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The 2009 FilmScope Awards
It is awards season time for the movies. I love seeing great work getting recognition and have always wanted to do my own bit of awarding. That is why FilmScope has the Scopies! And while FilmScope isn’t any AMPAS, we like pride ourselves in our ability to call a performance as we see it. We will be giving awards for Acting and Technical excellence in filmmaking, including the one that never gets any real recognition from those other guys; Best Choreography, which recognizes film sequences with noticeable dance and/or stunt work. So here are your 2009 Scopie Award recipients:
<< MORE >>Top Ten of 2009
So now 2009 has come to a close, it is time to rank the ten best films of the year. We don’t have to do this, but it’s kind of fun and I just love giving attention to the films that I thought were superb and worthy of a chance. Because of my pretty rough year, I didn’t get to see as many documentaries or obsure films as I usually like, and all the ones that I have seen weren’t all that good to begin with, so most of these are pretty mainstream (even the indies I picked are pretty well-known). Bear in mind that in mid-March, just before the Oscars, I will be doing my Right One Awards for films that I didn’t get to see in time for this list. We’ll also be doing the FilmScope Awards (The Scopies) a little later in the day or week, celebrating the best performances and some technical categories, not to mention the best of the decade. But for now, here are the ten best films of 2009:
<< MORE >>Top Ten of 2008
Just when things can’t get better, 2008 year changed the rules about filmmaking. It keeps seeming that the next movie was always better than the last and making a top ten list was extremely difficult. But here we go anyways:
<< MORE >>Top Ten of 2007
2007 was an exciting breath of fresh air. This was year that Horror films became great again. Musicals and Music-Based films had risen to magnificent heights. Superhero films faltered and Transformers proved to be slightly more than meets the eye. Here are the ten best films of that year.
<< MORE >>Avatar (10 of 10)
It has been eleven years since Titanic and almost nineteen since James Cameron’s last science fiction epic Terminator 2. During this time, he has been taken to making documentaries about the ocean in his Ghosts of Titanic and Aliens of the Abyss, working out his supposedly revolutionary 3D technology. He had been promising his re-emergence with a project that would change how movies would be seen. That film would be Avatar, the mother of all science fiction epics, taking everything that Cameron has learned over his 30-year career and making it into a simple and powerful story about connections, which even the Title makes pretty clear.
<< MORE >>Up in the Air (10 of 10)
Ryan Bingham has a really nasty job; he fires people for companies too cowardly to do it themselves. He likes his job mostly because he knows he’s good at it, but also because he loves to travel. He isn’t interested in anything that can’t be packed into his travelling case, including people. In any other movie, he would be a villain condemned to a sad and tragic end. But this isn’t any other movie. This is Up in the Air, directed by one of my favorite filmmakers Jason Reitman and stars George Clooney in a role tailor-fit to perfection.
<< MORE >>Top Ten of 2006
If there's something that can be said about 2006 and the movies, perhaps it should be that this year was definitely interesting. We've seen the first movies dealing with 9/11. Comedy became both entertaining and artistic again. This year Superman and Bond returned (neither did much for me, though) while Rocky finally said goodbye (just 20 years too late). I found ten great movies worthy of being called the best. I hope you'll give them a look.
Top Ten of 2005
2005 was one of my favorite years in film. So many great films came out that I had a hard time putting a list together. But I did put one together and here’s how it came out. By this point, I knew what I was doing and I would probably rank them the same way now as I did then.
Top Ten of 2004
2004 has to be one of my favorite years in film this decade. So many great films were made and so many didn’t make my list barely. One of those were Million Dollar Baby because I didn’t see it until late January 2005, long after I made my list. Again, this was my list as I made it that year and might be different if I made it today:
The Road (10 of 10)
The Road is probably one of the most breathtakingly beautiful pieces of literature I have ever read. That it is about the end of the world and humanity literally eating itself says a lot more about Cormac McCarthy’s skill than anything. I never thought that The Road should be made into a movie, but after the success of No Country For Old Men, I wasn’t surprised to see it happened. Directed by The Proposition’s John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortensen, I still didn’t think that this story could translate into anything, though I desperately wanted it to. So after coming out of the theater into the crisp night air, I found myself not just content with this film, it affected me.
<< MORE >>Fantastic Mr. Fox (8 of 10)
Fox and His Friends in Fantastic Mr. Fox
Witty banter? Check. Overeducated characters? Check. A pungent yet brilliant aura of elitism? Double check. Yep, it’s a Wes Anderson film, no matter if he replaces oddball human characters for stop-motion animation. This is a filmmaker who waves his flaws like banner, and you know what? God bless him. He dances on the razor-thin line between pretense and stupidity and half the time gets sliced in half. But there are times when his brand of arrogant filmmaking actually works. In that sense, Fantastic Mr. Fox works and works well.
<< MORE >>Antichrist (5 of 10)
I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting when going into Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. The buzz I heard was that this was unique, challenging and terrifying. Anticipation and dread filled me coming into this film with the knowledge that the other two films of Von Trier’s I have seen (Dogville and Manderlay) were really terrible. Coming out of the movie, I didn’t really feel challenged, but more confused. What is this movie really getting at?
<< MORE >>Top Ten of 2003
2003 was the year I started writing movie reviews on Yahoo, beginning the long ascent to FilmScope. If you want to have a laugh, read some of my earlier reviews. While that year wasn’t very strong for me in film, it did have some great moments and the top two were simply some of the best cinema this decade. Remember this is snapshot of what I thought at the time. If this were now, I might have made a few changes:
<< MORE >>Meet a New Face of FilmScope: Julie Randolph
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (5 of 10)
Oh Edward, Edward, where for art thou ...wait, wrong film. Actually, no it's not. It's very much the same, plus vampires and werewolves, but that's just being picky.
I really wanted it to be great. Honestly, I did. My main priority in going to see the movie was because I had not seen Twilight on the big screen and the scenery was so amazing I was sorry I didn't see it. I grant you, the scenery was amazing, but did not make up for the travesty that is Kristen Stewart and/or Robert Pattinson.
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2012 (7 of 10)
I now officially declare that the disaster movie genre is dead. The world has been destroyed by earthquakes, floods, fires, famine, nuclear war, and alien invasion. Mankind has been dealt a fatal blow by these and a host of others. As a famous song has said before, it’s all been done. And perhaps it should be fitting that Roland Emmerich be the one to kill it off with a disaster movie to outdo all disaster movies, to effectively kill off 99.9999999% of the population of our little planet in 2012.
<< MORE >>Top Ten of 2002
2002 was the year I left home and made my way in the world. It was also the year that Enron collapsed and sent a lot of people I knew to the unemployment line. And it was a rather enjoyable year in film. As usual, this list came from a younger version of myself that I will respect, though I might have changed the list a little if I knew then what I know now.
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (6 of 10)
I must be a bad film critic for not liking a movie it appears every other film critic has embraced. This is not the first time I have stood alone against the critical juggernaut before, most recently with The Wrestler, but this time I feel more isolated in my displeasure about such a sloppy movie made of interesting parts. Oh, well, I don’t want to be apart of their club if they can’t take the criticism they dish out.
<< MORE >>Pirate Radio (7 of 10)
It has just now really hit me that the decade is finally coming to a close. That ten years of my life has passed in what seems like a heartbeat. It has been ten years and yet no one still has come up with a name for this decade; the double-Os, The Zeroes, the None-ties. I put my hat in the ring now and declare we should call this decade the Seymour Hoffmansies. Let’s face it, this diverse actor started his decade playing a scruffy brash music critic who mentors a young man to make life-altering decisions in Almost Famous. And now at the close of the decade, he plays a scruffy brash music jockey who mentors a young man to make life-altering decisions in Pirate Radio. In between, he has been nominated for three Oscars, won once, played in every kind of film possible and still doesn’t take himself too seriously. If that isn’t a qualifier, I don’t know what is.
<< MORE >>Disney's A Christmas Carol (8 of 10)
There are no other directors who I think really master the IMAX format like Robert Zemeckis. I have seen all three of his digital 3-D animation films in the IMAX format and I am a firm believer that this is the best way to see these films. For his third, he takes on the over-used timeless Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. Making this film for Disney, this marks their third version of this film, although their first without using established Disney or Henson characters. And this is by far my favorite version out of all the prior versions, Disney or non, just for the sheer visual sensations.
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