One thing that irritates me about this time of year is the senseless flood of "Ten best of the year" lists. Film, music and literature are art, and judgments about their relative value are subjective. It's not like sports, where if a runner crosses the finish line before another, you can make a fair comparison. So what I'm going to do is list all the films I've seen this year and tell you what I thought about them. This is not to be confused with a professional critic's list. These were movies I paid to see with a blue collar worker's wages, and saw in what spare time I had.
January
Just one film, Pierre Morel's Taken. It's a Luc Besson - produced action film. Which means it's predictable, has a barely serviceable plot, and is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Liam Neeson gives it a bit more gravitas than it deserved.
February
Again, I saw just one film this month, Henry Selick's Coraline. One of the things I really dislike is the trend towards digitally created animated films. Coraline was done using old-fashioned stop-motion animation, with Selick's trademark attention to the tiniest detail. It's a simple story with a simple message (be very, very careful what you wish for), but sometimes it's not the story, but how you tell it, and this was very well told indeed. I saw in in 3D, in a theater filled with small children and the parents they'd be begging to sleep next to that evening. Like all great children's films, it was made by adults who weren't condescending to their intended audience. I liked this one a lot.
March
Didn't see a single film in March.
April
Just one film this month, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Crank: High Voltage. If I had made a film when I was seventeen, I would have made something like this. Insane pace, frenetic action, constant violence, gratuitous nudity, incessant swearing. I was smiling from the first frame to the last. The sort of film Roger Corman would have made if he was completely lacking in moral fiber. The sort of film Russ Meyer would have made on a month long methedrine jag.
(Rest of the year's films in subsequent entries)
