Film critics get paid a lot of money to see a lot of movies. One recent year, Peter Travers, movie critic for Rolling Stone, wrote that he watched more than 400 theatrical releases in 365 days. (He gave four stars to all of them, undoubtedly.) Here at Bareknuckle Vengeance, we’re too busy fighting the man to watch every movie that comes out. I haven’t seen Biutiful, or 127 Hours, or the King’s Speech, so I hesitate to make a “Best of” or “Top Ten” list. And I’m not going to waste the space here talking about how great the Social Network or Black Swan is, although I liked them both a lot, because you’re more likely to have seen them. But here are a few movies you might have missed:
El Secreto de Sus Ojos - This Argentinian film won the best Foreign Language Academy Award last year, but it was only distributed in the U.S. in 2010. It tells the story of an investigator who failed to crack a murder case and revisits it decades later, along with a relationship with his superior that fizzled out along with the case. You don’t need to know anything about Argentinian politics to enjoy the snaking storyline or the questions that the film raises about memory and trauma, and you won’t come away learning much about Argentina either. But El Secreto de Sus Ojos satisfyingly works on two levels; the decisions and attitudes of the film’s various characters are stand-ins for the varying stances on “truth and reconciliation” that wrenchingly played out on a national level after Argentina emerged from a dirty war prosecuted against its own people by the ruling military junta.
Machete - This movie should never have worked. But it does, incredibly. Modeled after the same Grindhouse pulp movies as was Robert Rodriguez’s prior film Planet Terror, Machete succeeds where that one failed chiefly because of its more straight-forward plot and likeable characters. It wears its politics on its sleeve, but perhaps its didactism is tempered by the sheer awesome ridiculousness of its violence. Who would have thought that a movie with so many has-been actors crammed in to the supporting cast -- including Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan, Jeff Fahey and <cough cough> Robert DeNiro <cough cough> -- would have turned out so well?
Mother - The latest from Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho, I think the less that I say about Mother’s plot the better. The film is at its heart about the unswerving loyalty of a mother towards her son, but twists in the story beg questions of the audience about how we understand the borders between right and wrong, hero and criminal, victim and victimizer. All of the characters have complex motivations, and none find solutions to the problems in their lives that don’t affect those around them. Like El Secreto de Sus Ojos, I believe this is actually a 2009 film that was released in the states in 2010. If you have Netflix, you can stream the movie now.
El Secreto de Sus Ojos - This Argentinian film won the best Foreign Language Academy Award last year, but it was only distributed in the U.S. in 2010. It tells the story of an investigator who failed to crack a murder case and revisits it decades later, along with a relationship with his superior that fizzled out along with the case. You don’t need to know anything about Argentinian politics to enjoy the snaking storyline or the questions that the film raises about memory and trauma, and you won’t come away learning much about Argentina either. But El Secreto de Sus Ojos satisfyingly works on two levels; the decisions and attitudes of the film’s various characters are stand-ins for the varying stances on “truth and reconciliation” that wrenchingly played out on a national level after Argentina emerged from a dirty war prosecuted against its own people by the ruling military junta.
Machete - This movie should never have worked. But it does, incredibly. Modeled after the same Grindhouse pulp movies as was Robert Rodriguez’s prior film Planet Terror, Machete succeeds where that one failed chiefly because of its more straight-forward plot and likeable characters. It wears its politics on its sleeve, but perhaps its didactism is tempered by the sheer awesome ridiculousness of its violence. Who would have thought that a movie with so many has-been actors crammed in to the supporting cast -- including Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan, Jeff Fahey and <cough cough> Robert DeNiro <cough cough> -- would have turned out so well?
Mother - The latest from Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho, I think the less that I say about Mother’s plot the better. The film is at its heart about the unswerving loyalty of a mother towards her son, but twists in the story beg questions of the audience about how we understand the borders between right and wrong, hero and criminal, victim and victimizer. All of the characters have complex motivations, and none find solutions to the problems in their lives that don’t affect those around them. Like El Secreto de Sus Ojos, I believe this is actually a 2009 film that was released in the states in 2010. If you have Netflix, you can stream the movie now.
Machete vs. Mother: It would be a close fight.
Exit Through the Gift Shop - I’m still not sure if this is a fake documentary about a real artist, or a real documentary about a fake artist. But either way, I think the point of the film, which follows an amateur L.A. videographer turned street artist turned local art celebrity, is that there is no way to characterize art as “real” or “fake” anyways, that authenticity in modern art is constructed, and in turn, commodified. In that way, the film is similar to another documentary about art, My Kid Could Paint That. But whereas in that movie, the filmmakers studiously try to redraw the lines between fake and authentic even as they begin to crumble around their protagonist, Exit Through the Gift Shop is more carefree, letting the artists, whoever the hell they really are, have the last laugh.
The Kids Are Alright - Conservative L.A. Times columnist Jonah Goldberg recently celebrated the rise of the homosexual bourgeoisie as a sign of the decline of more radical leftist movements, and I think he would find much to like about The Kids Are Alright as emblematic of the phenomenon as he understands it. I guess that I too wrote about this, albeit from a more critical and speculative perspective, but I still like The Kids Are Alright, a movie about a lesbian couple with teenage children. Even if they all live in a magical crunchy granola bohemia-land, the characters are fleshed out and fallible in a refreshing way. The film is at turns hilarious and quite affecting.
If you added the budgets of these movies together, you might be halfway towards that of Inception. But I give you the Gyp the Blood guarantee: while these movies might be searching, messy, challenging, dark or violent, they are all well crafted, and certainly not boring. Instead of catching the next Transformers or Hangover sequel, you might think about watching these instead.
Bonus: Best Movies of 2009 That You Still Haven’t Seen: Moon and In the Loop - One is a comment on the commodification of human bodies written and directed by David Bowie’s son and consists of Sam Rockwell talking to himself for two hours. The other is the only movie about the 2003 invasion of Iraq to feature the dialog: “It'll be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.” “No, it won't. It'll be difficult-difficult-lemon-difficult.” Both are great. |
So, Bareknuckle readers, have you seen any of these? Any films that I missed?
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1 Response to The Best Movies of 2010 That I’ve Seen (and You Haven’t)
nice instead-of-best-of list; nice spread of genres. i might actually watch machete now -- for reasons beyond michelle rodriguez's abs ;)
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