| (500) Days of Summer |
| A Serious Man |
| A Single Man |
| Adventureland |
| An Education |
| Anvil! The Story of Anvil |
| Avatar |
| Away We Go |
| Bright Star |
| Broken Embraces |
| Brothers Bloom |
| Coraline |
| District 9 |
| Drag Me To Hell |
| Duplicity |
| Every Little Step |
| Fantastic Mr. Fox |
| Fast & Furious |
| Food, Inc. |
| Funny People |
| Harry Potter 6 |
| He's Just Not That Into You |
| Humpday |
| I Love You, Man |
| Inglourious Basterds |
| Invictus |
| It's Complicated |
| Jennifer's Body |
| Julie and Julia |
| Monsters Vs. Aliens |
| Notorious Observe and Report |
| Paper Heart |
| Paranormal Activity |
| Precious |
| Public Enemies |
| Rudo y Cursi |
| Sherlock Holmes |
| Star Trek |
| State of Play |
| Sugar |
| Summer Hours |
| Sunshine Cleaning |
| Taken |
| Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 |
| Terminator: Salvation |
| The Baader-Meinhoff Complex |
| The Blind Slide |
| The Cove |
| The Girlfriend Experience |
| The Hangover |
| The Hurt Locker |
| The Informant! |
| The International |
| The Last Station |
| The Proposal |
| The September Issue |
| The Soloist |
| Two Lovers |
| Up |
| Up in the Air |
| Watchmen |
| Where The Wild Things Are |
| Whip It |
| Wolverine |
| Year One |
| Zombieland |
1.04.2010
A Year at the Movies (2009)
For the record--in case you think something's missing from my Top 10 List--here are all the 2009 movies I saw in 2009. These may not be all of them--just the ones Netflix helped me remember. (If you're curious about my take on any of them, just ask.)
1.02.2010
My Top Ten Movies of 2009
Maybe I've gone soft. I found a lot to love this year at the movies, far more than I have the last couple years. I was consistently charmed, moved, and thrilled by a variety of movies. More than usual, blockbusters seemed to live up to their hype (thanks, Star Trek!) and many on-the-verge filmmakers came into their own. Animation and documentaries had a watershed year, and female directors popped up everywhere (Bigelow! Ephron! Campion! Scherfig! Fletcher! Even Drew Barrymore!). Low-budget out-of-nowhere movies became hits thanks to great marketing and, you know, actually being good (District 9! Paranormal Activity!). I will almost certainly complain about 2009 in the future as being a rather ugly year, but when the conversation turns toward cinema, I'm sure I'll be unabashedly positive.
Here are my top ten favorite films of the year. And because some of my choices may cause eye-rolls from the well-bred cineastes, I've tried to articulate what these films mean to me and why they'll stick with me for years to come.
Julie & Julia
Poor Julie. Meryl Streep's Julia Child gets all the credit for this movie's charms and, while certainly worthy of all its praise, it's Amy Adams' Julie I want to talk about first. In her quest to be validated as the writer she always thought she could be, Julie Powell cooks/blogs her way through Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The process makes Powell selfish, needy, and narcissistic. The character was deemed unlikeable by many a critic, but I found the character and the performance refreshingly honest... and painfully familiar. Julie initially attaches her self-worth to realizing an idea of herself (a writer). But it's the journey toward that realization (being a student) that adds depth to her character and re-focuses her passions. And, oh yeah, the Julia part is pretty great, too.
Watchmen
If the film version of Watchmen is remembered at all, it will be because it was a disappointment. Or because it had that Facebook-live-feed-simulcast-technotardic thing on the Blu-Ray. And it's a damn shame, because walking out of Watchmen, I felt excited, confused, delighted, touched. It felt like the arrival of a filmmaker who was trading in his zombies and Spartans for brighter colors and bigger ideas and I wanted to applaud him for pulling it off. Maybe having no familiarity with the novel helped me get to such an awestruck place, but Watchmen is a bold, graphic blend of pop blockbuster cinema, classic Americana, and art-house philosophizing. The almost-omniscient Dr. Manhattan disconnects from humanity as he ponders its cosmic unimportance and Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach blends justice with hate until the seams are invisible. All the while, Nixon's elongated, neo-fascist reign corresponds to a Doomsday clock, a government/media creation that produces power through fear. (It doesn't seem so different from the color-coded terror alert, does it?). Unlike its third cousin once removed (Forrest Gump), Watchmen pokes holes into any kind of American Idyll by artfully dismantling its heroes along with the virtues they thought they were defending. Bravo, Zack Snyder. (And, I'm sorry, but if you weren't mature enough to handle a blue penis, I hope you enjoyed The Squeakquel.)
Coraline
Bizarre in the best way possible, Coraline feels like it was made by Terry Gilliam at his Brazilian best. The heroine is scrappy and independent--she has to be, considering how her parents' attention is often focused elsewhere--but she's not mature beyond her years like so many kid protagonists. She's admirably normal, with a moral compass that's still figuring out where North is. Coraline finds a door that leads to a parallel world that's similar to her own except for the disturbingly dark details (buttons for eyes, anyone?). As the plot unravels and Coraline's Gothic quest comes into focus, so do the film's themes about parents and children. Relationships that are supposed to be based on nurturing, it claims, too easily become relationships about control. A special bonus: the 3-D adds another level of wonder to an already wondrous film.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Much like Wall-E last year, The Fantastic Mr. Fox created such a grand, textured world that I lost myself in it. More and more often, animated films are reminding us of what the cinematic experience can be--escapism in which you not only escape to, but submerge yourself in a new world. It's easy to get lost in the stylistic details, but Mr. Fox also charms with its fresh story about returning to one's animal instincts. I didn't expect to ever put a Wes Anderson film on one of these lists again, having found his recent efforts so weighed down by irony that detached melancholy was the only human emotion on screen. Well, it turned out the fix to that problem was removing the humans.
Up in the Air
I am an unfortunate collector of unemployment, but I have no qualms about considering Ryan Bingham, a character that professionally fires people, the most sympathetic character of the year. Like the shattered people he lays off, Ryan (George Clooney) mentally connects who he is to what he does. And what he does is travel, most days of the year, from one set of corporate firings to another. He never has to confront commitment because he's always on the next flight out of town. Just when he's forced to defend his life philosophy (to a spunky know-it-all colleague), he's forced to question it (because Vera Farmiga's casual hook-up might just be worth changing for). Up in the Air perfectly captures the beating heart of a wary, sentimental America, one that gives out cookies at the hotel check-in. It's a classically made, razor-sharp, timely film that reminds us where we're going is less important than who we sit next to.
The Hurt Locker
I think I broke the edge of my seat during The Hurt Locker, an inside look into what makes an Army bomb squad tick. Kathryn Bigelow is a master of tension and when she carefully mixes in confusion (what is that Iraqi civilian doing with that cell phone?) and then adds disorientation (wait, is that the same kid I saw yesterday?), she creates a cinematic experience that nearly requires an oxygen mask. And just like the mess of wires inside the bombs Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) defuses, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal explore the neuroses and risk addiction that compel men like James to do what they do. The Hurt Locker is many things: a character study, a suspense piece, an episodic war tale. But Bigelow's ultimate triumph is making us understand the man who would rather consistently risk death than weigh himself down with the burden of a safe life.
Food, Inc.
I think it's safe to say that most documentarians hope that their films compel the audience to take some form of action (when the subject isn't something like, say, heavy metal has-beens. Although that doesn't make Anvil! any less of a great movie.) When my rage at the political food machine finally subsided, Food, Inc. made me take action. I said good-bye to meat. And now that I've fully pigeonholed myself as a lemming who does whatever a well-produced documentary tells him to, let me tell you just how smart, far-ranging, and entertaining Food, Inc. is. Everything is covered, from subsidies to chemicals (way more than I thought and I thought a lot) to "organics" to lobbyists to parents still waiting on apologies for that e coli burger their son ate. While much of the information about the food itself isn't necessarily new (especially to anyone who read "Fast Food Nation"), it's told with a persuasive, straightforward conviction. And the corruption--corporate and otherwise--in the system that sacrifices American health for American economic "stability" was the statement that made me really consider setting down the chicken strip. For good.
Inglourious Basterds
Full disclosure: earlier this year, when Michael Jackson was rushed to the UCLA medical center and huddled masses gathered around the building, my mom called to fill me in on the "breaking news." "I don't think there's any famous person for whom I would actually stand outside the hospital, awaiting news of their fate," I said. Then I added, "Well... maybe Quinten Tarantino." QT and his films have been an oft-discussed, ample portion of my cinematic upbringing. I would go so far as to call them formative. Watching Pulp Fiction for the first time was what Oprah would call my "aha moment"; I suddenly realized that bending reality can be just as truthful and enlightening as exposing reality. Violence, dialogue, and character all came together to form a sharp prism that offered a dark, funny, refracted view of humanity.
Whoa... before I bury myself beneath another steaming pile of metaphor, maybe I should get to talking about why Inglourious Basterds [sic!] is so damn good. First off, Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent give performances that will be discussed for years. Secondly, QT wittily--and haphazardly--blends his virtuosic gift for dialogue with a rousing cast of stylized (and yet fully-formed) characters and, oh, maybe a half dozen actual historical facts. It's a revenge fantasy, through and through, and no apologies are made for it. Tension mounts within scenes and builds between them until the audience matches the wary breathing of the characters'. And as bullets, movies, and fresh milk all spiral us toward the will-he-or-won't-he (blatantly mess with history?) climax, Inglourious Basterds doesn't just tickle the brain, it jump starts the heart and activates the adrenal glands.
Bright Star
The sweeping beauty and rhythms of Bright Star prove that writer/director Jane Campion is as much a poet as her subject, John Keats. Romantic dramas can so often rely on unspoken passions made physical, but in this case, the love exists within the words. Because of them, even. After a tenderly awkward courtship, Keats finds inspiration in Fanny Brawne, an independent pre-feminist who sews her own clothes and finds nothing too sacred to critique. His poetry--which eventually takes the form of love letters when he's separated from Brawne because of illness--is the dreamy stuff of romance and Romanticism. All of it is more affecting because we witness the intimate meaning behind each line. The bonds between Keats, Brawne, family, and nature, fuel the characters' creativity, but also Campion's, who makes the natural world feel homier than it's ever felt. Bright Star is the rare drama that makes you believe there's a destiny for the two souls on screen, that the connection between them is indelible. And then destiny fails them and you're left gasping.
A Serious Man
There is a theme that shows up again and again in the Coen canon: nothing ever goes according to plan. Ever. Murder plots (Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country...), kidnapping (Fargo, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski), blackmail (Burn After Reading), cons (Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers) and, um, road trips (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) all spiral into miscommunicated, bungled, chaotic messes. The moment a character feels like he is in control of his destiny is the moment the Coens knock him on his ass and everything around him goes tragically (or tragicomically) awry.
A Serious Man--my new favorite Coen Bros. movie--is very explicitly about this theme, without any of the murdery, kidnappy, blackmaily plotting. Well, actually, there is some blackmail, but it's fairly minor. Rather, A Serious Man is about what the title promises: a man whose commitment to reason and order is so strong, that he more or less self-destructs when those around him chip away at it. A Jewish physics professor in 1967 in the Midwest, Larry Gopnik's wife wants to leave him for another man, his daughter wants a nosejob, and his son needs weed money before his bar mitzvah. Meanwhile, Larry's enigmatic, almost-infantile brother crashes on the couch, working on a physics theory that might, just maybe, explain how and why everything happens the way it does. As Larry's order crumbles, he seeks advice from rabbis whose obtuse parables and simple sentiments ("Look at the beauty of that parking lot!") only seem empty. In fact, the characteristically Coen-goofball rabbis impart words of great wisdom, it's just that they end in ellipses and question marks when Larry's looking for a period.
Despite all the moments of dark humor, this is easily the most sentimental and sweet of the Coens' films; more than ever, they treat most of the characters with respect (without stripping them of their pseudo-ridiculous qualities). Religious faith, often seen as the least reasonable form of order, is treated with dignity even when it's questioned. The Coens stay true to themselves--the abrupt ending definitely signifies that chaos wins over order and plans only make YHWH laugh--but they also give Larry and his family and the audience a hopeful, resonating message: we may not be able to make sense of what happens to us, but that doesn't mean we can't find purpose in it.
Please feel free to leave a comment. And, of course, I'm on the twitter, too. Have a great year, everyone.
Here are my top ten favorite films of the year. And because some of my choices may cause eye-rolls from the well-bred cineastes, I've tried to articulate what these films mean to me and why they'll stick with me for years to come.
Julie & Julia
Poor Julie. Meryl Streep's Julia Child gets all the credit for this movie's charms and, while certainly worthy of all its praise, it's Amy Adams' Julie I want to talk about first. In her quest to be validated as the writer she always thought she could be, Julie Powell cooks/blogs her way through Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The process makes Powell selfish, needy, and narcissistic. The character was deemed unlikeable by many a critic, but I found the character and the performance refreshingly honest... and painfully familiar. Julie initially attaches her self-worth to realizing an idea of herself (a writer). But it's the journey toward that realization (being a student) that adds depth to her character and re-focuses her passions. And, oh yeah, the Julia part is pretty great, too.
Watchmen
If the film version of Watchmen is remembered at all, it will be because it was a disappointment. Or because it had that Facebook-live-feed-simulcast-technotardic thing on the Blu-Ray. And it's a damn shame, because walking out of Watchmen, I felt excited, confused, delighted, touched. It felt like the arrival of a filmmaker who was trading in his zombies and Spartans for brighter colors and bigger ideas and I wanted to applaud him for pulling it off. Maybe having no familiarity with the novel helped me get to such an awestruck place, but Watchmen is a bold, graphic blend of pop blockbuster cinema, classic Americana, and art-house philosophizing. The almost-omniscient Dr. Manhattan disconnects from humanity as he ponders its cosmic unimportance and Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach blends justice with hate until the seams are invisible. All the while, Nixon's elongated, neo-fascist reign corresponds to a Doomsday clock, a government/media creation that produces power through fear. (It doesn't seem so different from the color-coded terror alert, does it?). Unlike its third cousin once removed (Forrest Gump), Watchmen pokes holes into any kind of American Idyll by artfully dismantling its heroes along with the virtues they thought they were defending. Bravo, Zack Snyder. (And, I'm sorry, but if you weren't mature enough to handle a blue penis, I hope you enjoyed The Squeakquel.)
Coraline
Bizarre in the best way possible, Coraline feels like it was made by Terry Gilliam at his Brazilian best. The heroine is scrappy and independent--she has to be, considering how her parents' attention is often focused elsewhere--but she's not mature beyond her years like so many kid protagonists. She's admirably normal, with a moral compass that's still figuring out where North is. Coraline finds a door that leads to a parallel world that's similar to her own except for the disturbingly dark details (buttons for eyes, anyone?). As the plot unravels and Coraline's Gothic quest comes into focus, so do the film's themes about parents and children. Relationships that are supposed to be based on nurturing, it claims, too easily become relationships about control. A special bonus: the 3-D adds another level of wonder to an already wondrous film.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Much like Wall-E last year, The Fantastic Mr. Fox created such a grand, textured world that I lost myself in it. More and more often, animated films are reminding us of what the cinematic experience can be--escapism in which you not only escape to, but submerge yourself in a new world. It's easy to get lost in the stylistic details, but Mr. Fox also charms with its fresh story about returning to one's animal instincts. I didn't expect to ever put a Wes Anderson film on one of these lists again, having found his recent efforts so weighed down by irony that detached melancholy was the only human emotion on screen. Well, it turned out the fix to that problem was removing the humans.
Up in the Air
I am an unfortunate collector of unemployment, but I have no qualms about considering Ryan Bingham, a character that professionally fires people, the most sympathetic character of the year. Like the shattered people he lays off, Ryan (George Clooney) mentally connects who he is to what he does. And what he does is travel, most days of the year, from one set of corporate firings to another. He never has to confront commitment because he's always on the next flight out of town. Just when he's forced to defend his life philosophy (to a spunky know-it-all colleague), he's forced to question it (because Vera Farmiga's casual hook-up might just be worth changing for). Up in the Air perfectly captures the beating heart of a wary, sentimental America, one that gives out cookies at the hotel check-in. It's a classically made, razor-sharp, timely film that reminds us where we're going is less important than who we sit next to.
The Hurt Locker
I think I broke the edge of my seat during The Hurt Locker, an inside look into what makes an Army bomb squad tick. Kathryn Bigelow is a master of tension and when she carefully mixes in confusion (what is that Iraqi civilian doing with that cell phone?) and then adds disorientation (wait, is that the same kid I saw yesterday?), she creates a cinematic experience that nearly requires an oxygen mask. And just like the mess of wires inside the bombs Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) defuses, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal explore the neuroses and risk addiction that compel men like James to do what they do. The Hurt Locker is many things: a character study, a suspense piece, an episodic war tale. But Bigelow's ultimate triumph is making us understand the man who would rather consistently risk death than weigh himself down with the burden of a safe life.
Food, Inc.
I think it's safe to say that most documentarians hope that their films compel the audience to take some form of action (when the subject isn't something like, say, heavy metal has-beens. Although that doesn't make Anvil! any less of a great movie.) When my rage at the political food machine finally subsided, Food, Inc. made me take action. I said good-bye to meat. And now that I've fully pigeonholed myself as a lemming who does whatever a well-produced documentary tells him to, let me tell you just how smart, far-ranging, and entertaining Food, Inc. is. Everything is covered, from subsidies to chemicals (way more than I thought and I thought a lot) to "organics" to lobbyists to parents still waiting on apologies for that e coli burger their son ate. While much of the information about the food itself isn't necessarily new (especially to anyone who read "Fast Food Nation"), it's told with a persuasive, straightforward conviction. And the corruption--corporate and otherwise--in the system that sacrifices American health for American economic "stability" was the statement that made me really consider setting down the chicken strip. For good.
Inglourious Basterds
Full disclosure: earlier this year, when Michael Jackson was rushed to the UCLA medical center and huddled masses gathered around the building, my mom called to fill me in on the "breaking news." "I don't think there's any famous person for whom I would actually stand outside the hospital, awaiting news of their fate," I said. Then I added, "Well... maybe Quinten Tarantino." QT and his films have been an oft-discussed, ample portion of my cinematic upbringing. I would go so far as to call them formative. Watching Pulp Fiction for the first time was what Oprah would call my "aha moment"; I suddenly realized that bending reality can be just as truthful and enlightening as exposing reality. Violence, dialogue, and character all came together to form a sharp prism that offered a dark, funny, refracted view of humanity.
Whoa... before I bury myself beneath another steaming pile of metaphor, maybe I should get to talking about why Inglourious Basterds [sic!] is so damn good. First off, Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent give performances that will be discussed for years. Secondly, QT wittily--and haphazardly--blends his virtuosic gift for dialogue with a rousing cast of stylized (and yet fully-formed) characters and, oh, maybe a half dozen actual historical facts. It's a revenge fantasy, through and through, and no apologies are made for it. Tension mounts within scenes and builds between them until the audience matches the wary breathing of the characters'. And as bullets, movies, and fresh milk all spiral us toward the will-he-or-won't-he (blatantly mess with history?) climax, Inglourious Basterds doesn't just tickle the brain, it jump starts the heart and activates the adrenal glands.
Bright Star
The sweeping beauty and rhythms of Bright Star prove that writer/director Jane Campion is as much a poet as her subject, John Keats. Romantic dramas can so often rely on unspoken passions made physical, but in this case, the love exists within the words. Because of them, even. After a tenderly awkward courtship, Keats finds inspiration in Fanny Brawne, an independent pre-feminist who sews her own clothes and finds nothing too sacred to critique. His poetry--which eventually takes the form of love letters when he's separated from Brawne because of illness--is the dreamy stuff of romance and Romanticism. All of it is more affecting because we witness the intimate meaning behind each line. The bonds between Keats, Brawne, family, and nature, fuel the characters' creativity, but also Campion's, who makes the natural world feel homier than it's ever felt. Bright Star is the rare drama that makes you believe there's a destiny for the two souls on screen, that the connection between them is indelible. And then destiny fails them and you're left gasping.
A Serious Man
There is a theme that shows up again and again in the Coen canon: nothing ever goes according to plan. Ever. Murder plots (Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country...), kidnapping (Fargo, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski), blackmail (Burn After Reading), cons (Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers) and, um, road trips (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) all spiral into miscommunicated, bungled, chaotic messes. The moment a character feels like he is in control of his destiny is the moment the Coens knock him on his ass and everything around him goes tragically (or tragicomically) awry.
A Serious Man--my new favorite Coen Bros. movie--is very explicitly about this theme, without any of the murdery, kidnappy, blackmaily plotting. Well, actually, there is some blackmail, but it's fairly minor. Rather, A Serious Man is about what the title promises: a man whose commitment to reason and order is so strong, that he more or less self-destructs when those around him chip away at it. A Jewish physics professor in 1967 in the Midwest, Larry Gopnik's wife wants to leave him for another man, his daughter wants a nosejob, and his son needs weed money before his bar mitzvah. Meanwhile, Larry's enigmatic, almost-infantile brother crashes on the couch, working on a physics theory that might, just maybe, explain how and why everything happens the way it does. As Larry's order crumbles, he seeks advice from rabbis whose obtuse parables and simple sentiments ("Look at the beauty of that parking lot!") only seem empty. In fact, the characteristically Coen-goofball rabbis impart words of great wisdom, it's just that they end in ellipses and question marks when Larry's looking for a period.
Despite all the moments of dark humor, this is easily the most sentimental and sweet of the Coens' films; more than ever, they treat most of the characters with respect (without stripping them of their pseudo-ridiculous qualities). Religious faith, often seen as the least reasonable form of order, is treated with dignity even when it's questioned. The Coens stay true to themselves--the abrupt ending definitely signifies that chaos wins over order and plans only make YHWH laugh--but they also give Larry and his family and the audience a hopeful, resonating message: we may not be able to make sense of what happens to us, but that doesn't mean we can't find purpose in it.
Please feel free to leave a comment. And, of course, I'm on the twitter, too. Have a great year, everyone.
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