Happy April Fools Day. For years I have been pitching pieces to MSN for the April Fools Day edition of the Entertainment site. This year they accepted my modest tribute to this magnificent holiday: The Top Ten Films of the Next Decade. Think of it as a speculative list, based on careful reading of the careers, themes, artistic aspirations and economic models of the present, which I then tossed out for all this made up shit. Enjoy. Also note, this top ten list has twelve entries.

You can’t make this stuff up. Well OK, you can make this stuff up, and that’s the fun of looking ahead. I mean, why wait until the last minute to make a 10-best list? To get a jump on the rush, we’ve put on our prognostication caps, hit the flash-forward button and come back from the future with this snapshot of the 10 best films of the 2010s. We were just as surprised as you at the results.

“The Matrix: Devolution” (The Wachowski Brothers Siblings)
After the bizarre journey of Larry Wachowski’s transformation into Lana and a hermitlike retreat following the debacle of “Speed Racer” (only recently resurrected as a subversive blast of cinematic surrealism), the Wachowski Siblings relaunched their brand with a return trip to the virtual world that made their fame and fortune. Drawing liberally from the New Testament, the New Wave and various volumes of “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” “Devolution” pairs the messianic Neo with a sassy Southern society lady (Sandra Bullock, back with Keanu Reeves for the first time since “Speed“) who gets caught in the program while playing what she thinks is a cutting-edge version of fantasy football. Impressed with his ability to surf the Web and dodge bullets at the same time, she tries to adopt the jacked-up orphan and ends up marrying him rather than face deportation. The virtual romantic comedy of cyber-geddon took the country by storm: “Titanic” meets “Tron” with a dose of Southern comfort and a flashback soundtrack that turned “Freedom of Choice” and “Mongoloid” into anthems for the new generation of techno-rebels.

Read the entire piece at MSN here.

I confess that I’ve been both proud and chagrined at the winners of previous Online Film Critics  Society awards. This year, I couldn’t be more proud to put my name behind the list of winners. They’re not all MY top choice, but they do make a statement that I’m happy to stand behind.

The awards, announced on the evening of January 5, 2010, are as follows:

Best Picture: The Hurt Locker
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Best Actor: Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker
Best Actress: Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, Precious
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Best Adapted Screenplay: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on a book by Roald Dahl
Best Documentary: Anvil!: The Story of Anvil
Best Picture Not in the English Language: The White Ribbon
Best Animated Feature: Up
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds
Best Score: Michael Giacchino, Up
Best Editing: Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, The Hurt Locker

The complete press release can be found on the OFCS New Blog here.

I did the conventional “Best of 2009 on DVD and Blu-ray” for MSN here but I’ve been having some fun exploring the less heralded releases of 2009 for Parallax View. In fact, many of the reviews originally appeared on this blog but I’ve organized them into something resembling a series of features. If you feel like revisiting some of the releases that flew under the radar of the mainstream DVD coverage, check out these pieces:

Ten DVD Releases That Made 2009 Great

DVD Discoveries and Rediscoveries 2009

TV on DVD 2009 – The Great, the Rediscovered and the Timeless

Good Things in Big Packages: DVD Box Sets of 2009

The Village Voice / LA Weekly Year End Film Poll results are in and The Hurt Locker is the consensus pick for the year’s best film. I couldn’t agree more; it was my pick as well.

The compilation list (with point totals) is here and you can check out the individual lists on this page here. My list (which is only slightly different than the one I compiled for MSN) can be found here.

The Hurt Locker

The critics and contributors to MSN Entertainment’s movie section weighed in on the best of the decade: 12 critics, 12 films, 12 essays. The general results may not surprise you, but our top pick – by a significant margin – is not one I’ve seen top other compilation lists. I had the honor and the pleasure of writing up the essay for our number one film.

The feature begins here. The individual lists are collected here.

And the lists continue…

I participated in the MSN “Best and Worst TV of 2009” list and wrote up a paragraph on a certain science fiction show that ended its run in 2009.

Nope, this isn’t a rerun, but our list of the best and worst shows of 2009 does look an awful lot like last year’s. Seven of our 10 selections on the best list are the same; and two of last year’s choices (“The Shield” and “The Wire“) went off the air and weren’t eligible. Also like last year, all of our choices for the year’s worst programs were new this season, even if their lead actors weren’t (sorry, Kelsey). Read on to see our choices for the best and worst TV series of 2009.

Read the complete list on MSN here.

My annual “Best of DVD” (and Blu-ray) is currently running on MSN Entertainment: 10 movie discs/sets, 5 TV releases and 3 Blu-ray selections. And yes, I do bundle a few releases into a single pick, but hey, that’s the prerogative of the listmaker always trying to cram in that extra kudo.

10. ’Pineapple Express: 2-Disc Unrated Special Edition’ (Sony)

The best outtakes come from Judd Apatow comedies, hands down, and this is the best DVD from the Apatow factory this year (released in the first week of 2009), a hilarious and unexpectedly visceral collision of road movie, action thriller, accidental buddy comedy and stoner goof. This edition is slightly longer than the theatrical cut, but it’s the hilarious collection of deleted and alternate scenes (including some apparently imported from an alternate universe) and generous helpings of behind-the-scenes footage that makes supplements so much more fun. “I Love You, Man” (Paramount) and “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” (Genius) are runners-up in the realm of great unused improvisations and cutting-room-floor scenes.

What’s number one? You’ll have to check it out to find out. And it’s right here.

The “Ten Best” lists are a tradition that you can’t get past. I do my share of them, trying out different incarnation for various sites and occasions. The first of my lists has just gone live on the annual MSN round-up, which offers one of the most interesting compendiums. Ten critics are polled and an compilation list derived from the collection, and with a sampling of this size some interesting results are bound to arise.

The compilation list (and the collection of supporting essays, one from each contributor) can be found here. The individual lists are collected here (I lead the collection – sure, it’s alphabetical, but still…) and my essay is here (sorry, you have to click on it to find out what I was assigned. But I encourage you to explore the entire gallery; this is a terrific collection of critics (Richard T. Jameson, Kathleen Murphy, Dave McCoy, Kim Morgan, James Rocchi, Glenn Whipp, Mary Pols, Don Kaye, Jim Emerson and me) and a collection of essays that should prime you to explore each and every one of the picks. Even those that didn’t make my list.

"The Hurt Locker"

For what it’s worth, my top pick is The Hurt Locker (which, to no one’s surprise, is the top film on the compilation list by a significant margin), but my essay is on a film a little farther down the list.

My list will shift as time goes on as I catch up on films I missed, rewatch films I’ve seen already and consider and reconsider the criteria I use from day to day, but I promise that at some point in early January that only seems arbitrary (and, despite my protestation, probably is),  I will come up with my final list and stop with the revisions. Until then, enjoy the permutations.

In honor of the release of JT Petty’s The Burrowers, I put together a list of the best, most interesting and most noteworthy films to combine the genres of horror and western, for the IFC website.

Westerns and horror films are, more than any American film genres I can think of, viscerally grounded in mortality, the vulnerability of human flesh and the primal drive of survival instinct. Whether facing wild animals or bloodthirsty monsters, cold-blooded gunfighters or psychotic madmen, roving bands of raiders or packs of zombies, the heroes of these films fight to live. “It feels like a natural connection. They’re two of the most cinematic experiences that you have watching a movie,” notes director J.T. Petty. He should know — his film “The Burrowers,” which was released on DVD yesterday, is the most recent and one of the most creative approaches to the horror western hybrid, a unsettling monster movie by way of “The Searchers.”

The complete feature, and the countdown of ten films, is at IFC.com here. And no, Billy the Kid vs. Frankenstein versus Dracula is not on the list.

The deep sleep of a victim of "The Borrowers"

[originally written for Parallax View]

As the shock of New Yorker’s announcement sinks in, so does the complicated legacy of New Yorker. In conversations with friends and colleagues who programmed college campus films series and commercial repertory calendars (back when such things were a vital part of a metropolitan city cinema landscape), we all recalled the high prices of New Yorker film rentals and the deplorable condition of much of its print library. In my days as a video store manager, I sweated the premium prices of New Yorker videotapes, titles that would be lucky to break even, and they dragged their feet when it came to price reductions (many of which I wound up reviewing for Amazon.com during the early days of its home video launch). As a viewer I was often frustrated by the image interference caused by the heavy Macrovision copy protection. When it came to DVD, the quality was always fine, but never showed the crispness of Criterion restorations and digital mastering.

New Yorker Films' first release

Yet for all those gripes, New Yorker was essential to the richness of cinema culture in my time. It kept alive the canons of Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Godard, Herzog, but in addition to its commitment to the European canon, it brought to light filmmakers from neglected corners of the cinematic culture, in particular Africa, South America and Iran. Would the films of Ousmane Sembene be accessible to American audiences if not for New Yorker? Would the films of South America’s Cinema Novo movement have been “discovered” with them?

Just contrast New Yorker with Miramax. Back in their Miramax days, the Weinstein Bros. showed cagey instincts when it came to sifting through imports for that sexy title that they could sell with their own inimitable mix of art cinema ballyhoo and cultural cache. They outbid everyone else to secure those films in which they saw potential and sunk money into striking good prints with strong, readable subtitles, and into promoting their films. And at times they brought in the scissors to trim down their imports. They combined the arrogance of an old-time studio boss with the promotional savvy of a William Castle or a Kroger Babbs, only with a touch of class.

New Yorker never had those promotional instincts and certainly never had the capital to compete with Miramax and the boutique divisions of the major studios that flowered in the wake of Miramax’s success. But then it never occurred to Dan Talbot and the New Yorker crew to edit down the films they imported. Miramax made foreign filmgoing special. New Yorker was about special foreign films and filmmakers. It was, in many ways, up to the audiences to find them.

Most of those studio indie/art film divisions have since been shut down or absorbed back into their parent companies, and the Weinsteins are still looking for a signature acquisition to re-establish themselves outside of Miramax (which is doing just fine in its more modest, post-Weinstein incarnation). On the home video side, we’ve seen specialty labels like Tartan Films and NoShame close up and others struggle to continue.

Read more »

Wall-E on Blu-ray

I recently wrote up a kind of Blu-ray 101 – an introduction to the format and a list of stand-out discs for the essential library – for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It went live on Tuesday. February 17. Here’s a few of my picks:

STATE OF THE ART

WALL-E (Disney): Pixar’s robot love story is a joyous and gorgeous work of animation, and it practically leaps off the screen on Blu-ray. The picture is crisp and rich, the color iridescent and the sound mix a marvel of subtlety and aural depth. Beyond the movie, the supplements are magnificent, and the Blu-ray exclusive picture-in-picture video commentary is the best use of that technology I’ve seen yet.

THE DARK KNIGHT (Warner) / IRON MAN (Paramount): The second film in Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the “Batman” franchise made use of Imax cameras, the high-definition peak for film, for select scenes — the first studio feature to do so. Blu-ray is the closest you’ll get to that Imax experience on home video. “Iron Man” has no Imax scenes but, like “The Dark Knight,” features impeccably mastered image and sound.

ZODIAC: DIRECTOR’S CUT (Paramount): David Fincher shot this 2007 feature on state-of-the-art digital video. On Blu-ray, the stellar grain-free image is so sharp and pristine, it’s unreal.

The complete feature and the rest of the picks can be found at the Seattle P-I online here.

We  wrapped the year at Parallax View with a collection of Top Ten lists and a few comments. And I contributed my final Top Ten list of the year:

1. A Christmas Tale/Un Conte de Noel (France) (dir: Arnaud Desplechin)
2. The Edge Of Heaven (Germany) (dir: Fatih Akin)
3. WALL•E (dir: Andrew Stanton)
4. Let The Right One In (Sweden) (dir: Tomas Alfredson)
5. Wendy And Lucy (dir: Kelly Reichardt)
6. The Fall (dir: Tarsem Singh)
7. The Dark Knight (dir: Christopher Nolan)
8. The Class (France) (dir: Laurent Cantet)
9. The Secret Of The Grain (France) dir: Abdellatif Kechiche
10. My Blueberry Nights (dir: Wong Kar Wai)

I also saw six films at various film festivals that could easily have made the list, were they eligible under most Top Ten guidelines (i.e.: a theatrical release). Some of them have been set for a 2009 release, a couple still await distribution.

Four Nights With Anna (Poland/France) dir: Jerzy Skowlimowski
The Hurt Locker dir: Kathryn Bigelow
L’heure d’ete (Summer Hours) (France) dir/scr: Olivier Assayas
Of Time And The City dir/scr: Terence Davies
Still Walking (Japan) dir/scr: Hirozaku Kore-Eda
Ain’t Scared (France) dir/scr: Audrey Estrougo

See the rest of the lists at Parallax View here.