A lot of times I am compelled at the end of the year to cook up some sort of Top 10 list of favorite movies. This year is a toughie, though. I haven't seen a lot of new movies, and the ones I've seen have largely been wiped clean from my brain-slate.
So, I won't do a top 10. Here are the 3 films I remember liking best from 2010, in alphabetical order.
And Everything Is Going Fine (Dir. Steven Soderbergh, with Spalding Gray) - Spalding Gray was a unique talent who managed to create a niche for himself, doing pieces that incorporated performance art, stand-up comedy (more like "sit-down" in his case), and something like confession or open therapy. There are already 3 feature films documenting Gray's best-known monologues -- all performed with Gray seated at a desk, while the film directors try to figure out how to keep things visually interesting. Steven Soderbergh (the Ocean's movies; sex, lies, and videotape), who directed the last of those movies (called Gray's Anatomy), here constructs a narrative of Gray's life through a succession of clips from Gray's other monologues, some television interviews, and a few home movies, with no authorial interjection from any other voice besides Gray's. The effect is that of a posthumous autobiography, or as the blurb in the trailer below suggests, a final monologue. Read more »
