Friday, January 7, 2011

Picks of the Year: 2010: Movies


(author's note: My picks of the year are taking longer than anticipated to write, so this post is only my movies of the year, videogames and miscellaneous things are coming later.)

Well, here we are with 2010 over, and 2011 just beginning.  2011 has yet to tease many things of interest beyond the upcoming Marvel movies, but 2010 was definitely a bumper year.  There were alot of things worth seeing, playing, reading, and listening too.  I myself saw, played, read, and listened to many things, though not everything.  Like everyone, I have my own personal tastes.  Sometimes they coincide with other people’s, sometimes not.  And if they don’t, then I’ll tell you that that doesn’t matter.  This is my work, not theirs.

So now that that’s out of the way, here are my picks of 2010.  There WILL BE some obvious omissions, and I will note ahead of time that those omissions are because I haven’t seen, played, read, or listened to it.  In fact, nothing I listened to will make this list because I didn’t listen to much new music, and even if I did, I simply don’t have the vocabulary to speak about it.  These are my personal favorites for 2010, and nothing more.

Movies:

Despicable Me:  Straight up, this is sort of tied with How To Train Your Dragon as my favorite animated film of the year.  Yes yes, Pixar had a tour de force with Toy Story 3, and yes it was an incredibly well made film.  BUT, it did not make me want to go back into the theater and watch it a second time, or even buy it on DVD when it came out.  Despicable Me and HTTYD did that for me.  The story of a supervillain who learns that there’s more to life than supervillainy, while at the same time not using it as an excuse to turn him into a hero.  At the end, he’s still a supervillain, just one with a bit of a soft spot.  The characters are all well written, and well acted, and was an incredible suprise to me.  Oh, and the Minions are awesome. XD

How To Train Your Dragon:  Like Despicable Me, a genuine suprise this year, especially considering that it bucks the trend that Dreamworks Animation has continued to do since Shrek 2, IE, crappy writing.  My thoughts have always been exactly that.  That Dreamworks can match Pixar on a technical level, but are seriously in need of better writers.  Based off a book that I am probably doing to have to read now, its the story a young, weak Viking that learns to talk to dragons, something no other Viking has done.  Everything about it is, like Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda, well written and realized beyond almost all of their other films.My only real issue was the dragons were a little too cartoony for my tastes.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World:  Where was this comic and why hadn’t I heard of it before?  This is pure, right up my alley, geekery, and I loved every minute.  With a little time, and extra cash, I’ll read the comic its based on too.  The movie, as well as the books, play with the imagined battles any kid who ever played 8 and 16-bit videogames ever dreamed of.  A guy who has to fight off his new GF’s exes while learning to be less of a douche, who’d have thought?

Kick-Ass:  Geeky kid wants to become a hero, gets his ass beat for it, so he tries harder the next time around.  But even then, he still sucks, and gets in over his head.  Like Scott Pilgrim, this is very much about the nerd fantasy come true, though in a different way.  Rather than being a crazy way of dealing with personal inadequacies in mind-bending ways, this one is more about someone with no power trying to take control in a physical sense, and finding out things are much harder than he thought.  As for Hit-Girl, she’s the most unrealistic thing in the movie, but she adds alot of fun to the proceedings.  A little girl like that doing parkour and gun-kata?  Seriously fun, and just as crazy.

Honorable Mentions (IE, stuff I want to mention but can’t come up with anything to say about):
The Social Network
Inception
Iron Man 2
Splice
Shutter Island
Toy Story 3