2010: The Year in Review

Cutting it close this year, aren’t I?

I usually earmark the last Friday of the year to share with y’all what it was that I liked, didn’t care for so much, and plain ol’ thought was kinda like, huh?

In 2010 I find myself in an interesting predicament. There are some movies I haven’t seen yet, so I can’t know whether I should include them in my traditional list, which starts out funny and irreverent and ends with my more serious top picks. So this year, I’m starting at the end, with my Top 10 films of the year only.

Stay tuned for the rest, my pretties.

10 Best Films of the Year (in alphabetical order):

127 Hours

Black Swan

Blue Valentine
The Ghost Writer
How to Train Your Dragon
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech
The Social Network
Toy Story 3

Honorable Mention (tie): The Other Guys and The Town

Best Animated Film: Toy Story 3

Best Directors: Darren Aronoksky (Black Swan), Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine), David Fincher (The Social Network), Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right), Christopher Nolan (Inception)

Best Body: David Lyons (Eat Pray Love)

Should’ve Done Better: Jennifer Aniston

Should’ve Gotten Better: Julia Roberts (Eat Pray Love)

Best Comeback: Gwyneth Paltrow (for her expanded role in Iron Man 2 and her expertly executed media blitz on behalf of Country Strong)

Best Dress: Tina Fey’s multi-purpose blue dress in Date Night

Best Supporting Actors: Vincent Cassel (Black Swan), Andrew Garfield (The Social Network), Jeremy Renner (The Town), Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right), Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech)

Best Use of Kim Cattrall: The Ghost Writer

Worst Use of Kim Cattrall (and Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon): Sex and the City 2

Can’t Wait to See More of – Female: Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right)

Can’t Wait to See More of – Male: Garrett Hedlund (Country Strong)

Most Welcome to the A-List: Emma Stone

Most Underappreciated: Knight & Day

Most Oh, No They Did Moment: When they brought back Aidan for that in Sex and the City 2

Best Supporting Actresses: Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech), Marion Cotillard (Inception), Barbara Hershey (Black Swan), Mila Kunis (Black Swan), Olivia Williams (The Ghost Writer)

Breakthrough Performance – Female: Mila Kunis (Black Swan)

Breakthrough Performance – Male: Jaden Smith (The Karate Kid)

Best Hair: Reese Witherspoon in How Do You Know

Best Look: Chris Pine in Unstoppable

Best Prop: Cam Gigandet’s box of Famous Amos Cookies in Burlesque

Best Trailer: Inception

Sexiest Mofo: Jake Gyllenhaall (buff in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, sensitive in Love & Other Drugs)

Best Actors: Jim Carrey (I Love You Phillip Morris), Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network), Colin Firth (The King’s Speech), James Franco (127 Hours), Ryan Gosling (Blue Valentine)

Best Actresses: Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Julianne Moore (The Kids Are All Right), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Gwyneth Paltrow (Country Strong), Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine)

Photo: DreamWorks Animation (How to Train Your Dragon); SuperHeroFan.net (Eat Pray Love); Sony Pictures (Easy A); The Weinstein Company (The King’s Speech).

Dreamworld

Having seen Inception early – jealous? – I can safely and responsibly say that you’re going to have to think of the film, most definitely, as a trip.

This, of course, means its director, Christopher Nolan, is your cruise director. The Dark Knight helmer has, for lack of a better way to put it, dreamed up a world in which we can go into characters’ dreams, and the dreams within the dreams, and the dreams within the dreams within the dreams. It’s quite a ride.

Now, I didn’t say it would be an easy trip to take, and that’s because I’d much rather think of it as a most cerebral one.

The plot of Inception has been shrouded in secrecy since Day 1, I don’t think because it’s necessarily difficult to follow – although, I will concede, it can pose a bit of a challenge if people don’t focus – but because it revolves around such a far-out idea....

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Dom Cobb, a skilled thief and the bestest at stealing valuable secrets from deep within a mark’s subconscious during the dream state when their mind is at its most vulnerable. This is called extraction.

His is a rare ability that has made him a coveted player in this high-stakes new world of corporate espionage. It also has made him an international fugitive and cost him everything and everyone he’s ever loved.

As it often happens in this sort of film, Cobb is offered a shot at redemption and a clean slate. All he has to do is pull off one last job, one that could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible – inception.

Yep, he has to plant an idea in a mark’s mind, which is considerably harder and requires more layers of work. See, to pull off this type of job, these dream infiltrations, Cobb and his team, which include an architect of dreamscapes and a forger of identities within them, have to create a world for the mark to do their thing in, a world they can enter and manipulate in order to get, or introduce, new information.

The problem is anyone who goes into these dreamworlds faces dangerous...eventualities, some of which are created by the mark, some of which are manifestations of their own minds. In Cobb’s case, the danger is all-too familiar, beautiful, and full of baggage.

I think I’ve said too much, so I’ll close with this: See Inception, pay attention to it, be dazzled by the scenarios Nolan has come up with and his cast (which includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page), try to resist newcomer Tom Hardy, who pretty much steals ever scene he’s in, and don’t let the ending melt your brain more than it needs to. This is supposed to be a fun trip, after all. The journey is what matters most.

My Rating ***

Photo: Warner Bros.

Mind-blowing to Say the Least

The teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Inception – opening next summer! – just blew my mind:

Inception @ Yahoo! Video

Not much is known about the thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, and Ellen Page, other than it’s described as “a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind.”

My likey!

A Time to Kill

Leonardo DiCaprio has beaten Tom Cruise to the playing-a-serial-killer punch.

The Inception star has lined up the story of one the most notorious murderers in U.S. history as the next entry in his résumé.

DiCaprio will play Herman Webster Mudgett, a.k.a. H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who confessed to having introduced 27 people to their maker – and may have killed as many as 200 – during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, in the big-screen adaptation of Erik Larson’s 2003 best-seller Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.

Cruise had initially optioned the book and planned to play Holmes, but DiCaprio’s reported determination went the distance on the project.

Photo: GQ.com.

Accenting Gotham

Well, clearly, when Christopher Nolan sees something he enjoys quite a bit, he works to keep it around.

The director has tapped another of his Inception stars, Marion Cotillard, for a role in his third – and final – Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, reuniting the actress with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy.

No word on what character Cotillard will be playing, but she’s due on set early this summer, after the birth of the baby she’s expecting with fiancé Guillaume Canet. And she will have a sexy French accent for sure.

Photo: Ykone.com.

Simply Irresistible, Pt. 68

His name is Tom Hardy – and he steals all of his scenes in Inception.

A good thing since he plays a skilled thief of secrets that are buried deep down in a person’s subconscious.

I don’t know if it was the stubble, the lips, or the accent, but whatever it was it was H-O-T, and I can safely say a star is now officially born.

Photo: Nolanfans.com.

In Fighting Shape

Uhh...wow.

Tom Hardy really bulked up for his role in the upcoming Warrior (due out on Sept. 9), huh.

The Inception scene-stealer co-stars opposite fellow up-and-comer Joel Edgerton in the movie about two estranged brothers who end up competing against each other in a mixed-martial-arts competition.

The muscle he packed on – click here to see more of Hardy’s super-developed physique – also will be on display in next summer’s The Dark Knight Rises, in which he plays the villainous Bane.

Photo: Towleroad.com.

The Producers and the Writers Please Me

I gotta say I was quite chuffed when I saw that the nominees for best picture that the Producers Guild of America announced this morning matched seven for 10 with my Top 10 of 2010 list.

Among the PGA’s picks are 127 Hours, Black Swan, Inception, The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, The King’s Speech, The Social Network, The Town, Toy Story 3, and True Grit.

I actually went eight for 10 if you count my honorable mention of The Town, btw.

Click here for a full list of PGA nominations.

Meanwhile, the Writers Guild of America also announced their nominees for the best of the year that way, and their picks included many a surprise, chief among them the inclusion of I Love You Phillip Morris in the Adapted Screenplay category and Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give in the Original race.

Click here for a full list of WGA nods.

Photo: Paramount Pictures (True Grit).

Update: The National Society of Film Critics have named The Social Network the top film of 2010 and saluted its director (David Fincher), leading actor (Jesse Eisenberg), and screenwriter (Aaron Sorkin).

I was so pleasantly surprised by their pick of Olivia Williams from The Ghost Writer as best supporting actress...because I picked her, too.

The King and She Are Back

Five-time Tony nominee Kelli O’Hara is probably hoping the sixth time will be the charm.

The Bridges of Madison County star will be back on Broadway next spring, starring opposite Academy Award nominee Ken Watanabe (most recently seen in Godzilla) in a revival of The King and I.

The show will begin previews on March 12 for an April 26 opening.

The King and I will mark the American stage debut of Last Samurai and Inception star Watanabe.

Photo: HollywoodReporter.com.

Behold the Sorcerer Supreme

But before he gets his producer on, Benedict Cumberbatch is gonna get Strange.

As in he’s going to become Doctor Strange for Marvel.

Yes! The first trailer for the eagerly awaited new superhero blockbuster has just debuted, and it looks...intriguing, and oh-so-Inception-esque.

Tilda Swinton features prominently as the Ancient One, the Tibetan mystic who guides and mentors the Cumber-stud’s Stephen Strange – a selfish neurosurgeon recovering from a near-fatal car crash – in the art of becoming the Sorcerer Supreme, a.k.a. the planet’s mystical defender. The preview also begins to answer who Rachel McAdams will be portraying (not Captain Marvel at all but a fellow caregiver), and provides a first look (and hear) at Chiwetel Ejiofor as Baron Mordo, Doctor Strange’s antagonist.

Directed by Scott Derrickson (Sinister), Doctor Strange is scheduled to arrive in theaters on Nov. 4.

Photo: ComingSoon.net.

Update: Speaking of the Cumber-stud, the guy has been tapped as the one to voice the Grinch in a new animated take on How the Grinch Stole Christmas scheduled for release on Nov. 10, 2017.

Call it Cumbervember from now, kids. Easier that way. ;)

The Directors Do It

Like the Producers and the Writers last week, the Directors are getting in the award-giving swing of things.

The Directors Guild of America has announced that David Fincher (The Social Network), The King’s Speech’s Tom Hooper, Christopher Nolan (Inception), The Fighter’s David O. Russell (pictured here with Mark Wahlberg), and Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan) are vying for best director 2010 honors.

Kinda surprised not to see Danny Boyle (127 Hours) or Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right) on that list.

Photo: FilmSchoolRejects.com.

The Climber

Just keep climbing, just keep climbing....

That seems to have been Tom Hardy’s mandate to himself since he made a splash in Inception a few years ago. Now, dude’s gon’ take it to the next level.

Rather literally.

The Dark Knight Rises baddie is looking to scale Everest as British mountain climber George Mallory, a.k.a. the first person to reach the titular mount’s summit in the 1920s. Mallory was last seen making his final approach in 1924.

Doug Liman is attached to direct from a script adapted from Jeffrey Archer’s book Paths of Glory.

Photo: SexiestMenAlive.net.

She Only Has 2,880 Minutes...

This fall, Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard will make a play for a second nomination once again.

The actress – who many believe would, at the very least, court Oscar at his own party again a couple of years ago, for her Golden Globe-, SAG-, and BAFTA-nominated turn in Rust and Bone, only to...not – will be starring in Two Days, One Night, a new drama directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (The Kid with a Bike).

The film will zero in on a woman who, when faced with unemployment, spends an entire weekend trying to talk her co-workers into giving up their bonuses so she can be kept on the job.

Check out the trailer and do keep the film in mind this coming season. Cotillard was amazing in The Immigrant (another option for her come the next awards season), which is to say that she truly has become one to watch in every film she makes.

Like, Cotillard, to me, is like a modern-day, French Sophia Loren in that she is so good, and so adamant and capable to make Hollywood movies like Inception and Contagion and The Dark Knight Rises and then go back to Europe and work on this kind of stuff.

I kinda like her all that much more for it.

Photo: CommercialAppeal.com.

J. Lo’s Idol Return Is a Go

Just as expected, Jennifer Lopez will judge again.

Us Weekly reported yesterday that the caliente multi-hyphenate will, indeed, return to TV’s American Idol next season – the show’s 13th – in 2014.

La Lopez will share her duties with returning judge Keith Urban and a third judge TBA. This will be her third go at the job after taking a break last winter to focus on other projects, a time during which Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj were brought on board (with decidedly mixed results).

American Idol returns in January.

Photo: Putu.us.

Update: Betcha Randy Jackson wishes Idol knew how to quit him.

That or producers backed up the Brink’s truck up to his front door because the dawggiest of former American Idol judges has agreed to return to the show, this in spite of his finally having left it at the end of last season.

Jackson will not be back on the seat he occupied since the show’s inception back in forever and a half ago but instead will serve as big-time music exec Jimmy Iovine’s replacement as the contestants’ house mentor.

Memory of a Crime

Don’t you just hate it when you steal a priceless work of art – and then you get your head knocked out and you can’t remember where it is?

Or when the goon that you got in cahoots with really starts to lose his temper and threatens your existence?

That’s what James McAvoy’s poor little good-guy auctioneer gone naughty goes through in Trance, the next film from Danny Boyle that’s opening in limited release on April 5.

So what’s a dude to do to get himself out of the jam?

Find a hypnotherapist, of course, and if she’s a hottie like Rosario Dawson, keep her from becoming a target herself. (Unless, of course, she’s also in on it on working ya som’in’ fierce.)

The plot of the film reminded me of Inception, in a way, especially when I heard bad-guy Vincent Cassell tell McAvoy in the trailer that “she put that there” and that “it’s not real.” I presume he is talking about a memory.

Anyway, for a second there I even forgot I wanted to type what I just did because the Trance looks like total Boyle goodness, especially the cleverly executed nudity.

This one’s gonna a sexy one, people.

Photo: EW.com.

Desperate Measures

Picture it, if you can: Thanksigiving, 2013. Keller Dover and his family are on their way to their friends, the Birches, for dinner. They’re not going very far, just down the street.

We’re in America, not quite near a major city, but not quite in the middle, either. A relatively safe environment.

Keller’s a blue-collar man, a religious man…a survivalist. When we first meet him, he is praying the Our Father, teaching his teenaged son how to hunt deer. He wants to instill in his kid a sense of respect for all creatures while ensuring that he be ready for anything. “Pray for the best, but prepare for the worst” is his go-to.

It’s quite the quaint set-up the one that Aaron Guzikowski writes for Academy Award-nominated helmer Denis Villeneuve (Incendies) to direct as Prisoners, this season’s most quietly riveting dramatic thriller, gets underway.

What could possibly go wrong.

What does is Keller’s young daughter Anna goes AWOL, as does the Birches’ kid. Some time between dessert and after-diner play, the girls disappear.

Hugh Jackman plays Keller in the film, and right away, given his loving shortness toward his family (Maria Bellow portrays his wife, Grace, while Dylan Minnette, from TV’s Lost and the upcoming Labor Day, plays their son, Ralph), he comes off as a little unsympathetic.

Until he doesn’t.

Hugs and cuddles he ain’t, but Keller lives for his family. The man’s gruffness comes fully front and center when he starts dealing with the police, whom, as embodied by Jake Gyllenhaal’s Det. Loki, he feels could be doing more to find the girls.

That is the conflict within the conflict of Prisoners, a film that for the longest time totally leads you down a path that is somewhat as frustrating as the one charted by its characters. Why is Keller being such a short-fused hardass? Is he that blinded by shock that he is unwilling to consider the police, indeed, may have the wrong guy in the creep that Paul Dano plays? And what’s up with Loki? He’s a lone wolf-type like Keller, but, hey, he also has a heckuva lot of tats. Should we trust him?

The Awesome Aussie and my Gyllen-yum break new ground for themselves as the desperate father trying to find his daughter by any means possible and as the methodical and seemingly (un)bothered cop on the case, respectively. Jackman received his first Oscar nom earlier this year, for doing something we all knew he could in Les Misérables, but I would love it he got his second one in 2014 for this simmering powerhouse performance. The rage and determination with which he realizes Keller are matched by the grit that Gyllenhaal gives to Loki.

The pair is mesmerizing on that screen. They may have few scenes together, but when they do, it’s like, oh boy.

Prisoners is a surprising film, and not just ’cause of its third-act twists and turns. It is a confronting proposition. Here’s a man who will stop at nothing to get to the truth, and what he does in his quest is highly questionable. They don’t make ’em like this that much anymore (I mean, smart, engrossing mid-range films for grown-ups), but thanks to strong supporting turns by Terrence Howard and Viola Davis as the Birches, and Melissa Leo as Dano’s aunt, especially, it all pays off in the end.

Well. Until an Inception-style head-scratcher of an ending and fade to black that literally will have you jumping from the edge of your seat.

My Rating ****

Photo: Warner Bros.

Keeper of the Order

One of the most magnetic actors around – you just gotta watch him when he’s on screen – is about to close the deal on his next role.

Inception’s Cillian Murphy is in talks to co-star in I’m.mortal opposite Ir Girl Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake.

The project is set in a near-future where scientists have finally figured out how to stop aging.

The actor would play an officer for the Timekeepers organization, while Timberlake (who’s still negotiating his involvement) would take on the role of a poor man who suddenly becomes rich and snatches an heiress (Seyfried) while on the run from a murder investigation.

Photo: TinyPic.com.

Boozer

Tom Hardy, that Inception scene-stealer, is going back in time all the way to the Roaring Twenties for his next project.

The Brit will co-star with Shia LaBeouf in The Wettest County in the World, a movie based on a novel about a family of bootleggers in Prohibition-era Virginia that John Hillcoat (The Road) will direct.

Hardy, who’s rumored to be playing a character named Dr. Hugo Strange in Christopher Nolan’s final Batman chapter, The Dark Knight Rises, will be seen next opposite Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine in This Means War.

Photo: ReelLoop.com.

So...It’s About Building Stuff with Your Mind?

The new trailer for next summer’s Inception is out – and I’m still puzzled.

Why can Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page bring down buildings just by looking at them?

And what does Leo mean when he says he has to “steal” an idea?

And while we’re at it, why is Page yelling “Wake me up!” with such fright?

He Gon’ Get His

Tom Hardy is gonna do it with Leo again.

Co-star with that guy – don’t be filthy.

Indeed, the Inception scene-stealer is joining Leonardo DiCaprio in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, a revenge story based on a novel by one Michael Punke.

Since the film is about a man who gets mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead by some associates of his who also, btw, rob him of all his s---, Imma wager that the Mad Max: Fury Road star will play the leader of the men who have theirs coming their way courtesy of a pissed-off Leo.

Photo: FabulousTomHardy.tumblr.com.