The butter wouldn't melt, so I put it in the pie.

Seemingly, at the end of every year, I hear how poor a year it was at the movies.  From diminishing box office returns to a mere dearth of quality cinema, it's been a sad refrain that 2000-and-whatever was a down year for the industry.  And each year, at least from a critical standpoint (box office performance means little to someone who is spending his own money actually going to all these movies), I'm incredulous at the assertion.  When it comes time to make my year-end list(s), I often find myself sad at the exclusion of certain films because I can never find enough room for them and excited at the prospect of exploring the movies on other writers' 10-best lists that I hadn't had the pleasure (and opportunity) of seeing.

But as 2010 wound down, it seemed apparent that it actually was a weak year for movies and only slowly was I able to compile a list of movies I thought fit to include on such a list.  Make no mistake, the movies that did finally end up earning their way onto the list are all terrific films and I'll stand by all of them, but on the whole, I would describe the 2010 movie year as... "Meh."


Smarter people may be able to come up with a reason why this is the case (if it even is such) and year-end analyses provide the perfect venue for that kind discussion.  But as it were, these movies make my final list not because they've come to define something as arbitrary as a 365-day range on the calendar, but because they're still with me, lingering in slow motion.

So just to be a little different, here are my top 11 films of the past year, intercut with the added bonus of 10 of my favorite movie moments from 2010:

11. Made in Dagenham
(Nigel Cole)
Based on the real-life strike by the 187 female sewing machinists at the Ford plant in the London suburb of Dagenham, this film accomplishes the difficult act of preaching without being preachy.  A vibrant cast, including a collection of terrific female actors, from Geraldine James to Rosamund Pike to Miranda Richardson, led by the resilient Sally Hawkins and a rousing 60s soundtrack make it the feelgood movie of this list.

Emma Stone getting a pocketful of sunshine, proving she may be the next great screen comedienne, in Easy A.  She has also put herself squarely in the running to be my future ex-wife. (Though Tucci and Clarkson nearly steal this movie away from her.)

10. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
Can we stop saying every year that it's been such a great year for documentaries?  The documentary genre has never gone away and has always been fertile and vital, and that it continues to produce such varied work as the sobering Restrepo (which I loved) and the completely inebriated I'm Still Here (which I didn't), proves as much.  But the best is Banky's maybe-fact-maybe-not look into the world of street art.  As much a dissection on the process of being an artist as a meditation on the artistic process.  As entertaining a movie made this past year--real, fake, or in between.

The museum scene in Obselidia, which I would dare say is nearly on par with the planetarium scene in Manhattan.

9. The Kids Are All Right
(Lisa Cholodenko)
But too bad the adults have some serious fucking issues. The first thing people think of when this movie is mentioned is that it centers around a lesbian couple. The last thing you think about when watching this movie is that it centers around a lesbian couple. They are a typical American family, which is to say that it's dysfunctional and emotionally fractured. There are no grand pronouncements about what it is to be an alternative family, except that life, whether you're a parent or a child, is a slog and that it's only your loved ones who can get you through it.

Stephin Merritt arguing with Claudia Gonson at the piano about time signatures in Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields.  Movies about the craft (of anything) fascinate me.  I can only wish the film explored this particular aspect of their relationship a little more.

8. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
When Cleo, a remarkably self-possessed 11-year-old is dropped off by her mother at the hotel room of her movie star dad Johnny Marco, she doesn't realize she's being abandoned.  Their next few days and weeks together, where he takes her to skating practice, on a short working trip to Italy, and lounging about in the Chateau Marmont, is an extended vacation.  Only Johnny's been on a permanent vacation and it's his real life that has come to take him away.  Coppola is smart enough to criticize the lonely celebrity life without exactly condemning it.  It's also a tender love story between a father and daughter, both of whom may only now be realizing how much they need each other, if maybe just a moment too late.

Men gazing out the window, across the street at women they don't know, but certainly will (and somewhat to their demise) in Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl and Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger, helping prove the Godard sentiment that the history of cinema is the history of men looking at women.

7. True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen)

The Coen Brothers' remake of the classic John Wayne vehicle (adapted from the Charles Portis novel) doesn't necessarily possess anything new in regards to genre conventions.  It is the simple, straightforward story of a young girl who hires a bounty hunter to avenge her father's murder.  But it's also richly textured and superbly acted by all three leads, full of the acerbic wit and tight action we've come to expect from the Coens.

Hands down the sweetest first kiss of 2010.  The tall Rebecca stooping down to smooch the much shorter Eugene on their first date that didn't include their grandmothers, in Please Give.

6. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)
There are really only ever two love stories: falling in love and falling out of love.  That nearly all of our significant relationships will tell both stories is something of a tragic fact.  Cindy and Dean's is no different and the film weaves both stories together with such striking precision that it can't help but break your heart.  But a movie like this can't work without the two people at its center.  And I think it can now be said that both Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are two of the defining actors of their generation.

Getting mind-fucked in Get Him to the Greek.

5. Obselidia (Diane Bell)

This is the smallest and quietest movie on the list, but it has made it's share of noise across the festival circuit over the past year.  For me, it was the standout pic of the 2010 Florida Film Festival.  The acceleration of technological breakthroughs (both large and small) makes life seem to travel at a fevered clip.  Tomorrow's innovation is already in yesterday's trash heap.  That may be bad (as George, a librarian creating an encyclopedia of obsolete objects, thinks) or that may be good (as Sophie, his brand new friend, might suggest).  The answer, I imagine, is somewhere in the middle.  But as I type on my laptop, post on this blog, check my iPhone, and fast forward my DVR, this film is the best reminder that sometimes it's important to just slow down and enjoy the ride.

Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" as rendered by a drunk Greta Gerwig in Greenberg. 

4. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)

Pixar's ridiculous streak continues with the third installment of Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the gang.  Unlike some of the more recent Pixar features, which only made my also-ran or second-tier list of the year's best pics, this one finds the best balance between all its disparate elements, the sadness and loneliness, the thrills and the action, including...

A scene in a junkyard, with all the toys holding hands, facing the inevitable. That what is ostensibly a children's movie can broach a subject of such gravity is what elevates the Pixar releases from other standard Hollywood animation--think also Wall-E or the brilliant early montage in Up as well.

3. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik)

A 17-year-old's quest to find her missing father or else lose her house where she takes care of two young siblings and her incapacitated mother.  Set in the Ozarks, at first glance it may appear to be more a work of cultural anthropology than dramatic cinema, but that's only partly true.  Think of it as a displaced mob movie, but it flattens the operatic overtones and indulgences of that genre and centers on the everyday struggles of this kind of rural living and the strength of familial ties therein.  It also has two of the strongest performances in movies this year, by Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes.

A dance between friends.  Harry cheering up Hermione in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I.

2. The Social Network

(David Fincher)

The zeitgeist movie of 2010 is actually only tangentially about Facebook or social networking, really. Certainly, the specifics of how Facebook came into being and how it works are important to the minutiae of the movie, but it's a semi-Macguffin. It's more about things like ambition, friendship, honesty, even identity. Between Aaron Sorkin's rapid-fire dialogue and almost kaleidoscopic structure, Fincher's focused direction, and the propulsive Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score, this was also the tautest thriller of the year.

Fellas (Ladies, please look away), if the cinema of 2010 has taught us anything, it's that it gets us nowhere to go down on women.  Ask Dorff in Somewhere, the Cloonster in The American, and Stiller in Greenberg.  All of my future dates will now end in amicable handshakes.  Such is the everlasting legacy of the last twelve months in movies.  Which awkwardly leads into the title of our next movie...

1. Please Give (Nicole Holofcener)

Two sets of families: one a husband-and-wife team (with an acne-ridden teenage daughter) who buys furniture off the families of the recently deceased, hikes up the price, and sells them in their Manhattan store; the other, a pair of sisters tending (one significantly more than the other) to their ornery, 91-year-old grandmother, who the other family is waiting to die so they can expand their apartment.  All save for a couple of the characters in the movie, both central and periphery, are essentially jackasses.  Yet Holofcener and her actors make them likable.  And it's those observations about human nature that it hits right on the nose.  We're all some measured combination of asshole and sweetheart.  Each character is in some way working out that dichotomy, each trying to judge the worth of what they're doing for themselves versus what they're doing to and for others.  That the picture concerns neurotic New Yorkers who are acutely aware of their own flaws and shortcomings, it has garnered several comparisons to the work of Woody Allen, yet I think its combination of cynicism and warmth more reminds me of another master, Billy Wilder. (Also contains a superb supporting performance from Ann Guilbert, who I mention because she played the neighbor, Millie Helper, on my favorite TV show ever, "The Dick Van Dyke Show".)

Other movies I quite liked, but just fell out of the list:  the aforementioned Greenberg and The American.  Also,  Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture and Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Another art doc, The Art of the Steal.  Imports like Dogtooth and Mother also nearly made the list.  I adored I Am Love and was surprised at how much I enjoyed The Fighter.  So, alright, it was an okay year after all.