The Best of 2010

WHAT I THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT I SAW - 2010

2010 has been another great year in movies.  Among the top three films on this year’s list, any one could have taken the top spot.  But #1 is so visionary, so refreshingly original, that I believe it is the best film of 2010.

#10:  Kick-Ass
   
Violent, vulgar, clever, and careful, Kick-Ass is an audacious and original take on the superhero genre.  You won’t see another film like it this year.
   
#9:  The Killer Inside Me
   
It takes great big stones to make a lurid, pulpy novel into a lurid, pulpy movie with world-class production values.  It takes even bigger stones to film its story in all its horror and expect an audience to stick with its antihero.  The Killer Inside Me gambles big and rakes in all the chips, delivering a compelling and disturbing story while establishing Casey Affleck as one of the most interesting young actors working in American film today.
   
#8:  The Secret of Kells
   
In this animated feature, young Brendan is a monk in an abbey/fortress in medieval Ireland.  Torn between the abbot who’s driven to ready for the next Viking attack and the illuminator who unleashes his genius, Brendan finds a magical ally deep in the woods.  The Secret of Kells reflects its milieu with a daring 2-D animation style that reflects the illuminated manuscripts in which Brendan finds his inspiration and his calling.  This film is beautiful and imaginative and delightful.  See it even if you don’t have kids.
   
#7:  The Other Guys
   
It’s hard to make a big budget action-comedy that’s actually funny.  The Other Guys, however, is funny all the way through to the end credits and it delivers on the big action set pieces and it works in a Yojimbo joke.  How many wide-release comedies can you name that work in a Yojimbo joke?  Look for clever supporting work from Michael Keaton, Eva Mendez, and Ron Riggle.
   
   
#6: Shutter Island
   
I define a gadget movie as a film that’s as much a puzzle as anything else, and Shutter Island is a terrific gadget movie.  This challenging and puzzling film features a deeply compelling and disturbing premise, and it comes through on it.  Scorsese orchestrates, shepherding knockout performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo in a film that’s as gothic, creepy, compelling, and horrifying as anything I’ve seen this year. I need to see it again, and soon.
   
   
#5:  True Grit
   
True Grit is a no-nonsense, three act western featuring outstanding work from Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, Josh Brolin, and especially young Hailee Steinfeld, as the heroine Mattie Ross.  The film is full of little moments that define and develop its characters and its world, and we get the sense of a picture whose every detail was carefully designed and executed.  This is as professional as the professional western gets.  John Huston would be proud.
   
#4:  The American
   
George Clooney plays Alain Delon playing a very bad man in hiding from some other very bad men in a film that feels more like a late ‘50s – early ‘60s French or Italian production than a modern American one.  I like Goerge Clooney.  I like Alain Delon.  I like French and Italian movies from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.  And I can’t stop thinking about the sense of world-weariness, fear, isolation, and dread that comes through in nearly every scene of this criminally underappreciated film.
   
#3:  Black Swan
   
I challenge you to name a Darren Aronofsky film that doesn’t rank among the best releases of its year.  Black Swan, the latest in a line of Aronofsky masterpieces, will baffle you and scare you and challenge you and elevate you.  It’s filmmaking about high art that is, itself, high art – a film about a dancer in ‘Swan Lake’ that is, itself, a production of ‘Swan Lake.’  The film enraptured me in the moment, and I think about the sound and imagery of its emotional climax several times a day.  I suspect it will become as much a part of my touchstones of great filmmaking as the sand Kyuko Kishida’s body in Woman in the Dunes or Hugh Jackman in the bubble in Aronofsky’s The Fountain.  You must see this film.
   
#2:  Winter’s Bone
   
Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sprang from the same soil as Mattie Ross, and I think Mattie would see her as one of her own.  When Ree sets out to find her father in the moral and economic wasteland of meth-corrupted Arkansas, she’s in territory as strange and dangerous as the Indian country Mattie penetrates to find her fugitive.  While Mattie had help, however, Ree is alone.  She alone must find her father, dead or alive, so to save the pathetic home in which she’s raising her younger siblings.  She alone must brave the suspicion, the fear, the hostility she meets within her own family.  She must do it all, and Winter’s Bone takes us every step of the way, plunging us into the icy winter waters of its world and daring us to grab hold onto what we may find there.  Winter’s Bone is a perfectly executed, utterly horrifying film.  You must see it.
   
#1:  Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
   
Inventive, audacious, and infectiously fun, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the best film of 2010.  The picture crosses from reality to fantasy and back again with delight and energy, immersing us in the mind of its hero so completely that we cease to care about the objectively real and happily ride along with him while he, well, while he works himself out.

Granted, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World isn't the first film to explore boundaries between fantasy and reality; neither is it the first to exist almost entirely in the head of its protagonist. The film recalls Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, which gave us a man-child protagonist whose fantasy world so thoroughly informs his connection with the real world that we cannot understand one without the other.  While Gondry's man-child seems cloying and stunted, however, director Edgar Wright here gives us a man-teen so bursting with geeky enthusiasm, so ready to take the step into actual adulthood, that we root for him instead of just wait for him to grow up.

Scott Pilgrim does this by evoking the Big Three of nerd culture: comic books, video games, and alt-indie rock.  It doesn't do it by just throwing references out there and hoping for a few lightbulbs to come on.  It does it by borrowing graphic references from comic books, co-opting the look and feel of video games from their 16-bit arcade heyday to their modern, hyperrealistic incarnations, and overwhelming the audience both with music and with unique visual depictions of music.  Scott Pilgrim doesn't just reference this culture or remind you of this culture: it immerses you in this culture.  As A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times, "There are some movies about youth that just make you feel old, even if you aren’t. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World ... has the opposite effect." 

Bravo, Mr. Wright.  I can't wait to see what you do next.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

I loved Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

The film is extended adolescent fantasy about a nerdy kid who (a) plays bass guitar in a rock band, (b) is a kung fu master and fearsome swordsman, (c) has super powers, and (d) leaves behind a trail of the broken hearts of improbably attractive young women.  So, y’know, hey, what’s not to love?

Sure, you and I both know that the movies are full of tales of nerdy kids who save the day and win the girl (I have a theory that screenwriters, generally speaking, are a pretty nerdy bunch.  You’re not going to find a whole lot of movies about how the cool kids finally got those damn nerds to quit blowing the curve on the mid-terms.).  The thing that sells Scott Pilgrim, that makes it leap off the screen, is its exuberant storytelling and its ear for music.  Oh, and it’s really, really funny.

How does Scott Pilgrim qualify as “exuberant?”  Through love of storytelling itself, through an embrace of fantasy, through a willingness to use every bit of the frame to communicate with the audience, and through a spot-on ability to mine nerd culture (or, more specifically, the unique nerd culture of the psyche of Scott Pilgrim) for everything from easy sight gags to major plot points.  When Scott defeats a foe, the antagonist bursts into a rain of coins like a Lego Star Wars storm trooper.  When he has an emotional breakthrough, bonus points flash above his head.  And when Scott rocks the bass, he goes from shy kid stumbling through a few simple acoustic chords to musical dynamo, conjuring warrior-avatars to rival anything in Guitar Hero’s Star Power mode.  Scott amplifies everything about his world, making it funnier, scarier, deeper, better.  And the film goes right there with him, reveling in its acoustic bubbles and do-overs and classically nerdy fascinations.  It doesn’t draw lines between reality and fantasy because, as Scott experiences the world, those lines don’t exist.  This makes for a visual feast, allowing us to revel in absurdities like The Underground Lair, “Ninja Ninja Revolution,” and an Evil Scott who surprises and delights the observant, even if he doesn’t rock the goatee.

{Holy smokes.  I think I’m talking myself into asserting that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a better movie about the power and majesty of Dream than Inception.  Perhaps that’s a conversation for another day (But there’s certainly an argument to be had about when or if Scott enters the dream state.  I need to see this film again).}

As much as Scott Pilgrim loves storytelling, it loves music.  Music supplies its beating heart, its adrenaline, its sense of belonging to that select group of people who understand, who get the zeitgeist.  When I was Scott’s age, that music came from The Dead Kennedies and X and Social Distortion and Oingo Boingo and Two Fettered Apes.  Today, it’s The Hold Steady, Ekko Galaxie and the Rings of Saturn, Gaslight Anthem, and Adam WarRock.  But the idea is the same, that there’s a whole culture happening that’s more than a subculture – a superculture, better than the pap everyone else is getting and more happening, more fun, just plain better in every way.  To be Scott’s age and in love with such a culture is a wonderful thing, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World gets it, relays it, sells it.

This movie is just plain fun, an exciting and satisfying homage to adolescence (for though the film stipulates Scott’s age as 22, he’s clearly an adolescent) and nerd culture.  More interestingly, the film’s an homage to the power of fantasy, to dream and aspiration and desire and all the things that brew inside the head and heart of a young man on the verge of breaking out of himself and mustering the power needed to make one’s mark in the world.  This is the best movie I’ve seen since Un Prophet, it’s certain to make my year-end roundup, and you need to see it on the big screen.  Soon.  Like, now.

Get out of here.  I mean it.  Go to the movies.  You’ll thank me later.