Blue Valentine is such a mannered, affected piece of filmmaking that in its early minutes, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to survive it. A prematurely aged Ryan Gosling, wearing an aggressively receding hairline — the character he’s playing appears…
Did you think Avatar was going to settle for being the highest grossing movie of all time and then just fade away quietly? No way! This record-breaking juggernaut is also the most pirated film of 2010. On one hand, this makes no sense at all since Avatar seemed like the last film you would want to download, given that its visual, 3-D experience was the main selling point. On the other hand, I guess the hype behind any movie making that much money is hard to ignore, even for internet pirates. In any case, while 20th Century Fox is probably okay with this distinction since the film already killed it at the box office, a few other films on the top ten list probably aren’t so happy.
I’m especially looking at Kick-Ass and Green Zone, both of which were more or less considered failures. If, for example, half of the people who downloaded Kick-Ass had gone to see it in the theater at, let’s say, eight dollars per ticket, that would have added an extra $45.6 million to its gross. Granted, those numbers of who would and wouldn’t have paid to see it are totally hypothetical, but I’m sure the producers are trying to guess about the same figures right now. Ah yes, and we already knew that the Hurt Locker producers were made about piracy.
1. Avatar / 16,580,000 2. Kick-Ass / 11,400,000 3. Inception / 9,720,000 4. Shutter Island / 9,490,000 5. Iron Man 2 / 8,810,000 6. Clash of the Titans / 8,040,000 7. Green Zone / 7,730,000 8. Sherlock Holmes / 7,160,000 9. The Hurt Locker / 6,850,000 10. Salt / 6,700,000
Year-end lists are great! But as we’ve learned in the past few years, they aren’t enough for this tech-savy age. No, we need end of year video montages too. Extremely comprehensive end-of-year-montages. Well, two particularly well-edited ones have just popped up; one counting down the top 100 viral videos of the year and one just paying homage to the avalanche of movies, good and bad, that reigned down on us during 2010. So join me for a trip down memory lane and try to decide whether the year’s best entertainment was delivered in a movie theater or on cell phones and laptops.
This seven minute montage of 2010 films apparently features 270 movies! It’s edited like an Academy Awards tribute reel, which wouldn’t bother me too much if it didn’t pay tribute to the surf scene from Marmaduke alongside excellent films like The Social Network. Anyway, it’s very slick, but as far as evoking something like nostalgia or even making me look back on this year in film in any more detail, it’s not working. It seems that the films which get the most screen time are based solely on how they fit into the editing. Otherwise I have no idea why Cop Out is featured so prominently. Also, unless the editor, Gen, decided that Enter the Void didn’t count for this year, I’d like to see a new cut with some footage from that. It would fit perfectly. Still though, 270 movies! [Via Slash Film]
Onto viral videos! This Top-100 countdown from Gawker TV is, as you’d expect, more ironic and snarky. But it’s also much shorter and a lot more fun to watch. It starts on a perfect note, and while some of the music is a bit annoying, it’s a covers a pretty diverse spectrum, along with some cute cats and people getting hurt. Though, I wish they could have found a way to include the reigning champion of news bloopers. [Via Gawker TV]
Verdict: Chalk it up to editing, context or truth, but if I had been living off the fat of the land in some remote cabin this year, I’d actually be more anxious to catch up on viral videos based solely on these two montages. Though, I’ll admit viral videos are more conducive to montages.
· Here’s a bountiful reel of pre-Thanksgiving warmth: Ahead of Tangled’s release, Disney has compiled short clips from all 49 of its previous animated films and set it to the music of Brandi Carlile. It’s cute — except for when you realize how much money you and your family have given to Disney since 1937. [YouTube]
· Here’s your first X-Factor promo. I’m trembling a little. [EW]
· Actress-songwriter Bird York, who wrote the Oscar-nominated song “In the Deep” from Crash, is writing a drama pilot for Fox called In Deep. [Deadline]
· It’s time to accept that Tom Felton might be the coolest Harry Potter cast member. His appearance on Attack of the Show proves it. [ONTD]
· Officially, Dancing with the Stars’s finale was up 23% from last season’s. Jennifer Grey didn’t even have to flash her cha-cha-chas. [Deadline]
Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece gets a snappy new DVD release with The Complete Metropolis (new from Kino International this week), including long-lost footage that recently surfaced thanks to a 16mm print found in an Argentine vault. Sadly, the fact that it’s a silent movie will cause lots of otherwise-adventurous moviewatchers to turn up their nose at it, like it was a spoonful of cod-liver oil being administered by Kate Gosselin. But even if repeated film-class screenings of Intolerance made you think that all pre-sound movies were tedious and overacted, a look at Metropolis — or any of the following films — should convince you otherwise.
1.) Sunrise: After more than 80 years, F.W. Murnau’s haunting romance about a cheating husband, his underappreciated wife, and his slutty mistress remains one of the screen’s most beautiful (in both the visual and emotional sense) love stories ever put on the screen. From the film’s clever use of its intertitles — when the mistress wonders if the wife could be “drowned,” the word sinks slowly off-screen — to its breathtaking and revolutionary use of the camera, Sunrise still gets you where it counts.
2.) The Navigator: Film scholars get all gooey over Buster Keaton’s The General, but my favorite from this early comedy genius is this tale of two clueless rich kids who find themselves all alone at sea, and are forced to learn how to cook, sail, and generally fend for themselves. Keaton’s agility for physical and visual humor makes words completely extraneous, and the same could be said for…
3.) The Gold Rush: … Charlie Chaplin, who basically helped to invent the movies as we know them, even though his films still feel fresh and electric today. He’s got plenty of great silent features to choose from — City Lights, Modern Times, The Kid — but this one’s perfect for beginners, as it showcases his deft skill at balancing mammoth sight gags with intimate moments of sentimentality.
The Navigator
Gold Rush
4.) Safety Last: The other great comic of the silent era was Harold Lloyd, forever immortalized as the guy hanging off the clock (which he does in this movie). But while his breathtakingly foolhardy and hilarious stunt work is Lloyd’s main claim to fame, he was the screen’s original nerd, a bespectacled and underestimated little guy who managed to accomplish some extraordinary feat by the end of the movie.
5.) Greed: While MGM slashed the running time of Erich von Stroheim’s masterpiece, even the butchered version still stands as one of the greatest American movies. A winning lottery tickets spells disaster for the woman who holds it and the two men who love her in this uncompromisingly hard-hitting drama. You can trace a direct line between what von Stroheim accomplished here and, say, Paul Thomas Anderson’s evisceration of American avarice in There Will Be Blood.
Did you think Avatar was going to settle for being the highest grossing movie of all time and then just fade away quietly? No way! This record-breaking juggernaut is also the most pirated film of 2010. On one hand, this makes no sense at all since Avatar seemed like the last film you would want to download, given that its visual, 3-D experience was the main selling point. On the other hand, I guess the hype behind any movie making that much money is hard to ignore, even for internet pirates. In any case, while 20th Century Fox is probably okay with this distinction since the film already killed it at the box office, a few other films on the top ten list probably aren’t so happy.
