Am I a Hater or a Lover?....of film. Part 1

Because I have been recently accused of being a hater, rather than a lover of film, mostly because my Top 10 List for 2011 consists of four films, I've decided to go back and make my Top 10 Films of the Year list for the past decade.

BTW, here's my Top 10 Films for 2011, I added X-Men: First Class just to try to get to five.

1. Drive

2. Melancholia

3. Bridesmaids

4. Super 8

5. X-Men: First Class

And just to be fair, here's some honorable mentions: Tree of Life, Captain America, Rango, Thor, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (I could have made a full list with these, but these last films I just didn't feel like I could list on my "favs" list.

2010

Now while this year was a huge disappointment for blockbusters and Summer films, it was exceptional when it came to dramas and technical pieces. But despite that, Youth in Revolt was by far my favorite film of this year, while Winter's Bone was my favorite for the dramatic and higher brow films and A Prophet was my favorite foreign film.

1. Youth in Revolt

2. Winter's Bone

3. A Prophet

4. King's Speech

5. The Social Network

6. Black Swan

7. Inception

8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

9. Despicable Me

10. Tron: Legacy

2009

Again, a clear favorite at the top, but Moon is definitely one of my favorite films of the last few years.

1. Fantastic Mr Fox

2. Moon

3. Zombieland

4. The Road

5. The Hurt Locker

6. A Serious Man

7. Away We Go

8 500 Days of Summer

9. District 9

10.  Inglourious Basterds

Honorable Mention: An Education, Taken, Where the Wild Things Are

2008

Besides these five films I just could not find another film I would consider a favorite. I was a hater this year apparently.

1. The Dark Knight

2. Kung Fu Panda

3. Iron Man

4. Wall-E

5. Doubt

2007

Barely got to 10 on this year. I didn't see Zodiac until this last year and I found it an utterly amazing film. No Country For Old Men still holds a special place in my heart for the film that caused two nightmares where Javier Bardem tried to kill me.

1. Zodiac

2. No Country for Old Men

3. Hot Fuzz

4. Ratatouille

5. Transformers

6. Across the Universe

7. The Darjeeling Limited

8. Juno

9. Live Free of Die Hard

10. Sicko

2006

This is a year that I can look back and re-assess what my favorite films are. I hated Children of Men at first, but now I love it. I didn't see Nacho Libre till way later and now....I am in love with it.

1. Nacho Libre

2. The Departed

3. Children of Men

4. Borat

5. The Pursuit of Happyness

6. Little Miss Sunshine

7. The Prestige

8. The Devil Wears Prada

9. Marie Antoinette

10. United 93

Honorable Mention: V For Vendetta, Accepted

2005

Another hater year. Not much to "fav" during the year, except we saw the best of the Star Wars prequels and the beginning of the new Batman franchise.

1. The New World

2. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

3. Batman Begins

4. Wedding Crashers

5. Serenity

6. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

7. Madagascar

8. Munich

9. Hitch

10. Walk the Line

Two Thrillers: The Road and Nosferatu

The Road - A complete and total must see. It's imaginative and real and a film that filmmakers should aspire to. It leaves out the unnecessary answers that people often complain about; there's no explanation for the post-apocalyptic world, or how the mother died. It's just a bare bones story about a father protecting his son and surviving in the craziest of worlds. The film even lacks a real depthful plot; they just have to get to the coast where hopefully it's better.
The kid at times is slightly annoying, but what 10 year old isn't? The real plot of the film involves the duo keeping their moral sanity in a world where people are doing anything and everything to stay alive, from stealing to eating each other. The father establishes this when he tells his son that they'll stay good, they have to because they're carrying "the fire" within themselves. The film does ask some pertinent questions and establishes a scenario that feels frightening close to our current world. What would you do to survive? How close to you get to the blurry line between good guy and just surviving? The father teeters closer and closer to that line to protect his son, while trying to keep him as good as possible. In a way, the father protects his son from getting close to that, by crossing the line himself.
In a world, where banks have collapsed, homes taken, and formally well-off people one paycheck away from starving, this film really hits home to how close we are to utter chaos.

Nosferatu - What happens when you can't get the rights to a book? Just change the names of the characters. That's what the producers of this silent horror classic did. Nosferatu is basically the Bram Stoker's Dracula. In fact, it is Bram Stoker's Dracula, except they call him Nosferatu. It follows the same story, guy goes to Nosferatu's house out in Transylvania, Nosferatu becomes obsessed with guy's wife, he travels back to get that wife, yadda yadda. Except, the guy never does anything redeeming, while getting home he ends up in the hospital and the wife ends up killing the vampire by tricking him. The story is so horrible, the second half of the film seems like it fell off a cliff. They spend an hour setting the whole story up, establishing Nosferatu as a creepazoid, then the "second half" is maybe 25 minutes. They cut out the vampire killer, the main guy is incapacitated for the second act, they rush through the ending....this shouldn't be a classic.
The one redeeming thing that makes it such, is Max Shreck as the creepazoid vampire. Bravo! I think this guy actually became a vampire to get into the role. I should mention one other redeeming aspect; the third person cue cards. They're written by some narrator, who is writing them like a book, relating the things he's been told. In a way, it comes off as cheating, since he explains a lot, and it's kind of like useless narration, but really, it adds to the weird and dark nature of the film. Many films have followed this form into sound films, with an outside narrator creepily telling the story as if it's all real. That's how it came off, this narrator was telling us the details of the story as if they're real, explaining certain details, but leaving out others because he doesn't know or it's a mystery. That adds to the atmosphere in a big way.
Although this is a landmark in horror, that inspired so many others, it isn't scary, nor well told, leaving you to snicker at times and never get engrossed except when Nosferatu is around.