Nothing like cutting it close on 2010. It's literally two hours from 2011 and here I am ... blogging.This year I didn’t stop at 10 films. When the list is just as complete at 11 or 12, then there’s no reason to stop. Fifty … OK, I would have stopped before then. But one or two extra seems appropriate, especially when they’re excellent pictures. Here are my favorite films of 2010.
1. Waiting For Superman — Here’s a film that will provoke many emotions: disgust, outrage, skepticism, shame, but most of all just sadness. Waiting For Superman, a surprisingly riveting documentary about the nation’s educational system, uses common logic from some skilled education experts to try and figure out why public schools in America are so astonishingly awful. It supplies many possible culprits, including the teachers and their incessant complaining, the teachers unions that bind schools’ hands, state and national standards, Bush’s (in)famous No Child Left Behind, failures within the homes and asinine rules within schools. In New York, the film shows us, bad teachers are wharehoused where they receive full pay and often play cards or sleep until their cases can be reviewed months or years later. Mostly, though, Superman is about students who have a desire to learn but are refused it by a system that is so dysfunctional that within another decade if you aren’t going to a private school you’re less likely to graduate high school. Arizonans, with our horrible education, need to see this.
(As an interesting postscript, check out this White House photo of President Obama greeting the students of the film.)
— Michael Clawson
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1. Waiting For Superman — Here’s a film that will provoke many emotions: disgust, outrage, skepticism, shame, but most of all just sadness. Waiting For Superman, a surprisingly riveting documentary about the nation’s educational system, uses common logic from some skilled education experts to try and figure out why public schools in America are so astonishingly awful. It supplies many possible culprits, including the teachers and their incessant complaining, the teachers unions that bind schools’ hands, state and national standards, Bush’s (in)famous No Child Left Behind, failures within the homes and asinine rules within schools. In New York, the film shows us, bad teachers are wharehoused where they receive full pay and often play cards or sleep until their cases can be reviewed months or years later. Mostly, though, Superman is about students who have a desire to learn but are refused it by a system that is so dysfunctional that within another decade if you aren’t going to a private school you’re less likely to graduate high school. Arizonans, with our horrible education, need to see this.
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2. Winter’s Bone — If Southern gothic veterans Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner ever shared a screenplay, it would be Winter’s Bone, about a girl’s terrifying journey through the meth-riddled trailers of her Ozarks town. The girl is 20-year-old newcomer Jennifer Lawrence playing a teen trying to track down her father who used the family home as collateral to get out of jail and then promptly disappeared. Lawrence — under the careful direction of another newcomer, director Debra Granik — takes her character deep into the meth underworld, where hicks, rednecks and backwoods yokels control the destroyed landscape like caretakers of the apocalypse. But this isn’t no apocalypse. It’s the dark side of a forgotten America, and Granik and Lawrence nail it._______________________________
3. Toy Story 3 — Pinocchio was a toy who wanted to be a real boy. The toys from Pixar’s Toy Story have no such notions: they’re toys and they know it and accept it. Somehow, though, they’re elevated past being just toys in Toy Story 3, a fitting and lovely finale for the Toy Story characters. After a rambunctious tussle with bitter day-care toys, Woody and Buzz Lightyear and all the rest of Andy’s toys find themselves staring into the fiery gaping maw of Hell. Death, it seems, has finally found them. They join hands and for one beautiful, poetic moment these toys have bigger hearts than any human in the film’s landscape. It’s one of the most important moments in Pixar’s library of important moments._______________________________
4. Inception — Have you figured it all out yet? The movie that got more repeat business than Lil’ Wayne’s probation officer was this summer’s mega-hit, and it deserved every greenback and it deserved it with its puzzling layers of dreams within dreams within dreams … within dreams. How far did the rabbit hole go? Don’t ask Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the leader of a team of dream infiltrators tasked with planting an idea into a businessman’s mind without him knowing. Boosted with amazing special effects, a big horn-heavy soundtrack and some terrific performances, Inception was another wonderful film by the very talented Christopher Nolan, the genius director of intelligent blockbusters._______________________________
5. The Ghost Writer — Roman Polanski is one of the cinema’s more complex filmmakers: part fugitive, part auteur, always controversial, always intriguing. His Ghost Writer is an intellectual mystery thriller like no other this season. About an author (Ewan McGregor) hired to ghost write a British politicians memoirs, Polanski’s film starts with a light mystery that grows into a bold suspense-thriller with every finished page. Exiled from America because of a sexual assault charge from 1977, Polanski (Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby) is still making devilishly clever films. Whether you think he’s a fugitive rapist or a great Hollywood artist doesn’t change the fact that his films are well made and supremely inventive._______________________________
6. Black Swan — No film this year was as sinister as Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s haunted and macabre vision of a tormented young ballet artist played by the lovely Natalie Portman. I admitted in my original review that Black Swan wasn’t for everyone — it’s terrifyingly morose — but that it provided one of the most beautiful and tragic portraits of obsession, Aronofsky’s favorite theme. Look for an Oscar nod for Portman this year._______________________________
7. The American — George Clooney has a lock on these low-key art-house thrillers. Syriana, Michael Clayton, The Good German and now The American, a movie that has polarized its audience — some who see it say nothing happens; the others say it’s spellbinding. Clooney plays an assassin, or maybe an assassin’s mechanic, who’s paid to build a sniper rifle for a customer in a desolate European village. Amid this simple plot is a nefarious undertone of evil that permeates up from the film’s red-hot molten core. Shadowy figures turn up, familiar faces lurk in rear-view mirrors, chase sequences explode in violence … the film seems intent to wrap its true purpose in an enigma. And Clooney’s job is to figure it all out._______________________________
8. Conviction / Fair Game — Here are two movies in similar tone, and with similar ideas: authority figures covering up the truth in order to persecute innocent people. Conviction stars Hilary Swank who gets a GED, graduates college and becomes a lawyer so she can exonerate her brother of a crime he didn’t commit. Fair Game stars Naomi Watts as a covert CIA agent who’s ousted by the Bush White House as payback for the writing her husband (Sean Penn) published about the lies that took us into the Iraq War. Both movies are true, and both movies have phenomenal female leads. Both will make you angry at a system that grinds forward, the gears lubricated with the blood of innocent Americans._______________________________
9. 127 Hours — Would you do it: cut your own arm off with a dull utility knife to save your life? Aron Ralston did it after a boulder trapped him inside a canyon in the untamed wilderness. It took him 127 hours, but he’s alive to tell the story. Ralston is played in Danny Boyle’s fantastic movie by the ever-popular James Franco, who actually looks like the scruffy and athletic Ralston. The film, which utilizes the word “oops” to great effect, spends much of the time dealing with Ralston’s internal dreams and thoughts as he seems to glimpse the curtains ready to fall on his life. And when he escapes alive, minus an arm, the film represents joy in a way that pours from the screen._______________________________
10. Restrepo — Critics have said Iraq is our Vietnam. Iraq might be a drop in the bucket by the time troops are done in Afghanistan, a country that, in all likelihood, will become far bloodier than the country housing our other war in the Middle East. Restrepo is National Geographic’s year-long documentary of a forward operating position in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the deadliest places in the entire country. The outpost is named Restrepo after a well-liked soldier who was killed there. Film crews follow the soldiers as they live and fight on what seems like the very edge of the Earth. At times it has a reality-show shimmer to it, but it’s always unflinching as it looks at the soldiers and their agonizing duty in a war they don’t understand._______________________________
11. The Town — Ben Affleck’s acting gets a lot of heat from critics. His directing … not so much. In fact, Affleck the director has received downright glowing marks, first with Gone Baby Gone and now this rip-roaring bank heist movie The Town. Filmed in his hometown of Boston, Affleck’s picture was a welcome surprise to the late-summer/early-fall season. Starring Affleck and the terrifying Jeremy Renner— fresh off his incredible turn in Hurt Locker — The Town was an electric action-thriller.
