Year In Review - Movies

As I look back over the year in movies, it seems a bit unremarkable. I'm not going to do a top ten list, off the top of my head these are the five worth commenting on. (Caveat - I haven't seen Girl With The Dragon Tattoo yet, which I have high hopes for.)

• Moneyball - My favorite movie of the year. I love behind-the-scenes types of movies. It looks like it's about baseball, but really it's about data analysis. Gotcha!
• The Island President - I don't think this has gotten distribution yet, I saw it at the Telluride Film Fest. It's a documentary about The Maldives, a country of islands under imminent threat of being submerged in the ocean, thanks to global warning. The president of The Maldives is my new hero, it's an amazingly affecting movie, watch for it.
• Contagion - I seem to love all of Steven Soderbergh's movies, and disaster themes appeal to my darker side. It really gets you thinking about what would happen in the world if (when?) an unknown virus starts spreading. I had a hard time touching the theater door on the way out.
• Melancholia. I can't believe I'm even writing this. It took four or five attempts to finish it, and I was thoroughly bored by the first half of the movie, with the exception of the most hypnotic opening sequence ever. But the more I thought about it, and the further I got into it, the more curious I was about the ending, and the more I started to appreciate the structure of the story. (Or maybe I should put it this way - the more Jim explained it to me, the more I got it.) It's weird and artsy and disturbing and my initial instincts might be right. But I'm a bit obsessed with it. Melancholia is in theaters and on pay-per-view, which is how I had the opportunity to take a month to get through it. (Incidentally, it's about a woman having a serious episode of depression during her wedding reception, while another planet is heading ominously for the earth.)
  
• Conan O'Brian Can't Stop - A documentary about a concert tour between talk shows. Another behind-the-scenes that I thought was so fascinating about what it means to be Conan O'Brian. Not what you think.
  

I liked lots of others this year -- The Descendants, Ides of March, Crazy Stupid Love, Harry Potter, The Artist, Midnight in Paris, Bridesmaids... But these above captured my imagination the way a great movie should.

(Honorable mention: Inside Job, which came out at the end of 2010 but I just watched a few weeks ago. AMAZING documentary about the financial crisis that kicked off in 2008, and how it all worked. This movie is a terrific workout for your brain.)