10 movies I could take or leave in 2010

The movies in today's list are ones that I generally liked, but wasn't able to get really excited about for various reasons.

Number 30



I like Thomas Haden Church and Elisabeth Shue and the premise of Don McKay grabbed me. Church plays a lonely, high school janitor who gets an unexpected letter from his own high school sweetheart (Shue) asking him to come home. She's dying and wants a second chance at their relationship before she goes. When he gets there though, he finds his true love surrounded by a creepy caregiver, an even creepier doctor, and an awful aura of Something's Not Right Here. It's a great setup and while the movie's focusing on Don and his loneliness and teasing the mystery, it's good stuff. Unfortunately, once it reveals what's going on, the movie gets a bit nuts and hard to connect to.

Number 29



It's Green Zone's marketers fault that I was in the mood for another Bourne movie when I saw this, but even had I been fully on board with the different tone, the preachiness of the film would've been enough to keep me from fully embracing it. I really like the character of Freddy (Khalid Abdalla) though and the perspective he gives to the differences between American and person-on-the-street Iraqi interests in that country. That alone made the movie worthwhile for me.

Art Show: X-Bob-omb

Night Approaches (time to kill some zombies)



By Jeremy Vanhoozer.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The X-Men



By Bryan Lee O’Malley and Rico Renzi. [Robot 6]

Quotes of the Week: The Revenge of Atticus Finch

The thing that kills me is that a sequel and a prequel for Watchmen are being sought by people at DC in the first place. This doesn't seem to me like out of the box publishing thinking; this seems to me like sad, typical all the way in the box corporate media thinking. I don't want a prequel to Lawrence of Arabia, I don't want to see a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird and I like Watchmen just the way it is as a singular expression of potent pop culture, thank you.
--Tom Spurgeon.

Hating Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is perfectly fine. It's got a style; you sort of embrace it and dig it or you don't. But when there's too much effort given to tut-tutting the people you imagine to be enjoying it, or declaring and promising that only narrow categories of losers and non-life-havers and other stupid annoying hipsters could possibly be having a good time when you're not, it sounds pinched and ungenerous. And, not to put too fine a point on it, a little bit jealous and fearful of obsolescence.
--Linda Holmes.

Movie News Roundup: "Tell It to the Cleaning Lady on Monday"

Pirates 4 gets Rushed



Barbossa's back for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. I would've bet on that early on (in fact, I could've sworn it had already been announced), but all the focus on casting Blackbeard and his daughter made me wonder if Barbossa was out. Glad to see he's not. By At World's End, I liked him even better than Sparrow. [/Film]


Voyage of the Dawn Treader trailer



The quality of the trailer isn't real good, but the movie looks fantastic. As I've said before, this ought to be my favorite in the series. [/Film]

Cleopatra



Angelina Jolie is working with producer Scott Rudin to develop (and most likely star in) a movie about everyone's favorite Egyptian queen. Apparently, this is of some concern to people who don't recall that Cleopatra was, in fact, Greek and not African. [/Film]

After the break: Musketeers, Spies, Oz, and rock'em sock'em robots.