Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Listomania! Prologue

It’s that time again.

As I start to look back over the last twelve months so that I can cobble together a list of my favourite films of the year, I thought it would be a good idea to look a little bit further than that to remind myself of the films that I had loved in previous years. And that’s when I realised that I hadn’t actually published any Year-End Favourite Lists for quite a few years running now. So, consider this a corrective.

A quick note: I don’t really do Top Tens. Ten seems like an incredibly arbitrary number, and I have absolutely no intention of adding or subtracting movies I love from a list just because of some meaningless, predefined “That’s What Everybody Else Does” rule. None of the lists below add up to ten. Feel free to draw your own conclusions. (At the moment, it looks like my 2012 list is going to feature eleven titles in total. I laugh in the face of your quaint, archaic Round Numbers!)

So. I present my favourites from the last three years in alphabetical order, without explanation or apology. Let’s do it:

2009

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Phil Lord & Chris Miller)
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp)
Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi)
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
Moon (Duncan Jones)
Up (Pete Docter & Bob Peterson)
White Lightnin’ (Dominic Murphy)

2010

Buried (Rodrigo Cortés)
Four Lions (Chris Morris)
Gentlemen Broncos (Jared Hess)
La nana (The Maid) (Sebastián Silva)
Madeo (Mother) (Joon-ho Bong)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright)

2011

Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
The Interrupters (Steve James)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
Rango (Gore Verbinski)
Source Code (Duncan Jones)
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams)

2 comments:

James Whatley said...

I like that you liked Rango, but I'm yet to work out why.

AKA said...

For a start: "I found a human spinal column in my fecal matter once..." is probably my favourite line from any movie last year.

Love RANGO. It's CHINATOWN done as a Western, with a chameleon played by Hunter S. Thompson as the lead. The High Plains Critter. And the animation is absolutely gorgeous.