'Toy Story 3' best film of 2010
The movies of 2010 thrilled us, chilled us and nearly killed us.
From Harry Potter's half-swan song to “Black Swan,” from deception to “Inception,” the year's films provided critics with more than enough ammunition to fire off a top 10 list.
Here's mine.
In the immortal words of Lucky Ned Pepper from “True Grit,” I don't varnish my opinion.
1. “Toy Story 3” — I realize the uncoolest thing a film critic can do is name a Disney animated comedy as the best film of the year. And a second sequel, at that.
Fire me.
When I reflect on all the magical, powerful moments I witnessed at the movies in 2010, I always come back to this one: the scene where Buzz, Woody and the rest of their toy friends face death. In the terrifying and touching moments before they drop into that giant incinerator, they make their unspoken peace with each other and with their fates.
I argued then, and I argue now, that this scene represents the single greatest galvanizing moment in the history of animated features, save for the shooting death of Bambi's mother in Disney's 1942 classic.
“Toy Story 3” laments with wistful melancholy the sure passage of time as a teenage Andy goes off to college and decides what to do with the toys he no longer needs or wants.
This is a bittersweet story all about growth, change and moving forward — even “death” (Bo Peep and other toys have passed, if you know what I mean).
Yet, the toys reinforce the belief we all had in adolescence that somehow, some way, our friends will always be there for us, and we will always be there for them.
That wonderfully adolescent premise worked for the first “Star Wars” trilogy. It worked for “Grease.”
And it still works here.
2. “Inception” — One of the most fiendish, diabolically engineered plots in cinema. It's one thing for a De Palma movie to show us a-dream-within-a-dream. Christopher Nolan gives us a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream and we can keep all four levels of reality perfectly straight!Best 007 movie ever made without James Bond. Plus, best ending of 2010.3. #8220;The Social Network#8221; #8212; David Fincher's fact-based drama is a work of social grand opera that whisks us step by step as enterprising friendship and trust turn into a maelstrom of suspicion, back-stabbing, finger-pointing, greed and lawsuits.
This is a marvelous piece of insightful entertainment accompanied by a symphony of words delivered like slugs from a machine gun fired off by wordsmith Aaron Sorkin.
4. #8220;The King's Speech#8221; #8212; If you're going to put a stage play on film, this is how to do it. Get wonderful actors who can kill you with a look of sadness. Slap a wide-angle lens on the camera for great in-depth close-ups. Find a perfect London apartment that looks as if a set designer spent centuries getting the spackled decor just right. And rewrite the script 50 times to make it sing like an aria worthy of Carnegie Hall.
Bonus points for excellent double-meaning in the title.
5. #8220;Winter's Bone#8221; #8212; Cinema can re-create whole worlds right under noses, and does just that when Debra Granik takes us into the secretive culture of the Ozark Mountains where a teen girl (Jennifer Lawrence) goes on a quest to find her missing father before the bank forecloses on their family home.
The flip-side of #8220;Deliverance#8221; where we experience the customs and mores of the mountain people, and they're not exactly romanticized.
6. #8220;The Kids Are All Right#8221; #8212; Lisa Cholodenko's comic and daring drama assumes the #8220;normalness#8221; of a lesbian couple (Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, both in excellent dramatic form) raising a family. The engaging conflict occurs when their children track down their sperm donor dad (Mark Ruffalo), and he falls for one of their moms. A thoughtful, frank and slightly sad story with Oscar-caliber performances.7. #8220;True Grit#8221; #8212; The Coen brothers improve upon a western classic. Finally, Ethan and Joel prove they can create a worthwhile remake after tackling one of #8220;The Ladykillers,#8221; with understandably mixed reactions.
8. #8220;Rabbit Hole#8221; #8212; A drama about the loss of a child doesn't make for merry entertainment during the holidays, but John Cameron Mitchell's spot-on exploration of death's effect on a once-happy couple (played with restrained melancholy by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart) at least shows viewers who've experienced recent losses that they're not alone, that their feelings are justified and there is a point when the intolerable pain diminishes. It helps that screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire is a great believer in forgiveness.
9. #8220;Shutter Island#8221; #8212; It may be more style than substance, but man, can that Martin Scorsese do wonders with a creepy and mysterious #8220;Twilight Zone#8221;-like tale, even one adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel.
The ending?
Didn't see that coming.10. #8220;Black Swan#8221; #8212; We witness a perfectionist ballerina go down a frightening, hallucinogenic path into madness as she fights to snare the main role in #8220;Swan Lake.#8221; Natalie Portman's disciplined, all-out portrait of the dancer already qualifies as one of the great performances of cinema.
Daring director Darren Aronofsky, known for his harsh and uncompromising visions, doesn't disappoint. The camera is practically a dancer itself, one choreographed to move with the characters as they bound about the stage.