I have never read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but I feel like it’s been read to me after watching Mark Romanek’s perfunctory film adaptation, a pretty Cliff’s Notes of a movie with all the brightness and vivacity of dutifully checking items off a to-do list.
Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley are all great as mopey teenagers who wistfully look out windows, and they deserve more than a two hour commercial for a book which I’m sure is much much better.
Also, a few people have asked me this, and yes, I am aware it is no longer 2010, but I have about four or five more movies to go through before I officially put a bow on the year that was. I’ve already started watching 2011 movies (No Strings Attached is— no joke— surprisingly charming and I highly recommend it if you like good romantic comedies) but, outside of an occasional update, I’ve decided not to blog about movies again this year, because: a) there are other things I can blog about, and more importantly b) as I live in LA and take meetings with studios and production companies, I am less and less enthused by the knowledge that the people I am meeting with are a short google search away from discovering that I thought their last film was “the platonic ideal of a just okay movie,” or “thoroughly unpleasant,” or “a pretty Cliff’s Notes of a movie with all the brightness and vivacity of dutifully checking items off a to-do list.”
…
Every year I keep a running tally and ranking of how much I like every movie I see because apparently I can’t just enjoy anything anymore:
1. Catfish
2. Blue Valentine
3. Inception
4. Winter’s Bone
5. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
6. The Fighter
7. How To Train Your Dragon
8. Rabbit Hole
9. Greenberg
10. Somewhere
11. Easy A
12. Animal Kingdom
13. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
14. Toy Story 3
15. The Kids Are All Right
16. True Grit
17. The Social Network
18. Tangled
19. The King’s Speech
20. Black Swan
21. 127 Hours
22. Mother and Child
23. Shutter Island
24. Please Give
25. The Town
26. Salt
27. Dogtooth
28. Splice
29. The Other Guys
30. Date Night
31. Never Let Me Go
32. Fair Game
33. The Ghost Writer
34. Buried
35. Iron Man 2
36. Piranha 3D
37. Kick-Ass
38. Death at a Funeral
39. Sex and the City 2
40. Get Him To The Greek
41. Hot Tub Time Machine
42. Dear John
43. Tron: Legacy
44. The Switch
45. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
