2010: See

In a contradictory (to my last post) way, my movies' list nearly always consists of films from the past year. It's been a good long while since I've watched an older film that I missed or some such that had an impact on my little brain. Anyway...

Darren Aronofsky's BLACK SWAN isn't so much about ballet as it is about the high standard we hold ourselves to. A little on the nose at times, but Aronofsky manages to get you to empathize with Nina (played by Natalie Portman), who is clearly very driven and a very technically talented dancer, even as her own sense of self and her mind fracture to the point of doing herself more harm than good. The outside forces in Nina's life (her mother, her director, her would-be adversary) seem to play a huge part of her oncoming deterioration, but I think each is enhanced more and more throughout the film by Nina's own insecurities. Still, it's not that we want Nina to see what she's doing to herself and to those around her: WE want her to be perfect, even after blood's been spilled. Aronofsky's mentioned this is a companion piece to his THE WRESTLER and it is, not just as stories, but cinematically and thematically as well. Where I think BLACK SWAN excels is in the imagery Aronofsky's DP, Matthew Libatique accomplishes as Nina, finally, gets to become the Black Swan. She's perfect, of course.

David Fincher directed a script by Aaron Sorkin is all I kept hearing in regard to THE SOCIAL NETWORK for most of the year. Never having seen anything written by Sorkin, I didn't know what that meant; it was just the Facebook Movie to me. But I went due to my being a nerd fan of Fincher's since ALIEN3. And, unexpectedly, it blew my entire set of expectations away! The art direction is solid, the acting is superb (I can see why Andrew Garfield was picked as the new Spider-Man, and Jesse Eisenberg immediately was forgiven for being the poor man's Michael Cera), Fincher's direction is spectacular as usual, if not a bit more personal than in his other features (a lot of lingering shots on the solitary (mostly) Mark Zuckerberg drive home the point each time without being obvious), and, yes, the script was so fucking good! There wasn't a line in the film that felt unnecessary nor wasted. It's not just the Facebook Movie, it is the movie for this generation, trying to be more with others, to be closer to each other, but only at a distance. THE SOCIAL NETWORK isn't about what it means to be Zuckerberg or a Facebook user, but about the lengths that we might go for a vestige of attention, of admiration, of, yes, love. The internet's provided that for people who're born for the 21st century, and Sorkin and Fincher adapted THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES very well, and to say more about the current change in the pop-culture that is most of our lives.

In my eyes, Christopher Nolan can do no wrong. INCEPTION is a perfect film: it questions our way of thinking, our way of seeing our dreams, but not just our literal dreams, but the dreams we speak of when we talk about "I used to dream..." or "I dream of..." Tom Cobb and his team are thieves in dreams, stealing ideas, but now, the harder task they've accepted is inserting an idea into a man's brain: this is inception. At the core of this heist film is the constant idea that is what we dream real or not, how solid is it in our reality, do we really understand what any of it means, or is all of this completely unnecessary since in our dreams we have everything? I want to spoil the movie for you but won't. But what I will say that Nolan as writer and director is a fucking genius: he's done with practical and digital effects things that no one else has done in a long while (THE MATRIX comes to mind in technical, not story, terms), and the way in which his characters, in particular Cobb's go-to man, Arthur, played by the stellar Joseph Gordon-Levitt, seem more normal and true than they should be considering their profession. INCEPTION is the kind of movie every director should want to make: perfect.

I am a sucker for writer Alex Garland, and when I discovered his new screenplay was being directed by Mark Romanek, how could you go wrong? Adapting Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, NEVER LET ME GO, Romanek and Garland accomplished in giving me a parable for the future, what it means to grow up, what it means to raise children, and what it means when you discover, as an adult, that everything isn't as good as you're taught to believe. A story set in an alternate Earth that begs several questions about life, morality, love, death, and when it's time accept the world for what it is. Kathy (played by the spectacular Carey Mulligan) is carer, and has seen all the death for a better cause for most of her life. But in recalling how her life and her friends' lives from Hailsham to now have changed, Kathy and her friends show us what it means to be human when you're thought of (if thought of at all) as a product. Romanek broke me with Ishiguro's three main characters. I can identify with each of them, not as various stages of growing up, but as archetypes in the modern world: Ruth (Keira Knightley), a petty and jealous and torn and damaged person, who doesn't quite know what to do with herself so she becomes what she sees around her, what she thinks people will like, what she thinks people want; Tommy (Andrew Garfield), not so much the wide-eyed optimist, but he isn't very pragmatic, willing to believe what he's told, and learning the hardest possible way that the world will fuck you over; and Kathy, a stoic realist because she's seen the truth out in the world and recognizes that accepting it as it is isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I wager she finds herself a little lonely and a little cold. I know I did at the end.

I'll just say it: SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD is perhaps the best comic book movie of all time. Screw off everyone else. Directed by Edgar Wright, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD is the adaptation of the comics series by Bryan Lee O'Malley, and gives us 23 year old Scott Pilgrim's trials and tribulations through young adulthood, his flailing band, his romances, and, finally, his growth as a man, as a person. You have not see any modern movie like this, perfectly capturing what is in a black and white comic book and putting it on screen the way it should. And this movie has everything: a bad ass soundtrack, great acting (including the titular character played by Michael Cera), kick ass action, tons of heart, lots of humor, and something you'll take home with you: how do you step up your game when it comes to love, when it comes to yourself?