My Picks for 2010

At the end of every year, I usually find it not too hard to pick out my favorites, but this year I found it especially hard to narrow down. There have been many memorable movies (both in a good and bad way), many great ones, many truly awful ones, and a surprisingly many fantastically memorabe ones. Those that stood out stood out beautifully, each in their own unique way, and even the worst directors of all-time released a not-too-awful spoof called “Vampires Suck.” Things are kinda lookin up. That being said there were some epic disappointments too, and light of that statement let’s talk about “Toy Story 3,” the only Pixar offering this year, and yet this year was the first year in four years that I have not had a Pixar in my top ten. I was not epically disappointed by TS3, yet it did not strike the same chord with me as TS2 did, and half the plot felt rehashed, but it’s not going to go on my Disappointments list because it wasn’t disappointing enough, and the farewell it gave to the series was heartbreaking and beautiful. So I’m sad I can’t in good conscience put it on my Top 10, but it will always hold a special place in my heart. So forgive the delay, and enjoy my favorites and not-so-favorites of 2010. 🙂

The A-Team (7/10)

Hannibal (Liam Neeson) is talking to one of the A-Team members about halfway through the film, and he says with winking confidence, “Overkill is underrated.” This could be the motto for the whole movie – a bombastically over-the-top series of action scenes, each one more ridiculous than the last, strung together by the most basic of plots. The dialog is mere excuse for the action – cursorily inserted in the five-minute lulls between explosions. It’s not concerned with traditional movie-musts like plot, but that’s okay, and the sheer honesty of its camp is actually kind of refreshing.

Iron Man 2 (5/10)

Remember the final battle in the first Iron Man? It was technically thrilling, but entirely unncessary to the plot – it just seemed like the filmmakers felt the need to put in a final bombastic action sequence. That fight is the weakest of the entire movie, which is one of the slickest action pics of all time. And unfortunately, Iron Man 2 seems to have learned more from that clunky final boss fight than it did from the rest of the semi-brilliant origin story.

New Screen Junkies Articles

So it’s been awhile since I came out with new Screen Junkies stuff, but in the past couple weeks I’ve published two articles. Here are the links, knock yourselves out! 😀

This one is a couple months old, but I never linked to it here, so here ya go…

12 Delicious Movie Theatre Munchies

In honor of the new South Park season coming out…

12 Best South Park Political Parodies

And a continuation of my article awhile back, 11 Terminally Typecast Actors, here is…

13 Terminally Typecast Actresses

Enjoy!

Shutter Island (9/10)

Every last thing in “Shutter Island” is conducive to the stifling atmosphere of fear, a tour-de-force mystery that tightens around your neck like a noose at the beginning of the film and drags you, unknowingly, into the creepy black corners of the room, where secrets live and gnaw at the edges of your vision, ducking into shadows before you can spot them. It weaves a fascinating and absorbing tale about corruption, the psychological effect of war, and the horrors of the mind, real or imagined, that haunt the dark places in our hearts.

The Wolfman (6/10)

The best horror films showcase a masterful manipulation of the balance between that perverse desire of expectantly waiting and wanting for something awful to occur and the mounting terror that builds as you hope that the characters you care for don’t fall prey to some evil of the night. “The Wolfman,” for a time, walks this line pretty carefully, but through some awkward and cliched plotting devices devolves all-too soon into that devilish pitfall of an monster movie – it’s more about the gross-goodiness of the monster than the humanity of the man.

Up in the Air (5/10)

Ryan Bingham’s life is tidy and uncluttered, just the way he likes it. Jetting from town to city to metropolis and back again, firing hundreds of workers, because the companies of these employees don’t have the guts to fire them themselves. So they outsource the job of firing them to Ryan’s employer, who send him and 22 other people zooming across the nation on a daily basis, a handy rehabilitation packet in their hands and the words “you’ve been let go” always on their lips. Ryan is the company’s best employee, always eager to hop on a plane or spend a few hours in an airport lobby, and the movie’s premise is clearly a set-up to illustrate the lonely and isolated life Ryan leads and the importance of personal relationships in our daily lives. In fact, it is painfully clear, to the point where the movie feels less like one man’s personal journey and more like a series of pre-arranged vignettes that Ryan must travel through in order to become enlightened.

An Education (9/10)

A man pulls up to the curb in the rain, feigning concern that the cello you’re carrying in a bag will suffer water damage, so won’t you please put in his car so he can drive alongside you, because you’d have to be a fool to get into the same car with a strange older man. So you oblige him, until the rain bothers you enough that you ask to get into the car, fooled into thinking that you, not he, made the decision.

The Spy Next Door (4/10)

Hooray, another groan-worthy “family friendly” flick that aims to reach new levels of mediocrity! Only this time, they’ve roped Jackie Chan into the proceedings! How fun! Well, actually, it is kinda fun, and Chan and his Kung Fu antics are the only saving grace of a movie that includes such humor black holes as George Lopez and Billy Ray Cyrus.

Precious (7/10)

If you haven’t figured out the movie’s true intentions by the time Precious’s mother, Ruby, has sent a TV hurtling over a staircase in an attempt to crush Precious and her newborn beneath its weight, you probably never will. On the surface, it’s about the age-old tale of an oppressed person escaping an oppressing situation through sheer hard work and the unconditional love of non-oppressive people. “Precious” follows this formula to a “T,” but its intent is more subversive and clever than its plot would have you believe.