'Cine'cism

There’s no better time than not-the-end-of-the-year to write my end–of-the-year-column. So rather than rate the movies and the year as a whole, I thought I’d reflect on the most important things I’ve learned throughout 2010. My top 10 list might change in the next few weeks, but my perception won’t.

Every single year is back loaded with good movies, and more people are recognizing it as a problem.

As is fairly obvious with the timing of this issue, I have been unable to see some of the best, Oscar-bait movies of the year.

It’s a long held strategy to slowly market a movie throughout awards season to build buzz. But for as much as I complain now, I likely complained just as much every year before.

As the Oscars beg for ratings, analysts are saying the key is simply to make everything earlier. That would make the half dozen or so movies I’ve yet to see infinitely more accessible to wider audiences prior to the end of the year.

And with digital distribution, a good number of Academy voters are seeing no reason not to.

Ten is a good number.

Say what you will about what looked like an Academy publicity stunt last year, but doesn’t knowing there will be 10 films in the Best Picture category just make the race more interesting? The fact that “Inception” and “Toy Story 3” are sure-fire locks will put a lot of minds at ease.

It also shakes up the other races, because with so many great movies breaking into the Best Picture field. It makes it harder to sort out who gets cut from the categories that still have five nominees.

Some movies, no matter how good, require a beating with a stick before people see it.
For anyone who hasn’t seen “The Social Network” yet, it’s likely because of the reservation that it’s just a Facebook movie. They are wrong.

The same goes for “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” which has been inappropriately tagged as the hipster film of the year.

The MPAA rating system is getting ridiculous.

Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips wrote a great column saying he was done with the MPAA, who assigned “The King’s Speech” an R-rating following an improvised scene of Colin Firth repeatedly uttering the f-word. He questioned how a period piece character drama could possibly get the same rating as “Saw 3-D.” A valid question.

James L. Brooks’ “How Do You Know” suffered the same fate until it was appealed to help its awards chances. And I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of scene is in the indie romance “Blue Valentine” that would warrant an NC-17.

Iraq War films will never be seen as “accurate.”

I was a bit surprised when a lot of backlash surfaced prior to “The Hurt Locker’s” Best Picture win as being inaccurate, plagiarized, what have you. The same goes for “Green Zone,” and it was all reiterated in one issue we put out of WEEKEND on Veterans Day.

With all due respect to the article and the soldiers profiled in it, if the war on screen was not the war they were fighting, whose war should it have been?

They say you never take an expert to a film about their own field, and apparently that applies to veterans as well, but I don’t think any filmmaker ever claimed their film was the real deal. Case in point: “The Deer Hunter,” “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Apocalypse Now” are not documentaries, and they are only “realistic” in their cinematic style. “The Hurt Locker” is the same.

However, “Restrepo,” an Afghanistan War documentary shot in the Korangal Valley is the real deal, and everyone, enlisted or not, should seek it out.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

I won’t deny I have some criticisms on 2010. They are valid, if not bitter.

The funny thing is, I did the exact thing in 2009, and now I point to it as something of a model.

All I can really do is ultimately come to the conclusion that there were some good movies and some bad ones, and by the time next year rolls around, all that’s worth remembering are the good.