Monday, December 27, 2010

Best movies of 2010



Winter's Bone

A film noir about hicks in the backwoods that treats its subjects (and its audience) as sophisticates rather than bumpkins.

Poverty is the main character of this movie. We don't like seeing him anymore in American movies, but he almost always is an excellent actor. Damn, he did a good job here.



Heartbeats

A high-concept art house film that's secretly a buddy movie.

Beautiful cinematography, dialog, and soundtrack. The movie is gorgeous and everything you imagine a French movie could be. Two friends fight over a man. A very simple concept, but how the characters in this movie choose to fight!

Watching it with my friends, I found the movie could be viewed as a tragedy or a farce. I say it's a farce, perhaps because I can see myself getting into the same situations the characters do, so I was able to laugh at them.



Black Swan

Psychological torture porn.

I think this movie is Natalie Portman's All About Eve. Portman, like the character she plays, is aging in a industry full of fresh faces and has a squeaky clean image she needs to get rid of if she wants to stay around.

The cinematography sometimes overreaches in an attempt to look artistic, but the movie was unlike anything I had seen before.

You may feel somewhat like a monster when you've finish watching it.

4 comments:

Pete said...

I'm with you on Winter's Bone as being one of the best movies of 2010, mainly because, uh, I haven't seen your two other choices.

But Winter's Bone is something both familiar and new - a noir film set in the Ozarks amid a society completely foreign to my experience treated, as you said, with sophistication and not condescension. A cinema rarity.

chickelit said...

Winter's Bone is kind of the anti-Deliverance and for this reason I don’t think it will be widely seen, especially by urban intellectuals. I do wish it well though come Oscar time.

I haven't seen the others you recommend but I will try to see them.

Jason (the commenter) said...

chickelit: I haven't seen the others you recommend but I will try to see them.

I don't know if I'd recommend Black Swan, even though I think it's one of the best movies of the year. Keep in mind, it is from the director of Requiem For A Dream. I can imagine there must be some women who wanted to see "that ballerina movie" and were in for a shock.

Winter's Bone and Heartbeats, though, those I'd recommend people see. Happy surprises were they for me.

Anonymous said...

"Black Swan" achieves an effect that I never thought possible. It makes me nostalgic for Polanski's "Repulsion" and proves twice as adolescent.