Things you need to know about my Top 10 list before we get underway:

1) It’s f**ked.
2) I didn’t see everything released this year, because I’m not insane. I like interacting with people, getting drunk, reading comics, things like that. I can’t do those things if I’m in a theater every waking minute of my life.

Movies I probably should have seen before making this list:

In Bruges. Doubt. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Milk. Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Rachel Getting Married. Superhero Movie. Speed Racer. One of those last two is a joke.

Movies I saw that didn’t make this list:

Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Tropic Thunder. Quantum of Solace. Indiana Jones and What The F**k Is This S**t. The Spirit. A 5-second version of Batman and Robin that consisted solely of a man pooping in close-up.

Honorable Mentions: Hellboy II, which was better than Iron Man, which was one of the best superhero movies I’d ever seen until they both got dwarfed by The Dark Knight. Choke, a quiet, low-key, almost hopeful transformation of Palahniuk’s grimiest novel. Cloverfield, which worked in spite of it’s s**ty characters and shaky-cam artifice.

The List.

10. The Wrestler: Aronofsky makes another movie about addiction. Mickey Rourke plays a burnout mid-card professional wrestler who gives up on life the instant it gets hard, and hides in a fantasy world where it’s always 1988 and he’s always being cheered by a crowd that superficially loves him for slowly killing himself in front of them. Aronofsky pulls his punches enough that some people are reading the film as an inspirational story. One man, true to himself and his art, sacrificing what he loves for what he does. I see it as a sad story of a man choking himself to death on his own security blanket. The film works either way, honestly, and is a testament to Aronofsky’s skill. A minor-key run-through of the same themes he sledgehammered to devastating effect in Requiem for a Dream.

9. JCVD: This movie actually does for Jean Claude Van Damme what The Wrestler is being trumpeted for doing with Mickey Rourke. Van Damme’s performance is deeper, more heartfelt, and more impressive in an ambitious, arty little heist movie that is equal parts Dog Day Afternoon, Killing Zoe, and The Player. Okay, maybe not equal parts. That’s some movie-poster-blurb s**t. But the film bounces around from tense, to goofy, to touching, to exciting, all without feeling too labored. There’s a lot packed into these 90 minutes, and Van Damme never drops the ball. Rourke is gonna get a Best Actor nom for his turn as The Ram, and he did good work, but Van Damme (can’t believe I’m saying this) kicked his ass. In an actorly way, that is.

8. Rambo: Tarantino and Rodriguez saw this and proceeded to kick themselves in the balls for taking 3 hours and about a hundred mil to make something daring to call itself “Grindhouse.” The movie is all viscera and visceral thrill. There’s really no other theme than the one Stallone utters as his first lines of the film: “F**k the world.” But he f**ks it gloriously.

7. Pineapple Express: Seth Rogen’s s**t is getting tired. Good thing James Franco and Danny McBride are around to prop his fat ass up, Franco especially, scaling heighs of onscreen potheadedness not seen since Cheech met Chong. Good thing he’s a better writer than he is an actor. Good thing he’s got director David Gordon Green bringing some laconic weirdness to this violent little stoner comedy. Good thing he’s got Gary Cole as the villain. Good thing there are lines like “You got killed by a Daewoo Lanos motherf**ker!” and “War is upon you! Prepare to suck the c**k of Karma!” and “It smells like God’s Vagina.”

6. Let the Right One In: F**k Twilight. How this movie could have come out in the same year where pre-pubescents and their saggy, cougarly matrons cried at the sight of Team Edward is beyond me, but this creepy, haunting slice of Swedish cinema might have singlehandedly rescued the Vampire movie from the goofy dimension its been trapped in ever since Buffy and Underworld. There are scenes in this film that make the floating boy from Salem’s Lot look like Marley and Me.

5. Frost/Nixon: Ron Howard still knows how to make a movie. You might have thought he’d lost his Beautiful Mind after that cinematic turd frosted your eyes. But he went back to Apollo 13 on this one: Historical event. Tight script. Ensemble cast comprising some of the most solid actors currently working, including Oliver Platt, Kevin Bacon and Sam Rockwell, who just barely missed making this list twice with the Palahniuk adaptation he carried on his back. Michael Sheen’s Frost is a jittery, grinning piece of work, but Frank Langella’s Nixon is probably the best onscreen portrayal of the man ever. The re-enactment of the final interview in the legendary showdown between the smarmy british fop and the angry, sweaty failure of a president packs a hell of a punch.

4. Slumdog Millionaire: Danny Boyle made the first Bollywood movie that didn’t cause my teeth to rot out due to saccharine overdose. And this IS a Bollywood movie: Music, lighting, staging, fairy tale whimsy, elaborate dance number. But it’s also a Danny Boyle movie. Which means quick cuts, compelling performance, explosive violence, mounting tension and cathartic release. From Trainspotting to 28 Days Later: Boyle loves to put you through the wringer and leave you exhausted. This one, about a kid from Mumbai who exists in a world made almost entirely out of poverty and constant humiliation, goes on India’s version of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire,” leaves you exhilarated. The movie begins with him 1 question from winning the grand prize, and shows you how he got there. Here’s how good this movie is: It almost excuses the existence of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” Almost.

3. Burn After Reading: People didn’t quite know what to expect after No Country For Old Men. Same thing happened after Fargo. The Coens got their Oscar, and people looked at em like “Now What?” Back then, they unleashed The Big Lebowski. Nobody got it, and now the film is regarded as a modern masterpiece, a bathrobed onion with layers and layers of zen stoner philosophy hidden inside some of the foulest, funniest dialog ever uttered. This time, they dropped a comedy grenade called Burn After Reading, and unlike Lebowski, people got the joke on the first telling. A pissy, smartassed stab at spy thrillers with an equal amount of ha-ha’s and oh s**t moments. Pitt and Clooney and Malkovich and McDormand and blah blah blah–the movie is stolen by Richard Jenkins hangdog portrayal of possibly the only character not criminally stupid and/or coldhearted, along with JK Simmons and David Rasche (Sledge Hammer! Yes!) as CIA execs who sum up the punchline of the movie so succinctly I couldn’t stop laughing until about 4 minutes into the credits.

2. The Dark Knight: Christian Bale’s mouth is apparently too small for his tongue, because when he talks as Batman, all I can imagine is his tongue, washing up on the sides of his mouth like an ocean being poured into a fishbowl. Other than that, this is one of the best crime epics since Heat, which Chris Nolan was aiming for. To aim for a film that great and get this close is a f**king achievement indeed. That he did it with a Superhero movie? Almost unbelievable. Maybe next movie, they’ll address that ridiculously stupid voice in the same way this movie addressed the fact his neck couldn’t move in Begins. Oh yeah, Heath Ledger. Best Supporting Actor. Bet that. And not just for sentimental reasons. The performance is more than deserving.

1. Wall-E: Yeah, the humans probably shouldn’t have ever spoken in this film. But the first half of this movie is so damned good, that even if it becomes a little more formulaic in the last 25 minutes, it can’t be dragged down from the #1 spot. It’s the most beautiful film Pixar has ever made, which is really saying something. I hate trying to sum the movie up for people, because I can’t do it. Trying to blurb something this pretty seems dirty and wrong. I’m hoping this movie doesn’t end up like Ratatouille: The quiet success that is quickly forgotten and appreciated only by a certain few. I’m hoping this ends up like The Iron Giant: A movie mismarketed and misunderstood (The Environment! Fat People!) only to be universally beloved by everyone who lays eyes on it.

Frank Miller has become a man of reduction. Spare dialog. Sparse layouts. Black/White. Stark lines cutting figures out of granite on a comics page. Sin City. The Dark Knight Returns. Ronin. 300. Heralded as Comics’ Dashiell Hammett by way of Will Eisner, Miller’s colleague. Friend. Mentor. So in keeping with the spirit of Miller’s most recent work, here’s a reductionist, starkly worded review of his adaptation of Eisner’s “The Spirit.”

Things That Worked:

The score was okay. It was pretty much Danny Elfman’s “Batman.” I think I heard the Batman Theme at least 5 times in it’s entirety. I guess that’s kinda cool. In a stupid way. There’s a misstep, though, when a key moment at the end is scored with what sounds like the Duracell chimes.

He made all the pretty girls look really pretty. Except for maybe Jaime King. She looked like Galadriel tripped and faceplanted into a bedazzler. But Sarah Paulson, Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johannsen? Smokin hot. No question.

There’s a headfoot. It’s kinda funky.

Who knew a thespian of Louis Lombardi’s unique talents could effectively play a headfoot? He gleans maybe 2 intentional laughs out of the script. That’s better than Samuel L. Jackson did.

Arthur the Cat nails his role as a meowing cat.

Things That Didn’t Work:

Everything f**king else.

This is not a movie that is so bad it’s good. This is a movie that veers towards that threshold, but is such a failure it can’t even achieve that level of incompetence. It’s a limp dick being flogged for 90 minutes and having nothing but a rash to show for it. There isn’t a single 10 minute stretch of this movie that displays any sort of tonal coherence. Not a single performance seems to be in tune with any other performance, and those performances are sometimes out of step with themselves depending on which takes Miller is crazy gluing together. It’s ugly, it’s annoying, and it’s embarrassing.

I’d tell you why the plot doesn’t work but I’ve already forgotten it. I’d highlight some of the particularly horrible parts, but aside from Spirit straightfacedly seducing a woman by quoting Elmer Fudd, anything Eva Mendes does onscreen, and Miller’s inexplicable need to shoehorn in Nazi iconography, I can’t discern individual moments of badness. It runs together like the heated contents of your local diner’s greasetrap. Samuel L. Jackson is trying, but the script is failing him utterly. Gabriel Macht is trying, but there’s nothing to him. I don’t think Scarlett Johannsen is really even trying, honestly.

This is embarrassing because it lays bare the engine that propels Frank Miller, and it is an engine fueled by infantile stupidity. He put so much of his personality, his fetishes, his foibles, into every inch of the frame, and I was embarrassed at the resultant mess. It was like the socially awkward uber-nerd in drama class trying to be edgy and funny and quirky all at the same time in the same monologue up in front of the class, and stuttering, stammering and spitting all over himself in an increasingly annoying and loud act of desperate attention whoring. The movie is constantly begging the viewer to tell it “you’re cool.” “Look at me! Look at this ass! Look at these stiletto heels! Ho Boy look at all this Nazi stuff! Nazis! Look, I’m melting a kitty cat under a nazi flag! Here’s Hitler! I’m shooting the hero with a bunch of huge guns! Look at me look at me look at me!”

Frank Miller is creatively bankrupt and artistically empty. This is a work so bad it calls all his previous good work into question. That’s not an overstatement, or fanboy overreaction. A movie this personal, this crammed full of unmistakable Millerisms, that fails this hard, makes one look back at all his other work and question whether the praise came from a place of severe misunderstanding on the critics’ part. If we’d known this was all there was behind Miller’s cranky glare, would we have judged him a success? Did we project a whole bunch of substance onto those works? Substance that this movie would have us believe Miller himself wouldn’t recognize if it shot him in the chest with 8 barrels?

He can’t make a movie. He can’t write one, he can’t direct one. He can barely make comic books anymore. He saved up all his creative goodwill to do this movie. He had a bank full of chips after Sin City, and cashed them in to realize his vision of his friend’s world. This was his dream. And this is what he did with it. He had his chance, he got his stage, he fixed his spotlight, and he showed us nothing. Less than nothing, honestly, because nothing is understandable. I can wrap my head around the concept of nothing. But what he shone the light on is befuddling, stupid, inept, pointless and sad. I still don’t really get what any of this movie is supposed to do, what it was supposed to make me feel, how it was supposed to grab me. It has all the grip of a quadriplegic. It’s 90 excruciating, interminable minutes that go nowhere, and succeed at almost nothing. Its successes seem accidental. This movie makes the case that Frank Miller is a man who has spent all his life surrounded by creative people, and hasn’t learned a goddamn thing from any of them.

Lasting Effects of This Movie:

From now on, I will hear Dan Lauria’s line readings from this movie whenever I read All-Star Batman and Robin. Regardless of character. Joker. Robin. Black Canary. Doesn’t matter. They’re all Goddamned Dan Goddamned Lauria.

That’s it.

I’m Italian. So it goes without saying that I love Rocky. For as pop-culture drenched as my brain is, I try not to derive all my life-lessons and wisdom from hollywood concoctions. That’s like someone trying to subsist solely on candy and big-macs. Learning everything you need to know from TV and Movies leads to an unhealthy soul. But every now and again, the machine cranks out something that works on a personal level, that rings so true you can’t ignore it. It’s why pop songs stay stuck in your head, it’s why books get re-read. You gotta acknowledge those moments as true, same way you’d acknowledge your dad sitting you down and imparting wisdom from behind his squinting eyes, or the way gramma would slide a bowl of soup in front of your tired face and fire off a one-liner that brings the whole world into sharp focus.

Things have gotten all kinds of dire lately. Corporate Bombs are going off all over the place and people are going to work dazed and stumbling around, goggling at craters, nose filled with smoke, and tripping over limbs. People are patting their bodies down in disbelief, wondering how their skin was spared the shrapnel digging in.  Others are driving home confused, wondering how of all people, for reasons nobody can make sense of, they’re looking at classifieds with a sharpie and screaming checkbook. The holidays almost always work in reverse. You’re supposed to be happy and thankful and all life wants to do is punch you in your gut so hard that breath becomes as hard to hold onto as sand in a colander.

So what does this have to do with Rocky? Stallone put out “Rocky Balboa” a couple years ago.  It’s a movie that is filled with more than a few little profundities here and there, especially when you watch knowing that the movie is just as much about Stallone’s redemption as it is Rocky’s. The movie maybe rambles a little too much, and is a little too eagerly earnest for it’s own good, but there’s one moment in the middle of the movie, when Rocky is talking to his grown son, and that moment is the one that keeps echoing in my head, like the chorus of a song that gets stuck. I think it keeps floating to the front of my consciousness because it sounds right. It fits. For us here in this building, and for a lot of people out there standing around, dazed, searching for parts of themselves that have been blown apart and scattered on a dirty patch of sand.

“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there. Permanently, if you let it. You, me, or nobody, is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward.

That’s how winning is done.

Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth.”