Keith's Top Films of 2010

I have a rule that there’s no sense in deciding what the top 10 films are from a given year unless you’ve seen at least 40 of them. Even then, a quarter of what you’ve seen makes the list. But when you’re not getting paid to see movies (and I wish I was), it’s hard to fit viewing them into your budget and schedule. So 40 seems noble and fair, and it took me a few months of 2011 to get to that point, which explains why my top films of 2010 list is just now seeing the light of day.

Like last year, and thanks in part to Chris Zois, a former student, I’ve also included additional categories to include films that don’t fit tidily into my list but deserve special mention. I also, like last year, have included a list of dozens of films I wish I had seen prior to making this list, and suspect that at least a few of them might have appeared on my list of favorites if I had seen them.

But you have to go by what you’ve seen, so that’s what I’ve done. Enjoy and feel free to comment!

Keith's Top 10 Favorite Movies of 2010
1. The King’s Speech
2. Exit Through the Gift Shop
3. 127 Hours
4. Blue Valentine
5. True Grit
6. The Fighter
7. Toy Story 3
8. Inception
9. Winter’s Bone
10. The Ghost Writer
Honorable Mentions: Restrepo, Tangled, Rabbit Hole, Buried, How to Train Your Dragon

The "Messy Masterpiece" Award: (tie) Black Swan, Dogtooth
(This goes to a film that is equally brilliant and bad and is therefore hard to categorize but unworthy of pure dismissal.) There is much to admire about “Black Swan”…until the final half hour. Then, the movie goes off the rails. There is no clear sense of what is reality to ground the narrative. And while the film is a masterwork of tone, it maintains virtually the same tone throughout, without levels. Having said all of this, it’s too well-made and occasionally brilliant to be anywhere close to a bad film. “Dogtooth” is even more polarizing; it takes the stunning premise of protective parents raising their children in physical and mental captivity and explores the deep psychology therein, but does so with ridiculous, WTF moments that tend to defy the message instead of supporting it.

Overrated: (tie) The Social Network, The Kids Are All Right
"The Social Network” is not a modern-day “Citizen Kane,” as some have suggested. Nor does it speak for a generation the way Peter Travers of Rolling Stone swears it does. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t even explore the psychology of what social networking is doing to us as human beings the way everyone claims it does, though if it had, the film would be brilliant. Instead, it’s just a fantastically-made, well-acted and brilliantly-written, solid film. A great way to spend a few hours and nothing more. “The Kids Are All Right” generates its smokescreen of importance from the fact that the parents in the film are lesbians and from the fantastic acting performances, with Julianne Moore giving the film its true emotional center, though she was overlooked during the award season. But on the whole, the film was fairly pedestrian. People are mistaking the buzz surrounding the movie’s topic with the film itself. And the film was, well, “all right.”

Underrated: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
A small part of me found “Scott Pilgrim” to be just as much of a game-changer as last year’s “Avatar” was; perhaps it is the first film to truly deliver cinema from the perspective of video game culture. While I felt a bit old for some of its humor, the visuals were stunning, the symbolism rich, and the effects top-notch. Not enough people were talking about this movie, overlooked for the accolades it deserved.

Guilty Pleasure: Jackass 3-D
While the gross-out humor was more gross than ever, the Jackass gang delivered some its biggest laughs in franchise history in this third film when it created sketch comedy-styled situations and allowed them to play out away from high concept stunts, such as when they staged a midget-cheating-on-another-midget scenario in a bar, with hilarious results thanks to the “regular-sized” bystanders. By no means quality cinema, and by no means a waste of $10 when you’re looking to have a great time!

Biggest Disappointment: TRON: Legacy
The effects for “TRON: Legacy” were as good as I hoped they’d be. But I was also hoping someone could iron out a better story than the limp original. Nobody did, leaving only a few sequences and a kick-ass Daft Punk score as a signpost of what could have been.

Most Pleasant Surprise: (tie) The King’s Speech, Tangled
I expected “The King’s Speech” to be an excellent film. What I didn’t expect a movie that was among the funniest of 2010. And “Tangled” looked ripe to be another botched attempt to keep the Disney princess franchise alive, with the studio not knowing if it wanted traditional animation or CG animation, traditional song scoring or Pixar-styled music use. They compromised by using CG animation that looked like hand-drawn paintings and traditional song scoring by Alan Menken, the Disney master. In doing so, they surprisingly gave the Disney studio (excluding Pixar) its greatest animated film in probably 20 years.

Worst Movie of 2010: Death at a Funeral
All those funny people in a room and the original is still better, with the exception of James Marsden. Truth be told, I enjoyed “Dogtooth” the least of any film this year, but I don’t think this moniker is a fair description of that film. I also feel that I’ve avoided most of the movies that got horrible reviews this year, and I suspect that my true least favorite film of the year is something I’ll come across during some late-night HBO viewing six months from now.

Still to See: I would have liked for my list to have been based off of a more complete viewing experience, so in the spirit of full disclosure, here’s what I planned to see from 2010 that I haven’t had the opportunity to watch yet:

The A-Team, The American, Another Year, Barney’s Verison, Biutiful, Burlesque, Carlos, Catfish, The Company Men, Conviction, Country Strong, Day Breakers, Easy A, For Colored Girls, Frankie & Alice, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Green Zone, Hereafter, I Am Love, In a Better World, I Love You Phillip Morris, The Illusionist, Inside Job, Knight and Day, The Last Airbender, Let Me In, Letters to Juliet, Little Fockers, Love and Other Drugs, Made in Dagenham, Morning Glory, Never Let Me Go, The Next Three Days, Nowhere Boy, Red, The Secret in Their Eyes, Solitary Man, Somewhere, The Tempest, The Tillman Story, Unstoppable, Wall Street 2, The Way Back, Waiting For Superman, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Studs Terkel: Listening to America (2009)

In a quick 40-minute blast, one can better understand the monumental influence of Studs Terkel on the journalism profession in the form of Eric Simonson’s STUDS TERKEL: LISTENING TO AMERICA. The documentary, which aired in 2010 on HBO, includes many interviews with Terkel, including interviews conducted when he was 95 and just six months prior to his death at 96 in 2008. It also includes snippets of fascinating interviews conducted by Terkel – both on the radio and on television – that help the viewer to understand his deep skill in the area of talking to people.

“I never invited a guest I didn’t respect,” Terkel said. And when you see that his interviewees were not just landmark author James Baldwin and acting great Marlon Brando, but also housewives and steelworkers, it becomes clear that Terkel had a great deal of respect for the “ordinary man” – so much so that he makes it a point in one interview to share his distaste for the word “ordinary” in such a context. To Terkel, no man or woman’s life is simply that.

LISTENING TO AMERICA briefly traces a history of how Terkel progressed from his early radio days in Chicago to a career as a best-selling author, where he documented in writing the “verbal histories” he conducted via thousands of hours of reels of tape for books like “Hard Times” and “Working.” It also touches on his persecution by McCarthy during the Red Scare, where Terkel admits that he “never met a petition he wouldn’t sign.”

If there’s anything wrong with LISTENING TO AMERICA it’s simply that Terkel is a subject worthy of a longer documentary and deeper exploration. This film serves as a wonderful primer or sampler to one unfamiliar with one of the greatest broadcaster/writers of all-time. With any luck, the impending centennial of Terkel’s birth in 2012 will spark an even richer cinematic document of just what an impact the man had on the stories of the common man in America. Until then, watching this little taste is enough to garner an appreciation.

Death at a Funeral (2010)

Playwright Neil LaBute seems like a jarringly odd choice of a director to take someone else’s work, written in an entirely different tone from his own, and assemble a film from it in a director-for-hire invisible style. This is the man who brought us the angry “In the Company of Men,” among other things.

But maybe the guy wanted a break, looking no further back than a few years for source material on his latest film, DEATH AT A FUNERAL, an African-American version of a perfectly enjoyable British comedy from just a few years ago. This remake is almost a paint-by-numbers “cover” of that relatively unsubstantial but fun-to-watch 2007 film, and even features Peter Dinklage in the exact same role from the original, but with a different name.

Given the fact that the purpose Dinklage’s character serves in the film is one of its best comedic surprises, LaBute must have been confident that the audience that this DEATH sought to reach had not seen the original; it’s a surprisingly hilarious and shocking bit.

In this version, Chris Rock is Aaron, the man responsible with organizing his father’s funeral, which is to be held at the family home. Mother Cynthia (Loretta Devine) is in no condition to be of any assistance, and things start to go wrong early on when the body the funeral home delivers to the house is not his father’s.

The supporting cast of wacky funeral attendees are a perfect storm of mayhem-in-waiting. Aaron’s brother Ryan, played by Martin Lawrence, flies in from New York to attend; he is now a successful writer and a thorn in Aaron’s side for succeeding in a profession Aaron himself aspires to, and with lesser material to boot. A family friend is placed in charge of getting a crabby, unpredictable and wheelchair-bound uncle to the funeral, and a niece arrives with her white fiancé, to the instant disappointment of her father.

Making matters even more ridiculous, that white fiancé, played by James Marsden in the film’s most lively comedic performance, has taken what he thought to be a valium in an attempt to calm his nerves about being in the presence of her family, only to discover that it was LSD, a mistake that an audience might think could never happen but one that the film makes relatively believable. Naturally, this is also a plot device that allows Marsden’s Oscar to engage in the most erratic behavior of all, and Oscar memorably spends a large chunk of the film completely naked and on the roof of the house.

The relationship here between Aaron and Ryan sucks a lot of the comedic joy from the film, and it’s hard to buy Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence as brothers. But a ridiculously good Marsden is flanked by a crabby Danny Glover, the always-wonderful Devine and the always-clueless Tracy Morgan, each of whom delivers on whatever jokes they are given.

Dinklage, called Frank in this version, has the same purpose in this film as he did in the original, as I’ve mentioned before. He’s a fish-out-of-water guest at the funeral, in the original because of his dwarf stature and here because of his skin color as well. And I won’t spoil his purpose in the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, because it’s worth a good laugh, though I will caution that LaBute is not as successful in hiding the surprise for as long as Frank Oz did in the original. (I’m sure it was hard, though, for me to observe this with any kind of objectivity, as I knew what would come to pass going in.)

DEATH AT A FUNERAL was an unnecessary remake but a universal and simple enough story to merit an American reboot good for a few hours on the couch when all of your network favorites are reruns and you want a good laugh or two. It’s by no means a disaster; neither is it anything to remember.

2.0 out of 4

Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)

The opening of GNOMEO & JULIET actually looks surprisingly promising, as a garden gnome wobbles out in front of a red curtain to warn the audience that “the story you are about to see has been told before…a lot.” The cute little ceramic guy then goes on to whip out a long scroll and attempts to read Shakespeare’s prologue to “Romeo & Juliet” verbatim until the shepherd’s hook snags him offstage.

Though this Elton John-produced animated feature goes on to include a few sly literary references thereafter, there’s not much from a storytelling perspective that makes GNOMEO & JULIET very interesting. In this setting, the star-crossed lovers are garden gnomes in the bordering backyards of the Capulet and Montague families living in the duplexes in front of them. The “gangs” distinguish themselves from one another by their red and blue hats, respectively. And since the humans are rarely seen in the film, the gnomes attack each other with gusto as Gnomeo and Juliet fall in love with one another in spite of it, coaxed on by a plastic lawn flamingo.

John not only produced the film but lent a stable of his classic hits to the film, to mixed effects. While “Saturday Night’s All Right For Fighting” works relatively well during a fight sequence and “Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word” is moving as instrumental scoring behind one of the film’s emotional moments, it’s hard to watch this film without wishing we were getting the kind of high-quality original material we got with “The Lion King,” or even “Road to El Dorado.” Why didn’t they want new music here? It’s puzzling.

The film isn’t a complete disaster, however. As a matter of fact, the vocal talents assembled make for quite a distinguished and clever group, starting with James McAvoy and Emily Blunt as the couple and featuring the work of everyone from Michael Caine and Maggie Smith to Jason Statham and Ozzy Osbourne. And perhaps my favorite thing about the film is the way the animation team creates the garden gnomes to truly appear as plaster lawn decorations. The faded and chipped paint, the cracks and imperfections and, especially, the hollowed-out chinking sound they make when the move around – some on square bases – heighten the film’s sense of place and its element of kitsch.

Adults will get an extra chuckle whenever a good Shakespeare joke flies by, but there are only a few. While any film that co-stars both Patrick Stuart and Hulk Hogan is worth a look, there’s little else in GNOMEO & JULIET to knock our socks off.

2.0 out of 4

The Town (2010)

There was a lot of speculation that THE TOWN, Ben Affleck’s sophomore feature as a director, might earn a Best Picture nomination and/or a screenplay nomination for Affleck and his co-writers. Neither of those things happened, though Jeremy Renner scored his second acting nomination in as many years as a reckless bank thief. I’m not sure if the film deserved to replace any of those that eventually did get nominated, but make no mistake – THE TOWN is a well-acted, intense and fun-to-watch thriller, and it marks a noticeable step forward in Affleck’s skill as a director. His “Gone Baby Gone” was a solid debut; now Affleck is developing a style.

Affleck also stars here as Doug MacRay in the unoriginal setup of a criminal discovering that his days on the job are numbered but too pulled by the allure of one more great attempt to say no. The story is complicated here when Doug develops feelings for a bank manager (played by Rebecca Hall) who was just one of his victims days before and, because of the disguises worn by Doug and his partners, is unaware that the man who once held her at gunpoint and drove her out of Boston until her toes were touching the Atlantic Ocean is now her boyfriend.

THE TOWN features some semi-familiar but well-executed sub-plots with regards to the men with the brains pulling the strings behind the crime syndicate. Here, that man is played to perfection by Pete Postlethwaite in what would sadly turn out to be a posthumous performance. John Hamm, of “Mad Men” fame, plays the FBI agent devoting every bit of his attention to taking down this particular group of individuals.

The best scenes in THE TOWN happen when Affleck taps his inner-Hitchcock. There’s an unforgettable sequence involving the unexpected appearance of Renner’s James Coughlin at an outdoor café where Doug and Hall’s Claire are having lunch that turns into a suspense-filled sight game as Affleck works to hide the tattoo on the back of Renner’s neck from Hall’s view; that tattoo is the only identifiable mark on any of the men that she can remember from the bank robbery. It is a genius sequence. Another great moment is a climactic heist that takes the robbers into the bowels of Affleck’s hallowed Fenway Park.

If I’m being really picky, THE TOWN was probably a little long at 125 minutes, and I was surprised to see Affleck also release a 150-minute director’s cut, which tells me that he still has a little to learn about making choices to tighten up a story, though I did not see the extended cut to be able to tell you whether or not those extra minutes were justified or add anything of value to the story.

But for a pure cinematic thrill-ride, it’s hard to quarrel with a movie like this. The acting is excellent, even from Affleck himself, a performer I’d previously dismissed as much more of a lightweight than his co-Oscar-winning writing partner and BFF Matt Damon. Here, Affleck is emotionally tight and cuts a handsome, scruffy leading man figure as Doug. He is surrounded by equally strong performances, and it’s not hard to see why Renner stood out to the acting branch of the Academy this year.

THE TOWN makes me look forward to more work from Ben Affleck The Director, who with only two pictures has established a voice as a storyteller of down-and-out, suburban Boston family tales of compromised dreams and violence. This one, if you haven’t seen it, is worth your time…at least the original running time.

3.0 out of 4

Animal Kingdom (2010)

Short film director David Michod thought he’d try his hand at writing and directing a feature-length film and began that phase of his career with a doozy, the intense and interesting ANIMAL KINGDOM. A story of the criminal underworld in Melbourne, Australia, ANIMAL KINGDOM tells the story of the Cody family and is, apparently, based on a true story.

The film opens on 17-year-old Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville) witnessing the death of his mother from a heroin overdose. With no family left, he contacts his grandmother for a place to stay, never mind the fact that his grandmother presides over her three sons in a quasi-incestuous manner and that the sons are all openly involved in some sort of crime, from drug dealing to theft. These things happen right in front of the grandmother, played with quiet intensity by Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver, thus the reason that J’s mom kept him shielded from this side of the family prior to her death.

Without looking to do so, J is quickly versed on the rules both spoken and unspoken of the criminal underworld and how the business works. He attempts to main teenage normalcy by spending time with his girlfriend, but just as it happened to Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” the pull of the family business begins to become too great. Even as J stays out of the criminal acts, he finds himself defending his cousins and covering for them, and things get more complicated when a homicide detective tracking one of the brothers as a prime suspect for some murders attempts to befriend J and rescue him from the rest of the Cody family. But devoted first to her sons, J’s grandmother puts him in the middle of a tense standoff between the police and the family.

With the always-awesome Guy Pearce as the detective and a breakout performance by Frecheville as the film’s main character, J, ANIMAL KINGDOM succeeds in large part because of the quality of its performances. Weaver’s nomination for an Oscar is perhaps a bit of a surprise, as she is certainly intense but definitely a lot more understated than the types of performances that get such recognition. This makes her nomination refreshing, regardless of whether or not she might have been better than other deserving possibilities. But if you put her work in this film up against what eventual-winner Melissa Leo did in “The Fighter,” you might not even notice her.

What works best in ANIMAL KINDOM is the study of family dynamics and the natural human panic of being hunted, which undoubtedly explains the film’s clever title. It’s the kind of film made outside of the United States that a film lover worries others won’t know about and check out. Your loss. ANIMAL KINGDOM is intensely-acted, suspenseful and engaging. And writer/director Michod now belongs on the radar of cinephiles everywhere.

3.0 out of 4