2010 IN REVIEW!

No diagnostics, no common trends, just a personal journey through my viewings. Here's the 2010 list(s) and grouchy comment I submitted for Matt Ravier's annual Sydney Film Critics poll.

BEST RELEASED:

1. Fantastic Mr Fox
2. A Prophet (Un Prophete)
3. Inception
4. The Social Network
5. Father Of My Children
6. The White Ribbon
7. Buried
8. Blue Valentine
9. The Other Guys
10. La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet

UNRELEASED:

1. Alamar
2. Meek's Cutoff
3. Compline (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA)
4. Leap Year
5. Another Year
6. Wild Grass
7. Carlos
8. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
9. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
10. Let Each One Go Where He May

There was a distinct lack of Australian theatrical releases this year that truly reminded me of why I fell in love with film in the first place. With so little artistry, ambition, and pleasure on offer in mainstream and arthouse releases alike, watching the human subjects of Frederick Wiseman's La Danse almost made me wanna tear up my imaginary Movie Lover card and regularly invest my funds in the ballet instead. Then again, a list of the year’s best Australian theatrical releases is hardly any kind of definitive representation of what’s truly exciting in cinema today. As with every other year in film, the real heroes of 2010 are the valiant folk – programmers, journalists, bloggers, etc – who ventured outside their comfort zone to deliver a semblance of that representation to filmgoers; not the armchair critics whinging that it was a lousy year for movies based on their multiplex viewings.

AWARDS FOR THE YEAR IN FILM!

Best rom-com: Wild Grass

Probably the only PG-rated French trifle in which the aging protagonist fantasises about brutalising scantily-clad teen girls. Resnais has either retained his iconoclasm at 86, gone hopelessly senile, or both; whatever the case, his latest candy-coloured opus, in its indelible melange of cutesy cliché (adorable kids, May/December pairings), creepy pathology, and other bouts of inexplicable weirdness (that ending!!!) is one of the truest cinematic portraits

of obsessive love and its myriad textures.

Best scene in an otherwise lousy movie: Plaster mask, Somewhere

Sofia Coppola’s latest exercise in wheel-spinning amount to little more than a torpid series of vignettes that hammer home the same point about its protagonist’s ennui with crass metaphors, as well as outlining how less is often less. But occasionally, there’s a stray moment that’ll capture that ennui with genuine acuity, best exemplified by the scene in which Johnny Marco's (Stephen Dorff) face is coated in a plaster mould that he has to let set for a while. The scene is little more than a slow zoom into his plaster-covered face, scored only to the rhythm of his inhaling/exhaling through his nostrils. The shot’s held long enough that the thought of this vacuous celebrity being alone with his thoughts (and lack thereof) is almost terrifying, and enough to built some momentary empathy. Then it’s back to a tired rehash of Lost in Translation with one of the most staggeringly lame final scenes in the history of all time.

Best acting that’ll never be recognised by the Academy: Jerry O’Connell, Piranha

I didn’t see this in 3D at the movies, so I missed out on the luminous sensations of spring breaker puke and severed penises and whatnot. But in any medium, Jerry O’Connell’s sublimely obnoxious turn as a fratboy pornographer is a joy to behold. Hunched over, screaming his slimeball dialogue to the point of hoarseness, with his red rubbery punchable face filmed in mocking closeup, O’Connell plays his character to a loathsome hilt, constantly sentient of the fact that the paying audience want to see him gruesomely die. And he does… twice!

Most underrated overrated movie: Inception

No, the dreams don't resemble dreams, but the implicit argument is that being absorbed in no-frills storytelling offers a kind of liminal state of its own. I can buy that. It's hardly the 'new 2001', nor is it a shallow puzzle... but it's great fun and very heartfelt in its own dorky, shorthanded way. Let's find some middle-ground here, guys.

Worst film of 2010: Love & Other Drugs

Just a giant, gaping black hole of grating smugness & phoniness, with corporate endorsement as the rotten cherry on top of the steaming shit sundae. It's a film whose complete reliance on the worst cliches of sex comedies, romcoms and disease-of-the-week weepies is abrasive and unpleasant enough to make one wish for one of the later reels of The Human Centipede slipped in for some relief. I haven't loved any 2010 release as much as I hated this one. Congrats, Edward Zwick!

BEST OLDER FILMS SEEN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2010

1. Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

2. Dillinger is Dead (Marco Ferreri, 1969)

3. Fury (Fritz Lang, 1936)

4. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)

5. La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001)

6. He Who Gets Slapped (Sjostrom, 1924)

7. To Parfisal (Bruce Baillie, 1963)

8. Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958)

9. Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, 1979)

10. Hausu (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977

I didn't want to end up with two Criterion releases at the top of the list, as if to confirm their monopoly on all that is great about the moving image... but what the hell. McCarey's masterpiece more than lived up to expectations as the most plaintive and wrenching depiction of ageing ever put on film. And reports of the singularity Dillinger is Dead were not exaggerated. I can't think of another film that so cannily encapsulates the absurdity of life itself - and more specifically, the fascination that meaningless process holds for the individual in the face of such absurdity. Kind of like the flipside to McCarey's film; it remains truthful despite neglecting to portray a single emotion or character behaviour that is credible in any conventional sense.

RU's: 23rd Psalm Branch (Brakhage), California Split (Altman), The Land of Silence and Darkness (Herzog), Street of Shame (Mizoguchi), The Verdict (Lumet), A Real Young Girl (Breillat), Side Street (A. Mann), Hospital (Wiseman), Welfare (Wiseman), The French Connection II (Frankenheimer), A Day in the Country (Renoir), Pure Shit (Deling)

Prosperity for 2011!