(and yes, i know it's almost may but it took me a little longer than usual this year to get caught up on everything that was released in 2009.)
10. CORALINE
Somewhere along the line, the fairytales we tell our children stopped having any real menace in them. Blame it on Disney if you want or just on the fact that the world is generally a lot more civil now than it was when the Brothers Grimm were penning their tales. But whatever the reason, that lack of menace makes most modern fairytales pretty damn boring to anyone old enough to have driven themselves to the theater. Not so Coraline. This stop motion animated film is genuinely scary with stakes that appear to actually be life and death. And the film is ultimately much better for it, featuring multiple sequences of genuine peril that are legitimately tense. That they are also breathtakingly animated is a nice bonus.
09. THE ESCAPIST
It’s hard to know what to make of The Escapist, a film that tells the story of one convict, serving a life sentence, trying to escape prison to see his daughter one last time before she dies of cancer. Filmed in a bizarrely designed (and clearly very old) prison, the film seems to at once be both a period piece and some kind of sci-fi drama set in the future. Further muddying the waters, director Rupert Wyatt intercuts scenes of the convicts preparing for the escape with scenes of the escape itself. This technique, combined with somewhat bizarre set and wardrobe choices, gives the film an otherworldly feel that is both unsettling and confusing, probably not unlike the experience of actually being in prison. And yet, when all the overlapping chronologies and elaborate double crosses finally unravel themselves at the film’s end, The Escapist ends up packing a pretty hefty emotional wallop. It’s a surprisingly rewarding ending to a film that, even when you know exactly what’s going on, still feels somewhat elusive.
08. BIG FAN
Robert Siegel’s directorial debut tells the story of Paul Aufiero, a lonely Staten Island parking garage attendant who’s such a diehard Giants fan that he never misses a home game even though he can’t afford a ticket and so must watch the game on a tv while sitting in the parking lot. One night, a chance encounter with his favorite player results in a misunderstanding that leads to Paul getting his ass kicked by his idol. That set-up is both full of promise and ripe with the potential for disaster. But the various repercussions of that one night, which comprise the bulk of the film, and are so precisely observed and cleverly rendered that Big Fan manages to follow through on its set-up in ways I never expected. It’s a surprisingly warm, human and ultimately hopeful film.
07. ZOMBIELAND
One thing that always irks me about zombie movies is that the characters in them behave as if they’ve never seen a zombie movie. You need to shoot them in the head to kill them? Really? You mean my wife / brother / child / best friend wants to eat my brain? I don’t believe it. So Zombieland feels refreshingly new just for the simple act of beginning the film long after the zombie apocalypse happened and all of the characters already know everything about zombies. We’re past the whole oh-my-god-the-world-is-ending and I-can’t-believe-my-husband-tried-to-eat-me stuff and can move on to just seeing what it would be like to live in a zombie-infested United States. Turns out, it might be kinda fun.
06. STAR TREK
Describing a particular film as a rollercoaster thrill ride is about as cliché as it gets and usually the last refuge of a lazy critic, but that phrase is uniquely appropriate as a description of J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot in that the film is as fast moving, exciting, enjoyable, harmless and ultimately forgettable as any ride at Six Flags. I’m hard pressed to think of more than a handful of films that offer as much genuine enjoyment as this one. But like a rollercoaster ride that’s been enjoyed by thousands of theme park attendees without any real incident, the thrill of Star Trek is just in taking the ride, not in being asked to contemplate what any of it means.
click here to read the full review
05. THE DAMNED UNITED
Brain Clough was one of the most successful managers in the history of British football, winning multiple British championships and European cups in the 1980s as the manager of Nottingham Forest. But rather than tell the rousing tale of Clough’s championships, The Damned United chooses to focus instead on Clough’s disastrous forty-four day run as manager of Leeds United in 1974. The film also weaves in various stories from Clough’s past as his upstart Derby County team was repeatedly savaged at the hands of Leeds United, their most hated opponent. These overlapping timelines weave together to form a fascinating portrait of a man compelled by sheer hubris to attempt to remake his hated rivals in his own image and the monumental failure that resulted from it.
04. SURVEILLANCE
Serial killer movies are a dime a dozen. At this point, fifteen years removed from Se7en, the pinnacle of this particular subgenre, it would seem that there’s little crazed-killer-on-the-loose ground that hasn’t been covered in some shape or form. Hell, Criminal Minds features a different serial killer every week on CBS. But the killers in most of those tv shows and movies are pussycats compared to the masochistic madmen at the center of Jennifer Lynch’s brutally terrifying Surveillance. It’s hard to talk much about the film without spoiling some aspect of its incredibly clever, twisty-turny, multiple point-of-view plot, but suffice it to say that this movie pulls no punches. It doesn’t wrap things up nice and neat. It leaves the viewer horrified, terrorized and hoping desperately that these particular bogeymen are fictional creations and nothing more. It’s a deeply unsettling film that’s all the more powerful for featuring almost no on screen violence.
03. UP
It almost seems as if Pixar purposefully sets out to make films centered on topics and ideas that, on the surface, appear least likely to produce great films. The animation studio’s latest masterpiece is the resonant story, told with incredible grace and skill, of an old man coming to terms with the death of his wife and finding his place in a world without her. Much of the emotional heft of the film owes to the extraordinary, wordless, ten-minute sequence that follows the film’s central couple from youth to old age as they face some serious (and very adult) problems along the way. And yet, somehow, even with all the emotional heavy lifting, Up is also Pixar’s funniest film yet.
click here to read the full review
02. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
Here, finally, is a film in which Quentin Tarantino has managed to splice together the two disparate styles he favors (long, drawn out dialogue scenes and explosive, provocative violence) in a coherent way that makes sense for the story the film is trying to tell. And unlike in most of the movies he’s made this decade, wherein Tarantino is content simply to have his characters talk about movies, Inglourious Basterds has something more to say about the power of film and the role it plays in the way we see ourselves and our history. The climax of the film features a plot to destroy all of the Nazi high command by igniting piles of old film stock (which, at the time, was made of a highly flammable material). In Inglourious Basterds, film, quite literally, has the power to end World War II. Finally Tarantino has taken the most familiar trope of his films and said something interesting with it.
click here to read the full review
01. ADVENTURELAND
Greg Mottola’s second directorial effort is a love story. But it’s a realistic love story, not whatever it is that Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson and Hugh Grant have been passing off as love stories in their romantic comedies all these years. Perhaps the reason those romantic comedies have prevailed is because it’s extremely difficult to convincingly portray love on screen. It’s difficult for so many reasons, not the least of which being that falling in love doesn’t look exactly the same to any two people. What one person sees as a completely realistic depiction of love may look to another like utter nonsense. Thus I can only speak for myself when I say this, but to me Adventureland contains probably the truest rendering of what it feels like to be young and in love, with the world supposedly at your feet but seeming instead like it’s spinning completely out of control. It evokes a time and a place and a stage of life with such pitch perfect emotional clarity and honesty that at times I was a little embarrassed by how much it affected me. But any film that can peer that deeply into a viewer’s soul is special indeed.
click here to read the full review
HONORABLE MENTION:
MOON
Set on a one-man mining station on the far side of the moon, Duncan Jones’s debut is the best sci-fi film of the year, tapping into the philosophical implications and technological fears that mark the best of the genre.
THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL
For a certain generation, the horror films of the 1980s are unparalleled, offering a perfect mixture of amateur craft and sheer enthusiasm. If no one told you otherwise, Ty West’s spot-on recreation of the classic babysitter-in-peril subgenre could easily pass for a lost 80s horror classic.
AN EDUCATION
Any film that features a naïve seventeen-year-old girl falling in love with a mysterious older man is guaranteed to end badly. An Education is fascinating because it holds off on this inevitability for so long that the viewer thinks maybe this time it'll play out differently. And when, of course, everything finally does fall apart, the result isn’t anything like what you’d expect.
IN THE LOOP
Erudite and funny but also a little sprawling, this fictional behind-the-scenes account of the American and British state departments figuring out how to justify an unjustifiable Middle Eastern war is worth a watch just for the extravagantly baroque profanity alone.
DISHONORABLE MENTION:
(there are plenty of awful movies released every year. to make this list a film has to be both terrible and offensive.)
HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU
This film’s depiction of both men and women is so aggressively offensive and intensely stupid it boggles the mind. The women are shrill, annoying and completely defined by the men in their lives. And the men are awful human beings incapable of any real emotion who need to be tricked into marriage. Avoid like the plague.
click here to read the full review
TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN
There’s so much wrong with Michael Bay’s latest magnum opus that it could serve as a treatise on how not to make a movie. It's deeply stupid, profoundly unfunny and belligerently racist and deserves consideration in any discussion about the worst movies ever made.
click here to read the full review
THE BLIND SIDE
Peter Krough describes the blatant racism in this film better than I ever could: ‘Sandra Bullock's Leigh Anne is insufferably condescending to Michael Oher, who is depicted as a big, dumb, gentle animal. Other black characters come off even worse. Leigh Anne visits and consoles Michael's crack-whore mom, who tearfully calls her a real Christian. She threatens the dope-dealing head gangbanger in Michael's old hood with her connections to the DA's office and the gun in her handbag, and he shrinks before her white power, hiding behind his 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor.
Even more outrageous is her younger son, S.J. (Jae Head), who takes over training Michael. A smarmy homunculus, he rides the mute Michael like a jockey, putting him through his paces like a pint-sized plantation overseer. The coup de grace occurs at the end of the movie on the Ole Miss campus, when Leigh Anne spots Michael casting a sidelong glance at a co-ed. "If you get a girl pregnant," she says sweetly, "I'll cut off your penis."' Real crowd pleasing stuff, huh?
click here to read the full review
THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON
The experience of watching the second installment in what’s been dubbed, rather grandiosely, The Twilight Saga, is akin to getting kicked in the brain: disorienting and painful. It’s disorienting because there’s just no reason that something like this should have earned the shrieking adoration of millions of people, and painful because nothing in it has been crafted with any tact, subtlety or skill.
click here to read the full review
1 comment:
Well done Bella...my netflix is locked and loaded.
Loved Moon.
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