1. Exit Through the Gift Shop

Banksy-Art-exit-gift-shop-lobster dog

It probably helps that I only saw it last week and it’s still fresh in my mind, but… damn.  I took it at face value, but even if the whole thing was faked and Banksy conned me and Mr. Brain Wash was acting or whatever else the conspiracy theorists claim, it’d still be brilliant.  The only difference would be that it would be Borat-level subversive brilliant instead of once-in-a-lifetime documentary brilliant.  Just watch I’m Still Here if you want to know how hard it is to pull off a performance art/hoax mockumentary.

It documents the beginning of a trend in art/entertainment (street art, in this case), follows it as it grows, peaks, intersects with commercialism, and eventually becomes a parody of itself.  Like I said, if you want to understand the way trends and pop culture works, watch this movie. The way the characters’ motives collide and grow out of their back stories — it’s perfect.  Better than any scripted movie I can think of.   I think the main reason so many people think it’s fake (besides Banksy’s inherent mysteriousness) it’s that it’s just so damned good.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is like the Troy Duffy documentary, Overnight, if Troy Duffy had become wildly successful.  There have been a ton of amazing documentary characters in the last few decades — the guys from Anvil, Mark Borchardt from American Movie, Billy Mitchell from King of Kong, the Man on a Wire guy, some older ones that will make me seem wise — Thierry Guetta is as good as any of them.

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MOVIES THAT ALMOST MADE THE LIST

True Grit (did a great job capturing the tall-tale cleverness of a Charles Portis novel, entertaining all the way through — only real criticism was the melodramatic music, which didn’t seem to fit)

Restrepo

Jackass 3D (I loved it, I just have no idea how to compare it to other films)

The Town (might be unfair to leave it off the list, consider how often I’ve repeated the most famous line.)

Jonah Hex (intentional or not, one of the funniest of the year)

Black Swan

Tiny Furniture

Cyrus (funnier than it got credit for, marred by a tendency to stick the camera an inch from everyone’s face — plus there just weren’t a lot of good comedies this year)

MOVIES DEFINITELY NOT MAKING THE LIST THAT WERE ON OTHER PEOPLES’

127 Hours (impressive acting, I’d still rather not watch a guy stuck under a rock for two hours)

Buried (see above, then add manipulativeness and a preposterous plot. it’s the Paul Haggis movie Paul Haggis never made)

Wall Street 2 (are you people high? this laughable pile of sh*t was almost as bad as Last Airbender and not nearly as funny as Jonah Hex)

Unstoppable (never saw it, but I’m pretty confident it wasn’t very good)

At least 10 forgettable action flicks

Anyway, that’s my list. I should probably make a separate one in a few weeks when I finally go back and see all the good foreign films I missed.