Top 10 Movies - 2009

Article by Zach Saltz

Posted - 1/18/10

2009 was a little better than 2008 and thankfully won’t feature a Best Picture that looks like a two-hour music video for M.I.A., but it still wasn’t all that great.  Hopefully before the world ends in 2012 with John Cusack flying fighter jets from burning buildings, we’ll see the return of believable film entertainment.  And hopefully in two years, Barack Obama won’t inexplicably look as old as Danny Glover (gosh, 2012 jokes are so last October!)

A couple of interesting notes about the year and this list.  Of the 50-plus films I saw, 15 of them had a single word for their title, and I didn’t even see Nine or Zombieland.  Maybe this isn’t interesting to you, but this is a clear sign to me that studios need to get more creative in naming their films.  Does anyone really think that Up was truly the best title they could come up with?  (In fact, this disturbing trend seems spurned on by Disney/Pixar with their recent releases: Cars, Ratatouille, and Wall-E.)  At a certain point, the tendency is to lump these monosyllabic motion pictures together, such as Sugar and Extract, and Bruno and Brothers (all right, the clumpings shouldn’t really be based on what the films are about).  Most of my top films of the 2000s had titles that were three or four words long.  They were also better motion pictures.  Guarantee you if Knowing had expanded its title to Knowing: Port of Call Religious Allegory it would have sold more tickets.

As for this year’s top ten list, this is the first time the words “porn star” and “dolphins” have been mentioned on the same top list since the early 1970s.  Also the first time a guy who’s been dead thirty years (Steve McQueen) has directed a film since the last Warren Beatty flick.  One of the films (The Hurt Locker) sounds like a place for fed-up customers with sore insoles after a visit to The Foot Locker, another (Paranormal Activity) could describe the Dallas Cowboys actually winning a game in December, and another two titles (The Girlfriend Experience, Two Lovers) are currently in the running for the title of Tiger Woods’ new biography.  Don’t worry though: His appearance has now been virtually assured in any future book with the title Inglourious Basterds.  Sha-bam!

(Note: That last paragraph was the best thing I’ve written all year and I’m a graduate student.)

Without further ado:

Honorable mention: The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh), Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog).

10. Away We Go (Sam Mendes) Jon Krasinski and Maya Rudolph play a young couple Ronald Reagan wouldn’t mind personally assassinating (they’re pregnant, unwed, and bi-racial; they also do something in the opening scene Ronnie only did to Margaret Thatcher).  They want to move someplace else, and the story is really just an excuse for them to interact with strange, often foul-mouthed characters in the Dave Eggers universe.  My favorite character was Maggie Gyllenhaal’s baby stroller-abhorring love child English prof.  This is the funniest scene out of any film I saw this year that wasn’t called Bruno.

9. The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh) Sasha Grey kind of does a reverse Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights by being a porn star cast in the lead role of this decidedly non-pornographic pic (reportedly 99% of the straight male audiences wanted their money back).  She’s sometimes a little hollow, but Soderbergh (who seems to have a film on my top list every year – promise it’s not a conspiracy) knows what he’s doing, and her hollowness reflects the character’s boredom with her clients (she’s a call girl) and her fitness-happy boyfriend.  In fact, what comes through clearest here is that having a girlfriend who’s a prostitute isn’t all that bad – she makes bank, looks hot, and gets paid by rich white dudes who can’t do much without the help of a little purple pill.  It’s Grey’s best work since her unforgettable performance in Grand Theft Anal 11.

8. Two Lovers (James Grey) Before Joaquin Phoenix made the all-time YouTube highlight reel with his appearance on Letterman, he made this affecting little gem, where he plays an introverted bi-polar loser with surprisingly good dance skills who falls for Gwyneth Paltrow but gets stuck with Vinessa Shaw.  But like Girlfriend Experience, you really have to ask yourself whether this guy has it bad in the end – Shaw was, after all, the hot girlfriend from Hocus Pocus and the saucy prostitute in Eyes Wide Shut.  For a guy now impersonating Hank Williams Jr. crossed with a little Rutherford B. Hayes, he could do (and by all accounts, should do) a lot worse.

7. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas) As a helpless Seinfeld addict, I’m naturally attracted to films that are about absolutely nothing, and one needn’t look further than French films to fill that void.  This one focuses on three grown children as they decide what to do with their elderly mother’s elaborate estate after she dies.  In an American film, the brother would be sleeping with the sister-in-law and there would be a host of nephews and nieces on steroids and diet pills, respectively.  In this film . . . well I can’t say that stuff doesn’t exactly happen, but I can say that the central dramatic thrust of the film is how valuable the house’s belongings are according to the appraisers.  So, if you’re a fan of PBS’s can’t miss combo of Upstairs Downstairs and Antiques Roadshow, it’s safe to say you’ll enjoy this movie as much as I did.

6. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino) My favorite intentionally misspelled film since I’m Gonna Git You Sucka!  Also, my favorite review of any ’09 film from the Focus On the Family movie review website (comparing the film to Hogan’s Heroes, the reviewer shamelessly concludes: “Hogan never dropped any F-bombs!”)  The film is chalk full of crazy Tarantino characters, ranging from the likes of backwoods Lieutenant Aldo Raine, Colonel Hans Landa, and even a guest appearance by Winston Churchill (sorry, reports that Nicolas Cage reprised his Fu Manchu role from Werewolf Women of the S.S. are false).  Even though the end of the film is questionable in its intent (Tarantino cannot change history as easily as he can correct spelling), it’s still good bloody fun, and in a year of the Twilight sequel, blood desperately needs to be made fun once again.

5. The Cove (Louie Psihoyos) We already knew the Japanese were pretty despicable.  Godzilla. Pokemon.  The male kimono.  But after watching and being shocked by The Cove, one realizes they haven’t come off this bad since Tokyo Disneyland.  Psihoyos examines the genocide of dolphins that routinely takes place off the Japanese southern coast that the government has hidden from the international fishing community as well as its own citizens for decades.  Spearheaded by the former trainer on Flipper, the motley crew of government ops and skin divers attempt to expose the mass slaughter.  A horrifying film that illustrates why, once again, corrupt governments are usually not the best providers for their citizens or their marine life. 

4. Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli) In a raucous, jam-packed theater on a Saturday night in a small Midwest college town with people throwing popcorn at the movie screen . . . I was still scared out of my mind at this movie.  I opted to sleep in the chilly autumn cold for weeks just so I wouldn’t be awakened terrified by the sounds of the heater going off in my apartment in the middle of the night.  All right, I confess – this film made a complete wimp out of me, and it will likely make you one too.  My balls were ripped off faster than when I saw Beaches.  The actors here clearly modeled their normal-people-who-would-rather-get-killed-than-turn-off-their-camera performances after Heather from The Blair Witch Project and from what I could hear, their screams were nearly as good . . . that is, when the audience wasn’t screaming over them.

3. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow) A movie that takes place in the turbulent, violent streets of a war-ravaged Iraq, but remains staunchly apolitical about who’s right and who’s wrong.  What does come through here is that war is a drug to which its most fervent and reckless soldiers are helplessly addicted.  One such soldier is Sergeant First Class William James (played in a hopefully Oscar-winning performance by Jeremy Renner) who disarms IEDs without wearing a protective suit and throws his radio out when he gets annoyed.  He’s a hotshot, yes, but one with enough savvy and enough emotional aloofness to survive the brutal conditions.  This is the best film made to date about the conflict in Iraq precisely because it is about what the other films have, for the most part, entirely avoided: The day-to-day realities of soldiers on the ground.

2. Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga) Boy meets girl, girl loves boy, boy barely notices girl until she begs him to accompany her as she attempts to illegally enter the United States by way of sitting atop a northern bound train through the slums of Mexico.  It’s a little like El Norte except with guns, gangs, and subtle, sad romance that inevitably ends in complete tragedy.  Like The Hurt Locker, Fukunaga’s film is a portrait of a politically charged “hot-button” issue that doesn’t definitively state one thing over another, but does adequately portray the dire straits immigrants face attempting to flee their shattered lives and start in America anew.  Through their journey, the two characters slowly (and realistically) grow to trust and depend on one another, which makes their story timeless, regardless of the political climate they find themselves immersed in.

1. Hunger (Steve McQueen) The shit doesn’t hit the fan, but it does hit the prison walls quite a bit in this remarkable debut motion picture (by McQueen the director, not the actor), which chronicles the 66-day hunger strike of Bobby Sands, an IRA rebel locked up at Maze Prison in 1981.  Michael Fassbender almost outdoes Christian Bale in The Machinist by putting his body under complete shambles, cutting himself down to raw flesh and bone.  But the performance only makes up a slight fraction of the film’s power: It is a story about activism, and whether being selfless truly leads to proliferation and liberation.  It is a film that shows desperation and alienation at its most stark – made all the more powerful by the film’s nearly complete absence of spoken dialogue – and resurrection through self-sacrifice.  If the overtones sound religious, they unmistakably are, but the film doesn’t dwell on it.  Instead, like the angel in Wings of Desire, it is merely content to gaze helplessly from a distance, as suffering and brutality dominate the screen visually.  It’s rigorously audacious and unsettlingly painful to watch, but nonetheless beautiful at times and completely unforgettable, for better or for worse.