This Aggregation or My Hay Flick Limit for the Year in Movies

2010 was the year I began to say goodbye to the movies, although any year with a new Coen Brothers movie should be celebrated. But why is that? Adult-onset ADD, with symptoms of distractibility in a fidgetative state? Movie theaters with Cimex lectularius infestations are not helpful either.

Perhaps Greenaway was right that cinema died on September 31, 1983. Or Godard or whoever said it first, but maybe the dead cinema doesn't know it's dead yet and keeps on going and I have just about had it with those motherfucking zombies as a motherfucking cultural praxis. (Insert vampire reference here.)

Just as dumb are the discussions about their cultural relevance in the commentariat. I have yet to hear a good take on this and I guarantee I will give 20 dollars (roughly the hourly wage of a graduate-student TA) to anyone who can give me a convincing read on what makes zombies so ubiquitous these days and/or why the public intellectuals are so ill-equipped to address this rather boring phenomenon.

Whatever. I've cut my habit down to 2-3 movies a month. Still, there was a weekend where I wanted to see six movies. Instead, I ended up not going to a single one. Angry Birds is more fun.

No patience? I did not make time to see the 6-hour version of Carlos and I did not feel too conflicted to skip the Shoah re-release at the IFC. For old-time's sake, I caught the screening of Syberberg's 7-plus hours of Hitler: A Film From Germany. Still fascinating, especially in conjunction with Susan Sontag's accurate commentary and the dispute about the Hitler rage videos on YouTube, which Constantin Films decided to challenge the day after the Führergeburtstag this year.

I am also not interested in seeing A Serbian Film. There was a time when I would feel the need to subject myself to such a movie and form a measured opinion of it, but that is no longer necessary. Aargh, pretentious Eastern-European filmmakers, could you please just quit or at least curtail your repulsive impulses? Calling it allegorical is one of the last refuges, you scoundrels.

We don't need you to rub our eyes in it. Booshie that I am, though, I found myself appreciative of A.O. Scott and his pieces, despite his moronic apodicticities such as "these are truisms, obvious enough to anyone who has given these issues more than passing consideration." These appear most reliably whenever the topic is actually way more interesting.

Manohla Dargis' attempt to elevate the status of film coverage at the New York Times is laudable (not you, Holden). I am even more impressed by the absence of Manohla images on the web. But all of this good faith disappeared again when both the film A Film Unfinished and its coverage in the Times were irritating exercises in self-righteous piety.

Now, now. More ranking, less ranting. Here goes, the ten best movies I caught in 2010:

1. True Grit (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)
2. Alle Anderen (dir. Mären Ade)
3. Exit Through the Gift Shop (dir. Banksy)
4. I Am Love (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
5. Inception (dir. Christopher Noland)
6. 127 Hours (dir. Danny Boyle)
7. Salt (dir. Phillip Joyce)
8. The Kids Are Alright (dir. Lisa Cholodenko)
9. The Social Network (dir. David Fincher)
10. The American (dir. Anton Corbijn)

Still on my tada list: Tiny Furniture, Black Swan, Biutiful, Last Train Home, The Tourist, Tamara Drewe, Machete, The Next Three Days, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Monsters, The Runaways.

Again - maybe, maybe not.

Interesting calamity: Enter the Void. Interesting disappointments: Catfish, Green Zone, Greenberg. Uninteresting disappointments: The Secret in Their Eyes, Shutter Island, Hot Tub Time Machine.

Uninteresting calamity and my worst movie of the year: Love and Other Drugs.

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