December 31, 2010–Every year, it is any critic’s “duty” to put together a list of the “ten best” films of the year. I find year after year that this is a time-consuming and difficult task. How is one who truly loves film supposed to narrow down a list to a mere “top 10″? I’ve tried every way I know how to list, number, and/or categorize my favorite films of the year – a lengthy list, indeed – and it never feels as though I’m doing true justice to those films that don’t fit in a list of ten.
So: I have listed my “top 10″ alphabetically below, preceded only by my two favorite films of the year, then my “Eleventh Place tie” for the films every bit as good that don’t quite fit in those 10 slots.
So: I have listed my “top 10″ alphabetically below, preceded only by my two favorite films of the year, then my “Eleventh Place tie” for the films every bit as good that don’t quite fit in those 10 slots.
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The Top 10: |
1. The Social Network |
Triumphantly returning to the big screen from the wilderness of too-smart-for-TV weekly series such as The West Wing and Sports Night, Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for The Social Network about misanthropic genius Mark Zuckerberg (played with almost freakish gusto and magnetism by Jesse Eisenberg), the multi-track-minded creator of Facebook, begins in a torrent of words and ideas – before the studio logo even comes up! Visual dynamo David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac) has directed the year’s best film – an astonishing, hypnotically fascinating, brilliant, (I swear to God) often funny tale of one man’s rise and spiritual (if by no means economic) fall. The film is not simply the story of the ascent of a business or the increasing popularity of a truly unpleasant, at times even despicable human being, nor is it exactly the mere Rashomon-style account of how he may or may not have stolen the idea from Harvard crew-rowing identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played seamlessly by Armie Hammer with some doubling of Tyler by Josh Pence), but rather it is also the story of his partnership (and eventual blood feud) with young moneyman Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), whose friendship and business relationship with Mark is eventually eclipsed by the seemingly Devilish influence of Napster creator Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake in a wonderful supporting turn).
Perhaps it should be no surprise that Zuckerberg’s apparent misanthropy and almost Asperger’s-esque social ineptitude would (along with his rather algorithmic fascination with what makes things tick) drive his creation of the most popular social networking site in the world, and perhaps it should be no surprise that being scorned by a girl (Rooney Mara) he fancied, who quite correctly calls him an asshole in the tour-de-force opening scene, took its toll on his emotional maturity. But, it is still profoundly affecting to see, in the film’s closing moments, how a young man with all the promise of the future of Internet human connectivity in his worldview, and all the money he could ever (but doesn’t appear to) want, and as many “friends” as his Facebook creation has generated, STILL just wants that girl to like him. Although Trent Reznor’s original score for the film (including a virtuoso variation on “In the Hall of the Mountain King”) must be lauded, the fact is that the use of the Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” over the final shot of this film could never have sounded more ironic. Bravo, Monsieurs Fincher, Sorkin and Eisenberg. Bravo! |
2. Fish Tank |
Whereas Fincher’s The Social Network deals in the oft-tread world of the Angry Young Man tradition, writer-director Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, her sophomore effort (following Oscar-winning short Wasp and debut feature Red Road) might well be the first real Angry Young Woman’s tale. First-timer Katie Jarvis gives a mesmerizing performance as Mia, a very troubled youth living in an intensely suffocating suburban slum in Essex with her alcoholic partying cougar mother (Kierston Wareing) and her much younger, foul-mouthed and similarly troubled sister (Rebecca Griffiths) – Precious has nothing on this trio. After a party, Mia’s mom brings home a young, attractive Irish guy called Connor (Michael Fassbender of Inglourious Basterds and Hunger fame) who becomes the one force encouraging Mia’s best way out of this existence – dance. What could go wrong you ask? Arnold’s intensely focused 1.33:1 frame follows this deeply troubled teen as she finds out in what is perhaps the most strikingly effective British film in this mold since Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993).
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3. Another Year (alphabetically): |
Mike Leigh’s film career has been an improvisation, from stage to screen, always first conceiving of a basic plot/theme and then casting and working with actors to craft characters and scenes, molding dialogue from their collaborations, and finally turning out a work of art from the process. His eleventh feature film (not including his many televised stage productions and TV movies) is no different, and becomes one of his most vital, lovely works in the bargain.
Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen play Tom and Gerri, a long happy and rather Bohemian London couple with a grown son who moved away from home quite some time ago. Never losing their sense of humor, they watch the seasons change, bringing challenges for which they’re fully equipped. However, their close friend Mary (Lesley Manville) sees no joy in life. Bumbling, a mess, lonely and depressed, Mary is their (bi-)polar opposite. Her outward tone is hopeful with more than a tinge of melancholy peeking through the facade. As lonely as she is, she finds herself holding out for a Prince Charming, certainly not Tom’s exceedingly unhealthy golf partner Ken (Peter Wight). She has her sights set instead on Tom and Gerri’s son Joe (Oliver Maltman), who sees her more like an aunt or sister than a girlfriend, and certainly brings about bad feelings when he comes home one night with his own girlfriend Katie (Karina Fernandez), the cheery opposite of Mary. As with his many overlooked masterpieces, Leigh looks at these people with brutal honesty, and a good deal of humor. Consider these titles: High Hopes, Naked, Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing, Vera Drake, Happy-Go-Lucky. One can only hope the list will go on and on through the years. |
4. Black Swan |
With Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s follow-up to his award-worthy, gritty but inspiring take on the world of athletic entertainment in The Wrestler (2008), he has concocted a powerful mixture of the in-depth and observant (ala’ that film) and the dark and disturbing (which marked his beloved debut efforts Pi and Requiem for a Dream). Natalie Portman hypnotizes as Nina Sayers, a freakishly obsessive perfectionist in a New York City ballet company who aspires to be cast as both the Swan Queen, as well as her dark doppelganger the Black Swan in a “reimagined” version of the classic Swan Lake.
Faced with the devastating and graceless exit of her beloved predecessor (Winona Ryder, great in just a few scenes), sexually pursued by her lascivious ballet director (Vincent Cassel, appropriately smarmy and perverse) and brutally psychologically, emotionally and physically stifled by her similarly obsessive mother (Barbara Hershey, giving a rare but welcome and memorable performance), Nina’s problems go from bad to worse with the arrival of the young alternate/understudy Lily (Mila Kunis), who may be more threatening than she even first appears to be. The horror is aided and abetted by Matthew Libatique, whose grainy 16mm (occasionally mixed with opposite side of the spectrum HD Digital) camera darts, swoops, jostles along behind and sometimes simply watches as we at first observe Nina and then are, basically unwittingly, plunged deep inside her troubled mind. Aronofsky (who almost directed The Fighter instead) is well within his element, starting at about the pitch of a nightmare in the opening shots and escalating for virtually two hours to a horrific shriek of psychological collapse and emotional despair. So how much of the film is a nightmare and how much, if any, can be taken literally? It’s up to you to decide. |
5. Blue Valentine |
Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine chronicles the wretched descent of a loving, unplanned marriage into the ninth circle of domestic Hell. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are, respectively, Dean, a working-class stiff, and Cindy, his doctor wife. The film opens with a sense of playfulness undercut by deep, dark tension. The film then precariously balances these two unique tones for just under two hours. Observing in almost painful detail as this ordinary Pennsylvania couple attempts to cling to some semblance of the love they once shared while enduring its very death rattle, co-writer/director Cianfrance, making the leap from TV, short and feature documentaries creates, with his first foray into dramatic narrative since his 1998 debut Brother Tied, an indelible portrait of the disintegration of love and respect between two people whose improbable connection started out so promisingly.
Beginning first with their union in the middle of a long, painful downward spiral, Cianfrance intercuts the present with key moments from the couple’s past; paradoxically, the past is grainy and ugly-looking even as it is relatively happy-seeming, while the present appears in bold, beautiful cinematography even as the content is, at times, borderline repulsive. Thematically and stylistically, one could be reminded a bit of Francois Ozon’s 5×2 (2005), without the Memento-esque backwards narrative progression. Between the two lead performances and the story they inhabit, this is one of the year’s most surprisingly powerful films. |
6. The Ghost Writer
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Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer is perhaps the film that got away in 2010. Still reeling from the arrest and pending consequences over his past indiscretions with an underage girl, audiences certainly liked Polanski’s film – that is to say, those who bothered to see it – but, unfortunately, it’s not always easy to see the forest through the trees when it comes to art; an artist’s personal life can take over whatever merit their work might’ve had (just ask Woody Allen).
In this case, it’s a shame because Polanski has made his best film since his heyday back in the early to mid-1970s. Working from Robert Harris’ novel The Ghost, the film stars Ewan McGregor as an unnamed ghost writer hired by a London publishing company (led by an unrecognizable Jim Belushi – sorry to any fans – are there fans? – of TV’s According to Jim, which remains unseen by me save for an unavoidable commercial here or there) to pour over the existing draft of the memoirs of one Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a career politician clearly meant to evoke echoes of Tony Blair and George W. Bush. War crimes charges levied against Lang, mysterious motorcyclists haunting McGregor at every turn, and the mysterious relationships between Lang and his undervalued, enigmatic wife (Olivia Williams) and his icy blonde secretary (Kim Cattrall) heighten the suspense to Hitchcockian levels, aided and abbetted by Pawel Edelman’s chilly cinematography and a delightfully haunted broken circus score by Alexandre Desplat. One of the great overlooked award-worthy films of the year. |
7. Greenberg |
The life of Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) lies in seemingly perpetual neutral. Having fled a key role in a rock band nigh on exploding in the City of Angels for a “simpler” life of carpentry in the Big Apple, he now spends his free time writing angry, acid-tongued poison pen critiques of businesses which have inspired his ire and uses the opportunity to vent his bitter, misanthropic mindscape out into a cold, indifferent world. Everyone’s a critic. Returning to L.A. to house-sit for his more successful brother (Chris Messina), he looks back on what might’ve been and those he left in the dust and illustrates his own ignorance – a former bandmate, Ivan (Rhys Ifans) has become successful on his own despite the abandonment of Roger on the brink of success lo those many years ago, and an ex-girlfriend who loved him and whom he loved in return (to whatever degree he could) is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who co-conceived the film’s story. Now the world has left Roger in the dust. His life, or what remains, is upended by a recent college grad called Florence (Greta Gerwig, in a career-making performance; the opening credit sequence of her routine and driving in close-up set to a perfectly-utilized “Jet Airliner” by Steve Miller Band is the kind of star-making image and sound fusion that Tarantino attempted with Pam Grier at the start of Jackie Brown). Jobless, directionless, but with abundant energy and an abiding spirit of positivity to rival Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, she is like Greenberg’s polar opposite; no wonder he’ll be drawn to her like moth to flame. Writer-director Noah Baumbach is slowly but surely becoming the sharp-witted chronicler of urban quasi-intellectual malaise after The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Margot at the Wedding (2007) and here tops himself. Stiller plays the role he was perhaps born to play (at least, outside a Wes Anderson movie) and if Gerwig inspires our adoration and fascination, he instead inspires our pity, sympathy and – yes – even empathy: perhaps we’ve known someone like Roger Greenberg, perhaps we are Roger Greenberg. Nobody’s perfect.
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8. Inception |
Writer-director Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight) has outsized imagination when it comes to even the most seemingly straight-forward big studio effort, and with his latest that potential finally pays off with a labyrinthine screenplay developed for the past decade. A corporate raider (Leonardo DiCaprio) leads a crack team assembled like a bank robbery gang (including Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt) along with a new young protege in the making (Ellen Page of Juno fame) into the minds of business rivals, constructing elaborate and fantastical dreamscapes in the process. A movie of astonishing visual invention, with everything from hotel rooms and hallways to entire cities of the mind folding in on themselves, rolling around in space and threatening to implode in something resembling Dark City through a kaleidoscope. The most puzzling of puzzle box movies that Nolan or, indeed, anyone has ever constructed on a big studio budget, and a beautiful and astonishingly brilliant metaphor for what it is to be a dreammaker (or is it, filmmaker?).
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9. The King's Speech |
The feel-good, award-bait antithesis of The Social Network may well be this ‘shy white man finding his “voice” in the face of a potentially indifferent world’ biopic of Prince Albert (Colin Firth), who becomes King George VI just in time to lead England into WWII. With a publicly paralyzing stutter, a worrisome perceived lack of confidence and boldness, a more conventionally leader-esque brother Edward, later King Edward VIII (Guy Pearce) who is passed over for political reasons, and a supportive, sharp-tongued wife (Helena Bonham-Carter), the newly crowned King faces his affliction head-on with the help of an unconventional speech therapist from Australia (Geoffrey Rush), who forges first a successful transition into eloquence for George VI and then a lifelong friendship. Director Tom Hooper (The Damned United) crafts his film in a refreshingly, even quaintly, old-fashioned biopic style and tradition while also imbuing it with life and immediacy and, yes, even humor which keep it from becoming too stuffy. Inspiring and moving stuff. [The film went on to win Best Picture amongst other of its many Oscar nominations in early 2011.]
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10. Leaves of Grass |
Another film which “got away” (or, rather, never really got distributed because – how the hell do you market the damn thing?!?), Tim Blake Nelson’s latest as writer-director, in some sense, couldn’t be more different from his dour but impressive Holocaust drama The Grey Zone (2002) or his modern high school violence transposition of Shakespeare’s Othello, O (2001). What these films have in common, besides a wonderful filmmaking instinct and distinct flavors, is a courage to take risks and the genius to pull them off. Edward Norton is virtually identical twin brothers Bill and Brady Kincaid, the former a dry, straight-laced philosophy professor who has moved to the big city to rid himself of his down-home Oklahoma country bumpkin family ties (overseen by 60s pothead turned matriarch Susan Sarandon), only to be sucked back in by the news that his pothead and mildly criminal twin brother has died. This, of course, is a ruse aided and abetted by Tim Blake Nelson himself as the twin’s best friend, a fellow burn-out turned inspired entrepreneur in the burgeoning marijuana racket of their small town. The plan I’ll leave you to discover, but suffice to say it puts them at darkly comic, bloodily violent and vulgar odds with a local Rabbi and pot kingpin (Richard Dreyfuss!) among others, and threatens to distract from an, ahem, budding romance between Professor Bill and a sweet young local English teacher (Keri Russell) who can go toe to toe on philosophy and quote poetry to sooth the savage beast. Nelson has made a smart, sweet, funny, bizarre, refreshingly down to earth yet outta sight (hell, outta orbit) crime comedy in the vein of his past collaborates the Coens (whose Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and others course through this film’s DNA, all the while the film becomes something wholly its own by the time the credits roll).
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Runners-up |
There we so many very good to great films in 2010, and I had had them categorized at one point, but it might be easier to just list them. Alphabetically: |
Note: This is a combination of lists published first here ...