A Journey Through My Collection: The 2010's

The 2010’s was a decade when it felt like cinematic storytelling matured to such a point that comic book movies were finally well made, auteurs took the time to make kids movies, westerns and space movies returned to prominence, documentary film was perfected, and comedy figured itself out. This decade saw at least one of the best years for film of all time, 2019, after a pretty loaded decade of films. I definitely didn’t have trouble finding at least one great movie from my collection for every year of this decade, and I couldn’t resist pairing a couple 2011 movies, Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin and Scorsese’s Hugo, on this list together to enjoy a couple of really great movies aimed at kids from two of the best directors of all time.

True Grit (2010)

The story goes into some odd, Coen-friendly directions, but a lot of the movie is as straight forward if a western as you can get. Almost every sequence seems to be mirrored somewhere else in western film history, even if the original version of this film isn't as memorable. This does everything about a western so we'll, I think the only thing missing is a gunfight on main street, which is the insighting incident of the whole movie. The performances are all perfect, great casting as well. I did have to pull up a clip of this movie when my four year old asked me, "can horses swim?"

The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

This is like a lost Indiana Jones movie, or, I guess more accurate would be a lost Young Indiana Jones movie. It is pure adventure joy. I have no clue how they didn't the animation, but this was made to look like the most realistic and most beautiful animated movie ever. The production team and cast are like an All-Star team of the 2000's with a mix of Edgar Wright, Steven Moffitt and Joe Cornish writing and Spielberg at the healm and Peter Jackson in production. It's a shame this didn't get a million sequels.

Hugo (2011)

I was looking to get my six year old son to watch something from my collection that's just outside of his comfort zone and ultimately got to get him on board with Hugo. He's a big fan of the movie The Naughty Nine about kids doing a heist on Santa Claus and the show The Inbestigators about Australian kids solving mysteries at schools, so it was only fitting for him to get into Hugo and his friend living in the walls, fixing a robot and solving a mystery of film history. This did have some scarier parts to it than I remembered but it wasn't bad, some adults are very angry, the police man trying to send kids it the orphanage and Hugo's father burning to death, but he handled it well. It really is a kid friendly story and movie, and in the end my son was fascinated enough to want to watch clips from A Trip to the Moon, Safety Last and to start watching The General. For all that Scorsese has done for film, film history and world film, it's nice that this has life to it despite its initial release and is introducing kids to film history.

The Impossible (2012)

I've watched this a number of times, I find it's a movie that I can't resist going back to because of how good this is at putting the audience in a position to feel like you are living into he middle of the film and this just tugs all the heartstrings. I recently broke down and finally bought a physical copy of my own because I know I will continue to come back to this over the years. I seem to be hitting all the movies that are guaranteed tearjerkers lately, not necessarily on purpose. This is so well made and the climactic moment is so improbable that it has to be true. Although, on this viewing I realized that they would eventually find each other, it's not as though they were all lost forever, although that hope probably lowered stress levels for the to recover from their own injuries. And the injuries in this are as gruesome as any in a horror movie or an action movie. It just feels so real, and open to infection. A nice little gem of a movie.

The Great Beauty (2013)

This was the movie that took me down a Paolo Sorrentino rabbit hole and I appreciate that. I think I like his lesser seen, weirder movies, but this is much stranger in terms of format than I had recalled. I mostly remembered how beautiful the cinematography is, the use of bright interior light as well as natural light outside, but I remembered the order of the scenes completely backwards. I had thought the dying tourist was from the end of the film and not the begining, and it really could have worked either way. Yes, this has a lot of La Dolce Vita, but it is really more of a mix of J.D. Salenger and Margaret Atwood as writers with one great novel (although that's not accurate to Atwood, although it was the perception of her for years) through the lens of an Italian in Berlosconi's Rome. I love that this takes multiple concepts, places them out of their own contexts then throws them into a blender controlled by an artistic filmmaker.

Boyhood (2014)

It's crazy that this would work, either as a production or as a watchable film. This could have come out as a behind the scenes documentary about a disaster of a movie that didn't work out and all the pitfalls could have happened instead of an amazing movie. I think there's a few directors that could have had foresight, the ability to improvise year to year, the ability to make a great story and have it look amazing. Apparently, the greatest stroke of luck was that the same studio executive remained in the same job the whole time. And that Linklater could bribe his daughter with a new phone every few years when she was needed for a few scenes.

The Hateful Eight (2015)

This is not easy to watch. You really shouldn't root for anyone, it's overly violent if not abusive, but, for a movie that could have been a stage play this very well could be the best cinematography of any Tarantino film. The uses of light are incredible, kissing hat brims, letting the camera shoot through the stage coach while allowing us to see interior and exterior background and foreground, this is like a painting. I love westerns but I don't know exactly what it is that makes this genre so perfectly cinematic, perhaps it's the natural beauty, earth tone clothing, the sun and geology, and simple wood buildings. It's a genre that's brutal but spans from The Hateful Eight of total revenge to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid that is entirely about friendship. It's a genre that battles modernity and nature and the simple, telling problem of a broken door in a blizzard.

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

It's a shame that this seems to be the last of these movies because this seems to be the one that really figured out how to fully integrate the humor and effects of these movies with a serialized feel. While the other two of these Star Trek movies are very much J.J. Abrams vehicles, and this feels more like a perfect collaboration of Simon Pegg as a sci-fi fan and comedy writer, Justin Lin as an action director, Michael Gianchino's music and Abram's production crew. This is a lot of fun and the characters get a little bit more of a glance of their stories, but they are valuable glimpses that really tempt the viewer to want more movies or a series with these characters. The designs in this are spectacular and beautiful. I do feel like the attack that brings them to their desert planet is a bit extreme, and overly deadly for how the crew reacts, but still spectacular. This makes up for Star Trek Into Darkness, which isn't a badly made movie or a bad story, the lesson of it is culturally dangerous in a conspiracy theory-minded way.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Star Wars movies are known for certain types of sequences that are in most, if not all, of the installments in the series. If you're going to have a Star Wars movie, you're going to have a space battle, a battle on land of a new and different planet, a duel with lightsabers, and each trilogy has an explanation about the force. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that each of these types of scenes has perhaps the most stunningly visual sequences. The destruction of the Star Destroyer that had been in pursuit is perhaps the most incredible image of all Star Wars movies, a fantastic use of light and dark space. There are actually two amazing lightsaber sequences, the red throne room sequence is great, although it leaves me wanting more, more of the battle and more from those guards, and Luke's astral projection duel is amazing, even if they never connect lightsabers. The battle on the salt planet is visually really interesting, although it's hard to make sense of why a battle of space capable combatants is a pitched battle. The conversation about the force with Rey and Luke is so artistically shot and a wonderful visualization of the force and the real world grounding to an appreciation of nature and life. I love this movie and only wish that the kid at the end, using the force to move a broom like the child at the end of Tarkovsky's Stalker using their mind to move a glass of water on a table, that they had a chance to be the unsung hero, an x-factor to defeat the dark side in the final Skywalker saga film.

Ready Player One (2018)

I really enjoyed the book of Ready Player One. It isn't high art, it isn't great literature, and I don't have the greatest attachment to 1980's pop culture, but it is a scavenger hunt with puzzles and it's pretty fun. Through that fun and trying to picture some of the references I didn't quite know, along with those that I did, there is an attachment to the characters, even if the main character is a bit whiny. What works about the book is that it creates a world where a VR universe makes sense for school and entertainment and the challenges are surprising, exciting and inspire the imagination. It was a bit of a surprise that Steven Spielberg signed on to make this movie, although it makes a little sense considering that his one big non-movie side project in his life was making a puzzle video game Boom Blox as well as creating the Medal of Honor games, that sure have a passing resemblance to Saving Private Ryan. Like many adaptations, the movie is not a carbon copy of the book, but it sure takes a lot of the world building, the characters, and the story outline. Spielberg changed the games that are the challenges in the scavenger hunt, and what's really interesting is that he manages to make cinematic challenges that have pop culture references just like the book, but every one of them is a difference challenge with a different main reference. It provides the reader viewer an opportunity to have more of the book. Unfortunately, it isn't quite as grand, and the translation of avatars from the imagination in your head to animation on the big screen. It isn't bad animation, but the reveal that the best friend is not male but female is soured due to a decision to give her voice modulation that is quite distracting. If nothing else, this movie gives an incredible opportunity to relive The Shining in a brand new way and is perhaps nice piece of trivia as it might be the only time Spielberg and Stephen King ever had a collaboration of any sort that made it to screen as two icons of the '70's and '80's on different areas of the spectrum of children of divorce coming of age. I couldn't resist finally getting a discount physical version of this purely as a nice piece of escapism.

1917 (2019)

It’s interesting how the illusion of a film in one shot has been attempted a few times over, Hitchcock attempted to buck claims that his use of fast cut was a gimmick so he filmed Rope in four or so shots with the intent to look like one. Newer films Hardcore Henry and sections of Children of Men, used similar tricks to attempt to hide cuts, although extreme close ups are a bit too obvious. Russian Ark attempts to use reel changes in motion to have a seamless film, although it lacks a story. The one movie that actually manages to have a great story and was really shot in real time in one cut was Victoria, a film that was attempted four times starting at the same time of day each attempt.1917 is fairly good at hiding the cuts, although few are distracting. The greatest trick that this pulls is from the use of spectacular single action sequences to the point that this doesn't feel like a trick on the audience. That final run in the field is absurd for the number of people in the scene that keeps growing and growing as the scene extends and extends. While it's a distraction that our POV reaching a point of blacking out in order to compress time, this movie is such a great exhibit of so many of the visually captivating sights of World War I.

Final Thoughts

Apparently this was the decade where therapy worked for the best directors, whether it was from a professional or the kind of introspection that comes from age and cinematic obsession. Speilberg, Scorsese and Linklater all tapped their childhoods for great movies and Sam Mendes mined the stories of his grandfather to tell an epic story from history. Filmmakers with fond childhood memories of Star Wars and Star Trek put together from visually stunning installments to decades old franchises. I’ll always have very fond moviegoing memories of this decade, this was the time that I went off to law school, met my wife, got married and started to have kids. This was when I life really kicked off, there were a lot of changes, and a lot of moves around the country, a lot of stressors and a lot of high moments, the movies along the way enhanced it all very well.

Running List on Letterboxd

What’s Next!

Tenet, The Matrix Resurrections, Babylon, Asteroid City, Dune Part Two.