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Movies Seen in 2010

District 9 - A
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - B+
The Wrestler - B
V for Vendetta - C+
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone - C
Corpse Bride - C
Battlefield Earth - F
There Will Be Blood - A
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - B
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - B
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - A
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - B-
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - B
Faust (1994) - A
Night on Earth - B
Schizopolis - B-
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes - B
Primer - B
Ryan (2005) - B
Lost Highway - C+
The Seventh Seal (1957) - A
Metropolis (1927) - A
Kagemusha - A
Following - B+
Masters of Russian Animation 1, 2 - A
The Old Man and the Sea (animated) - A
The Man Who Planted Trees - A
Miller's Crossing - B+
Ocean's Eleven - B-

I've just watched Miller's Crossing for the first time this weekend, and it's a very good film. It's a period mob drama with some interesting plot twists and some memorable performances. How awesome are tommy guns? (Answer: very awesome). John Turturro turns in another great performance as the Coen brothers go-to guy. This might deserve an A, but the Coens have made better films since then, so I'd give it a B+.

Ocean's Eleven - I must live under a rock because I'd never seen this until this past weekend. It's a serviceable caper movie with at least one really good plot twist. The writing and direction were both pretty good, but it seemed to be missing a little extra something to really capitalize on it's premise. B- for being a fun movie about Vegas and for star power.
 
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Miller's Crossing remains my favourite Coen Bros. film; the scene where Albert Finney escapes an assassination attempt to the tune of "Danny Boy" is pure magic.
 
I quite liked Hudsucker (at times it was a little too self-consciously imitating the rhythms of a 1930s screwball comedy).
 
I like all of the Coen Bros films that I've seen, the only one that I'm lukewarm on is Raising Arizona. My favorites are probably Fargo, Blood Simple, and The Big Lebowski. I still haven't seen A Serious Man, Burn After Reading, Barton Fink, or The Ladykillers.

I thought No Country was good but not as good as it got credit for. I thought There Will Be Blood was the better film that year.
 
Do you even like Intolerable Cruelty, which I thought was so bad, it's just easier to forget the Coen brothers were the ones who made it?
 
I really liked No Country most of the way through, but the ending annoyed me. I understand what they were going for, but of the "non-ending"s that I've seen, I didn't think that one was pulled off well (I also had a hard time understanding why Javier Bardem's performance got so much acclaim; mostly he just acted impassive; he was a terrifying villain, don't get me wrong, but how different were 99% of his scenes from Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator? Actors voted him a ton of awards, so they obviously saw something there, but it didn't look to me especially complicated).
 
Bardem had to learn English for the role, and considering how charismatic he was in other films (such as The Sea Inside, which he should have won for) his unemotional, terrifying villain was a major stretch for the actor. As opposed to Schwarzenegger in The Terminator--cold and emotionless is basically a safe role for the actor.
 
I really don't see how acting unemotional is a "stretch" in an award-worthy sense; whether it's something that comes naturally to him or not (and just because he showed more life in other roles doesn't mean it was something difficult), Schwarzenegger could have given the same performance, and generally you try to gauge acting by the result, not relative to the talents of the performer. It doesn't, to me, seem like an award-winning part, in anyone's hands. Chigurh was scary because he went around shooting people the head with a cattle-gun.
 
To each his own. I think he's an effective and scary villain, who was memorable enough for an award nomination. I was surprised he won, though.
 
Harvey said:
Do you even like Intolerable Cruelty, which I thought was so bad, it's just easier to forget the Coen brothers were the ones who made it?
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I actually really enjoyed that movie. What I liked was well, on the one hand, the screwball nature, and on the other, the titular cruelty - it was a very, very vicious movie about divorce and death and screwing people over and messy power plays. When it comes to black comedy I'm a pretty easy mark, so I lapped it up.
 
If it had gone in that vein all the way to the ending I would have lapped it up, but I remember an awfully soft conclusion. But reading Metacritic the reviews at the time were fairly positive? Perhaps I should give the film another look.

Though, speaking of blasphemy, I enjoyed their remake of The Ladykillers (though I have yet to see the original).
 
I never really got around to seeing the Coen brothers Ladykillers (I will eventually, but I'm lazy)... but I'm not a huge fan of the first one. It's good, just not absolutely fantastic. Basically, I was expecting Kind Hearts and Coronets. Which if you haven't seen, well, as a rather shameless fan of black comedy that film is one of the best out there.
 
Theatre:

Avatar [ B]
Precious [A]
Invictus [ B]
A Single Man [B-]
Crazy Heart [A-]
A Serious Man [A-]
The Last Station [A-]

DVD:

Adventureland [B+]
Samaritan Girl [C+]
3-Iron [A]
The Hurt Locker [A-]
Citizen Kane [A]
Planet Hulk [B+]
High Society [B-]
The Philadelphia Story [A-]
The Pianist [A-]
Murder By Decree [A-]
A Man For All Seasons [B+]
A Patch of Blue [B+]
Broadway Danny Rose [B+]
The Departed [A]
The Purple Rose of Cairo [B+]
Zelig [B ]
Radio Days [B ]
Hannah and Her Sisters [B+]
Gone Baby Gone [A+]
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths [B+]
Doctor Zhivago [B ]
A Beautiful Mind [A-]

2001's Best Picture winner, directed by Ron Howard (who comes into a lot of criticism in some quarters; and certainly, while he's not the most original or daring director out there, he's a very accomplished craftsman; not to say The Grinch Who Stole Christmas wasn't an abomination). I ran across the midpoint twist in this film, which I thought would diminish my enjoyment, but while I of course twigged to Ed Harris I didn't think to apply it to Paul Bettany, so it still had some punch. The movie rides on the performances of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, who are of course very capable of pulling it off (also featuring Christopher Plummer and the little girl from Everwood, one of my favourite 00s shows). For such a hyper-masculine guy, Crowe is remarkably good at playing a wimp/nerd (he did so as well in The Insider). I quite liked it.
 
Sherlock Holmes [B-]
Men in Black [A]
Up in the Air [A]
Star Trek: The Motion Picture [D+]
I'm Not There [A]
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009) [D-]
American Violet [B ]
Inglourious Basterds [A]
Death at a Funeral [B ]
A Serious Man [A]
The Hurt Locker [A-]
Mad Max 2 (AKA The Road Warrior) [C]
The Book of Eli [C-]
Elegy [B+]
Close Encounters of the Third Kind [A]
The Invention of Lying [B-]
Gamer [C]
Timecrimes [A]
Metropolis [A]
Pandorum [B ]
Raiders of the Lost Ark [A]
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade [A]
Moon [A]
Fun with Dick and Jane [C]
Sunshine [C]
Stanley Kubrick's The Killing [B+]
Ernest Hemingway's The Killers (1964) [A-]
Ernest Hemingway's The Killers (1946) [B+]
Glengarry Glen Ross [B-]
Gattaca [A]
The Big Chill [ B]
The Producers [A]
Rent [C+]
Blade Runner [A]
My Cousin Vinny [B-]
Zombieland [ B]
Infernal Affairs [A]
The Walker [F]
Starship Troopers [A]
Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith [F]
Altered States [A]
Devil in a Blue Dress [ B]
Renaissance [ B]
District 9 [ B]
The Shawshank Redemption [B+]
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story [ B]
Memento [A]

I was very curious to see if this unique puzzle film by Christopher Nolan would hold up after I had seen it a few times, and spent more than a little time online and elsewhere trying to unravel that puzzle, and I'm glad to find that it does. We're never quite sure if Lenny is Sammy or not. There are clues that would indicate this, but they come in the form of memories (many of which the film presents two different versions of), and as is pointed out in the film, memories are unreliable. But, ignoring that puzzle, the film provides another joy which is to introduce characters who seem sympathetic at first, but we come to discover they're all using Leanord Shelby--including Lenny himself, as we find out in the very end. Even Burt, the friendly guy behind the hotel desk, uses him to make an extra buck by checking him into an extra room.
 
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