Best Films I Saw of 2010

It could be because I didn't go to the Chicago International Film Festival in 2010 but I had a lot more excitement about the movies I saw the previous year. There were 2009 movies I saw that didn't even make my top 13 list that I liked better than some of the movies on this list. Where has the good stuff been hiding? Is culture winding down? Maybe I just haven't seen enough Romanian or South Korean films this year. Though I have seen several. I guess last year the English language was represented by Julia and Avatar. This year Another Year is all by herself apart from the two political documentaries.

1. Lourdes (France)
2. A Prophet (France)
3. The Illusionist (France)
4. Another Year
5. Dogtooth (Greece)
6. I Am Love (Italy)
7. Ajami (Israel/Palestine)
8. Cell 211 (Spain)
9. Soul at Peace (Slovokia)
10. Inside Job and/or Casino Jack and the United States of Money

Honorable mentions: Black Swan, Blue Valentine, Brotherhood (Denmark), A Call Girl (Slovenia), Catfish, A Farewell to Hemingway (Bulgaria), Gordos (Spain), Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Suss (Germany), Jack Goes Boating, Mary and Max, Milk of Sorrow (Peru), The Other Irene (Romania), Prima Primavera (Hungary), Please Give, Rabbit Hole, Winter's Bone

And movies I quite liked that came out in 2010 but which I saw in 2009 but which didn't make my 2009 list: Fish Tank, Mother

And for being fun cinematic experiences: Inception, Tron: Legacy


What this list wants you to know is that you should be sad if you don't live in a city that has the Gene Siskel Film Center or the Music Box. (Unless you happen to live in New York or San Francisco or something in which case consider yourself a victim of my evil eye of envy.)

5 Worst Movies I Saw of 2010

Last night I finally saw an English language movie from 2010 that I thought could be worthy of the title "Best English Language Film of 2010" so I decided to reverse my previous decision of not making a top ten list this year. It's a month late but it shall follow. As a prelude, here are the five movies I hated the most this year:


1. The Secret in Their Eyes

I hope I will be able to say that this is the worst movie to be awarded Best Foreign Film in my lifetime. It's cheap. It's predictable. It insults your intelligence at every turn.

2. Casino Jack

Why is Kevin Spacey allowed to make movies?

3. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Why is Michael Douglas allowed to make movies?

4. Slaves in Their Bonds

I feel like the running theme here is: It's cheap and predictable and insults your intelligence at every turn.

5. Get Him to the Greek

Why is Jonah Hill allowed to make movies? All of these dumb comedies in recent years are such a putrid blend of poor taste and cheap sentiment.


Runner up:
Sex and the City 2,

Burlesque (Steve Antin, 2010)

All Cher's whores and all Cher's mens could not put this turkey together again. Cher was pretty fun to watch in this movie but the rest of the movie was pretty much a waste of time. The songs ran the gamut from bad to mediocre, generally. There wasn't really anything inspired about the movie except for the casting of Cher and Christina Aguilera. Christina Aguilera is magnetic but she acts at a level that is appropriate for a music video. I'd probably like her to make more movies but only if she studies acting hardcore before doing so. The guy who plays her boyfriend is unnaturally pretty and has a lovely form from head to toe but he's not that interesting. In fact, none of the characters are any more interesting than the story. I got the feeling the script was salvaged from some bin of unproduced screenplays from 1988. Financially strapped nightclub threatened by an unscrupulous real estate developer? Add a couple of hired goons and this becomes a flashback to USA UP ALL NIGHT. Rhonda Shear is on the line, Mr. Antin. D

happythankyoumoreplease (2011) / The Illusionist (2010)

happythankyoumoreplease reminded me of those indie comedies from the 90s that dealt with various creative New York people and their romantic goings on. It's about a short story writer who wants to be a novelist but who lacks the maturity for that and he finds a lost boy on the train who doesn't want to go back to foster care and ends up keeping him for a while. He also picks up this bartender named Mississippi and they amble towards couplehood while his best friend and his cousin (stepsister?) work through their own emotional hangups. It's not groundbreaking and its pretty slight and periodically very cheesy but it was generally entertaining. C


I found The Illusionist to be a film of real grace and a beauty that was at once complex and simple. An elderly French magician in what I assumed to be the late 50s travels around the UK working thankless jobs for an audience that has moved on from his old-fashioned amusements. A young girl attaches herself to him and she seems to believe he's a real magician who can supply her with all the things she desires. They live together. He tries to please her. Life goes on. There was this intense authenticity running through every scene and watching it was an experience of aching beauty and wonder. It's really amazing how affecting all the little details and background characters are. It's definitely the best animated film I've seen in the last year. Maybe in the last ten years. One of the best I've ever seen, I think. It's a little sad that Toy Story 3 is going to win this year just like whatever bogus nonsense beat The Secret of Kells last year. A

How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders & Dean DuBlois, 2010)

Another overpraised mainstream movie I didn't get, I suppose. I thought it was a big boring mess. The animation feels as wooden and lifeless as the inconsequential plot. It occurs to me that the one curious thing about the movie is there weren't any adult female characters. I didn't believe the relationship between the kid and the dragon so much. And I guess I didn't really care about any of it. C-

Red (Robert Schwentke, 2010)

It's poorly written and ridiculous. It's morally inconsistent and places too low a value on human life. Nonetheless, it manages to be engaging throughout. C-

Cell 211 / Celda 211 (Daniel Monzón, 2009, Spain)

Gosh, on the one hand it's a genre film. It's a movie about a prison riot and it features many of the expected tropes. Unlike A Prophet though, its production values are probably more in line with those of a made for television movie. Still, it really won me over. Beautiful Juan has left his pregnant wife at home so he can go in for a sort of orientation at this prison where he'll be working. He finds himself in the middle of a prison riot and poses as a prisoner. The prisoners are using a guard and three Basque prisoners as hostages. There are all sorts of moral and political considerations at play.
I sit here after watching the movie feeling really moved, pretty close to tears. It's interesting the way the film sets up the guards as civilized and the inmates as animals throughout most of the first twenty minutes. I mean, I was prepared for the inevitable reversal but I really found it to be done suavely. I appreciated the moral complexity, as most American mainstream films are about as morally complex as a tater tot. A-

2010 in Review at a Glance

I didn't do a great job of keeping up with this journal over the last year but here's my little summary of 2010.

There is, for various reasons, a bit of overlap between this year's and last year's lists. I have to say, the year doesn't seem so impressive to me. It seems like people's standards are going down. Que penses tu?


Loved it
Another Year
Dogtooth (Greece)
The Illusionist (France)
Lourdes (France)
A Prophet (France)



Really liked it
Ajami (Israel/Palestine)
Animal Kingdom
Black Swan
Blue Valentine
Brotherhood (Denmark)
A Call Girl (aka, A Slovenian Girl) (Slovenia)
Casino Jack and the United States of Money
Catfish
Cell 211 (Spain)
The Chaser (South Korea)
Cropsey
A Farewell to Hemingway (Bulgaria)
Fish Tank
Gordos (Spain)
Guidance (Sweden)
Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Suss (Germany)
I Am Love (Italy)
Inside Job
Jack Goes Boating
Mary and Max
Milk of Sorrow (Peru)
Mother (South Korea)
The Other Irene (Romania)
Prima Primavera (Hungary)
Please Give
Rabbit Hole
Soul at Peace (Slovakia)
Tron: Legacy 3D
Winter’s Bone



Liked it
The American
Easy A
Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Portugal)
Everyone Else (Germany)
The Girl Who Played with Fire (Sweden)
Harry Brown
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
Love and Other Drugs
Micmacs (France)
Red Riding: 1974
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
The Secret of Kells
The Social Network
Storm (Germany)
Shutter Island
Tangled
Unstoppable
Vision: The Life of Hildegard von Bingen (Germany)
Wild Grass (France)
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger



It was okay
127 Hours
Bluebeard (France)
Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Collectress (Lithuania)
December Heat (Estonia)
Despicable Me
Eyes Wide Open (Israel)
The Fighter
The Ghost Writer
Hadewijch (France)
How to Train Your Dragon
I Love You Phillip Morris
I’m Still Here
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Kick-Ass
Knight & Day
Megamind
Salt
Somewhere
Sweetgrass
The Tourist
Zero (Poland)



Blah
Chameleon (Hungary)
Date Night
Disengagement (France/Israel)
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Green Zone
House of Boys (Luxembourg)
The Killer Inside Me
The King’s Speech
The Last Station
The Misfortunates (Belgium)
Monsters
Never Let Me Go
RED
Restrepo
Soul Kitchen (Germany)
The Town
True Grit
Whiskey with Vodka (Germany)
The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner (Bulgaria)



Didn’t like it
Alice in Wonderland
Around a Small Mountain (France)
The Bounty Hunter
Burlesque
Enter the Void
Get Him to the Greek (or did I HATE it?)
Leaves of Grass
Let Me In
Sex and the City 2
Toy Story 3



Hated it
Casino Jack (and the united states of kevin spacey)
The Secret in Their Eyes (Argentina/Hell)
Slaves in Their Bonds (Greece/Hades)
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Wall Street/Hollywood)

Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2010)

Sweetgrass is a documentary about a sheep ranch in Montana. From the 19th century until about 2003, if I'm remembering correctly, ranchers would take their livestock to graze in the mountains during the summer. The film starts off with the most enchanting, beguiling, and sometimes gently disturbing series of episodes in which the sheep are the central characters. The people almost seem like machines and there's something uncannily reminiscent of a Holocaust film in some way. I thought that might be me reading something into it because I just spent a semester contemplating the Holocaust but my boyfriend said he was thinking the same thing. As the film progresses the perspective gradually shifts to the men of the ranch. This is done pretty craftily but I have to say that the film kind of lost me by the time this shift was complete. Part of me this morning, the morning after, wonders if it might have hit kind of close to home since those are the sort of unintelligible, emotionally immature salt of the earth types that to some extent populated my early years. I kind of wish the filmmakers had included less footage of the guy's lunatic rampages. I think it crosses the boundary from pathos to pathetic and that's unfortunate because if the characters didn't devolve into such infantile wretches there might have been more weight to the yearning towards the comfort of modernity that seemed to propel their discontent. I mean, I guess it's sort of a real life version of that Marilyn Monroe film, The Misfits inasmuch as it's about people who have been passed by by the world's progress. It's really sad in this case because what's modern is likely much more barbaric than the primitive. I'm happy this wasn't any sort of dumbed down IMAX nonsense like March of the Penguins or something but I guess I was hoping for something more. Or less. C+

Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell, 2010)

Talk about a tough sell. I was initially thrilled about Rabbit Hole because I love John Cameron Mitchell's two previous films, Shortbus and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Then I heard about the subject matter and got nervous. It could have gone terribly wrong but I think it went mostly right.

I've seen this film dismissed as "grief porn." My first problem with this is that it implies that movies about grief are as hollow, perverse, and pandering as "torture porn" or actual pornography and this is not something I think is even true in bad movies about grief. Certainly there is an element in exploitation in many of the movies about grief that have popped up in recent years, particularly since In the Bedroom, and that this charge might even be leveled against a pretty good film like Ordinary People. Whatever. I personally feel that all but the cheapest of these films are valuable because they provide the purifying vicarious experience that the word "catharsis" was pretty much born to represent. I also feel though that this isn't one of the cheaper films so the term is empty regardless.

I found the picture of grief presented in this film honest enough. The performances are great. Sometimes Diane Wiest reminded me of Brenda Blethyn's somewhat campy turn in Lovely & Amazing but I liked that thing so it worked for me. Anyway, I also found her performance reminiscent of the role(s) she played in Synecdoche, NY. I guess there's something about this movie that felt like a revision of Revolutionary Road but I think it's less crass than that film. The performances are great. Everybody knows that by now. What I loved about this movie was how gently it evoked an authentic experience of grief. I don't agree with critics who have suggested that this film offers no light to the viewer. I kind of feel that anyone who feels that way has never really experienced that sort of loss. I will say that some of the plotting felt a little off, particularly some of the details of the story involving Sandra Oh. B+/A-

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich , 2010)

Toy Story 3 is one of those movies about which I feel so at odds with the prevailing opinion about (even among my friends) that I start to psychoanalyze myself as a result. I thought this movie was at least as dull as the others. I found a couple of the toys cute and I liked the girl and thought the movie would have been more interesting if she had been closer to the center of it. I thought the ending was unforgivable schmaltz and I thought the plotting seemed almost color-by-numbers. I guess one thing that's always bothered me about this franchise is its aggressive lowbrow Americana. It's nostalgia and kitsch and the exultation of empty consumerism and smug bourgeois mediocrity. Whenever people talk about these movies I always think to myself, "Is this really how you want to program your children?" Fortunately, I've grown polite in my old age and I've learned to use my alienation as a springboard to the comforts of endless introspection.
As my best friend shockingly took to the defense of this film, I turned toward introspection. It occurred to me that I didn't care for any of these toys as a child. I got to thinking about how I didn't have many toys as a child, how we grew up in the middle of nowhere and how playtime meant going out and making believe in fields and forests or communing with horses, barn cats, and other animal life. This led me to my troubled childhood and something I've realized at least since high school, which is that I have always felt at odds with the physical realm. This is naturally a problem but although a film like Toy Story 3 calls a number of related issues to mind, I'm pretty sure I don't want any remedy nor any solution to which the appreciation of empty crap like this is part. D+

PS: Give me a hollow Care Bears redux over this quatsch any day. :-*

Coming Back to the Five and Dime and a Carey Mulligan Double Feature

I've been so overwhelmed with being back in school that I have hardly had time to watch movies, let alone keep up with this journal. I'm going to try to fill in some of the gaps over the next couple of weeks, with all due respect to any friends who may have enjoyed the sudden decrease of activity on Google Buzz that coincided with my Rodney Dangerfield back to school moment. For my second post today I present a double feature that illustrates that it takes more than a delightful turn by Carey Mulligan to rescue a weak script.

I can't remember why but I expected more than this from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I feel like I heard an interview with Oliver Stone talking about Gordon Gekko and about how his new movie was going after Wall Street. The final product is far too silly and poorly written to worthy of its subject matter. Not even a charming performance from Carey Mulligan can redeem this movie. Shia Leboeuf is serviceable here and could have seemed better if the material hadn't been so rotten. Michael Douglas, on the other hand, manages to be worse than the screenplay. His anachronistic hamming that might have served the original Wall Street (which I also dislike) render this 2010 film as absurd, particularly since he looks like a withered sack of reasons to take it easy on the cosmetic surgery. Maybe it isn't even just Michael Douglas who's doing his best attempt to portray an old man in 2008 who's thinks he's still a young man in 1988. I feel like the whole movie is dated. The cameo by Charlie Sheen didn't help things, let alone the cheap gag about the 1980's cellphone. It almost seemed like the movie was waiting for Molly Ringwald to show up and ask where's the beef. I haven't had the time or opportunity to watch Inside Job yet but I'm hoping that'll be the movie this should have been. D-

Never Let Me Go reminds me of Perfume in that it was a relatively faithful adaptation of a book that I found both dazzling and unsatisfying. It's not quite as faithful as Perfume of course, because otherwise the audience would have have sat there for half the film wondering where Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley were. Ishiguro has an amazing gift for conjuring life and sensitivity but I wasn't really convinced by his book and I was probably convinced even less by the film, despite an effective performance by Carey Mulligan. The movie certainly lacks much of the depth and texture that made the book so enthralling but it doesn't even attempt to answer the holes in the book. In fact, the weaknesses of the book are laid bare when Ishiguro's sensitive prose and thicket-like progression are stripped away. When you aren't as invested in the mind of the character, the willingness to suspend disbelief falters detrimentally in this film adaptation. They needed to have found a way to trim less from the book. I understand that the stars of the movie needed to be at its center but even a cheesy solution like telling the story of her childhood in a series of several flashbacks would probably have been more effective. Other than adding depth, this would have given the excellent supporting cast more screen time. Sally Hawkins, Charlotte Rampling, and Nathalie Richard were perfect for this movie but their characters were robbed of the gravity they possessed in the book such that their performances emerge as odd curiosities that leave the viewer wondering what Charlotte Rampling is doing in this movie anyway. I don't know, the film struck me as much too morbid, where the book was haunting. I felt like the book failed in not providing an adequate justification for itself and the movie didn't even attempt to address this. C

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern & Anne Sundberg, 2010)

I've always found something compelling about Joan Rivers. Even before she looked like she might be Amanda Lepore's biological mother. It's clear that she's intelligent and funny even though much of her humor is unintelligent and unfunny. It's like she's this great star devoured by her insecurities and half defeated by her own bitterness. I felt like the scene where Melissa talks about how her mother unconsciously works to make people dislike her could be expanded to cover her career. I guess the trouble with her is that her humor isn't clever enough to make up for how hostile she is.

The movie is engaging but it doesn't really rise to the same level of, say, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which I confess to adore. She may certainly have opened a lot of doors for a lot of comediennes but I wish the film had paid tribute to other early comediennes like Rusty Warren or Fanny Brice or spent a moment talking about her relationship to other comediennes in the cannon. Of course, that would have turned this into an A&E special. I just felt like the scope was too narrow at times and it lacked the dramatic intensity and vulnerability that made the Tammy Faye piece so compelling. Even when I compare this to other recent profiles like the Jimmy Carter documentary or The September Issue, I'm just not sure it was as layered or ambitious by comparison. C+

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

Instead of working on my finals and so forth I ended up reading best of the year stuff and The Social Network seemed like the favorite. I haven't seen many new movies since the spring and wasn't in a big rush to see this movie but it was all right. I feel like it's overrated but it's more effective than I expected it to be. I guess I got sucked into the plot but it didn't really make me think about much other than how awful most of the characters were. I guess that caused me to think more about my relationship to Facebook in particular and to the internet in general. The acting was good, I suppose, although Justin Timberlake's performance has been exaggeratedly praised. I thought the most interesting thing about his performance was that the most interesting thing about it was contemplating the changes in his face. I guess I hoped that he got all Marilyn Monroe and hired a deranged Russian acting coach to turn him into a legend but he seemed like the next Mark Wahlberg (or Ryan Phillippe?), at best. Not that that's necessarily something to scoff at.

I'm just not sure the story as it was told was the story that should have been told. It's interesting because Facebook plays such a central role in the lives of almost everybody I know but I guess it seemed like it was missing something. Whether it was context or depth or humanity I don't know.

I guess I liked the way Fincher handled the business with the privileged Winklevoss brothers. I guess that aspect of the movie might have been the most worthwhile for since it showed an aspect of our culture that is rarely acknowledged seriously (or at all) in popular media. One of my literature professors said that what she's noticed about American students compared to Europeans or Canadians is a tendency to focus on extracting a moral purpose or didactic intent from works. I guess for me that's what interesting, from a sociological or psychological standpoint. When I think about it, I suppose I appreciate that they depict more realistically what kind of assholes men are than you usually see. That's really a running theme here. Men are assholes and women are crazy. People in suits are just as bad as you thought they were. It's interesting though that the movie is book-ended by two of the three sympathetic characters in the movie: first the girl who dumps him (and of whom he's thinking in the final scene) and then the lawyer lady who kindly tells him how it is at the end. The only other character who seemed particularly sympathetic to me was the discarded best friend. I feel like I'm dancing around what was missing in this movie and I can't put my finger on it. C

2 short films: Spike Jonze & Guy Maddin

Over the last few weeks the blogs in my Google Reader have been chattering about a few short films: Jonze's I'm Here, Maddin's The Little White Cloud That Cried, and Ramin Bahrani's Plastic Bag. I do most of my internetting at work (without audio) and it took me a while to get to the first two. The latter I still haven't gotten around to watching.

Given that the kind of person who has a film blog seems most often to the kind of person who likes both robots and Spike Jonze it seems natural that people have seemed to like I'm Here so much. My own circle of friends has given a range of responses that goes from "meh" to assorted vitriolic displays of scorn-fueled mirth. I'm more on the "meh" side of the spectrum. I thought the story was engaging enough but the metaphors and so forth aren't so great. I didn't really like philosophy driving the narrative. You can watch it on the official Absolut-sponsored page here but I found that page irritating and a little precious so I found it on this page which seems to be Hungary's answer to Youtube. C-

Guy Maddin basically brings us tranny art porn. If your math doesn't make that last sentence add up to "fabulous" you're clearly using the devil's calculus. It took me a couple of minutes before I was won over by The Little White Cloud That Cried but the important thing is that it won me over in a big way. Of course, I can't imagine most people enjoying it as much as I did because there are so many ways for people to criticize movies with hardcore sex involving pre-op transsexuals and a metaphysical edge. I liked it though. It's said to be a tribute to experimental filmmaker Jack Smith but I'm not very familiar with any of his work (which includes Flaming Creatures and Normal Love) so I can't even speak to any of that... Watch it here. If you dare. A-

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

So, Shutter Island isn't so very original and it isn't so very unpredictable yet I haven't figured how it manages to be so effective. I'll have to watch it again but, on an initial viewing, even though I sort of had the mystery figured out pretty early on I still found it pretty engaging. Scorsese's style is often pretty vexing to me but I quite enjoyed the style of this film. Patricia Clarkson's unexpected appearance was fabulous and Michelle Williams was good, as usual. I don't know what to say about this movie other than it should have been cheesy but I didn't think it was. It joins The Departed and The Aviator as the only Scorsese films I've particularly liked since The Last Temptation of Christ. B+

Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010)

I got a chance to see the new Tim Burton update of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland at the IMAX at Navy Pier in Chicago tonight. I have to say I tend to agree with the reviews I've read that characterized it as a letdown because it certainly was for me. I mean, apart from the Cheshire Cat, which was enchanting, and the Dormouse, which was cute. The real world story was dull and the "Underland" story was uninspired. It almost seems like the writer and the director were bored, as though they had been there to pick up a check, though I doubt that's the case. Perhaps they were too distracted by the technology and the mise-en-scène. The Mad Hatter is definitely sympathetic here but it's just kind of blandly weird. It sort of reminded me of Harry Potter goofiness but less entertaining. I love Helene Bonham Carter but not in this movie. I didn't know she could be boring but in this movie I just didn't care. I also thought it was a very strange choice to cast dog-faced Anne Hathaway as the beautiful White Queen. Um, excuse me? She makes a good junkie but she was so wrong for this part it's unreal. And what is up with this movie tying beauty to goodness? I sort of thought Tim Burton might be above that sort of thing. It was all right, I suppose. I mean, the visuals keep you watching. It's just that the story is so bland. I feel like the critics of Avatar should take their knee-jerk contrariness and see this movie. I think the comparison highlights a lot of what Avatar did right. That Cheshire Cat deserved a better movie! C/C-

Edit- I don't know how I could have forgotten to mention that horrible Avril Lavigne song at the end credits. The movie was not strong enough to withstand the weight of that awful song being the last thing you remember...

Omnibus Update: The last six films I watched in January

I've been kind of under the weather the past few weeks and while I've watched a fair amount of movies, I haven't been very good at keeping up with this film journal. I think I'm going to try to crank out a couple of quick updates instead of trying to come up with longer entries for all of these.

First up was Goodbye Solo, an indie drama about a Senegalese cab driver in North Carolina who gets hired by a guy to drive him around town for a couple of weeks and then drive him out to some mountain and leave him there, presumably to kill himself. The cabbie insinuates himself into the man's life. There are ups and downs. It's less serious than I had expected. I had put off watching it because it seemed so dark but it wasn't really. I have to say I enjoyed it quite a bit and liked the characters but something about it didn't quite seem on the level to me. B-

Jack Goes Boating was next up. I saw it at the Sundance USA event here in Chicago. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz was there for a Q&A. Roger Ebert wrote an uncharacteristically good column about the event. I was really surprised by how much I liked this movie. The couple reviews I had seen beforehand, on the Sundance website, were sour little things about PS Hoffman playing yet another sad fat guy and I braced myself for a long night. To my surprise there was something really alive about the film and it even had a little insight into the old human condition. B+

Next up came four more films in my revisiting Almodovar festival. I think I've seen his entire body of work in the past two months except I still need to revisit Bad Education and Volver, which I haven't seen since their theatrical releases. It's really been a pleasure going back over these and watching them in order like that. I get the impression that the director might not be a nice man in some respects but his films are pretty much all good and they seem kind of synergistic, where they mean more as a body of work than the sum of the constituent parts. I thought Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown had held up remarkably well and I gave it an A.
I have Law of Desire somewhere on VHS and it was a real eyeopener to see it on DVD. The colors are such a big part of his films. I liked it but there might be a hint of ambivalence which I don't know what to attribute to at the moment. B+
I seem to be in the minority as far as Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down goes. I actually really like it. I've seen it three or four times and I really enjoyed it each time. spoilers People don't understand why she falls for her kidnapper. Well, first of all, she's a recovering junkie so she's probably no stranger to self-destructive impulses. Secondly, I think it's really important to understand how important it is to her character to be taken care of like the way he wants to take care of her. And it starts to make more sense when you realize they've already met./spoilers I don't know. My boyfriend didn't get it so much, I don't think, but I really identified this one. And it's also fabulous. A-
Live Flesh was next up, as I had already visited Kika, High Heels, and Flower of My Secret. People always want to dismiss these films that he made between Women on the Verge and All About My Mother but I kind of feel like that's my favorite period for him. I think Live Flesh is satisfying on a literal level but it's also great because it shows this urge to break free from Spain's history. I mean, the happy ending only comes when the two younger characters are able to free themselves from the older characters, who all end up dead or crippled by their own faults. I'm tempted to say it's stronger than Talk to Her or even All About My Mother. A-

Never Let Me Go

They've apparently made a movie of Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO. It stars Keira Knightley, Sally Hawkins, Charlotte Rampling, and Carey Mulligan and is directed by the guy who made ONE HOUR PHOTO. The screenwriter wrote 28 DAYS LATER, SUNSHINE, and 28 WEEKS LATER for Danny Boyle. I liked the book and it seems like a lot of talented people but I always wonder about adapting books whose strongest suit is their writing, especially since I saw what they did to THE ROAD.

The release date is listed as November 2010...