MOLLY TEMPLETON'S TOP MOVIES OF 2010
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6. ANOTHER YEAR
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Mike Leigh’s quietly satisfying, thoughtful Another Year spends a year in the life of an older
married couple, Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), around whom a gaggle of unhappy,
unsatisfi ed singles rotates. Central among them, and to the fi lm, is Mary (Lesley Manville), who never
met a glass of wine she didn’t like and who is perpetually unable to see how much she gets in her own
way — though to be fair, her friends aren’t so much helping her as keeping her company while she
trips herself up. It’s diffi cult to describe Another Year without making it sound reductive or moralistic:
Own your shit and grow up happy! Change comes from within! But Leigh’s fi lm is far kinder than that,
a character study that considers but doesn’t attempt to answer the complicated question of why some
people are so much happier than others. (2/3/11)
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7. INSIDE JOB
Though I could do without the heartstring-tugging score, Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job is an
effective, furious takedown of those responsible for the 2008 fi nancial crisis. Ferguson deftly distills
complex explanations into bite-sized chunks of information, refusing to accept that what happened
is too complicated for us ordinary folks to understand. While many key fi gures declined to be
interviewed for the fi lm, plenty of prevaricating, infuriating men offer non-answers to Ferguson’s
questions, and the fi lm is often structured so that the evidence comes before the interview, meaning
we’re left watching people deny or evade truths Ferguson’s already uncovered. It’s enough to make
you want to keep your savings in your mattress. (11/11/10)
FEATURING “TEXT-A-BEER”
“NO LONGER SNEAKING BEER INTO THE MOVIES SINCE 2008”
8. INCEPTION
It’s big. It’s fl ashy. The score makes that blaring BWWWAAAH noise way too
often. But the way Christopher Nolan deftly plays with dream logic — making it fi lm
logic, with roles assigned and parts carefully worked out, the trick being that you have
to believe, or it doesn’t work at all — gives Inception a hell of a kick. (Breakout roles
for Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt don’t hurt, either.) The elaborate effects and
set pieces are immersive, massive, dream-scaled, but in the end, Inception asks the
same thing of its audience as its dreamworld does of its characters: that we decide for
ourselves what’s real, and what really happened. (7/22/10)
9. TINY FURNITURE
It would be so easy to dislike Aurora (Lena Dunham), the twentysomething main character of
Tiny Furniture. But I don’t. Figuring out why I have a strange affection for both writer-director
Dunham’s inward-focused fi lm and her mopey, aimless alter ego is part of the movie’s appeal. Maybe
it’s Dunham’s utter lack of vanity or self-protectiveness that makes Tiny Furniture work. Maybe it’s
that there are so few honest, non-man-obsessed stories about young women struggling as they grow
up into themselves. Aurora’s situation is inherently privileged; she has the luxury of wallowing, of
wasting time and her mother’s money trying to fi nd herself. Her awareness of this is nearly invisible,
but it’s there, somehow, in Aurora’s uncertainty, and in the way her comfortable life shapes, and is at
odds with, the identity she’s desperate to fi nd. (1/20/11)
10. DOGTOOTH
This dark horse from Greece makes Mother look downright normal. Somewhere in the countryside,
hidden behind fences and hedges, a peculiar family lives. Three siblings are under the thumb of their
father, who gives them a daily vocabulary lesson that includes the wrong meanings for words. He
teaches the family to bark like dogs to scare off “man-eating” cats; he brings in a security guard to
have sex with the son. Why? Who knows? Why do the parents reward their children, who are at least
in their late teens, with stickers, or keep them from any mention of the outside world? What is the point
of their isolated, misshapen existence? Why is Giorgos Lanthimos’ fi lm, with its white walls, sterile
lighting and casual violence, so effective at getting under my skin? Will it have the same effect on you?
(Dogtooth didn’t play in Eugene but is available on DVD.)
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THE OTHER 10
Watch the quietly forceful Australian
crime-family drama Animal Kingdom
(9/9/10) back-to-back with David O.
Russell’s clichéd but powerful The Fighter
(1/6/11) for a double feature in matriarchal
dominance: Both Melissa Leo in The Fighter
and Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom give
intense, unforgettable performances
as carefully controlling mothers with
questionable ways of looking out for their
own. The same is true of Kim Hye-ja in
Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (5/6/10), in which
the mother of a slow-minded young man
goes to great lengths to prove her son
didn’t commit a murder. Another controlling
parent is central in Darren Aronofsky’s
melodramatic Black Swan (12/23/10), as
Barbara Hershey pushes and pulls at
Natalie Portman’s unstable ballerina. Tilda
Swinton is a very different kind of mother
in I Am Love (7/15/10), a rich , lush Italian
film about a wealthy, elegant woman whose
life is reshaped by newfound passions.
Though Ewan McGregor is the star of Roman
Polanski’s flawed but intelligent thriller
The Ghost Writer, the oft-underused Olivia
Williams shines as the wife of a former
British prime minister (a smug Pierce
Brosnan). In Nicole Holofcener’s funny,
sharp, underrated Please Give (7/29/10),
Catherine Keener plays a woman who’s
constantly trying to find ways to make up for
the fact that she feels guilty about liking her
comfortable New York life. You won’t find
any women at all in Sebastian Junger and
Tim Hetherington’s documentary Restrepo,
a quietly unforgettable take on the indelible
effects of war on those who fight. While I
didn’t care as much for Toy Story 3 as many
people did, 2010 was nevertheless a superb
year for animation, including the beautiful,
mythic Irish tale The Secret of Kells (6/3/10),
which begs to be seen on the big screen,
where its intricate animation — inspired by
the illuminated manuscript at the center
of its story — can be fully appreciated. On
the other end of the animation spectrum
is the whimsical, peculiar A Town Called
Panic (4/15/10), which follows its own
breathless logic as it relates the adventures
of three plastic figures who accidentally
find themselves in the possession of far too
many bricks.
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Oktoberfest Sausage .................. $4.75
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EUGENE WEEKLY FEBRUARY 24, 2011 13