Director Danny Boyle’s dramatic thriller chronicles the hours of Aron Ralston and his battle with a lodged rock that sealed his fate and brought Aron down to Earth to come to grips with his own life and mortality. Much like “In to the Wild,” director Boyle takes what was something of an already interesting story and turns it in to much than an experience by altering it in to a surreal and somewhat spiritual look back at a young man whose life has been filled with excitement and adventure that he used as a form of coping with his inability to allow people to connect to him as he connected to nature and the wilderness. And much like Sean Penn accomplished with “In to the Wild,” he manages to take an accident and uses it as a form of expressing the ideas of fate, coincidence, and the afterlife and a person communing with and ultimately becoming one with the environment around him.
Let Me In (2010)
I think “Let Me In” will be deemed as a respectable companion piece to the infinitely superior “Let The Right One In” if only because Matt Reeves directs this version with his eye on convention more than edge. The original was already so gruesome and complex and filled with subtext and undertones that Reeves opts instead for simple and superficial and it will rely on the audiences preference if they want a movie about a vampire and a boy falling in love, or if they want a story about a boy and a girl falling in love, one of whom mutilates people and drinks their blood.
Batman Beyond: The Complete Series (Limited Edition) (DVD)
Back when Bruce Timm’s critically acclaimed award winning groundbreaking “Batman: The Animated Series” finally bowed out after branching off the “Superman” animated series, Warner approached Timm and his creative team with a mission. They wanted Batman back but this time younger, and geared to a much less mature audience. And Bruce Timm obliged and by god, he gave them a youth oriented Batman show, but he did it his way and on his terms. And what Warner likely intended to be a fun hilarious goofy series, ended up being just as moody, adult, grim, and bleak as the original Batman series. “Batman Beyond” is one of the beloved relics of the late nineties entering in to the millennium that managed to completely re-think the Batman universe, but also stay true to the themes and adult nature of the original series.
Black Swan (2010)
Director Darren Aronofsky has always had a talent for delving in to the human psyche and offering us deeper more complex looks in to our souls and perceptions of reality. “Requiem for a Dream” was a film constantly teetering between a life of misery and woe distorted by our own desires for something better, while “The Fountain” destroyed all of our notions of time and infinity in a world not bound by simple quantities of hours and days. His master opus is a work of art that transforms the world of Nina Sayers in to something of a personal hell where she is incapable of escaping and is seeking a perfection that she may never be able to obtain. “Black Swan” is a masterpiece, a classic trail of perceived normality in to madness, a world of light consumed by shadows, and our very own minds becoming the key to our unraveling of consciousness and reality.
The Uncanny Boris Karloff
I would love to be one of those movie geeks who explain that the first time they saw a Hollywood legend like Boris Karloff was in a movie only five people have seen for years, and I explain the details of the plot and make you feel bad for not having watched it and give you some impression of my knowledge of movies because you have yet to see it or can’t even find it. But no. My first time ever coming close to Boris Karloff’s insane greatness was during “The Grinch That Stole Christmas.” Yes, it was “The Grinch,” a half hour animated movie animated by Chuck Jones that played on television every single year. Not very impressive? I don’t care.
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
What Disney studios have done is completely remade their take of “Alice in Wonderland” except they’ve given director Tim Burton carte blanche to completely re-think the lore and Burtonize it to the fullest extent. These days though, Burtonize is akin to doing basically nothing to completely re-work a formula. “Alice in Wonderland” is Tim Burton basically just riding on his name recognition even more by offering up a re-telling of “Alice in Wonderland” except now with a darker tone, surreal imagery, the usual suspects in terms of supporting characters, and a cliché story about a person destined to save a land and become a warrior who will save them from evil.
The Expendables (2010)
I grew up with two kinds of movie fans. One (my mom) was a hardcore horror buff, and the other was an unabashed action buff (my dad), so for most of my life before I sought out various genres, all I sat and watched were sleazy action flicks and gory horror films. “The Expendables,” while not a perfect movie, is a call back to the classic action films of the seventies and eighties when men were buff, grizzled, hairy and fired off huge guns while also getting the woman in the end, it’s a traditional action film that is also director Sylvester Stallone’s own version of “The Wild Bunch” about old cowboys who have one last stand to reclaim their dignity and self-respect. They do the missions because they feel as if they have to, and they don’t take in to caution their own well beings.