Mid-Year Top Movies - 2009

Article by Zach Saltz

Posted – July 29, 2009

The biggest movie news from 2009 thus far is the Academy’s June 24 decision to increase the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten in a half-hearted attempt to include films which would have otherwise gone unnominated. According to Sid Ganis and the geniuses at the Academy, films like "The Dark Knight" and "Wall-E" were woefully neglected by movie audiences and Academy moguls alike last year because they were not nominated for Best Picture, despite their combined $750,000,000 box office earnings and 14 Oscar nominations. This seems to only validate further the claim that the ghost of last year’s Oscars will not go away, and that the 2008 Academy Awards may have been the worst Oscars in modern history (narrowly beating out 1941, when "Citizen Kane" didn’t win Best Picture, and the infamous 1989 Oscars’ musical duet between Rob Lowe and Snow White).

Despite the attempt at inclusiveness of films that may go unnoticed, none of these films will be nominated for Best Picture. Why do I even care about the Oscars any more? Like Ann Coulter, it unnerves, angers, and nonetheless intoxicates me.

5. Lymelife - (Derek Martini) - Yes, it’s essentially "The Ice Storm," but "The Departed" was a retread of "Infernal Affairs" and "The Dark Knight" made Tommy Lee Jones more charismatic and Jack Nicholson’s charisma about the same. But Martini’s film is a strong retelling of a family’s emotional turmoil featuring a Thanksgiving get-together, a much-maligned affair between friends, and mass hysteria centering around the mysterious spread of Lyme Disease. The film’s multi-generational cast, including Alec Baldwin, Jill Hennessey, and Kieran and Rory Culkin, is uniformly solid, and though the film veers into unnecessary uncharted waters in its ambitious final act, most of the motion picture is enjoyable, funny, and sometimes painfully real cinema.

4. Away We Go - (Sam Mendes) - Avoids most of the pitfalls of the hip, young, trendy summer feature (read: "Garden State," "Little Miss Sunshine") while creating a funny and sweet story about two cynical parents-to-be (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) and their exploits with offbeat and occasionally obscene friends and family. Episodic, to be sure, but with some genuinely entertaining stuff, including 2009’s most hilarious scene so far, involving Josh Hamilton and Maggie Gyllenhaal as tripped-out New Age space cadets(!) Director Mendes is proving to be one of the most versatile filmmakers in America, and "Away We Go" is one of the most versitile romantic comedies in a long while.

3. The Girlfriend Experience - (Steven Soderbergh) -  Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant bow down to inferior big budget projects in order to finance little gems such as this one, which stars real-life porn actress Sasha Gray as a high-price escort model who will go beyond sex to provide her Wall Street clients with relational fulfillment. Feels less like a flesh-happy expose than like a sad documentary, obsessed with its central character’s unhappiness as she casually sells her body and her authenticity for not only money, but a sense of belonging and personal propriety. No great philosophical insights into the meaning of life, but provocative and surprisingly compelling, with a cold, stark performance from Soderbergh’s multi-talented leading lady.

2. Sin Nombre - (Cary Fukunaga) - A great adventure film from start to finish, with classical motifs nicely mixed with modern-day characters and situations. A Mexican gangster on the run (Edgar Flores) and a Guatemalan teen attempting to illegally enter America (Paulina Gaitan) find themselves fleeing from both hoodlums and border police, as they slowly grow to care about and love each other. Includes some terrific action sequences, but the best moments of the film are the quiet, subtle ones, when we see the immediate and unquenchable connection between the two characters, which isn’t born out of love or even sex, but mutual desperation and sadness. Their trek to America extends beyond the politics of illegal immigration, and "Sin Nombre" makes superb statements about the trust and care instincts born within each of us, only evoked when the chances of happiness and fulfillment are thin.

1. Hunger - (Steve McQueen) - Harrowing and horrific, Steve McQueen’s unrelenting prison drama profiles the 66-day hunger strike of Bobby Sands, an IRA radical sent to Maze Prison in 1981. A brutal and vicious film that for stretches is nearly unbearable in its stark savagery, made all the more remarkable by its complete lack of dialogue for the vast majority of the picture. The one spoken sequence, a spellbinding unbroken 16-minute exchange between Sands and a priest, is remarkable in its pontifications into the ethics of self-starvation and protest, along with a summoning of the film’s second half digression into Christ allegory. While "Hunger" may be the most violent film I’ve ever seen, it also manages, incredibly, to be one of the most beautiful, with brilliant imagery and rich camerawork. The lead performance by Michael Fassbinder is excruciating and will not be surpassed this year. Like "Schindler’s List" and "The Passion of the Christ," it is hard to recommend because to call the experience “enjoyable” would be a far cry from to the truth; to call it “important” would be an understatement.

My reaction to hearing the news of ten nominees for Best Picture was similar...