Special: The Top Films of 2009

    One of the great moments of 2009 for me was the release of the trailer for Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. Whether you liked or hated the film, that trailer was simply mesmerizing. Surprisingly, I feel a certain resonance of that trailer in all of 2009. Arcade Fire, in their great song “Wake Up,” sings, “Children don't grow up / our bodies get bigger / but our hearts get torn up.” The image of children growing up in a way has been the major theme of the year in cinema.

    Of course, it helps that two of the most curious children films of the year were not exactly intended for children. Mr. Jonze, along with Wes Anderson and his film Fantastic Mr. Fox, may have been examining childhood stories, but it was a revision—somewhat of a return—to reexamine what actually happened. The images of our childhood are brought back to life, but as Mr. Jonze showed so eloquently, there was sadness, anger, and frustration. Mr. Fox isn’t just stealing chickens for fun—he’s attempting to reconnect to his own days of innocence.

    Others refused to grow up. Ryan Bingham, the protagonist of Up in the Air, along with Sergeant James of The Hurt Locker, both refuse to stop playing with their toys and friends. They want to live only in their imaginary worlds and not understand the danger or consequences around them. The second-level politicians of In the Loop do the same, aiming to make them selves look better than actually see they are sending thousands of men to fight a war. Carl Frederickson of Up tries to rekindle his childhood spirit of adventure by taking him and the memory of his wife to South America. And Jake, the paraplegic hero of James Cameron’s Avatar, is literally reborn in a new body, and must take the adventure of boy to man.

    And what does all this mean? Children are thrown into very adult worlds, while adults act childish in the very same worlds. More than anything, I think the stories and films of 2009 are calls to responsibility. We have had our playtime, our time to cheer, to cry, to annoy, and to moan—now it is time for action. Of course, not every film can claim to these themes, and certainly not every film should be about the same things. And while some of this is loose interpretation, I think it is important to find a unifying message, and to talk about the films that made a difference, cinematically and culturally.

    My top 10 this year includes 11 films (I have a tie), and while I don’t think this has been one of the best years for cinema, it certainly has been an interesting one. Before I get to the top 10 though, I have a number of honorable mentions, many which could have made the list:

-Bright Star saw the great return of director Jane Campion, combining her lyrical compositions with a haunting romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawn, with an excellent supporting performance by Paul Schrader.

-Of this year’s documentaries, none stood out like The Cove, which played more like an action thrill ride than a muckraking documentary, and it had an important message as well.

-Sam Raimi, finally free of big budgets with the Spider-Man films, showed why he is one of the best directors working today with Drag Me to Hell, a hilarious and frighteningly well crafted horror flick that was a true audience pleaser.

-Me and Orson Welles was a curious choice for director Richard Linklater, but it proved to be one of his most light and swiftly made films, with a standout performance from Christian McKay.

-The Romanian New Wave continued its saga of masterpiece works with Cornelieu Porumboi’s Police, Adjective, a curious comedy that dealt with the control of totalitarianism after the fall in a very clever way.

-While some of the best adaptations of novels are loose, The Road proved that direct readings can often be harrowing and beautiful, which Jon Hillcoat did so masterfully in this bleak and stunning film.

-Hollywood proved it can still make good choices by putting J.J. Abrams in charge of the rebooted franchise of Star Trek, which was fun, sassy, and most of all, entertaining and with very strong characterization.

-Sugar is a film I hope many people find their way to on DVD. This baseball story follows a Dominican who comes to the US play minor league baseball, and writer-director team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck skip every cliché in the book to make a haunting film.

-Even more overlooked is the Mexican film Voy a Explotar (I’m Gonna Explode) from director Gerardo Naranjo, which is part Bonnie and Clyde, part Pierret Le Fou, and all thrillingly told with his lucid camera and wonderful young performers.

-And in a landmark year, animation proved itself beyond the borderline of children films with some truly stunning features like Mary & Max, Coraline, Ponyo, and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

I’d also like to highlight eight more films, which I’m giving my “Originality of Vision” awards. These are films that I didn’t personally love, but I found inspired, daring, and at least bold in some way that tried to break from the norm, and may not have succeeded, but at least that tried. They include Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Richard Kelly’s The Box, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Neil Blomkamp’s District 9, Duncan Jones’s Moon, and Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are.

#10 Thirst

Directed by Park Chan-Wook

    Director Park Chan-Wook has been one of the most unique and original voices in cinema in the last ten years, but when it was announced he was doing a film about vampires and sex, it seemed like a dead idea. Twilight has already tiptoed around the issue in a terribly trashy manner, and Alan Ball’s TV series True Blood is extremely overt and simply too over-the-top ridiculous in tone. But leave it to South Korea’s finest director to fine a method that truly explores the strange paradox. What makes Thirst so unique and original is that vampirism isn’t a sign for anything sex related, but he compares the craving to the idea of sin in Catholicism. More than anything else, Mr. Park has made the most beautiful statement on the difficulties of living a truly Catholic life, by using a priest who is tempted both by his need to suck blood in order to live, but also to keep his sexual pleasures in check. With Mr. Park’s wild camera that switches from serious drama, to bloody horror, to screwball comedy in a manner of minutes, Thirst is a devilishly clever reinterpretation of St. Augustine’s Confessions, and one of the most entertaining films of the year.

Thirst is currently available on DVD. Review the original review here. Read an interview with Park Chan-Wook here.

#9 Up

Directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson

    Even in a year of great animation, no one can touch Pixar, which is majestically continued in Pete Docter and Bob Peterson’s Up. What makes Up as revolutionary as their previous films is their bold storytelling, which is willing to use the medium of a children’s films, complete with marketing opportunities for their parent company Disney, and instead tell one of the saddest, most painful stories of the year. Many films deal with grieving parents, shattered memories, and deaths of loved one, but in a four-minute silent montage, Mr. Docter and Mr. Peterson achieve a lifetime of disappointment in a hauntingly beautiful and truly cinematic way. From there, he uses an instantly iconic image—a house that floats with the help of a million colorful balloons—to portray how his protagonist Carl refuses to let go of the past, by literally tying it to his back. Up, with its lush colors, memorable characters, and simply the fact that it is truly an emotional picture that is hard to forget, makes it one of the top choices for the Pixar canon, and establishes that it is truly possible to make films that can appeal to eight year olds and eighty year olds, as well as everyone in between.

Up is currently available on DVD. Review the original review here.

#8 The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant!

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

    In my one tie of the year, the director of these two films asks the big question of 2009: what the hell is with this capitalism? Steven Soderbergh, as experimental and unique as ever, tells two very different tales, both about our greed instinct. The first, the gorgeously digitally shot The Girlfriend Experience, captures the moment of capitalism’s falling, and shows a world in panic, desperately trying to grab onto something physical. Mr. Soderbergh brilliantly casts porn star Sasha Gray as a call girl for Wall Street bankers, and shows both her and her clients attempts to save themselves from the recession, using every trick in the book to stay afloat, but leaving themselves cold and calculated, faking human connection instead of creating real bonds, which is how Mr. Soderbergh creates the desperate environment around him. In his more bold and zany film The Informant!, Mr. Soderbergh looks to the past for answers, and creates one of the most unique comedies ever crafted, by taking an extremely serious, as well as true, story of price fixing and corruption in a middle America company, and adding layers and layers upon it. Along with Matt Damon giving the best performance of the year in a role that is so wildly crafted and truly original in its lack of authenticity throughout, The Informant! makes us understand that capitalism is our nature—we can often commit crimes of greed without even comprehending them. Mr. Soderbergh may have read Caesar before beginning, as he answers with both films “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”

The Girlfriend Experience is currently on DVD. Read the original review here. The Informant! will be released on DVD in the spring. Read the original review here.

#7 The White Ribbon

Directed by Michael Haneke

    If Mr. Soderbergh tells us that greed is in our nature, director Michael Haneke tells us a darker message in The White Ribbon—evil is the fundamental part of our nature. Mr. Haneke’s most conventional film in years is also one of his richest thematically. He astutely places us in a village that we know will raise the children of Nazis, not because he is attempting to explain the rational for Nazism, but attempting to understand how evil is born. What he creates is a story is cyclical nature, where children are brutalized by the authority of their parents, and children in turn brutalize each other in order to gain their own dignity. And while not as bold in its filmmaking as his other features, The White Ribbon is extremely cinematic, simply in Mr. Haneke’s camera choices, and his gorgeous black and white cinematography. He astutely holds us away from the pain and the emotion to keep us as detectives—not to discover who has committed these crimes, but to specifically make us realize how all religion, power, and parents behave when set into a seemingly perfect society. The seeds for evil are always planted by the previous generation.

The White Ribbon is currently in theaters. Read the original review here. Read an interview with Michael Haneke here.

#6 A Single Man

Directed by Tom Ford

Tom Ford may be best known as a fashion designer, and may have filled his first film with rich images throughout, but A Single Man is more daring in how he reserves himself more than anything else. Mr. Ford immediately shows his understanding of the possibility of cinema, by the simple gesture of playing with color composition. When his protagonist, an gay English professor in the 1960s on the verge of suicide, finds a single hint of beauty or life, Mr. ford’s canvas instantly explodes with color in a simple, but potent collection of images. But beyond that own simplicity, A Single Man is a truly timely story about a world removed just one from our own about repression of love, beauty, truth, and many other things. The film delicately balances its grandiose themes by laying it within the context of a person on a single day, one that is a truly unique day. Supported by an amazing cast that includes Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, and Matthew Goode, Mr. Ford has created a stunning image of a truly telling story, and has established himself as one of many directors to watch in years to come.

A Single Man is currently in theaters. Read the original review here.

#5 Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

    James Cameron, who always pushes the envelope of cinema in terms of finance before anything else, once again tries to show that cinema’s best technique is to make us stare in awe more than anything else. In Avatar, Mr. Cameron returns to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and once again retains his status as one of the few director who can make us think that bigger is better. Mr. Cameron truly creates his own unique planet with Pandora, everything from plants, to flies, to his clan of indigenous people, which with the help of Mr. Cameron’s new technology, captures a real performance in a CGI body. All in all, Mr. Cameron takes us through the rabbit hole, along every twist, weaving us through a familiar journey, but in a way that has never been imagined before. The beauty of Avatar is that it is both familiar in story, but wholly unique in its adventure. Its both nostalgic and novelty at the same time, which is why Mr. Cameron is such a talented filmmaker, and one of the few that can manage a large budget, but still keep a truly independent voice. Mr. Cameron invites us to a world that can only be imagined in cinema, and reminds us the purpose of cinema is to be fascinated in its novelty of showing us things we could never otherwise see.

Avatar is currently in theaters. Read the original review here.

#4 In the Loop

Directed by Armando Iannucci

    Armando Iannucci has co-written and directed one of the funniest and brilliantly witty films in recent memory. The only problem is that behind every ridiculously funny line, is a destructive and very unfunny truth about the idiots that run our nation. In the Loop, a comedy of manners, is the story of politicians who fight for themselves more than the country around them. They compete, scheme, and demean, all in the name of their position more than for the good of the United States or Great Britain. But behind every play of words is the haunting truth that the actions of these mid-level politicians will result in a disastrous war that will change the lives of millions. Mr. Iannucci uses language as a weapon, showing how it can be twisted for both good and evil, and for here, mostly evil. It is a deadly concoction of humor in the most vulgar sense, but it shows that language can be used to control—to twist the hearts and minds of the people, and when it comes to the people just below the top, to create personal gain over anything else. In the Loop would of course fail without its amazing cast: Tom Hollander, James Gandolfini, Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky, Paul Higgins, Mimi Kennedy, David Rasche, Zach Woods, and above all else, Peter Capaldi. Mr. Capaldi, who began his character with Mr. Iannucci on the television show The Thick of It, bites, chews, and trashes the words his character Malcolm Tucker is given. But what he shows is that language is the most deadly weapon of all, and whoever can preach the right sermon can lead the people astray.

In the Loop will be released on DVD in the spring. Read the original review here.

#3 A Serious Man

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

    What does it all mean? Why do bad things happen to good people? In what almost feeling like a film that is a culmination of every other one of their works, Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man is one of their most clever, puzzling, difficult, but truly funny and rewarding works. The Coens have constantly established themselves as directors who deconstruct genres and create mysteries about the nature of the world around their protagonists. None is more evident than Larry Gopnick, played with an audaciously hilarious manner by Michael Stuhlbarg, who can’t seem to find out the why to the world. Why is his wife leaving him? His son buying records? His brother building a machine that will solve the universe? The Coens always have a method to their madness, but are never willing to let us in on it. Instead they present their clues, lead us down dead trails, and most brilliantly, leave us in the middle of the lake. In their modern take of The Book of Job, The Coens beautifully craft a tale around their own childhood, coming to terms with it through the trials of their father, and attempt to understand why they led the life they did, and what it all really meant. The sad question, which is at the heart of most of their films, is that it is often nothing. Their trials are irrelevant, the money worth nothing, and the God watching out for them? Nonexistent. A Serious Man ranks among the most strange and wondrous of the Coen Brothers’ unique career.

A Serious Man is currently in theaters. Read the original review here.

#2 Inglourious Basterds

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino always ends up on a movie critic’s list, because he makes movies for people who love movies just as much as him. Inglourious Basterds, his misspelled cinematic journey through World War II, ranks among his most direct films that explores this strange curiosity we have with cinema, and does it through five very unique, and refreshingly original chapters. On a second viewing, one finally understands how each little line of dialogue or strange camera move is essential to the way Mr. Tarantino crafts his story. He throws us not into France during WWII, but Tarantino-land. He takes a genre of films and flips it on its head, turning a revered and prestigious genre into a playground for French New Wave antics, B-movie action, and Spaghetti Western operatic styles. He constantly asks us to consider what he is doing by setting up dual narratives with the same objective, making everyone in the film a cinepheliac, and setting up action sequences that only start after forty minutes of dialogue. Mr. Tarantino likes to play with his audience, and he knows we enjoy his wholly original style. Yet underneath the amusing novelty of Inglourious Basterds is this exploration of how cinema is a storytelling business, and how everything we see these days creates its own myth. The Basterds can’t actually win the war; they are just supposed to be boogie men. The same with Col. Landa and his devilish nickname, the Jew Hunter. He can’t find every Jew, but the fact that his myth is out there creates the fear and paranoia. And cinema itself is the great mythmaking machine, which can turn an ordinary Jewish woman into the giant face of revenge for the Holocaust. Filled with brilliant performance, sharp and cleverly designed dialogue, and wondrous settings and compositions, Inglourious Basterds once again shows why Mr. Tarantino loves movies, and makes us love them just as much.

Inglourious Basterds is currently on DVD. Read the original review here.

#1 The Hurt Locker

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow has created one of the best war movies ever made with The Hurt Locker, a heart-pounding visceral thrill ride that its subtle in its politics, captivating in its performances, and unbelievable in its portrayal of war. Ms. Bigelow, working with Mark Boal as screenwriter, crafts a dynamic story about one of the most hell jobs in the world: deactivating explosives in the most hostile country in the world while in the middle of the war. Ms. Bigelow examines a daring character, played with a dark humor and unbelievable depth by Jeremy Renner, who lives off the adrenaline of death, marching closer every time, and smirking when he cheats it. The repetition of Mr. Boal’s script gives the sense of the endlessness, and the futility of the whole manner. In the film’s most daring scene, two soldiers lie in the desert after an ambush, patiently waiting the kill their enemies, but more than anything, waiting for it to end, to feel safe once again. The Hurt Locker, through Ms. Bigelow’s beautiful construction of space and time, creates daring environments that keep you wholly in tact with the experience of the characters—she rushes through shots, capturing details that keep you paranoid, on the edge of your seat, and ready for anything. And in the end, The Hurt Locker asks why it is necessary for such a futile battle. Sgt. James can survive through the adrenaline, but the others around him find it unnecessary, and simply too much. The difficulty of survival and endurance is the subtle theme of Ms. Bigelow’s masterpiece—she brutally asks us to question the real experience by bringing it to us, as well as question the soldier’s experience by giving us real characters that we can imagine having to work with and be part of. And despite being an action movie, more thrilling and visceral than any other movie in years, Ms. Bigelow is in fact a woman, showing that gender is irrelevant when it comes to filmmaking, and women can do just as good as the boys. And on top of that, The Hurt Locker stands as the first Iraq war narrative to truly capture something unique and important about the war, without using a spoon, but asking difficult questions hidden in a thrill ride unlike anything you have ever seen. The Hurt Locker ranks among the greatest war films ever made—a truly unbelievable film that uses every cinematic technique to capture war in its reality, and send a message to those who will never understand what it is like for those who give their lives for this country.

The Hurt Locker will be released on DVD in January. Read the original review here. Read an interview with Kathryn Bigelow here.