Best of the 2010s: 91 - 100

Check out the entire series here.

The ongoing shock of this global pandemic has affected us all in ways beyond our reckoning. What we do understand can't be communicated without cliche. We're too close. The implications need time to unravel. It's not just the big stuff; there are microtectonic shifts proliferating in our personhood that are nearly undetectable.

I lost the ability to watch new movies in a movie theatre, something that I held precious without even realizing it. For the first time in half a decade, I didn't feel like I watched enough new films in 2020 to put together a proper Top Ten List. To make right by that failing, I will here offer the ten film and film-like works that stuck with me the most from the year 2020.

10) The Platform - a limited allegory with an appealingly grisly design sense
9) The Old Guard - mediocre liberal propaganda dressed up in excellent stuntwork and fight choreography
8) Sonic the Hedgehog - a crap movie with crap effects and a crap plot salvaged entirely by an Oscar-worthy performance by Jim Carrey as the evil Doctor Robotnik
7) Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm - a return to form with an actual emotional core, and a matured political outlook to boot
6) Birds of Prey - an extremely colorful performance showcase for a bunch of cool folks
5) Invisible Man - although ultimately a bit hampered by its genre trappings, Elisabeth Moss's devastating performance and some wildly good suspense scenes make this a standout remake
4) Mank - Fincher takes his late father's story of a writer who takes another man's life story and makes it into a story taken by Orson Welles... all in lovely black and white
3) Opal - this formally experimental musical-horror youtube short is an impeccable stand-in for all of the amazing artistic work being done on that platform
2) Palm Springs - I could not have expected Andy Samberg's breakout existential drama/comedy to be so goddamn good on a molecular level, but the writing directing and acting are all exactly on point
1) "Fargo" S4E9: East/West - it's not a movie, but this sublime apex of a sublime season of television is rife with cinematic references, none more prominent than The Wizard of Oz

The upside is that the lack I experienced in 2020 spawned this project, a celebration of the riches of times past. Below are the first ten entries in my Top 100 Films of the 2010s list. I've seen hundreds of movies worth recognizing released between 2010 and 2019, so whittling that down to 100 standouts was long, arduous work. This was a labor of love all too long in the making.

These particular ten may have prominent flaws. They may not stick the landing the way better films do. They may be a bit awkward and gangly. But they are ten worthwhile examples of the riches this past decade had to offer us.

MORTAL KOMBAT: Soul Sucked

Director: Simon McQuoid
Writers: Greg Russo, Dave Callaham, Oren Uziel
Cast: Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Joe Taslim, Mehcad Brooks, Matilda Kimber, Laura Brent, Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada, Chin Han, Ludi Lin, Max Huang, Sisi Stringer, Mel Jarnson, Nathan Jones, Daniel Nelson
Runtime: 110 mins.
2021

In the course of researching this movie I stumbled upon this hilarious little article about fan-favorite four-armed monstrosity Goro and how expensive he was to create. Here's the crux--

"He's extremely integral to the plot," [producer] Garner said. "He is a beloved character. He's awesome. He's obviously somebody that I would love to have in every movie. He's also really expensive. Not going to lie. He's really expensive. So again, if somebody wants to give me a billion dollars to go make a Goro movie, I'll make a Goro movie. I'll love that. Every second of him is a lot of money. Every second was like my house. So you got to use him sparingly, you got to be smart about how you use him. It's not that we don't love him, it's not that he's not hugely important. It's just practically, he's so damn expensive."

This quote provides a uniquely forthcoming depiction of the deranged way in which some producers approach filmmaking. The commodification mindset evident here penetrates every aspect of the production: the characters, the visuals, the story. Mortal Kombat is the sallow progeny of a deranged, unfocused video game series and an entirely cynical production process. It shows.

TRANSCENDENCE: Turding Test

Director: Wally Pfister
Writer: Jack Paglen
Cast: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara, Cole Hauser, Morgan Freeman
Runtime: 119 mins.
2014

Transcendence was clearly positioned as a buoyancy project for frequent Christopher Nolan cinematographer Wally Pfister to break into directing with some high concept philosophical sci-fi. Transcendence was also clearly positioned as a solvency project for decomposing megastar Johnny Depp to remain in the public imagination without putting too much effort in. I doubt either of them got much of what they wanted out of this project.

Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is a famous scientist who gets poisoned by an anti-tech terrorist movement, so his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and friend Max (Paul Bettany) attempt to graft his consciousness to their burgeoning Artificial Intelligence project. It works, but as digi-Will starts to amass power, many folks become slightly irked by the idea of an AI overlord. This is all so much less interesting than it sounds.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly where Transcendence goes wrong, which often indicates bad direction. The film seems committed to only exploring its ideas with the most facile surface probings. IIf a movie doesn't thrive on its ideas, you have the meat and potatoes of human drama to fall back on, another aspect that Transcendence fumbles. How are we to care about how human digi-Will is or isn't if the original human Will was basically a walking corpse already? Most of Depp's work in this movie is as a monotonous floating head, which is perhaps a blessing because the actor doesn't seem invested at all. The character is theoretically charismatic, but Depp can barely muster a sickly smirk through his wine hangover. Pfister lacks the grace to mask any of this, or maybe he doesn't care. One thing that can be said about this film is that there are some somewhat lovely visuals, which probably indicates that the director's former line of work was his correct one.

If you want a deeper dive into the dumb as a doorstop world of Transcendence, I guested on a podcast with Jenna Kuerzi to talk about the film in great detail. Check out our episode of Depp Impact here.

0.5 / 5  BLOBS

GODZILLA VS. KONG: Darwin Some Darlose Some

Director: Adam Wingard
Writers: Terry Rossio, Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields, Eric Pearson, Max Borenstein
Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Julian Dennison, Lance Reddick, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, Kaylee Hottle
Runtime: 113 mins.
2021

Godzilla vs. Kong is the capper to Legendary Entertainment's 'MonsterVerse' quadrilogy that began in 2014 with Gareth Edwards' Godzilla. That film, imperfect as it was, had a real artistic vision guiding it. Godzilla uses impressive CGI, restrained pacing, and painstakingly careful cinematography to capture the sublime terror of a godlike creature. The opening minutes of Godzilla vs. Kong unwittingly demonstrate the folly of jamming this iconography into a shared universe model. Kong casually lumbers around the jungle with no sense of suspense, reveal, or scale. It gets immediately worse once the first lines of dialogue kick in. Bored actors immediately inform us that they need to protect Kong because Godzilla is coming and, wouldn't you know it, two Alpha Predators (tm) are bound to fight.

This is one of the worst, most dully written movies I have seen in a while, stacked to the brim with talented actors pumping out insipid exposition while standing awkwardly around neutral spaces. These shambling bodies can barely be called characters-- everyone is given between zero and one piece of characterization that ranges from 'cares about Kong' to 'used to have a wife.' This is partially owing to the caked up shared universe mythology being ported in from previous lazy films. The result is a slate of new and recurring characters doing absolutely nothing.

MONEYBALL: Beane Counter

This review was requested by Don Rebel. Many thanks to Don for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Bennett Miller
Writers: Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin
Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop, Reed Diamond, Brent Jennings
Runtime: 133 mins.
2011

It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life.
-Mickey Mantle

Moneyball is not the best baseball movie out there, but it may be the most interesting. That's because it's not about a player, a team, an important game, a magical season, or a comeback victory-- though it contains those elements. Moneyball is about an idea.

The film follows the true story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), General Manager of the Oakland A's, and picks up in the final hour of their 2001 season. Against all odds the A's have made it to the American League Divisional Series against the New York Yankees in a classic story of David vs. Goliath. Only, Goliath wins. We learn in short order that the magical season the A's cobbled together with luck, skill, and spunk, is not destined to be repeated. All of their rising stars (Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, Jason Isringhausen) will be unceremoniously snatched up by teams that can afford their rising star paychecks. In the midst of this prologue's suffocating sense of deflation and disappointment, we see the all-important insert card: 

$114,457,768 vs. $39,722,689

These are the budgets of the respective teams, and their prominence in the prologue signals to us the themes that the film will insist upon over and over again: it all comes down to money, and baseball is an unfair game.

UNHhhh

This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

UNHhhh is an internet program in which two Drag Queens talk to each other about stuff. There are as of this writing 143 episode of UNHhhh. Using advanced "Random Number Generator" technology, I selected five arbitrary episodes to analyze. Here's that.

CHUNGKING EXPRESS: Paranoia Agent

This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Kar-Wai Wong
Writer: Kar-Wai Wong
Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Valerie Chow, Jinquan Chen
Runtime: 102 mins.
1994

Chungking Express is a movie about intimate urban encounters. The ways we brush elbows with entire universes that we will never know. The jittering pace and the frenetic energy of a busy day or an exciting night in the city, manifested by a choppy framerate that blurs pedestrian movement and turns the film's incredible fluorescent light design into sickly rainbow smears. The city is the main character, maybe the only character.

That city is Hong Kong, though it's as much about Every City as it is about the particularities of HK. The movie settles us in with some noir voiceover from our supposed protagonist, known only as Cop 663. Beat cop, lovelorn romantic, a mysterious woman of crime in a blonde wig... Chungking has all the ingredients of a tidy little thriller. Then it takes those ingredients, throws them at the wall, and does a little softshoe routine to smear them across the kitchen tiles.

THEATRE OF BLOOD: The Bard's Price

This review was requested by Brian Kapustik. Many thanks to Brian for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon. Be warned, spoilers abound.

Director: Douglas Hickox
Writers: Anthony Greville-Bell, Stanley Mann (idea), John Kohn (idea)
Cast: Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Harry Andrews, Coral Browne, Robert Coote, Jack Hawkins, Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Robert Morley, Dennis Price
Runtime: 104 mins.
1973 

Theatre of Blood (also stylized as Theater of Blood depending on where you look) follows the exploits of the ghost (?) of Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart. Lionheart has returned from death to mercilessly exterminate a cabal of theatre critics one by one, all because of their excoriating treatment of him in the papers. Each gloriously ironic killing follows the template of a Shakespeare play that Lionheart headlined in his final season. I present this review in ten segments, one for each of Shakespeare's works as represented in Theatre of Blood.

SCHITT'S CREEK Season 1

This review was requested by Sonja Dominguez. Many thanks to Sonja for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Episode 1 - Our Cup Runneth Over

Schitt's Creek is a story about opulence gouged. This cuts two ways. It's exciting to have a tiptop production quality show that is so explicitly about class in America. The emperors robbed of their clothing, and banished to a podunk town that they have ironic ownership of. We see the underside of the great American success story.

But you can't have your cake and eat it too. This show asks us to sympathize with a family of rich entitled white people, the exact folks who are killing the world hardest and fastest. Even more troublesome and potentially tone deaf is the pilot's insistence that this family's wealth is not being repossessed because of anything wrong they did, but because of the shady dealings of another (unseen) member of the clan. This retreat from responsibility means the show is likely aware of its central dilemma: How can we make a show about the redemption of rich monsters without making them so monstrous that the audience can no longer sympathize? Or to put it more bluntly... nobody makes millions of dollars without stepping on the necks of thousands of people.

The writers are therefore savvy to begin the show by emphasizing the gouge rather than the opulence. The first scene shows the government ransacking their mansion, which is both an economical storytelling choice and a way to shift our focus away from the inherent evil of millionaires.

This leads directly to the first joke of the show that really lands. The family learns that the government neglected to repossess one asset, the town of Schitt's Creek, which the family purchased as a joke. "You mean you actually bought that town? I thought you photoshopped the deed," the family says to the father, who responds, "Of course I bought the town! The joke was owning the town! Why would I photoshop the deed? The joke was owning the town!" This bit is both about the excesses of the rich, and about a father who takes having fun with his family seriously. It emerges nicely from Eugene Levy's performance, which I already like quite a bit. There are layers in the way he later overreacts to the weird but amicable presence of Roland Schitt (Chris Elliott), the greasy town mayor.

Not all the actors come off so well right away. The daughter Alexis Rose (Annie Murphy) is little more than a mediocre valley girl impression at this point, although she does get an absurdist scene that consists entirely of her saying "OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK." on the phone while her brother David (Dan Levy) gawks aimlessly at their new motel home.

The real highlight of the episode is its production design, especially the props. At the local diner the simple act of a waitress handing the family their enormous laminated menus completely dominates the scene. There's a gag that consists entirely of the mother Moira (Catherine O'Hara) holding a lightbulb as if it were a foreign object. And of course, her gaudy earrings that go missing and lead to this fantastic piece of dialogue: "I politely accused that girl of stealing my earrings and she turned ice cold!" I have a feeling the props design is going to be a backbone of the show, both from a design and a direction perspective. What better way to talk about the rich and the poor than showcasing the Stuff that they respectively surround themselves with?

All in all the pilot is modest, far from spectacular. That may be a smart approach, familiarizing us with the character dynamics before adding some razzle-dazzle. That focus on character means I don't yet know how the show will tackle its tricky class themes. I will be very curious to find out.

7

IN BRUGES: Sin Stooge

This review was requested by Rafael Schneider. Many thanks to Rafael for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Martin McDonagh
Writer: Martin McDonagh
Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clémence Poésy, Thekla Reuten, Jordan Prentice
Runtime: 107 mins.
2008

I have long wondered what to think about the very white, very male, very cis vulgarity that runs its tendrils through In Bruge's screenplay. The jokes are intentionally shocking in their casual malice. Writer/director Martin McDonagh intends protagonist Ray (Colin Farrell) to be a lovable hitman asshole with a heart of gold, which raises interesting questions: why are we in America so eager to condone and even celebrate physical violence in our media, but verbal violence is off the table? And can that verbal violence ever crack open our cultural norms in a cathartic way? Ray's brash ignorance lets him stumble into surprisingly honest conversations with people leading quite different lives. So we still wonder, does this screenplay excuse the violence of white men? Does it excoriate it? Or does it get at a truth deeper than purity politics allows-- the webs of contradiction at the heart of our culture that can only be confronted through perverse honesty? Ultimately, I don't know, but you don't get an onscreen discussion of the coming race war this raw and real unless you're willing to be offensive along the way.

Given the tone deaf treatment of race in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and the uneven meta-flailing of Seven Psychopaths, it's safe to say that McDonagh's flagrantly offensive impulses only work some of the time. In Bruges is the pinnacle of the McDonagh style on film. One of the screenplay's best tricks is that each time a character delivers an offensive or inhumane joke, the movie makes a point of weaving tragedy into the joke's callback. What once struck us as humor in ill taste takes on a surprising resonance when it leads to a real relationship, a moment of intimacy, or a horrifying misunderstanding.

McDonagh is writing about flawed people, broken murderers. Ray's attitudes about others are callous, but so are his feelings about himself. The slow reveal of the way Ray masks his own pain with childish lashing out offers a keen character study. It's also a smart foil for the warmth and soulfulness of Ray's partner in assassinry, Ken (Brendan Gleeson). This is a story about condemnation, redemption, and purgatory. It's also a riproaring comedy.