SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE – amy jones – 2.5 / 10

This film fits the slasher movie blueprint to a 't,' almost as if it were constructed with that as the goal.  To wit: there’s some tragic event in the past that comes back to haunt a bunch of young women left all alone with no one in authority.  And then they’re hunted by a madman and picked off one by one.  Whatever merit there is in being able to paint within the lines, this film achieves it.

 

ROBIN HOOD – ridley scott – 6.0 / 10

The latest in Ridley Scott’s long list of staggeringly mediocre, perfectly acceptable but nonetheless occasionally visually striking films, Robin Hood is, as all Scott’s films are, overlong, tedious and curiously devoid of passion and emotion. This is, of course, completely unsurprising since Ridley Scott hasn’t made a genuinely good film since 1982’s Blade Runner. But he also hasn’t made an outright bad film since then either. He just makes absolutely pedestrian movies, of which Robin Hood is merely the latest.

IRON MAN 2 – jon favreau – 5.5 / 10

Do you love Robert Downey, Jr.? If you do, if you’d be content watching him read the proverbial phone book for two hours, then you might enjoy Iron Man 2. If, on the other hand, you merely like Downey (I can’t imagine anyone outright disliking the guy, he’s just too charismatic), Iron Man 2 is going to be something of a bore. Because make no mistake, this is the Robert Downey, Jr. show; and if you don’t find his portrayal of Tony Stark endlessly fascinating, you’re going to find an awful lot of this film to be incredibly tedious.

THE TOP TEN FILMS OF 2009

my list of the ten best films of the year along with a few honorable and dishonorable mentions.

(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.)

KICK-ASS – matthew vaughn – 7.0 / 10

Though it’s being touted as some sort of critique or satirization of the comic book-based superhero blockbusters that have taken over the multiplex in recent years, Kick-Ass, perhaps unsurprisingly, wants to have its cake and eat it too, to be both a satire and a straight-up superhero movie. And for a while, when the critique is confined to the half of the film featuring Kick-Ass and the superhero stuff confined to the half of the film featuring Hit Girl and Big Daddy, this tactic sorta works. But, inevitably, Kick-Ass, the ‘superhero’ alter ego of uber-nerd Dave Lizewski, despite spending the first two-thirds of the film proving just how stupid the idea of donning spandex and fighting crime really is, ultimately saves the day and in the process completely undercuts anything interesting the film was trying to say.

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS – ryan murphy – 3.1 / 10

I guess the book this film is based on must be pretty good.  How else to explain how all of these demonstrably talented people got snookered into being in this film.  It’s no secret that I love Ryan Murphy’s series Nip / Tuck (the first couple seasons anyway).  And his direction and writing on that show are often exemplary.  The direction of this film (his feature debut) is workmanlike but serviceable, mostly getting out of the way of the ‘hilarious’ and ‘heartbreaking’ events of the film.  It’s the writing that fails him.  In the special features on the DVD, Augusten Burroughs, the author of the ‘personal memoir’ upon which the film is based talks at length about Murphy’s determination in pursuing this project.  That leads me to believe that Murphy feels some sort of personal connection to the weirdness on display here.  And maybe that’s why he misses the mark by so much.  Maybe he thought that other people would connect to the story as he did.  Maybe he just took for granted that the story was compelling on its own.

 

THE BEST ALBUMS OF THE OO'S

Before we get into the list proper, a word about how I determined the order of the twenty albums below. In order to be as scientific as possible, I compiled three separate lists. For the first list, I determined the average number of plays per song on each album (since iTunes keeps track of the play count and I only ever listen to music on iPods, this was as simple as adding up the total number of plays per album and dividing it by the number of tracks). For the second list, I determined the overall rating of each album (adding together the number of stars (out of five) I’d given each track and dividing that by the total number of possible stars (the number of tracks times five)). The third list was simply a ranking of where I thought the albums would place if I was being unscientific.

I then took these three lists and averaged out the albums’ placement on all three to arrive at a final score. I arranged the albums according to that final score (with certain allowances for the fact that I didn’t have iTunes (and hence the ability to keep track of play counts) until late 2003) to arrive at the final list of the twenty best albums of the 2000s.

Why go to all that trouble? Well, without taking into account factors like the total number of plays per album, it would be easy to convince myself that albums I admired more than liked should place higher, that, say, Fennesz’s Endless Summer should place higher than The Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow. But by being as scientific as possible, I was able to (hopefully) eliminate any bias I might have had.

All right, then, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, on to the list.

FOOD, INC. - robert kenner - 6.0 / 10

Lately there’s been an increase in what you might call social commentary documentaries. Traditionally relegated to the back of the book store, these sorts of polemics (often liberal and always one-sided) have, since An Inconvenient Truth made $50 million and won an Oscar, more and more begun to morph into documentaries. In and of itself this isn’t cause for alarm. But when they aren’t filmed or edited with any particular grace or style, offer no real narrative throughline and clearly leave one side out of the debate, they can become quite tedious.

PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF – chris columbus – 2.9 / 10

The director of such insipid middlebrow fare as Bicentennial Man, Mrs. Doubtfire and I Love You, Beth Cooper as well as the man responsible for almost killing the Harry Potter film franchise before it started (having directed the first two terrible entries before Alfonso Cuaron came in to save the series with the third film) returns with a mishmash of Greek mythology that possesses one of the oddest and most pernicious messages of any film I’ve ever seen aimed at kids.

CRAZY HEART – scott cooper – 2.5 / 10

Even before his celebrated turn in Crazy Heart, it was well established that Jeff Bridges was one of the best actors working today. He disappears so completely into every role that it seems as if he must, in real life, be exactly like the character he’s playing. When you watch The Big Lebowski, for instance, you believe that Bridges is exactly like The Dude, the aging hippie he plays in that film. Similarly, when you watch The Contender, you completely believe that he’s as thoughtful and confident in real life as the President he plays in that film is. Of course, since those characters are so different from each other, what that really means is that Bridges is just damn good. His work appears effortless. You can never catch him acting.

SHUTTER ISLAND – martin scorsese – 6.5 / 10

The reason that there are so many films about World War II has, I think, a lot to do with the Holocaust. A filmmaker can easily piggyback on the horror of the death camps as a sort of emotional shorthand. A few shots of emaciated corpses and grief-stricken loved ones and the film gains an instant amount of emotional credibility. Similarly, filmmakers so often give their main characters tragic pasts (dead wives, dead children, both in the case of Shutter Island) because it allows them to easily and without any real effort make the audience care about and feel for their protagonists. This tactic is clumsy and cheap but it’s undeniably effective.

THE BEST FILMS OF THE 00'S

my picks for the fifteen best films of the decade.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE – paul thomas anderson – 10 / 10

Even before the film begins, it’s abundantly clear that Punch-Drunk Love is something different. It’s a relatively short film from Paul Thomas Anderson, a director known for making very lengthy movies. And it’s a drama starring Adam Sandler, an actor known almost exclusively for his sophomoric comedies. Then the film begins and it becomes clear just how different it really is. But in this case, different is wonderful. Punch-Drunk Love bears almost no resemblance to any love story you’ve ever seen. Despite that or, perhaps more accurately, because of it, the film is able to evoke the joy, pain, unpredictability and volatility of love better than just about anything else out there.

IT’S COMPLICATED – nancy meyers – 0.7 / 10

Make no mistake, It’s Complicated is porn for middle-aged woman. Jane Adler (Meryl Streep, in shrill Mamma Mia mode) is the walking talking embodiment of everything a fiftysomething woman could possibly want. She’s the chef / owner of a successful restaurant. She has three grown children who are all beautiful, well adjusted and well on their way to being successful. She has a group of friends who fall all over each other to tell her how great she is. She’s got a fabulous home complete with a huge garden (both of which seem to magically require no upkeep). The architect designing the addition that she’s planning (which will double the size of her house) is head over heels in love with her. And now her ex-husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin, happily reveling in his physical shortcomings), even though he’s remarried to a hot thirty-year-old, finds her irresistible. The dialogue in the film is pretty much an unending stream of compliments to her and everyone seems to appreciate and respect her. Who wouldn’t want to be Jane?

THE HURT LOCKER – kathryn bigelow – 7.8 / 10

There are a few pieces of advice you often hear in relation to movies. One of them that’s undoubtedly true is that a good ending forgives a lot. A film that has a solid ending leaves the audience walking out of the theater feeling good about the movie and thus more likely to talk positively about it. You might call this The Sixth Sense effect. The reverse is also true. A great movie that ends poorly cancels out all the good will it’d built up to that point and leaves the audience feeling unsatisfied. You could call it the Unbreakable effect.

THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – paul greengrass – 9.3 / 10

As anyone who’s talked with me (or, more accurately, listened to me talk) about movies for any length of time can tell you, I generally hate movies that employ a shaky handheld camera aesthetic. In fact, I even disliked it pretty severely in The Bourne Supremacy, this film’s immediate predecessor. The look is meant to convey immediacy and a you-are-there sense of documentary realism. But for reasons I’ve detailed elsewhere, that never works for me. It succeeds only in making the film in question seem cheap and slapdash. Mostly it just makes we me want to send the director a gift certificate for a tripod. But then along comes The Bourne Ultimatum, the exception that proves the rule.

AVATAR – james cameron – 4.4 / 10

An awful lot has been made about James Cameron’s first film in twelve years being some kind of game changer that takes cinema to a new level or some such nonsense. To be sure, Avatar is visually very impressive both in its utilization of 3D and in its photorealistic environments that only ever existed in a computer mainframe. Unfortunately, being visually stunning is only enough to occupy the audience’s mind for half an hour or so. At that point there needs to be some kind of story or character development in order to sustain the audience’s interest for the remaining two hours, and Avatar provides none.

UP IN THE AIR – jason reitman – 3.9 / 10

Unlike most movie stars who really only play minor variations of a single character (Will Smith’s everyman good guy, Brad Pitt’s coolest guy in the room, Tom Cruise’s all American hero) George Clooney has a couple default modes. He’s either the witless idiot (O, Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, The Men Who Stare at Goats) or the suave sophisticate who’d rob you blind and get thanked for the privilege (Ocean’s Eleven, Three Kings, Michael Clayton). Up in the Air sees him earning critical raves for doing a combination of the two. And to be sure, Clooney’s performance is at least half of the (very limited) appeal of this boring, completely obvious ode to normal workaday life. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save what is, at bottom, a very tedious and rock solidly conservative piece of awards-baiting nonsense.

THE BLIND SIDE – john lee hancock – 1.5 / 10

If anything about film can be said to be dangerous it’s that a movie can be simultaneously both horribly offensive and skillfully made. John Lee Hancock’s latest is a case in point. If you’re not paying all that much attention, The Blind Side seems like an enjoyable, if somewhat hackneyed and clichéd, crowd-pleaser. But if you look a little closer, it becomes clear just how horrifyingly racist the film is.

NEW MOON – chris weitz - 1.9 / 10

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.

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU - ken kwapis - 0.1 / 10

Before even sitting down in the theater, I knew this was going to be bad. The signs were all there. Its release date had been pushed at least twice. The studio that made it sold it to another studio before distributing it (something you don't do if you think you have a decent product on your hands). And I'd seen the trailer so many times I could quote most of it (always a bad sign as it means they're trying to get everyone to see it opening day because they know word of mouth will be so awful that it'll soon kill the film). But even knowing it was going to be bad, I didn't expect it to be this bad, and outright offensive besides. He’s Just Not That Into You is one of the most offensive, most odious films I've ever seen, and certainly the most offensive film I've seen this past year (one that included cinematic gems such as Rachel Getting Married and Twilight).

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY – oren peli – 4.0 / 10

I’m not sure if the backlash against Oren Peli’s no budget horror film has already begun, but if it hasn’t, let me start it now. Far from the ‘scariest film ever made,’ Paranormal Activity is little more than long stretches of boring people talking about themselves punctuated by the occasional jump scare that could’ve been rigged up by any fifth grader with a decent imagination and a couple hours to kill.

RATATOUILLE - brad bird - 9.2 / 10

Creating art of any kind and then sending it out into the world to be evaluated, critiqued and judged is a singularly strange experience whether the ‘art’ in question is a book, a movie, a song, a meal or even a letter to the editor. Though the creator of this object-- whatever it may be-- didn’t necessarily create their work to satisfy other people, there’s no doubt that the reward of seeing an audience (even an audience of one) appreciating what you’ve created can be very great indeed. Just as, similarly, the disappointment of failing to connect to your audience can be crippling. Something that you’ve trained for years to do, thought and planned about for days on end, and worked tirelessly to perfect is then sent out into the world to be judged by people who may or may not even give your work their full attention. The artist knows that their opinion shouldn’t matter. And yet, pleasing them is validating in a way that nothing else in life ever really can be. And when that satisfied audience is a knowledgeable one-- a critic, say, or a friend whose opinion you value-- the satisfaction is that much sweeter. That singularly gratifying feeling is what Ratatouille, the story of a rat who becomes a gourmet chef, is really about; and it’s what provides the film’s deeply satisfying climax.

ALL THE REAL GIRLS – david gordon green – 8.6 / 10

It would, of course, be an oversimplification to say that there are only two kinds of film dramas. There are, however, two opposing, polar opposite kinds of dramas with everything else (more or less) falling somewhere in between. On the one side you have the kind of drama that attempts to mimic life as closely as possible. The characters, settings, structure and style are almost indistinguishable from that of a documentary. Scenes can be long and meandering or short and seemingly without purpose. The actors are often not very attractive (or, if they are attractive, they’re dressed in such a way as to de-emphasize that attractiveness). The lighting is often drab. The shots are almost uniformly handheld. And, much like in life, this sort of drama almost never has any real sense of closure. For lack of a better term, let’s refer to this sort of film as ‘realist.’

DISTRICT 9 – neill blomkamp – 7.5 / 10

Compared to the average summer blockbuster, G.I. Joe or Transformers for instance, District 9 is something of a masterpiece. It manages to be entertaining and engrossing while also having something on its mind. That’s a rare and somewhat special accomplishment that should be celebrated. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the film is actually a masterpiece.

The back story and plot of District 9 are actually rather basic. Three decades ago, an alien spacecraft entered our atmosphere and began hovering over Johannesburg. After months with no activity, the South Africans boarded the ship and found about a million aliens (whom they dubbed, rather derisively, ‘prawns’) alive but seemingly stranded. The aliens were moved to a makeshift camp outside Johannesburg, the titular district 9, where they’ve lived as outcasts and second class citizens for the past thirty years. As the film opens, district 9 is in such a state of lawlessness and disrepair that the government has decided to move the aliens into a newly constructed facility 200 miles away from any human population centers. The plot of the film concerns the difficulties encountered during this forced relocation.

That the film is set in a ghetto just outside the South African capital is a deliberate attempt to draw a parallel between the back story of this film and apartheid. And, indeed, the similarities between the treatment of the aliens at the hands of the humans and the treatment of the native African population by the ruling white Afrikaners during Apartheid is a rich one. It’s impossible to listen to the humans talking about the aliens as if they were unwelcome pests over images of the aliens’ terrible living conditions without drawing the shudder-inducing conclusion that we’ve done the same sort of thing to our fellow humans for almost all of our history. It’s a bold and thorny issue to raise in what’s basically just an action picture and is thus all the more effective because of it.

Wikus van der Merwe (a terrific Sharlto Copley, in his first film role) is the bureaucrat charged with relocating the aliens. And as he sets about evicting them from their pathetic hovels, District 9 can be hard to watch. Backed by a team of elite military troops who shoot to kill at the slightest provocation, Wikus forces the aliens to do whatever he wants with no explanation and complete disregard for the havoc he's introducing into their lives. In these sequences, the humans treat the aliens so inhumanely that the audience’s sympathies are firmly on the side of the rather grotesque looking ‘prawns.’ And as the film progresses and Wikus (rather predictably, I’m afraid) finds himself becoming more and more aligned with the aliens, the humans become the villains and the aliens the heroes.

This is a rather bold approach to what is essentially an alien invasion film. In the long history of such films (which dates back at least to the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956), you’d be hard pressed to find more than a few films (ones with any real budget anyway) that attempted to get their audience to root for the destruction of human life in order to preserve the lives of the aliens. That District 9 is able to so thoroughly accomplish this role reversal is a testament to how powerful the film can be.

Unfortunately, as solid as the film is thematically, its execution leaves something to be desired. The first ten or so minutes of District 9 sets the film up to be a sort of documentary from sometime in the future, after the events which are about to unfold have happened. The film begins with what appears to be outtakes from a cable news interview with Wikus as he prepares to begin the alien relocation program. This footage is intercut with other interviews of the various players in the coming drama talking about the events of the film as if they had already happened. In essence, these first minutes set the film up as a something of a video history of the fictional events we are about to see. Thus we get lots of shots of news camera footage, some video shot by surveillance cameras, footage Wikus’s team shot during the forced relocation and even what appears to be video taken by some random bystanders.

But then, out of absolutely nowhere, the style of the film suddenly changes. Director Neill Blomkamp (making his directorial debut) cuts away from all this ‘real’ footage to show a couple of the aliens talking to each other. The film continues in this way for a little while before switching back to the news, surveillance and other ‘found’ footage. But then, a few minutes later, Blomkamp cuts to back to the aliens. Then, a few scenes after that, we start to see Wikus outside of the footage shot by either a news crew or his team. We see him at home, at work, even in the bathroom.

It’s such a radical shift in point of view that it jars the viewer completely out of the movie. Why bother going through all the trouble of establishing the point of view of the film as that of a distant, removed bystander only to suddenly shift to the point of view of Wikus and his alien allies halfway through? Why set up the film to be a faux documentary only to break that format almost as soon as it’s been established? On top of that, the un-sourced footage is shot in the same handheld style as the sourced footage, which blurs the line between the points of view and makes it seem like Blomkamp was aware of what he was doing and trying to hide it so that the audience wouldn’t notice.

Eventually, as the film uses more and more narrative, un-sourced footage and less and less of the news and surveillance camera footage, the shift in point of view becomes slightly less jarring. But it’s always there, on the edges, nagging at you. And it left me wondering, more than once, why the audience was allowed to see what we were seeing. If the filmmakers weren’t going to follow the rules they themselves had established, why go to the trouble of establishing them in the first place?

If, however, you can get past the point of view problems in District 9, there are plenty of little grace notes in the film that play like a breath of fresh air in a genre that had lately become old and tired. Take, for instance, the fact that our human weapons can destroy the alien technology. So conditioned are we, from countless other alien invasion films like Independence Day or The Day the Earth Stood Still, to think that alien technology is impervious to our puny weaponry, that it comes as something of a shock when a human missile is able to severely cripple one of the alien spacecraft.

There’s also the matter of the human names that are given to the aliens. Though it goes largely uncommented upon by the characters in the film, the idea that we would force such mundane names upon these creatures calls to mind the way we forced slaves to adopt the surnames of their masters in the antebellum American south or the way the Australians forced the Aborigines to take on ‘normal’ English names in early twentieth century Australia.

Small moments like those add up to a rich, complex and detailed film that has an awful lot on its mind. That it manages to raise all those questions while also being a genuinely gripping action film is a testament to the filmmaking skill on display here. If they'd just dispensed with the distracting and convoluted faux documentary set up, District 9 might have been truly great without having to tack on the qualifying phrase ‘for an summer action film.’