Salon film critic Andrew O’Hehir recently put the finishing touches on his year-end, first-ever, all-encompassing movie ranking list. Salon’s editor in chief Kerry Lauerman wanted to challenge him on his rationale. Their IM exchange is reproduced below:

Lauerman: Let’s do this!

O’Hehir: Sure.

Lauerman: Actually, that’s the sort of enthusiastically clichéd line that might appear in “Grown Ups”! I must ask — with your year of moviegoing over and your full ranking of everything you’ve seen completed — do you really, really think “Grown Ups” was the worst movie you saw in all of 2010?

O’Hehir: Ha! Well, “worst” is always a tough thing to define. I think it appalled me more than anything else I saw all year, in that talented people were involved, and in some sense the intentions could be called good — by all accounts, Adam Sandler is a great guy — and the results were teeth-grindingly juvenile and stupid.

Lauerman: They were. But I have to say: I watched that movie over Thanksgiving, with my family. And it did as reasonably well as anything could in a living room that included two liberals, two arch-conservatives, a couple of college kids and two octogenarians. I loved “Fish Tank,” but I think it would have thoroughly confused my mother. Is there something to be said for a middling, un-ambitious entertainment that appeals meekly but broadly?

O’Hehir: Oh, totally. That’s an excellent point, and that’s what movies like “Grown-Ups” or the “Focker” franchise are meant to do — appeal across demographic and generational lines, so that large summer and/or holiday audiences can be satisfied. And it is important for critics to be cognizant of that.

My mom might tolerate “Fish Tank” OK, but obviously that’s not its role. I do think that the social role of pleasing all comers can be accomplished without the combination of Hollywood vanity and aggressive stupidity in “Grown Ups,” though. Audiences seem to be taking a pass on James L. Brooks’ “How Do You Know,” which I think is unfortunate. That’s an enjoyable movie with stars, gags and a love story that would offend very few viewers from 8 to 88, or whatever.

Lauerman: Right. The most objectionable part of “Grown Ups” to me, to be honest — and devil’s advocating over, I’ll admit it’s a really dumb film — is that awful, key gag they showed of shooting the arrow straight up in the air as everyone runs away. Do you remember that? It’s played as farce, but that’s the sort of idiotic thing that kids will actually go out and do.

O’Hehir: That’s a good point. Normally I don’t worry about that in movies, but if you remember that movie about frat boys lying on the yellow stripe in the middle of roads, a kid actually got killed doing that. There are an awful lot of gags about inflicting physical pain in “Grown Ups,” actually, which is nothing new. I sure hope there aren’t kids who went to E.R.’s this fall with arrows in their feet.

Lauerman: Or anywhere else. Did you expect any movies to be near the bottom that weren’t? Movies that, in retrospect, wore better as the year went on?

O’Hehir: Well, I don’t get the impression that my fellow critics have much time for the “Twilight” franchise, and in all honesty our readers weren’t much interested either. I haven’t read the books, and don’t intend to. But simply taken on its own, the latest installment was solid popcorn cinema, with committed acting, good action scenes and a classic romantic triangle. It’s not in my top 20 or anything, but it was a whole lot better than many earnest indie films I saw this year!

Lauerman: I was surprised to see “Killers” so far down your list, because I remember you defending Ashton Kutcher.

O’Hehir: Oh, that’s a terrible movie! Almost unbearable to watch. That director, Robert Luketic, personally embodies the most vapid kind of Hollywood style, without even having the flair or technical prowess of somebody like Michael Bay or Tony Scott. I am willing to defend Kutcher, up to a point. But I have to admit that proposing him as the next Clark Gable, as I did this year, was somewhere between a joke and a dare. Like: This guy might have this kind of talent, if he can figure out how to harness it and say no to the offensively stupid roles.

Lauerman: Well, but you’ve liked him in other things, too. So it made sense.

O’Hehir: Yes, I have. He’s one of those actors who can be entertaining in anything. I enjoyed his camera commercials! If people dismiss him for making bad choices, or undermining himself with his jokey persona, or whatever, I simply disagree. I would love to see him get better parts, but that may not be the plan — and I know Kutcher has a plan.

Lauerman: Is there a point on the list that delineates Good from Bad? Where, precisely, is the dividing line?

O’Hehir: To me, everything up to about 85 or so is a movie I think is basically pretty good, and then I start to get major reservations about 92 or 93 — with “Conviction,” which is watchable but very flawed, or “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” a compelling but problematic documentary. And then, somewhere around 110, you get to movies I just don’t think are very good, but there might be interesting things about them.

Lauerman: Poor “Fair Game” (No. 110).

O’Hehir: Yes, exactly! That’s pretty much it. Two wonderful actors, a great story and some good scenes. But it runs out of gas, and ends up as much less than the sum of its parts.

And then the ones I would call bad don’t start until maybe the 140s. I would say No. 145, the German comedy “Soul Kitchen,” is watchable and interesting, kind of funny but totally minor. And then 146 is “All Good Things,” which is not a good thing at all.

Lauerman: Your low ranking of “Waiting for ‘Superman’” (No. 93) is actually probably the single biggest shock on the list. It’s just so universally beloved, that film.

O’Hehir: Yes, I puzzled about where to put “‘Superman.’” It’s super-well-intentioned and I admire what Davis Guggenheim was trying to do there. The emotion in that film is very effective, and I guess there’s a political element to my judgment. I just don’t think he depicted the public education debate fairly enough. He meant to, but there was a failure of understanding or execution.

Lauerman: How was it not fair?

O’Hehir: I think Davis really buys into the argument that charter schools are the be-all/end-all solution to the dilemmas of public education. Now, I am not a status-quo booster at all, nor am I a charter-hater. (As Salon’s readers may know, my children are currently home-schooled.) But he blundered into a really complicated situation that people have pondered for seemingly eons, and thought he found the answer. It’d be like somebody reading up on Israel and Palestine a little, and saying, “Hey — they need to have two states!”

Lauerman: Right, yes. Though it’s a front-runner for the documentary Oscar, surely. What would your pick be?

O’Hehir: There were so many terrific docs this year! I think I’d have to go with Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job,” which is a rage-driven exposé of the global financial crisis and just an exemplary use of the medium. Although I’d also be tempted by “The Tillman Story,” which is a simultaneously heartbreaking and hopeful movie about a really unusual American family.

Check out Andrew O’Hehir’s ultimate 2010 Movie List — and tell us what you thought the worst film of the year was in the comments section below.

As a person whose job it is to develop digital products, I’m online nearly every moment I’m awake (whether I’m looking at my phone, my iPad or a laptop), and I’m often asked for recommendations. Frankly, every year it gets tougher to be in-the-know. Just like there’s more and more content published on the Web every year, there are new technologies, sites, apps and devices rolling out at a breathless pace. But you don’t need me to tell you this; it’s a problem we all face on some level.

Given that, I tend to gravitate toward things that are either curatorial in nature — offering me new ways to skip past the chaff (of whatever variety) and get straight to the wheat — or that make it easier for me to do things I’ve always done. So while this is by no means a definitive list, what follows are the five things that elbowed their way out of the crowd and onto my pinned tabs or my home screen in the past year.

View the slide show

To say 2010 was an eventful year would be quite the understatement. It was an election year, of course. Also a year of plane crashes, landmark legislation, meat dresses, flash mobs, Tea Party protests, faux scandals, Wikileaks and more devastating floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcano eruptions, factory explosions, mine collapses, oil spills and forest fires than we could even begin to count. The world cheered the Olympics, the World Cup and the return of Tiger Woods, and mourned the death of Paul the Octopus. Election disputes turned bloody. The Roma were driven out of France. Celebrities posed for their mug shots. And through it all, the situation in Haiti — which began with an earthquake on January 12 — went from bad to worse to indescribably tragic.

Don’t worry — the tsunami of Best Of lists is almost over. I think we’re all looking forward to the fresh mystery of the new year. And right now, our necks ache from looking back so much; we’re particularly sick of the forced remembering of Christine O’Donnell and the Trololo guy. To the annals of footnoted history, we banish ye!

But we did want to highlight the pieces in Salon that — through an unscientific staff poll — we decided we liked the best this year. None of these should be a huge surprise to Salon readers; they were all big hits with you, too. From Glenn Greenwald’s incisive exploration of WikiLeaks, to Mary Elizabeth Williams’ gripping accounts of her cancer diagnosis and treatment, our favorite stories this year run a familiar Salon gamut of world-changing importance to the expressly, meaningfully personal.

I’m reluctant to use the word “remake” to describe strong new versions of material that was great the first time around. The directors of such films sometimes call them “cover versions.” That’s a somewhat defensive term — “I liked the original, too! This is just my version!” — but it’s more palatable and in some ways more accurate. The filmmakers aren’t presumptuously trying to fix what wasn’t broken but trying to bask in the success of a beloved work while putting their own (hopefully unique) spin on it. Any music buff will tell you that cover versions of a great recording sometimes end up being different from but equal to the original. Not always, but sometimes.

Oh, come on! They wouldn’t kill off Cowboy Woody and Buzz and Jessie and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head and Hamm and Rex and Slinky Dog!

Would they?