Top 10 of '10 #4

4) #1 Movie: Wristcutters: A Love Story

Netflix was my social life last year when I was living in the cabin in Michigan. I would work all day--fairly productively--and then at 6, 7, or sometimes even 8 or 9, I would sit down with my laptop and watch some foreign movie, documentary, or, well, Lost.

This year, everyone I know has Netflix and I hardly use my account. My roommate has it hooked up to the Wii and there is often a movie streaming in during the evenings--sometimes 2 or 3 in a row. I don't have as much patience for movies and so don't embark on every journey with them; I fortunately missed most of Repo: the Genetic Opera. But sometimes it works out and we all agree on something mind-bending, quirky, rom-com, or doc.

This movie may not actually be the best I saw of 2010, but it was certainly one of the biggest surprises. With a title like that, it seems juvenile, crass, or goth, but it turned out to be endearing, melancholic, and, ultimately, uplifting. It really is a love story.

It begins with a death, self-inflicted, of this guy Zia, distraught over a breakup. He was pretty hung up on this girl, even in the afterlife--a hang up I've been through at least once, probably more...well, once for sure...for real. His afterlife was a bleached out version of some southwestern state: some mountains in the distance, mostly flat desert with highways disappearing into the horizon. And worst of all, in this post-suicide afterlife, you still have to work.

Zia and this other guy drive around in a car looking for stuff: Zia for his ex-girlfriend (who they find out also "offed") and this other guy for other stuff. They keep losing stuff in a very literal vortex into another dimension that exists beneath the passenger seat. They meet this girl who shouldn't be there, for her OD was accidental. And then they meet Tom Waits. And Gob, from Arrested Development. Interestingly, he's a magician of sorts, trying to perform some dimension-bending escape trick: like if Houdini were wrapped in chains at the bottom of a pond, but instead of chains it was reality itself, and instead of a pond, it was the mind of god. I don't know what kind of success he had; seemed like a failed illusion.

It was bleak but comically so. I'm glad I won't be ending up there; I'd rather play the game and lose than forfeit.

I wish I could say that it was still on Netflix streaming, but, as I was just putting my account on hold (saving 10 bucks a month!) I checked: no luck. You should watch Enter the Void instead, which is, so far, my #1 movie of this year.