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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

An actual blog update....... kind of

It’s been far too long – what have I been up to? Well nobody asked so what the hell – why not talk.

This summer was crazy, it lead me to far flung places like Pompton Lakes, NJ, the Flaherty Seminar and a few times Toronto for research trips at the NFB and the Cinemateque Ontario.

Beyond that I did make a film I’m very proud of that is taking some form and have been swamped with TIFF 2010 – which is why this time last year I was sort of anti-social: the energy of TIFF could power you straight for 10 days without sleep, who needs sleep when there is that much cinema to catch with the highly receptive audience.

Instead of posing my exploits here, I’ll be covering TIFF for The Film Stage, where my review of Easy A is already posted:

http://thefilmstage.com/2010/09/14/tiff-review-easy-a/

More reviews to come from Toronto – including this weekend when I’ll catch two up my most anticipated film of the fest, Bruce Springsteen in The Promise: The Making of the Darkness on the Edge of Town.

2 MAJOR EVENTS - THIS WEEK / TONIGHT

Hi All,

It's been a while but I've got two major things coming up this week:

-ARTISTS AND MODELS (2010): STIMULUS - I'll be presenting a new video instillation about failure as a mode of stimulus at Hallwalls' big fund raiser, should be a fun time. It's tonight from 9PM-2AM. More at www.hallwalls.org

-HOLLOW SPACES will have a work in progress screening at the Bergenfield Film Festival, it'll be 10 minutes shorter than previous versions that have played in Buffalo. And hopefully 50% better. That's May 6th from 6PM-10PM at the Clearview Cinemas in Bergenfield, NJ.

If You Must Remake "The Wizard of Oz"....please don't hire Tim Burton to goth it up.

Growing up The Wizard of Oz was one of my favorite films, I’ve evolved but the fact remains for its time it’s still an excellent looking film that packs an emotional punch. With that said, there is talk of a 3-D remake, one that Warner Brothers is saying will skew darker than the original. Fine, but please, please, please – don’t let Tim Burton get his hands on the remake.

Tim Burton is great craftsmen but his films, or at least the past few films of his don’t engage the mind as much as they engage the eyes. There is nothing for me to do, except sit back and be passive, he’s done it all for me. I don’t like this, and there many world-class filmmakers that I’d much rather see a Wizard of Oz remake from.

My problems with Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Corpse Bride and Big Fish are that they were visually engaging films. Visual engagement is only half the battle: mental engagement, character development, drama, plot, excitement should be the whole thing. I’d rather pay to see a film that looks like it was shot on your handy cam that captures me. One such example is a documentary I just saw on Hollywood screenwriters, Tales from the Script.

Tales from the Script is visually the blandest film you’ll see all year, I don’t mean that as an insult: it’s a series of talking heads with the occasional scene from a film about screenwriting intercut to introduce the next theme. But what it does right (or write!) is that it contains truly interesting characters talking about a profession they love and are frustrated by and are critical of a closed system, not unlike Burton’s created worlds. I’d rather watch Tales from The Script twice more than Alice in Wonderland.

After paying to see Alice in 3-D, a format I’m not still sold on, I felt nothing, numb. The visuals weren’t terribly exciting to me, in fact we’ve seen this all before. 3-D is a format that I think still hasn’t been used to its full capacity (although Avatar in IMAX was a visually amazing experience), digital 3-D anyway (we saw the Dolby Digital process with glasses that we had to return). 3-D doesn’t do much to add to this experience, as there is a loss of light.

Burton also lost all respect from me as a filmmaker when he didn’t speak up over Disney’s shortening of distribution windows, for his own film (not Old Dogs, which probably should have been released direct to video). He makes films that are visually extravagant and expensive when a micro-budget documentary has the ability to be more exciting – you’d think with those visuals he’d inset on having it be seen on a giant screen, such as IMAX. Therefore you’d think he’d push for a full theatrical run, including a second run at a cheap house.

We’ve made the film a hit by seeing it. I will not see it again unless there was the promise of getting laid afterwards. So why is Burton wrong for Wizard of Oz?

I think the dark, dare I say “hot topic Goth” elements of some of his characters including the White Princess in Alice, serve to alienate audiences, it alienates me. Unlike most I like seeing myself on screen, which is why I had such a good time with She’s Out of My League this evening. The “hot topic Goths” and CGI creatures would ruin The Wizard of Oz. The story is about humans, not animals, humans trapped by their conditions and flaws. The idea of a CGI cowardly lion makes me want to puke.

Why not leave a classic alone. Sure there are things to be done, it could be made into a darker story, but why toy with a classic. The Wizard of Oz has been re-released a few times, I saw it ironically enough back in 1998 the same weekend as I saw the Oz-like Velvet Goldmine in theaters. Maybe Todd Haynes is the right person to do a Wizard of Oz 3-D remake; his work is about superstition, image, desire, alienation, and real humans. He gets women. He’d probably get these men with something missing, being a filmmaker from the golden age of “new queer cinema”. His Wizard of Oz would be personal, moving, and memorable with an emphasis on emotion more than visual.

Sony got that when they hired Marc Webb to reboot Spider-Man (why it needs a reboot I’m not sure). He’s only directed one feature before, but it was the fun character driven comedy (500) Days of Summer, boil it down to its elements and its about a boy and a girl, much like Spiderman. Burton has been adapting the work of others creating a hyper reality without engagement or any sort of conflict for us, the audience. It happens, we pay our $13, sit there for 2 hours and that’s it. The thing is, it shouldn’t more than that, we should connect, and when we can’t there is a huge problem. Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t you rather see somebody theoretically inventive take an artist risk and do something bold, then the safe CGI-infused choice that leaves you feeling bored?

Paris Hilton with a Gun and a Badge: PC Sheriff Speziale

This essay was submitted and has yet to run in The Bergen Record in response to a puff piece the paper ran about Passaic County Sheriff Jerry Speziale’s role in Brooklyn’s Finest (http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/86740172_Sheriff_enjoys_his_star_turn.html) What sickens me most about Speziale is that he’s front and center and often not challenged by the papers that cover him.

Granted the papers cover the facts and reporters should be objective -after you read this, you may have the same reaction I did: if we give this guy enough rope, eventually he’ll hang himself. I have no doubt he'd do something very stupid in the name of self promotion, it might be a stupid YouTube Video. It might be a reality show. Think of him as Paris Hilton with a gun, a badge and an elected position.

Because The Record hasn’t run this essay, nor may they ever especially after running the above linked article which is factual if devoid of real valuable news especially in regards to the film's content (he wasn't asked the important questions as I do below). I think its fair to present it in its entirety for the 3 people that actually read my blog:

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Letter to the Editor, The Record
RE: Passaic County sheriff celebrates film debut in “Brooklyn’s Finest” at screening in Paterson
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After attending a screening of Brooklyn’s Finest, a film that features Passaic County Sheriff Jerry Speziale in a supporting role as a Captain of a corrupt Brooklyn police force, I have to wonder if such a thing is good for the Speziale brand. Speziale is a textbook example of effective self-marketing, he has become the front man for a brand of justice, as evidenced by the website for his office and technological outreach. Speziale is a prominent feature on the department’s crime fighting posters including a recent campaign to text in crime and quality of life issues. His face is front and center on all of the department’s materials.

This is why it is not shocking to see he’s now acting in a film – he’s capitalizing on brand equity, however like Ron Paul’s disastrous interview with Sacha Baron Cohen in Bruno, I have to wonder if in advancing his own interests the Sheriff was duped into participating in a narrative heavily coded and perhaps inspired by the Sean Bell shooting in 2006, and the ever changing narrative that immerged from the NYPD as it was uncovered.

The film also mirrors allegations within the Sheriff’s department. Sure there are good cops, bad cops and the unspoken “blue wall of silence” – the film shows many extremes, focusing primarily on three cops. One is pushed to the limit while undercover forcing him to lash out and commit homicide, the other bares similarities to former Passaic County Sheriff officer Alan Soto as he makes an unethical decision for money, while another cop finds redemption after regular visits with a cocaine snorting prostitute whose regular clients are cops.

The film blurs the lines between real life scandals and a shoot first; justify later mentality that haunts police forces. In this respect the film seems to be a direct reaction to the killing of Sean Bell. Following that incident the NYPD practically shook down every black man in Queens trying to find a mysterious shooter to justify some 50 shots fired. Law enforcement as portrayed in Brooklyn’s Finest is systemically corrupt from the top down to the new 20-year-old recruit. The title appears to be an ironic commentary. The corruption becomes viral; those at the bottom of the food chain witness it and are inspired by it. The film offers only one honest cop who is justified in his behavior at all times. Ronnie (played by Brain F. O’Byrne) does not break the law for a vendetta or for personal needs.

As a resident of Passaic County, I find it inappropriate that our front man for law enforcement would participate in a film that, while fiction, has parcels to recent scandals involving Passaic County law enforcement including the previously referenced Soto, who was convicted of selling narcotics from the department’s evidence locker, and other allegations of friendships and business arrangements between cops and drug dealers (such as an incident that involved cops from my town, Pompton Lakes as well as the Sheriff’s department a few years ago)

I suppose the reason Sheriff Speziale agreed to star in the film was to advance his brand as covered extensively in Robert Bieselin’s article of March 7, 2010, which also includes a book on his experiences that has been optioned for film. The Sheriff gives a fine, realistic performance and is featured in two important scenes in the film: he offers Richard Gere’s Eddie a shot at redemption by mentoring a new recruit and in the other he encourages Eddie to embellish a truth.

A push in the film is to justify all actions of police force, including shootings as “drug related” even when they are clearly excessive force. Propelling the myth of the blue wall of silence- that is cops sticking together to craft a version of the truth to protect each other, Speziales’ Captain Geraci confirms our worst suspicions.

Having an active leader in county law enforcement in this role inspires cynicism about his department and his leadership. The Passaic County Sheriff has a duty to the citizens of Passaic County, and it seems impropriate that he is creating a public persona to advance his own interests and not those of Passaic County or law enforcement’s interests, by taking a role in this film. His participation in the film provides a chilling two-dimensional character – and one can only hope it is not true to life.

I find it’s impossible to remove his persona and the film’s themes from scandals and allegations within his department. I would be interested to hear the Sheriff’s take on the themes explored in the film, while many are valid; this is a film that does very little to glorify the honest cops, although one character finds redemption. As Ronnie states “there are good cops and bad cops, we have our good days and our bad days” – this is a string of very bad, dark days that mirrors recent allegations of law enforcement abuse and the burying of truth. Perhaps the filmmakers were attempting to capture the immediacy of classic film movements such as neo-realism, by including non-actors in the cast.