127 Hours
Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring James Franco, Kate Mara, Amber Tamblyn, Clémence Poésy
Pathe Distribution
Release date: January 5, 2011 (UK)

Variety is the spice of life. With that in mind, director Danny Boyle decided to follow up his nicey-nicey, award-hogging sparkly dance-fest Slumdog Millionaire with a true story about a trapped canyoneer who is forced to cut off his own hand to save his life. Danny Boyle didn’t spice up his life, he destroyed the recipe.

127 Hours tells the real-life story of Aron Ralston, a prolific climber. Ralston’s story is a famous one: in 2003 he fell while climbing Blue John Canyon in Utah and landed at the bottom of a claustrophobic ridge. He dislodged a boulder which tumbled with him, crushing his right hand against the ridge wall. The boulder was too heavy to move let alone lift, and being a little arrogant he made the disastrous decision not to tell anyone where he was going. He desperately tries everything to escape: pushing and pulling at the rock every which way, chipping away at the rock with his multi tool, rigging a pulley system to try and heave the rock upwards, but nothing works. After six days he was forced to make a decision: stay and die, or cut off his hand and escape. As if that wasn’t hard enough, all he had to do it with was a cheap multi-tool with a small, blunt knife.

Trying to figure out the themes that the 2010 year in cinema gave to us is not a hard task at all. If anything, this year’s best films had an irrepressible surge that impelled them all toward themes focusing on alienation, instability, conformity, and deception, all different routes that lead to the same destination: at an arrival of self-discovery.

Below are my picks for the Top 30 films of 2010, all of which, in one way or another, had characters that had to confront the danger that was permeating their existence, as a bullfighter bravely confronts an oncoming bull. This confrontational theme knew of no cinematic boundaries. It hit hard in Toy Story 3 and The Kids Are All Right just as hard as it did in Winter’s Bone and Black Swan. It did not matter if Andy had to confront college or if Nina had to pierce a deep wound into her own being just so an answer could be derived. All characters in all 30 films were just as much bothered with universal issues as they were with personal demons. King’s Speech demonstrates this as King George VI has to face WWII and his stammering issue. And the directors of these films did not revile such themes, as they satisfyingly indulged in them by creating unwelcoming atmosphere fostering trite and brutal themes and making them into something glowingly artistic.

Here are my picks for the best films of 2010:

The first teaser trailer for Danny Boyle‘s follow-up to his Best Picture Academy Award winning Slumdog Millionaire has been released by Fox Searchlight.

The movie, titled 127 Hours, tells the true story of a mountain climber who finds himself fighting to survive a seemingly impossible situation while reflecting on the life he has lived and the people he has met. True story survival films such as Cast Away and Alive have always been incredibly compelling, and we’ve seen life reflection in the face of death stories in movies like Ladder 49, so just such a story as told by Mr. Boyle should be really fantastic.

Be sure to click on over to the other side to check out the trailer now!

Let’s just get it out of the way right off the ol’ bat: Yes, we know it’s been a few months since we left the decade. Most folks undertook this heavy task pre-2010, but we decided that it would be a little bit better to let the new year settle in a bit before hitting you with something of this magnitude.

So here we are, geeks; we’ve officially arrived in FUTURE *cue retro ’50s sci-fi music* and still we have no freakin’ flying cars yet. What’s the deal with that? While it is pretty exciting to be a month or so into the year 2010 — a year that always seemed unreachable to us mere mortals — we are also exiting another entire decade that leaves us staring at one majorly epic task. That task? To search, dig, locate, retrieve, organize, polish, and present the very best films of the past ten years!

We must once again declare that this list is also simply opinion. You are are without doubt going to find movies here that you hate and do not think deserve to be included. You will surely think of movies that you think should not only be on here, but that should be at the very top of the list. There will even be some that I have not seen and thus, can not add. Even at this very moment, I sit, worrying and wondering if I’ve forgotten any that I would include; that’s just the way things fly when compiling something this massive.

With all of that said, we invite you in to relax and check out Chapter I of our list, The Decade List: The 59 Best Films of the Past Ten Years!

Slumdog Millionaire
Blu-ray Edition
Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor, Saurabh Shukla, Rajendranath Zutshi
Fox Home Entertainment
Release date: March 31, 2009

Life and times are tough right now, well, at least for some. Director Danny Boyle realizes this and appoints himself commander in chief as he ventures out to satisfy and revitalize the crippled and worn hearts of America. Recent years past have seen the likes of violent films with no redeeming qualities and they were received with awards (The Departed and No Country for Old Men). Kudos to the Academy for singling out this crowd-pleaser that was head-and-shoulders above the frail and weightless competition, the eight academy awards it walked away with, including Best Picture, are rightfully earned.

Though the film takes place in both old India and new, Bombay and Mumbai, there’s no questioning Boyle’s film is something of an international phenomenon. Not complacent with fixing the hearts of Americans, he creates a film that wants to embrace the entire world. When a film finds itself with a beating heart, like Slumdog Millionaire does, there isn’t any questioning involving its emotional magnificence.

Surviving what the slums of India heaves, hatred, poverty, and desperation, is human hope, doing its best to prevail against forces that don’t want individuals to succeed.