Critics' 10 Best Lists

Greg
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Post by Greg »

The Original BJ wrote:
Greg wrote:
Damien wrote:2. Inside Job
Does anyone think, with Best Picture now in a field of 10, that Inside Job will be the first documentary nominated for Best Picture?
I watched Inside Job yesterday, and I can't even see it as a genuine threat for the Documentary Oscar. It's solid and rich with detail...but I can't imagine anyone being emotionally affected by it or attached to it the way I think voters' hearts will swoon for Waiting for 'Superman.'
I think Inside Job, dealing with the current financial collapse, might end up trumping Waiting For Superman, about the U.S. educational system, on the basis of the immediacy of its subject matter hitting much closer to home for many people. After all, it does no one any good to be well educated and trained for a job that does not exist.
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Post by The Original BJ »

Greg wrote:
Damien wrote:2. Inside Job
Does anyone think, with Best Picture now in a field of 10, that Inside Job will be the first documentary nominated for Best Picture?
I watched Inside Job yesterday, and I can't even see it as a genuine threat for the Documentary Oscar. It's solid and rich with detail...but I can't imagine anyone being emotionally affected by it or attached to it the way I think voters' hearts will swoon for Waiting for 'Superman.'
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Post by Greg »

Damien wrote:2. Inside Job
Does anyone think, with Best Picture now in a field of 10, that Inside Job will be the first documentary nominated for Best Picture?
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Post by Damien »

anonymous wrote:Toy Story 3 is still my #1, Damien. :p
What was I saying about arrested development . . . :p
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Post by Bog »

Big Magilla wrote:Maybe some of the others would be as well, but I haven't seen any of them except Toy Story 3 and The Social Networkd and don't plan on seeing any others except Rabbit Hole.
???

Because they're nowhere near Oscar they don't even merit the Big Magilla viewership?...this will help me try not to criticize your top 10 for 2010 when it is only one off from Oscar's Best Picture list.

Not saying you have to see everything or anything like that, but we've got 2 highly regarded docs, a likely ridiculous "sequel" to Happiness, a summer Oscar contender that turned "bust" adapted from a wonderful book, and how many more will we even get from all-time great Resnais?
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Post by The Original BJ »

flipp525 wrote:
Damien wrote:Time's Richard Corliss.
3. Never Let Me Go
I'm surprised that Never Let Me Go isn't popping up on more lists. It has its problems of course, but I think it's one of the most underrated gems of the season. And Carey Mulligan should be recognized for her heartfelt performance in lead.
I've been meaning to write more in detail about Never Let Me Go since I saw it months ago, but I agree with you, flipp -- the fact that it has just been completely overlooked is baffling to me.

I can see people not thinking it were a great-great movie (which it isn't), and after starting to read the source material, I can see some having the "not as good as the book" problem. But for me, Never Let Me Go is up there with Social Network and Black Swan as one of the more entrancing American pictures of the year. The fact that it's also the kind of movie that lends itself easily to discussion and debate makes me even more disappointed that it has just evaporated from the critical ether this season.
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Post by flipp525 »

Damien wrote:Time's Richard Corliss.
3. Never Let Me Go
I'm surprised that Never Let Me Go isn't popping up on more lists. It has its problems of course, but I think it's one of the most underrated gems of the season. And Carey Mulligan should be recognized for her heartfelt performance in lead.
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Post by Big Magilla »

How does Corliss keep his job when so many of his contemporaries are losing theirs right and left?

The only interesting thing about his lists have been that his Time co-critic Richard Schickel often puts the same films on his ten-worst lists.

I don;t know about Schickel, but if I did a ten-worst list, Green Zone would certainly be on it. Maybe some of the others would be as well, but I haven't seen any of them except Toy Story 3 and The Social Networkd and don't plan on seeing any others except Rabbit Hole.
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Post by anonymous1980 »

Toy Story 3 is still my #1, Damien. :p
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Post by Damien »

Time's Richard Corliss. His incessant need to put a cartoon at number one year after year is clearly a case of arrested development.

1. Toy Story 3
2. Inside Job
3. Never Let Me Go
4. Life During Wartime
5. The Social Network
6. Rabbit Hole
7. Wild Grass
8. Green Zone
9. Waiting For Superman
10.Four Lions
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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Post by Damien »

New York Magazine's David Edelstein is a silly and obnoxious little twit, but, hey, I have to give him credit for having Vincere on his list.
============
The Year in Movies
By David Edelstein Published Dec 5, 2010

Foreclosure, massive fraud, manufactured right-wing outrage, a growing suspicion that how we live now is untenable: Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? Or, rather, how did you like the movies of 2010, which in rare instances (ten, give or take) ameliorated the sense that art is powerless and journalism impotent?

1. Winter’s Bone
In what is by leagues the best movie of 2010, Ozarks 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) embarks on a bloody, nightmarish odyssey to locate her lost father to keep the bank from foreclosing on the house in which she lives with her young siblings. Debra Granik’s harshly beautiful adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s “Ozark noir” achieves a mythical intensity, building to a midnight boat ride on what might be the River Styx—and to a silent scream that will echo forever in your mind. The performances of John Hawkes (as Ree’s meth-fueled uncle) and Dale Dickey (as a violent but all-too-human matriarch) are beyond praise.

2. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Inside Job
It’s a documentary draw! Alex Gibney’s show-offy (in a good way) Client 9 suggests that what happened to Spitzer was nothing less than a bloodless coup—that its roots lay not only in his fevered psyche but in enemies he made while policing Wall Street for the kind of crimes portrayed in … Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job, which traces the Ayn Rand–ian crusade to deregulate the financial industry, leading banks to reward risk (however insane) and to the global economic collapse of 2008. It’s the horror double bill of the decade, with a chilling finish: The bad guys devastated millions of lives, got away clean with their staggering fortunes intact, and are still writing the laws.

3. Please Give
Nicole Holofcener’s great comedy starring her favorite alter ego, Catherine Keener, is typically amorphous and typically cutting—a portrait of guilt and shame in an age of uneasy affluence.

4. Toy Story 3
Yes, it’s a goofy comedy with terrific cliffhangers. But this sequel, one of the summits of Pixar’s art, is also a story of aging, impermanence, and death in which toys have spiritual properties and to discard them carelessly is to dishonor the childhood that shaped us. Also, we should recycle stuff, no?

5. Another Year
And another Mike Leigh gem, a four-season (but autumnal in spirit) portrait of a snug, large-spirited couple, Tom and Gerri (the marvelous Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), and the lonely single people drawn to their hearth—especially the too-forward, too-tremulous, too-tippling, too-everything Mary of Lesley Manville.

6. Mother and Child
It’s easy to see why Rodrigo García’s film was overlooked: It’s too damn painful. But it has the best female performance of the year (by Annette Bening as a mother who gave up a child for adoption at age 14) and the most tantalizing structure: all echoes, crosscurrents, and profound variations on the theme of mothers and daughters, absent or too present.

7. Vincere
In the story of Mussolini’s secret first wife (jettisoned for the sake of political expediency), the great Marco Bellocchio burlesques Il Duce while sweeping you up in the excitement of his rise. The movie—the title means “win”—is an opera on the theme of intoxication: of sexual conquest, military conquest, and, most of all, cinema. The parade of Fascism passes on, and we, along with the volcanically beautiful Giovanna Mezzogiorno, watch Mussolini’s ascent from afar, as a country, Italy, slips into a kind of delirium—a lie perpetrated by a lunatic.

8. Exit Through the Gift Shop
The subterranean graffiti artist Banksy’s doc tells the story of Thierry Guetta, a somewhat pathetic graffiti-artist groupie who becomes an L.A. art-world sensation (“Mr. Brainwash”) with sub-sub-Warholian ripoffs. If Banksy—as seems likely—had to manufacture Mr. Brainwash to drive home the faddishness and philistinism of the art world, the satire is too rich to make me cry foul. It’s a prank of genius—and he can vandalize our movie screens anytime.

9. Marwencol
Jeff Malmberg’s endlessly suggestive doc is a monument to the bizarre relationship between the unconscious and pop culture. The subject is a Kingston, New York, showroom designer, Mark Hogancamp, who was beaten into a coma outside a bar and spends most of his life hovering over a fictional, one-sixth-scale Belgian WWII-era town in his yard, in which military and Barbie dolls (in astonishingly vivid poses) enact the ongoing struggles of his psyche. How mysterious the mind of man …

10. Despicable Me
Like that heartless Ayn Rand–ian capitalist Scrooge before him, the dastardly supervillain Gru, voiced by Steve Carell, is forcibly introduced to his social conscience—in this case by a trio of incorrigible orphan girls. Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud’s animated film is anarchic and heartwarming—but mostly, hilariously, anarchic.




Edited By Damien on 1291880374
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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