In my Crystal Ball for January, I warned that this month was shaping up to be one of the worst I’d ever seen in terms of quality movies.  But at that time, I at least held out hope for a couple of films.  One of them was “The Way Back”, an attempt for an epic “escape” film about six men held in a Siberian Gulag who escaped, and walked all the way to India, a journey of 4,000 miles.

It was directed by Peter Weir, the great director from such films as “Witness”, “The Truman Show”, and “Dead Poets Society”, and had a terrific cast with Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, and young Saoirse Ronan, so I had high hopes.

It was a complete bore, and totally unworthy of wasting one more sentence about.

So that was one of my two “Movies That I’m Anticipating” for the month.  The other was the action adventure “The Mechanic”, a remake of the not-so-classic 1972 film starring Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent.

And like the Cleveland Cavaliers; I am now 0 for January.

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It’s January.  The weather sucks.  The Browns suck.  The Cavaliers suck.  And the movies almost always suck.

 So there is not much to do but hide out in our man caves and wait until the conditions make it OK for us to hit the golf course.

Luckily, while we are in our quasi-hibernation, there is plenty of football to watch and DVDs to view.  But what about those of us that are wanting a break, and would like to go out to see a movie?  Do we dare leave the comforts of our fireplaces, large screen TVs, and kegerators to venture out in the elements?

To answer that, Mixultany Mitch will stick his head out the back door.  If he sees grass on the other side of his patio, then it will mean an early bounty of decent movies.  If he can’t see the grass for the snow, it’s eight more weeks of crap.

I’m opening the door…

Crap.

 Gimme another beer.

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As is tradition for me here at TheClevelandFan.com, I use the last weekend of the year to look back on what we saw at the theaters in 2010.

And what a horrible year for movies it was…at least until November, when the decent movies came out, and have somewhat saved this year; at least in terms of good movies.  The Top 10 I’m giving is just as strong, I feel, as what we’ve seen in any year since 2006.  Now overall, I think 2010 is just as strong at the top as 2006, but it’s missing an all-time great movie like “The Departed” to really stand out.

The summer is what really sank 2010.  While there were the usual barrage of crap movies from January to April, May is when things were supposed to heat up; and it flopped miserably.  “Iron Man 2” kicked things off with what was to be the theme of the summer; Sequels and Remakes that were 100% worse than the originals.

“Robin Hood”, "Clash of the Titans", “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, “Shrek Forever”, “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time”, “Sex and the City 2”, “Get Him to the Greek”, “The A-Team”, “The Karate Kid”,  “Jonah Hex”, “Grown Ups”, “Knight & Day”, “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse”, “The Last Airbender”, “Predators”, and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.  I’m getting a headache just reading that list.  The only things that saved the Summer were “Toy Story 3” and “Inception”.

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 The Coen Brothers’ remake of the iconic John Wayne film “True Grit” completely snuck up on me.  Try as I might, I couldn’t quite shake The Duke from my thoughts as I watched it, no matter how different Jeff Bridges played the role of Rooster Cogburn.  Watching the film was almost disconcerting; it seemed so original and fresh; but also so familiar.

As the story went on, however, I was drawn more and more into it, and accordingly left my preconceived notions further and further behind.  When I left the theater, I was immediately thinking that I saw a very good movie.  But the more and more I have thought about it over the past 24 hours, I am convinced I have seen one of the best movies of the year.

The entire concept of this movie seems a bit off kilter.  Why remake a movie from over forty years ago…especially a Western; a dying genre?  And then to choose one that is forever linked to Wayne’s one and only Academy Award?  Just what the hell were Ethan and Joel Coen thinking?  Had their egos swollen up so much after “No Country for Old Men” that they thought they could do no wrong? 

Perhaps their egos are larger than they should be; but that’s not what I’m judging here:  I am judging THIS film, and trying to do so on its own merits.  Trying…but it’s almost impossible to do that; which is a shame.

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