Well it’s been over for a few weeks now! An entire decade of movies and I felt like I should celebrate in some way. Not that I can give some well rehearsed and choreographed history lesson like CNN is doing so well with their Movies TV show that I have yet to catch up on, but ya know, something a little simpler maybe, a little more base and sarcastic. Certainly more childish and probably a little more Disney-infused (sorry), a little Marvel-Packed, sentimental and female empowered for sure!

Fair warning: I’m only going to discuss the categories I care about – largely:

• -super hero/sci-fi and fantasy flics (oh god I know…NERD!!!)
• musicals or comedies (cause that’s how the Golden Globes likes to categorize them for some insane reason.)
• Historical dramas (or comedies, but I don’t think those really exist.)
• Disney (or other animated stuff, but I warn you this list will be miniscule by comparison)
• Horror (The handful I was not too scared to watch.)
• Other…Things I don’t know what else to do with.

Alright, let’s get started! This is the impression left on me by cinema of the decade that was the 2010’s…

Sci-fi /Fantasy – Action:

• 2010 shot out of the gate with Christopher Nolan’s Inception and literally blew my mind apart. I didn’t know where to think or how to think, I couldn’t process it. It was beautiful and terrifying. A mystery and an art show, an action film and a dystopian future all rolled into one! Simply gorgeous.
• The beginning of the end started for Harry Potter and friends with The Deathly Hallows I, and concluded with deaths of so many of those friends in Part II. Closing this chapter of our lives was the end of its own decade, really one that started back in 2001 and very hard to let go of. It may not have been perfect every step of the way but it was certainly a perfect closing shot of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson staring out at us one final time.
• When The Hunger Games surged into theaters the following year my friend Jess and I rushed in hoping it would fill the void HP had left behind. It didn’t. But neither did the first film of the franchise disappoint! At then just 22, Jennifer Lawrence, already having taken over the role of a certain blue super villain, burned through the screen and right through the decade unbelievably navigating 2 block-buster series and Oscar award winning roles that were far too mature for her age.
• One month later The Hobbit landed, both delighting and angering internet trolls the world over. We all spent so much time debating whether or not their should be two films or three, we forgot to calm down long enough to just enjoy the ones we had. Because there won’t be anymore…Be happy with what you got I say! Much of The Hobbit hits the mark. Watch Gollum and Bilbo and the riddling scene and try not to shiver. Compare it with the old Rankin Bass cartoon. The resemblance that Jackson manages to capture is mindblowing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN–EzTdXEA.
• The reboot of Star Trek pre-dated the decade but as with the original series, we all liked the second one better. Into Darkness featured Benedict Cumberbatch (who will show up a number of times on my list of favorites) making me love everything about this series just a little bit more than I already did. Now if they could just lose the damn skirts!
• Regardless of how this current series wrapped up, Star Wars The Force Awakens was delightful and finally gave the little girls of the world a reason to pick up those lightsabers. And Rogue One, though fairly unnecessary, is all around an excellent film and very near the top of my Star Wars list in general.
• The most realistic film in this category was about a trip to Mars. Hanging out with Matt Damon, eating potatoes, while an all star cast worked to save him from earth. The Martian was such an unexpected movie going joy!
• And not to leave us hanging, J. K. Rowling soared back to save us from Potter-less hell with Fantastic Beasts led by Eddie Redmayne, a darling cast and cute fuzzy nifflers! This movie finally got me out of my Disney World kick and into Universal Studios and Diagon Alley twice!

Comedy:

I realize that Bridesmaids is probably a direct result of the success of The Hangover – seriously one of the most outrageously hilarious movies ever. But until Bridesmaids came along, I simply did not know how far women could actually go on screen. And thanks to the genius of that film, the FLOOD GATES HAVE BEEN OPENED!

What blows my mind about what has happened now is the way the tables have turned! Everyone has their favorite female driven, comedies of the decade. Pitch Perfect, Trainwreck (which I saw with my mother who snorted out loud in the theater!), Bad Moms, Ghostbusters (which I refuse to hate upon no matter what the troll boys say).

But my personal favorite is The Heat with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. It might be because Melissa’s name in the movie is Shannon, but I think that is just a coincidence. I think it’s because the movie is so perfectly set up as a buddy cop movie. Switch out the two ladies for two men. Right down to the way they speak to each other…Melissa McCarthy continuously brushes off men from past dates who are desperate for a second night with her! The sexy secretary played by adorable Marlon Wayans flirts with no nonsense cop Sandra Bullock. They argue with the police Captain, they get drunk at a bar, they go rogue, they get caught by the bad guys who start monologuing…sound familiar?? The movie hits every single male driven buddy cop trope EVER – right down to the way they speak to each other, from discussing body parts to locker room conversations we have only ever heard from the mouths of men! Finally!

Musicals:

• The Muppets made a comeback again with two movies. The first was good, the second was great! Anytime a movie can get in a sequence from a “Chorus Line” it gets a gold star from me! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRqaSYQEfrY.
• La, la Land was musically impressive, fun and flirty and refreshingly new. Just not so hot on the dancing end. No offense Ryan and Emma, I love you to death, but you are not Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds and no amount of Singing in the Rain comparisons will make it so.
• Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables almost ruined my decade and should have been a big warning for the CATS debacle that was to come – I’m sticking to my guns on this – do not try to sway me – it was a misjudgment on multiple levels. Thankfully Wolverine bounced back with The Greatest Showman proving he can sing AND dance splendidly. Its not a great movie, its not even a good one, but it is gorgeous and pieces of it are so inspiring they will last a lifetime.
• Rocketman turned out to be the Bohemian Rhapsody we should have gotten (though I liked that movie far better than the critics did.) Getting to see Sir Elton himself in concert for the first (and likely only) time in my life a few months later was just the icing on a very big, pink, funfetti filled cake.
• I adore Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga and I thought A Star is Born was very good, even if it was not one I would watch over and over again.
• Mary Poppins inspired not one but two movies. An extremely loose backstory of its author and her battle with Walt Disney, and a sequel to the picture itself. Saving Mr. Banks and Mary Poppins Returns, 2 Disney flicks that promised more than they gave. But I loved them both! I mean Tom Hanks playing Walt Disney?! How can you not love that?? There is a huge amount to criticize in Saving Mr. Banks, not the least of which is the incredible amount of historical inaccuracies. But seeing it for the first time in the theater, I had no had zero knowledge that I was watching anything untrue and so I was awed by the story of how Mary Poppins went from page to screen. Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks are delightful of course, but so too are the trio of Bradley Whitford, Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak who play screenwriter Don DaGradi and songwriters the infamous Sherman brothers who are stymied throughout the film by an increasingly frustrated and ‘annoyed-by-all-things-Disney’ Mrs. Travers. I think what really attracted me to the movie was all of the winks and nods to the Disney machine itself. I just love it when Disney makes fun of itself. Oh, and pay special attention to actress Melanie Paxson as Dolly, Walt’s adorable secretary.
• Despite the negative opinion of the real P.L. Travers, I doubt that we actually needed a sequel to one of the greatest movies of all time, But Mary Poppins Returns is still a far better movie than any critic gave it credit for. It pretty much follows the exact same pattern and formula as the first, and though the tunes are not nearly as hummable as the originals, the picture is gorgeous, the dancing is good bordering on great, Emily Blunt and Lin Manuel are energetic and cheeky, the three children are fantastically adult as only the English can be, and there are more ridiculously fun cameos than you can count! (watch for the original Jane Banks to walk by and ask for directions!!)

Historical:

This category can go a whole lot of ways. I mean, it’s not going to be all sweeping war epics, although there are a few of those on my list. I literally put anything in here that has the ‘based on a true story’ tagline attached to it. Ah those marvelous few words! I imagine historians both adore and despise them simultaneously. I LOVE these films because I learn so freaking much from them! A movie like Trumbo or Hidden Figures or Imitation Game, with subject matter from a time before mine, will find me racing to google, gobbling up every bit of information I can gather, henceforth a self-proclaimed expert on Hollywood’s Blacklist, women mathematicians in NASA and Alan Turing cracking German Enigma codes in WWII.

Hollywood churned out a few more WWII pics this decade but the ones that stood out for me were the quiet ones…Dunkirk – an almost terrifying film with practically no words. I hardly breathed, following a handful of men try to escape a beach as every ship they tried to get on sank out from under them; and The Darkest Hour – FULL of words spoken by Winston Churchill, played by that chameleon Gary Oldman, an old man navigating his way through the same war, ironically, trying to find a way to save the SAME men off that SAME beach!

I loved Battle of the Sexes and Black Klansman, two hilarious films with outrageous stories that I had never heard of before and will now watch again and again. Contrarily, 12 Years a Slave and The Revenant, though they are both masterpieces, are too difficult for me to get through ever again. Lincoln I have already seen a dozen times. Daniel Day Lewis is an artist and I cannot get enough of him. But more than that, I was utterly fascinated but the look of the film, the stars on the screen, and the way the political process worked. Then as today, begging, buying, threatening and all around controlling others to get those votes is mind blowing to me!

But my two favorite movies in this category were also the most quotable: The Social Network, (“Dating you is like dating a stairmaster.”), David Fincher’s Oscar winner about Mark Zuckerberg and Argo, Ben Affleck’s Oscar winner about the CIA using a fake Hollywood sci-fi script to smuggle six hostages out of Tehran during the hostage crisis. And the movie responsible for teaching us all to say – “Argo-fuck-yourself.”

Horror:

This will be brief I assure you. This isn’t a category I hang out in. I had to pad it a little with movies from the suspense category honestly.

• When Black Swan came out I was unprepared for how I felt leaving the theatre. Natalie Portman’s award winning turn as the insane ballerina was perplexing. I couldn’t quite tell what I was watching. It has taken me several more watches and a few years to appreciate it, but Black Swan has indeed grown on me.
• I put Gone Girl in here because I don’t know where else it belongs. I never read the book, but I was hooked by the movie. Damn! Rosamond Pike was a powerhouse and NPH’s extremely creepy turn shocked me.
• Get Out was my favorite horror story of the decade by far. I felt like I was watching a modern day Stepford Wives and I was SO relieved when the TSA guy made it through the movie alive!
• IT was pleasing enough (the sequel not so much but that’s ok)
• and A Quiet Place definitely makes the list. Cannot wait for the sequel!

Animation:

The decade for Disney was a monster. The bar was raised so high so fast that other companies were even allowed to elbow the House of Mouse aside here and there and win a few awards. I even liked a few of them!

• 2010 had Dreamworks and Disney sparring back and forth several times between Despicable Me, Tangled and How to Train Your Dragon before finally ripping our hearts out with Toy Story 3.
• Animated Christmas movies were paraded out non-stop through the decade but only two made enough of an impression on me that I actually purchased the blue ray making them a part of the small collection allowed to be rolled out each season at my house. Arthur Christmas – which has Santa handing off the reins of his office to one of his 2 sons. I loved that there were three generations of Santas in this! The present Santa was a bumbling old man who relies on techno savvy elves to take care of Christmas for him. (There is a brilliant sequence right at the top of the movie where swat team type elves swing through windows, mission impossible-esque and deliver presents, even going so far as to disarm a battery operated toy that has started making noise like a bomb about to go off. They painstakingly cut open the wrapping paper with a scalpel and then carefully replace it with tape so the child it is for will be none the wiser.) Santa’s sleigh is now a gigantic spaceship run by eldest son and heir apparent Steve dressed in his Christmas camouflage and running the ship like a platoon general, while youngest son Arthur steals the original old fashioned sleigh along with 136 year old Grandsanta and an obsessive present wrapping elf to deliver a forgotten present to one little girl. It really is a wonderful fresh new twist on the Santa story and boasts an all-star cast with an opening sequence that is just hilarious. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=arthur+Christmas&&view=detail&mid=8D02A3F2C162383676948D02A3F2C16238367694&&FORM=VRDGAR&ru=%2Fvideos%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Darthur%2BChristmas%26FORM%3DHDRSC3
• The second is Rise of the Guardians – For the life of me I cannot understand why this movie was not a bigger hit! The voice talent was there, the animation was solid. I thought the story worked but most of all the characters were just so damned clever! Alec Baldwin plays Santa with a Russian accent and has “naughty” and “nice” tattooed on his forearms. It is one of the most brilliant versions of Santa I have ever seen. I love too that the elves in this world are NOT the toymakers. Instead there are giant Yetis that labor away while Santa and friends do the super hero work and every one allows the tiny dim-witted elves to think they are of any help at all. Brilliant.
• Before Frozen completely shredded box office records, Disney dropped Brave and Big Hero 6. Both were underrated and seem a bit overshadowed now. But both won the academy award, and they both deserved it.
• I wanted to hate The Lego Movie but I just couldn’t. It was stupidly cute and ridiculously funny.
• But Inside Out wrecked me. Not even Toy Story movies managed to perfectly bring to reality our inner childhood feelings and reduced much of the world to a gushy mess of soggy tissues by showing us once and for all what really happened to all of our imaginary friends once they are long forgotten.
• Somewhere in the middle of all of this creative genius, Disney started a whole new endeavor: they began transferring their animated movies to live action films. Its an enormous debate as to how much of a success it has all been and believe me, I will be back with more to say in the future, but I myself have found a few positive movies in the vault to my liking. The first of these was Cinderella. Directed by Kenneth Branagh (not too shabby) and starring Lily James, Cate Blanchet, Stellen Skarsgard, Richard Madden and Helena Bonham Carter. A little otherwise quite good! Lily James is just charming, and the blue dress she wore to the ball…man, I could have watched the thing spin for days. It was just magnificent.
• A year later Jon Favreau, director of the Iron Man films, brought to life the most magnificent transformation of an animated film I have seen to date: The Jungle Book. It was and still is the best. I saw it in the theatres three times. His Lion King does not come close to touching it. It is simply staggering what he managed to do with that movie and it is the one that every other live action has yet to live up to.
• I know many of my friends despise Beauty and the Beast (Hermione can’t sing – I know!) but I still maintain there is quite a bit to salvage there, including a wonderful performance by Dan Stevens as the Beast.
• I also give this past year’s Aladdin a much higher score than it got on Rotten Tomatoes. It made solid attempts at modernizing poor Jasmine’s limp story, it gave the Genie a purpose, it was simply gorgeous to look at, it added Bollywood choreography, Will Smith has still got it and not once did the film disrespect the memory of Robin Williams.

In the last four years Disney has churned out dozens of films, and easily seven more make my favorites list.

• Moana, with its fabulous music (Lin Manuel Miranda!) miles of animated water, my current favorite female role model and The Rock!
• Zootopia: an actual animated buddy cop movie? I couldn’t believe this one! A buddy cop animal animated film with the awkward pairing of a fox and a rabbit! There is so much fun to be had in this film. You have to watch it over and over again to catch all of the Easter eggs. And then of course there is the DMV/sloth scene. I saw this in a packed theater. I have never seen adults in a theater laugh harder than their kids!
• Finding Dory: No where’s near as good as the original. But man that opening scene when Dory loses her parents is brutal, and not too far off the mark. What if you had a kid, with maybe a disability who can’t be left alone ever, and you lose them?? Oh god it is heartbreaking! Plus the addition of Hank the 7-armed Octopus just killed me!
• Coco: Fighting for the crown of most beautiful Disney movie of the decade. Its also a bit creepy side. But did you cry like a baby when you found out who grandma was? I cannot wait until Epcot finishes the Mexico exhibit where Coco will be housed!
• Disney finished out the decade with a triplet of marvelous sequels. The Incredibles 2, flying into theatres after a 15 year hiatus, did not disappoint in the slightest! Frozen 2, properly gorgeous of course, if not as game changing as the original. And Toy Story 4 – unnecessary maybe, but most welcome and, unbelievably, as good as the last three – also, should have won the Golden Globe a couple of weeks ago. It deserves to win the Oscar, as I’m sure it will, and like Woody said, “Help create memories that will last the rest of your life.”

And Finally…The Super-hero:

This was the decade for it. The 2000’s may have started it, but this last ten years has been literally explosive. To be fair we have really one and only one company to thank for this insane outpouring of superhero greatness. Marvel. Purchased in this decade by that monstrous of monster entertainment companies, my personal favorite, Disney itself, Marvel released a staggering 19 films during the decade, 11 of which made my favorite list.

• The Avengers: of course, as well as the two big ones, Infinity and Endgame. Both Guardians movies, the first Antman, Spiderman Homecoming, Civil War, Thor Ragnorak (the best Thor movie in my opinion), Black Panther, and my personal fav, Captain Marvel.
• Not that Marvel took ALL the glory for themselves. The X-Men came back with a few jabs, notably the first two of three pre-quells, X-Men First Class – Good, and Days of Future Past – Better, and the super dark and gritty Logan which ended Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine for good.
• The first Deadpool was funny and irreverent enough to make my list.
• When Spiderman Into the Spider-verse blew everyone’s mind last year, and blew Disney off the map and out of awards season as well, I was simultaneously furious and impressed. But even I could not deny the sheer brilliance of that film.
• But for me, honestly the year belonged to Wonder Woman. Directed by a woman (Patty Jenkins) and starring Gal Godot, this Diana Prince is both fearless and powerful. At the same time she is this fish out of water, funny and slightly bumbling if only because of the single-minded path she insists she must stay on. There is nothing silly or young or, dare I say it, “girly” about her. Chris Pine never rolls his eyes at what she is doing, he never treats her like she is stupid or crazy. As a kid, I always put Wonder Woman on the same level as maybe Batman. Not that that’s a bad thing at all. She was clever and had cool equipment, maybe more magical, but still comparable. It never occurred to me that Wonder Woman was strong and powerful as well. She could run at great speeds, stop cars with her strength, leap tall buildings with a single bound. Sound familiar? And when I saw Gal Gadot doing THAT on the big screen…more importantly, when I saw her stand up, shed that cloak, don that shield and climb that ladder, when she came out of that fox hole and stormed across No Man’s Land with all of those MEN staring up at her, watching in stunned admiration, I have never been happier or prouder to be female in attendance of a super hero movie in my life!

Here are a handful of my other recomendations I think are more than worth the time and money I spent on them…

• Nebraska: An all black and white movie starring Bruce Dern and a relative new comer name June Squibb (great name!) playing his wife. About an old man with dementia who insists that he has won the publisher clearing house sweepstakes, determined to travel across the country to collect his prize.
• Whiplash: The film about the drum teacher. J.K. Simmons is a bully of a college teacher. Holy shit this is good.
• The Hateful 8: Quenten Tarentino’s twisted Stagecoach western in the snowy mountains.
• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: One of the more bizarre entries of the decade. Extremely brutal, but also weirdly hilarious.
• Crazy Rich Asians: New twist on an old fashioned girl meets boy and girl meets family story.
• Dallas Buyers Club: Matthew McConaughey at his scrawny best.
• Vice: A little all over the place, but fascinating all the same. And Christian Bale is mesmerizing.
• Ready Player One: The pop culture references alone are worthy even if the movie makes you a bit video game dizzy.
• The Post: Because I love watching Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks work.
• True Grit: I love updated westerns and seeing Jeff Bridges play John Waynes old part was delightful.
• The Way Way Back: Coming of age summer drama that caught my eye mostly because of the title. It refers to the far back seat of the station wagon. Something my brother and I used to call the “way way back”.

That is it folks. Goodbye 2010’s! Can’t wait to see what the next decade will bring!