Contrary to Alexandra’s opinion, I think this year was a great one for television. Sure, if you weren’t watching Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, it might not have seemed that way. This seemed to be the year that the traditional sitcom format finally crashed and burned, but arose like the mighty phoenix once more in the form of 2 Broke Girls.

Once again, we’ve narrowed the traditional “Top 10″ films down to a scant three. Trust me, it wasn’t easy. Deciding on just three films that define your cinematic taste is all the more difficult when you find yourself running the kind of movie blog that doesn’t garner press screenings of films or DVD screeners.

Yeah, we’re not doing the traditional “best out of three” round-up of games, or even a top 10. Who has time to play that many video games? Reviewers, that’s who, and their jobs are to play video games that they got for free and then review them.

Opinion on current topics of interest isn’t exactly our bag here at TFL. If you’ve found your way to this site, it’s likely that you’re an obsessive film fanatic (like we are) or Google Images sent you here for a picture of The Warriors or Natalie Portman. Whatevs. We’re cool with it. However you found your way here, we’re happy to have you. Now bear with us as we recount our favorite and not so favorite things of 2011. We’ll be back to discussing and dissecting classic cinema in a hot minute.

Stephen King’s novel The Shining may have been based on a real-life stay at the Stanley Hotel, but the story itself does have a literary predecessor: Henry James’s masterful 1908 ghost story “The Jolly Corner.”

Redemption is a theme that never quite made it into Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, but is the most prevalent major theme of the modern Western. Films like The Wild Bunch sparked the revolution known as the ‘Revisionist Western’, many choosing to de-emphasis the romance of the era and instead focusing on the intense reality of a life filled with hard choices made by hard men and women.

Marketing for a movie like Once Upon a Time in the West is an undertaking that boggles the modern mind. It’s easy to forget that a film has a life outside of it’s own native culture, and that marketing for audiences in those respective countries must be custom tailored to their individual societies. For a film to be an international success, it must truly have ‘something for everyone’. Demonstrating that is the job of artists and marketers around the globe.

As Kitano excelled as a painter, his zeal for the aesthetic would soon spill into another of his passions, filmmaking. His eventual return to directing in 1996 with his semi-autobiographical boxing drama, Kids Return and again in 1997 with Fireworks (Hana-Bi) bore the benefit of Kitano’s time spent as an artist in recovery. His paintings appear throughout Fireworks, while the film itself features a lush palette of colors and dynamic camera movement not previously seen in Kitano’s work. The film, widely considered amongst the best of his directorial efforts, netted the director his first Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

In many ways, without those intense opening scenes of Battle Royale the film simply wouldn’t work. We needed an intense and complex character to bring us and the characters into the world of the film, a world where anything can and will happen. For Kinji Fukasaku, prolific director of four decades of films, there was only one person to turn to – his friend, Takeshi Kitano.

To world audiences, Chigusa (Girl #13) is easily the most recognizable amongst the cast of students involved in the melee in Battle Royale. She is after all, Quentin Tarantino’s own “Go-Go Yubari” from his great and successful film, Kill Bill Volume 1. Plucked from relative obscurity for the role, Tarantino saw something he liked and cast the unknown actress based solely on her performance in BR. The fact that the film ranks amongst Tarantino’s favorites may have had something to do with it, regardless the film and her brief appearance in it struck a chord with audiences the world over.

How on earth do we wrap-up this amazing month we’ve spent with the Caped Crusader himself? We could recommend which Batman films are worth seeing, but the truth is, you probably already know. We could try to talk about the impact and legacy of the Bat franchise, but one teeny blog post could never do the whole thing justice.

Instead, we’re headed back to the beginning, to the medium where the Bat first took flight: comics. We offer you a selection of, in our humble opinions, some of the greatest Batman comics we’ve ever read.

Batman and I clicked on a level I’d never quite expected. The film was a dark summer blockbuster, aimed at kids and adults, and kids who thought they already were adults. The kind of film that said, “Children are smart enough to handle this.” That was something great about the 80s and early 90s; There was very little pandering to my age set. We grew up on W.W.F., G.I. Joe, Masters of the Universe, Beavis & Butthead and Ren & Stimpy… not SpongeBob SquarePants, or even Barney. Our heroes weren’t perfect, sex symbol teeny boppers on the CW or Disney channel. They kicked ass and took names.