Movies 41-50: Still getting better

Sorry this has taken so long. I've been battling a cold and haven't felt much like writing.

50. "The Brave One": While, on a personal level, I'm not a great fan of revenge films, this one at the very least skillfully made. Jodie Foster makes the grief and desperation real. Would even probably be a little higher if not for an ending that seems to be a bit of a cop out, taking a decision out of the hands of Foster's character when that choice would have helped define her character, for better or worse.



49. "The Simpsons Movie": It is, in essense, a solid episode of the TV show that inspired it, except longer. Nothing more, nothing less. It's entertaining and fun, but little about it really stands out on the big screen.



48. "Fracture": A moderately entertaining cat-and-mouse game. Gosling and Hopkins both give good, if not incredibly memorable performances. Never really works as anything but a mystery, but as a how-he-done-it, it works well enough.



47. "The Darjeeling Limited": There are moments here where you can remember why Anderson's first three films were so brilliant, moments that make you hopeful his next will be a return to form. Unfortunately, much like his characters, the film seems to be striving for an emotional connection it never seems to reach. The obvious change between the "Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore," "Royal Tenenbaums" trio and Anderson's last two films is the absence of Owen Wilson as a screenwriter. Maybe he balanced Anderson out, added something that Baumbach, Coppola and Schwartzman just aren't able to do. Whatever the case may be, I don't think Anderson has lost it, but I do wish he go back to making movies that I'd still be marveling over days after seeing them.



46. "The Great Debaters": This film would have been a lot more powerful had it not undercut it characters' accomplishments at every turn. First, they never had to debate the "wrong" side of any issue, a near mathematical impossibility in debate. Arguing against something you believe in is part of debate, and the ability to do so effectively helps separate out the good debaters. Second, the pair of supposed national champion debaters from Harvard were portrayed as a couple of arrogant twits who even I could have wiped the floor with. And I'm a little peeved that they changed the school they beat from USC to Harvard just for a bit of heavy-handed beating the white power structure symbolism. In real life they beat the best, and the best didn't go to Harvard. While this might make it sound like I hated the film, I didn't. I just wished they hadn't taken a great story and turned it into a pretty good movie.



45. "Bridge to Terabithia": A good film, a solid film, but it wasn't really able to re-create the level of magic and sadness that I remember from reading the book when I was young. Maybe the book would have lost some of its appeal in the intervening years, but the film didn't quite live up to my childhood memories. It shouldn't affect the ranking, but since these are mine, it did. So take this number with a bit of a grain of salt.



44. "The Hoax": Not even the best Richard Gere movie of the year (that would be "The Hunting Party," which I saw too late for it to be on the list but which I consider to be one of the most underrated films of the year), but there is still a lot to like here, from Gere's solid lead performance to the way truth, lies and rumors all kind of blend together. And somehow I don't care that the story has at times as much basis in the factual events that happened in the real-life case as Irving's Hughes "autobiography" itself. It seems fitting in this case that storytelling should triumph over facts given the man who is being profiled.


43. "The Waterhorse": A surprisingly good family film. Nothing here is terribly striking or original, but it is simply a good story well told. In this case that is enough.

42. "Across the Universe": A bizarre mixture of genius and frustration. Some of the song pieces are absolutely amazing. I loved the bitter, ominous "Strawberry Fields Forever." The angry "Revolution" worked well too. Othertimes the action of the film felt forced in order to get the songs in. It's perhaps viewed, as a friend of mine at work said, as a series of music videos that happen to have the same actors. But when they are on, it's memorable.

41. "The Namesake": The first half of this film belongs in the top 10. Its picture of an Indian man and woman, both adjusting to living in a country they do not know and falling in love as they grow to know each other after an arranged marriage provides some of the best character work of the year, and Irfan Khan and Tabu are absolutely wonderful in these roles. The problem is, the second half of the film, which centers on their son ("Harold and Kumar's" Kal Penn) trying to discover his identity as a second generation immigrant, lacks the focus that made the first half so wonderful. It doesn't help that each of his love interests function as little more than signposts for how he is viewing his heritage at the time. There are still some good ideas, though. If the execution could have been better, this would have been one of the year's best.

Next up, a break for a review of George Clooney's "Leatherheads."