4. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Is Michael Cera underrated? He famously “only plays one character.” But isn’t that always the complaint about actors who’ve been typecast. What does Scott Pilgrim really have in common with George-Michael Bluth, or Evan from Superbad, or that short-shorts guy from Juno? George-Michael is nerdy and dumb, Evan was nerdy but smart, and short-shorts guy was… I dunno, kind of quaint, I guess. He never really got a full character in that movie (Did he even have a name? Was it something super-hipstery? I bet it was hipstery. <checking> His name was Paulie Bleeker. So, yes).

Scott, though, isn’t nerdy at all, he’s just bucket o’ rocks-level dumb, and Cera gets to bring his small-voiced, off-beat comedic sensibility to the role. Almost everything Cera says here is laugh-out-loud funny. I wasn’t sold on Cera as the cool rocker kid, or the cool anything kid, and now that he's 22, I'm getting less sold on him as a kid at all. But he and director Edgar Wright seem like a perfect comedic match. He’s fantastic as the consistently quizzical titular hero.

Scott Pilgrim feels like the kind of movie that shows where movies are going, for good and for ill (I’m in favor). It’s frenetically paced, packed with flashy special effects that whiz in from all directions, and tosses off jokes pell-mell in a wild dash to the finish. The critics who disliked it said scathing things about it being “a movie for an ADD generation,” as if filmmakers should make movies for generations other than their target audience. My favorite criticism was that “the film is, like the comic's creator, tragically Canadian.” I’m not totally sure what that means, but I’m pretty sure that’s racist. But they are right, it sometimes feels more like you’re watching a Saturday morning cartoon after six bowls of Lucky Charms than it does a feature film

But let’s appreciate, for once, a movie that is not for everyone for still being very good at what it is. I get tired of film geeks harping that “not nearly enough of America” saw X documentary (this year it's either Waiting For Superman or Restrepo, and it's pretty much the same group who saw both), or infrequent moviegoers looking scornfully at vaguelly artsy movies and saying loudly (why are these people always so loud?) “who would want to see that?” on their yearly pilgrimage to see a Fockers movie. Scott Pilgrim is energetic and entertaining and – this is truly shocking in this day and age – completely unique. And someday we will only watch movies that look exactly like it on our space iPods (It's like an iPod, but it works in space. I guess. I'm not good at imagining the future). 

5. How To Train Your Dragon

I’m not a Dreamworks Animation guy. Other than Pixar, and Disney films from their heyday, there’s very few children’s movies I’ll put myself through. I don’t like animals singing pop songs or cartoons getting kicked in the nuts or excessive fat jokes. Just not my thing.

I understand that they’ve produced some perfectly acceptable movies, but I haven’t felt the need to bother with them, and after years of steering carefully around the Madagascars and Shark Tales and Shrek sequels and various films featuring the Dreamworks face, it took a heckuva lot of good reviews for me to decide to see this film. I’m glad I did.

This will be my third consecutive review of a children’s movie where I’ll use the word “maturity.” The reason is, there’s a growing divide in children’s movies these days between lowest-common-denominator jokes and movies with grown-up themes of longing and sadness and learning to grow up. This is the latter. At the end of this movie, one of the characters loses his leg. No offense to the classic Nickelodeon tunes, but we’re a long way from Wile E. Coyote popping back up out of a crater with a shrug at the camera after the TNT blows up. Movies like How To Train Your Dragon or Up combine the fantastic with the realistic, so that everything you see seems perfectly possible in a child’s world. I’d much rather have a kid see something like that than Mars Needs Moms.

How To Train Your Dragon seems less in the business of making lewd references that go over kids' heads, and more in the business of trying to spark the imagination. Y’know how the best part of Avatar was the part where he trained the dragon (fine, Avaturds, it's not a dragon, it's an ikran. Kill me) and then flew around on it for a while? Well, all of Dragon is like that scene. The animation is thrilling - the camera darts and flits around rocks and through caverns, making full use of 3-D (about time, moviemakers) – if someone had turned a fan on me during the movie, I think I would’ve really thought that I was flying (though I am prone to becoming disoriented in darkened spaces).

Dragon is fun, adventurous, well-told, and while occasionally a little dark, it’s mostly a light-hearted romp through that age-old story of tenuous dragon-viking relations (how many times have you seen that old chestnut trotted out?). It’s strong enough that I’d recommend it to anyone, regardless of whether you have progeny or not.

6. Toy Story 3

Speaking of children’s movies with surprising maturity…

All you need to understand about how good this movie is can be distilled down to a single sentence: at the climax of the movie, when the characters are being dragged helplessly down towards a burning furnace, I honestly believed that this movie was going to end with all the toys being burned alive. I was that convinced by this movie’s commitment to expressing the deep sadness of the plight of the forgotten toy.

All of the of the Toy Story films have explored similar territory, of course. A toy is only important in the life of a child for so long, and then he grows up and doesn’t need it anymore. But if a toy was a living, feeling object, how would that toy feel to be thrown aside so readily? How does a toy adapt to not being needed anymore?

This being a Pixar movie, the answer is: in as amusing a fashion as possible. Were there any comedies this year as consistently funny as this film was?For a movie they reportedly didn’t want to make (feeling they’d sufficiently completed exploring the themes available in Toy Story 2) but were forced to by the studio, the film avoids all the traps that sequels fall into. It isn’t endlessly self-referential, nor full of in-jokes, and it doesn’t tell the same plot as last time from a slightly different angle. Instead, it explores the theme intrinsic to a toy’s life: “what happens when I’m not needed anymore?”

Some of the Pixar films age better than others, and after two straight films that were more impressive but felt less re-watchable (Wall-E, Up), it’s nice to see them return to their biggest strength: making films that people of any age can watch over and over again.

7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I

Speaking of Maggie Smith clucking disapprovingly and long pauses where people think about their feelings…

Y’know, when they announced that the last Harry Potter book was going to be split up into two parts, I was wholly against it.  I seemed to  be the only one – everyone else would note that “so much happens in the last book!” To which I would reply, “No, nothing happens in the final book!”  (I’m a great conversationalist).

But my point was valid. The final Harry Potter book’s plot goes something like this: Harry and his friends hide in the woods while they search for the hidden Horcruxes. They wander around for a while, not finding Horcruxes and bickering. Then they go to Hogwarts, find all the Horcruxes, there’s a big battle, and they kill Voldemort (whoa, spoiler alert!).  That’s the whole book. Considerably more happens in Books Four, Five, and Six, but all of those were able to be weeded down to single movies. How much time can you really spend watching three kids wander through the woods?

Evidently, quite a while. Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part I is 146 minutes long, and seems perfectly content to move a slower pace in order to focus more on the characters and their struggles. And I loved it. I’ve completely switched camps, which is ironic because all the people I was arguing with about it not needing to be two movies also switched camps. Most people I discuss the film with had the same complaint: it was way too slow for them.

I couldn’t disagree more. Part of the fun of the Potter books is getting to spend time with the characters, to interact with them as they work to defeat whatever plot Voldemort has cooked up that year and deals with yet another untrustworthy Defense Against The Dark Arts teacher (whoa, spoiler alert!). Each of the movies strips away all the details, all the interactions, and all the quirks, and just says “what do we need to hit in order for this movie to make sense?” For once, we got to experience the characters’ journey with them, rather than jumping frenetically from action sequence to action sequence. If you’ll forgive the snobbishness, this may be the first Harry Potter movie that is actually a film (I’ll admit, that was a terribly snooty thing say. I vomited a little inside).  But there’s a great scene midway through the movie where Harry tries to cheer up Hermoine by dancing with her to Nick Cave’s “O Children,” the two of them trying to cover the other’s sadness with false cheerfulness, but neither of them is capable of overcoming the weight of the burden on both of them. It’s a moment of such emotional maturity from a series where the characters used to spend their time whizzing around on broomsticks and cheerily buying Puking Pastilles.

There’s a scene in the Lord of the Rings movies where a voiceover explains that Frodo has realized “that the quest will claim his life,” spelling out clearly for the audience the stakes of the character’s quest. This movie, God bless it, never spells that out. It’s a film about death, really – three characters venture into the woods in order to complete a mission that will almost certainly claim their lives. Two of them are ready for that, the other needs the whole movie to come to terms with that reality.

Of course, the movie never really says so explicitly. But from the very first moment we see our main characters on the screen, we watch them cut ties with their lives in preparation for death. Harry wanders through an empty house, saying goodbye to the last remainder of his life. Hermoine erases herself from her parents’ minds and her image out of her picture frames. It’s a sad image to start a children’s movie – watching teenagers put their affairs in order before their mission claims their life.  And it’s remarkable that a children’s movie so implicitly trusts it audience to understand its message: some things are worth dying for.

8. The Town

I’ve always been a Ben Affleck apologist.

Now, I will not deny: he’s been awful, god awful, in some movies.  Pearl Harbor, anyone? Or, Reindeer Games? Paycheck, certainly (of all the unfortunate titles to be giving a half-hearted effort in…).  And above all, Gigli. There’s a lengthy list of less-than-mediocre Affleck performances in considerably-less-than-mediocre films.

But people have been too willing to insert him into the Paul Walker/Channing Tatum/Hayden Christiansen – an actor who produces mediocre work and who lacks the capacity to do better. Affleck can – and has –done better.

Look at his career. He was good in Chasing Amy, very good in Good Will Hunting, solid in Shakespeare In Love, solid in Dogma, solid in Changing Lanes, solid in Boiler Room, underrated in a bad Daredevil movie, great in Hollywoodland, good in Smoking Aces, solid in State of Play and very good in Extract. He’s got a lot of recognizably good work under his belt, and all of it gets forgotten, even by me. I didn’t have to spend any time researching the paragraph listing the movies he was bad in, but I did have to research this one.

Plus, he seems, by all accounts, to be a top-flight nice guy. He got his break working in Kevin Smith movies, and even as he blew up to become, for a brief moment, perhaps the biggest star on the planet, he never stopped taking time out to make cameos or take small roles in Smith’s movies. He kept shoehorning small parts for Matt Damon in his movies until Good Will Hunting finally made him a star, and specifically wrote the lead role in Gone Baby Gone to give his younger brother Casey his big break.

People have been celebrating Affleck’s resurgence as a director the last few years but haven’t seemed willing to forgive him for his earlier mistakes in movie choices (the man did make two Michael Bay movies. But hey, so did Will Smith. And you all love Will Smith) the same way they have, say, James Franco.  Though in my mind, their situation was the same. Franco has been stuck in a series of bland lead roles in uninventive movies (Flyboys, Annapolis, Tristan + Isolde), became frustrated with his films he was being offered, and set off to reinvent himself. And isn’t that exactly what Affleck has done? Let’s just wipe the slate clean.

Particularly when you consider how great a job he does here, both as an actor and a director. The Town is stuffed full of tension and expertly assembled. Affleck may not have been in that many good movies, but he’s certainly learned how to make a good one himself. It’s a thrilling, fun, surprisingly emotionally rich heist movie – like Heat for a new generation, or for people who only watch movies where people have Southie accents.

And every actor in the film is as good as they’ve ever been, Affleck included – Jeremy Renner’s a (warning: overused movie review phrase approaching) tour-de-force as Affleck’s unhinged best friend/partner, Rebecca Hall is sweet and quietly strong as Affleck’s unsuspecting love interest. Even Blake Lively is good here, and I think at this point we all know how uncertain that can be (I weep for you in advance, Green Lantern).

I complained earlier in this list that not enough of the movies on this list are really re-watchable, but The Town certainly is. It goes to show that a film can be Oscar-caliber without sacrificing excitement or energy. Not every award-seeking film has to feature Maggie Smith clucking disapprovingly and long pauses where people think about their feelings.