It’s been a bad year, but we did our best…

127 Showers, The King’s Reach, Season of the Itch, Assland, I Emit on Your Grave, The Disgustment Bureau, The Insatiable Poon, Bare Game, Lord of the Lance 3D, Norwegian Wood, Pussy in Boots

Fulfilling Bono, Sucker Munch, Old Fish, Fucking with Stella, Little White Prize, How I Distended This Summer, Daughter for Elephants, Deep End, Forget My Clot, A Screaming Man, My Week in Marilyn

Attack the Cock, Pirates of the Caribbean Sores: On Stranger Brides, Julia’s Cries, Sex-Men: First Pass, Screwed, Tongue Fu: Panda’s Goo, Bean Lantern, Ache Land, The Cum Diary, Wuthering Nights, Runnyballs

Merry Christmas, again.

Hopefully one of Orson’s other minions will step in to complete this Top 10. Here’s my half of it, anyway – the best of 2010. (Mea culpa: living with only an Apollo in walking distance, I had precious little to go on this year, hence the rather suspect idea that the following could be claimed as the ‘best’ examples of anything. The Apollo only showed one, by the way – guess which.)

5. Exit through the Gift Shop (dir. Banksy). Misunderstood, I think, by an embarrassment of eminent critics, this fun-but-harsh mockumentary is another of Banksy’s occasional assaults on the absurdities of the arts establishment – but what makes it great is that instead of standing heroically apart from the horror, he includes himself as one of the age’s worst offenders. Banksy is Thierry Guetta.

4. The Kreutzer Sonata (dir. Bernard Rose). Orson’s already rambled on about Rose’s achievement on a couple of occasions. Suffice to say, it’s a magnificently literate film on all levels: as an adaptation of Tolstoy’s story, as a tale of charity gone awry (I think it has a lot of moral freight), and as a masterpiece of editing (Rose himself) and sound design (Nigel Holland).

3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul). After Syndromes and a Century, I expected to be further stunned by ‘Joe’ Weerasethakul’s other films, and Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee is suitably terrific. It has the same demandingly slow pace as before, but this is here married to a pulp-fiction cheekiness: out-of-body experiences, ghosts, and monsters done the old-fashioned way (men in suits with LED eyes).

2. The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (dir. Werner Herzog). My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? came out as a too-loyal homage to its producer, David Lynch, but Werner Herzog’s other US film gave Nicolas Cage his best role for years, and offers a shot in the arm to the identikit thrillers Hollywood prefers to spend its money on. It was the best comedy of the year – I watched it a second time to remind myself how outrageous it was.

1. The Social Network (dir. David Fincher). Fincher redeems himself after insipid Benjamin Button by historicising Facebook and working with Aaron Sorkin, whose charming, geeky dialogue is a near-perfect match for Fincher’s restless camera. The pomp of Sorkin’s banter means rooms and corridors are usually enough for any scene – except Fincher always wants to be poking his way into the corners of the stage. And they both get their way. For a film about a website, it is chock-full of weird sounds and fine compositions. It’s a feast second to none in 2010.

Slash of the Titans, Shrek Forever Shafter, Seep Year, Gone with the Grope, The Twilight Saga: Her Clit’s, Jonah Sex, How to Stain Your Dragon, Fish Wank, Winter’s Bone

Mince of Persia: The Demands of Slime, The Fuck of Eli, 44 Inch Breast, Youth Fairy, The Girl on the Chain, The Sex Tourist, The Bled Baron, Slot Machine Zone, Diary of a Gimpy Kid, Fucking for Eric

Sex in the City’s Goo, Cry Ram Love, The Extendables, Despicable Amputee, The Kids Are All Tight, The Mother Guys, Hot Tub Slime Machine, Tranny McPhee and the Big Wang, Gulliver Unravels

(i.e. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all at the Well.)

Gone in 60 Seconds

Dogma

Standard Operating Procedure

The Royal Tenenbaums

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

W.

Scary Movie

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The Road to Guantánamo

Robin Hood: Men in Tights

Jaws

Lethal Weapon

Gone With the Wind

The Jazz Singer

Mad Max

Jules and Jim

Kramer vs. Kramer

8½

Triumph of the Will

Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang

I’ve been trying to catch up with Sight & Sound lately. It’s a magazine I’ve always found strangely uninviting, and perhaps that’s the reason I’m still behind in my reading – I’m only now leafing through the February 2010 issue and scanning the provocative ‘Films of the Decade’ article. It’s one of those Q-style list features magazines routinely do when the staff can’t think of anything better  – and why not? It’s a fun day in the office, and fun to read.

This time, the limit is 30 (Q sometimes aims for 1,001), and the criteria is “films that best represent the decade’s most distinctive oeuvres and movements”. The decade being January 1 2000-December 31 2009 (I often wonder, if decades began in ‘85, ‘95, ‘05 etc., would modern history look any different?). I’m not about to take issue with the fine choices – the selection includes The Five Obstructions, There Will Be Blood and Inland Empire – but I do want to take a look at the rationale offered in the article that follows.

Apparently, the team started off by simply comparing their favourite films, but it soon became obvious that the list would somehow transcend personal preference and say more about “cultural significance”. It’s not long, though, before it’s revealed that Wall•E “disappoints”. British films, it’s thought, “rarely broke new ground”. Already, there are three different scales of judgment involved. Presumably, to make it through the gauntlet, the Top 30 needed to be culturally significant, innovative and impressive. This isn’t outlandish, and it’s hard to argue that many of the films on the Sight & Sound list don’t meet these requirements.

But it got me thinking – how do critics normally present their criteria? More often than not, I think they don’t. (Sight & Sound is a completely mundane example of a critic attempting to tuck his needs under the rug.) Maybe a critic needs to hide from/protect himself, constantly. No one likes to think of themselves as going into the cinema with a rigid set of demands. Like Clive James once wrote, “those without theories write better”. But everyone has theories, even Pauline Kael.

Also notable in the Sight & Sound article is what it does with Africa.

The Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness was preferred to his later Bamako (2006), and ends up representing the entire undervalued cinema of a continent, largely through lack of consensus as to which other titles should qualify. We should have done better.

It’s unusual for such a skew to get acknowledged upfront, so this is semi-laudable. On the other hand – if they knew what they were doing, and thought it was wrong, why didn’t the team just, er, do better?

Yes, this is Orson’s Well’s second post featuring the word ‘porn’ in its title, and yes, that probably means you’ve been sent here erroneously by Google in your search for gratification, and yes, for that very reason you probably never really started reading this sentence in the first place. Still, in case you’ve got this far, here’s the rest…

1. Miss Congeniality (2000)

Back when Sandra Bullock was still cute like a sexy person and not cute like a broody Furby (well, Meg Ryan’s demise has left a hole in the market), some clever Hollywood producer had the brilliant idea of throwing her into a competition of vacant pretty people, with Micheal Caine as the Have I Mentioned I Am Gay? father-figure. Only Caine seems to get the idea. He hams and camps around with unmasked zeal, presumably waiting for the scene where Bullock leads her fellow contestants in an orgiastic attempt to win his sexuality over. Strangely, it never happens.

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Occasionally I’m going to do one of these catch-all posts, as a reminder-to-self of what I’ve been watching. Imagine them as barely legible post-it notes for someone else’s future reference. Jonny and Tavs (my fellow bloggers at the Well), might do something similar, if we’re lucky.

2010 took me from behind and by surprise, so my film-watching has lapsed from its happily unhealthy 2009 levels. I might have watched more than the following twelve, but I’m presuming that if I’ve forgotten a film, I’ve got nothing much to say about it. I hope, of course, to watch films more often now we’ve got the blog running, and tonight – yes, tonight – I start with Timecop!
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Roast of Girlfriends Past, Porn Blart: Mall Cock, He’s Just In You, The Hairy Gentleman, Dance Flick, Shag Me To Hell, What Goes Up, Whip It, Land of the Tossed, Queer One, My Wife In Ruins, Poon

The Pervert Locker, In the Loop, My Sister’s Deeper, Julie On Julia, Glandslam, The Slime Traveler’s Wife, In Glourious Basterds, Taking Woodcock, Up, Cloudy With a Chance of Balls

Informal Activity, The Lovely Boner, Elastic Mr Fox, Push, Astro Joy, Where The Wild Things Scar, Sperminator Salvation, The Men Who Bare All At Goats, 35 Shots of Cum, Me in Orson Welles

What did you do this morning?