Jaime’s Top 20 Films of 2010

"Machete" is in the 20th spot in my list.

by Jaime Grijalba.

So, here I am, after all my talk about doing my list in february I’m doing it now. Why? Well, I was checking my blog archives and it turns out I always posted my list a couple of days after the Oscar nominations, an ocassion that always bring me some sort of happiness: I get to see a lot of films and everyone is doing their predictions, even if the nominees aren’t what you expect, you always root for something at the end of the day. Looking back, awards season has always meant something for me, and the Oscars have a special place in my heart, since usually I started going to school the next day, now university, and you always have something to talk about for a couple of days (and it’s an excellent conversation fuel with people you don’t know yet).

Now this should be the paragraph in which I talk about how a bad year for movies 2010 was, and how future looks dim and somber and how we are all going to die a sad death. I won’t do this to you, but I’ll say this, 2009 was a better year for movies, the range between good and bad films was very small and I have to say that any of my four favorite performances of last year (Nicolas Cage, Catalina Saavedra, Christoph Waltz and Maggie Gyllenhaal) are way better than the four performances that (for now) are my favorites of 2010. There has been a real disminishment in quality overall and I can’t explain why, there was no real technical dazzlement apart from the movies that make the first five spots in my list.

So, I bother you no more with my random thoughts and I present to you the better 20 films of those I’ve seen in 2010. Keep in mind that this list includes shorts, TV movies and miniseries as well, and they must’ve been released in the year 2010 period, no 2009 or 2008 movies that were unseen until now, no exceptions made whatsoever. Let’s start then.

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Angèle – 1934, Marcel Pagnol

by Allan Fish

(France 1934 164m) not on DVD

The clock has stopped

p  Marcel Pagnol  d/w  Marcel Pagnol  novel  Jean Giono  ph  Willy Faktorovitch  ed  Suzanne de Troeye, André Robert  m  Vincent Scotto  art  Charles Brun

Orane Demazis (Angèle Barbaroux), Fernandel (Saturnin), Jean Servais (Albin), Henri Poupon (Clarius Barbaroux), Edouard Delmont (Amédée), Annie Toinon (Philomène),

Between parts two and three of his celebrated Apu trilogy, Satyajit Ray took time off to produce The Music Room, which Ray’s sincerest adherents often put up as one of his masterworks.  Twenty or so years earlier, Marcel Pagnol was in the process of filming a trilogy, this time based on his own saga of life on the Marseilles sea front. The first two films in the triptych were directed by effective hired hands, Alexander Korda and Marc Allégret, but Pagnol was the real creative force behind them.  Maybe he always intended to film the last part of the Marseilles trilogy himself, but before turning to César, he made several other films, of which Angèle is both the most famous and the least seen.  Georges Sadoul had been in no doubt, naming it Pagnol’s best film, and many other critics have agreed with him, yet many of them have seen something like the full version.  The only English subtitled version that can be tracked down – and even then with great difficulty – is shorn of over half an hour of footage, has subtitles that lose much of Pagnol’s rich language, obvious even to non Francophones, and the subtitles we do have are nearer to the centre than the traditional, less obtrusive foot of the frame, appearing much as copyright warnings flashed onto copyrighted material on the internet. 

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