Best of 2010: Nathaniel's Top Ten List

Previously on "Best of the Year"
Honorable Mentions: Scott Pilgrim, Another Year, Winter's Bone, etcetera
Runners Up: A Prophet, Toy Story 3, Rabbit Hole

TOP TEN LIST

10 How to Train Your Dragon (see previous article)
09 The Ghost Writer (see previous article)
08 Fish Tank (see previous article)

Animal Kingdom dir. David Michôd.
[SPC, August 15th]
It begins with a banal static shot of a mother & son watching a game show, all zoned out like couch potatoes. A few seconds later paramedics arrive. Surprise, you've been staring at a dead woman! This is but the first of many chilling upheavals (and, uh, dead bodies). Her orphaned son "J" is soon picked up by his estranged Grandma (Jacki Weaver in an Oscar worthy performances) and dropped right into her lion's den; his uncles are all crooks. Animal Kingdom circles around introducing this testosterone-heavy crime family and then it makes like a boa constrictor. It may be the family that's getting squeezed but you have to remind yourself to breathe. It's the year's best crime drama and a major arrival for first timer writer/director David Michôd.

The Fighter dir. David O. Russell
[Paramount, Dec 17th]
Springing as it does from the extremely tired sports bio, this movie is a real miracle. It's tough to single out a favorite moment or element because it's "squirrely" humanity keeps popping into frame even within standard tropes and traditional scenes. Christian Bale and Melissa Leo and Christian Bale are a perfect exhaustive mother and son but Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams quieter work as Mickey and Charlene resonates, too. David O. Russell is the movie's MVP. He's not brawling or slugging it out as many directors do. Like Mickey he's picking his punches... "Head. Body. Head. Body". He's an even craftier boxer. You never know where the next punch is landing "Head. Body. Funnybone. Heart".

The rest is in alpha order. 

"No rankings?" you scream in disbelief and protest? See, it's like this. It's late at night and I'm way tired and I kept changing the order and I finally gave up. But I gotta announce my personal Best Picture nominees.  You don't wanna know medals already, do you? (Don't answer that.) We've just begun our annual awardage.

Black Swan dir. Darren Aronofsky
[Fox Searchlight, Dec 5th]
"It's so pink. Pretttttty" Nina (Natalie Portman) says peering down at a grapefruit. What is it with Aronofsky and grapefruit? (See also: Requiem for a Dream). Nina is in some ways a silly girl, terrified of her own shadow, grossed out by sex, at odds with her body, still living in her mother's apartment.  Black Swan is silly and girlie itself, in love with its most histrionic moments, its mad crushes, and always eager to peer over but then retreat from the precipice [Spoiler] until the actual adult moment arrives when Nina dances the Black Swan. So what to make of artistic triumph being a literal fall if not, perhaps, a literal death? [/Spoiler] It's odd that Aronofsky's fifth feature feels so juvenile after his most adult (The Wrestler) but he's clearly having a ball. Nina's not the only one seeing reflections. This is Aronofsky's own funhouse hall of mirrors.

Blue Valentine dir. Derek Cianfrance
[Weinstein Co., Dec 29th]
Hundreds of stories announce their resolution straightaway and use the 'How did we get here?' hook as they circle back to kick off the story. Blue Valentine doesn't do this exactly, but you can soon compare and contrast the start and finish line. The film shows us the courtship and the breakup of Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) simultaneously on linear tracks. Cindy and Dean are out of sync even in their happiest moments but the actors are brilliantly in sync. The genius of the telling is not, I think, in how it starts or how it ends but in all the tiny details that point you towards that vacuum in the middle. Notice the gap. As for the film's own middle? Perfection. Shortly after we've seen that Cindy don't wanna dance with Dean no more ("You and Me") she happily dances for him ("You Always Hurt The Ones You Love"). The songs are in the wrong order.

The Kids Are All Right dir. Lisa Cholodenko
[Focus, July 30th]
This dramedy is so effervescent that its easy to miss the depth and the detail as you're laughing. Though it's light on its feet, Kids is grounded in multi-dimensional characters, smart specific dialogue and structural beauty, too. It takes place in that wonderfully vital summer between adolescence and adulthood and so does the movie, toggling between the two as Joni and Laser (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) cope with growing up and their moms (Julianne Moore and Annette Bening) cope with marital trouble and Paul, the new man in all their lives (an exceptional Mark Ruffalo). Paul himself is caught between adolescence and adulthood albeit in a different way. The family expands and constricts and expands and constricts as all families do, experimenting with their own dynamics as life rolls on. Paul may be an interloper but then, so are we. We're just happy to have shared our summer with them.

I Am Love dir. Luca Guadagnino
[Magnolia, June 18th]
In I Am Love, a ravishingly operatic melodrama, Tilda Swinton, that prized jewel of the movies plays Emma, the prized jewel of a wealthy Italian family. The storytelling is in the images and oh, what images. (I Am Cinema would be an appropriate alternate title.) In fact, the film might reveal itself more readily without the subtitles. The secret key to its divisive ending (if you ask me, she's not being punished as some angry readings go) is to notice that it's not just her husband who wants her locked up. Even her beloved servant cocoons her with curtains, shutting out the world. Her son, too. She's never to be lost or shared or stolen or even changed. Whenever Emma escapes, there's sudden rushes of feeling, sunlight, flavor, curiousity, beauty.

The Social Network dir. David Fincher
[Columbia, October 1st]
Not many movies feel like new classics while you're watching them. And as early as the first scene, too. Most need time to settle. Not so with The Social Network which just speeds through, all synapses firing with rich performances (Jesse's best) inspired direction (Fincher's best) and handsome production values (many people's best?), until... "wait, it's over?" When that ending comes (spoilers: Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook, got sued, is a gajillionaire) you want to click "refresh" yourself. Project that bad boy again! Here's why I know it's a new classic: second viewing, ending comes "wait, it's over? Refresh!"; third viewing, ending comes "wait, it's over? Refresh!"; Fourth viewing, ending comes "wait, it's over? Refresh!"

Red Carpet NBR

When The Beautiful People start collecting awards it's... heaven. It's only later when the same people have collected dozens of the same titles that we start getting bored. "And the Winner Is... The Most Recent Winner!"

"Mattie Ross", Michelle, Coppola Jr and Lesley Manville

Jessica Lange, Mrs Ben Affleck, Blake Lively

poll by twiigs.com

From the looks of the NBR evening -- minus the black dresses which never ever go out of awards style -- a certain color family was in. Something in the burgundy, fuschia, purples spectrum your next red carpet?

It's an homage to ___________ [Complete the Sentence in the comments]. You know you want to!

Distant Relatives: F for Fake and Exit Through the Gift Shop

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through a common theme and ask what their similarities and differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema. There's a mixed response on the internet in terms of how much of Exit Through the Gift Shop to reveal.  Some people will tell you nothing, some will give you a smattering of plot.  I'll do the latter, though I won't give away any secrets (for I know none) but I will discuss some of the mysteries.

F for Film

When Orson Welles made F for Fake in the mid-70's his reputation was somewhere between visionary director of the greatest movie ever (he'd won his honorary Oscar a few years earlier) and washed up, indecisive, expatriate.  Far removed from the War of the Worlds episode, it's unclear how many people saw him as the master charlatan he proclaims himself as the host of his film.  At the time F for Fake was a strange and new type of documentary.  More essay than narrative, Welles himself serves as ringmaster, telling us the stories of famous art forger Elmyr de Hory, fake biographer Clifford Irving, and others.  When it premiered it was, predictably shunned by a public who didn't know what to make of it, the other bookend to Welles' cinematic career.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is the first film by Banksy, English street artist, man of mystery whose identity is still unknown and whose work has sold for thousands of dollars thus legitimizing the street art movement and thus doing what to it?  The film follows Frenchman Tierry Guetta who uses his ever present camera to chronicle the likes of Banksy and Shepard Fairey before taking up the movement himself to much success, and dismay of his contemporaries.  The major debate sparked by the film is whether Mr. Guetta, who does his art under the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash and is never actually shown creating is, in fact, a creation of the film itself, meant to make some larger point about commercialization or populism.

The joke is on us

Elmyr de Hory - fake

Welles and Banksy are clearly two personalities who enjoy their self-adopted trickster status and relish any opportunity to embellish it.  But is the joke on us?  Is our deception, our infuriation, part of the point?  The idea of passing off something fictional as something true wasn't invented by Welles or Banksy.  They join a large collective which includes Michelangelo's early forgeries, P.T. Barnum's famous claims, Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita prologue, Peter Watkins' films, Andy Kaufman, everything Andy Kaufman, Jonathan Swift's misunderstood commentaries, into modern times with Sacha Baron Coen, the Blair Witch Project, or Joaquin Phoenix (though let's not get into that).
 
Let's talk about Werner Herzog who believes that verite truth is overrated.  In his documentaries he often stages moments and feeds lines to his subjects.  Why?  Because sometimes manufactured reality is more truthful than actual reality.  Truth is something both Welles and Banksy are going for through these films which are works of art.  This is where questions and realities begin to double back on top on themselves.  If art is a fictional representation of the world (even, as Herzog believes, the most untouched documentaries can't achieve objectivity), then what about fictional representations of art?
 
But is it art?

Thierry Guetta - fake?

What is art is a question that isn't likely to lead to any consensus, but it is what Welles and Banksy are asking with these movies.  If Elmyr and Mr. Brainwash have achieved success through their art (in sales, museums and galleries) then what sets them apart from "real" artists?  Perhaps success isn't how we should judge art.  Perhaps it should be up to the critic and the expert.  But as Oja Kodar, Welles' lover and subject of F for Fake suggests, what purpose serves the experts if they can't deciper the fakes?  If the experts disappeared, would the fakes?  These films leave us with more questions than answers.
 
Exit Through the Gift Shop is one of several recent films which have generated a surprising amount of controversey over just how many of their elements are fictional or not (it's hard to generate controversey these days without wading into the pools of political opinion or explicit content).  Here perhaps lies the significant difference from F for Fake to Gift Shop.  Welles' subject Elmyr was well known as a forger.  Clifford Irving was eventually outed as a fraud.  Even Welles reveals his hand at the film's finish, quite a ways after it's gone off the tracks.  But don't expect Banksy to give us any answers any time soon.  Perhaps for him, and for a new generation of charlatan artists, truth need not be revealed as if it's fact.  Truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Husbands and Wives

Michael here from Serious Film. I’ve been posting analysis of all the Oscar categories one at a time so when the Supporting Actress category came up I naturally had to compose variations on the phrase "supportive girlfriend/wife" (Amy Adams and Helena Bonham-Carter) so as not to get repetitive.

Supportive Gals = Oscar Traction

You don't have to break out any such phrase for the guys. Just how lopsided is this situation? Do the fellas ever get nominated for staying home and cheering on the ladies?

I looked up some stats, and long story short, I didn’t think it would be that lopsided. Going back over the last twenty years there was only one, count em one, nomination for the traditional supportive husband/boyfriend role, Jim Broadbent for Iris. (He won.) If you want to stretch you can push it up to three by including John C. Reilly’s doofus husband in Chicago and Christopher Plummer’s Tolstoy in The Last Station, but if you ask me those don’t fit the type. After that…nothing. Just villains and character actor parts as far as the eye can see. Of course a few of the others play husbands but their wives have equal or lesser roles (Think Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire)

As for the ladies I stopped counting in the mid-twenties. The supporting actress category, as should come as zero surprise, is overflowing wives and girlfriends, including the entire 2004 line up, if you count Portman in Closer. They matched the guys’ total of three last year alone with the girlfriend parts played by Gyllenhaal, Farmiga, and Cruz. Throw in mothers and you’ve got the whole category covered.

Supportive Guys ≠ Oscar Traction

I’ll leave it to you to draw conclusions about the diversity of female roles in Hollywood but one conclusion I can say for sure: If you’re a guy looking to win an Oscar avoid playing the husband.

P.S. Remember Nathaniel's Illustrated Chart of Supporting Actor 'Types'? (click to embiggen)

Natalie Portman and Rooney Mara TOPLESS !

What? I was feeling jealous of everyone else's sensationalist headlines. It's weblag from that NYFCC brouhaha and that 'lazy journalism' Jacki Weaver was talking about in our interview. So, 'bout that headline. Define Topless. We're most concerned with definition #3...

...although we suspect most actresses would like us to use the obsolete definition, #5.

Ubiquitous NATALIE PORTMAN found that she just wasn't making enough bank this year from Black Swan or her four, yes four, 2011 features. Also, the covers of every magazine weren't enough now and won't be enough when she wins the Oscar and still won't be enough this summer when she gives birth either. So now you can find her photos inbetween the reams and reams of magazine articles about her as as she hawks Christian Dior's cosmetics and perfumes. Here she is posing for Miss Dior. 

Her children's children's children will have their trust funds all insured by the end of 2011. Also: many trees will die in her honor.

For what it's worth she's more naked in Wes Anderson's Hotel Chevalier (2007) than she'll ever be in a magazine and it's a damn good miniature performance, too.

Meanwhile...

W Magazine has a whole slide show featuring ROONEY MARA as Lisbeth Salander for David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011).

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander

The photos are pretty amazing though we're still not crazy about that Millenium Trilogy in concept and apart from the money and that unbreakable serial killer obsessions of David Fincher's, we're still not sure why he's doing it. Especially since you know he's not going to actually make the sequels.

Rooney... remember how much she did with just three scenes in The Social Network? Imagine what she might do over the course of two hours!