This year was an interesting one, but well isn’t every year in it’s own way? A few months into the year I had seen a few films and thought I was in decent shape. In a fairly short amount of time I saw Inception, Toy Story 3, and Mother and thought this year was off an running. Not surprisingly I hit a wall sometime later and before I knew it the “it’s still early” mindset turned into “I better get my ass in gear”. If I told you how many films I’ve watched from this year in the past month I’m sure my picture would appear in Webster’s under the word “obsessed”. Well frantically racing to the finish turned out to be more of a marathon than anything else, and I made it, a few minutes ago to be honest.
Looking at my list from 2009 I was amazed how few foreign language films made the cut. It didn’t seem like I wasn’t watching them, but films like Summer Hours, 35 Shots of Rum, Tulpan, The Headless Woman, and The White Ribbon didn’t seem to impress me as much as everyone else. Don’t misunderstand I didn’t dislike any of these films but when it came to list time they weren’t even under consideration for me. From an early time this year foreign films seemed to be singing a different tune. Bong Joon-ho’s Mother got the ball rolling quite nice. By the time it had come out in theaters here in Chicago the DVD/Blu-Ray was about to be released and mercifully my library got it instantly. After becoming a fan with his previous Memories of Murder and The Host, this was a most looked forward to film, and it certainly lived up to my expectations.
Unlike the majority of American product that gets shoved upon us all at year’s end in order to be fresh in everyone’s brain for Oscar season, foreign films seem to trickle out whenever. Distribution is bad, and getting worse, after all how many foreign language films can you go see right now if you checked your paper. Even a local art house is showing King’s Speech and Black Swan on two screens a piece even if both of these films are now in wide release. Thanks to the wonderful world of region free DVD players, often times DVD’s of current foreign films can be had before they even hit US theaters. I first discovered this phenomenon when I grew tired of waiting for Zhang Yimou’s Hero to come out, and bought a bootleg DVD. Turns out the film was released about a month later, but my patience was already gone. Point is this is happening all the more, and well if you’re resourceful enough it isn’t hard to locate these films, which is wonderful considering how obscure and buried they often get especially for cinephiles living in the suburbs. For movie theater purists though, well get bent.
I was amazed though that this time many of the films popping up on critics top ten lists were released quite early in the year. I left the theater after seeing Black Swan wondering just when the hell all the Oscar bait was going to be released, not realizing that most of the year’s best films trickled out so gradually that I hadn’t even noticed. Early releases like Roman Polanski’s excellent Ghost Writer, Scorsese’s Shutter Island, Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg all hit theaters long before Memorial Day weekend. Even a pair of summer blockbusters worked wonders with critics and both Toy Story 3 and Inception have earned plenty of year end recognition. Perhaps the year’s best reviewed film, The Social Network was released in September which doesn’t often happen for most Oscar hopefuls.
In the next few weeks some more films will trickle out. I’m looking forward to a few, but many of the films I’m keeping an eye out for came and went and now the wait for DVD is on. It’s virtually impossible to see “everything” from any given year. Long ago I set up the 50 film benchmark, and consider it last year’s New Year’s resolution but I hit that benchmark this year. The mark of any good year of cinema is whether or not I find 10 worthy films before I hit that 50 film mark. To answer your query, I found more than enough. Rather than cop out and deliver a top 15 or 20, or split it up amongst foreign and domestic, I’m sticking with ten. Read on and there just might be a supplemental list of add-ons that were good but not quite up to par.
I realize that every list is going to draw some dissention. There’s going to be a film that you might think is the best of the year that I don’t have on my list. The odds are I liked it but perhaps it didn’t hit me hard enough. After all History of Violence didn’t make my top 15 of 2005 list and five years later I have a hard time thinking of a film better than it from that year (aside from Sin City). Time will shape this list, perhaps as I see more films, maybe when I revisit a few with some perspective, or maybe my mood will change, who knows. As of today though this is the list:
10. Wild Grass - France/Italy Alain Resnais
Still got it, could be a theme of some very veteran directors this year. Manoel de Oliveira didn’t
let turning 100 slow him down from making several films, so by comparison Alain Resnais seems wet behind the ears at a youthful 87. Wild Grass is part of a wonderful re-emergence of Resnais which brings back a large portion of the cast of his excellent Private Fears in Public Places. As with that film, he sets up wonderfully pedestrian plots and then with a mind blowing subtlety completely avoids every expected twist. It’s that type of mastery of craft that can only come with six decades of making films. He doesn’t seem like he’s lost any of that anarchistic bravado that made Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad art house classics 50 years ago. Here a plot about an older man who finds a middle aged woman’s wallet and begins to develop a fascination/obsession with her that avoids all the trappings of stalker obsession that we’ve grown accustomed to. Months later I still don’t know how he did it, but for an exercise in how to remain relevant into your 80s, hunt this film out.9. The Ghost Writer - Germany/UK/France Roman Polanski
Guess whose back on the scene? The world’s most infamous director is still not welcome in America and is still finding a way to craft masterpieces. Perhaps I misjudged and assumed The Pianist would be his final triumph back in 2002. His follow up was a somewhat flawed and very
unnecessary adaptation of Oliver Twist, but don’t overlook the early release. Typically anything that can be construed as a “political thriller” usually bores me to tears and has me running for a good zombie film as an antidote, but Polanski did the very limited genre a service here and had forced my hand to possibly re-examine the whole lot of these films. That might be a misstep after all how many Roman Polanski’s are there in the world. This is the director of Chinatown doing what he does best, slowly involving a protagonist and us as viewers into a story that is bigger than we could imagine, pulling the rug out from under us a few times. He keeps us in the dark as Ewan McGregor is, and we never know more than he does, in fact often it seems we know less. The excellent cast easily makes you overlook Kim Catrall’s British accent, in fact she had me believing. Polanski has always allowed for longer takes and his actors room to breath, with a sharp eye for focus. The sky never, ever seems to show a ray of sunlight and well isn’t that just as it should be? It may have been decades but this film, along with Wild Grass have shown that the older generation can still crank out the masterpieces with the best of them.8. Air Doll - Japan Hirokazu Kore-eda
It may come as no surprise to any of you that Hirokazu Kore-eda is my favorite Japanese director working today. If you are in the minority and wonder “who the hell is that?” then
proceed to your Netflix cue and put all of his films in it. For me 2010 was as much about rebounding as ever. I wasn’t overly impressed with Kore-eda’s Still Walking which was disappointing considering how great Nobody Knows and Hana were. This brought me back to his corner. None of his films seem to be anything alike, but he has a sense of delicacy where even the most horrific of acts seem downplayed. I know others might think him overly obvious, but there’s a subtlety to his obviousness if that makes any sense whatsoever. Well let me explain the plot quickly for you, a sex doll gets a heart, and becomes a living person, sort of. It’s not quite the Pinocchio tale that you imagine, after all her owner eventually relegates her to the closet in favor of a new doll. The plot seems ridiculous but I couldn’t help buying into the perverse sense of magic in the film. It’s as absurd as any fairy tale but with a mature sensibility. She gets a job at a local video store where she finds a kind soul but the potential “cool movie references” are downplayed tremendously. Things work out the way you’d almost expect in a Kore-eda film but the journey is certainly something.7. Mother - South Korea Bong Joon-ho
There has been a great deal of love for South Korean cinema in the past decade. I’d say a large part of that has to do with Bong Joon-Ho who probably would be elected most likely to be co-opted by Hollywood, although I’m surprised the Old Boy franchise hasn’t been bastardized by
Hollywood yet. After all they’ve already helped ruin Let the Right One in for everyone. Mother isn’t a horror film, but then again was The Host? This picks up a little with the grim murder plot of Memories of Murder and takes on a whole new dimension. An overprotective mother wouldn’t be a great subject for a movie, after all Psycho kinda did plenty for everyone. However a mother protecting her accused son whose actually mentally retarded gives it a new twist. For her to simply assume her boy is innocent because what mother wouldn’t, takes the story into an interesting who-done-it that like most of those stories isn’t terribly important who the guilty party is because often no one’s hands are clean. Kim Hye-ja is excellent as the title character who is our hero but often hard to really root for. Can’t help feeling she’s a little unstable and certainly won’t allow anything to alter her course. Keep ‘em coming Bong, I’m a fan.6. Dogtooth - Greece Giorgos Lanthimos
Dogtooth easily gets my award for strangest film of the year. Sure Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void is the most “tripped out” film of the year, but that film was about an hour too long and lost a lot
of steam. This is a film where you’re slowly adjusted to the strange world and little by little it starts to make sense in a way that defies common logic. Basically a wealthy Greek man has decided his kids aren’t suited to enter into the real world . A very blatant and easy parable of not just over protective parents, but the constant stream of misinformation and giant wall recalls plenty of Iron Curtain parallels. Early on we wonder just what the hell is going on. We hear English words being translated completely wrong and wonder if something is wrong with the subtitles, but no that’s the parents and their steady stream of misinformation they’re feeding their kids. At times it recalls Salo, but not in a disgusting way, and it’s subtle surrealism is more along the lines of Bunuel and Ripstein but I can’t say I’ve seen anything quite like this. Of course European films have been known to occasionally throw some graphic sex in to get anyone outside of an art house to notice, but it’s effective and certainly not as gratuitous as other films of the kind. The few outbursts of violence however are truly shocking, including one related to the title of the film which has to be seen to truly be understood. Don’t expect this to hit any theater near you ever, but it can be found and for all those people looking for something a little out of the ordinary you’d do well to hunt it out.5. Please Give - US Nicole Holofcener
I remember in 1996 hearing it was the “Year of the Woman” mainly because everybody seemed to REALLY like Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill. In the world of film some people are
applying that here. In the wake of Katheryn Biegelow’s Oscar I’m sure plenty of people were wondering what doors would open for females in film. For most people Lisa Cholodenko’s film The Kids Are All Right was the one to top the non-existent list of best female directed film of the year. It had some star power, made it to a few theaters in your neighborhood and was one of those films that Hollywood loves to take credit for making. Truth be told that film was so powerfully liberal it made me sick, and I tend to lean towards the left. That aside slipping through the cracks was Nicole Holofcener’s vastly superior Please Give, which had some recognizable faces if not outright stars. I was turned on to the film from watching The Kids Are All Right and hearing it described as the film you wished Woody Allen was still making. A novel approach it’s a film where no one is entirely good or bad, everyone gets a few laughs, and everyone is able to gain our sympathy at various times. Easily juggling an ensemble cast that never seems to wear thin on you. Perhaps Oliver Platt was a precarious choice for a man who’d have an affair with anyone let alone someone attractive, but his face betrays his skill as an actor who still manages to emit a wonderfully laid back warmth that helps to anchor a cast of largely neurotic women. By all means this film deserves to be seen by more people.4. White Material - France Claire Denis
Well I almost wanted to call Please Give the best film directed by a female this past year, but well Claire Denis had something to say about it as the art houses resident Queen Bee for two decades. White Material might very well be her best film, certainly impressed me far more than any other film of hers I’ve seen. For this she returns to her roots somewhat by setting it back in Africa, but this is nowhere near the safe haven for white’s that Chocolat was. In fact it’s quite doomed, and we know it. A few fragmentary shots at the beginning show us the end of it all, but it isn’t until she backs up a bit that these start to make sense. There is an aura of death and foreboding throughout the film largely because of it’s cryptic opening, but there is no hiding from the ensuing insanity. Perhaps it is a criticism that should be levied that nearly every white made film about Africa features whites in all the lead roles, but here that white meddling doesn’t go
unnoticed or unpunished. Isabelle Huppert is the perfect choice to play a domineering and woefully stubborn matriarch whose determination gives her a feeling of invulnerability here. She’s no stranger to strong willed and often wrong women in movies and although it’d be presumptuous to say this is her finest performance, it is at least among her best. Denis rarely seems to work on a scale this large, and her films usually steer away from violence, with a few very notable exceptions, but it strikes all the harder when you see it. She can make a film whisper quiet and then bludgeon you over the head before you even know it. Like the best films, this is an experience one that will envelop you into its world rather than simply visiting it for a brief time. This can get my official vote as the year’s best film from a female director.3. The Fighter - US David O. Russell
Sometimes a preview for a film can really send you the wrong signal. I first saw a commercial for this and saw Mark Whalberg sweeping a street in a working class neighborhood on the East
Coast and thought “Oh boy, it’s Invincible part 2”. Although Christian Bale looking cracked out, the fact that David O. Russell was directing it, and an appearance in the Chicago Tribune’s top ten list made me think maybe this film was a little better than let on. I went and checked it out and was instantly blown away. Many have tried to make their mark on the boxing film but few have really succeeded. I mean Million Dollar Baby, Raging Bull, Rocky, and you have to go back a long time before that. On it’s surface though this is something of a typical sports movie. Everyone loves an underdog especially one who makes good after years of heartache and disappointment, overcoming odds etc. However in this film it’s the supporting players who really mix it up. Melissa Leo is incredible as the loving mother who simply doesn’t get it, and the cast of sisters make for a grotesque Greek chorus. Christian Bale should get an Oscar for his work here because honestly I haven’t seen a better performance from anyone all year. Amy Adams has earned a reputation as one of the best actresses working today for a reason. Wahlberg has a difficult role because he has to be essentially an emotional pushover for the majority of the picture, and it’s not always easy being meek, especially when the rest of the room is in hysterics. The fight scenes are all shot excellently, and all seem to have their own unique feel ala-Raging Bull. If there’s anything you should be going to the theater to see right now, this is it.2. Inception - US Christopher Nolan
Well the first great film I saw this year was damn near the greatest. Like 2008 this was not the best year for American films, by comparison, and like that year it was a summer blockbuster from Christopher Nolan that won my heart. Inception showed that there was more than a few grand, or very, very grand ideas kicking around Nolan’s brain. The script reportedly took 10 years to write or finish, and well it seemed worth the wait. As high concept narrative acrobatics the film is incredibly fun to dissect, and it’s had more written on it than even Shutter Island and the Black Swan. However at it’s core it’s closest comparison is probably D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. After all that was high concept with a simple message, simply running on a theme of
intolerance for four stories, crossing them together with a few rescue scenes. That is belittling arguably the greatest silent film ever made, but you can see the parallels. The dream within a dream and so on structure of this is what you might call a heist film but there is a rescue to be had, just like the man needed to be saved from the gallows in Intolerance. Along the way Nolan playfully cuts between multiple storylines each with its own unique look, feel, and subplot and somehow we manage to care about every one of them. There’s just a whole lot of everything going on, but it’s the simplicity of it broken down into the foundations of cinematic language that make it so appealing, an art film with a James Cameron budget, something usually costly for any studio to venture out at, but after The Dark Knight how could you say no. The beauty is people actually seemed to get it, the film worked and although South Park may have taken it’s obligatory poke at it, you can’t diminish the wonderful audacity of this film and the success at which it was pulled off.1. Carlos - Germany/France Olivier Assayas
Well here it is, up until I started writing this I didn’t know what was going to top my list, in fact I actually started the intro to this post before settling on the ranking. Perhaps it seems that I am a fan of the audacious, the pretentious, the ludicrous, well sometimes. Inception may have been high concept with an epic feel, but Olivier Assayas’ film is just plain epic. Coming in at 333 minutes it’s a tour-de-force broken up into three separate films. To me this is what I wished Steven Soderbergh’s Che was. The fact that this is compelling from start to finish is unbelievable, there are some films that can’t sustain interest for 30 minutes let alone 5 hours. Narratively
speaking this is among Assayas’ most strait forward films. He doesn’t jumble us around, things follow a logical order, we don’t get confused and we always seem to know what’s going on. Perhaps he knew his subject was compelling enough to sustain our interest. It’s never easy making a film about a real life terrorist or serial killer, and its even harder to get us to sit through his actions for any extended period of time. Rather than witness a bright young man succumb to his own demons, this film shows us multiple sides of Carlos. We see him as a very flawed person very early on. His ideals seem right, but his personality leaves something to be desired. You can understand his charm and at the same time his repulsion. A commitment to ideals yet a streak of villainy. This is grand stuff and the type of thing that makes for the most profound of cinema. Olivier Assayas bit off quite a bit, but in the end he managed to produce a masterpiece, and the year’s best film.
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