A few words on the wrap-up of this year's Muriels

Another year gone, another ceremony done and enjoyed by all. I think this year went particularly well, all things considered - I'm really starting to get the knack for this.

The Muriels 2010 page is ready for your viewing pleasure. You can access it here. The voter pages are still under construction. Hopefully, by Thursday I'll have wrapped that up.

Thanks to all the voters and writers who participated this year. I tried to thank you all individually upon receiving your pieces, but I know I probably forgot a few. Don't think that means I didn't appreciate what you gave me - you all stepped your game up this year. The consistent high quality of our writing this year was heartening. Thanks also to everyone who read, commented, recommended, passed on links and/or bitched about our selections, either here or on Twitter or on other websites. The link field on the side has been updated to include the new voters. Link roundups should resume next week (if I can remember/find time to do them). Now, I leave you with this:

Golden Muriel for Best Picture of 2010

The Social Network [268 points / 23 votes]

"For a long time before The Social Network was released, people just called it "The Facebook Movie" -- even after the inspired trailer (the one that combined footage from the movie with Facebook screenshots and a choir singing Radiohead's "Creep") made it clearer that it dealt with the human stories behind how the social networking site was created.

I joked that the studio should adopt the approach used in the famous trailer for Stanley Kubrick's Lolita in 1962: "How did they ever make a movie of Facebook?" That turns out to be the title of the "making of" documentary on the extras DVD (the people who made this movie have an exceptionally sharp sense of humor). Since it opened the New York Film Festival in October, it's been described as a ruthless ladder-to-success story, a thwarted romance (with Erica or Eduardo?), a courtroom drama, a fast-moving portrait of a generation and The Way We Live Now -- and "a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people" (that last comment written by a person still in beta, apparently).

Is it any of those things -- or all of those things? I don't think we know yet. As the movie's Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) says of the newly launched Facebook to his friend and CFO Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield): "We don't even know what it is yet. We don't know what it is, what it can be, what it will be." That may be the smartest thing Mark says in the movie, and I think it may apply to The Social Network itself -- a deceptively conventional film that races by at such high-bandwidth speeds that even after you've seen it, you may not be sure you know what you've seen. I've seen it only twice (though I've gone over individual scenes in shot-by-shot detail), but I feel like it's been downloaded into my brain and I'm still trying to process it. What I know for sure is that it's exquisitely designed and thrilling to engage with. (John Pavlus was absolutely right to compare Fincher's direction with Jonathan Ive's designs of Apple products.)

Actually, there's a kernel of truth to that "1.0 vs. 2.0" comment: the visual grammar of The Social Network is fairly traditional. Establishing shots, two-shots, reverse angles, limited use of steady dollies and cranes rather than shakycams and extended takes. (Though, as I learned from the DVD supplements, the shot over which the title appears is really several shots stitched together.) The difference is the rapid speed at which they are deployed, and the effortlessness with which the movie delivers multiple streams of information.

Unlike that other 2010 movie that made such a big deal of explaining arbitrary rules for getting from one level of storytelling to another, The Social Network just does it. And you get it -- without the actors reading you instruction manuals encoded into dialog. It shifts backward, forward, sideways in time and space (with no "present tense" defined), through depositions, memories, e-mails, affidavits... and you may get temporarily/temporally thrown now and again, but it's not hard to follow. Again, unlike the science-fiction movie that preceded it into theaters in 2010, The Social Network is complex without trying to appear complicated. Indeed, its design and direction, the tools of its tale-spinning, are far more sophisticated, but less ostentatious. And more fun. And lead to a better life." - Jim Emerson

Multiple Levels of storytelling in THE SOCIAL NETWORK from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #2

True Grit [180 points / 20 votes]

"My recurring dream, as a young girl, was that the world needed saving and nary an adult was willing nor able to do anything about it. I’d fly around, battling evil and righting wrongs, while the adults in my life bumbled about like benevolent buffoons. My father always wore a top hat.

Mattie Ross in True Grit is this dream fully realized, and Hailee Steinfeld inhabits the character like she was born haggling for ponies and bringing evildoers to justice while the language of Charles Portis tumbles acrobatically out of her firmly set jaw. She is a wonder and a force, staring down corrupt businessmen, wayward marshals and the man who killed her daddy while haughtily, scoldingly reminding her companions that she is, “only fourteen years old.”

Mattie is the brilliant center of a film that hits every mark. The Coen Brothers, the Kings of the Remake and the Jesters of Genre, kept very true to the original text, rarely getting cutesy Coeny (the Medicine Man comes to mind). It’s a love affair with the Western, gorgeously shot by Roger Deakins (oooh, that night ride!) and achingly scored by Carter Burwell, playing gracefully with the traditional hymns that disqualified him for Oscar consideration.

The cast supporting Mattie (yes, she is the lead here, Academy) is uniformly marvelous. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn doesn’t reinvent the character canonized by John Wayne, but delves deeper into his true grittiness. His shoot-em-upmanship with Matt Damon’s Texas dandy is the funniest bit in a film that massaged my every emotion. Barry Pepper and Josh Brolin round out the crew of scruffy bad 'uns.

But it is Mattie who moves us. Mattie whose sense of right is unfailing and happens to entail hiring the most ruthless marshal she can find to track down the man who killed her daddy and bring him back dead or alive. Mattie who politely and eloquently bulldozes everyone in her path to get what she wants. Mattie’s insistent, “I want what I want!” is a line my five-year-old echoes instinctively, and one I’ve forgotten completely. Where is my inner Mattie?

My favorite update to the original film calls back to the novel where adult Mattie comes looking for Rooster, who’s already passed away. And adult Mattie? She’s no more willing to take any crap than child Mattie was. We don’t have to lose that strength, that drive, that conviction. True Grit is a nearly perfect film that, as Mattie tells Rooster after a particularly violent interlude, “displayed great poise.”" - Marya Murphy

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #3 (tie)

Dogtooth [148 points / 12 votes]

"Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos's revelatory drama about cats, lamps, incest and video tapes, is that rare transgressive drama that's able to transcend the stigma of the taboos it employs onscreen and truly dazzle even the most unadventurous viewers with its filmmaker's craft, sense of humor and limitless imagination. Lantimos has grown leaps and bounds since Kinetta (2005), an equally mysterious film about willfully assimilating corrupted information and the creation of a new language through bastardized rituals. Dogtooth is similarly just as much about how we absorb information as it is about the end of the concept of family -- a fantasy of dizzyingly indeterminate meaning. (Just try to limit its meaning to a single coherent allegory) It immediately exudes raw intellectual and visceral power in virtually every scene. And the best part is, while watching and then later endlessly rewatching Dogtooth, one realizes: Lanthimos is at the height of his powers as a storyteller and is only just getting started. Long live the new flesh." - Simon Abrams

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #3 (tie)

Toy Story 3 [148 points / 12 votes]

"Toy Story 3, a whiplash-paced wonderment, goes through so many evolutions in its running time it's difficult to keep up. It's a kids movie! It's a buddy movie (again)! It's a prison-break movie - a molded-plastic Brute Force with a sense of whimsy! It's a celebration of childlike imagination! It's a horror movie about the physical destructiveness of little kids! It's a rumination on mortality and the afterlife! All this, and it's STILL a kid's movie! Able to switch tone on a dime, from hilarious ("Spanish Buzz") to heart-crushing (the incinerator) and back again, Lee Unkrich and company have provided the rare 'something for everyone' film that actually does have something for everyone while managing to not alienate any part of its audience. It's a dizzy, unpredictable and moving delight, a cinematic feast in CG form. Hell of a balancing act you got going there, boys." - Steve Carlson

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #5 (tie)

Winter's Bone [118 points / 14 votes]

"Despite all of its plaudits during awards season, I feel the need to defend Winter's Bone against a charge I keep hearing levied at it: that it’s just another Sundance-feted minstrel show, depicting those poor flyover state slobs and their beautifully ugly, inconsequential lives. Certainly, on paper at least, all of the elements of those “hix pix” that the “sticks nix” are here.

However, like Jeff Nicholl’s Shotgun Stories before it, Bone transcends any potential pandering rednexploitation by exercising impressive formal control and simply keeping itself very, very weird. Deborah Granik approaches Daniel Woodrell’s “country noir” as a folk or fairy tale rather than a piece of ethnography. Cinematographer Michael McDonough frames the Ozark hinterlands as hazy blue-gray wastes that are more akin to Werner Herzog’s Eastern Europe in Nosferatu the Vampyre than the sun-dappled Americana of, say, Sling Blade.

Ree Dolly’s quest to find her father takes her through coded interactions with redneck chieftains, skittish meth heads, and her spectral uncle Teardrop. Granik pares Woodrell’s already tight prose down, giving these exchanges a cadence that’s hard-boiled, poetic, and (yes) a little folksy. What keeps all of this from feeling affected is the film’s preference for storytelling over message-mongering. Thanks to Jennifer Lawrence’s taciturn performance, we’re never asked to view Ree as an object of pity. Rather, we end up infected with her obsession to pursue the mystery to its horrifying end." - Philip Tatler

Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #5 (tie)

The Ghost Writer [118 points / 14 votes]

"In form, The Ghost Writer is most reminiscent of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” On the surface, it brims with a plethora of characters, offers a resonant colour palette and a distinctive landscape. But a closer inspection reveals the artistic detail that went into its creation. Whereas Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece blossoms out of uninflected dots of colour, Roman Polanski’s equally admirable film is an intricate web of performances, both in the actual narrative and out of it. Polanski’s ensemble is what gives the film its power -- it’s what makes the film.

In the centre of it all is Ewan McGregor’s anonymous (that word lately has such a different meaning in the context of the film’s events) writer, a boozing hack, drifting from one shitty biography to the next. McGregor adopts the role’s slimier qualities with gusto: you might not want to be friends with this man, but you’d definitely get drunk with him. Similarly, Pierce Brosnan instills in his character, the former British PM, a shadiness, sure, but also intelligence and cunning behind a veneer of false respectability. Thankfully, he never tries to physically mimic Tony Blair. As his trusting but shifty wife by his side, Olivia Williams is a modern-day Jezebel-meets-Lady Macbeth. Again, you probably wouldn’t want to marry this woman, but you’d fuck the living shit out of her. Which, later, turns out to be the point.

But, naturally, the ensemble is more than just those three. Everyone sparkles, everyone shines. Tom Wilkinson’s the embodiment of corruption and malice, and hats off to the man with the most avuncular face in Hollywood for forging a latter-day career out of playing assholes. Kim Cattrall, despite her risible accent, is wonderful as the ex-PM’s once-hot-but-now-rough-round-the-edges secretary, the first performance of hers I’ve enjoyed since she took off her Vulcan ears. Random cameos, from Tim Hutton (!), Eli Wallach (!!), and Jim Belushi (!!!!), add to the film’s Hitchcockian flair as each character comes alive. The sum, as they say, is indeed greater than the parts. But the parts are rather magnificent themselves." - Ali Arikan