Constructing The Best "Movie" Of 2010
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 29, 2010 7:20PM
We wonder if they are re-thinking that whole "ten nominees for best picture" thing this year. Not that there weren't some excellent fare and a few late comers here in December, but 2010 was mostly a down year for new movies. In lieu of a traditional "best of" list, here are the best pieces of the year's movies, which we propose Frankensteining together into one Best Movie of 2010.
The Best Opening Credits of 2010 must go to the sumptuous I Am Love. These graphics are tasteful, stately, a bit glamorous, like the existence of the posh Milanese family in Luca Guadagnino's wonderful melodrama. It's like paging through glossy a spread in a $16 lifestyle magazine.
The Best Flashback could only go to the miraculous The Social Network for transforming two legal depositions into a film. Aaron Sorkin's justly celebrated dialogue and David Fincher's equally-lauded painterly compositions are only capable of telling a story by the force of an ingenious script. It is no mean feat, creating a riveting film which relies so much on people sitting in a conference room or in front of a computer.
The title of The Most Uncomfortable Sex Scene is ripped from the clutches of Stephen Dorff's pathetic sexual narcolepsy in Somewhere by Ben Stiller's hideous and awkward Greenberg, a scene that made me question whether our species deserves to continue reproducing. It's fitting that this award goes to director Noah Baumbach, whose movies have all of the cringe-tastic self-loathing of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but without the laughter.
The Best Action Sequence With Vomiting goes to terrorist biopic epic Carlos. I never knew director Olivier Assays had so much John Frankenheimer in him, but the masterful pacing of this film's central sequence, in which Carlos the Jackal orchestrates, executes, and eventually bungles the kidnapping of 42 OPEC ministers, was a marvel.
The Best Reason to Have, Borrow or Kidnap a Child in 2010 was in order to watch Toy Story 3 in the theater without feeling like a weirdo. As much as it pains me to say that a movie featuring supposed comedian Tim Allen may have been the best action movie of the year, Pixar packed in so many of the things that once made classical Hollywood cinema the most effective storytelling mode on the planet, how can I say otherwise? Where else on the action movie front will you find universal themes conveyed using every textbook just about every visual storytelling technique in the book to perfection? Iron Man 2? The A-Team? The Expendables? Prince of Persia? The best action movie of the year was for the kids.
The Worst Date Movie of 2010 was also the one I found most interesting: the German/Ukranian/Russian film My Joy. I was captivated by the tale of Georgi the truck driver, whose day begins typically enough but strays off course somewhere along the way. He plows along anyway, going deeper and deeper into a lawless world that becomes a brutal parody of itself. If you want a harrowing movie that will provide a satisfactory resolution, stick with Winter's Bone. If you want your sensibilities gently traumatized, go for My Joy.
Most Laughs of the Year is an award that shouldn't even be doled out this year. Where were the good comedies? The pleasant The Kids are All Right was only incidentally a comedy. 2010 may have been The Year of The Galifanakis, but It’s Kind of a Funny Story was only kind of funny, and the less said about Due Date, the better. Hot Tub Time Machine was made tepid by John Cusack, who has a hard time not keeping his unfunniness to himself. Let's give it to Easy A, which was an admirable attempt to make an updated John Hughes-style teen comedy.
The Most Needed Dose of Reality is an honor hereby awarded to Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's portrait of a year on the front line in Afghanistan. The film tries its best to sidestep the politics of the war to show us a little bit of what living and working in that terrible business, but when the bitterly hard-won base is later given up, it seems difficult not feel we are squandering the dedication, sacrifice and patriotism of a generation of soldiers. In the documentary field Waste Land was an inspirational triumph and Exit Throught The Gift Shop a fascinating debut, but Restrepo is the splash of cold water to the face that we all need from time to time.
The Best Poster of the year goes to one of its biggest disappointments: Black Swan. I thought that my allergy to Darren Aronofsky was cured by the triumph that was The Wrestler, but Black Swan found him up to his old gimmicky schlock. The terrible script, the overdetermined and cliched characterizations, and the uneven performances are only nominally salvaged by genuinely beautiful photography and some nifty camera work. It is fitting that my favorite thing about the film is the series of retro posters cooked up by a British design shop, which both channels a 1920s Art Deco vibe and evokes Polish movie posters from the 1960s.
Lastly, The Best Closing Credits belong to Inception. The one high-concept Hollywood blockbuster which delivered on its promise this year, Inception had audiences right on the edge of their seats even through its final minute: I heard gasps when the closing title appeared. Christopher Nolan loves to create ridiculously intricate narrative puzzles to find his way out of. It was easy to get lost in there, but he very nearly kept the top spinning for the duration.