Top 10 Films I Saw That I Can’t Believe Made It On To Other People’s Top 10 Lists
- Limitless - Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, you’ve got to be kidding me. Did you only see ten movies this year? Because I saw about fifty and this was the worst one.
- The Future - I watched this on my computer on a plane, which is admittedly not the ideal circumstance for movie-going, but I also watched Beginners on a plane and it’s in my actual Top 10. The Future, on the other hand, caused me to want the plane to have something serious enough go wrong that we would have to make an emergency landing and I’d have to stop watching. I went in thinking that I enjoyed Miranda July’s previous film, Me You and Everyone We Know, but now I think I was probably just more of a pretentious twit back then.
- Super 8 - Sometimes going into a movie with high expectations sets you up for major disappointment. I guess my really low expectations were also too high.
- 50/50 - Not sure how to deal with the difficult situations you’ve put your characters in? Throw another music montage at it! All better!
- Hanna - Apparently, when you make a lethal teenage girl the protagonist of your globe-trotting action film, you don’t have to deal with logic or plot holes! The more you know.
- Midnight in Paris - Just because Woody Allen makes a movie every year, it doesn’t mean that you have to like one every couple of years. Maybe if I’d read more the assigned reading in high school I would have liked it more. My B.
- Margin Call - Like 50/50, this one takes on a ripe and rich subject just waiting for someone to make a great film about it. Like 50/50, it leaves the subject still waiting for someone to make a great film about it.
- Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Did I watch the same movie as everyone else? I must not have, because in the movie I watched, James Franco was one of the main characters and didn’t seem to know he was supposed to give a performance of some kind.
- X-Men: First Class - This was on an MTV.com Top 10 list I came across on Metacritic’s year-end round up of year-end round-ups. I don’t know why I’m giving them a hard time about it, because I liked this movie well enough and think it’s a good pick for a Top 10 blockbusters of the year sort of thing. Please ignore.
- Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - Brad Bird has set the bar far too high for this to be considered a success in my book. It was fun, but Brad Bird’s previous film was Ratatouille, which is one of my favorite films of all-time.
Top 10 Films I Totally Meant To See Before Writing My Top 10 List But Didn’t
- A Seperation - I’ve heard it’s great. I almost caught it yesterday, but then Maya didn’t feel like going. I blame Maya.
- Margaret - This movie has done an excellent job at being impossible to see. I don’t know when it was in theaters, it’s not on DVD, and I can’t find a screener online. I’m starting to believe that it’s as much of a myth as dry land.
- Take Shelter - I bet I’m really gonna like this movie. The poster looks cool and the main character looks ugly.
- Certified Copy - An Iranian filmmaker making a French film set in Italy. I’m looking forward to feeling much more worldly than everyone who didn’t see this movie.
- The Skin I Live In - Almost every night for the past two weeks, I ask Maya if she wants to watch the screener of this I downloaded and every night she says “no, but don’t watch it without me.” Blame Maya #2.
- Poetry - A slow-burning Korean drama/mystery about a sixty year old woman. Sound boring? Not if you loved Mother, last year’s slow-burning Korean drama/mystery about a sixty year old woman. Sign me up!
- Carnage - I like to argue with Raphael about Roman Polanski so I’d like to see this in the hopes that I’ll think it’s great, because apparently he didn’t like it.
- Shame - I saw about half of Steve McQueen’s previous film, Hunger, and loved it, but then Kevin saw this one and said it was just okay. So now I really want to see it, but not so bad that I’ve seen it.
- The Descendants - I’m not planning on liking this, but I haven’t seen any of Alexander Payne’s films since Election, so there’s always a chance. It’s just that all of his recent movies look like they’re about the most boring parts of being an adult, and I’m still trying to get excited about the idea that I am one.
- The Adventures of Tin-Tin - No one’s recommended it, I never read the books or watched the cartoons, and it didn’t make that many year-end lists, but there’s something about how clean and colorful and adventurous it looks that makes me feel like it will have all the fun that Spielberg left out of Indiana Jones and the Shitty Skull — sorry, I meant “Crystal” — Indiana Jones and the Shitty Crystal Skull.
My Actual Top 10 Films
- The Tree of Life - This is one of my favorite films of all-time, and it’s the only movie of the year that holds that distinction. There are rumors of a six-hour cut, as there always are for Terrence Malick movies, and, as always, I hope to god they’re true. Show me another movie that has as wide a scope, as beautiful an eye, and as honest an exploration, and I’ll be amazed.
- Martha Marcy May Marlene - When I started writing up my personal remarks for this list, this movie was at #7, but the more I thought about it the more I started to realize how great and unique of an experience it had been. It was an uphill battle for me to go see this movie. The title was just … ugh. I could never get it right in conversation just like when Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out and I kept calling it Spotless Sunshine Mind … Eternal?, but with enough recommendations and an afternoon where I felt like catching a matinee my fate was sealed. And I’m lucky I did, because it’s one of the most subtly ambitious and finely crafted films of the year. It might not knock you on your ass when you exit the theater, but it’ll stick with you for months.
- Drive - Most quiet hero types are just psychopaths whose story gets told from a generous perspective. Drive takes off the white gloves and shows you what’s really going on. At the beginning, you’re not quite sure how the Driver ended up leading such a solitary life and you’re glad when he let’s someone in, but by the end, you realize he had good reason to keep to himself, and find yourself wondering how many stories like this dot his past.
- The Artist - A great film of the sort that I’d guess everyone can agree on. I’m a legit fan of silent film so the experience of getting to see one of this caliber new in the theater was a thrill. It’s meticulous, sincere, and, despite all its influences, somehow, original.
- Meek’s Cutoff - One of the smallest stories of the year; if I hadn’t read the plot summary in advance, I may have missed that it had anything to do with the Oregon Trail. As the group of pioneers tries to find their way to safety in the unmapped territories of America with only the bare essentials, the film progresses with the bare essentials of story. These people are lost, and there’s not that much more to their situation, and there doesn’t need to be. It’s a cold cold look at the restrained panic that exists when everything is truly on the line.
- Attack the Block - If I was in high school, this would have been a movie that temporarily defined my life. I would have left the theater howling, bought the soundtrack at Planet Music, quoted the movie twenty times a day, and all my friends would have done the same. As an adult, I still had a ton of fun, but in a year where Super 8 churned up a ton of press for the return of the kids-save-the-world genre, this was the movie that truly took me back, and not by trying to copy and paste and recapture previously bottled magic, but by pushing forward with the genuine energy of youth.
- Fright Night - Easily the most fun I had in a theater this year. I don’t think too many people saw it, but its mix of genuine scares, for real laughs, and legitimately surprising action scenes and plot twists made it one I’m not embarrassed to put on my list. If you missed it, invite a couple of friends over, pop some corn, and have a blast. (I feel like I just wrote a review for USA Today)
- Beginners - I’m not entirely sure that Raphael didn’t write this movie. The only reason I can think of that keeps me from buying into my little conspiracy theory is that it lost a little steam towards the end and Raphael’s great at endings.
- Contagion - I wish I’d seen this when everyone else saw it, because I liked it, but I’m not sure why I liked it, and I imagine other could have helped me figure that out. Maybe it’s that the film was so different than what the trailer led me to believe. I mean, there were scenes that I thought were going to be the climax of the whole thing that happened in the first five minutes, which almost never happens, and left me way more open to the rest of it than I otherwise would have been.
- Moneyball - I didn’t really want this in my Top 10. Like, even now, while you’re reading this, I’m probably still considering watching another movie and then replacing this entry. It was a solid movie with no flaws that jump to mind outside of the one Ben Joseph nailed to the wall, but it also failed to leave much of an impact. The kind of movie you watch and say, “That was really well done … … … Hey! Remember that trailer for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Wanna talk about that instead!?”
