CaseyMalone (Level 14)

Intro 

At first I thought 2010 might just suffer from comparison to 2007 and 2008, years which debuted some of my favorite movies of the decade. But even compared to 2009, which saw The Blind Side and Avatar nominated for a stunning number of awards, I found fewer films to connect with in 2010*. Even the films accepted as the best of year, (Black Swan, True Grit, etc.) while fine films, didn't feel substantial to me. I left them entertained, but with no strong opinion about, uh... anything. Not exactly the reaction art aspires to. 
 
So instead this list focuses on movies that got a big reaction from me in some way. Most of these movies aren't going to pick up any awards, but they provoke something from me, be it extreme joy, excitement, or righteous outrage. I'll be re-watching these movies for years, while those "better" films will fade away from my mind into trivia.

[As with all year-end lists, mild spoilers, but they're so mild they could be used as baby shampoo.]
 

#10 (Tie)  - How to Train Your Dragon

I imagine that the shadow cast by Pixar Studios is a tough one to live in, but for a while it felt like Dreamworks was building a second story on their home there. Elements of their films would dip into the sunlight (Kung-Fu Panda's opening sequence comes to mind) but for every moment of "maybe this is getting good," another Shrek sequel pulled them back, returning to the studio's hallmarks of pop-culture references, poop humor and winking at adults. So when How To Train Your Dragon eschewed all of these and focused on a great adventure story, I was shocked.
 
My shock subsided a bit when I discovered the team of Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who created Lilo and Stitch, were behind it all. Focusing on a small but lush island ruled by vikings and under seige by dragons, the movie gets to work populating it with fun characters and fantastically designed dragons. Sanders and DeBlois smartly model the main dragon, Toothless, like a giant winged cat. Every time he opened his big ol' eyes I wanted to rub his belly. 
 
The movie also deals with a surprising number of complicated themes. Most animated kid's movies focus on one simple idea, but How to Train Your Dragon juggles a few, the most radical of which is that maybe whoever you're at war with isn't so bad. Given that the US is at war in two countries, it's not a heavy message for kid's movie, and it's all delivered smartly, and with a light hand. 
 
With two sequels on the way, it'll be a shame if Dreamworks turns this series into a fart factory, but they can never really take away how full of life and adventure this movie is, and how much I love it. 

#10 (Tie) - Tangled

Wondering what other animation studios that have been putting out mediocre films for a decade? How about Disney. Coasting on Pixar's golden Buzz Lightyear wings since 1995, it's easy to forget that Disney's animators put out anything other than direct-to-DVD sequels of their best, decades-old, movies. So when they announced Tangled, based on Rapunzel, was to be their last fairy-tale princess movie, you heard more sighs of relief than cries of excitement.  

Somehow, though, Tangled ended up being a master class in "Disney movie." A perfectly executed fairy-tale story, there's a great deal of swashbuckling, beautiful locales, a missing princess, and some grand old musical numbers. There's not an "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" in the bunch, but as someone who typically goes comatose when characters start singing, I was completely engaged. 
 
This movie was relatively notorious on the internet for changing it's title to Tangled from "Rapunzel," for fear that boys wouldn't go see a movie named after a girl. It's a shame this movie got linked to that, because Rapunzel is exactly the kind of female character these movies need more of. She's strong, adventurous, and does a good deal of the rescuing in this film (though the major rescue is left to a horse, but he's a pretty bad-ass horse). How casually this was treated, her being so brave and take-charge, was great, and helped elevate this movie above some of the gripes people traditionally have with Disney heroines.
 
If none of this sells you on this film, I will simply add that Ron Perlman is in it, and he voices a pair of twins named "The Stabbington Brothers." 
 

#8 - The Fighter

Sports movies are tricky. Because the plot is pretty much rote, the movie needs to come through with strong characters with interesting personal dynamics to keep me interested. Most make due with tired gimmicks, like a true story of a player too old for the game or a mentally challenged Cuba Gooding Jr. Director David O. Russell takes Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale and, thankfully, goes with the first option. The result is a sympathetic story about how family often rides a fine line between propping you up and pushing you down.
 
Russell has a way of elevating Mark Wahlberg. I usually find him boring, his breathless shouting annoying whether played seriously (several of terrible movies) or parody (The Other Guys). Somehow, though, Russell posseses some magic words to make Wahlberg actually emote and portray Micky Ward, a character who spends most of the movie hiding his every emotion just below the surface. That they come across, just barely, is a credit to Wahlberg's skills. 

Even though Wahlberg throws most of the punches, The Fighter belongs to Christian Bale. He disappears so completely into the role of Dicky, Micky's crack-addicted older brother, that when the trailer (which features his character prominently) revealed that he was in it, I was genuinely surprised. 
 
Our attention hangs on the way the trust and dependency between Micky and Dicky stretches and bends and breaks throughout the film. There's real love between them, and second, third, and fourth chances are given, the kind only family gets. When Wahlberg gets in the ring, we don't care because he needs the money to save some orphanage or other plot device, but because we've watched him fight through an emotional hell with his family already, just to put the gloves on. We want it to be worth it, and for us, it is.

#7 (Tie) - The Art of the Steal & Exit Through The Gift Shop

Both fantastic documentaries, The Art of the Steal and Exit Through the Gift Shop both attack the place where art and commerce are forced to meet, though through very different means. 
 
There's a billion dollars worth of modern art... in suburban Pennsylvania. The Art of the Steal tells the story of the most wonderous collection of modern art that you (like me) have likely never heard of - the Albert C. Barnes collection. Barnes was a cranky drug mogul around the turn of the century, and spent his fortune befriending artists and buying up some of the most famous works of Picasso and Matisse before anyone recognized them as classics. 
 
Mocked by the art world for a taste that was ahead of his time, and in love with art, Barnes set up a school in the suburbs of Philledelphia, and hid this art from all but the students. When the paintings' value skyrocketed and potential tourist dollars were lost, the art world and the government of Philidephia turned on Barnes, and the executors of his estate after his passing, to take the art from him. 
 
It's a fascinating story of integrity versus exploitation, with people claiming to be art lovers on all side. The documentarians clearly have a position, but they handle the story evenly, giving a few key people enough canvas to paint themselves as villains without the filmmakers spelling it out. Art is good. Money is bad. And this is what people will do to the former to make the latter.  
 
Instead of presenting good versus evil, Exit Through The Gift Shop plays with both your sense of what's right and what's real. Directed by secretive street-artist Banksy, Exit Through The Gift Shop spends most of it's time following the adorable if clueless Thierry Guetta as he gets deeper into the world of street art, meeting Banksy, Shephard Fairy and other stars of that scene. That alone would make a fascinating doc, but instead the movie takes a turn when Guetta decides to make art of his own. 
 
Suddenly, Guetta is making street art as "Mr. Brainwash," and begins wheat-pasting art all over Los Angeles that is more than a little derivative of the artists he's been hanging out with. Guetta begins to commercialize his product, selling pieces and booking shows before they're even finished, spending more time on the marketing than the message. And his audience, caught up in the supposedly booming street-art collection craze, eats it up before it's even seen anything. It's a fascinating ride to watch him go on, and the move is sublte in the ways it condemns both Guetta and the art world.
 
There's a good deal of debate about how authentic this doc is. That Banksy is a rascally one, so I don't think it would surprise anyone if Exit Through the Gift Shop was "real" or "fake," but in the end it doesn't matter. What matters is that you start thinking about the meaning behind art as an medium for communicating ideas, and not as a product. If you'd like to learn more, you can order Exit Through the Gift Shop on DVD or Blu Ray at Amazon.com for $39.99 here.

 
 
 
 
 

#5 - Toy Story 3

Poor Tangled. Poor How To Train Your Dragon. Any other year and they could have had a shot at accolade, attention, and in a Cars year, maybe even an Academy Award. Instead Pixar put out one of their strongest films yet in Toy Story 3. 
 
So much has already been written about being in age group that grew up with Andy, who now miss their toys and the imagination they used to afford them, I don't know what I can add to that aspect of the conversation. Woody's story, though, of being put out to pasture (a particularly painful metaphor for a cowboy) and having to move on to a new phase of life particulary resonated with the almost 30-year-old me. He doesn't want to let go, he's scared of what his life is going to become without Andy. Woody's got to put away his childish things, except in his case it's an actual child. 
 
Everything's not dire and depressing, though, since Pixar are as adept as ever at mixing emotional turmoil with a grand adventure story and pitch perfect humor. The entire voice cast, full of dozens of name actors all perfectly cast, is fully invested in this last romp with their characters, and the script gives Toy Story 3 a perfect ending - even during that one moment in the movie where you think none is possible.
 
 
 
 
 

#4 - The A-Team

I don't think "effusive" is a strong enough term to describe my praise for Joe Carnahan's perfectly cast update of The A-Team. Fanatical? Maybe. Unabashedly silly, full of eye-candy for the ladies and 10% of the dudes (seriously, how big are Bradley Cooper's pecs going to get?), and with some of the coolest action scenes in a while, The A-Team was probably the movie that brought me the most actual joy while watching it in 2010. It did "dumb" in an incredibly smart way, and I really hope that DVD sales justify the sequel it sets up. 
 
Here's an excerpt from my review -  
 
"... Michael Bay ’s movies are for over-sexed 16 year-old guys, this movie is for sugar-addled 8-year olds boys. It’s full of big, stupid explosions. The plot is full of, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” moments that defy logic in favor of coolness. The characters are so two-dimensional they’re practically animated. But unlike Bay's films, which often get caught up in their almost maturity with a lot of attempts at drama, The A-Team is just about cramming as much fun into this movie by exploding as much stuff as it can by the time the credits roll. And it works, The A-Team ends up being such self aware Saturday morning fun that I left the movie with a huge grin on my face, to the point that I can’t recommend it enough."
 
 
 
 
 

#3 - Scott Pilgrim Vs The World

Most "coming-of-age" movies focus on the protagonist when they're in highschool or younger, figuring out how to stop being a kid and start living like a grown-up. Well, the pressures are still the same in Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, except Scott is in his twenties. In my late twenties and literally surrounded by LEGO bricks, I relate. 

Scott Pilgrim Vs The World has Michael Cera as Scott, fighting off his new girlfriend Ramona's exes as a metaphor for dealing with the emotional baggage that you have to push through in a new relationship. Edgar Wright, still without a bad film to his name, stages some pretty dazzling fight scenes that defy the laws of our reality and suck us into Scott's. The ensemble cast is exactly right, from Cera in the lead to the bit roles of the exes, and the score and soundtrack (with Beck standing in for Scott's band Sex Bob-Omb) are all perfect. It's a movie about music, about video games, and adapted from a comic book. Usually any one of those spells disaster, but somehow Wright handles all three aspects perfectly.
 
With only 2 hours and seven exes, the movie doesn't have a lot of time to deal with Scott and Ramona's relationship, so it instead focuses on Scott growing up in general. He realizes that he needs to change and deal with these issues, not to win her, but for himself. With its sense of fun, note perfect ending and message tailored for exactly where I was in life when I saw it, this movie will probably always be one of my favorites.
 
 
 
 

#2 -  Inception

Guys, I am worried about Christopher Nolan. No, I know he's doing okay. I think Inception made some money, and every time I hear him talk about filmmaking he comes off as the most eloquent and thoughtful director working. But after seeing Inception, another near-perfect Nolan movie about a protagonist fighting inner guilt and trying to find forgiveness... I'm just worried about him. What, exactly, did Christopher Nolan DO to make him so god-damn good at this?
 
There's a lot that's executed well in Inception - it starts with a unique concept (we're going to enter your dreams) that both allows for some brilliant action scenes and to allow for some psychological suspense. I can't think of any sequence from a film this year that compares to the final 20 minutes of this movie, itself three intense and unique action movies folded onto each other, a creamy core of character drama nestled within.
 
The true brillaince of the conciet, though, is that it lets Nolan do whatever he wants. While some of what he wants is to just indulge in the coolness of it all - like, say twisting a hallway in every direction while a gun-fight was going on, or driving a train through Main St. - Nolan uses it to tell a story that he couldn't in any other medium. 
 
Nolan knows enough that movies are nothing but sound and image over time, and uses the different levels of dream to bend and stretch that time - slowing them down and layering them upon one another - in a way he could only do in a movie. It simply isn't possible to tell this story, this way, in any other format. It's impressive, it's also something you cannot say for any other film this year. 

#1 - The Social Network

I like it when people talk fast in movies. It's not the only thing to like about The Social Network, but the zippy dialog that full of snappy one liners forces the audience to pay attention or get lost. Aaron Sorkin is the master of this (sorry, David Mamet), but even in his best work it can occasionally make the characters spouting off lines sound less like people and more like cold, removed computers. So, it was pretty perfect for the voice of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. 
 
The concept of a Facebook movie sounds about as appealing as the concept of a Marmaduke movie, but Sorkin and director David Fincher focus less on the website and instead on the fascinating events that surround Zuckerberg's creation of the site. The character (which may or may not be accurate, but as Alex put it - who cares?) is brillaint and slightly cruel in the way he uses people. It's fascinating to watch him build Facebook, full of bravado and naivete and see exactly what it took to make such a behemoth in today's society. 
 
It would be easy to cast Zuckerberg as the villain in the movie if Sorkin and Fincher hadn't been working with Jesse Eisenberg in the role. In a movie full of great performances, Eisenberg shakes the "Michael Cera Lite" lable and breaks out in this role. He giving it the right amount of edge while somehow still remaining vulnerable. He projects both hardness and this intese desire to be liked simultaneously. It's an incredible feat, and without Eisenberg's performance, we can't stand Zuckerberg, and the film falls apart. 
 
The Social Network wisely doesn't  take sides in the debate about who really created Facebook. I don't know that we're supposed to care. What I do care about is what someone gives up to create something as big and world-changing as Facebook, how it changes them, and whether or not it's worth it. It's incredibly hard to feel too bad for a multi-billionare, but The Social Network humanizes Zuckerberg. And if this weirdo is normal, maybe we all are. 

-Casey Malone-
 
 * By my own admittance, I didn't get to see everything this year, but as someone who goes to the movies once or twice a week, coming up with 10 great movies shouldn't have involved as much scraping and scouring of Wikipedia as it did.
 
(Also, if you read this far, here are some of the WORST of the year - The Wolfman, The Other Guys, The Expendables, Splice, Catfish.)

Recently I got together with friends for some hot-cocoa and 'Splosion Man, and eventually we started talking about Christmas. Specifically Christmas presents. While we hinted at picking out exciting gifts for one another, when it came to our families we all told the same story. All our relatives asked that we tell them, very specificly, what we'd like for Christmas, accompanied by the cry of, "You are so hard to shop for!"
 
Since our greatest passions are movies and games, you'd think that we'd be extremely easy to buy for! However, the problem is that my friends and I are finacially pretty well off. We're not rolling around in a new Benz every week, 50 Cent-style, but if we want something we just buy it. When we were kids, and made 10 dollars a week allowance, there were thirty things we couldn't afford and likely begged for non-stop. Now, as an adult, I am buying a new game or DVD for myself every other week, so what do our loved ones get us?
 
The upside to us buying the specific things we want, for the gift giver, is that a gift can be anything! You don't have to remember, "Did Casey want an Egon or a Venkman?" because I probably bought them both already. That leaves a lot of wiggle room to make the gift something personal. Something that just shows that you understand what we're interested in, and thought about us this year.
 
With that goal in mind, I threw this list together. It's meant to kick start ideas for shopping for your geek/nerd/dork. I'll also list a few sites which are treasure troves of dorky crap, and hopefully you can combine this list with knowledge of your loved one into the perfect gift this year.

1. Art!

The past few years, galleries in Austin, LA and California have put on shows in which artists channel their talents into posters and art prints inspired by movies and TV shows. Pieces range from gross, to hilarious, to bizarre, to beautiful. If you can find something that fits your particular geek's tastes, then these uncommon pieces should surprise and delight. 
 
MondoTees in Austin has been putting out some of the highest quality movie posters, but unfortunately they sell out rather quickly. Get on their Twitter feed to find out when the newest Star Wars poster goes on sale, or check out what they have left in their store at the link. They also have a bunch of pretty cool t-shirts.  

Gallery1988 in LA, however, has a much larger selection. The one downside is that, as an art gallery and not a t-shirt shop, the posters and prints run a little more pricey. Expect to pay at least 60 dollars before shipping, but it's always worth it.  

If you want the bizarre, one specific artist named Brandon Bird has got that market locked down. He takes celebrities and pop-culture icons and creates intensely strange posters, coloring books, and color-form playsets out of them. I think we can all relate to his fascinations with Law & Order and Nicholas Cage.  
 

2. Props/Toys.

I love it when a company puts out an affordable toy that looks identical to a prop from a movie or show. Holding a fictional item in your hand bends the walls between fantasy and reality in a way that provides me with no end of delight. These make great gifts because, often, we don't buy these for ourselves. They're kind of a waste of money, more so than the hundreds of DVDs and Games we own, as they serve absolutely no functional purpose outside of AWESOME.
 


 

3. Clever, Inspired Nerdy Things.

The sweet spot for those kind of toys, though, lives on either end of a bell-curve. We want them to be either as close as possible to what was in the show, or completely weird and removed from it, yet still referential. The more clever the abstraction, the better. Let's take a look at Lightsaber related merchandise so I can give you an idea of what I'm talking about:




Obviously, at no point in Star Wars did Luke and Darth Vader stop by a noodle hut for some bonding time (though Han Solo does get some in Blade Runner), but the chopsticks allow us to extend our nerdy crap to other areas of our life without resorting to using the plastic plates or Spider-man pajamas we had as kids. 

4. LEGO Sets 

So, I don't know if you're aware, but LEGOs are the best. I have never once seen someone presented with LEGOs who was not ecstatic at the opportunity to lose a key piece while assembling the most bad-ass race-car ever. In addition to possessing just the essence of fun in their tiny blocks, LEGO has gone out of their way to release nerd-friendly products. For those of you that like your dorkiness franchised, there are both Harry Potter and Star Wars themed sets available. If you're a gaming nerd there are dozens of console games, and LEGO has started releasing sets of build-your-own board games that are actually pretty cool. 

 My current LEGO-related obsession, though, is the blind-bagged LEGO mini-figures. They're figures you can't get in any existing sets, and vary in weirdness from mariachi man to a Zombie to a Pharaoh. Series 3 has just started, and these are perfect if you want to give something small (they range from $2-5) that's still pretty neat. 

5. Board Games

Board games have out-grown their Monopoly-roots. Now, they take hours to finish, with intricate rules that you need to learn and hundreds of tiny, very specific custom pieces. Luckily, they are also intensely fun. 
 
There are two levels of complciation when it comes to board games. The first is the "German agriculture stlye" games. These are more strategy driven than your Scrabbles or Parcheesis, but are still accessible if your nerd isn't that into games yet. Games like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Dominion offer a lot of depth but are still really easy to learn. Seriously, a few weeks ago I played Carcassonne with an 8 year old girl. I lost. 
 
Moving up from there, there are games like Arkham Horror or Cosmic Encounter which pride themselves on complication, and move away from accessible themes like "farming" or "kingdom building," and instead steep the players in stuff like Lovecraftian horror and space-faring. The complication provides a whole new level of strategy and replayability though, and the themes offer some genuinely fun escapism. There's only so many times I can live in the fantasy of "trading brick for sheep," but I will gladly hunt werewolves over and over again. If your nerd has played their share of Catan on Xbox LIVE already, it may be time to move up to this league. 
 
   The last thing that's great about board games is that, unlike videogames, sometimes the licensed games are the best ones. The Battlestar Galactica board game asks the players to work together to save the ship while one (or more) of them is secretly a cylon. The wide variety of Lord of the Rings games published by Fantasy Flight Games are also regarded as some of the best. 
  


 

6. Nerd Specific Books

As someone who spends his whole day focusing on things that were, more often than not, made for children it delights me to no end when other adults take them seriously. Luckily, there are publishers putting out whole series of books doing exactly that.
 
Smart Pop Books' catalog focuses mainly on television series, publishing anthologies detailing the cultural impact of stuff like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and The Simpsons, or outlining the themes being explored in each season of LOST. They have a few books that go beyond TV, on subjects from The Matrix to Batman to "The Psychology of Harry Potter." They're sharply written and again, give us an excuse to engage these fantasy worlds in another context.
 
Another publisher, Deep Focus, has take the 33 1/3 concept of "pocket sized book on one album" to the movie arena. Releasing once a month, and writen entirely by one author, these books focus on a single movie allowing the author to dwell on single scenes or details to draw their point out. So far, there are only two available, but they are both totally bad-ass movies: Death Wish and They Live.  
 

The End!

So, that's it! Hopefully now you've got a few thoughts about what might be good for your lovable dork. If none of these appeal to you, though, here are a few websites worth browsing about: 

etsy.com -  This is a site where people sell their homemade arts and crafts. It can be a lot of junk, but sometimes you can type in "Nintendo DS" or "Batman" and come up with some neat, one-of-a-kind gifts.
 
thinkgeek.com - If you can't find anything dorky yet delightful here, it may be hopeless. This site focuses on gadgets as well as toys, but everything on the site has a great sense of humor about it. 
 
entertainmentearth.com - This is entirely for the "Toys" category, but they have an insanely deep inventory, sorted handily into different themes so you can poke around and find the coolest Batman thing there instead of having to browse every "Super Hero" or "Boys" action figure. 
 
Happy holidays!
 
-Casey-    

 Welcome back! 

Before I jump into the next 4 episodes, I just want to remark on something that flap_jackson mentioned in the comments - 

Since the relaunch of Doctor Who, there have been a total of 72 episodes, written by about 20 different writers. With the exception of The Family of Blood two-parter, every episode on this list was written by the same man, Mr. Steven Moffat. Moffat's sensibilities match up really perfectly with what I want from the show, and I know several other fans who feel the same way - Doctor Who should be a funny, high-adventure tale full of true love and everyday dangers magnified one hundredfold. Moffat's episodes consistently lack camp and the soap-opera style melodrama show-runner Russell T. Davies made his hallmark. When Davies left the show, it came as no surprise when Moffat announced he'd be taking over as the new Executive Producer, and the show (I feel) has been far better for it.

Anyway! Back to the Doctor! Allons-y, Geroinmo, etc, etc... 

Silence in the Library & Forest of the Dead (2008) 

I, for one, am afraid of the dark. It's a sort of "immersed in darkness" only of fear, but this two parter does me the favor of extending that terror to all shadows, even my own. 

The Doctor and Donna (his new companion played by Catherine Tate, do keep up), go to a giant, man-made planet that is entirely a library. So well known for its librariness, in fact, that it's called "The Library." When the pair arrive, though, they find the planet empty but for the books. Scouring The Library to find out what happened to all the people, an Alien-style excavation team shows up, among them one woman (ER's Alex Kingston ) who seems to know the Doctor extremely well. This is perplexing, since he doesn't know her at all... yet.

I am just going to straight up throw The Casey Malone Stamp of Approval on this pair of episodes and say they're my favorite of the entire series. The terror in this one is of the unseen variety (even when it menaces more directly, it does so using innocent people in a fairly unnerving way), not just lurking in the shadows, but instead literally the shadows. The appeal of carnivorous shadows is that the danger extends beyond the screen into our lives. This is always my favorite aspect of Doctor Who - bits like this pack a double whammy of making the threat in the show feel scarier and more relatable and, corny as it sounds, opens the possibility of the real world being a little more magical. Every time the show uses this trick to break another brick between fiction and reality, it lends a little more excitement to everything and helps transform these stories from a TV show into mythology.

Ah, and then there's Professor River Song, the aforementioned crew member that knows the Doctor too well for someone he's never met. Where Blink used time-travel to do a lot of clever plot tricks and neat twists, this story uses time travel to hint at character development and depth that hasn't happened yet for us or the main character. As fantastic as we find The Doctor, River hints at the even greater man he's going to become, and watching his frustration at not being the person in the room with all the secrets entertains to no end. Everything in these pair of episodes builds up to the emotional last few minutes, which have everything; a big slap bang running about score-blaring climax and a quiet, powerful, moment at the very end of the episode, one of the most iconic of the series.
 
     

Midnight (2008)

Just as there are episodes like Blink that are Doctor-lite (no, not THAT Doctor Light), there are occasional episodes where his companion literally lounges by a pool somewhere while he goes off on an adventure. Well, he thinks he's going sight-seeing, but this being Doctor Who, it wouldn't be much fun if that's all that happened. This is a bottle episode done right as the Doctor boards takes a transport with a bunch of other tourists across a diamond planet called Midnight. The Doctor he makes friends with the rest of the tourists on the four-hour voyage across the lifeless planet, until the transport breaks down, and it becomes clear that maybe the planet isn't as lifeless as they thought.

Midnight does more of the unseen monsters I like so much, but instead of living shadows or something normally innocuous in our daily life, the monster in Midnight is completely alien. A living thing on a supposedly uninhabitable planet - we don't know what it's capable of doing, or what it wants, just that it doesn't seem friendly slamming on the outside of the transport. Then there's the humans. The moral that "man was the real monster," is hardly new territory, but that doesn't make it any less scary, because the more afraid the people trapped in this train get the more terrifying they become. They turn on each other, and suddenly the Doctor's normally charming oddball behavior and air of superiority cast him in a suspicious light. 

David Tennant, again, kills in this episode. In the face of space monsters and armadas of alien warships, he plays the Doctor as more serious than fearful. In this episode, though, he goes from excited to inquisitive to absolutely scared for his life on a dime. The other passengers constantly shout at him, provoking these rapid-fire reactions, keeping the Doctor on his heels... it could be too much business for a lesser actor, but Tennant finds the reality of the situation and draws us in deeper. The reality of the situation is fear for this man who just won a stand-off with shadows an episode earlier, and it makes the whole thing scarier. 
 
    

The Eleventh Hour (2010)

The Eleventh Hour (an episode title that's a bit on-the-nose) is the first episode of the fifth season of Doctor Who. It's the first with Moffat running the show entirely, and the first featuring Matt Smith, the eleventh Doctor. While the previous four seasons (and the movie-length episodes that comprised all the Doctor Who we got in 2009) were all connected, weaving companions and plot lines and Doctors together, this... this is a completely fresh start.  
 
After the events leading to his death and regeneration (it's a thing... ), the Doctor crash lands in the backyard of a little Scottish girl in an English village, a little Scottish girl with a particularly scary crack in her wall. He investigates the wall while dealing with the troubles that come from dying and coming back to life as a new man, and his also regenerating time machine. Like The Girl in The Fireplace, this episode is a case study in everything that makes up Doctor Who. It's a big, outlandish adventure that still manages to be set in the tiniest of English villages. There are moments that are quite scary, bits of humor that are quite funny, and a lot of the Doctor racing against a literal ticking clock. set the appropriate tone for the season - a grand fairy tale. 

With how fantastic David Tennant's protrayal of the Doctor is - and it is fantastic - there's a great deal of pressure on Matt Smith to be as good as Tennant, all the while showing us somethign new. Thankfully, he brings a whole new kind of oddball charm to the role, a Doctor who (ha!) has a less patience than Tennant's, but without the Twilight-style lonely brooding that occasionally dominated the character near the end of 2009. It's a focus on fun, leading off with slapstick gags about weird food and pithy one liners, and this approach fills the episode with the newness it needs.

This episode also introduces my favorite companion to date. A character that is a match for the Doctor in terms of bravery and guff, and occasionally out-thinks him. These are qualities I saw in the 2nd companion, Marth Jones, and I am excited to see them return in this character. Don't want to say who it is, as I worry about even the mildest of spoilers, but I hope she sticks around for quite some time.

The Eleventh Hour excels; it treats the new season like a new series, from cast to tone to even the way the series is shot, and sets up everything you need to know in the most exciting way possible.  
        

The End

So that's it! These are some of the best. I mentioned nostalgia earlier and how it allows people that grew up with this show to enjoy it inspite of the goofier elements. For me, though, Doctor Who (the show and the character) inspires such adventure. It stokes the fires of my imagination in a way that hasn't happened since I was very young.  
 
By firing those particular synapses, the Tardis doesn't just take the Doctor through time, it takes me back to when I was a kid, to when rocks in my backyard are the remains of dinosaurs that roamed the hills of Lynn, MA and the creepy hole in the floor in my basement could have led anywhere instead of just nowhere. By creating this sense of adventure, Doctor Who lets me drop my cynicism and develop that nostalgia-filter as an adult, letting me ignore the rubber monsters and instead see the stars.  
 
Hopefully these episodes can do the same for you.    

I didn’t grow up with Doctor Who.  

Most adult fans I talk to tell me stories about some nerdy guardian - parent, grandparent, older sibling, whoever – sitting them down in front of PBS to watch Tom Baker and his ridiculously long scarf fight rubber monsters. They were little kids when they saw the blue box for the first time, and this combination of nostalgia and childlike wonder is a powerful formula for forgiveness. And you need forgiveness to enjoy it as an adult because without nostalgia-vision, and now full of sophistication and cynicism, it’s largely impossible to look past the goofier elements of this show.

Even the 2005-present revival of the series, the entirety of my Doctor Who viewing experience, often revels in ridiculousness. There are mannequins come to life and meant to be menacing, rhyming alien rhinos, and flatulent green infant-looking creatures. Even the Doctor’s most deadly adversary, the Daleks, might induce a five-minute giggle fit when you see their weird plunger-adorned robo-shells for the first time. Which is a shame, because if you get past that rush of embarrassment you feel and stick with it, Doctor Who can create more wonder and excitement than any other series put to television.

So with that in mind, I put together this list. If you’re interested in seeing what this new run of the show has to offer, this is it – these eight represent the fewest rubber monsters and some of the strongest writing and performances of the series, with the lowest barrier to entry. All you need to know is that there’s a magic man in a box who goes on adventures through all of time and space with a few human friends in tow.  

 If you can enjoy that premise, you can enjoy these episodes. 

The Girl in the Fireplace (2006) 

The Doctor and his companions discover an apparently abandoned space-station. Fairly common as far as Doctor Who goes, what’s unusual is the working fireplace that goes to the bedroom of a small girl in 18 century Paris, France. When the Doctor slips inside and discovers the occupants of the space-ship stalking the little girl, who he rescues with swashbuckling aplomb. But when he to the space-ship and then back a few minutes later, he finds that the little girl is now a grown, beautiful, woman and the aliens are still after her.

Of all the episodes on the list, this one most basks in the adventurous FUN of hopping through time and space. The Doctor dashes about, practically sword-fights, (kind of) gets the girl and has a truly kick-ass last minute save-the-day entrance. It’s just a blast. This episode, along with 6 others on this list, feature the 10 Doctor played by David Tennant. Tennant owns this role completely, going from bossy to brilliant to hilarious to heroic seamlessly, and this episode is the first in the series where he gets to really show off. And his chemistry with Sophia Myles’ Madam De Pompadour makes their short time together on-screen feel significant.

This episode also deftly handles one of my favorite concepts of Doctor Who – the terror and excitement from everyday things. The broken clock in the room, the crack in the wall, the statue you walk past… these things could be just what they are, but what separates The Doctor from us is that he manages to see what these are – his world encroaching on our own. And if you look hard enough, you could see them, too.

While the monsters in this episode look proper creepy in their 18 century French porcelain masks, they still move and talk like little kids in cardboard robot outfits. Also, this is the only episode on the list to feature Rose and Mickey, who I find to be the most irritating companions of the series thus far. Thankfully both of these bits of business are kept at a minimum, and instead The Doctor is put front and center, as it should be.

  

  

Human Nature  & The Family of Blood (2007)           

“Trapped in a dream” episodes are nothing new to science-fiction. Characters get stuck in a dream world where they’re far more mundane than they would be otherwise while the audience waits patiently as they slowly get clued into the fact that there’s more going. This two-parter takes a slightly different approach. As the episode begins, the Doctor and his companion, Martha, are fleeing something when suddenly he wakes up in 1913 England, a teacher at a boarding school with no memory of his time-hoping alien combating self. But it’s abundantly clear that this is no dream – Martha is about behaving like her 21 century self (albeit as a maid) and the things chasing the Doctor from the open is still after them. So what happened to the Doctor to make him human and helpless, and will he snap out of before it’s too late?

The cat-and-mouse between the Doctor and his pursuers provides the thrust of the suspense, but there’s a lot going on beyond that. There’s a theme of tragic inevitability running through the episode. The looming threat of World War One means that all these young boys are a short year away from being sent to their deaths. There’s also a beautifully written romance between the Doctor and a matron at the school (played deftly by Spaced’s Jessica Hynes), one of the most convincing relationships in the show, developed quickly and sweetly. The fact that we know what the characters don’t - he’s got to climb into the Tardis and dash off when this is over - makes the whole thing absolutely heartbreaking.  None of this would work without David Tennant, who puts in his (if not the) finest performance of the series, making the heartbreak real and his vengeful rage all the more terrifying at the end.
 
Like the best episodes, the villains are best when they’re in human form or hidden… but then these ones go ruin that by raising an army of living scarecrows. Their goofy lumber across the English country-side with bizarre flute accompaniment is a bit too Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Also, the ray-gun effects makes Buffy’s “dusting vampires” trick look like Avatar.  That being said, the emotional core of the episode doesn't suffer any, and these are pretty minor issues.  
    
 

Blink (2007)

Sometimes, the show just aims for absolute nail-biting suspense by, like the episodes before, taking The Doctor out of the picture. Instead of focusing on him, we get Sally Sparrow who, while photographing an abandoned home, finds a message addressed to her written under some peeling wallpaper, telling her to “Beware the weeping angels.” The message is, of course, signed “The Doctor.” And that, frankly, is all I am going to tell you about plot of this episode. It’s an unbelievable hour of TV, and if you've ever enjoyed an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, this is for you.

This episode is brutally clever in the way it handles time-travel trickery (seriously, Bogus Journey has nothing on this episode), devious in the ways that it dolls out clues as to what’s going on, and the creatures hunting Sally Sparrow are just plain creepy. That’s what makes it a good piece of fiction, what makes it a great Doctor Who episode is the way Blink incorporates the show’s core philosophy. Doctor Who is about the triumph of cleverness over brute force and the ability of love to overcome, well, anything negative at all. In Blink the Doctor is completely isolated from Sally physically, but through sheer cleverness, he manages a great deal of heroics. And as far as love goes, even the characters which have the grimmest fate in Blink end up kind of happy, largely thanks to love. It’s hard to extol the virtues of this episode without giving too much away, and I really don’t want to spoil this one for you.

This episode is almost entirely free of hokum, right up until the last moments, where the director slipped in what is possibly the most eye-rollingest montage in Who History. But even that bit of can't detract what most Who fans agree is the best episode of the series. 

 
    

And, that’s it for Part 1! Go watch these, and if you like what you saw (they're all on Netflix Watch Instantly), check back for Part 2 later in the week.

From my perspective, it's really up in the air whether The RZA loves hip-hop or kung-fu more.  But checking out these new trailers for his upcoming directorial debut, Wu-Tang Vs The Golden Phoenix, it's clear that the later runs pretty god-damn deep.  
 
Check 'em out: 
    
     
There is some straight up slavish devotion to the art of old kung-fu, chopsocky movies there. Everything from the artificially crappy video quality, to the after effects, to the dialog,  to the audio samples used in the fight scenes is pulled straight from the kinds of movies you'd find in a dollar bin in the local used DVD store. Which is to say, the best kind of kung-fu movies.  It's not surprising, though, that the only part that feels modern in these trailers are the few seconds of score we get. RZA's score for Ghost Dog and Kill Bill are some of my favorite from recent memory. 
 
With this and all the crazy stuff stemming out of the trailers shown at Grindhouse (the upcoming Hobo With A Shotgun and Machete), there seems to be a renaissance of crap going on; movies that trade off perceived "quality" for nostalgia and ridiculousness, producing a film that, while far sillier, has a lot more heart than your average crappy Jet Li flick. That's a trade I will gladly make. 
 
-Casey-