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