Media Review 2010: Top Motion Pictures.

[The media review rolls on into its final installment as I break down my favorite films of the year.]

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Green Zone
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1
How to Train Your Dragon
The King's Speech
Secretariat
The Social Network
The Town

THE TOP FIVE:
5) Inception [Yes to the ideas. Yes to the characters. Yes to the imaginative visuals. Overwhelming yes to the masterful way Christopher Nolan worked in exposition without killing the momentum. Super-duper yes to the ambiguous ending. No, no, no to the bland directorial style and the James-Bond-villain-via-Hoth climactic battle setting. You fold up Paris for practice but when it comes time for the real thing, you just shoot a bunch of guns? Yawn.]
4) Exit Through the Gift Shop [While Inception is very good at provoking thought about the plot of Inception, this documentary is good at provoking thought about larger questions, like where should one draw the line between art and commerce, and how do free market principles play into that, and how awesome, exactly, is street artist Banksy? The first must-see documentary in a long time.]
3) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World [Not only is it outrageously funny, inventive, and smart--it is also far more perceptive about love in the real world than your average romantic comedy. Odd that a movie this off-the-wall has so much to say about the realities of relationships.]
2) True Grit [Pretty much perfect, and would've been my number one were it not for...]
1) Toy Story 3 [Based on the trailer, I was certain this was going to be Pixar's first grand misstep, a cynical cash-grab that just regurgitated the first two. So imagine my surprise when it turned out not only to be a wholly original story, but the story that the first two installments led up to. It's like they had this in mind all along. Storytelling at its best.]

MIGHT'VE MADE THE LIST IF I'D SEEN 'EM:
127 Hours
Four Lions
Inside Job
Lebanon
Rabbit Hole

THOSE OSCAR-BAIT MOVIES THAT COME OUT EVERY YEAR BUT THAT I'M NOT INTERESTED IN:
Black Swan
The Kids Are All Right
The Fighter
Blue Valentine

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED BUT ACTUALLY KIND OF TERRIBLE:
The Ghost Writer
Greenberg
Shutter Island
Winter's Bone

BEST FROM A PREVIOUS YEAR:
The General (1926) [I introduced my kids to the big three silent comedians on New Year's Eve, and we had a wonderful year experiencing some of these still-hilarious classic films. My favorite of all of them has to be this one, featuring Buster Keaton, a runaway train, and some of the most clever, seat-of-your-pants comic gags I've ever seen. The man really was a genius, and I can tell because his films still get belly laughs today, even from my children.]

WORST:
Clash of the Titans [Not nearly Transformers-level awful, but still loveably terrible, especially in its dartboard approach to mythology, Jamba-Juice-blender approach to editing, and who-cares approach to accents. Add in the casting of current interchangeable, mix-and-match lunkhead Sam Worthington as the lead, and it's just bland enough to be boring where it should be exciting.]