The Year in Review: 2010

As usual, it has been difficult to access a lot of the movies of 2010 that were worth seeing. Most of the smaller movies seem to open only in New York and L.A., which is enough to leave you howling with despair if you happen to live in Jacksonville. I'm thankful for Five Points Theatre, which has managed to get some of the smaller movies our way. Sometimes I'm frustrated with their lack of imagination when they do retrospectives, but I'm thankful that because of them I was able to see Howl, which was a flaky little movie but featured some magnificent animation, and also Get Low, which was a wonderfully dark comedy that seems to have been lost in the shuffle of the awards season (like so many others). I'm also indebted to Netflix, which has a large number of 2010 movies available for online viewing, and that's how I was able to see the fascinating documentaries Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and Casino Jack and the United States of Money.

Rants & Raves of 2010:

Robin Hood, so underrated, was fine entertainment. Russell Crowe was an obvious choice to play Robin Hood, but that didn't change the fact that he was the best choice. The director, Ridley Scott, managed to make something new and exciting out of the old legend. Perhaps people have been blinded by 300 and Gladiator and other movies of that sort, and think Robin Hood has nothing those movies don't have, for as good as it was, Robin Hood struggled at the box office. 

This summer there were a lot of baddies, but I managed to have a good time at The A-Team, which was stupid but often hysterically funny. It was probably one of the lightest comic book movies of late, and it had enough spy-thriller content to make it truly fun, particularly thanks to actor Patrick Wilson's performance as one of the rogue CIA agents. Salt, which featured Angelina Jolie as a rogue CIA agent, was equally fun entertainment, from the director of The Saint, Phillip Noyce. Salt was a lean, fast-paced thriller that brought out Jolie's strengths as an actress: her toughness, her litheness, and her ability to intoxicate the screen. I also liked the oft-maligned Knight and Day. It was a lot more enjoyable than people were willing to give it credit for, possibly because it's currently chic to dislike Tom Cruise. However, He and Cameron Diaz managed to make a fairly unoriginal plot into an amusing adventure. 

The biggest disappointment of the year for me was You Again. There were such wonderful possibilities with a cast that included Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis (and Victor Garber as Curtis's husband, who's a fine actor), who were set up in the movie to be going at it like cats in a box. The movie was simply inept. It plateaued within the first thirty minutes, and I was holding my breath waiting for it to kick into full gear. It never did. There were scattered laughs, but my increased disappointment with the bad writing and the bad acting made them less and less funny. There were better and more frequent laughs in Aliens and Halloween H20 than in You Again. It was probably the lamest movie of the year (possibly tied with Jonah Hex).

Then there was Easy A, a breath of fresh air. Emma Stone was so effortlessly funny as Olive that you were willing to oblige the movie's excessive need to enshrine teenage drama and 80s movies into one big sacred offering. It was Stone's character who undercut the phoniness of the pharisaic teeny-boppers who declared her a modern-day Hester Prynne. A very fun movie, and my favorite comedy of the year (and probably the most fun I had all year. I was rocking with laughter throughout the movie).

I suppose I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the most overrated movie of 2010, Inception. For everyone who wants to devote a day of fasting and celebration to director Christopher Nolan, I urge you to think through Inception again. Inception is the worst kind of inflated, bombastic nonsense because it tries to elevate itself to something greater, as though this were Nolan's attempt at Citizen Kane. Trashy, clunky movies like The A-Team succeed because of their refusal to take themselves seriously, but trashy, clunky Inception is deadly serious. It's so serious that it's become heresy to suggest that perhaps Inception was a misfire and not a masterpiece. 

Also on the worst list is the latest Twilight installment, the flickering, fluttering Eclipse, which somehow dulled a lot of people into thinking they were having a good time. People continue to chastise me that, "Twilight is meant to entertain teenage girls, and for them it's good." I disagree, because I don't think teenage girls should live with the assumption that Twilight is all there is, or that it's the best of what's new out there either in movies or in literature. They can think through a movie or a book if they're guided by someone with an affection for either or both, and they can see the relative merits and shortcomings of a piece of movie-making, given the right frame of understanding.

Every year I am tempted to write some treatise on the demise of movies, but then I realize that someone has written about that subject just about every year for decades. I encourage curious readers to seek out Pauline Kael's essay, "Why Are Movies So Bad?", which examines the way money has corrupted movies. If you look up the ten most financially successful films of 2010, they're all big productions, mostly geared toward younger audiences. It makes you wish that there was more intelligent stuff being marketed to them (with the possible exception of the Harry Potter movies). However, there are always good movies to seek out if we'll simply take the time to do so, and I hope you found this article insightful and interesting. Here's to 2011 and the good movies--not the bad ones--it will bring.

My favorite movies of 2010: The Social Network, Robin Hood, The King's Speech, The Ghost Writer, The Fighter, Get Low, The Town, True Grit, and Easy A.

Standout performances (in no particular order)
1. Bill Murray in Get Low
2. Emma Stone in Easy A
3. Cate Blanchett in Robin Hood
4. Geoffrey Rush in The King's Speech
5. Helena Bonham Carter in The King's Speech
6. Olivia Williams in The Ghost Writer
7. Melissa Leo in The Fighter
8. Jeremy Renner in The Town
9. Barbara Hershey in Black Swan
10. Naomi Watts in Fair Game
11. Jeff Bridges in True Grit
12. Matthew Broderick in Wonderful World


Cheers,

Jacob

Black Swan

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) wants to be the lead in Swan Lake. Her obsession with being a perfect ballerina leads to some kind of psychological breakdown a la Roman Polanski's Repulsion. It's the weirdest movie of 2010, one that leaves you feeling cold and disturbed by its bizarreness. Director Darren Aronofsky keeps us up close and personal with Nina throughout the movie, and I don't think there's a single scene she's not in. Her creepy, conniving nemesis, Lily (Mila Kunis), seems innocuous except for the fact that movie keeps telling us over and over again that this is about Nina's destruction in order for another ballerina to take her coveted place. It's like All About Eve in terms of the mousy young novice snatching the spotlight from the aging star. Except, there's a scene in a bar where Nina tells a young man that she's a ballerina and he's completely disinterested in ballet and doesn't even know Swan Lake. So, Nina is obsessed with and being torn apart by something that no one cares about. It's an attempt at marrying "high" art (ballet) with "low" art (movies), and I think in the process they're both taken down a few notches.

The movie has moments that make you think Nina is possessed by a demon. Is this The Exorcist all over again? Then Nina takes some ecstasy at Lily's urging and it seems more akin to Aronofsky's earlier Requiem For A Dream. Black Swan is a movie about how truly beautiful and perfect art can only be so if you are willing to die for it, to be completely consumed by it. And the act must be completed to truly work. There is no half-hearted attempt at perfection. Perfection is death, we are told. Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) as the director of the ballet company, seems convinced of this, but it really just seems like he wants to get laid. He's been feeding such fiddle faddle to the previous ingenue Beth (Winona Ryder), who's forced into retirement by her age (and she's not content to exit the stage in a graceful manner). Beth winds up being hit by a car and disfigured, rendered ugly and useless. And so only the young can truly experience the perfect beauty of art. Those past their prime can die by their own hand but not by the perfection of their craft. 

Meanwhile, Nina has a really sordid relationship with her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), who reminds you of the mom in Carrie (Piper Laurie). The mother-daughter relationship seems to contribute to Nina's madness, but then Aronofsky doesn't seem convinced about what the cause of her madness is. Perhaps it's simply a combination of Nina's unhealthy relationship with her mother and her obsession with being perfect, of being the Star. Regardless, we are being prepped for some kind of Jeckyll and Hyde transformation throughout Black Swan. You spend the entire movie so mired in Aronofsky's cold, freakish world that you experience a feeling of relief when it's all over and done with. Sure it's affecting, but it's also pretty dismal.

Aronofsky loves playing with the imagery of the Double. The movie is full of mirrors. We're beaten over the head with the doppelganger image. And pink seems like the color of death in Black Swan. A pink cake incites a bit of tension between mother and daughter. The hospital curtains in Beth's room are pink. The flowers filling the floor of her room are pink. The towel Nina uses to cover up an increasing pool of blood is pink. Pink, the most obvious and disinteresting symbol of innocent girlhood, becomes a cinematic device just like the mirrors to insinuate things that eventually come to the surface. It's all about Nina's sexual coming of age. The movie's much-celebrated eroticism is something out of a college fraternity boy's wet dream. Nina must find herself via sexual experimentation. She needs to "loosen up" in order to perfect her art. Her skill is brilliant but it's too forced, too skilled in fact, to really propel her into the realm of total emotional abandon. But it's all so creepy that you feel like the worst kind of voyeur for watching.

Wonderful World

Wonderful World is a movie about a man named Ben Singer (Matthew Broderick) who's really cynical and expects disappointment and negativity at every turn. Apparently he didn't always view the world this way, but then he got divorced and felt himself becoming alienated from his daughter and bored with his copywriting job (not to mention irritated at the perceived level of idealism of those around him). His only real glimmer of hope is his roommate, Ibou (Michael K. Williams), an African immigrant who goes into a diabetic coma early in the film, initiating Ben's journey down the road of not being such a grumpy pessimist. He meets Ibou's sister when she comes from Africa, and they enjoy a little romantic relationship while they're waiting for Ibou to wake up. It's The Accidental Tourist all over again, except they've replaced flakiness with foreignness. Sanaa Lathan, as the sister, is quite beautiful, and she has a natural warmth about her that makes her character really rather charming.

Matthew Broderick seems to gravitate toward parts where he's a perpetual loser. His pasty, frowning demeanor served him well in movies like Election and You Can Count On Me. In Wonderful World, there are moments when you wonder why on earth you're supposed to care about this schmuck, but his supreme annoyance with the world is somewhat understandable, and he's very believable as a grump. He just can't connect, but he's reawakened by African exoticism and values. Perhaps it's a bit much to believe, but okay.

Wonderful World has a remarkable slightness about it, although you feel compelled to watch anyway, if only to see what becomes of Ben. There's such an inclination that he will dig his own grave and bury himself too, and there's an inkling of belief that in fact Ben gets a kick out of being kicked when he's down. When he gets fired, he's forced to take a job as a pizza delivery man. He faces an uncomfortable moment when he delivers dinner to his former boss (William Ragsdale), who doesn't even seem to recognize him. It's humiliating and degrading, but even more it's a victory for Ben, confirming all of his worst notions about human nature. He's a man in search of such victories, and it's all too easy for him to discover them. He tries to sue the city for neglecting his roommate Ibou--another such search for confirmation that the world is vile and heartless. We're told that, yes, the world is heartless, but we shouldn't give up the ghost so easily. We should put on a happy face regardless and make the best of things.

It's a bit of a Hallmark message for a movie that wants so desperately to be an "indie" drama. Broderick's character, in one of his rants, makes an interesting comment about movies that they're only valued by how much money they make. Indeed, this little film has gotten virtually no notice by critics or audiences, and I think it deserves to be seen. Not because it's a great movie, but because it's interesting. Even as flawed as it is, it was more affecting than most of the high-grade junk that's produced from the studios. It's light even when it's heavy, and it's charming even as it reproduces scenes from other movies we've seen a million times. The movie is downright repetitive at times, but we're pulled into its games rather easily.

With Phillip Baker Hall, as the Man, who keeps turning up in Ben's dreams and marijuana-induced hallucinations. Written and directed by Joshua Goldin.