Top Ten 2010s... So Far

I just spent 108 minutes catching up with Jesse and Celine. We've met them twice Before... and I spent the first 2/3rds of the movie grinning like a damn fool I was so happy to be marinating in their always passionate detour-filled conversations. It's too early to say how much I loved the movie (though I did) but it got me to thinking what an achievement this series is and got me to thinking of true movie magic and how much of it we've had lately. So while so many of my fellow critics enjoy their mad rush through Auteursville at Cannes tonight I'm remembering the time I fell in love with this movie...

...and that one

...and that one

...and that one.

Here's my ten favorite movies of the 'Teens (2010-2019) ... so far of course

the bonafide masterpieces -it'd be tough to imagine them not being on the decade best list 6 years from now
1. I Am Love (Luca Guadagnini)
2. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
3. The Social Network (David Fincher)

indelible achievements
4. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin)
5. The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko)
6. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)

movie magic
7. Amour (Michael Haneke)
8. The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)
9. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

and?
10 ... let's leave this spot open for a current passion since this list is silliness until 2019 rolls around. How will Frances Ha and Before Midnight age? They'll certainly make my top ten list this year. And if they don't this will be a startlingly fine year.

And while I still have your attention you should "like" The Film Experience

Honorable Mention: Beginners, Weekend, Magic Mike, and Moonrise Kingdom
Growing?: Blue Valentine and The Fighter and Melancholia are aging well
Fading?: I admit my initial passions for both Black Swan and The Artist have cooled a bit.

Which films this young decade have already staked a claim on your 4ever heart?

Previous Top Ten Quickies
1930s | 1950s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s

Top Ten: Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine"Today is Cate Blanchett's birthday and since we just celebrated her Oscar-winning altar ego Katharine Hepburn, why not extend the love? As longtime readers know I have been notoriously cool on the Aussie star over the years equating her work with the kind of "click click click" technique-first acting that Meryl Streep was sometimes discredited for early on. But since I actually think it's interesting to hear other people talk about their favorite perfromances from actors they don't naturally respond to, I hope it will be interesting to you to hear the things I do love about Cate the to-others Great. Cate was EVERYWHERE throughout the Aughts aggravating me with her ubiquity (I have issues with this in general, I know. It's not just Cate but Hollywood's tendency, especially in the past decade, to put the same actors in every movie and wear me out on them) but after four relatively Blanchett-sparse years (2009-2012) wherein she was only doing cameos or that Robin Hood no one liked, I am actually excited to see her again. Which is a relief because they'll be no escaping her again soon...

She's coming back in a major way over the next 24 months with new pictures on the way from Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, George Clooney, and Peter Jackson. She'll cap off that new flush of activity with a blockbuster-hopeful evil queen showstopper in Kenneth Branagh's production of Cinderella. 

Here are the ten Blanchett performances of which I am most fond...

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Team Top Ten: Oscar's Greatest Losers (Actress Edition)

Hepburn won 4 Oscars. Every win leaves a trail of four lossesAmir here, to bring you our newest Team Top Ten. You may remember we tackled the best directors of the new century in our first episode and each first Tuesday of the month Nathaniel and all the contributors will vote on a new list. This time it’s all about two things I’m sure you all love as much as we do:

...Actresses & Oscar.

This is a list of the greatest performances that lost the Best Actress award. We’ve looked at the pool of 337 performances that were nominated for an Oscar in that category but failed to win and we ranked them in the order of our individual preference, irrespective of the actresses that won in any given year.

It was quite a heavy task, as you can imagine. How would you go about choosing only ten among so many stellar turns? 80 different performances managed to get at least one vote from our contributors. Actresses who have had multiple unsuccessful nominations were generally the victims of an internal spread of votes. Meryl Streep is the most glaring example, of course. Four of her performances garnered votes, but none was popular enough to make the cut. Katharine Hepburn’s performances were similarly divisive, though one of them stood head and shoulders above the rest as you will see below. There were surprising inclusions and even more surprising exclusions but the main takeaway was consensus over performances that have found their place in the critical canon. Only 6 ladies from this new century made the top 30, which is reason to rejoice, in my opinion -- old treasures aren’t forgotten just yet.

Swanson gave good face.

Nathaniel will share runners-up and some juicy trivia and stats because this experiment really deserves a lot more than a list of ten names. For now, however, here are the actresses Team Experience deems the greatest Oscar losers of all time:

THE 10 GREATEST BEST-ACTRESS-LOSING PERFORMANCES
are after the jump...

surprise! Holly Hunter made the list

10. Holly Hunter (Broadcast News, 1987)
Lost to Cher in Moonstruck

"The leads in so many romantic comedies blend together into a blandly likable blur. Not so with Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. She takes the trope of the hardworking professional woman who is great at her job but unlucky in love, and imbues her with a crackling specificity. Far from sanding down her rough edges, Hunter embraces them, from her crying jags, to her stubbornness, to her clumsy grabs at love, to that southern accent she makes no attempt to disguise. Hunter’s Jane Craig topped my ballot because she is the gold standard against which I measure all other romantic comedy performances."
- Michael C.

nine more iconic performances after the jump...

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April Showers... Poor Truman

april showers & a tuesday top ten in one!

Do you ever think of The Truman Show (1998)? I really and truly loved it in 1998 naming it 'The Best Film of the Year!' to anyone who would listen. (This was in my pre Film Experience days of course... though it's hard to remember such a time). 

My Top Ten Of 1998 - Unranked

• Bulworth (Warren Beatty)
• Celebration / Festen (Thomas Vinterberg)
• Gods and Monsters (Bill Condon)
• High Art (Lisa Cholodenko)
• The Idiots (Lars von Trier)
• Living Out Loud (Richard LaGravenese)
• The Opposite of Sex (Don Roos)
• The Thin Red Line (Terence Malick)
• The Truman Show (Peter Weir)
• Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes) 

...with Central Station and Shakespeare in Love just outside the top ten though I'm always considering reinstating them. They were both once on the actual list (The Idiots and the Malick I saw a little later). I haven't seen any of them save Velvet Goldmine for at least...seven years? Would my list hold up? Would yours? How often do you revisit your #1s from various years and do you ever lose track of them completely the way I did The Truman Show. 

Today the movie popped into my head in an existential "is this all there is?" crisis moment I was having. Then I thought about the malfunctioning sudden downpour that drenches the star of that show. Truman is played by Jim Carrey (in the first of his series of FYC performances that Oscar sadly passed on). The childllike man still hasn't figured out that his life is actually a TV show. Despite his ignorance oddities like the malfunctioning rain start waking him up to life's surreal absurdities if not yet fully to his own life's precarious relationship to reality. He stares in confusion and disbelief as the shower follows him and eventually he ends up laughing and yelling with joy as the glitch gives way to a fullfledged rainstorm.

I worry that I wouldn't be as amused if this happened to me.

I need to find a way to be that lighthearted and childlike when I'm suddenly drenched. After all, when it rains it pours and we aren't always carrying umbrellas.

previous shower
Anna Karenina's stylish snowfall

Meow. It's Michelle Pfeiffer's Birthday!

To celebrate the 55th birthday of the one and only I thought we'd resurrect an old post about her Catwoman performance. If she's got nine lives so should this post. Please to enjoy...

Tim Burton's Batman Returns, the best Batman film (you heard me... throw down!) is now 15 21 years old and still one of the best comic book films. The movie didn't change cinema or its genre or significantly alter any careers. But it did send yours truly and millions of other Pfeiffer inclined moviegoers into a pfrenzy, arguably marking the apex of La Pfeiffer's cinematic reign. She was still in Oscar chasing mode (Love Field) and the full fledged move from heavy dramatic lifting into light mainstream fare (One Fine Day) and then blink and you'll miss her erratic appearances (Dark Shadows) was years away.

Ten Best Catwoman Line Deliveries
All the dialogue rocks but these are my favorite Pfeifferian readings

10 "Life's a bitch. Now, so am I"
Blockbusters love to shove quips on the public, in the hopes of catchphrase afterlife. This one’s pretty basic but Michelle sells it with true believer zeal.

9 more purring quips after the jump

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