Since 2001 I have collected movie tickets to every film that I see at the cinemas. I keep them all in a small notebook (one per page) and I write the name of the movie along with the date. Don’t ask me why I do this. It’s something I started a decade ago and couldn’t imagine not doing now. Anyone who has been to the movies with me would know how adamant I am about keeping my ticket. Due to this, I have it very easy when looking back on what I saw in the year. Since 2008, I have rated my top 5 films of the year that I saw at the cinemas. I have kept this to myself (for the record, the winners for the previous two years were Slumdog Millionaire and Avatar – just a couple of small ones you may have heard of) but come 2010, with a few (courteous) people admitting to reading my reviews when I write them up, I thought it would be appropriate to make these choices a little more public.
First things first, this is obviously a very subjective list. Criticism is always welcomed but I am by no means proclaiming that the higher rated films are better made movies. It is merely a case of how they affected me personally and how much I enjoyed them. I have also cut this off to the movies that I saw at the cinema. Although I have seen other flicks that were released in 2010 not at the movies but to keep it more clear cut and maintain a more level playing field (watching a movie at the cinemas is always going to be a greater atmospheric experience) I will keep it to just the movies I saw at the cinemas.
Just so you know what I’m dealing with and the field that I am choosing from, here is the list of movies that I saw this year. In chronological order: Mao’s Last Dancer (12/1), Invictus (24/1), Bran Nue Dae (3/2), Valentine’s Day (11/2), Shutter Island (18/2), The Hurt Locker (25/2), The Blind Side (1/3), Brothers (21/3), Dear John (30/3), How To Train Your Dragon (2/4), She’s Out Of My League (18/4), I Love You Too (11/5), New York I Love You (19/5), The Back-Up Plan (22/5), The Losers (10/6), Get Him To The Greek (20/6), Animal Kingdom (22/6), Mother and Child (23/6), Toy Story 3 (27/6), Predators (13/7), Inception (22/7), The Waiting City (2/8), The Ghost Writer (26/8), Charlie St. Cloud (28/9), Eat Pray Love (11/10), Buried (21/10), Paranormal Activity 2 (28/10), Saw VII (31/10), The Social Network (4/11), The Town (11/11), Lebanon (6/12), Due Date (9/12), The King’s Speech (30/12).
So of that list of 33, I have come out with a top 10. This was a difficult process.
10. How To Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders)
Not being the biggest fan of animation, this one was a nice breath of fresh air for me. A very fun and enjoyable plot combined with some witty humour and inspiring character
growth ensured that this one will go down as one of my favourite animated films.
9. The King's Speech (Tom Hooper)
The new kid on the block and it’s all the rave at the moment. The King’s Speech was the last film I saw for 2010 and was aided by some absoloutly brilliant performances by Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth. A very interestingly shot narrative but emotionally poignant and a beautifully captured story.
8. Buried (Rodrigo Cortes)
My love for Ryan Reynolds helps to bump this one up the list but it is a love that is truly justifiable. How can you not respect a film that keeps you gripped until the end when you never once leave the confinements of one man in a single coffin? Reynolds is brilliant in a unique and challenging role and this different and risky idea worked a treat.
7. Get Him To The Greek (Nicholas Stoller)
Burst
s into the top ten (and almost crashes the party for top five) on a pure comedic level. The gut busting combination of Russell Brand and Jonah Hill ensures that laugh out loud moment’s come too quickly for you to even catch your breath from the previous scene. The film itself doesn’t need to pride itself on narrative structure and character development as much because it relies (successfully) on making their audience piss themselves. At the end of the day, people go to the movies to be entertained and unless you have a funny bone of steel then this is sure to tick the box.
6. The Waiting City (Claire McCarthy)
The best Aussie film of the year for mine and was very, very unlucky not to make my illustrious top five. Had the premise for a pretty sound narrative but was directed and portrayed in a way that was truly captivating. Nothing that was revolutionary cinematically but so emotionally engaging none the less. There were probably only two other films that I found more emotionally poignant in 2010. It’s a film that has stuck with me and although fictional, it just seemed like a story that had to be told. The passion for telling this story came out strongly in Claire McCarthy’s directing and the ability to portray the numerous character developments was also a real treat. Joel Edgerton was brilliant and Radha Mitchell also very good. It was a fascinating take on relationships, love and the ability to cope in an array of circumstances. A real winner.
5. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
I’m not really jumping out on too much of a limb here by placing this beauty into my top five. It cleaned up at the Oscars last year and for very good reason. Not being a real fan of wartime films at all, this movie still had the ability to speak to me and convey a real message through the screen. Unlike any war film I’ve ever seen, The Hurt Locker had this incredible ability to portray the circumstances in such a clear, realistic and believable fashion. It was also able to place the audience in the minds of those who choose to put themselves in these positions and have people understanding of why the elect to do so. T
his was done through incredible filmmaking and an amazing portrayal of human emotion that is so rare in
the cinematic world. On top of all that, Jeremy Renner put in a colossal performance that I believe was worthy of an Oscar himself and it was his contribution to this wonderfully crisp masterpiece that really helped to mark it so proudly in the history books.
4 – Inception (Christopher Nolan)
The on
ly real surprise about this one being in the top five is probably that it wasn’t placed higher. Inception was no doubt the blockbuster movie event of 2010 and all it had to do was live up to half of its hype and moviegoers would be impressed. As it turned out it probably did more than that. I’m yet to find someone who was disappointed in Inception and I am no exception. First things first I do love a blockbuster event. Being a movie lover, when a well-hyped film comes out it’s a bit like the sporting equivalent of the beginning of a finals series. Anything that can live up to big hype should get marked extra points right away. What I loved about this was the whole movie experience. It was a treat for so many senses. I loved the aesthetics and scenery of it all, the score was incredible and the cast was a closet A-grade line up (excluding the obvious A-grader being Leo). I was fascinated by the originality of the idea and loved how the narrative never got boring in its two and a half hours on screen. Most of all I loved the way Christopher Nolan created a film that treated its audiences as intellects but in a way that didn’t bombard them. He forced a lot of assumed knowledge on them and trusted the fact that they would be able to follow without having dumb proceedings down. I’ve never seen another film that gets this balance so right.
3. Mother and Child (Rodrigo Garcia)
This was
such an incredibly touching emotional journey. It so powerfully captured the relationships of (as you would have thought) mother’s and their children in a way that I’ve never felt before. I never expected to understand some of the situations that these woman go through on screen, and although I’m not suggesting that after watching it I know exactly how they would feel dealing with adoption, parenting and other various relationships, I certainly feel closer than I ever had. Kerry Washington puts in one of the performances of the year as she abosloutly rips her role to shreds and helps to ensure that this sometimes dry and insensitive film maintains its heartbeat. It’s her contrast with the characters of Annette Benning and Naomi Watts that helps to highlight the true love and spark that exists in the beauty of childbirth and how motherhood can be such a life defining process. Sometimes you will walk out of a movie feeling entertained, humoured, satisfied, educated or even just content that you’ve just killed two hours doing something better than lying on the couch. Mother and Child touched me in a way that perfect story telling is supposed to. I felt breathless trying to take in what I could from the film and left the theatre knowing that I had been treated to something pretty special.
2. New York, I Love You (various directors)
Interestingly enough, this is the only film in my top 10 that I have actually seen more than once; such was my craving to check it out again. It’s hard for me to sit there and totally rave about this one because a part of me can understand why people wouldn’t love it the way I do but for me it has changed a lot about how I watch films. What I loved so much about New York, I Love You was the way it made me think and in turn, the way it made me feel. I left The Rivoli with about a million thoughts running through my head about life and the people in it and how fascinating every single moment can be to certain individuals. It made me realise that everybody has a story to tell and although it may not mean something to you and me, by golly it means something to them. The interesting part about this notion is that it is the unwritten rule about all forms of cinema. You sit in an audience and watch someone else’s story unfold. It wasn’t until I watched New York, I Love You and saw all these short stories, some which seem small from the outside but so poignant on closer inspection, that I realised that these situations are happening all around me, every single day. It was such a refreshing realisation that had me appreciating every asp
ect of what I was being treated to on screen. It’s a film that I will always fall back on and still be able to feel the same way I did on first inspection. A real find for 2010.
1. Brothers (Jim Sheridan
On a cloudy one Sunday afternoon in March, I walked out of a cinema at Knox and said to Winga and Doodles, “that’s the best movie I’ve seen this year”. It wasn’t a massive call with the year only being three months old but as a sit down and write this eight months later, those words still ring true. As fate would have it, this little talked about drama starring Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal would join the prestigious company of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Avatar (2009) as MJ’s number one film of the year.
It was probably the heaviest emotional journey that I went on this year (in the comfort of a cinema seat of course), which says a lot about the meticulous filmmaking job done by the cast and crew of Brothers. It’s not easy to dish out some of that material, deal with some of the issues and portray some of those sequences and to get it all so right. That was the beauty of it though; it was all done so, so right. I guess the essence of the film is still a war story, but more a case of dealing with the post traumatic stress elements of it. It’s such a touchy subject, and so easy to get it all wrong that my respect simply grows for Jim Sheridan for nailing this emotional journey. There were moments that were harsh and brutally poignant and the incredible cast kept every scene ticking along with renewed life. Tobey Maguire played a very difficult role extremely well and I saw him in a light I’d never seen him in. A sign of a truly great performance. Natalie Portman also worked wonders on screen and if that wasn’t enough, it was Jake Gyllenhaal who stole the show for me. His incredible portrayal of mass but believable and heart warming character development is as well performed as I’ve seen on screen. To go along with these applaudable performances was the amazing effort of 11-year-old Bailee Madison who strung together one of the best efforts I’ve seen from a child actor ever. Her role played a vital part in the narratives flow, the character developments and emotional journey as a whole.
It was hard to find something that I didn’t like or respect about Brothers. It’s the reason you go to the movies. Some people will always think of going to the cinema as entertainment; a form of being distracted from their lives for a couple of hours. If that’s you, then great. Never lose sight of the fact that films are made to entertain their audiences. But that is just a part of it. Seeing a film, for me, is always going to be appreciating an art form. Cinema is the greatest art form in the world in my biased opinion. When you sit back and realise the work that has gone into making a film, it is hard not to agree with this. Every element of a film is planned and worked on in a meticulous fashion of perfection. Every shot is planned with perfection, every speech is spoken with perfection, every line is written with perfection. So many people take so much time and put in so much effort to find this perfection that it’s impossible not to appreciate this medium as the work of art that it actually is. For me, that was the only approach to watching Brothers. Wish an unashamed respect for what has been created, and what I’ve just witness. A remarkable film, and one that will sit with me for a very long time.
So there you have it. Why bother checking out the Golden Globes or Oscars? All your movie goss has been analysed and discussed right here!
That’s 2010 ticked off, can’t wait for another bumper year in front of the big screen in 2011! See you at the movies!
MJ 10/01/2011
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