Time For Anti-heroes: Top Ten Films of 2010

Where have all the heroes gone? In days of movie-going yore audiences would flock to the brave antics of wise-cracking maverick cops and nice-but-dim sporting underdogs for their cinematic kicks. You’ll find few such inspirational protagonists in The Skinny’s best of 2010. Take our film of the year, The Social Network, the story of a flip-flop wearing über-geek with a borderline personality disorder who shafts his best bud out of millions for no justifiable reason.

Mark Zuckerberg is a man you wouldn’t want to have a pint with but he’s a prince compared to some of the sleazeballs, sickos, and sociopaths that populate our top ten. Bad Lieutenant’s drug-sniffing, OAP terrorising Terence McDonagh (Nic Cage), Four Lions' cell of nincompoop terrorists, and Dogtooth’s Fritzl-esque patriarch, a man with inventively psychotic applications for VHS cassettes, are the obvious reprobates but even the year’s more conventional protagonists are hardly heroic. A Prophet’s greenhorn jailbird Malick (Tahar Rahim) brutally murders the closest thing he has to a friend to save his own skin. In The Ghost, Ewan McGregor’s eponymous writer is a pervy hack who can barely cycle across a gravel driveway, let alone bring down international political corruption. And in Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a dream thief whose last big job involves subjecting an innocent man to a Freudian mind-fuck to help one huge conglomerate take down their slightly bigger competitor. Propping up the list, meanwhile, are Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and White Material; the former is a tale of a smug Canadian hipster, played by smug Canadian hipster Michael Cera, the latter concerns an aloof plantation owning Frenchwoman, played by aloof Frenchwoman Isabelle Huppert. Hardly a pair to be confused with Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn, are they?

So why did we at The Skinny fall for these degenerates? I’d like to think it’s because our writers are edgy iconoclasts, ready to bring down the notion of the hero in cinema; but this list isn’t the work of idiosyncratic critics. It’s a broadly representative glimpse at what was great in 2010. Perhaps, then, it’s the filmmakers who’ve abandoned heroic protagonists, and who could blame them? In a world of crooked politicians, dastardly financial institutions and hollow celebrity, the idea of the good guy winning out feels a little antiquated. Whatever the reason, there’s no denying, as a black cat-suit clad Olivia Newton-John memorably taught us at the end of Grease, it’s fun to be bad.

The Skinny Film Writers’ Top Ten (or Eleven, to be more accurate)

1. The Social Network (David Fincher)
Is this the movie of the internet generation? Only time will tell, but for now it’s simply the movie of the year.

=2. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog)
After years of searching, Bavarian maverick Herzog finds, in Nicolas Cage (Bad Lieutenant) and Michael Shannon (My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?), two fearless actors to match the fish eyed lunacy of his best fiend, Klaus Kinski. At The Skinny we give the edge to Cage’s hysterical mania.

=2. Inception (Christopher Nolan)
Nolan’s brand of pompous bombast certainly has its fans: it’s currently sitting fourth on IMDb’s top 250 list, nestled snuggly between The Godfather Part II and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. It won’t stay there long, but for now there’s no denying it was the year’s most ambitious blockbuster spectacle.

=4. A Prophet (Jaques Audiard)
Audiard continues to stake his claim as cinema’s finest populist director with this swaggering crime epic. Lead actor Tahar Rahim is a star in the making.

=4. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)
Pixar’s Toy Story 3 rounds off cinema’s finest trilogy. Take that Star Wars fans and Antonioni aficionados!

6.Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)
The horrors of the Joseph Fritzl case seeps into celluloid, as three children are kept within the confines of their home, hermetically sealed from outside culture – chilling and brutal.

7.Four Lions (Chris Morris)
Morris does an extraordinary thing: he humanises the terrorist. Instead of western hating killing-machines he makes them lovable nitwits. It’s an approach that’s hilarious, tragic and utterly terrifying.

8.The Ghost (Roman Polanski)
An antidote to the high octane, mile-a-minute, wobbly-cam madness of Bourne, Polanski has made a film that’s stylistically three decades out of date but politically right on the button.

=9. Mary and Max (Adam Elliot)
Elliot has painstakingly crafted a beautiful claymation tale that’s both heartbreaking and uplifting. Narrator Barry Humphries joins Sissy Spacek (Badlands), Michael Hordern (Barry Lyndon) and Finlay Currie (Whiskey Galore!) in the voiceover pantheon.

=9. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright)
We knew Wright could do arch comedy and wham-bam editing, but who knew he could make something so visually sumptuous? A candy coloured explosion of pop-culture references. Delightful.

=9. White Material (Claire Denis)
White Material may not match the lyrical poetry of last year’s 35 Shots of Rum, but it is still a stirring piece of cinema from the world’s finest filmmaker.