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Best Movies 2009
January 2009
Here you go, my take on the best movies of 2009. In no order.
Knowing
The bad movie Gods smiled on us this year with both this, which would have been enough, and Orphan, coming up next. This one--WOW. You just don't get bad movie fun like this anymore. Nicholas Cage comes into possession of a piece of paper that predicts various upcoming disasters and decides to FREAK OUT. He runs here, runs there, accosting people left and right, drawing an innocent woman and her disturbed child into his web of inanity, and all for nothing, because he can't do a damn thing to stop the big apocalypse at the end. And this is not even to mention the ALIENS.
Orphan
This movie should have done better at the box office, but the trailer could only make it look bad, without getting across that it was KNOWINGLY goofy and very aware of how silly it all is. It also couldn't show too much evil child fun--you know the old bible belt--and this film is chockablock in evil child fun. Your typical couple with marital tensions, anchored by a mother a half step from the loony bin, end up adopting the child from beyond hell, who isn't content to just push a few girls off swings, but crushes the skulls of nuns with hammers as a warm-up to her other activities. There's a twist, obviously, which is actually not that bad, but is quite OUT THERE, so the self-serious will tut-tut and raise their noses, but if you can handle a little outrageousness in your thrillers will work just fine.
An Education
An excellent example of the old adage that a familiar story can become fresh and new again when told well, this little film tells the story of a teen girl in 60s London who seems assured of a bright future at Oxford. She becomes involved with an older man who gives her a foretaste of adult pleasures like drink, travel and sex, and she begins to wonder why she should spend all that boring time studying just to turn out to be an old frump—and no one she knows can explain to her why she should. Featuring an excellent screenplay by Nick Hornby, crisp direction, lovely cinematography and wonderful performances from all involved, this isn’t flashy, but may be the all-round best film of the year.
Bronson
This semi-biography of Britain’s most violent prisoner is half about Charles Bronson, who has spent 30 of his 34 years in solitary confinement, and seems to rage against his captors for the simple joy of raging. For that reason, the other half of this film’s content is simply about the abstractions of masculinity, anger, rage and power, and how all of that is conveyed in iconic images. Tom Hardy delivers a fascinating, charismatic performance in an amusing, energizing film that stays with you.
Where the Wild Things Are
Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers expanded the quite spare original book into a rich and dark psychological journey a boy takes through being annoyed at his mother for expecting decent behavior to a place where he begins to realize his own responsibility. Their primary achievement is to avoid the chipper, surface-level antics that populate most children’s movies and dare to make a rich, dark, convoluted movie about the confusion and loneliness of childhood, including the presence of such bewildering things as distant siblings and depressed adults. It won’t make as much money as Alvin and the Chipmunks, but it’ll still be around in 25 years, which is more than most kids’ movies can say.
Thirst
From Chan-wook Park, known foremost as the director of Oldboy, comes this twisted horror-comedy that is bizarre, moving and hilarious. This priest ends up with this strange disease that causes a form of vampirism. He meets a lovely and sad woman in an unhappy marriage. They make plans to be together one way or another and, well, he should have watched The Postman Always Rings Twice first. This young woman, so sweet and quiet at first, soon morphs into a monster, filling the second half of the film with all sort of evil, mean-spirited horror comedy that will have you snickering under your breath.
The Informant!
Steven Soderbergh’s telling of the true tale of corporate informant Mark Whitacre is suffused with 60s style, from the music by Marvin Hamlisch to the credits and titles, and though no one can really say why, it fits the goofy, comedic tone of the film. This is a film that quite effectively turns into something quite other than it seems at the start, which makes it difficult to discuss its merits while still preserving the secret. Suffice to say it is richer, funnier and more moving and involving than it might seem at first glance, and is filled with wonderful, spot-on performances, some of which are very funny.
Tokyo Sonata
This is a film I didn’t think too much of when I first saw it, but now, looking back, emerges as one of the most memorable of the year. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who often works in Japanese horror films such as Pulse and Cure, turns in a quiet, sensitive family drama that still veers off into surreality toward the end. Sasaki gets fired from his job, but continues to leave the house every day and allow his family to believe he’s working. One son is surreptitiously taking piano lessons, another wants to join the US forces fighting in Iraq, and his wife ends up having a strange odyssey all of her own. It moves in a strange, elliptical way, but takes you on a fascinating personal trip and lingers on the mind.
Julia
Both a total hoot and a serious, decent film, this features Tilda Swinton as an out-of-control sex and booze addict who thinks she just might dabble in kidnapping in order to drum up some extra cash. Things go from haywire to total chaos as she schemes and plots, holding the child captive in a nasty desert motel. Eventually she forms a strange bond with the boy and begins to fell as protective of him as someone like her is capable of. The rare very fun, trashy movie that also leaves you with a lot to chew on.
Star Trek
This is not a film I feel all that comfortable putting in my year-end best-of, as I am dubious about its actual merit and VERY dubious about how future entries in the series might fare, once the novelty is worn off, but I can’t deny that something about it compelled to see this movie four times in the theater [and buy the blu-ray on day of release], something I haven’t done in over 15 years. It’s like crack! And it must be said that while this isn’t the Star Trek someone capable of a sustained attention span might like best, it’s a fun goosing of the old characters and situations, respects its source while offering a lot for the Ritalin set, and is just really fun and really cool. And it effectively steered Star Trek away from the phony bombast and sentimentality of the later movies and TV shows, for which we have to be grateful. And for me personally, it got me to go back and finally watch the Original Series, which has been a revelation and a joy. So, Star Trek 2009, here’s to you!
WORST MOVIES OF 2009
He’s Just Not That Into You
This is from the emerging sub-genre of romantic comedies that purport to support women while actually undermining them. While attempting to pass itself off as a realistic look at the white yuppie dating scene and to disabuse women of unrealistic fantasies about courting and relationships, it portrays women as vacuous perky bubbles of jasmine-scented superficiality whose pathetically empty selves can only be made complete through the affirmations of dating a man. It also supports the popular but bewildering notion that a correctly-lived woman’s life proceeds through five major steps: 1) Dating, 2) Marriage, 3) Babies, 4) Home Remodeling, 5) Divorce. And aside from all this, it’s just a shitty movie, unable to tell a coherent story, lacking focus, with too many characters and ending with a reinforcement of the very romantic fantasies the rest of the movie purports to tear down. Truly detestable in every way. Everyone involved should be forced to perform several hours of community service.
Terminator Salvation / Sherlock Holmes
Two movies that aren’t particularly awful, but are just garden variety, run-of-the-mill crap. Both are bald attempts to continue/start movie franchises, and both are nothing but market-tested product, with no reason to exist aside from to part the foolish with their money. As it becomes more and more urgent that blockbusters have worldwide box office power, appeal to every possible market segment simultaneously, and make all their money on opening weekend, we’re starting to see an increase of this particularly generic brand of entertainment that are essentially all the same movie with minor redressing. The only thing I remember about Terminator Salvation is that it was boring and I couldn’t believe Christian Bale got bent out of shape because he had to concentrate on making THIS. Sherlock Holmes is so shapeless and unremarkable the only way you know it’s over is that the villain has been killed. Okay, so they’re both of no consequence, but what’s distressing is that they will contribute to creating a generation of moviegoers who think that this kind of flat-out crap is, you know, not that bad.
The Box
Now that Richard Kelly is starting to look the intellectually vacuous, arrogantly blinded douche he apparently is, I’d like to point out once more that I called Donnie Darko as a pseudo-intellectual piece of claptrap back when I first saw it. Yes, I DO think I deserve some sort of award. Anyway, he follows up his giga-mess Southland Tales [which was at the same time hilarious and delightfully demented, putting it on my best-of 2007 list] with a would-be thriller about a couple who kill a stranger for a million dollars. But Kelly just can’t resist impressing us with how very much he understands about quantum physics [give it a FUCKING REST, kid], and the thriller goes from intriguing to odd to WACKYLAND. For a while I thought this would end up one of the delightfully awful movies of the year, like Knowing, but the ending just isn’t satisfying enough and is just kind of … well, stupid.
Surrogates
You know, it’s kind of a challenge to get me to dislike any cheesy sci-fi, but what we have here is Terminator 4-level generic crap with all its real-world resonance neutered, making it not just a waste of time, but an intelligence-insulting waste of time. This adaptation of a graphic novel is about people living their lives through robots while they remain safe inside in rooms. But do you think any movie from Disney is going to tell people that conducting human interactions through electronic interfaces—why, like they’re doing with their cell phones and IMs and Facebook and multiplayer video games—is BAD?! Not a chance. So we get this castrated social satire that pretends to have a big message about how we shouldn’t live our lives through surrogate robots—but since surrogate robots don’t exist, we’re pretty much fine! You wonder why they even bother to make movies like this.
