Critics pick the best movies of 2010

2010 Film Critic Top Ten Lists  [Updated Dec. 18]


Current Top 10

1     The Social Network
2     Winter's Bone
3     Black Swan
4     Toy Story 3
5     Inception
6     Carlos
7     The Ghost Writer
8     The Kids Are All Right
9     Dogtooth
10   Another Year


2010 Film Critic Top Ten Lists

Scott Myers: Yet more reasons why Pixar are the best storytellers today

A nice LAT article yesterday featuring the director and co-story writer of Toy Story 3 Lee Unkrich.  You should read it all including the front part which describes how Pixar approached doing a sequel to a movie (Toy Story 2) which they felt already had a perfect ending.  What I want to focus on are two scenes in the movie.  First what Unkrich has to say about the riveting conveyor belt scene:

Yet, Unkrich, screenwriter Michael Arndt and the rest of the creative team never backed away from raw truths, either. When the toys find themselves on a conveyor belt heading into a landfill incinerator, it would have been easy, Unkrich says, to have Mr. Potato Head crack a joke or to have inserted a series of silly sight gags as the toys tried to scurry to safety. Instead, they clasp hands, look into each others' eyes and face their demise with a quiet grace and dignity.

"When I talked to my animators about it, I thought, 'If I were on an airplane with my family and something happened and we were in an emergency, what would I do?'" Unkrich remembers. "Would we be screaming our heads off? I don't think so. I think we'd get very quiet and we'd gather as a family and I'd hold my children and face what was about to happen."

Then what in my estimation is one of the best cinematic denouements ever:

And, in those closing moments — a scene that proved so adept at opening the tear ducts of viewers that Unkrich and company had to scramble and craft a closing-credits epilogue to give moviegoers a chance to compose themselves — Pixar fashioned another perfect ending.

Because, despite what Woody said at the end of "Toy Story 2," we see that, all these years later, he's still so attached to Andy that he can't see the writing on the wall. The other toys know Andy isn't going to play with them again, but Woody's almost delusional in his devotion.

"I love that by the end of the film, not only does Woody learn to let go of Andy and see that one of the most loving things you can do sometimes is let somebody go, but also his feelings from the beginning of the movie are completely vindicated," Unkrich says. "Andy plays with them again. We created this safe environment where Andy can do that, even though he's 17 years old. We kind of got our cake and ate it too."

Those two scenes and the rationale Unkrich provides for them say so much about why Pixar are master storytellers:

* They embrace the humanity of their characters.  Even if they're not human, Pixar characters each have qualities with which we, as moviegoers can identify.

* They don't shy away from emotion, recognizing that a viewer's emotional resonance with characters and moments is a big part of a story's meaning.

* They treat emotional issues both honestly and restraint, not going over the top, but simple moments: on the conveyor belt, wordlessly holding hands as they approach their presumed doom; a teenager and a little girl playing with toys in a front yard.

* They think about story themes: life, death, separation, belief, community, family, tradition, each of those is at play in both of the scenes referenced above and the movie itself.

* They embrace beauty, finding it over and over and over again in the lives of their characters and the key moments they share.

Important lessons all for screenwriters.

Why do you think Pixar are such great storytellers?

For more of the article, go here. j

Inception: Nolan’s Hand-Drawn Map

Michael Arndt Digs Into Toy Story 3 and the Genius of the Pixar System - Thompson on Hollywood

Michael Arndt Digs Into Toy Story 3 and the Genius of the Pixar System - Thompson on Hollywood

Excerpts:

This is the whole genius of the movie, that you're going to let time elapse in real time, so that Andy will have grown up, and he's going off to college, so ten years in real time is ten years in screen time, and that way you are giving your characters a real problem.

Now, it's not like the toys go to outer space or Japan or something like that. The toys have to deal with what seems to be the end of their natural life, and facing these fears of obsolescence, of being replaced or being disposable.



When I first got there, I was like, 'is it the people or is it the system? Where's the genius?' And to a degree it's the combination. Obviously you have a lot of smart, hard-working people all over the place, and you also have animation companies that use the same animation system, so it's this combination of the two.

It really is to a degree like lightning in a bottle. I mean, every Pixar film…I've been there when films weren't working, and you go 'Oh my god are they going to be able to pull this off?'

And it's so collaborative, and I don't think that you can actually point to any one person. The metaphor I could use is that writing one of these scripts or making one of these films is like building a Cathedral. It really is the expression of a whole creative community.



Until you get there you can't imagine how much work goes in, and not even just making the movie, just putting the story together is such a laborious process. And it's really because you make the film like seven or eight times.



There were some scenes where I wrote sixty drafts, just because you are always honing and honing and polishing so that it just works.



You never want your second act or the whole movie to just be this relentless march towards its goal. You want things to take the audience by surprise.



AT: How long did that take? It took three years to write?

MA: Yeah.



And then—and this is always sort of the hardest scene to write in screenwriting—you have your fun in the beginning, and then your characters actually have to sit down and have a conversation.

As soon as you have something - well, they start boarding almost immediately. Almost immediately they bring in people to start boarding stuff.



You do sketches of an entire film, you do initially scratch recording, then you start layering the characters, you do scratch music, you do sound effects, and you basically create a movie in a rough form.

And then—this is what's so crucial to the process of animation and what makes it so different from live-action, is—I'd actually finished my script, I sent it out to everyone, everyone reads it on their own, and reading is sort of a private experience, you know, and everyone writes up their notes on their own, and it's a hub-and-spokes system.

Everyone sends their stuff back to me, but it's everyone's individual reactions, unmediated by anyone else's experience. And at Pixar, you show it in a big theatre with everybody sitting there, so when everyone laughs you feel the laughter, or when everyone is bored, you feel the rustling, or hopefully, when it's moving at the end, you can hear people sniffling. Just as a writer you get a sense of what's working and what's not working.

AT: So how many times does that happen?

MA: Seven or eight.

AT: And that's the whole movie?

MA: The whole movie. In a very rough stage, but with the thematics. But as problems start getting solved, for example there's that one scene that I did seven drafts of and we're like, 'its done, it does what it needs to do.' And then you can go, 'OK this is approved for production.'



I'm still writing, which means you're still going back to the actors for recording dialogue, and you're still going back to guys sketching and just throwing it up on screen to see if it will work. It is such a luxury as a writer to be able to make mistakes, put it up on screen, go back, have a huddle and try again.

And then the last part of the process is you screen it in public and you get together in a room and you've got John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Doctor, you know it's like, my metaphor is that it's as though the Harlem Globe Trotters are in your living room, and you just have ideas like flying all over the place and jokes flying all over the place and you can—I've said this before- - you can feel the story getting better on a minute-to-minute basis, because a lot of times when things are going well you just feel this energy in the room.



The great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.

So that all these pieces of the machine are all talking to each other at the same time, it's like a real dialogue. In live action you do all your writing, then you do all your production, then you do all your editing, and if you're a writer, a lot of times you just get thrown out, so that's why it's very gratifying to be a voice in that process, a part of the ongoing process.



AT: At what stage do your pages get turned into animation?

MA: What happens is you break the script into twenty-five sequences, so it's like these are all solid, don't worry about them, here are your problem sequences, work on them.

So lets say I'll attack three or four scenes, and what I'll do is I'll write a draft and hand it in to Lee the director and he'll go, 'eh, X, Y and Z.' So then I go back and I'll go through that very small two-person feedback loop for five or six passes, basically, until Lee finally goes, 'OK, I think that's it.'

And then he'll take it from me and hand if off to the story guys and they'll start sketching it and they can add jokes, they can add visual stuff, they figure out how to frame it, if there is a way you can communicate information visually rather than verbally, so I was embarrassed sometimes to find the scenes come back to me shorter because things can be done visually instead of having to rely on dialogue.


Michael Arndt Digs Into Toy Story 3 and the Genius of the Pixar System - Thompson on Hollywood

Observations on film art : New Zealand is still Middle-earth: A summary of the Hobbit crisis

Example of the influence of big film-making and the new dynamics of cinema.

Imagine a Mahabharata Trilogy or the three Battles of Panipat with top star-cast, solid production value costing 300-500 crores made over a period of 3-4 years and various states of India fighting to 'host' the show. Hmm...maybe far-fetched but that day may not be far.

Read recently that Ghai wants to open (WW) film-school in Haryana and would try to set up an industry; maybe JatWood. Yet....with too much moolah flowing who knows how things could change in the next 10-15 yrs.


Observations on film art : New Zealand is still Middle-earth: A summary of the Hobbit crisis

In a way, it is amazing that a film production, even a huge one like The Hobbit, virtually guaranteed to be a pair of hits, could influence the law of a country–and make the legal process happen so quickly.

Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird

What does stimulating the creativity of animators have in common with developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs? A lot.

Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird


Excerpts:

Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and John Lasseter said, in effect, "The only thing we're afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out. We want you to come shake things up. We will give you a good argument if we think what you're doing doesn't make sense, but if you can convince us, we'll do things a different way." For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had just come off a failure and say, "Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up"—when do you run into that?


We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here.


Not all shots are created equal. Certain shots need to be perfect, others need to be very good, and there are some that only need to be good enough to not break the spell.

We also made superelaborate storyboards. We even emulated camera movement in them, so everyone knew that "We only need to make things work between here and there." Once I was able to commit to the camera angles, we could be very specific about how we built things. Something would look beautiful from one position, but if you moved five feet to the right, the image would disintegrate. I gave up the flexibility to move within a set, but in exchange I bought size and scope.


In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie's budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.


The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. There was a point during the making of The Incredibles where we had a company meeting. We have them about twice a year, and anybody can bring up concerns. Somebody raised their hand and said, "Is The Incredibles too ambitious?" Ed Catmull said, "I don't know" and looked over at me. I just said, "No! If there's one studio that needs to be doing stuff that is 'too ambitious,' it's this one. You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don't play it safe—you do something that scares you, that's at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That's what gets you up in the morning."


So my goal is to make a movie I want to see. If I do it sincerely enough and well enough—if I'm hard on myself and not completely off base, not completely different from the rest of humanity—other people will also get engaged and find the film entertaining.


One thing Pixar does—which is a knockoff of old-school, Walt-era 1940s Disney—is to have all kinds of optional classes. They call it "PU," or Pixar University. If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there's a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. Sometimes, people even move from one area to another.


I think the best leaders are somewhat subversive, because they see something a different way.


The Quarterly: We've been talking a lot about how you promote innovation. What undermines it?

Brad Bird: Passive-aggressive people—people who don't show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away—are poisonous. I can usually spot those people fairly soon and I weed them out.


They were masters of the form, but they had the attitude of a student. This guy taking over the studio had only done a few pieces of pretty good animation, and he was totally satisfied. Could not have been less inspiring.


Walt Disney's mantra was, "I don't make movies to make money—I make money to make movies." That's a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It's also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can't be the focus.

Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don't want to just collect more fuel.

Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird

Article: Why we need more "adult" movies - By Matt Zoller Seitz

"The American" and "The Romantics" are part of a tragically rare genre in America: Films that kids won't understand

What do we mean when we call a film or TV show "adult"?

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The word is often used to refer to language, violence, sexual imagery or other material that adults don't want small children to see. But other films are "adult" in a different, arguably truer sense. They tell stories about people and situations that children (and the childishly minded) either cannot understand or aren't interested in. And they tell them in ways that demand engagement from the viewer, rather than slack-jawed spectatorship. These aren't "shows." They're situations involving somewhat believable adults involved in emotional and sometimes moral conundrums. And you don't always know whom to root for, or if you should root for anyone.

As critic Jim Emerson is fond of saying, a film isn't about what it's about -- it's about how it's about it.

Why we need more "adult" movies