My Best and Worst Movies and TV of 2010/2011

Here's an oldie but goodie that I whipped up while applying to a summer internship program for Summer 2011.  The prompt was quite simply to write about the best or worst movies/tv I'd seen.  Too bad for me they said to be brief.  Too bad for them I just couldn't do it.  But no worries, I got in.  Everyone wins!  This is what I wrote:

I know the instructions were to be brief, but there is no way to briefly and justly explain these movie and TV choices.  Forgive me, but I picked fairness over brevity.

BEST MOVIES - EASY A, I LOVE YOU, PHILLIP MORRIS, AND INCEPTION

All three of these movies had interesting stories with great characters and interesting plots, but the thing that ties them together for me is the memorable, dynamic way that they are told on screen.

For Easy A, the screenwriting is what makes the movie.  We’ve heard the basic story before—an ordinary teenage girl is misjudged at her local high school—but the great comedy writing takes that ordinary girl and ordinary scenes and turns them into laugh-out-loud situations, the likes of which I hadn’t seen done well since Tina Fey’s screenplay for Mean Girls in 2004.

 

The acting in I Love You, Phillip Morris is definitely what brings that story to life.  Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey share an intimate, almost awkwardly intimate, onscreen chemistry that tells more of the story than the writing alone ever could.  Then there is the sheer number of unbelievable situations in the film, which would not be successful without Carrey’s confident, realistic performance.  It helps the audience be more willing to suspend disbelief at the hyper-realistic scenes that are supposed to be part of a very real, true story.

As for Inception, part of the movie’s message is also its greatest strength: there is nothing more powerful than an idea.  And when a great idea is fully formed and executed with great magnitude and great intensity, we end up with great movies like Inception.  What’s more is that for such a cerebral film, and the storytellers do a nice job of balancing that with characters we care about, using them as vehicles to reveal more about the intellectual aspects of the film.

WORST MOVIE - THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

My expectations were exceedingly low, and somehow this movie failed to meet even those.  It had so much potential!  But twenty minutes in, I wondered how much longer I had until the end.  Then, fifteen minutes from the end I thought, "Wait a minute, it’s almost over?  But I'm still waiting for something good to happen." 

The characters seemed half-developed; there was never a point when I cared about the supposed main characters any more than I cared about the more peripheral ones, and that’s when I could distinguish the main characters from the peripheral ones.  My entire experience was just one potentially great letdown after another.  Climaxes in the film fell many marks short, the villains weren't mean enough, and the heroes weren't smart enough.  This movie was like watching an old episode of Blue's Clues, and yelling at the TV for Steve to see the clue that was right in front of his face.  I don’t think I’ve ever been so underwhelmed.

BEST TV SHOWS - MODERN FAMILY, PARKS AND RECREATION, 30 ROCK

It feels like TV is in a sitcom revival, a Situational Comedy Renaissance.  Dramas are still popular, but they are gradually giving way to their witty, half-as-long, comedic counterparts.  Dramas do have their high points—characters we love, characters we hate, and stories that leave us dying to know what happens next.  Sitcoms, on the other hand, have the ability to give viewers a 30-minute fix of laughs.  I think viewers have picked up on the idea that dramas require a lot of work from them (keeping up with the story, understanding the characters), whereas sitcoms are simple and don’t require nearly as much ongoing, active involvement.  You could say that a sitcom is like quick sex in a storage closet, whereas a drama is like making love to your 3-year romantic partner.  After making up from a huge fight.  On Valentine’s Day.

 

So my picks for the best TV shows this year are based on the way that these programs are able to take the some of the best qualities of a dramatic show and put them into a situational comedy series.  First, Modern Family on ABC successfully bears a positive message for tolerance without being too overbearing or too “Full House.”  Then we have Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock, both on NBC Thursdays.  I call these two shows the “SNL Brain-children,” led by Tina Fey’s awesome writing and Amy Poehler in what I consider her best role.  The best thing about both programs is that the quality of comedy writing has been pretty constant, and in many places it has improved as seasons passed.  (Particularly for Parks and Recreation, the second season turned out much better than the first.)  Most impressive to me about all three programs is their capacity for character development in relatively nonlinear stories.

WORST TV SHOW - BURN NOTICE

Last summer, I read the screenplay for the show's pilot, and it looked promising.  I watched the pilot, and even though most of the acting left something to be desired, the whole thing showed lots of room for growth. But I soon noticed that as the series continues, the story stops moving forward.  It never completely halts, but it moves in a circle.  The main character’s super objective is crystal clear—to find out why he was burned, who burned him, and how to get justice for himself—but at the beginning of season three, I felt no closer to finding the answers to these questions than I did at the end of season one.  Things got boring.

It has become a sort of hobby of mine to watch shows that seem to be on the fast track to cancellation, and attempt to remedy the problem, or try to figure out how the story could be saved.  The most tragic example of this for me was the NBC show, Heroes.  It had taken a turn for the worse during the writer's strike, but just when they made a bold story choice that could have saved the story, the show had to be cancelled.  (Understandable, as it had lost viewers who would be difficult if not impossible to win back.)

In terms of Burn Notice, it seems like the show's writers decided to focus more on character development, but the problem with that is that these characters were created to play into certain roles.  Of course, with enough backstory, this is not impossible to fix, and it looks like that's what they tried to do.  The trouble with going along that route is that it lost most of the initial appeal of the fast-paced, hiding-from-the-law, spy story.  I haven't watched the show since the beginning of the most recent season, but I would be interested in seeing what they have done with it, especially since NBC Universal and USA have renewed it for what looks like another two seasons.