Year in Review

Well, year end is here and I… don’t have a final review ready. Huh, it just sort of happened. I’d meant to write one, but then I didn’t. I blame the whole ninja/pirate thing… and hipsters. Because hipsters ruin everything, don’t they?

So instead I’m closing the year out with a retrospective list of the reviews I liked the best. Not the best movies, oh sweet waffles, no. Just the reviews that I personally found amusing or that I’m particularly fond of. Yes, I know it’s useless, but it’s been an interesting year and truth be told I’m a little exhausted. So, let’s knock this one out quick and then go for drinks, what’d ya say?

Here are my 10 Favorite Reviews of 2010…

The Greats: Westerns, Samurai & Kung-fu

For a long time, I’ve had the idea that Kung-Fu movies, Westerns and Samurai movies were all essentially the same thing just for different cultures. Each dated back to the beginning of filmmaking, each looked back to a Golden Age that might never have really existed, and each fell out of favor for a long time only to see a resurgence in recent years. As a result, I decided to cast a wide net and get one great from each of the areas that these movies exist in. Since this is the last day, we’re going to have three from each genre.

The Greats: Sci-Fi

We all like Science Fiction, right? Maybe? A little? Well, you should, and here are the ten movies from that genre that you should see.

The Greats: Crime Pictures

Holy crap! Someone stole the intro for this piece. Darn them thieves.

The Greats: Historical Movies

Pretty much, movies that take place before the time that the movie was shot in. That’s a historical piece and that’s all the criteria I used for picking these.

The Greats: Fantasy

I fantasize about a world where I can get an intern to write intros for me.
I’m trying to cast a wide net with these selections, but this week I failed. Most of these were made within a few years of each other. I put it down to the fact that my formative years coincided quite nicely with a renaissance in fantasy filmmaking. A couple of obvious things like The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of The Lost Ark aren’t here because they’ve already been addressed in last week’s entry.

The Greats: Horror

I’m too scared to write a proper into. Horror movies are scary!

The Greats: Great Series

If you want to know whether or not you should listen to a critic, you should hear what they think The Greats are. So here are my suggestions for you to peruse. We’ll start with movie series that I think are great.

I’m posting this first to avoid people thinking that I forgot to mention some of the movies that won’t be turning up. I’d hate to hear that it’s no big deal, but how could I forget to add that one movie to the list? That surely I couldn’t have thought it inferior, could I? Well, no of course not. What happened was I couldn’t decide which movie from a particular series to add to the list. You can’t go around naming every movie from a series, because then you’re just padding the list out to make ten. No, instead you’ve either got to name the group as a whole, or write a list made up entirely of series. I did the later. Here we have the ten film series that I think are essential to informed movie watching.

Ten Best Non-Superhero Comic Book Movies

There is a flaw in this list. I’m hoping if I point it out in the introduction, I’ll be forgiven for the flaw. See, this isn’t really the best movies based on comic books that aren’t superhero themed, just the best ones I’ve personally seen. Ghost World is supposed to be really good, but I’ve just never gotten around to watching it. As a result, it can’t get on the list. That fact flaws this list immensely, but hopefully not to a point where it becomes unforgivable.

10 Classics I Don’t Love

Let’s get something perfectly clear before we begin, I am a lover of the classics. I regularly get accused of never watching, or at least never enjoying, anything new. I’ve had people ask if I ever watch anything that’s in color. So, no actually, I’m not some young dick head who hates anything that doesn’t have an explosion every ten seconds. I like most your recognized classics, but some I just do not enjoy. I’ve made a list so that I can share it with you, which is probably a dumb thing to do because it’ll just cause comments from people demanding to know why I don’t offer hand jobs and Chips Ahoy Cookies to their favorite movie. I don’t care though! One of the most important parts of establishing a reader/critic relationship is letting the reader know what movies the critic likes and doesn’t like. Mind you, there is nothing actually wrong with most of these movies, I just don’t like them much. If anyone actually reads this list, I’m likely to get complaints about it.

Top Ten Cheap Cinema Classics

Before we can talk about my top ten, we should perhaps define my terms. Cheap Cinema is a specific kind of movie to me. It’s not one that is just low cost, or independent. No, it’s something that is truly made on the cheap. Something that really deserves the term “cheap” to be applied to it. That’s not to say it’s made without love, or without care. Often, the only way these movies could be made at all was to go the cheapest route. Quite often the filmmakers had to endure many trials just to get their story on the screen without compromising their visions. It’s those films we salute here with a list of the top ten occupying my mind right now.

10 best things about A Christmas Story

I’ve wanted to write a review of A Christmas Story for about six years now. Even before I started doing reviews regularly, I wanted to do it. Every year I tell myself this is going to be the year I write it, this is going to be the year I do it, and then it never happens. The problem with trying to do a review of A Christmas Story is that if you’re under 50 you either know the movie or don’t want to. I wouldn’t find it impossible to believe that a person had just never managed to see it, but I would think that person maybe didn’t have it high on their priorities and didn’t want to see it. And while sometimes it’s fun to play along, I don’t want to do a review just to reinforce the feelings we have for this movie. So I decided on a 10 best list. And then, I decided to go one step beyond and do this 10 best list. Not agreed favorites, not what we all love, but my own personal favorites. These are the things I love.