Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
To conclude my 2010 in Movies series, here’s another very fun trend: 2010 brought us more food-centric films than any year in memory: I Am Love (Io sono l’amore), Mid-August Lunch, The Kings of Pastry, Today’s Special, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle House and Soul Kitchen. The Movie Gourmet approves of this trend.
You can get the idea here from I Am Love‘s trailer. Check out the plate of glazed prawns about 58 seconds into the trailer.
Here’s my list of 10 Food Porn Movies.
2010 continued a trend of really good recent crime dramas. This year, most of them came from overseas: The Secrets in Their Eyes (Argentina) won the most recent Best Foreign Language Oscar and A Prophet (France) and Ajami (Palestine/Israel) were nominated.
All three made my list of the year’s best movies and my list of Best Recent Crime Dramas.
We also had other strong imports in this genre: the Mesrine films (France), Animal Kingdom (Australia) and Mother (Korea).
The best American crime drama was The Town, in which the rockin’ first two acts were betrayed by a sappy and implausible climax.
Here’s the trailer for Ajami, an ultra-realistic crime drama set in a scruffy neighborhood in Jaffa, Israel. The story weaves together Arab Christians and Arab Muslims and both religious and non-religious Israeli Jews. Everyone aspires to make a living and live in personal safety, but the circumstances and tribal identities make this very difficult at best. There are two trans-religious romances, but no one is going to live happily ever after. Ajami was co-written and co-directed by Scandar Copti, a Jaffa-born Palestinian, and Yaron Shoni, an Israeli Jew. After seeing the film, I was surprised to learn that it has no trained actors – all of the roles are played by real-life residents who improvised their lines to follow the story line.
Here’s my list of the best films of 2010: 1) Winter’s Bone; 2) Toy Story 3; 3) The Social Network; 4) The Secrets in their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos); 5) Rabbit Hole; 6) Black Swan; 7) A Prophet (Un Prophete); 8 ) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; 9) Mademoiselle Chambon; 10) (tie) Ajami and Inception.
(Note: I’m saving room for some films that I haven’t yet seen, especially Mike Leigh’s Another Year.)
Continuing with my list of 2010’s best films: The Tillman Story, True Grit, The King’s Speech, The Girl on the Train (La Fille du RER), Inside Job, Fish Tank, The Ghost Writer, Carlos, Fair Game, Hereafter, The Fighter, Solitary Man, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and Sweetgrass.
You can watch the trailers and see my comments on all these films at Best Movies of 2010.
(Further Note: The Secrets in their Eyes, A Prophet and Ajami were nominated for the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but were widely released in the US in 2010.)
As usual several documentaries made my list of Best Movies of 2010: Inside Job, The Tillman Story, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, and Sweetgrass.
And there were still more excellent documentaries. Ken Burns augmented his brilliant Baseball with The Tenth Inning. PBS’s Earth Days told the story of the modern environmental movement through the voices of key players. The Most Dangerous Man in America brought new texture to the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. The fine PBS series Independent Lens brought us Lost Souls (Animas Perdidas), in which filmmaker Monika Navarro trailed an uncle deported to Mexico and discovered secrets in her own family.
Here’s the trailer for the magical Sweetgrass.
I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the recent post updating my 10 Most Memorable Food Scenes – the movie food scenes that are the most amusing, shocking, etc. But what about the most tantalizing food movies? They are on a completely different list: 10 Food Porn Movies.
Nobody will be surprised that I’ve included Babette’s Feast or Eat Drink Man Woman. But I also feature four 2010 films. Visit the 10 Food Porn Movies for the other picks, trailers, images and even a link to some recipes.
One of the main threads of Toy Story 3 is how the toys escape (while sending up virtually every convention of the prison movie genre). On NPR’s Fresh Air, Toy Story 3‘s editor Lee Unkrich and screenwriter Michael Arndt recently discussed how they watched many prison movies for inspiration. The interview is here.
The movie that they call the “most boring” is Le Trou, which actually tops my list of Best Prison Movies.
We’re living in a good time for crime drama. When I think of this genre, I generally think of The Godfather, Goodfellas, and the film noir of the 40s and 50s. But there are some excellent contemporary ones. This year, we have had A Prophet, The Secret in Their Eyes, Ajami, Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Animal Kingdom. (Interestingly, two of those films are French, and the others are Australian, Argentine and Israeli.)
Here are some more outstanding crime dramas from the past seven years: The Lookout, A History of Violence, Layer Cake, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Tell No One, Gomorrah, Sin Nombre, In Bruges, Zodiac, Maria Full of Grace and Eastern Promises. All of them have inventive, fresh takes on the crime genre. All of them are on my list of best films for its year.
For descriptions and trailers, see Best Recent Crime Dramas.
My pick for 2010’s best movie to date is Winter’s Bone, which is just now available on DVD. A 17-year-old Ozarks girl is determined to save the family home by tracking down her meth dealer dad – dead or alive. The girl’s journey through a series of nasty and nastier Southern Missouri crank cookers is riveting – without any explosions, gunfights or chase scenes. Every moment of this film seems completely real. Winter’s Bone won the screenwriting and grand jury prizes at Sundance.
With just her second feature, Debra Granik has emerged as an important filmmaker to watch. She presents an unflinching look at this subculture without ever resorting to stereotype. Granik hits a home run with every artistic choice, from the locations to the spare soundtrack to the pacing to the casting. I’ll be watching for her next film.
As the protagonist, 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence is in every scene. With a minimum of dialogue, she creates a lead character of rarely seen determination.
Dale Dickey is exceptional as a criminal matriarch. John Hawkes (the kind Sol Star in Deadwood) also gives a tremendous performance as the ready-to-explode Uncle Teardrop.
For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week. Winter’s Bone is on my lists of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far and 5 Great Hillbilly Movies.
By popular demand, I have updated my list of 10 Most Memorable Food Scenes. Many of you have pointed out deserving scenes that I left off my first draft. Paula reminded me of the dining-as-foreplay scene in Tom Jones. Rick mentioned The Freshman, in which the The Fabulous Gourmet Club charges a $1 million prix fixe “for the privilege of eating the very last of a species”. And somehow I had forgotten the food fight scene from Animal House.
And Judy reminded me of a movie that I had erased from my memory because I hate, hate, hate it – The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Nevertheless, I admit that the final (and I mean final) dining scene is most memorable.
Here’s my pick for the most memorable food scene in the movies:
For the most tantalizing food in the movies, see my completely different list of 10 Food Porn Movies.
Tony Curtis has died. He was a very handsome and sexy guy, and the first half of his career was at the tail end of Hollywood’s Studio Era. As a result, he played the pretty boy leads in lots of mediocre action movies. He and first wife Janet Leigh (parents of Jamie Lee Curtis) made up one of Hollywood’s most glamorous couples ever.
But Tony Curtis could act if he got the right role, and he made at least three great movies. The fact that these movies come from three very different genres (screwball comedy, contemporary drama, sword-and-sandal epic) is a testament to his ability.
Some Like It Hot (1959): This Billy Wilder masterpiece is my pick for the best comedy of all time. Seriously – the best comedy ever. And it still works today. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play most of the movie in drag (and Tony is kind of cute). Curtis must continue the ruse although next to Marilyn Monroe is at her most delectable. Curtis then dons a yachting cap and does a dead-on Cary Grant impression as the heir to an industrial fortune.
Sweet Smell of Success (1957): This has Curtis’ most subtly acted role as a Broadway press agent who is completely at the mercy of Burt Lancaster’s sadistically nasty columnist. Many of us have experienced being vulnerable to the caprice of an extremely mean person – Curtis perfectly captures the dread and humiliation of being in that position.
Spartacus (1960): Once in a while, a grand epic is a really good movie , and Spartacus qualifies. Curtis plays a slave who is hit on by Laurence Olivier’s Roman patrician in a scene of BARELY implicit homosexuality. “Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?”, Olivier leers from the bath. It was a gutsy scene for a studio actor at the end of the 50s.
