Best/Worst of 2010 (finally)

I have kept putting of my annual list of 2010 - it’s difficult to construct a list like this when you live in Buffalo, NY which is not a hot city for film. Toronto is, but it feels weird having to show your passport to go to the movies, but I do it (for TIFF, Bruce McDonald, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul - not to mention Inception in D-Box motion code seating, but that was really to just to have lunch with one of my best friends who was in town).

No list is perfect - but I’ve waited till I’ve seen enough to justify its creation and it took some catching up. But instead of looking forward to Oscar season which I have no doubt will be lame (King’s Speech is probably the front runner, an excellent film but - COME ON!), let me look back at 2010 - and this list of films that deserve to be nominated for an Oscar, and get a wider release than they did (except Toy Story 3 - that one has been seen by anyone who was going to see it). I should also stress how highly subjective this list is, there is a certain type of film I’m a sucker for - this list in years past has always included those types of films.

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Top 10

10.- Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich) Pixar delivers again with a wildly emotional and humorous adventure - proving first and foremost to be filmmakers working outside the box that Dreamworks and other animators seem to be stuck in. Delightful and intense - who can forget one of the most disturbing moments of any film this year - in a movie with toys!

9.- Uncle Boome Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) A lucid, poetic, warm and at times silly fable with lush imagery.

8.- 127 Hours (Danny Boyle) Boyle breaks through several restrictions creating an intense and brilliant personal story. Boyle is at the top of his game.

7.-Mother (Joon-Ho bong) A solid thriller/revenge comedy - it walks a fine line with a masterful tone and pitch perfect performances - this is an odd trip.

6.-Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy) Okay - so Thierry Guetta attempts to create a documentary about underground art, and instead underground mystery artist Bansky turns the tables and creates a fun and exciting documentary about Guetta.

5.-Stone (John Curran) A compelling and well crafted morality drama by Angus McLean (Junebug) with top notch performances.

4.- This Movie is Broken (Bruce McDonald) A startlingly lovely film about two guys, a women, and a Broken Social Scene concert, lyrical and poetic, haunting and challenging - it’s everything you’d expect from a Broken Social Scene album, filmed by a master experimental filmmaker.

3.- We Live in Public (Ondi Timoner) We certainly do, while The Social Network got all the buzz this year, this film predates Zuckerberg - Josh Harris and his social experiments simulate the benefits and dangers of Facebook and Google, in the flesh. You won’t be able to turn away.

2.-Another Year (Mike Leigh) Balancing humor and sadness, often in the same scene, Leigh has crafted his best film since Secrets and Lies - following a stable couple through 4 seasons and the misery, joy and uncertainty of their friends and family. Painful but often very funny - and touching, a masterpiece.

1.-Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (Sam Dunn & Scot McFadyen) Much like Bruce McDonald’s two films (maybe its a Canadian theme) - Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage is more than the music - the personalities are greater, here we get the tale of Rush - three dudes from Toronto making it big, making brilliant music and still together after 30+ years. Part tribute, part travelogue, it’s a wild, emotional, uplifting spiritual journey and the best film made about Rock n Roll since Almost Famous.

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Runners up (11-50)
11.-Trigger
12.-3 Idiots
13.-The Square
14.-The Social Network
15.-Morning Glory
16.-Carlos
17.-Ajamni
18.-Wild Grass
19.-NEDS
20.-Animal Kingdom
21.-The Secret In Their Eyes
22.-Somewhere
23.-Please Give
24.-Blue Valentine
25.-Alamar
26.-Fair Game
27.-A Prophit
28.-The American
29.-I Am Love
30.-Daddy Longlegs
31.-The Killer Inside Me
32.-Rabbit Hole
33.-Made in Dagenham
34.-The Ghost Writer
35.-Buried
36.-Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
37.-The King’s Speech
38.-Client 9: The Rise & Fall of Elliot Spitzer
39.-The Kids Are All Right
40.-Soul Kitchen
41.-Casino Jack & The United States of Money
42.-Conviction
43.-Black Swan
44.-Inception
45.-Winter’s Bone
46.-Mao's Last Dancer
47.-Heartbreaker
48.-Middle Men
49.-Four Lions
50.-Chloe
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Worst of the Year:

We can’t talk about the good without the bad - this year’s list includes the worst musical I’ve ever seen (and in the same four-weeks as I saw both Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquell and Nine - one of last year’s worst - proving January is a dumping ground even for Bollywood). January gets a bad rap as there were some pretty big 3D misses, Tim Burton continues crank out boring but eccentric visuals disconnected from anything emotionally interesting, Shrek needs to end (the first two worked, the third was a mess, and the last one is unwatchable), and Step Up 3D lacked the guilty pleasures of its British counter part Street Dance 3D, just to name a few. Also #2 was a snuff film that was so bad when it ended the theater had cleared out - it was me and the projectionist - a snuff film in Jackass form, made by a jackass, no doubt, what seemed to be “edgy” and “in your face” was less mature than Knoxville stapling his nuts to his leg. Here’s the bottom 10 - confession, I stayed away from Vampires Suck which surely would have been here had I seen it, but truthfully life is to short to see a bad movie - and here’s about 50 hours - almost 2 days of my life I wish I had back (the only redeeming quality of many of theses are the train wreck - you can’t look away - factor and the fact filmmakers should learn how not to tell a story for many of these):

1.-Veer
2.-Shooting April
3.-Shrek: Forever After 3D
4.-Alice in Wonderland 3D
5.-Last Airbender
6.-Skyline
7.-Little Fockers
8.-The Virginity Hit
9.-Love Ranch
10.-Kites
11.-Nightmare on Elm Street
12.-Valentine’s Day
13.-A Women, A Gun & A Noodle Shop
14.-My Soul to Take 3D
15.-Devil
16.-The Warrior's Way
17.-Legendary
18.-Mermaduke
19.-A-Team
20.-Killers
21.-The Lottery
22.-Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
23.-Sex & The City 2
24.-Clash of the Titans in 3D
25.-Step Up 3D

Statement of Purpose / Reactivation

So my new years resolution is to write more, I once was good at keeping a blog - then grad school happened. As I write this I’m still not sure what should be said here - I keep “resetting” it - saying I will write more, but I haven’t had time to write let alone read for fun: my main focus of coarse is and will for the foreseeable future be seeing films. In terms of writing reviews I haven’t kept up or drafted much in the way of commentary - I keep my own journal but so much of what I see has me dumbfounded: there’s not much to say about a lot of it if there was no passion. Those I feel passionately about I think you should just go see - take my word for it, these films are worth it.

Then there the films I want to call out for one reason or another, but in the last year on this blog, I’ve only felt the need to call out a public official who should have been cleaning up a corrupt organization in Passaic County instead of participating in a whorish stunt, as if he was Snookie from The Jersey Shore.

Other friends have used blogs to write books or aggregate content (which is what made me stop writing in the first place: someone else has probably said it more brilliantly than I in the online realm - strangely I find it safer to write in an academic context - here I can’t figure out a way to cite with footnotes). With that said - what is the roll of a blog in the age of Zuckerberg where everything is communicated and aggregated - many things I don’t care about, some things I do. It’s always useful to log in and see certain friends (I have curated this to a degree) and what they’re up to, not as a stalker but as a sort of cultural pulse amongst a diverse set of friends from high school, undergrad and grad school. Sadly many of them are interested in The Jersey Shore.

With that said, I don’t know what to use this space for - I will be publishing a top list of movies from 2010 here, perhaps reviewing others from 2011. Several of my film reviews, including my upcoming adventure to South by Southwest will appear at another fine site: www.thefilmstage.com - where I provide reviews and hope to provide more commentary to a very wide audience. That site has an ever growing presence and will continue to grow - reaching eyeballs on another aggregator - IMDB’s Newsdesk, it had a mythological beginning much like Facebook, on a college campus, probably in a dorm room. Although I don’t think a break up, getting shitfaced and coding all night involved (it started on a blog site much like this). It was strange the first time I clicked on an IMDB film page and saw a review that not only I agreed with but thought from the first few lines “hey this guy is good, he gets me” - yeah. (I think that was for the unreleased in the United States, British version of Step Up 3D - Street Dance 3D)

So perhaps I’ll use this as a behind the scenes to what I’m working on - I’ve vowed 2011 will be a productive year and perhaps it should include some reflection - therefore 2011 will be (provided I get my ass in gear) the year when a lot of things I do (not everything) will be chronicled in a web presence. Fantastic - now on to reinvent the awful, dormant and boring www.johnfinkfilms.com - with some new shit.

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links:
www.johnfinkfilms.com - new stuff coming soon (promise)
http://thefilmstage.com/author/john-fink