Sunday, January 2, 2011

Noah's Year-End Film List

2010 was my first year of reviewing film. Coming in to it, you can ask my poor girlfriend, the waves of excitement were palpable - little tremors of anxious glee. Thrust in to doldrums of March though and attempting to watch anything and everything, my excitement quickly waned. I subjected myself to shitfest after shitfest, the damage being done to my filmic psyche almost without cure.

If you’d asked me eight months ago to come up with a top ten list of films I might just have said no. Now, looking back, amongst the steaming piles, the overrated dreck, and Sex And The City 2, this has been one of the better years of film in a long while. Looking at my list, it feels similar to the rest floating about out there, but I’m happy with it. 76 films down the tube, and these 11 (plus a couple special mentions) were what wet my cynical whistle the most.

Thanks for reading!

Special Mentions

Shutter Island, d. Martin Scorcese

This was a divisive film in 2010. So many people I excitedly peppered with praise for the film were stumped by my love of this big, arch mind-fuck of a picture. But this is Scorcese at his most dramatic, his most theatrical, and with Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio biting off hunks of the scenery, it entirely worked for me.


The Invention of Dr. Nakamats, d. Kaspar Astrup Schroder

A tiny little portrait of a Japanese super-inventor that completely caught me off guard. This could’ve been a quirky film about an amazing subject, but Astrup Schroder manages to dig relatively deep in the wacky world of this self-professed genius. The man thinks oxygen deprives the brain of creativity ... so he buys waterproof paper and comes up with all his ideas while submerged in a swimming pool. And that is just the beginning.
 

The Top 11

11. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, d. Edgar Wright

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the Brian O’Malley Scott Pilgrim series. No real reason, it’s just not up my alley. Yet in the hands of Edgar Wright, the film adaptation is a thing of absolute originality and joy. Stuffed to the gills with visual imagery, pop culture references, and a visual style so cheeky it’s breathtaking - this is truly the only way this comic book could’ve adequately been brought to the screen. Wright’s young cast does brilliant work with Michael Cera etching out a new corridor in his on screen persona.

10. Greenberg, d. Noah Baumbach

The best Ben Stiller performance of his life. Easily. This story of an anxious 40-year old do-nothing is so spot on about the way our lives just don’t work out the way we hope them to, I left the theater shaky with anxiety. Stiller’s Greenberg is a babbling wreck of a man, still holding on to the intellectualized coolness he once thrived on. You beg Greta Gerwig to stay away from him, but can somehow understand her unavoidable attraction. With some of the best L.A. cinematography I’ve ever seen, this film hit me in the gut and just wouldn’t let go.

9. Four Lions, d. Chris Morris

Chris Morris did what no American could possibly ever think of doing: he made terrorism funny. He took the story of four moronic Jihadists attempts to blow up, er, something and turned it in to a cutting, laugh-out-loud funny satire of the entire way the Western world views extremist Muslims. Laughing at would-be killers seems amoral, but Morris manages to turn them from stereotypes to fully rounded characters, wrought with moral complexity and heart-wrenching moments.

8. Inception, d. Christopher Nolan

The last 40 minutes of this film is every action movie you’ve ever wanted to see, all happening at once, with every layer somehow affecting the other. I poo-poo the last-minute haters who’ve started fussing about the over-intellectualizing of the film, and point every person on Earth towards the last 40 minutes of it. 40 of the most splendidly realized action ever recorded. I point, slack-jawed with drool hanging from the corners of my mouth.

7. Black Swan, d. Darren Aronofsky

I love Darren Aronofsky. Not just because his films are brilliantly composed and far outside the reaches of modern film viewing culture, but because without him our theaters would be just a little more homogenized. I can’t say I know how he’s done it, but this stridently art house director has turned in to a go-for-broke Hollywood heavyweight, and he’s bringing his fucked-up brand of filmmaking to the masses. Black Swan is as tense a film as I’ve seen in years, riding on the too-thin back of a game-changing performance by Natalie Portman. This is body-horror, and Italian Gallo, and late 70s thrillers all spun in to one grandiose film about what we’ll do to ourselves and those around us to achieve what we think is ours. Brilliant.

6. True Grit, d. The Coen Brothers

Two weeks ago every critic in America was bemoaning the idea that the Coen Brothers had made a "family film." That’s egg on your face critical world of America. The Coen Brother’s update on Charles Portis’ classic Western tale of a girl seeking redemption for her murdered father is a family film, but one fed through their indelible lens. Jeff Bridge’s Rooster Cogburn is as iconic as The Dude and Hallie Steinfeld’s Mattie Ross is one of the great child performances of all time. The entire cast of this picture is brilliant, from Barry Pepper’s charming villain Lucky Ned, to Matt Damon’s outcast Texas Ranger LaBeouf. The Coen Brothers have shed the unhappy times of The Ladykillers and it makes me want to celebrate.

5. Toy Story 3, d. Lee Unkiel

It might not be a year in movies if I’m not slobbering over the recent Pixar release, but Toy Story 3 went above and beyond what I was hoping for. Lets be honest, everyone thought a third Toy Story was going to be a shameless money grab. But these wizards of animation at Pixar took a fifteen year gap in narrative and turned this threequel in to a rumination on growing up and growing apart and giving up the things we love. It’s a film about change and how hard that is too except but more so it is a fitting send-off to a cast of truly beloved characters. Pixar, you sorcerers you, I tip my hat.

4. I Am Love, d. Luca Guadagnino

After this year, Tilda Swinton makes any film she’s in a must-see. Her performance in the terribly unseen Julia was the perfect capturing of a life falling apart, but the true Swinton magic appears in I Am Love. A tragic love story set in the richest sectors of Italy, Swinton speaks three languages in the film, and creates a character so emotionally complex and realistic she seems to tear free of the screen cloth and step in to your lap. Stylistically this film shines, adding a layer of beauty and originality to a fairly stayed storyline. And let us not forget about the shaky-cam sex scene, one of the most charmingly erotic in recent film.

3. The Social Network, d. David Fincher

Leave it to David Fincher to take on a film about the creation, and creator of Facebook, and turn it in to a searing examination of our culture’s need to be accepted. Jesse Eisenberg takes himself to the next level with his portrayal of almost-autistic genius Mark Zuckerburg. It’s a stunningly attractive film (in the way that only Fincher can) and I found myself riveted each and every moment of it. This is a defining film for a generation, a pull back of the curtain of our social media-obsessed lives.

2. A Prophet, d. Jacques Audiard

Wow. Wow. Wow. Any other year, any other fucking year, and this would handily be the best film of it. Audiard’s tale of a Muslim loner who ends up imprisoned and in the service of a group of violent Corsicans is one of the great prison/gangster films ever made. Tahar Rahim is a revelation as the street smart El Djebena who connives his way to the top of an empire. Combining mysticism with grit and spirituality with some of the most exciting characters in recent memory, A Prophet is the type of gangster film we rarely see anymore. I’m still trying to digest it in full.

1. Blue Valentine, d. Derek Cianfrance

After I saw Blue Valentine I was pressed to look at my own relationship. Pressed to see if the cracks existed, if this film forecast a world I might myself soon enter. That’s why it’s the best of the year because Derek Cianfrance’s capturing of a couples first moments and their attempts to salvage their relationship ten years later is so brutally realistic that it effected the way I see my own relationship (briefly and without consequence). After this film Ryan Gosling easily holds the reins of his generations greatest actor and Michelle Williams ably stands toe-to-toe with him. The dialogue, the settings, the situations created thrum with so much realism and bottled-up pain that its hard for me to recommend this film to those with significant others. It is a testament to the lingering hopes of an artistic society that The Weinsteins were able to get the NC-17 rating revoked, giving a wider audience the chance to see such a stunning film. I still think about this film and smile or shudder or gasp. Absolutely brilliant.

- Noah Sanders -



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