The MacGuffin

I love best, worst and “most” lists of all sorts. Whether they can ever escape the inherent flaws of being somewhat arbitrary and never all-encompassing, they are fun. They can make your opinion feel validated, or spark a lively argument, or both. I’ve read dozens of top film lists already this year, and am happy to now provide my own.

I spent a little over two-thirds of 2010 contributing to this site, and I look forward to doing much more in 2011. So, we’ll call this my First Annual Top Ten list. There are other movies I very much admired, but these are the ones that most spoke to me personally.

I’m sure that most readers of this film blog hoped that Father Christmas would have delivered at least one DVD to them for the 25th of December. A few may have gone to the cinema on Christmas day, watching the latest release as part of their celebrations. At home, over the holiday season, many enjoy the luxury of being able to sit in front of the TV without guilt. To watch a film from start to finish without moving—reaching for a chocy brazil or a different treat before another begins—is, presumably, quite a common routine. But what to make of this passive digestion of the film in front of us?

Most of us know the feeling of having no choice but to perform a duty you feel you’re ill-equipped for; luckily for most of us, our tasks aren’t quite so high profile as those of a member of a royal family, and our failures don’t matter to a nation. In The King’s Speech, for Prince Albert, Duke of York, the pressure to overcome a prominent stammer is bad enough when performing princely duties. But, as our title suggests, his duties are about to intensify.

A preview of the movies slated to be released during January-March of 2011, before closing out with a very special DVD picks of the week.

DISCLAIMER: The following tutorials are made for me more than you. These are neat techniques I have picked up along the road. Articulating them aloud and writing them down is an exercise I use to better my memory; sharing them helps me transfer the data into conversation form; things make more sense when the information is distributed casually. I am not a teacher and I am less credible than a Wikipedia site. Some of this information is regurgitated and bastardized from multiple sources, but who knows…if you’re interested in this kind of thing, maybe this will help you as much as it does me.

The premiere episode of the MacGuffin Film Podcast Writer’s Block segment. Brandi and Henry take a look at the screenwriting work of the Coen Brothers in honor of the release of True Grit.

What the fock?

Little Fockers (2010) continues to repeat a joke that wasn’t funny even in Meet the Parents (2000). Let’s just get this out of the way: yes, Ben Stiller’s character is named Gaylord Focker. Yes, he has a first name that hasn’t been around since the Civil War. Yes, his last name sounds a lot like the curse word. Yes, he is a male nurse. Can we get over it now? Throughout the course of the “Focker Trilogy,” we’ve been subjected to more joke variations of this guy’s name than I can think of, none of which is very clever or amusing. Here, the filmmakers attempt to take the series away from the flamboyant craziness of Meet the Fockers (2004), and try to bring it back more along the lines of the first film. Unfortunately, they did it almost too well, because essentially, the two are the exact same.

The Men Who Stare At Goats – This is a story about a reporter (Ewan McGregor) who interviews who he thinks is a crazy person (played by Stephen Root) who talks about being trained by the military to stare down animals and ultimately kill them with their minds. Some sort of telepathic soldiers. The reporter doesn’t believe him (at first), but sadly, the reporter’s wife leaves the report for his editor and in a desperate move, the reporter sends himself to Iraq. He tells his x-wife he’s joined the military, but he’s on his own dime.

Spencer and John share some good film remakes, some bad Christmas movies, and give their DVD picks of the week.

One of the many inconveniences of being a 14-year-old girl in the 1880s was that if you had a death to avenge, you were going to need to hire some help to do it. This obstacle is no deterrent to the central character of Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit, which opens across the U.S. on December 22nd. Her steadfast goal to find the man who shot her father and see him hanged provides a basis for a Western that might seem overly typical if it didn’t come from her distinct perspective. In this sense, True Grit is a genre story with a twist; given their filmography, it’s hardly surprising that the Coens found themselves drawn to this material.