127 Minutes

Last Tuesday:

"A guy and a tiger on a boat for two hours?" my friend asked.

"No no," I assured him. "There are going to be flashbacks and fantasy sequences. It'll be like 127 Hours."

And so I thought it was a funny coincidence that the running time of Life of Pi happens to be 127 minutes.

(Since I'm a bit of an amateur numerologist, I can't help but notice that I'm writing this post on 11/27.)

In truth, there are a lot of similarities between the two stories/movies. Each features an opening section in which we meet the protagonist (a young man) and gradually start to see how he ended up in his horrible predicament. Then, the second act begins, and he's thrust right into it. Both predicaments present a very low chance of survival, each seemingly hopeless in its own way. (The big difference is that one really happened and the other is a work of fiction.) And both predicaments feature a necessary stasis, essentially pinning the characters to their locations -- whether literally, between two immovable rocks, or figuratively, in an expanse of the Pacific Ocean that looks the same to a person on one day as the next. 

And in both cases I knew the outcome of the story. With 127 Hours, it was a famous incident that had been covered in the news, the details of which we knew only because the man had survived the ordeal. With Life of Pi, I'd read the book.

127 Hours was my favorite movie of 2010. So I should love Life of Pi just as much, right?

Not quite.

And I'm having a hard time figuring out why.

In every respect you can imagine, Ang Lee's movie is nothing less than a perfect adaptation of Yann Martel's book. It's a faithful rendering in almost every aspect, and the visualization of the book's images is something you might have thought was only possible in your mind's eye. It's that beautiful. Some shots are so stunning that you may just scratch your head about how they were even accomplished. Also, I would absolutely recommend seeing it in 3D, even if you are someone who's skeptical of the film industry's motivations when it comes to the third dimension. It's gorgeously immersive.

Nor can I find fault with the lead performance of Suraj Sharma as Pi, short for Piscine Molitor Patel. I don't necessarily think it's in the same league as James Franco's from 127 Hours, but I wouldn't argue with you if you did. Pi is a character obsessed with finding his spiritual path -- he dabbles in several contradictory religions simultaneously -- and that aspect of the character may make the acting performance even more tricky.

So, why am I having trouble saying I loved the movie?

It's not because I knew how it ended, or at least, I don't think it is. Sure, for the most part, you want to be surprised by these things, which is why I know certain film fanatics who have a rule about not reading books they know will be adapted into movies. That's a rather strict stance, because it means you'll miss out on a lot of good books. But I know why they take that stance.

But I also knew how 127 Hours would end, and it vaulted to the #1 spot on my year-end list. As did Michael Almereyda's present-day adaptation of Hamlet, back in 2000. As did Titanic three years before that. Merely knowing the ending of a movie doesn't spoil the experience of it. As I've written before, that's the big difference between movies and TV. With TV, you watch to find out what happened. With movies, you watch to find out how it happened.

So the only element I can really point to was a part of the story structure that may be different from the book, though I can't honestly remember. I've been dancing around whether Pi survives the ordeal, but then I realized, I shouldn't be, because the movie doesn't. You meet the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) before you meet the young one, and he's telling us this whole harrowing story several decades after it happened. But he's not actually telling it to us -- he's telling it to a Canadian writer he's just met, played by Rafe Spall.

For some reason, I was bothered by this narrative device. Every time the film jumps out of the lifeboat and back into the present, I felt unceremoniously ripped out of the story. I think that's because there's something inevitably hokey about it. We used to see movies told this way all the time, with regular breaks from the action to check back in on two doe-eyed children with their chins propped on their palms, asking "And then what happened, Grandpa?" "Well my child, we're just getting to the good part," Grandpa would answer.

So I felt there was something irredeemably quaint about the listener/storyteller relationship between Spall and Khan, as though this one adult man was playing doting grandchild to another adult man. And I think part of the problem is that Spall isn't all that good. They could have chosen anybody for this role, and this guy just wasn't doing it for me. That's a shame, because Khan, an actor I've seen a number of times before, is quite good.

But there's one climactic moment where the script fails Spall more than his line reading. At a truly key moment, Spall is forced to speak a line of dialogue that sounds so goofy, in context, that I felt like laughing, and one member of my audience actually did laugh. Which is certainly not what Lee or writer David Magee were going for in that moment.

However, Lee also makes a very smart decision at the end that I will only hint at here. If you've read the book, you know that something unexpected happens near the end of the story. What Lee chooses to show -- or not show -- during this moment is key in how we read and understand all the previous events we've seen.

Ultimately, I did not feel the surge of emotion in the climax of this movie that I felt during the climax of 127 Hours. Is Danny Boyle just better at emotional manipulation than Ang Lee? Maybe. And is that not necessarily a good thing? Maybe.

But sometimes, all your critical analytical tools fail when confronted with the physiological reaction your body produces as an emotional response to something you're watching. Life of Pi did not produce that physiological reaction in me, at least not to the extent I was hoping.

It's still filmmaking at a nearly unparalleled level, especially on the technical end. And you should most certainly see it in the theater, in 3D if possible.

Will it be my favorite movie of 2012? No, but only one film can claim that hallowed honor.  This just doesn't happen to be it.

After Moon and 127 Hours were two previous #1s essentially carried by one actor, I don't want to become too damn predictable anyway.

Something old, something new

Before I lose half my audience right off the bat, let me say that this post has nothing to do with the 2011 romantic comedy Something Borrowed.

Honestly, I just thought this would be some "clever" poster art to accompany the title I'd already chosen for this post.

I actually want to talk about the double features I watched over the past week while my wife was out of town. She left Wednesday morning and returned Saturday afternoon, leaving me control of the television in our living room on three different nights last week. I set out to watch a double feature each night. Turns out I took it even further than that, but we'll get to that in a minute.

The themes of my double features were simply this: Something old, something new. More specifically, each double feature would consist of one movie I'd already seen, and one movie I hadn't already seen.

I've been wanting to do this for some time, but I've lacked the discipline. When my wife and son went to Australia for 11 days last May, I had the crazy idea of doing one double feature like this every day they were gone. That turned out to be impractical, of course. There were days when other things I wanted to accomplish (like getting out to a baseball game) prevented me from seeing even one movie, and then there were days, specifically the weekend days, when I wanted to watch more than two movies. See, I'm anal about things like this -- it either has to be exactly two movies, fitting the exact specifications of my project, or I won't do it at all.

Three nights, however, was a much shorter and more manageable timeframe. Plus the fact that I had to stay home to babysit my son meant that I wasn't tempted to go out into the world on any of those nights. (Couldn't even if I was tempted.)

I ended up developing a bit of a theme for each individual double feature, but I'll get into that as we go along. The movie I list first is the one I watched first.

Wednesday, February 15th

Something old: 127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle)
Something new: The House of the Devil (2009, Ti West)
Informal theme that developed: Recent movies with moments of squirming intensity

Although I had some ideas for what I wanted to watch set in stone before my wife left town, I also wanted to leave some up to whim and circumstance. Both of the first night's movies were to be determined that way, in part as a result of what I picked up at the library that afternoon. As it turned out, all three of the movies (the maximum I'm allowed to check out) were movies I'd already seen. The one I knew would make it into my DVD player that night was 127 Hours.

127 Hours was the movie I ranked #1 in 2010. Since then I'd wondered if a different movie (The Social Network, #3 at the time) deserved to be in that top slot instead. So after flirting with my second viewing of 127 Hours a couple times, I finally made it happen on Wednesday night.

I'm not sure if it will have the ability to endure over time that The Social Network has, but I averaged out to liking 127 Hours about as much as I had the first time. I say "averaged out" because the first 2/3 inevitably did not strike me as much as they originally had, when the freshness of Boyle's choices caught me so delightfully by surprise. I didn't consciously like this part less, it was just the typical second-viewing phenomenon of having seen these choices before. What I found odd, though, was that I was more emotionally stricken by the ending than I had been the first time. I'm conscious of the fact that Boyle is really manipulating us at the end of this movie -- as (spoiler alert, ha ha) Aron Rolston grows closer to finally being removed from that canyon he thought would be his tomb, A.R. Rahman's score swells and increases in intensity. Yet I felt the emotions even more intensely than I had in the theater, and when the helicopter finally comes into view, it slayed me. I think it's okay to be taken by these techniques if you know they're operating on you on that level. Hey, movies are made the way they're made for a reason.

As for The House of the Devil, I'd only just added this to our Netflix queue two days earlier. On Monday I was listening to my weekly Filmspotting podcast, and they were discussing West's new film, The Innkeepers. The House of the Devil was mentioned a couple times as a point of contrast, and both of the show's co-hosts made it sound like some batshit stuff happened in that movie. I like batshit stuff. I like movies. It was on my queue 15 minutes later and in my ocular cavities two days after that.

I might be overstating how much I liked this movie, but here are two of the horror films I compared it to in discussions afterward: Halloween and Suspiria. If you don't know anything about this movie, it's basically a babysitter-in-peril movie that is styled after slasher films from the 1980s. Or so people are saying -- I actually found that the aesthetic reminded me more of the late 1970s than the 1980s, and the film never actually says the year it is set. However, the lead listens to The Fixx's "One Thing Leads to Another" on her walkman, and although the walkman was invented in 1978, "One Thing Leads to Another" was not invented until 1983. In any case, my quibbling with what style it most resembles is actually intended as a compliment -- the film looks and feels great, and its slow, dread-filled build toward [stuff I won't tell you about] is simply exhilarating.

Thursday, February 16th

Something new: Le Samourai (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville)
Something old: All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
Informal theme that developed: "Old" movies that would require my full attention

The problem with watching two movies in one night, starting after your child goes to bed at 7 p.m., is that you are in serious risk of falling asleep before the second one finishes. Especially if you don't get to the first movie until the disappointing end of a basketball game between the Boston Celtics and Chicago Bulls. And especially if the second is over two hours, which was the case with both of my "old" options: All About Eve and John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre, both of which I had absolutely adored but never revisited (and which were the other two movies I picked up at the library on Wednesday). As it turns out, I ended up finishing the second at about quarter to 2 in the morning after a short "nap," but first things first.

Le Samourai had been on my radar again thanks to Filmspotting, where Melville's movie has come up several times in connection to movies featuring "man with no name" type characters. Since I'm pretty sure it came up first during their discussion of Drive, which I did not really like, that should have been a warning sign that Le Samourai might not have exactly been in my wheelhouse. It wasn't exactly in my wheelhouse, but it's still quite a good film. Just nothing I want to recommend breathlessly to other film fans. (Without any set plan on when to watch it, I elevated it to the top of my queue and it arrived a couple weeks ago. I decided last week's project was as good a time as any.)

The story revolves around a mysterious hitman named Jef Costello (Alain Delon), who is sought by police after carefully setting up several alibis that should deflect attention from him after he completes the contract to kill a prominent Parisian night club owner. Although there is some nice atmospheric stuff involving him and his spartan apartment and the way he walks the Parisian streets looking guarded yet cool, much more of this film than I was expecting revolved around the procedural stuff related to finding the killer in this particular murder. There are some fleeting and interesting character relationships that crop up, but I guess I just thought there would be more "there" there. Still, I can't deny that it was pretty engaging and that it was shot beautifully. To make the experience more complete, I enjoyed wine, cheese, crackers and Italian salami while watching it.

As it was 10 o'clock by the time I got myself in position to start the second movie, I was moments away from inserting Treasure of the Sierra Madre into my DVD player, due to its 12 fewer minutes of running time. But then I got real with myself and decided that All About Eve was the one whose gravitational pull I was feeling more strongly -- the one I'd either almost borrowed or actually borrowed from the library on a few previous occasions. Damn that wine during Le Samourai -- it took me down for the count around 11, and threatened to throw my whole double feature schedule out of whack. Fortunately I revived in time to finish, even if it was well into the next day at that point.

I quickly remembered why All About Eve had been calling me back. The 1950 best picture winner is quite simply one of the best written films I've ever seen, primarily from the perspective of dialogue, though I also love the story. Bette Davis is terrific in the central (if not title) role, and boy can she sure deliver the hell out of Mankiewicz's dialogue. If you don't know the story, an ambitious nobody who is blessed with otherworldly acting skills latches on to a famous stage star (Davis) in order to try to learn all her tricks and eventually suck her dry. The deceptive innocence Eve (Anne Baxter) initially puts forward is terrific, as it demonstrates how you don't have to be an easily flattered stage diva to be taken in by her charms and apparent good intentions. I love how the story gets increasingly complicated among a coterie of secondary characters, and eventually culminates in that hollow awards acceptance speech at the end. Makes me wonder how many other people in the entertainment industry are thanked in contexts where they loathe the person thanking them.

Friday, February 17th

Something new: The Road Warrior (1981, George Miller)
Something old: Hardware (1990, Richard Stanley)
Quite formal and intentional theme: Post-apocalypse movies

One of the most embarrassing deficiencies in my viewing history has been The Road Warrior. I'd seen both of the other movies in that series, but never that one. But I had heard two wildly divergent opinions of it. Back when I was seven years old and it was in the theater, my parents and some of their friends went to see it while we were vacationing on Martha's Vineyard. I distinctly remember them (specifically my mother) saying how much they had loathed it, that it was violent and nihilistic (though they probably wouldn't have used the word "nihilistic" with a seven-year-old). Of course, since then my contemporaries who have seen it say it's awesome in all the right ways. They may have liked it for the exact reasons my parents didn't.

So I thought it made a good pairing with Hardware, which my contemporaries and I all loathed when we saw it in the theater. In recent years I've been wondering if it wasn't just that the movie had disturbed me -- quite possible, as it does feature a battle robot that comes back to life in the apartment of an artist and tries to rape her. I'm probably more open-minded to something dark and twisted like that than I was 22 years ago. So when I saw Hardware was available on streaming, I loaded Road Warrior into my DVD queue, and it arrived just in time for Friday night's premeditated double feature.

I guess I came down somewhere in the middle of those two opinions of The Road Warrior. I expected it to be non-stop lewd and lascivious acts from start to finish, but it really wasn't. In fact, it had more Beyond Thunderdome in it than I was expecting. (Something about that feral little kid with the boomerang just screams "Thunderdome" to me.) I loved the fast cars, spectacular wipeouts and amoral brutality ... but to be honest, I expected those elements to be present to a greater degree. I also expected Mel Gibson's Max to be a bit more depraved and a bit more of an antihero than he was. Really, he's fairly safe, as would have made sense in trying to make the movie more mainstream for a bigger box office. That said, I really enjoyed most of it, and felt like I was checking a seminal film off my list.

I didn't realize how perfect a double feature partner Hardware was until I started watching. The lead character here, played by Dylan McDermott, is actually nicknamed Max, though his given name is Moses. I couldn't tell if that was supposed to be either a direct or an indirect allusion to the Mad Max series -- the movie never really expounded on it.

It was funny how much I remembered of this movie I hated (another indicator that this movie might have scarred me in some way, which my 17-year-old brain interpreted as hatred). I actually remembered the tune of the movie's theme song, which is "The Order of Death" by Public Image Limited and includes the refrain "This is what you want, this is what you get." I don't think I've heard that song since then (although I see it was used in The Blair Witch Project), so my memory of exactly when it played, 22 years later, is really quite something.

Here's what I'll say: This movie is not good in any conventional sense, but it's a lot more interesting than I gave it credit for. The robot splatters a couple humans (including a sexual predator) in really grotesque ways, and his advances at the artist (Stacey Travis) are pretty menacing and frightening. The movie has some awkward moments where it's very poorly executed, which is probably part of what turned my uncertainty into out-and-out distaste when we were first watching it. But I also don't really think we could handle this movie back in high school. As someone who has since gone on record with my affection for depraved films, I think Hardware fits in nicely -- it's bleak, hopeless and tarnished, which I now view as positive characteristics rather than negative ones.

******

My "official" double feature slate ends there, but funnily, I got in two more pairings of double features that fit the old-new theme before the end of Saturday night. I might as well run quickly through those since I've already come this far:

Saturday, February 18th

Before my wife got home:

Something new: The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges)
Something old: Rabbit Hole (2010, John Cameron Mitchell)
Informal theme that developed: None, really -- but both were movies I could watch while my son was awake?

I won't spend too much time on these, in part because The Lady Eve is part of my Getting Acquainted series and I'm going to spend more time on it a week or so from now. But let me just say that I'm glad I was watching The Lady Eve while my son was awake, doing his little projects around the house and occasionally bothering me, rather than Rabbit Hole. I watched Rabbit Hole during his nap, and was glad I did -- I simply love this movie, and as with 127 Hours, it hit me even harder, emotionally, on the second time through. It wasn't that I wasn't a bit distracted while watching it -- I needed to take care of some last cleaning around the living room before my wife came home. But at least the distractions were of my own choosing.

After my wife got home:

Something new: Chronicle (2012, Josh Trank)
Something old: They Live (1988, John Carpenter)
Informal theme that developed: Science fiction? Unintentional comedy? I don't know.

I'm going to leave these undiscussed. If I find the time, I'm going to devote a whole post to giving Chronicle a piece of my mind later this week.

Sunday, February 19th

The pattern was finally broken yesterday when I watched only one movie, the hilarious spy spoof called OSS 117: Lost in Rio. It's from the director (Michel Hazanavicius) and star (Jean Dujardin) of The Artist.

Which, for the record, was something new.

Mourning The Social Network in advance

The Social Network will not win best picture this weekend.

Why? Because a nice little period piece about overcoming adversity is going to come in and swipe away the Oscar.

When I say "swipe away the Oscar" I might as well be saying "sweep the Oscars." If the 12 Oscar nominations for The King's Speech did not stagger you, the fact that it could win half of them should.

Mind you, this isn't one of those years where I have serious misgivings about the eventual best picture winner. That's happened a bunch in recent years, where I've had minor to major problems with the movie that won. Even in the six years I've known my wife I can think of four examples of movies I thought had too many flaws to win: Million Dollar Baby, Crash, No Country for Old Men and The Hurt Locker. When The King's Speech wins, it will have my unambiguous support as a worthy contender.

It's just nowhere near as worthy as The Social Network.

I don't talk a lot about The Social Network on this blog. I've spent considerably more time heaping praise on the other four of my top five films of the year -- 127 Hours, Tangled, Agora and Winter's Bone -- than on The Social Network. In part that's probably because I thought each of those films, in their own way, required some kind of help from me, while the chorus of love for The Social Network was deafening already. For me to construct an entire piece on why David Fincher's film was so great would be just to repeat what numerous others have already written on the film blogosphere.

Now I'm wondering if we took The Social Network for granted. All of us.

I read an interesting take just now on why The King's Speech will win. You may already be aware of it, but I was not. While the praise for The Social Network was inescapable about two months ago, that's because that was when all the critics groups were releasing their accolades. But critics don't vote on the Oscars -- Academy members do. And so when the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild and the Screen Actors Guild all awarded their top honors to The King's Speech, the writing for The Social Network was on the wall.

But why? Why do critics have such a different outlook on this year's best picture race than the people who actually make the movies?

If I were being cynical/uncharitable, I'd say it's because the people who make movies are not as smart as we are. On the whole, that is. Any large body, like the Academy, tends to have a very populist undercurrent, just because it is comprised of so many damn people (upwards of 4,000, right?). And if you're an intellectual snob, populism = stupidity.

The thing is, I thought that The Social Network was stupidity-proof. I thought it was so damn good that it was going to walk away with the Oscar, unchallenged. And that's me trying to be unbiased. It's not even my favorite best picture nominee -- that honor goes to 127 Hours. But it was the best picture nominee I thought "we all" (both critics and Academy members) could get behind.

Speaking of 127 Hours, I'm still trying to get over the fact that Colin Firth will take the best actor Oscar over James Franco, even though I conceded that long ago. In fact, Franco is probably not even the #2 contender for the award, which you could argue would be either Jesse Eisenberg or Jeff Bridges (despite his win last year, people seem to love Bridges in True Grit). Franco probably sealed his fate as a non-contender when he agreed to host the ceremony. (We just watched the Dana Carvey SNL last night, which featured Paul Brittain as Franco, doing every job on the set -- as well as discussing all the other jobs he's doing, such as rabbi and cab driver.)

But I really didn't think I would have to concede best picture to The King's Speech as well.

Look, The King's Speech is good. I'm not saying it isn't. I was the first person I knew who saw it, several weeks before Christmas. When I came out, I thought, "That was a very solid movie." It actually held more interest for me as a study of the difficulty of a life of royalty, than as an "overcoming adversity" movie. There's no doubt that the movie has an excellent build toward the climactic speech, which is indeed quite tense. But I was much more fascinated by the way ordinary people rise or fail to rise to the occasion of being royalty -- because even though they have the bloodline they do, these royals are just human beings, at their core, who want and need ordinary human things, things that don't necessarily jibe with a life in the public eye. I liked the cinematography, set design and art direction, I thought Firth's was probably the second- or third-best performance of the year, and I was with it the whole way.

But best picture? Nah.

In The Social Network, you have a movie that defines our times. A director at the height of his powers has fully realized a complicated, layered script from one of the greater writers of our age, and gotten a performance of lacerating unlikeability from Jesse Eisenberg in the lead. The Social Network is so interesting because it takes something that seems so frivolous -- an addictive networking website -- and makes it stand in for a host of ways we define modern discourse and psychology, such that our very humanity is what's being studied. I'll leave it at that, because as I said, others have gone into this in great depth.

And now, it may not win any Oscars.

How could this happen?

For one, I guess The Social Network is, at its heart, cold. We forget that the Oscars often shy away from emotional coldness. One of the reasons Slumdog Millionaire won best picture was that it was emotionally warm. The fact that it happened to be the best nominated film that year was just a bonus, making for a perfect Oscar winner (even if the film has suffered backlash since then).

The thing is, "cold" movies win all the time. No Country for Old Men was as icy as the crypt.

Then there's the possibility that The Social Network came out too early. Its October 1st release date meant that audiences had months to fawn over it, and to get over that fawning. In fact, perhaps The Social Network crammed in a period of fawning followed by a period of backlash, all before Oscar voters even cast their votes. Meanwhile, The King's Speech had two months' less opportunity for that cycle to complete itself.

The thing is, movies released early in the season win all the time. The Hurt Locker came out in July. Maybe even June.

Who knows. Maybe one too many person in the Academy decided that The Social Network was too progressive -- too young for their tastes, even though the Academy has stated a desire to appeal to younger viewers. Along those same lines, maybe one too many person couldn't stomach giving best picture to a movie in which Justin Timberlake appears. (Let's hope that's not the case, because Timberlake always does good work.) Or maybe too many of them had worked with Fincher, who is supposed to be very difficult.

In any case, it looks like an advanced mourning of The Social Network is definitely warranted. It's a shame.

Here's hoping it wins at least one award. I won't say which one, but when/if it does happen, check back here for a post on the subject next week.

Until then ... enjoy the Oscars. At least there's no truly inferior film to Crash the party this year.

Solo men in dire straits

Now that I've revealed my favorite movie of 2010, I can freely discuss a recent pattern in my movie preferences.

For the second year in a row, I've awarded my top spot to a movie that's been carried almost exclusively by a single actor.

A single actor up shit creek, at that.

Last year, the weight of my favorite movie, Moon, fell on Sam Rockwell's shoulders. This year, 127 Hours was in the capable hands -- so to speak -- or arms -- so to speak -- of James Franco.

And boy did they knock my socks off.

I'm assuming you know plenty about 127 Hours. Not only is the subject ostentatious enough to have gotten your attention, even if the film was not otherwise on your radar, but both the film and its lead just got nominated for Oscars. (I did a little fist pump when 127 Hours was announced as one of the best picture nominees, because some conventional wisdom had The Town claiming that spot -- which would have been fine with me, if it weren't coming at the expense of the best movie of the year.)

But let me explain to you a little bit about Moon, if you don't know about that one. Moon is the story of an astronaut (Rockwell) who's the only human on a lunar base, with only a computer (voice of Kevin Spacey) to provide companionship. The base is owned by a lunar mining company, which employs humans for three-year stints. Rockwell's Sam Bell is in the final two weeks of his own three-year stint, and is starting to get just a little bit batty. But when he takes a patrol vessel out to examine some damaged mining equipment, things take a turn for the ... surreal. To say anything more than that would be a disservice to those who haven't seen it. (And if you're in that group, by all means, get out there and watch it.)

I'm trying to figure out what impresses me so much about these movies and these performances -- why I'm drawn to them at the expense of other films. I'm sure part of it has to do with the basic commitment shown by the actors. Put another way, I'm impressed by how hard it is for them to do the thing they're charged with doing: keeping us entertained for the better part of two hours, without an assist from any other performers. Both Moon and 127 Hours do have other actors who appear sporadically, but they are mostly either in video transmissions or dreams/hallucinations. At the core, Rockwell and Franco have been given the responsibility of engrossing us, all by themselves, and they each hit the ground running.

But I'm also wondering if this is a broader thing for me, something that stretches back longer than the last two years. Moon and 127 Hours are distinctive for their lack of other actors, but the character type may be something I've been rewarding for longer than that. And once you expand the definition of a "solo man," you can go back most of the last decade.

Each of the films I've crowned as my best film of the year -- dating all the way back to 2002 -- have a strong performance by the lead male, playing a character known for his loneliness and isolation, or more generously, his independence. Shall we take a look?

2008 - The Wrestler. Mickey Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson is definitely approaching the twilight of his career -- and possibly of his life, if you look at those heart issues -- alone. He lives in a trailer, and his life is comprised of benign but disinterested neighborhood kids, co-workers in the wrestling industry who are more acquaintances than friends, and the occasional stripper who makes the mistake of being nice to him. He's trying to reach out to his estranged daughter as a last-gasp effort not to die alone.

2007 - There Will Be Blood. Daniel Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview is a self-made man in every respect of the word. Not only does he not need anyone else, but he imagines it would weaken him to let anyone get close enough to him to take the credit for his achievements. His natural suspicion of others and their motives further alienates anyone who might wish him well. In fact, after bearing at least partial responsibility for the deafening of his adopted son, he sends him away, widening the gap between himself and other human beings.

2006 - Children of Men. Although the quest to safely shepherd the first pregnant woman in 20 years is, in its most essential form, a collaborative effort shared by a handful of dedicated individuals, Clive Owen's Theo Faran is essentially bearing this burden himself. He's carrying the weight of his own dead child, and as the story progresses, the others who have tenuous connections to him start slipping out of the picture as well. In many ways he is the portrait of loneliness, doing his stoic duty in the public eye, but bursting into floods of uncontrollable emotion in private.

2005 - Hustle & Flow. Terrence Howard's D-jay is surrounded by prostitutes of varying levels of loyalty, but he is a fiercely independent man who has carved his own world out of his own raw materials. His quick temper and deep-burning passion make him a lone wolf walking through his own environment and playing by his own rules.

2004 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jim Carrey's Joel Barish is painfully shy. He's drawn out by Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), but his essential shyness and alienation are only highlighted by the procedure he undergoes to have Clementine erased from his memory. It's like Clementine's influence was never there, and left to his own instincts, he's cut off from the world, unable even to sustain eye contact without becoming acutely aware of himself.

2003 - Lost in Translation. Bill Murray's Bob Harris is so alienated, he has to go to Tokyo just to symbolize the idea that he's a foreigner in his own life. Like all these other characters, he flirts with making connections, and perhaps Bob succeeds more than these others with his necessarily fleeting connection to Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte. But we can tell that Bob's sadness and isolation cannot be cured by a single positive interaction -- they will reset upon his return to America, which makes this beautiful film a kind of tragedy as well.

2002 - Adaptation. Nicolas Cage's Charlie Kaufman is perhaps a more exaggerated (and less handsome) version of Carrey's Joel Barish, which is appropriate since the real-life Kaufman wrote both scripts. Socially awkward to the point of distraction, Cage's Kaufman stumbles through life sweating, stammering, unable to make eye contact, and living in a prison of his own overactive mind, with the mitigating factor that he's capable of producing absolute brilliance on the page.

At this point we run into a clear exception to the rule. In 2001, I awarded Robert Altman's ensemble film Gosford Park with my top honors for the year. However, even with this there is a bit of an asterisk. Although I stand by the choices I've made with every film I've honored as my favorite, I secretly believe that I was blown away by Gosford Park in a way that was somewhat temporary. The film that had been holding the top slot all year, and is what I sort of now believe was my true #1 of that year, was Christopher Nolan's Memento, which has got isolation and loneliness written all over it. (My actual favorite film of 2001, which I didn't see until two years later, meaning I couldn't rank it, is Donnie Darko. But there's no alienation or isolation in that movie, is there?)

In 2000? Yeah, it was Michael Almereyda's modern update of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke. Has there ever been a character in the history of the world who embodies isolation more than Hamlet?

Okay, the streak officially stops at this point. My favorite film in 1999 was Run Lola Run, whose main character was a woman, a woman not particularly known for her isolation. And then my favorite film of 1998 was Happiness, another ensemble. I think a dozen years is a good place to stop.

(Not only are those 11 different directors -- Danny Boyle, Duncan Jones, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alfonso Cuaron, Craig Brewer, Michel Gondry, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Christopher Nolan and Michael Almeyreda -- but they're also 11 different talented actors: James Franco, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke, Daniel Day-Lewis, Clive Owen, Terrence Howard, Jim Carrey, Bill Murray, Nicolas Cage, Guy Pearce and Ethan Hawke. Not bad.)

So as I dig deeper into this post -- which is going places I didn't even imagine when I started writing it -- what am I discovering about myself? Am I some kind of loner? Or is there at least a loner part of me that I see mirrored in the cinema that affects me most profoundly? And what does it say about me that almost all of these films are depressing in one way or another?

It's something I'll have to chew over, I suppose. And it's something I will certainly keep in the back of my mind as I start ranking for 2011.

Before I go, I do think I should return quickly to the original idea of a single actor using a brilliant performance to carry a film. I thought I should tell you that I don't consider this an automatic recipe for greatness. The last film I watched before my deadline on Monday night was Buried. You know, the movie where Ryan Reynolds spends 98 minutes trapped inside a coffin. (It says on the right that the last movie I watched was Casino Jack and the United States of Money, but that's because I started watching Casino Jack first and still had about 30 minutes to watch after finishing Buried.)

Buried ranked only 48th in my year-end rankings. Granted, the last film of the year always kind of gets the shaft, as you end up finishing it only an hour or two before you finalize your rankings. We all know it's helpful to let a movie marinate for a bit before you can be sure what you think about it. However, having to rush to judgment can actually result in too high of a ranking -- in fact, I'm not 100% sure that the film I saw on Sunday night, Animal Kingdom, deserved to be ranked as high as tenth.

Ryan Reynolds is good (though not brilliant) in Buried, and the set-up is good (though not brilliant). But where the movie really fails -- relative to the success of Moon and 127 Hours at least -- is that you feel the minutes passing the way you don't in those other films. That's probably director Rodrigo Cortes' point, to some extent. The film is clearly trying to feel claustrophobic, to simulate the experience of time passing interminably in such an enclosed space, and in fact, when at one point it's discussed that Reynolds has been in the coffin for two hours, it feels like it's been much longer. Points to Buried for that. Meanwhile, Moon and 127 Hours are not really trying to make you feel the claustrophobia of their situations, and the passage of time is not a significant detail. (That's a funny thing to say about 127 Hours, whose title involves the amount of time Aron Rolston is trapped by that rock, but Danny Boyle is not that interested in making time seem to pass slowly in the film -- that's my point.)

I should pause here to say that I was also bothered by various narrative choices in Buried -- the petulant reactions Paul Conroy has to the people who try to help him, how wantonly he uses a limited amount of Zippo fluid (before he even knows that there are at least four (!) other light sources available in the coffin -- a logistical necessity of the camera having to see Reynolds' face), and how wantonly he uses his limited cell phone battery, which those trying to help him are using to attempt to track his location.

But why those other two films are great and why Buried is only pretty good is because ultimately, Buried makes you tire of Ryan Reynolds. The feat Sam Rockwell and James Franco achieved is so amazing precisely because it's so counterintuitive -- you should need to see other actors in a film in order to be entertained the whole time. Buried's pretty goodness, then, is the logical thing, while the other films' greatness is the surprise.

And when it comes to films I love, surprising me is a really good start. Especially since few films actually do surprise us these days.

2010, your hours have run out

Another year, another Oscar nominations morning, another list of my favorite -- and least favorite -- films from the previous year.

If you haven't been present for my several weeks of hype leading up to the big event, I always reveal my list of movie rankings, from first to worst, on the morning Oscar hopefuls wake up at 5:30 our time (it's 5:27 right now) to watch the reading of the Oscar nominations. (I always watch it on ABC, for some reason.) My reward for waking up early is that I have time enough before going to work to make myself a breakfast complete with eggs and breakfast meat. Mmm, breakfast meat.

The reason I deviate from the usual tradition of publishing my list during the week between Christmas and New Year's is simple -- I need a few extra weeks to watch the movies that get released late in the year. The morning of the Oscar nominations has always seemed like a good amount of extra time. Of course, I don't limit myself to just those movies during these extra couple weeks -- I also watch plenty of bad movies released in February, which have been available on DVD since July.

I fell just short of last year's record total, which was 113. Then again, last year, the Oscar nominations were revealed a full week later, on February 2nd. An extra week this year would have netted me an additional ten movies for sure. But since I'm always suffering from major movie fatigue this time of year, I'm just as glad not to have that extra week. Looking forward to returning to business as usual after the big crunch.

Okay, Mo'Nique is coming out on stage right now ... excuse me for a moment as I watch the nominations live.

A best picture nomination for The A-Team? I didn't see that coming.

But seriously, I've seen ten of ten best picture nominees. I'm getting good at this. Particularly glad to see my favorite film of the year nominated ... no better moment to get down to business ...

Without further ado, my top 109 films of 2010, listed in no particular order. (Wait, scratch that last part.)

1. 127 Hours
2. Tangled
3. The Social Network
4. Agora
5. Winter's Bone
6. Mother
7. Rabbit Hole
8. Exit Through the Gift Shop
9. Cyrus
10. Animal Kingdom
11. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
12. Greenberg
13. Kick-Ass
14. The Human Centipede
15. Four Lions
16. The King's Speech
17. Toy Story 3
18. The Town
19. Black Swan
20. The Living Wake
21. Mother and Child
22. Please Give
23. Easy A
24. Lebanon
25. Blue Valentine
26. Inception
27. Date Night
28. Never Let Me Go
29. I'm Still Here
30. The Kids Are All Right
31. The Ghost Writer
32. Countdown to Zero
33. Let Me In
34. The Last Exorcism
35. Restrepo
36. After.Life
37. Piranha 3D
38. Catfish
39. How to Train Your Dragon
40. The Fighter
41. City Island
42. Get Him to the Greek
43. Daybreakers
44. Splice
45. Shutter Island
46. Micmacs
47. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
48. Buried
49. Casino Jack and the United States of Money
50. Extraordinary Measures
51. Hot Tub Time Machine
52. The Square
53. The Book of Eli
54. The Losers
55. She's Out of My League
56. I Am Love
57. The A-Team
58. Saint John of Las Vegas
59. Frozen
60. Ondine
61. Dear John
62. Youth in Revolt
63. Remember Me
64. Babies
65. Creation
66. Knight and Day
67. Tron: Legacy
68. True Grit
69. Tiny Furniture
70. Sweetgrass
71. Somewhere
72. Machete
73. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
74. Holy Rollers
75. Solitary Man
76. The Killer Inside Me
77. Unstoppable
78. Happy Tears
79. Phish 3D
80. The Joneses
81. The Bounty Hunter
82. The Other Guys
83. The Runaways
84. The Last Airbender
85. MacGruber
86. Easier With Practice
87. The Crazies
88. Edge of Darkness
89. Repo Men
90. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
91. Centurion
92. Killers
93. Brooklyn's Finest
94. Just Wright
95. Finding Bliss
96. Valentine's Day
97. Little Fockers
98. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
99. The Expendables
100. Devil
101. Jonah Hex
102. Operation: Endgame
103. Dinner for Schmucks
104. The Wolfman
105. Vampires Suck
106. The Back-up Plan
107. Legion
108. When in Rome
109. Furry Vengeance

Most regret not seeing before the deadline: Another Year, Biutiful, The Company Men, Get Low, The Tempest, Waiting for "Superman"

Okay, I am waiting -- waiting -- with bated breath for your comments. Even if you don't usually comment, I would love to hear your comments today. I know I've outraged you with certain choices, but I imagine I've also pleased you with others. Tell me about it. This is why I do this.

On to 2011. My rankings so far:

1. The Green Hornet

Discuss.

Ranking Danny Boyle

I saw 127 Hours this past weekend.

I know you probably did not. I'm having a hard time figuring out on IMDB when it gets a wider release, but I have to assume this is one of those situations where I benefit by living in Los Angeles. Whereas it may be playing on a single screen, if that, in your city, I've got five choices in LA, two that are within ten miles of my house.

Considering that, I don't want to tell you too much about my new favorite movie of the year. Except this: GO.

Okay, I'm going to tell you a little more than that. But within the format of looking at the entire body of work of the film's director, Danny Boyle.

So welcome to the latest in my informal "ranking" series, in which I take a particular type of film of which I have seen all of the qualifying films, and rank them in order of preference, briefly discussing each. I did it with Pixar, the Coen brothers and Star Trek, so now it's time for Danny Boyle and his nine feature films to go under the microscope.

Without any further ado ...

1) 127 Hours (2010). Yes, it's that great. Boyle is a highly respected director, even auteur, who has had a hugely varied career in terms of the subject matter of his movies. Yet this is his greatest, and I'm not even sure it's that much of a debate. Playing Aron Rolston, James Franco gives the kind of performance that should quiet all talk of the Oscar going to anyone else. (Keep quiet over there, Colin Firth with your King's Speech.) But even getting himself into the many different head spaces and stages of panic and disorientation this film requires, Franco may only give the second-best performance in this film. The best performance may be Boyle's, as he's equal to the challenges this film poses, requiring as it does an outside-the-box storyteller and narrative stylist. There are so many creative choices made with spacing, camera setups, fantasy sequences, flashback, music, sound, editing and color that I wouldn't even know where to begin describing them. What's even more amazing is that everyone knows how this story ends -- it's not a spoiler to tell you that the guy had to amputate his own arm -- yet the journey to that outcome is no less suspenseful and downright tense. At one point in the film -- okay, it was during THE scene -- I looked down and noticed that I was gripping my box of Altoids as though I wanted to choke the life out of it. An absolutely visceral cinematic experience, a surefire best picture nominee, and (I hope) a frontrunner to win the award, even only two years after Boyle last won for Slumdog Millionaire.

2) Trainspotting (1996). If 127 Hours eventually earns (or has already earned) the reputation of being Boyle's hardest film to watch, then this is certainly his second hardest. Boyle took Irvine Welsh's novel and turned hardcore drug use and the reckless lives of Edinburgh punks into a dizzy, dreamy soup of sex, music and fury, and it introduced us to a stylist with a unique vision, in a way that was only hinted at in Shallow Grave. I regret that I've only seen this film once, 14 years ago, and have probably been tempted to let some of his other films surpass Trainspotting on the Boyle Greatness Scale, because I have yet to check back in with it. But that's overdue, so I'll try to get to it soon. Trainspotting also introduced us to no less than Ewan McGregor (not his first film, but his breakout), Robert Carlyle (ditto), and to a lesser extent Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Kelly MacDonald.

3) Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Poor Slumdog Millionaire. Only two years after we were all thrilled by it, we've subjected it to an almost Titanic-style backlash. Slumdog's former fans are now made up of scores of revisionist historians, who pretend they had issues with it all along -- they talk about its cheesy ending, its narrative shortcomings (why was the order of the questions the same chronological order as the events in his life that gave him the answers?) and its Bollywood dance sequence over the closing credits. (Which was pure fantasy, mind you, just a shout-out to the glorious history of Indian cinema.) But if you remember how you first felt when you saw Slumdog, especially if you saw it on the big screen, this ranking is appropriate. The film has life pulsing through it, another electric fusion of visuals and music that sends a tingling sensation down your spine. Just think of that scene where Boyle and his camera crew ran through the Mumbai slums following that foot chase, and you will remember how great Slumdog really is.

4) 28 Days Later (2002). Do you think we'd have nearly so many movies/TV shows/other properties involving zombies right now if it weren't for 28 Days Later? It wasn't George Romero who revitalized the zombie movie, it was Danny Boyle. 28 Days Later has its detractors -- I know one guy who hates it, even though the thing everybody knows about him is that he loves zombie movies -- but they're far outnumbered by its supporters. In another introduction to the world of a new talent, Cillian Murphy wakes up in a hospital bed and stumbles out into a completely abandoned London -- or so it would first appear. The eerie stillness of those early scenes provide an excellent contrast to the fury that comes later on, and what happens next is consistently crazy and surprising. I loved the grungy despair of the London created by Boyle, and remember being completely caught up in its spell when I first watched it. I've only seen it that one time (I'll end the suspense and reveal that I've seen all of Boyle's movies only once), but it deserves another, and soon.

5) Millions (2005). And here's where there's a pretty decent-sized dropoff from Boyle's first four masterpieces. Arguably Boyle's most insignificant film, Millions earns my affections for its liveliness and the great performances of its child actors. (In fact, you could say that Boyle's success with the children here would preview his work with them in Slumdog.) However, I must say that one of my enduring impressions of it is that it's a little too colorful, that it's maybe in my face the same way Robert Rodriguez' children's movies are in your face and garish. I remember there also being some kind of music-box soundtrack that's a bit jarring in its volume and emphasis. Still, Millions is an excellent display of technique and more or less just a "fun" movie, which is not how you could describe any of the first four on this list. It also has some themes that echo his first film, Shallow Grave, particularly the idea of an evil lurking in the attic.

6) Shallow Grave (1994). And speaking of Shallow Grave, I bet you were wondering when it was going to show up. I differ with most Boyle fans on how good Shallow Grave is. In fact, I'm sure that had something to do with how it was hyped to me by some of my friends who are passionately devoted to it. I may be holding it to too high a standard, especially since it's a first film, but it just didn't do for me what it did for my friends. I know I'm supposed to be creeped out by the way the relationship between these flatmates develops, particularly Christopher Eccleston holing himself up in the attic and basically attacking the people below. But I didn't consider it good weird, I considered it weird weird. I bet I'd have a more favorable impression of it if I watched it again.

7) Sunshine (2007). Ah, Sunshine. What an excellent film you could have been. Some people are willing to forgive the disastrous third act of this film in deference to the many things Boyle does right in the first two. I was totally with this film, and in its first half-hour was thinking it could be up there with 2001 and Alien as one of the great films about crazy shit happening in outer space. Until the shit got too crazy in a way-too-formulaic way, and basically devolved into a variation on the tried and tired "serial killer in space" format. I should note that the circumstances under which I saw this movie were highly strange. I started watching the movie in Melbourne, Australia, at an advanced screening attended by the director himself. But projection issues, featuring reels out of order and played backwards, with an hour break in the middle trying (in vain) to fix the problems, meant that I didn't finish watching it until it was released six months later in the United States. So it took me six months to realize how terribly the film ends. But, I did enjoy hearing Boyle speak to us, even if we hadn't actually "seen" the film he was speaking about.

8) The Beach (2000). That makes two Boyle films in a row with promising beginnings and very bad endings. I haven't read Alex Garland's beloved book on which The Beach was based, but if it ends the same way as the movie ends, I don't imagine I'd like it. However, the first two acts (particularly the first act) are highly enjoyable, and for me constitute some kind of archetypal encapsulation of the free-spirited traveler seeking pleasure and adventure in Southeast Asia. I love the early scenes of Leonardo DiCaprio hunting down his island paradise among shady hostel tenants and similarly feckless backpackers, not to mention an exotic French beauty -- even thinking about it now I am awash in the escapism of it. However, I can't forget how quickly and fatally the movie goes south.

9) A Life Less Ordinary (1997). Even though I am choosing to rank A Life Less Ordinary last, I actually have decent affection for this film. Since many critics considered it a turkey, I came in with low expectations, and found myself intermittently charmed by the gonzo romance between Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz. In fact, in some ways, I think it is a more consistently realized effort than either Sunshine or The Beach, but I am rewarding both of those films for very strong beginnings that really stick with me despite their eventual failures. I don't have a very distinct memory of A Life Less Ordinary, and it would probably not really be worth a second viewing. However, I do remember its visual pizzazz -- I remember feeling like Boyle really went for it, and I admired him shooting for the stars with such gusto.

And that's really something you can always say about Danny Boyle -- he always shoots for the stars, sometimes literally (Sunshine). And what an interesting career he's had. A bit like Ang Lee, he never makes the same movie twice. Going chronologically, he made a psychological thriller, a drug movie, a crime comedy, a travelogue thriller, a zombie movie, a coming-of-age movie, a space movie, a coming-of-age love story and a survival movie. Even as I was typing out those generic descriptions of Boyle's nine films, however, I realized how few of them fit neatly into the genre I assigned them to. That's the mark of a great artist -- someone who is always expanding the boundaries and definitions of the medium in which he works.

So how would you rank Boyle's films?

Keeping in mind, of course, that many of you will probably have to wait some number of weeks before 127 Hours will be at a theater near you.

Los Angeles has its smog, but it also has its benefits.