Time Capsule: The 10 best films of 2010

 

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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