me Go
Tron
Romancing The Stone
Donnie Darko
The Return of Frank James
Vampires Suck
Obsessed
The Dentist 2
Fred
The Rat King
Funny People
Gladiator
Centurion
Youth in Revolt
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Six-String Samurai
Suspect Zero
The Enforcer
The Delta Force
Dinner for Schmucks
2012: Doomsday
Punisher: War Zone
Piranha 3D
Enter the Void
Here's hoping for a more successful run (especially at the theatre) in 2011!
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