Phoenix Critics pick top films of 2010

The Phoenix Film Critics Society announced today their annual list of Phoenician awards for the films, filmmakers and actors of 2010. I've been a member since 2001. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how the voting turned out. The King's Speech winning the top award came as a surprise, an unexpected but welcome one. Inception, my No. 4 pick of the year, won the most awards with seven awards, including best director.

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Best Picture

The King’s Speech

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Top Ten Films

127 Hours
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech
Never Let Me Go
Shutter Island
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

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Best Director

Christopher Nolan, Inception

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Best Actor

Colin Firth, The King’s Speech

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Best Actress

Natalie Portman, Black Swan

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Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale, The Fighter

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Best Supporting Actress

Melissa Leo, The Fighter
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Best Ensemble Acting

The Social Network

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Best Original Screenplay

Inception

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Best Adapted Screenplay

The Social Network

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Best Live Action Family Film

Alice in Wonderland

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Overlooked Film of the Year
Never Let Me Go

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Best Animated Film

Toy Story 3

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Best Foreign Language Film

Biutiful

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Best Documentary

Restrepo

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Best Original Song

Burlesque, “You Haven’t See the Last of Me”

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Best Original Score

Inception

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Best Cinematography

True Grit

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Best Film Editing

Inception

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Best Production Design

Inception

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Best Costume Design

Alice in Wonderland

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Best Visual Effects

Inception

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Best Stunts

Inception

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Breakthrough Performance on Camera

Chloe Moretz, Kick-Ass

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Breakthrough Performance Behind the Camera

Debra Granik, Winter’s Bone

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Best Performance by a Youth — Male

Kodi Smit-McPhee, Let Me In

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Best Performance by a Youth — Female

Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

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ElecTRONic sequel three decades later

Rarely are films so completely unique that they invent new genres upon their release. Even rare still: that the only other entry in the genre — call it cyber-adventure — is the original film's sequel 28 years later.

The first TRON was a watershed moment for computer imaging in films, so much so that the organization that runs the Academy Awards, scratching its head at the film’s pyrotechnic wonder, barred it from the special effects category. They simply didn’t know what to do with it.

No one really knew what to do with it, which is probably why you’ve never seen anything even slightly similar to TRON in the last three decades. In an industry where everything is derivative of something, TRON was genuine.

So is its sequel.

TRON: Legacy, the hotly anticipated computer adventure, is everything the Web geeks and techno nerds have been saying about it through the last few weeks of pre-release hype. It is as uniquely stunning as the original, but with some much-needed visual upgrades and with all the hyper-kinetic additions films have embraced since 1982: dazzlingly rendered computer effects, lightning-fast editing, a technocentric soundtrack (by Daft Punk) that soothes the film’s digital ego and some fresh, young stars who fill this realm of circuitry. Even the 3-D, which I loathe in principle, worked rather well in this neon-tinted wonder of computer imagery.

The film begins several years after the original TRON, with game designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) being permanently uploaded into the digital world of the first film, leaving his son with a crumbling software empire and without a father. Years pass and Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is more into mischief than following the footsteps of his forgotten father. The mischief leads him back to his father’s hidden office and into the rabbit hole of the digital universe.

It’s here on the Grid that Sam is forced to compete in a series of gladiator-like games involving Frisbees, ricocheting walls, gravity-manipulating arenas and the famous Lightcycles, which leave trails of neon ribbon behind them. It’s also here that he finds the original Kevin Flynn, now much older, and a computer clone called CLU, who serves as the villain — maybe he was created with ctrl-C and ctrl-V commands.

The story is fairly straightforward, though it leaves plot holes big enough for terabytes of information to flow from in big streaming arcs. There’s a whole business with CLU trying to take a digital army from the Grid into the real world, and some more business about a race of intelligent algorithms that are somehow the answer to the world’s problems. None of this really make sense, but neither did most of the first TRON; we’re just expected to watch and enjoy, not figure all this out.

Bridges is a lot fun, and occasionally he channels his inner Dudeness — “It’s like bio-digital jazz, man.” Between this and his turn as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, Bridges has a lock on the holiday movie season. Hedlund performs well in a role that must have required a lot of standing in front of green screens and grimacing at tennis balls on sticks. The two men are completed by Olivia Wilde, who plays one of the lost algorithms. She’s so perfectly beautiful that the geeks of the world might replace their gold-bikini’d Princess Leia toys with ones of Wilde.

The film is a dazzler. Much of it is shot in blacks and grays, but with this nifty neon trim attached to everything from clothing and Lightcycles to the Grid’s fantastic vistas and the computer architecture. And when characters, called programs, are killed — often by deadly Frisbees — their individual little bytes break apart as if corrupted by a deadly computer virus. It’s a neat effect.

There is no shortage of things to look at in TRON: Legacy: There are numerous Lightcycle scenes, laser battles, chase sequences and one-on-one fights to see who can crumble the other’s pixels first. I had a blast in this movie. I think you will too, whether you’re visiting the TRON universe for the second time or the first. Go have fun with this movie.

jetSet and otherwise unbloggable

So, lots of new, new, new, which is why I've been MIA here on Pick-Up Flix. For starters I've been traveling like George Clooney in that one movie where he flies a lot for work and then lays people off while accumulating air miles ... uh, what's it called ... oh yeah, O Brother Where Art Thou? jetBlue offered their nifty All-You-Can-Jet Pass for a month so Sara and I — Sara is my new everything — jetted off to Florida, Boston and New York City four different times. Needless to say, I'm not seeing many movies, although that's going to change. I have been writing about some of our trips on our new JetSetters page if you're interested in a little change of pace of the movie reviews. As for the regular movie content, it will be back very soon.

Ferrell plays Ferrell in Ferrell comedy

Will Ferrell has grown very tiresome on me. It’s not that he’s run out of material, but rather that he’s never had any material to begin with. He plays his characters like different hues of the same color — and the color is Stupid.

He must begin each movie with Mad Libs: “In this film I am Will Ferrell as a ________ working as a ________.” The blanks are always personality traits and occupation. Anchorman was masculine jerk and news anchor. Blades of Glory was sex addict and figure skater. Talladega Nights was obnoxious redneck and Nascar driver.

Here in The Other Guys the blanks are computer geek and police officer. The performance is funny, like all his performances, but it all feels vaguely familiar, like Ferrell is doing the same character just in different costumes. He’s partnered with Mark Wahlberg, who wears comedy like it’s made of burlap and fire ants. Remember that SNL gag about Wahlberg talking to farm animals? That was not far from the truth in Other Guys, where Marky Mark seems unfit for even the simplest bits, which is strange considering the movie was probably titled from a line Wahlberg delivers in another cop movie, The Departed — “I’m the guy who does his job, you must be the other guy.”

Ferrell is Detective Gamble and Wahlberg is Detective Hoitz on the NYPD. They work in robbery-homicide, although they appear to be doing clerical work for the city inspector — Gamble has a pending investigation involving scaffolding violations. Hoitz is given desk work because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter once in a dark Yankee Stadium tunnel, and now all the other cops call him the Yankee Clipper. (Another cop tells him, “You shoulda shot A-Rod.” So true.)

Hoitz and Gamble share an office with Danson & Highsmith (ampersand intended), hero cops who live in a perpetual Michael Bay movie. In the opening scenes, they eject a hotrod out of a double decker bus into Trump Plaza — Michael Bay, take notes. They’re played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson as if they thought the movie was starring them. In the end you’ll wish it had.

Anyway, the hero cops eventually meet an unfortunate end (here's a hint: their end involves lots and lots of bagpipes) and the department needs some new cops to take the lead on hot cases, which is where Gamble and Hoitz come in. Of course, though, they’re dimwits. Early in the film, Gamble, in his Prius, accidentally plows through a crime scene, over a bodybagged corpse and into a table full of cocaine evidence. The Prius spends the rest of the film dusted in the fine narcotic powder; at one point a bad guy swipes some off the hood and rubs it on his gums.

There’s another gag where Gamble is tricked into doing a Desk Pop, which is shooting your gun at your desk, something cops do every couple of months to blow off steam. He’s such a doofus that he actually does it and his captain (played by Michael Keaton) takes his gun away and gives him a wooden prop. When the bad guys take the guns later, they return the wooden one to the department but with a nice stain on it. “You should really send them a thank you note,” the captain says. The captain ha some other clever lines, including one where he mixes up the morning briefing (involving serial rapists and murderers) with the morning briefing at his other job at Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Some of the gags are funny, but the movie wasn’t put together very well. It transitions from scene to scene the way television commercials transition together, which is not at all. I kept wondering, “How did the characters get here?” And the action has that shaky Bourne-style editing that involves a million different shots pieced together in semi-chronological order. Also, watch some of the awkward reaction shots at the dinner table sequence; makes you wonder if director of photography was sick that day because the angles are strange and meaningless.

Mostly, though, I just didn’t care for Ferrell and Wahlberg together. The chemistry is there, but the film seems to fluctuate in and out of the sweet spot on their dial. At one point I wondered if the film was ever rehearsed in front of the actual writers. If so, then they would have seen that a three-minute monologue about a lion swimming in the ocean wasn’t really on the money. Neither was Wahlberg doing ballet moves. Nor was an extended sub-plot with Gamble as a pimp with a stable of women who refer to him as Gator.

Some bits are only funny in Ferrell’s head. The Other Guys has more of those jokes than most Ferrell comedies.