If 2009 scattered my activity in many directions, 2010 brought it together in a way that highlighted both diversity and consistency. Starting in the fall, I followed a tight schedule: Sunday for European New Wave reviews, Monday for something random (usually essays), Tuesday for my Wind in the Willows series, Wednesday for "Best of the 21st Century?" discoveries, Thursday for visual tributes, and Friday for Remembering the Movies, a highly-structured glance back at particular weeks in movie history. I stuck to this routine for six weeks and found it to be a liberating form of discipline.
Subjects include several Disney animated classics, a couple Beatles films, a historical overview of the British kitchen sink movement, a playfully Facebook-formatted review of the Facebook movie, an analysis of three versions of the vampire story Let the Right One In, and an essay and visual tribute each for personal favorites Fists in the Pocket and Daisies.
The Wind in the Willows - Conclusions highlights this period, rounding up my Willows pieces, from a meditation on the comfort/restlessness of the River Bank to a class analysis of the book's reactionary social views to a biographical excavation of Kenneth Grahame's sense of "home."
SEPTEMBER
Kicking off a series in which I discuss movies that came out in ten-year intervals on a given weekend
Announcing a new schedule for autumn 2010, one of the most productive periods on my site
Leaping into one of my most ambitious projects up to that time, an in-depth exploration of Kenneth Grahame's story illustrated by images from the film adaptations
My "unseen acclaimed films" series becomes weekly with Ousmane Sembene's colorful, political masterpiece set in a Burkinese village
Visual tribute to Michael Corleone's arc from infancy to the consolidation of his power as "godfather"
What came out this week in history, featuring Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and William Wyler, plus Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and the Great Bambino
Sam Fuller's film about a dog trained - and then untrained - to be racist
The mixture of comfort and adventure in this location captures the divided spirit of Wind in the Willows (culminating with the Piper at the Gates of Dawn)
Work as redemption - or escape
Pictures from The Company of Wolves, a striking mashup of fairy tale and monster movie
What came out this week in movie history, featuring Sly, Uma, and Judy
The question of historical fidelity in an Irish biopic (reprinting a 2004 essay)
Freeze frames from the drunken Dumbo's hallucinations
OCTOBER
What came out this week in movie history, featuring films by David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Raoul Walsh, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Watching a John Lennon doc on what would have been his seventieth birthday
What exists beyond the boundaries of Kenneth Grahame's world may be as important to its definition as what exists within
Tall tales told by the glow of an arc light rather than a campfire
My first tribute (in this case visual) to one of the most frequently featured films on my site, Fists in the Pocket
What came out this week in movie history, featuring a Broadway-themed film and a film adapted from Broadway as well as a couple John Fords
Expanding my fall 2010 schedule to six days for a series that will end up covering four European New Waves
Discussing the Facebook film on Facebook (not as easy to assemble as it sounds, but a lot of fun)
The Edwardian age and the cult of the automobile, as my Willows series reaches Mr. Toad's adventures
Robert Altman's slyly subversive take on the British country home genre
Snapshots of a gorgeous trip into outer space, reconfigured two decades after the Apollo missions for the documentary For All Mankind
What came out this week in movie history, featuring Cecil B. De Mille, Charlie Chaplin, and Francois Truffaut, among others
Underrated slice of sixties cinema, to introduce an Italian New Wave triptych
Some of my favorite directors illustrated by a credit screencap from one of their films
How does The Wind in the Willows deal with class (and how does this relate to the time it was written?), with reference to Jan Needle's revisionist The Wild Wood, which takes the weasel underclass' point of view
Sometimes disorientation can be clarifying
Animated antecedent to Fantasia and The Nightmare Before Christmas, screencaps from a single sequence in The Mascot
What came out this week in movie history, featuring Buster Keaton, Luis Bunuel, and a rare Ingmar Bergman
Random reflections from my IMDb message board days, gathered a few years later
How Kenneth Grahame navigates the complicated anthropomorphism of his tale
An Inuit oral tradition given cinematic form
Faerie Tale Theatre episode "The Nightingale" directed by Ivan Passer and starring Mick Jagger, represented by a few dozen frames
What came out this week in movie history, featuring some Halloween themes
Communism, Catholicism, and especially Cinephilia: belief systems in tension (drawing the Italian part of my Sunday Matinee series to a close)
NOVEMBER
In honor of the Wonders in the Dark countdown, I pick my own favorite
The final entry, exploring Kenneth Grahame's life and its intersections with The Wind in the Willows' theme of home
A Jean-Luc Godard film that didn't really click for me although I found the latter half frequently beautiful
Few have taken to color filmmaking after a long black and white career as readily, beautifully, and ferociously as Federico Fellini (as this visual tribute to Juliet of the Spirits attests!)
What came out this week in movie history, featuring an early start to the holiday season
Kicking off the British "kitchen sink" part of my Sunday Matinee series
Written after seeing the Alfred Hitchcock classic on the big screen for the first time
Gathering all the Wind in the Willows entries in one spot - this series is one of my favorite things I've ever done
Comparing various adaptations of Let the Right One In: how do they deal with different aspects of the story, including point of view, society, and gender?
Visual tribute to the spaceship sequence of alien abduction thriller Fire in the Sky
What came out this week in movie history, featuring a John Ford, a Yasujiro Ozu, and two animated Disney features
Visual tribute to a sunrise, the quiet opening of an acclaimed Mexican film
Albert Finney in an "angry young man" film that feels both sturdier and more volatile than some of the others
Help! is far from the best Beatles film, but it's possibly the most gorgeous - this collection of screenshots revels in that realization
What came out this week in movie history, with a new, more stylish visual format
My favorite from my Sunday Matinee series - an overview of early sixties British cinema with emphasis on two '63 films, both representing a rupture but each indicating a different direction
Pictures from Daisies' epic banquet/food fight just in time for Thanksgiving
What came out this week in movie history, featuring W.C. Fields, Douglas Fairbanks, and Fred Astaire among the icons on display
My favorite Milos Forman film kicks off the Czechoslovakian New Wave section of the Sunday Matinee series
Two Disney classics, considered side by side as representatives of different eras in the studio's history
DECEMBER
What came out this week in movie history, featuring an argument about Gimme Shelter between Pauline Kael and the Maysles brothers
Vera Chytilova's bold yet ambiguous sixties classic
What came out this week in movie history, featuring extremes of both violence and pacifism
A Disney film uniquely places itself in the recognizable world of the recent past
What came out this week in movie history, featuring grouchy old men redeemed from Scrooge to Forrester
Claude Chabrol sneaks up on you while other French New Wavers make more flamboyant debuts
Using the Wonders in the Dark animation countdown as an excuse to highlight a Quay brothers classic
Teasing three upcoming screencap line-ups
The ending of Steven Spielberg's Duel as a series of screenshots
Betty Boop does her own twist on Snow White, and I pay visual tribute
On the eve of Christmas Eve, I offered one more visual tribute to a favorite cartoon special
What came out this week in movie history, featuring a couple international crime sagas and animated musicals
The French New Wave portion of my Sunday Matinee series continues with Agnes Varda's real-time classic
Recalling a whirlwind 2010, with many links embedded
What came out this week in movie history, including some fascinating but relatively little-known titles from one of the most consistently quiet times of the yearly release schedule
JANUARY
Jacques Rivette's serpentine debut closes my Sunday Matinee series, studying four European New Waves
(I covered this period on Episode 11 of my Patreon podcast)
Next: Running on "Remembering" (January - May 2011)
(in which I rely on one particular approach to carry me through a winter)
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Previous: Heading Home (June - September 2010)
(in which I rely on one particular approach to carry me through a winter)
•
Previous: Heading Home (June - September 2010)
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