My 10 favorite movies of 2010 posted far too late for anyone to care

Jennifer Lawrence (above) starred in my favorite movie of 2010, "Winter's Bone," a film that reminds us that the reason we don't go into the woods uninvited isn't the monsters, but the people.

Sometime in early January a co-worker asked me for a list of my favorite movies for 2010. I hadn't thought about it much at the time. I planned to answer with a blog post. Then I got lazy. Then I started watching "The Big Lebowski"  over and over again. Here we are in the middle of March and I haven’t answered. I am absolutely worthless without deadlines. Many, especially my editors, would argue I’m not much good then, either. Ah well.

Anyway, here are my 2010 picks, each in about 140 characters.

1. Winter’s Bone makes you feel like a stranger in your homeland in a tale of a girl’s struggle to save her family home in the dirt poor Ozarks.

2. Get Low stars Bill Murray and Robert Duvall. If that is not enough of a recommendation, than I'll add it's very funny, warm and touching.

3. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Ryan are painfully shy people make one another better in Jack Goes Boating, a small, lovely romantic story.

4. The Dude outdoes the Duke in True Grit, which is almost as much fun to listen to as it is to watch. Contraction-free dialogue is captivating.

5. The Other Guys is a supposed to be a send-up of buddy cop movies, but it’s really the best buddy cop movie since Lethal Weapon.

6. The Town proves Ben Affleck has a lot more to contribute to movies than being a punchline and Jon Hamm is more than the maddest of Mad Men.

7. The Social Network is really about the increasing disconnection of people from their humanity despite technology designed to do the opposite.

8. Inception feels like walking in an MC Escher drawing while in the middle of a heist being chased by spies and trying to fix a relationship.

9. Salt is a great action movie. Angelina Jolie stomps adversaries in sequences worthy of the Bourne films but becomes a hero we root for.

10. Toy Story 3. Woody. Buzz. Rex. The Potato Heads. Barbie. Ken. Pixar. Adventure. High jinks. Coming of age. All heart. Aw, hell. Just see it.

Movie Review: "The Other Guys"

5. "The Other Guys" is very funny — maybe the funniest movie of the year and Will Ferrell's best comedy since the terrific "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" — but the flick works on another level: It's a buddy cop send-up that happens to be the best buddy cop movie since "Lethal Weapon."

4. Ferrell plays a mild forensic accountant with a dark side partnered with Mark "Third Nipple" Wahlberg, a talented-but-angry detective who yearns for action and glory but his held by the career-limiting move of accidentally (but quite hilariously) shooting Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter before the seventh game of the World Series.

3. Both Ferrell's and Wahlberg's characters are overshadowed by flashy caricatures of muscled action heroes, played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, who do all the things cop pals do in action movies — go on high-speed chases, wreck vintage sports cars, blow stuff up and shoot guns with great abandon — while Ferrell and Wahlberg tool around in Ferrell's Toyota Prius and investigate scaffolding permit violations.

2. "Guys" delivers the dead-pan cherubic worldview Ferrell does so well, though more restrained than some of his on-screen incarnations, while also providing a sly, stinging critique our decade-long economic woes and the greed and stupidity that led us here.

1. Another hidden gem is the closing credits, which provide a series of animated graphics about corporate greed that would almost be funny if they weren't so true.

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"The Other Guys"
Run time: 1 hour, 47 minutes
Rated PG-13‎‎
Genre: Comedy‎
Director: Adam McKay
Cast: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton and Dwayne Johnson
Finney's Flicks Grade: A