Time
Capsule: 2010
It was an eventful year, certainly. How accurately do you remember the major events? Here's a little reminder.
The
New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl and the San Francisco Giants won the
World Series. Lord Stanley’s Cup went to the Montreal Canadiens and Kobe Bryant
and the Lakers took the NBA championship.
The U.S.
witnessed one of the worst ecological disasters in history when an offshore oil
rig called the Deepwater Horizon exploded and leaked millions of gallons of oil
into The Gulf of Mexico.
The Tea
Party was formed and helped the GOP gain the majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives. The U.S. economy was still recovering after the housing bubble
burst in 2008. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Citizens United was law and
Apple’s iPad arrived.
The top
television shows were “Breaking Bad,” “Parks and Recreation,” and “Mad Men.”
Cee Lo Green had the top hit with “Forget You.”
The top
grossing movies for the year, according to boxofficemojo.com were:
1. Toy Story 3
2. Alice in Wonderland (2010)
3. Iron Man 2
4. Twilight Saga: Eclipse
5. Inception
6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
7. Despicable Me
8. Shrek Forever After
9. How to Train Your Dragon
10.
The Karate Kid
When I was a
film critic, I came out with my top ten movies of the year every year and it
wasn’t often that a film was one of the top grossers at the box office and
landed on one of my top ten lists. In 2010, one film managed to do both. While
we continue to hunker down at home during this pandemic, perhaps one of these
movies is worth checking out:
10. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – This
choice was because of the pure fun of it. It found a way to capitalize on
Michael Cera’s talents without losing steam toward the end. The film plays like
a video game where Scott must fight seven evil exes if he is to date Ramona
Flowers, his true love. This film is inventive and creative with its
quirkiness.
9. I Am Love – Tilda Swinton plays a
Russian woman who marries into a wealthy Italian family and despite her best
attempts, she never quite fits in. After a series of events later in her life
she seeks happiness elsewhere. She learns that the happiness she seeks is quite
different from the lesser sense of happiness she sought in the servitude of
others.
8. The American – George Clooney plays a
man who makes custom weapons for hit men. However, just as he wants to get out,
he becomes the target in the crosshairs. The story is a bit predictable but the
characterization and the dialogue aren’t. There isn’t much of the latter. But
when it comes, each word is measured carefully and carries enormous weight. It’s
a thriller without the typical thriller action and that is the point. It is far
more cerebral than others within this genre.
7. Winter’s Bone – This film is
responsible for launching the careers of Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes.
Lawrence plays Ree Dolly, a 17-year old girl who lives in the Ozarks and is
forced to care for her ill mother, brother and sister because their crystal
meth-making father has skipped bail and left them. She is left to navigate
through an enigmatic social strata among those in the drug trade in order to
find her father, save their home and keep the family intact.
6. The Social Network – Sure this is the
film that dramatizes the genesis of Facebook. This movie is perhaps the
antithesis of Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” (which comes later in this list) in
that the characters are brought closer together through technology but don’t
necessarily communicate better. Perhaps through social networking we only
communicate more, and such exponential exposure to others is bound to amplify
one’s faults as well as strenths.
5. The King’s Speech – Though King George
VI (played here by Colin Firth) was a figurehead in England prior to World War
II he was still looked upon as a leader of the people. But how does one lead
when one has difficulty putting sentences together because of stuttering? Queen
Elizabeth puts her husband in contact with an Australian speech therapist (played
by Geoffrey Rush) to address the problem. The film moves wonderfully well
between the drama of the pending war and the sometimes silly, unorthodox
methods the therapist employs.
4. The Secret in their Eyes – This Argentinian
film deftly works between unacknowledged love between a female judge and a male
criminal investigator, and the case 25 years earlier that still sticks with
them. The investigator believes the conservative regime in Buenos Aires
contributed to a wrongful conviction. Director Juan Jose Campanella takes what
could have been a ho-hum film in the hands of lesser directors and achieves
that elusive tone of perfection.
3. Inception – Any film by Christopher
Nolan is worth seeing. This is a brilliantly nuanced film that broaches the
possibility that dreams have not only a structure, but an architecture. It’s
not only a terrific premise in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character assembles a
team to invade a man’s dreams to influence corporate competition, it’s how
Nolan shapes this diamond with such perfect detail. I had never put that much
thought into analyzing dreams. After seeing this I was convinced Nolan’s
concept was right on.
2. Another Year – Director Mike Leigh is
one of the best living film writer/directors, a true film treasure. Tom (Jim
Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) prove it isn’t a myth: there are some
marriages that are truly healthy and wonderful. This middle-aged couple acts as
a sounding board to their dysfunctional friends. The couple treats everyone
with such patience and understanding. It’s a loving testament to human
potential fulfilled.
1. Never Let Me Go – This is truly one of
the great films of this century so far, a haunting and heartbreaking account of
how obscene wealth can be the demise of a just society. Based on the novel by
Kazuo Ishiguro, this sorrowful story takes us to a dystopian society in the
not-so-distant future. Children at a boarding school are “conceived” in a
nontraditional way and raised solely to be organ donors. These children exist
only for the organs and tissue they can provide and are left to die when too
much is taken from their bodies for others. Rather than horror story, though,
the film is really about three main characters who fight for their independence
and long to live as human beings. This was a breakout role for Andrew Garfield.
Few films have provoked such a visceral reaction in me.
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