2010 Year in Review / Silver screen gold

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This article was published 31/12/2010 (5730 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FOR critics compiling their Top 10 lists in December, it helps that the Golden Globe nominations come out while we collectively ponder the best of the year.

The Globes, nominated by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, have never been about quality. They’re about attracting the biggest stars to the Golden Globe party. Look in slack-jawed amazement at their nominations for best motion picture in the comedy/musical category: Alice in Wonderland, Burlesque, The Kids Are All Right, Red and The Tourist.

Did these clowns forget to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, or Easy A, or True Grit? Are they so debased, they would give Johnny Depp not one but two undeserved actor nominations (for The Tourist and Alice in Wonderland, the latter being Depp’s most ill-conceived screen performance ever) while ignoring Jeff Bridges’ bold effrontery in re-inventing Rooster Cogburn for True Grit?

To accentuate the positive, the Globe nominations compel critics to give credit where it’s really due, and also to call attention to smaller films that got lost in the shuffle come awards season. Bear that in mind when you read my choice for No. 1. Counting down:

10. The Social Network

Returning from the failure that was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, director David Fincher came back big-time with a weirdly riveting reality-based film. It’s about how tech genius/social nitwit/future billionaire Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) created Facebook amid a storm of litigation, betrayal and techie madness. It proceeds with the pace of a thriller and the juice of a documentary exposé.

 

9. True Grit

Joel and Ethan Coen treat Charles Portis’s novel as sacred text and lovingly, faithfully translate it to the screen with an actor (as opposed to a western icon) cast as one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn. As the young, vengeance-minded heroine Mattie, Hailee Steinfeld is a pistol, and Jeff Bridges dons the eyepatch with none of John Wayne’s broad comic bluster, but plenty of hard-bitten attitude. That plays perfectly into the Coens’ strategy to make True Grit 2010… well, grittier.

 

8. The Secret in Their Eyes

This film from Argentina entwines past and present narratives wherein a retired state investigator (Ricardo Darin) revisits the bad old days of Argentina’s military dictatorship while ostensibly researching a novel. In actuality, he is returning to the love of his life, his former boss (Soledad Villamil), while seeking closure to a case of murder perpetrated by a violent psychotic at a time when such a man was deemed a valuable resource to the ruling junta. It’s a love story, a political thriller and a police procedural, with all those lines coalescing into an elegant meditation on lives wasted.

 

7. Inside Job

 

This provocative, angry, thoroughly depressing doc pretty much states that the financial meltdown of 2008 was a heist perpetrated by venal, remorseless millionaires (aided by greedy government shills and pandering academic lapdogs) who stole investors’ money, got away with it, and still somehow managed to maintain their stranglehold on Washington’s political machine. On the doc front, many critics preferred Exit Through the Gift Shop, artist-provocateur Banksy’s possibly fraudulent doc about another would-be artist-provocateur. For me, effective muck-raking trumps artsy, hall-of-mirrors introspection any day.

 

6. How to Train Your Dragon

A delightful, savvy and even inspirational animated adventure about how an unlikely lad named Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) defies the fight-or-flight instincts of his kinsmen to actually study one of the dragons that habitually terrorizes his village. It has flight sequences as breathtaking as anything in the films of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, but beneath the spectacle is a pertinent lesson on the importance of knowing your perceived “enemy.” As the cereal commercials used to say: Good … and good for you.

 

5. Toy Story 3

 

The first two Toy Story movies were class acts, and the third — and reportedly final — instalment maintains the magic. When Woody, Buzz and the gang find themselves exiled to the Sunnyside Daycare Center (which at night resembles a high-tech prison), they’re on another escape mission that takes them to a garbage processing plant, culminating in a display of solidarity that is as sublime a moment as you’ll find in any movie, animated or not. Brilliant as it is, Toy Story 3 never flaunts its smarts at the expense of its effusive heart.

 

4. Inception

Only Chris Nolan could come up with a big summer thriller that simultaneously evokes Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris). With a challenging story of a thief (Leonardo DiCaprio) who works in the realm of other people’s dreams, Nolan does here for the heist film what he did for the comic-book movie in his 2008 hit The Dark Knight: he layers a fantasy premise with provocative ideas and serious intent.

 

3. The King’s Speech

A little-known slice of fact-based drama — King George VI’s hardship with stammering — yields a lovely drama demonstrating how history perversely casts the unlikeliest people for its plum parts. In the lead role, Colin Firth presents a masterful blend of technical virtuosity and soulful restraint.

 

2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Director Niels Arden Oplev unflinchingly stayed true to the

basics of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel, and the result is a film that offers the immersive pleasures of the page-turner novel. Of course, that would not have been possible without the perfect casting of Michael Nyqvist as rumpled, world-weary investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist, and especially Noomi Rapace as punk sleuth Lisbeth Salander, who radiates like a dark star at the heart of this story’s solar system. Director David Fincher is handling the English-language remake. Good luck with that.

 

1. Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World

I’m tempted to call this the best Canadian feature of the year because it was shot and set in Toronto, it stars Brampton-born Michael Cera and it was adapted from the graphic novel series by ex-Torontonian Bryan Lee O’Malley. But it’s a Hollywood studio film directed by the deceptively skilled Brit director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), who maintains the urbane, multicultural T.O. flavour and layers it with the visual lexicon of video games, music and comic books with sheer creative exuberance. In 2010, no other film gave me as much pleasure as this one.

 

Dis/Honourable Mention:

— Second best teen movie of the year: Easy A, a smart satire of moralist hypocrisy in the age of Twitter, anchored by a thoroughly charming, funny performance by Emma Stone.

— The best horror film of the year was Canadian: Splice was a Cronenbergian nightmare about genetic tampering gone amok.

— The overall best Canadian film of the year: High Life, Gary Yates’ tragically overlooked dark comedy about a quartet of drug addicts who aspire to rob a bank machine.

Alas, the worst film of the year was also Canadian: Score: A Hockey Musical. This embarrassing, squirm-inducing horribleness shot for the same kind of Toronto-based genre-mashing quirk of Scott Pilgrim and missed the net by a mile. Let me get this straight: Telefilm thought there was an audience for this?

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca