Category Archives: 2010 movie reviews

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True Grit

Every couple of years (and more often than that lately), the Coen Brothers release another film that cements their place among America’s finest and most consistent filmmakers. Recently, on the heels of 2007’s Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men, they released the hilarious screwball comedy Burn After Reading and last year’s brilliantly dark Book of Job-inspired A Serious Man.

In 2010, they return with True Grit, not so much a remake of the 1969 John Wayne classic, they say, but a more faithful adaptation of Charles Portis’ 1968 novel. Having neither seen the original film nor read Portis’ novel, I’m in a position to judge the Coens’ film simply on its own merits.

The verdict: it’s sublime.

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The Fighter

This movie season I feel like an honorary citizen of Boston. First came The Town, a hard-boiled, authentic look at a gang of bank robbers in Charlestown. And now there’s The Fighter, an equally hard-boiled and equally authentic exploration of a pair of boxing brothers in Lowell. These are two of the best films I’ve seen this year and their setting is a key reason why.

The Fighter tells the true tale of welterweight Micky Ward, an introspective bruiser whose own family proved as formidable an obstacle to his success as anybody he faced in the ring.

But unlike a long line of small town dreamers who strive to succeed so they can escape their situation, Ward wants to win as much for Lowell as himself. The central conflict of the film is whether he can be a champion without abandoning the people and the place he loves.

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127 Hours

It’s hard to think of a movie in recent years with a bigger marketing problem than Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours. If you know anything at all about this film, you know it depicts the true story of an adventurer named Aron Ralston who finds himself pinned by a rock in a Utah canyon and has to cut off his own arm to escape.

So here’s a film that spends most of its running time with a single character at the bottom of a dimly lit canyon and builds to a horrific scene of self-amputation.

Good times!

But somehow 127 Hours is neither boring nor grueling — on the contrary, it’s one of the most exhilarating and life-affirming films I’ve seen in years.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1

When I first heard that the filmed version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — the final installment of the hugely popular series of books about everybody’s favorite boy wizard — would be split into two chapters, I had two thoughts.

One, the film was clearly in need of an editor. The book didn’t run much longer than any of the other books in the series, and Hollywood managed to make entertaining and comprehensible films out of those tomes. And two, the producers were trying to milk this juggernaut for every dime they could get.

But after seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, I’ve completely changed my tune. I believe this is one of the best chapters yet — rivaled only by the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (which had both director Alfonsa Cuaron and a thrilling time-travel plot line going for it).

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The Social Network

The Social Network is a brilliant movie — expertly crafted down to the smallest detail, flawlessly acted, easily one of the best films of the year. And yet I feel like some of the effusive praise of the film is seeing something that isn’t there.

The film, which explores the cutthroat dynamics behind the conception, creation and explosion of Facebook, does not set out to make a grand statement about the way people communicate in the 21st century. I’ve read a lot of commentary about the irony of a borderline anti-social person creating the ultimate social community, but I didn’t see that on the screen. This film could have been about the creation of anything… Facebook is entirely beside the point.

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