At last! My year in review! And when I say a year, I really mean the whole thing: all 90 “official” Australian 2010 releases I saw, and however many festival films I saw in their own special entries. Now, curating it alphabetically means that no entry has a “theme” (until I reach the festivals, of course), but it also means it’s a damn sight easier to search. So here, your definitive guide to my 2010 in films (with perhaps some 2009 refugees to come at the end).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One of several \u00e2\u20ac\u0153French films I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get the appeal of\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that I saw in 2010. This features in several peoples\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 top tens. It blew them away – and why, exactly? A man on the make moves from petty criminal to criminal mastermind. He teaches himself how to read, how to speak Corsican, and how to kill<\/em>. With apparently no recriminations.<\/p>\n It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an okay film but there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing particularly special about it. The treatment of prison homosexuality was interesting and not as pat as most other movies treat it, but otherwise this is just a solid if unimpressive effort.<\/p>\n Tom Ford\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s A Single Man <\/em>is a beautifully shot interpretation of Christopher Isherwood\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novel, which my father bought for 70c in 1970. The strangest change in the adaptation – apart from the very end – is the suicide theme. By internalising the fatalism of Isherwood\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s omnipresent narrator, the very essence of Firth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s George is immeasurably changed. The universe is supposed to be unforgiving and cruel, not George himself. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just a man who is supposed to carry on regardless, without giving thought to ending it all.<\/p>\n The striking final pages of the book would have been nigh impossible to translate to the screen, but the overly literal conclusion we are given in its stead is not quite satisfying. But check out those glasses and those suits.<\/p>\n If you still like Tim Burton in 2010, I can offer you nothing but a shake of my head. Alice in Wonderland <\/em>is nothing short of an insult, a slap in the face, a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153my formula is so stale that even I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t watch my own shit anymore\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. You take Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, dress them up funny and set a camera on them. The results are exactly the same every time and the film is not only aesthetically dull in its quirkiness: it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unforgivably boring<\/em>.<\/p>\n The fact that Disney had the hide to put this film up For Your Consideration – and that it actually garnered several Golden Globe nominations – is among the greatest idiocies of 2010.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to say what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re supposed to think of a film like The American<\/em>. It was the second of four movies that I saw in one day, and it was only the third best (or second worst, depending how you want to look at it). George Clooney takes us on a monosyllabic picturesque journey through a tiny town in Italy, where he semi-wittingly sets the wheels in motion for his own death. Without much intrigue or movement, The American <\/em>is not so much a study in boredom as an examination of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153why?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Movies should not be made simply because they can <\/em>be made, and this is in the mode of sixties and seventies \u00e2\u20ac\u0153thrillers\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in which the thrills were few and far between. Film making may not always be tied in with narrative development and progression, but sometimes – most of the time – it helps. I think that Anton Corbijn crafted a very well made and densely packed film; he simply didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make a film that was interesting or particularly worth watching. I expect it to do very well on the student circuit for years to come.<\/p>\n Strange to think this got a theatrical release, because it really feels like more of a DVD documentary than a cinematic experience. I saw it at a festival and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m pretty sure it was just a DVD projected onto a screen in a room filled with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153alternative\u00e2\u20ac\u009d types.<\/p>\n The material covered by the film is interesting and entertaining but the execution thereof is distracting. A documentary about the life of Bill Hicks, the film shines most easily when it simply is clips of Hicks performing his stand up, which is frequently more depressing and abrasive than it is actually hilarious. When it is not <\/em>showing his stand up, the directorial decision not to show talking heads backfires in an interesting way: they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taken family photographs and animated them. The effect is disturbing and gimmicky and one can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help but feel that Hicks\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 story could have been told in a better way – but damned if I know what. An ultimately sad for reasons-beyond-control documentary, American <\/em>is well worth watching.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Easily the biggest Australian film of 2010, Animal Kingdom <\/em>is the film that people who hate Australian films went and saw. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one of those movies that I liked much more when I was writing about it than when I was watching it. Animal Kingdom <\/em>works better in retrospect simply because it is too unpredictable during consumption. Simon Michod composed a film that left me struggling to grasp its intent all throughout.<\/p>\n What we do have is a film with a great villain who has deservedly been nominated for multiple awards, even in the US (how long has it been since Americans have paid attention to Australian films produced outside of the George Miller and Baz Luhrmann machines) and one of the best endings of 2010. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a subtle work, and one that imprints itself on you. A legitimately good Australian film, and a true rarity on our modern cinemascape.<\/p>\n You know, The A-Team actually wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t half bad. That means it was more than half good! Maths! An utterly unnecessary movie (but who decides what makes a movie necessary?), but a fun one nonetheless. Liam \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pay check\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Neeson leads a team composed of Bradley \u00e2\u20ac\u0153No Talent\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Cooper, Sharlto \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fookin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Prawns!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Copley and Quinton \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Loathsome UFC Homophobe\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Jackson to victory over the hated CIA.<\/p>\n You see, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a team. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get you out of trouble. Absolutely ridiculous and insensitive treatment of the mentally ill surprisingly flies in 2010. Jessica Biel still gets work. Bradley Cooper plays the same character as he did in The Hangover<\/em> except he manages to restrain himself from saying \u00e2\u20ac\u0153faggot\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s impossible to take any of this seriously, and nor should you. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the perfect late Saturday night movie, the sort that you shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel guilty about giving money to because the surrender of your funds is inevitable. The A-Team <\/em>is a movie entirely without impact. Not that rare a beast, but one of the more fun examples.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What happened to my sweet little girl?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153SHE\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S GONE!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n The last movie that I saw in 2010 is technically an Australian 2011 release, but that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make it any less thrilling \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 or confusing. The Wrestler<\/em>, Darren Aronofsky\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s previous effort, is one of my favourite films, largely because it deals with a certain value of truth. Black Swan<\/em> takes a different approach entirely, to the point that you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be certain at any one point how literally you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re supposed to be taking it.<\/p>\n Natalie Portman gives a suitably splintered performance as a perfectionist ballerina who flushes toilets with her feet because she can. The scary part of this film is not the violence that people can inflict upon others, but rather the damage that one can do to oneself. There were many more wince inducing moments than your average film, and all of them arise from bloodied hands.<\/p>\n This movie will make you squeamish to distract you from the fact that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve no idea what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going on – and you won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s damn near impossible to say what literally happens and what is mere hallucination. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure if Aronofsky is making us work, or if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s impossible to actually piece together something from it all. Maybe what we see is all we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to get.<\/p>\n While Black Swan <\/em>is certainly great, it frequently strains against expectations. Things that I personally would have loved more of, like Winona Ryder, are fleeting but this is deliberate on Aronofsky\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s part. He has to retain a clarity – or obfuscation – of vision such that everything featured serves a purpose for the mindscape that is Nina\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.<\/p>\n I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d go so far as to call Black Swan <\/em>the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153masterpiece\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that others firmly believe it to be, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to let it gestate. I want to see it again, and then maybe my little princess will reveal herself to me in her entirety. Until I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve laboured that metaphor, though, consider Black Swan <\/em>to be a really good movie.<\/p>\n One of the more irksome films of 2009, The Blind Side <\/em>was released in Australia to coincide precisely with the awards season. One of the more cynical throwbacks of the last decade, The Blind Side <\/em>is a stupid and terrible and obvious <\/em>film about an upwardly mobile white family that comes along and rescues a poor black teenager from the horrors of being a poor black child.<\/p>\n They feed him, they clothe him, they give him a sense of self worth, and he repays them by throwing a football. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heart warming, it shows the true value of rich white Christians and the positive effects they can have if they deem fit to expend their resources on the lower classes. Seriously. That is what The Blind Side <\/em>is about. A horrible and inexplicably award winning performance from Sandra Bullock is compounded by an insult of a best picture nomination. If this is the best you can do with ten best picture nominees, Academy, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time to put you out to pasture.<\/p>\n Utterly abysmal formulaic telemovie pap.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You always hurt \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 the one you love \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 the one you shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hurt at all.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be horribly honest: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never felt a love so pure or so acrimonious as the one portrayed in Blue Valentine<\/em>, a movie that seems to resonate with those who have presumably had their hearts shattered to some degree. <\/em>Without that level of life experience under my belt, I had to take what I could from this film as I would any other. And without that resonance to assist me, this movie doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exactly fall flat, but it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t strictly mean anything.<\/p>\n Derek Cianfrance, rather than sketching in a world for the audience, expects the audience to take the relationship of Gosling and Williams on face value. So we are presented with a couple in two stages run in tandem: their subtle rise to union and their steep descent to ruin. Great performances but a slight film means that Blue Valentine <\/em>will either work very well for you, or not so much.<\/p>\n It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a good movie, but I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think of it as great.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Julianne Moore gets taken for a wild ride by psychotic escort Amanda Seyfried! Liam Neeson watches in horror as his marriage disintegrates! What is real and what is a lie? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actually pretty easy to tell. In this Canadian remake of a French film, everything is pretty much as it seems. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a lot of room for interpretation in a film that is utterly predictable almost from the go, to the point that one of my comrades spoiled the big reveal of the final shot seconds before it happened.<\/p>\n Kinda sexy, but also kinda drab and kinda empty, Chloe <\/em>offers nothing new or memorable to the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153psychotic hellbitch\u00e2\u20ac\u009d genre beyond Amanda Seyfried\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too tastefully concealed boobs. An excess of nudity ultimately can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t manage to defrost a film as cold as this.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Criminally boring, Clash of the Titans <\/em>sticks in my memory as one of the first post-Avatar <\/em>3D movies, trailing just behind the differently abysmal Alice in Wonderland<\/em>. Like The A-Team<\/em> this is a late Saturday night film but not one that one can derive any enjoyment from.<\/p>\n Consider Clash of the Titans <\/em>as Liam Neeson and Joseph Fiennes\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Schindler\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s List <\/em>reunion. Think of it in that light. Despair.<\/p>\n You know what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pretty cool? Greek mythology! What is not cool is squandering it on something that fizzles so completely as this does. When Christopher Columbus, ravager of Harry Potter and appropriator of the Americas, can do a better job of Greek mythology than you, you know you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re an utter disgrace. Nicholas Hoult is more than completely wasted in what amounts to a walk on death, and everyone is despatched in a lacklustre Medusa sequence.<\/p>\n More than this, the special effects are dull and grey. Nothing in the movie is distinct from anything else. There are different degrees of time wasters, and Clash of the Titans <\/em>is one of the worst. I will claw my two hours back, even if I have to pry it from the special effect addled corpse of Sam Worthington. (DISCLAIMER: <\/strong>NOT A DEATH THREAT)<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n The Concert<\/em> is the clich\u00c3\u00a9d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153odd duck\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Filled with the bizarre racism\/\u00e2\u20ac\u0153political correctness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d still permissible in movies manufactured in languages other than English, a group of Russian bumpkins defy real world logic to put on a show in Paris. There they battle the ghosts of anti-semitism and the filmmakers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 own \u00e2\u20ac\u0153comedic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d prejudices so that they can overcome the legacy of communism.<\/p>\n The Concert <\/em>is at heart a stupid film that redeems itself with a predictably explosive and sentimental finale, which it manages to effortlessly combine with its own epilogue. Not a good movie, but a feel good<\/em> movie.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Yesssss, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Wrestler<\/em> but with country music and without that film\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boundless nihilism. A pleasant Sunday morning spent in the company, an alcoholic Jeff Bridges and single mother Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart <\/em>is a movie you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve probably seen before, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s understandably well trodden ground.<\/p>\n Bridges\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 performance understandably won Best Actor, although I may have given it to Colin Firth instead had I the power. In my mind this movie is orange, the colour of Jeff Bridges in the morning light. It exists in that weird space between old cinema and the modern, the sort of film where it seems that the internet was never introduced. Bridges\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 character\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s existence is one that real people probably still live to this day, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lonely and alien. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Up In The Air<\/em>, had Up In The Air <\/em>actually been good (burn!).<\/p>\n Colin Farrell puts in a surprising performance as Bridges\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 protege, and the whole movie adds up to something that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s both understated and slightly magical. A fine film indeed.<\/p>\n At last! My year in review! And when I say a year, I really mean the whole thing: all 90 “official” Australian 2010 releases I saw, and however many festival films I saw in their own special entries. Now, curating it alphabetically means that no entry has a “theme” (until I reach the festivals, of course), but it also means it’s a damn sight easier to search. So here, your definitive guide to my 2010 in films (with perhaps some 2009 refugees to come at the end).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-12-months-of-movies","category-60"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HLZ6-fq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":962,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions\/962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A Single Man<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Alice In Wonderland<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The American<\/strong><\/h3>\n
American: The Bill Hicks Story<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Animal Kingdom<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The A-Team<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Black Swan<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Blind Side<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Blue Valentine<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Chloe<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Clash Of The Titans<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Concert<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Crazy Heart<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Next Time! From Date Night<\/em> to Four Lions<\/em>!<\/strong><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"