This week we reach filmic fever pitch and arrive at my Top 10 movies released on DVD in 2010.
Films that make up the Top 20 were in last week's column and can be found on Sunlive.co.nz. There are also a few films which possibly missed out because I neglected to watch them. Amongst them are Frozen River, which I hear great things about and intend to see very soon, and The Blind Side, which bagged Sandy Bullock her Oscar and is, I'm sure, very worthy. But, enough. Here's that Top 10
10: Toy Story 3 – Is it possible that this film is more affecting for adults than kids? Perhaps because the main theme is growing up and how everyone – toys and owners – cope with having to abandon childhood. It's beautifully animated and told, very funny, and, in places, startlingly emotionally powerful.
9: White Lightnin' – This autobiographical story of Jesco White, the man they call ‘The Dancing Outlaw' is an assault of manifest unpleasantness and sheer brilliance. Plunging the viewer into the heart of the gun-toting, moonshine-drinking Appalachian Mountains, it's a film about obsession and psychosis and following your art. (And has a fantastic hill-country soundtrack.)
8: In The Loop - The film spin-off from a little-seen (here) BBC political satire In The Thick of It. Starring Peter Capaldi as an unbelievably foul-mouthed spin-doctor for the British PM, the writing is razor sharp, a constant barrage of quotable one-liners as MPs flail incompetently in the build-up to an Iraq-style war.
7: Scott Pilgrim Vs The World - Dripping with attitude and dazzling visuals, Scott Pilgrim leaves every previous movie based on a comic book seeming anaemic and tame. It's like being inside a video game (in a good way). After Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, director Edgar Wright proves himself on a big budget, the pyrotechnic visuals matched by smart character beats.
6: The Secret In Their Eyes – The winner of last year's Best Foreign Film Oscar is a complex police thriller, smart and tied to a mature love story, complete with threatening undercurrents of repressive 1980s Argentina and the year's most impressive shot, a five minute swoop into and around a soccer stadium. Still dunno how they did it.
5: Silent Wedding - A short and sweet miracle of European filmmaking. The story-within-a-story structure tells a bawdy, funny and delightfully strange tale of life in a Romanian village under the dysfunctionally brutal rule of communist Russia, with flashes of magical, almost surreal beauty and undercurrents of tragedy.
4: Kick-Ass - Deliriously funny and joyfully politically incorrect, this manages to be both a geeky coming of age tale and an hilariously violent superhero parody. Ace in the hole is pint-sized 12-year-old assassin Hit Girl but the whole film is surprising, not just how taboo-breaking it is, but how impressively layered.
3: The Hurt Locker – The opening thesis is that war for some people can be like a drug, and this picks you up by the scruff of the neck and throws you into the middle of the conflict, leaving you tense and white-knuckled after only its first sequence; one of many scenes of bomb disposal that punctuate the film. Simply riveting.
2: Inception – A huge brave complicated idea is allowed full rein and only occasionally slips over the line into gratuitous Bond territory. A host of classy actors, spectacular action, and a genuine brain-twister of a plot which remains rooted in the emotional make-up of the characters. A beacon of originality in the gloom of sequels and remakes.
1: Boy – I've watched Boy a few times now and have decided that despite being the smallest of films it is pretty much perfect. It just gets everything so right. Charming, funny, surprising and sad, it wears its Kiwi credentials with an unselfconscious and unforced pride. And anyone who isn't laughing with pleasure during the end credits is surely dead.