Desert Island CD

Because last year's Desert Island DVD list was such a big smash Castor from Anomalous Material has devised a new list in which we pick 12 songs that we would take with us on a desert island and they all need to be from movie soundtracks. So, in no particular order:

1. Nine Inc Nails - Dead Souls (The Crow)



I think the Crow is a great movie from Alex Proyas and Nine Inch Nails are one of my favourite bands. The band's cover of the Joy Division song is what every cover should be: a faithful interpretation of the original while an update by the new band. Long before The Social Network Trent Reznor was already becoming a VIP soundtrack artist.

2. Elvis Costello - She (Notting Hill)



Costello is one of my favourite vocalists and although I love everything from his snotty early punk days to his transformation into country and pop and everything else under the musical rainbow I don't think he's ever let his silky smooth vocals soar over a song quite like they do on this one.

3. Trisha Yearwood - HowDo I Live(Con Air)



Funny, Con Air was on my Desert Island DVD list as well and maybe this song has something to do with that. Usually not a fan of pop country, there's something about this song that sets the tone for the whole movie, making it more human and grounded than usual big budget action vehicles. When Nic Cage meets his daughter for the first time at the end and hands her the dirty pink bunny while this song plays my heart skips a beat every time.

4. R. Kelly - I Believe I Can Fly (Space Jam)



There was a time, circa grade 6 or 7 where, when I wasn't playing basketball with friends I was wathing Space Jam and when I wasn't watching Space Jam I was listening to the Space Jam soundtrack and it was this song that always struck me the most. I love how it builds to the huge emotional payoff at the end.

5. Another Day (Rent)



I love musicals and Rent is my favourite and this song just embodies everything I love about it.

6. Michael Bolton - Go The Distance (Hercules)



There are two Disney songs I love and this is one of them. Just such a lovely song.

7. Part of Your Wold (The Little Mermaid)



Here's the other one

8. Come What May (Moulin Rouge)



Just another one of those wonderful songs that makes a good musical into a great one.

9. Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You (The Bodyguard)



The ultimate diva sings the ultimate ballad

10. Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Philidelphia (Philidelphia)



Few movies have as great an opening credit montage as Philidelpia and that is in part due to Springsteen's heart wrenching ballad. His song from The Wrestler could just as easily have been included but I went for the more ionic one. I just wouldn't want to live the rest of my life without The Boss

11. Josh Groban - Belive (The Polar Express)



Another soaring ballad but another one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite movies. Would come in handy come Christmas time as well.

12. Train - Ordinary (Spider-Man 2)



I guess I need one rock song to offset all the schmaltz

The Adjustment Bureau ( 4 out of 5)

Rumor has it that when the original Young Turks of the Cashiers du Cinema gathered years after the fact for a round table discussion one of the topics was with regards to how they had argued so hard towards the director as the artist of his own work that when he was finally given artistic freedom, he didn’t know what to do with it.

That is, in one way or another, the logic behind the Adjustment Bureau as explained by Terrence Stamp’s Thompson in one of those film stealing monologue scenes. It’s that free will is just an illusion. Sure we can chose what tie to wear and what tooth paste to use, but give a person real power over themselves and we get the Dark Ages or World Wars. Thus there is a Chairman who has a plan devised for everyone and when we step off course, he sends his men to give us all a nudge back into fulfilling the destiny that was set out for us.


That’s the story told anyway in the new film of the same name which places Matt Damon and Emily Blunt into, what is essentially an old fashioned melodrama with the ideas surrounding them loosely based on a Phillip K. Dick short story that, just possibly, Alex Proyas also had in mind when he dreamed up his masterpiece Dark City. It’s the foregrounding of this romance that essentially holds the movie together, giving it human momentum within a story that hasn’t been given half as much though by its writer/director George Nolfi as say was given to the aforementioned Dark City or even Inception for that matter, but then again, the old adage still stands: love conquers all.

Damon plays David Norris, a former bad boy turned senate hopeful in New York who looks poised to win until a picture of some former college hijinks is put into print and Norris loses. In the bathroom, before his speech on election night he meets Elise (Blunt) and immediately establishes a connection until she is chased away, no name or number having been given, by a pair of guards looking for her for crashing a wedding upstairs.

Norris, smitten and frustrated, manages a speech that night that is honest and compelling and looks like it will set him on course for a win come next term. Meanwhile, on a bus to his new job, he meets up with Elise and they manage to exchange numbers. However, this wasn’t the plan for Norris who, upon arrival to the office, finds men in suits erasing memories from his co-workers. They give chase but are inescapable. Their hats, we are later told, allow them the power to go through doors and be teleported around the city like magic. It’s a neat trick that doesn’t get much more logical an explanation than this.

Norris is told of this mysterious Chairman and this divine plan that has been written for everyone and is mapped out in convenient animated books which, despite their power, look less impressive and versatile than Ipads. Apparently God hasn’t caught up with the times. But now, reeling myself back in, I’ve gone and made an important assumption that the film wisely doesn’t. These men don’t stand in for angels nor the Chairman for God, although the parallels are there: we know this Chairman, we are told, by many different names and have met him but never know as he appears in a different form to everyone.

The thing is, Norris was never meant to meet Elise and her presence, if a relationship is allowed to develop, will throw both of their destinies off course and will ultimately, if Thompson is to be believed, ruin both of them. Therefore, the agents follow Norris, “nudging” him every once in a while in order to keep him on the fast track to greatness and away from Elise. The logic here though is a bit murky: if the agents need to keep nudging Norris back on track, aren’t they changing also, by doing so, the destinies of those around them, in a Butterfly Effect-like manner, or are there other agents who need to come in and nudge everyone else back on course after an initial nudge? That must require a lot of man power. Maybe in the sequel we can go backstage at the Bureau and see the Chairman going through the recruitment process.

The film is wise in that it doesn’t explicitly draw a religious parallel, which would ultimately ground it in some sort of reality and make it into something it isn’t, although it does suggest a certain spiritual subtext by which Nolfi, on several occasions, films Damon in long shot amidst beautiful, sprawling backgrounds which were, depending on how you look at it, either the design of human artistry or part of an overall destiny in which one small man is passing through.

And then the story ultimately becomes a romantic thriller in which Norris, with the help of one optimistic agent played by Anthony Mackie, tries to avert the agents, who aren’t, in one of the films many little nice touches, so much bad guys as simply men doing their job, and get back to Elise, even if it means changing the course of his entire life. It’s a nice premise for which Damon and Blunt can cast a likable couple that we generally hope find each other and features a world in which chases are handled by foot and not computers and are filmed in long takes and edited with logic not a blender.

And that’s what you get for your money. Here’s a film that is well acted and made and spreads a little bit of logic in with a little bit of illogic. It doesn’t have the sweep of say Inception, but unlike that film is does have an emotional drive towards some sort of foreseeable end point, which makes it not nearly as compelling but engaging for its own simple, earnest reasons. It won’t provide any food for thought that will justifiably leave anyone discussing it several weeks from now but then again, neither did Inception.

I'll Probably Eat Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of My Falling Out with the Movie Business (Part 4)

Read Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

So X's three week vacation was over and I was excited to start on some sort of regular daily routine. I won't go into regular detail on everything I did during the day for fear of stretching out this series of posts into infinity but what a normal day looked like was thus: come in, get my lap top set up, check e mail, create a daily list of things to get done with X, make phone calls until around 10:00 am (by which time it is closing time for most foreign territories that fit into that time zone) and then go about other daily tasks such as creating e-blasts (a mass e mail sent to all the distributors in a certain territory to announce either the availability of a title or an upcoming screening at a local film festival), going over deals, and other such things. It wasn't an exciting routine although there always seemed to be something to do and even though we went from 9:00 am till 6:30 pm (which, at $400 a week was less than minimum wage), the day usually went quick.

There are three main tasks that I had was specifically involved with during this time that I was involved in and that I will break down separately: 1) prepping for TIFF 2) penetrating the TV market and 3) prepping a delivery to Australia.

TIFF, although one of the world's biggest film festivals, isn't a major film market for the small guys. One of the nice things about TIFF is that it continues to maintain it's image as the public's film festival which is more about appreciating movies than making deals. That's not to say that deals aren't made there, because they are but it's not as formal as say Cannes or Berlin and it's usually only the big players who carry any weight at TIFF (since it's mostly the big movies that get played there). If you think about AFM or Cannes, sales companies will go there, set up a booth, display their promotional material and hand out screeners to interested buyers (which is what my phone calls were following up on). You won't see this going on at TIFF (it happens but mostly in hotel rooms and lobbys) and TIFF mainly attracts the likes of the Entertainment Ones or The Weinstein Companys; the big guys with money to throw around. Cannes however, because it is mostly all about business will attract all kinds of small and independent companies, like ours, trying to sell all kinds of films.

Therefore, TIFF wasn't as high on our radar as the other major markets were (Cannes, AFM and Berlin, plus Mipcom, which is a TV festival held in Cannes in October). That didn't mean there still wasn't prepping to do as X would be around, going to parties, meeting people, getting tips on what is looking good and seeing if there is anything worth acquiring (X's plan, for the record, was to have three new titles to reveal at Cannes. If his website is correct, he has, since, September, acquired just 1 new title). The problem with this company is that what X basically acquired was the leftovers that no one else wanted. Any company worth their salt already has their claim to the best stuff well in advance of the festivals (although I did spend a brief stint on the phone trying to find out the availability of Fubar 2).

However, one of my jobs was to download a list of all the films that were playing and check them on IMDBpro to see if they were available and if not who had gotten the sales rights and/or what countries did they already have distribution with. The reason for this was twofold. On one hand, it gave X a good idea of what films were available, in which case he would investigate whether or not they were worth checking out as well as, if we saw that one company was distributing such a film and we had one just like it, that, in sales, is what we call an angle.

The other TIFF assignment was to download the patron list to see who was attending, mark off who looked like someone we should talk to and e mail them to try and set up a meetings as well as RSVP to parties and other administrative duties.

TV was where X wanted to be. It was his belief that theatre and video were dying breeds and therefore ondemand and PayTV was where the future was and he wanted a piece of that pie (as well, I think he knew that the majority of the titles we backed were not worth the time to put into theaters and would only appeal to niche audiences on video). Therefore, having not much experience with TV, he left it up to me to dig deep into the TV market, find out who's who and what's what and try to get these movies in front of the people who could get them broadcast. We started with the States with two titles that were available there, although, to be fair, I can't imagine any big channel in the U.S. ever playing either of them. One being sci-fi movie, I targeted sci-fi channels as well as family channels for the other one as it was my opinion that it would play best as a harmless vanilla comedy that wouldn't offend anyone.

But this wasn't good enough for X. He wanted the HBO's, the Turners, the Star TVs, the big, global broadcasters. I had no faith in this exercise but it got me through the day. I called up HBO, many times trying to get through to someone in charge of acquisitions however, anyone who has ever called HBO without a direct name and/or number, knows it's next to impossible to get passed the switchboard. However, I did manage to track down the names and numbers of the acquisitions people for Turner, The Hallmark Movie Channel, as well as some little family channel and AMC. I also managed to set up phone interviews with AMC and Starz (the former of which didn't want the movie but wanted to tell us what they would like to see if we ever came across it and the latter had already seen the movie several years ago and passed on it then but wanted to have the same kind of conversation). It was progress.

As one last little note on this before moving on, I also did manage to get a screener sent to the Spiritual Cinema Circle which is a club that sends out monthly DVDs to members of movies that deal with Spiritual (not religious) subject matter and since our little movie involved God and the ghost of George Burns, I thought, why not? I never stuck around long enough to find out the outcome of any of these connections.

The most interesting thing I did during the remainder of August and the beginning of September was to hunt down all the materials for a delivery. The good news, was that the delivery was to Australia, an English speaking country (which eased the pressure a little) but the bad news is is that the delivery date was fast approaching and we didn't have all the materials. A delivery, in brief, is when you have sold a movie and you are sending the distributors all the materials it will take for them to format the film's release to their region. This includes, but is not limited to, the 5.1 sound, the M&E, a Dialogue Transcript, the Billing Block, the HD Master, the DVD Bonus features (if applicable), the Textless Backgrounds, etc.

Let me do a quick breakdown: 5.1 speaks for itself; M&E stands for "music and effects" which is exactly that, but without the inclusion of the dialogue (foreign countries need this for dubbing); a dialogue transcript is a print-out of all the dialogue and at what time it occurs in the film (which is needed for creating subtitles); the Billing Block is what you see on the bottom of posters where all the names of who did what are listed, HD Master I assume speaks for itself, as does DVD bonus features; Textless Background is the entire film without any text inserts. This is needed because, if a film starts with an image and over top reads: "Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away..." that will need to be translated into the country's language and put back in into the finished film.

We had exactly none of this. The problem was that the filmmakers behind the film were young first-timers who didn't really know what they were doing and since their movie had more or less made them all the money it was going to, they didn't really seem to care anymore. They had said that they didn't have any of the materials and put us in touch with a nice and helpful man named Oliver at Roadside Attractions in LA who were looking after the North American DVD release. Oliver gave us one-time access to the master at Fotokem so that we could make a copy of it but said that all of the other materials he had sent back to the filmmakers on burned DVDs. Despite this, they still claimed that didn't have it and didn't know anything about it. It was a brutal back and forth that was about the equivalent of clubbing seals. After Oliver had kindly, despite his business, offered to burn us what he had (the 5.1 and bonus features), the filmmakers decided they did have that after all and sent it to us.

Fine, now what about the M&E (which, once again, wasn't as important due to it being sent to an English speaking country, but would still be needed in the future) and Dialogue Transcript? The filmmakers sent me on another wild goose chase to another company in New York who did not have a dialogue transcript but directed me to another man in another company who might, as he had created the Spanish subtitles for the DVD. He didn't exactly have a complete dialogue transcript but he sent us his notes anyway and they would do for now. At this point we also had 4 people who were telling me that no M&E had ever been created. Fine enough, we'd do it and charge the filmmakers.

This task was done. So was I...

To Be Continued...The Conclusion Awaits

The King Spoke and He Said: The Oscars Kind of Sucked This Year

• 2010 will be remembered as the year that nothing worth remembering happened at the Oscars.
• Anne Hathaway could very well be a great Oscar host with lots of life and energy (if she'd give up the oh my gosh I'm hosting the Oscars references), but what was with James Franco? He looked like that if he didn't go backstage and start cooking up a shot he was going to go into withdrawl.
• I think the Academy found their host next year in Kirk Douglas.
• It's sad that the most talked about thing this year was Melissa Leo dropping the F-bomb.
• There was a moment when Wally Pfister was accepting his award when he thanked Christopher Nolan for being his master and Nolan half smiled as if to say, "Yeah thanks even though it should be me up there."
• Apparently Ophrah talking about the human condition did nothing for Joel Cohen who decided he'd rather pick his ear than listen.
• Randy Newman has been nominated for Best Song 20 times and won twice which is kind of ironic because he essentially made a career out of writing the same song over and over again (to be fair, his songs were one of the things that kept the Princess and the Frog from being great). Out of four nominees, only the 127 Hours song had any personality at all. However, in his attempt to be "good TV" Newman did give one of the funniest and lightest speeches.
• Tom Hooper managed to make thanking his mom actually sound sweet and meaningful.
• I have no idea who this kid who won best short feature is, but he's certainly going places.
• Susanne Bier won an Oscar. This makes me happy. She's one of my favourite directors and doesn't get enough credit for what she does.
• You can tell Aaron Sorkin is a great writer. He gave the most literate and confident speech. He reminds me a bit of David Mamet.
• I desperately wanted the Social Network to win more awards just so there could be more hilarious cutaway shots of David Fincher looking completely unimpressed as people thanked him.
• Was it just me or were Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis really awkward to watch?
• The opening montage was so uninspired that I thought for a second I was watching Saturday Night Live
• The opening monologue wasn't much better. Where is Carrie Fischer when you need her?
• Billy Crystal managed to revive the show a little and a video was played of Bob Hope doing one of my favourite Oscar lines "Or as it's called at my house: passover," but this was awkwardly melded into a way to introduce Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law
• Speaking of: if there has to be 2 hosts, these 2 get my vote for next year.
• Since when have the honorary Oscar recipients ever been brought on stage and not allowed to make a speech?
• How did David O. Russell and Christian Bale work together without anyone getting hurt?
• I got 2 wrong this year and 3 wrong last year. I'm getting better

The King Will Speak at Tonight's Academy Awards

I write 2 Oscar posts. The one I am doing right now and the one I will write after the show. I personally don't see the need for any more than that because what makes the Oscars fun is the concept of the Oscars and what they represent, which is glamour and old Hollywood excess. It doesn't matter who wins. Winning an Oscar is about the equivalent of picking a name out of a hat (except foreign film). The voter need not see a single one of the nominated films to cast their ballot and they don't even need to be the one doing the voting. So, the awards are meaningless, which is why I don't dwell on them and don't get up in arms over Christopher Nolan not getting nominated or whether or not Toy Story 3 should be allowed to be nominated in Best Picture and Best Animation. Life's too short, let's just enjoy the ride and see how my ability to predict political voting is this year.

Best Foreign Film: This category is always up in the air and one I get wrong because A) I haven't seen all of the movies and B) the voters have to have seen all the movies. Regardless, I'll take my best guess and do what I did last year, going with the Golden Globe choice of Civilization because I think Susanne Bier is a brilliant filmmaker who doesn't get nearly the credit she is due in North America.

Best Animated Feature: The truly best film in this category will not win. Nothing has a shot over Toy Story 3, which made the most money in 2010 and tricked just about everyone into thinking it was a great movie due to 10 minutes at the end.
Who Should Win: The Illusionist
Who Will Win: Toy Story 3

Best Adapted Screenplay: I think this will be one of the categories where the true best will shine and may be one of the only awards, besides Original Score, that the Social Network will walk away with.
Who Should Win: The Social Network
Who Will Win: The Social Network

Best Original Screenplay: I always wonder what the Academy considers to be a good screenplay. Is it the dialogue, the structure, the characters? If it's dialogue and character than Inception doesn't have a chance, not it it does anyway. I actually have the insider advantage here as I covered the screenplay for The King's Speech about a year ago and indeed, it was very good. I wonder if I'll get a raise when it wins?
Who Should Win: The King's Speech
Who Will Win: The King's Speech

Best Director: The Golden Globe went to Fincher, the DGA went to Hooper; the DGA usually is the definitive word. If Hooper wins this one, and I think he will, The Social Network doesn't have a chance at best picture as it will probably also sweep the acting awards as well and Oscar generally doesn't argue with the DGA. Poor Aronofsky, his time will come eventually.
Who Should Win: David Fincher
Who Will Win: Tom Hooper

Best Supporting Actress: This is a tough one. I think we can strike out Jacki Weaver because Animal Kingdom doesn't have the push behind it that would lead to a win. Melissa Leo and Amy Adams could potentially split the vote and cancel each other out for The Fighter, leaving Helena Bonham Carter and Hailee Steinfeld. Oscar loves the British but Steinfeld should win for her scene alone in True Grit between herself and the crooked business man. Last year in the writing category I picked the actual best script and was wrong so I think I'll go with the obvious this year instead.
Who Should Win: Hailee Steinfeld
Who Will Win: Helena Bonham Carter

Best Supporting Actor: It's down to Christian Bale and Geoffry Rush. Oscar likes weight loss and weight gain but King, I think, is going for a sweep and Oscar almost always votes British so I will too.
Who Should Win: John Hawkes
Who Will Win: Geoffry Rush

Best Actress: I think this one is fairly obvious although I'm not so sure Portman truly was the best as she was just one part of Black Swan's whole. I found Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole to be far more engaging to Portman's "acting" in Black Swan. However, Oscar likes stars who put themselves through physical strain and Portman certainly did that, plus, Kidman gave one of those "quiet" performances that Christina Bale, at the Golden Globes, said no one really ever gets noticed for.Wouldn't it be fun if Oscar pulled a punch and let Anette Benning, who is just as deserving, have the win?
Who Should Win: Nicole Kidman or Anette Benning
Who Will Win: Natalie Portman

Best Actor: Let's continue to vote British.
Who Should Win: Jesse Eisenberg
Who Will Win: Colin Firth

Best Picture: Not much to say here. Once again, despite 10 nominees, just as it always was when there was 5, the race comes down to two. The Social Network was the best movie of the year for me, but the King's Speech is more of an Oscar movie and currently has much more momentum behind it. Plus, if Hooper and Firth win there's no chance for the Social Network to take it.
Who Should Win: The Social Network
Who Will Win: The King's Speech

One Minute Review: The Last Song (2.5 out of 5)

The Last Song is a perfectly serviceable Nicholas Sparks adaptation which is, more often than not, right around where Nicholas Sparks adaptations lay. It has the Sparks standbys: the budding romance between two unlikely lovers who start out on the wrong foot, the inevitable death of a key figure, and the trials and tribulations of maintaining a relationship between two people who's backgrounds are so wholly different and the pretty bow-tie that everything is always wrapped up in.

The thing is though, that Sparks is such a middle-of-the-road writer (doing about what he has to and not much more) that his work requires a director who can cut through the melodrama and provide the proper background against which it can soar. The Notebook (still the best Sparks adaptation) found the scope and breadth to provide exactly the right note on which the audience could invest in it. The Notebook was  thus less a Nicholas Sparks adaptation and more a romance in the classic Hollywood vein of a pedigree we rarely ever see anymore. Melodrama can be big but it can't be shameless. That's often where Sparks fails as he meanders aimlessly from one heart tug to the next.

The Last Song sits right in the middle: it's nice, kind of sweet, tugs on the heartstrings a little and then fades away. Maybe it's because the story revolves around a character who is infinitely less interesting than just about everyone around here. Maybe that's partly to blame on star Miley Cyrus who can do broad children's entertainment (for what it's worth) but struggles here with the nuance of involving drama. 

Faring better is Greg Kinnear, so warm and natural, conveying emotions without even so much as trying, as Cyrus' father who is the most emotionally involving thing in the movie until he's unfortunately secured into the role of script convenience in the third act. 

And then the movie ends, leaving one no better or worse from having seen it. A collection of episodes that don't really find the emotional pull to add up to anything substantial. If you want to think of it in relative terms: It's not as good as The Notebook or A Walk to Remember and nowhere near as awful as Nights in Rodanthe.

The Top 10 Movies of 2010

I'm with William Goldman who says there is is no such thing as the 10 best movies of the year, only the ten that the writer liked the best. It may be possible to argue for the best movies of the year but that would probably require that all the critics sat down and did a shot-by-shot analysis of ten of the same movies and spoke about things such as canted angles and split diopters and mise-en-scene and wide lenses and long lenses and long takes and deep focus and all those other vast technical things that make up filmic language and affect the way we see things, mostly unconsciously.

That's why I have named my list the Top 10 Movies of 2010. They aren't the best (I haven't seen every movie in 2010 so how could they be?), but rather the ones that moved me in some way the most because it is my belief that all art has the ability to move us in one of two ways: emotionally or intellectually (the best of which often does both) and that's what this list of films did.

The list however, isn't complete. I thought I could do better (which explains it's delay in arriving) but I've finally given up. As of this writing I still haven't seen The King's Speech, Somewhere, 127 Hours or Another Year. It is what it is.One of the film's is from 2009. Deal with it. It's my list. I saw it in 2010 and it deserves the recognition. Just to be fair, I've put it at number 10 if that makes the blow a little easier.

I'm also doing something a littler different this year. Instead of making a separate post for the worst films I'm just going to list them without explanation. Life's too short and it's hard coming up with ten different ways to say something sucked.

So, at long last, here is my 10 favourite films, but first, those honourable mentions that would have made the list were it not for those other 10 (some of them, of course, are from last year but were seen in 2010):

Sin Nombre, Whatever Works, Management, Shutter Island, Rudo Y Cursi, Hot Tub Time Machine, Away We Go, Summer Hours, Death at a Funeral, Everlasting Moments, Orphan, The Losers, Sugar, The Cove, The Messengers, In the Loop, Just Wright, You Don't Know Jack, Knight & Day, The Invention of Lying, Inception, Amreeka, Moon, Legend of the Guardians, Salt, The Karate Kid, 2012, Dinner for Schmucks, Flame & Citron, Bandslam, Taking Woodstock, Easy A, The Princess and the Frog, The Road, The Book of Eli, Pirate Radio, District 13: Ultimatum, Trucker, Morning Glory, Winter's Bone, Remember Me, The Trotsky, Public Speaking, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, She's Out of My League, Unstoppable, A Small Act.

10. Michael Jackson's This is It - Michael Jackson's This is It doesn't sound like a good idea on paper. It's a collection of footage shot before the death of the pop icon, rehearsing for his upcoming comeback tour. However, despite how excellent the music is and what a true professional Jackson was, what this document truly reflects is just how few gifted contemporaries Jackson had. In a day when songs sound more like they were spit out of computers with no human involvement and performers sing in concerts to tapes and put on spectacles to mask lack of talent, Jackson actually sang, on a stage, to music that can be reproduced entirely by real instruments, when his voice didn't have the power to reach the notes it needed he utilized back up singers and he knew his songs inside and out and just exactly how every one of them should be. This is It is thus a bittersweet farewell to one of pop music's last true talents.

9. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World - This film proved that if filmmaking is moving towards being nothing more than computer generated flashes of light and sound that it may as well still be funny and entertaining and involve characters that we like and want to go on the journey with. Chalk it up to the combination of Michael Cera's ever charming screen personality and Edgar Wright's frantic imagination and ability to squeeze visual comedy out of every crevice of the film. Wright, a director of excesses who, finally after three tries, has found a platform in order to let his tendencies soar as opposed to bog down a story, goes to great painstaking detail in order to create the actual feel of a graphic novel and video game, while still allowing enough room for the characters to shine through, even if the story does dive into repetition. You wouldn't want every movie to be like this, but you're glad this one is.
8. Chloe - Mistaken and written off by many as trash, Atom Egoyan's Chloe is another dark and intelligent exploration of the lives of people who are all, in some way, emotionally connected. Like Egoyan's other works, but more straight forward this time, Chloe starts out at a distance and than slowly zooms in in order to reveal relationships in a light in which they didn't appear before. Taking the shape of an erotic thriller but delivering a fascinating character study of sex and need and desire, Chloe is also one of the few films that takes sex seriously and deals with it in an intelligent and mature manner.

7. True Grit - True Grit is, I guess, the only straight genre film by the Coen Brothers and shows that the madcap duo can play by the rules just as well as they can bend them. Stripped back and adhering to the conventions of the traditional western (while also finding the language and humor of the book that was lost in the earlier John Wayne adaptation of the same name) the Cohen's prove what master storytellers they are, building a film by creating one great scene after another. True Grit is thus like a collection of short films that all run together. There's the scene with our young heroin haggling with a crooked business man, Rooster Cogburn's courtroom scene and so on, building up to a whole which is probably the entertainment of the year.

6. Hereafter - Another misunderstood film, this is an intelligent and compelling meditation on life and death that ends with the ultimate truth on the subject: that no one really knows. It involves three separate stories from around the world, who are connected by their encounters with death and who will all ultimately come into contact with one another. But the film, masterfully directed by Clint Eastwood, is not so much about story or plot as standing back and quietly meditating on how fragile life really is, how unexplainable the mysteries of the universe are and how little control we really have over the time we have here. The film doesn't claim it believes in a Heaven or not, but opens itself up to the possibility that there is, just maybe, something profound out there that just cannot be explained. Than again, maybe not.

5. It's Kind of a Funny Story - Ryan Fleck and Anne Boden make genre films that stand outside of genre conventions and instead present real character dramas. They've made one film about a drug addicted teacher, one about a foreign baseball player and now one about a kid who checks himself into the mental ward at a hospital. Despite what a plot outline would suggest, the film avoids all opportunity to make fun of the colourful people who populate the ward and instead focuses on their hero and his journey toward discovering that maybe life isn't as bad as he thinks it is as he is accompanied by another young girl and another (Zack Galafinakis in a brilliant dramatic turn) mysterious fellow who has closed off his baggage from the world. The film avoids every opportunity to become cutesy or preachy and instead just follows this boy up to a realization that is both nice and utterly realistic in its open-endedness.

4. Rabbit Hole - Like Hereafter, Rabbit Hole is another meditation on death and all the mysteries of the universe from a completely different angle. This one is a quite, stripped back drama about a family coping with the loss of their young son. One of them is distant and has emotionally removed herself from the world, finding group meetings a joke and scorning her mother (Diane Wiest stealing the show) for trying to relate to her and the other who is open and confused and resents how his wife is trying to erase their son as if he never existed. The film raises all the hard questions and delivers none of the easy answers as what begins as a simple drama slowly expands into questioning the entire nature of the universe.

3. Greenberg - There is a scene in which Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller in his best performance since Your Friends & Neighbours) steps gallantly into a swimming pool, stands at the edge, being filmed in a close up from the side of his face, nobly prepares to swim a length and then sputters, coughs and gags his way to the ladder on the other side of the pool. That scene essentially defines Greenberg whose most noble actions end up pathetic attempts to prove nothing in particular. And as hard as it is to like this pompous man who fails at life, spends his time writing complaining letter to large corporations, has just recovered from a mental breakdown and is now taking some time off to just do nothing, Stiller kind of has you admiring the guy at the same time. Maybe that's the genius of Noah Bambauch's film: it never quite let's you know how to feel about this guy who can't quite do anything right, especially the on-again off-again romance he develops with his brother's assistant, but is still kind of admirable in his dedication to doing nothing at all. Greenberg is so fascinating because he is everything you wish you could have been and also every reason why you didn't.

2. Black Swan - Black Swan is another character study in which director Darren Aronofsky follows a character unmercifully towards their own destruction as they try to reach for something that is just ever so slightly out of their human reach. This time it's a ballet dancer who has been set up with the nearly impossible task of taking the lead in a new version of Swan Lake. She's perfect for the role of the White Swan but is too meticulous and rigid for the part of the Black Swan and is slowly driven made in her attempt to unlock her personal hang-ups (parental, emotional, sexual) in order to unleash her inner black swan. Barbara Hershey, as her over bearing mother steals the show.

1. The Social Network - Here's a film that conveys a story that exists inside a paradox: the world's most popular social networking site was creating by a guy with next to no social skills whatsoever. The Social Network is thus a fascinating study of how one kid, so oblivious to the world around him, went on to create a phenomenon that has defined a generation and changed the way we relate to people and communicate with one another. The film is perfectly directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, who manages to create amazing dialogue that explains complex things in a way that is both compelling and yet can be understood by anyone watching. Like Fincher's last masterpiece Zodiac, The Social Network creates drama not through plot twists and turns but by piling mounds of information onto an exciting case. Jesse Eisenberg also deserves credit for his role as Matt Zuckerberg who gets to act the best scene in his career as Zuckerberg addresses a lawyer who he has been largely ignoring. As close to perfect as any other film this year.

The Bottom 10 Films of 2010:

Honourable Mentions: Valentine's Day, The Ugly Truth, Dead Snow, Ghosts of Girlfriend's Past, Franklyn, I Can do Bad All By Myself, Pandorum, The Final Destination, Sorority Row, Grown Ups, Couples Retreat, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Whiteout, Armored, Nine, The Spy Next Door, Legion, Daybreakers, The Bounty Hunter, Furry Vengeance, Going the Distance, Love and Other Drugs

10. The Lovely Bones
9. Twilight: Eclipse
8. Killers
7. Year One
6. Kick-Ass
5. The Other Guys
4. When in Rome
3. The Boondock Saints: All Saints Day
2. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
1. Sex and the City 2