Home » Movies

Movies

Best and Worst Films of 2009
By Sean Chavel

It was a year when genre movies trumped "important" prestige films. The best "important" one is number #4 on my list, and it doesn't conduct itself as a message-laden film - it thrills and exhilarates then respects you to extract the message. Then there is #9 and #10. How do I list these anyway? My method is, the closer you get to number #1, the more exhilarating the movie was to me. In some years the real important movies are the ones that entertain the hell out of you. These are my eternal classics:

BEST OF 2009

1. Paranormal Activity - If you think like I do then you will agree that "The Shining" and "The Exorcist" are on Tier One as the greatest horror films ever made. "Paranormal" can now take the lead at the top of Tier Two. Taking place entirely inside a San Diego home where one boyfriend records infinitely with his video camera toy and a girlfriend haunted by the unknown, the film slowly creeps on you until it builds to unrelieved terror. As a result, the loudest screams in a movie theater you've heard in years if you were lucky enough to see this in a packed house. The fact that the best film of the year was principally made for $11,000 goes to say that if you live long enough you will eventually find something to surprise you. Yet there certainly must be a reason why the film rattles your nervous system so effectively. It has a way of tapping into fears that you thought were long dormant, and then extrapolating them. In a word: Primal.

2. Inglorious Basterds - Quentin Tarantino, giving good name to agonizing suspense as well as to stylistic homage, compiled a perfect cast for an awesome assembly of characters in this boyhood fantasy of American G.I.'s kicking Nazi ass in a fictional WWII. The opening sequence between Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz, the best villain Q.T. has ever created) and the French farmer is the best written sequence this year or perhaps in many years. Never before has there been a movie character that has used ingratiating qualities to such powerful, ironically menacing effect.

3. Observe and Report - Black comedy comparable to Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy," by some others compared to "Taxi Driver," one of those films you can't see its greatness until you've seen it two, three, maybe five times. As long as you believe that a comedy isn't required to have likeable characters then you will be knocked punch-drunk by Seth Rogen's bi-polar mall cop. Here's a guy who honestly and truly believes that his anti-social behavior is social normalcy. Second endorsement: Tarantino praised it as one of his faves of the year.

4. The Hurt Locker - Authentically filmed in the shrapnel littered conditions of the Middle East, the mesmerizing Jeremy Renner is the leader of a bomb disposal team in Baghdad. The title is symbolic of Renner's obsession with mementos of his past assignments, but the film digs deeper into his paradoxical compulsion to risk-take for the sake of risk-taking - he's a field operative who thrives on the adrenaline. The most haunting final shot at the movies this year.

5. Bruno -Sacha Baron Cohen is the preeminent avant-garde performer of our time, battery ramming his character into real world encounters and eliciting shocked reactions from onlookers. It's not the plot that's important, it's the anything goes quasi-documentary method that is which here veers into what should be called borderline documentary. By turns outrageous and side-splitting, then fascinating and intolerable, this is perhaps the only comedy that could be seen as a puke-your-guts-out rollercoaster ride and ask for seconds.

6. Departures - This Japanese film touched my heart more than any other this year, containing scenes that I am forever grateful for. While it initially stirred me upon my first viewing, I had no idea how much I really loved it until I reviewed the similarly themed but vacuous "My Sister's Keeper" two months later. Failed cellist Diago is a nokanshi, a man who performs ceremonial washing of corpses before their burial. It remains uplifting and spiriting even despite its cadaverous theme possibly because it honors and cherishes the memory of the dead, while soothing the hearts of the living.

7. Up in the Air - George Clooney as a termination specialist who travels nearly every day of the year, embracing his roaming lifestyle. He meets Vera Farmiga, also a woman of non-commitments. Jason Reitman ("Thank You for Smoking," "Juno") is once again the director of a smart, devious comedy that this time taking us all over the map, both literally and thematically.

8. Public Enemies - Underrated. Contains some of the most ironically beautiful and evocative cinematography of the year, while seducing you into the art deco texture of the 1930's. Christian Bale is a stiff as the agent on pursuit, but Johnny Depp as John Dillinger is the embodiment of criminal cool, a bank robber who saw recklessness and exhilaration as one and the same.

9. Precious - For those few people out there who thought "Juno" was too insincere and irresponsible (I don't know how you could, it's only a comedy) here's an honest heartbreaking reel: a portrait of an obese 16-year old Harlem girl who becomes a mother to two children. Gabourey Sidibe turns the title morose inward character into a revelation, but one of the year's great performances belongs to Mo'Nique who channels short-fuse fury as the abusive, oppressive mother.

10. Invictus - A Nelson Mandela biopic could have existed without giving us the marketing hook of rugby, but still, the two have been honorably integrated. And Morgan Freeman delivers one of his great performances. But highest praise to director Clint Eastwood's awe-inspiring location shooting.

Overlooked:

Julia - Is she the best living actress today? Tilda Swinton is a pitiless, self-absorbed alcoholic-cum-tramp who commits the hefty crime of kidnap-and-ransom which snowballs into multiple heftier crimes. The year's best under-the-radar thriller, although it is more of a human wreckage character study.

Milestones:

Best Documentary: "Tyson"
Best Animated Film: "Fantastic Mr. Fox"
Best Actor and Supporting Actor: Jeremy Renner in "The Hurt Locker" and Christoph Waltz in "Inglorious Basterds"
Best Actress and Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton in "Julia" and Mo'Nique in "Precious"
Best Cameo: Harrison Ford in "Bruno"
Most Surprising Robert DeNiro caliber classic performance: Seth Rogen in "Observe and Report"
Best Montage: "Observe and Report" exhibiting Rogen's off-medication nihilism followed by the beatdown of hooligan skateboarders.
Best Artistic use of Black & White: The opening sequence in "Antichrist"
Best Musical Interlude: "(500) Days of Summer"
Best Love Scene: Drew Barrymore directed the underwater tableau in "Whip It"
Best Sex Scene: The Korean vampire movie "Thirst" by Chan-Wook Park
Twenty dick jokes too many: "Funny People"
Two Hundred Eyebrow Twitches too many: Kristen Stewart in "New Moon"

Worst Films of the Year:

1. Miss March - So smutty and juvenile it makes you almost wonder for a moment if Playboy has ever been sexy.

2. Flame & Citron - Danish film replete with the most idiotic WWII clichés in ages. A blockbuster in its native country, this marks proof that the Danish are capable of having just as much bad taste as Americans when it comes to overhyped and shallow action spectacle. Then it takes itself so damn seriously.

3. 17 Again - Pervasively stupid. Characters adamantly act without thinking. Characters react slow when introduced to new surroundings. Characters demonstrate absent memories outside of a two-minute time span.

4. Management - Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn comedy that loses its sense of priority. To makes us laugh, to make insightful human observations.

5. Away We Go - John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are a couple with a baby on the way and obnoxious supporting characters along the way, against director Sam Mendes' washed-out color palette. The most literate movie on this worst list, yet so dreary it's soul-crushing.

White Wedding
By Crystal A. Johnson

Among the foreign films vying for Oscar consideration in the Foreign Language category is a little South African film called White Wedding. Don't let the idea of a foreign language film scare you, because it is primarily in English. White Wedding is a romantic comedy about the road to marriage. The main story revolves around Elvis played by Kenneth Nkosi (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency) who is also a producer of the film. Elvis is an all around good guy who wants nothing more than to be united with his fiancé and make it to the wedding in Cape Town. However, hurdle after hurdle slows the process. Meanwhile as the problems of Elvis unveil, a sub-story comes into play about Rose, an English woman unlucky in love department who comes to South Africa to escape her love story gone awry. Although, love clearly takes center stage in White Wedding, culture, traditions and social issues of the South African culture are the back drop.

There are no shortage of obstacles in this tale. The hurdles before Elvis include missing his bus, losing his mode of transportation, having a spat with his best friend, having a spat with his fiancé, contending with her looming well to do ex-boyfriend and the list goes on. The concerns for Elvis's fiancé Ayanda include planning a wedding wear she is torn between South African community traditions and the desire for a more contemporary white wedding. Ayanda's mom is often seen in the background as a wise and traditional matriarchal figure. Moreover, Ayanda's ex-boyfriend Tony has returned from the United State as a well off prime catch. Tall, smooth and confident, Tony makes it obvious that he would like to pick up where they left off despite Ayanda's plans for marriage. The chemistry is still there but there is a lot of baggage. Ayanda knows that Elvis is a good man but his tardiness, and few hiccups along the way in this story feed into Ayanda's fears about being left at the alter.

Although it doesn't seem like it, the weepy hitch hiker Rose is in the right place in the right time when she meets Elvis and Tumi. Needless to say, there are some bumps in the road for this union.

The existence of racism in South Africa is tackled for part of the story. The subject is approached in a palatable way, smothered with comedic bits. However, I found to have gross stereotypes of racists dumb bumpkins tired and redundant. The location may be South Africa but the racists could be mistaken for southern U.S.A back woods racists. The problem with this image is it continues to perpetuate this type of thinking to be only among uneducated folks.

Kenneth Nkosi is an unlikely leading man but the comedic story seems to play on his round belly in an opening scene. Audiences may find Nkosi to be a relatable average Joe in love. At times his character is annoying when played opposite the character Tumi. You shouldn't root for the charismatic playboy Tumi but the performance is given with vulnerability which at times overshadows Elvis's self-righteousness. Elvis points the finger at Tumi about his short comings so much that he inadvertently becomes an underdog.

At times, White Wedding is rather silly but for the most part it is an entertaining film. It garnered an Audience Award from the Hill Valley Film Festival.

It is truly a relational film about past loves, current love, trust, hurt and moving on. Furthermore, it cleverly intertwines issues of old and new world South Africa. Not only show the conflict between Blacks and Whites but it also shows the intra-contract Black Africans have about loosing cultural norms.

Leap Year
By Owen Gleiberman

The stars of romantic comedies used to be better than they are now at pretending that they don't like each other. In a movie like It Happened One Night (1934), Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert gave such good antagonism that you just knew they were meant to be together. The bickering wasn't petty; it was proof that they had the sparky toughness - the ego - for love. In Leap Year, Amy Adams plays Anna, a real estate exhibitor who chases her mealy cardiologist boyfriend (Adam Scott) all the way to Ireland to propose to him on leap-year day (an old Irish custom). Matthew Goode is Declan, the tall, faraway-eyed scruffy-dreamboat Irish bartender who, for 500 euros, agrees to shepherd Anna to Dublin. The two spend the movie roving through the countryside, from pubs to inns to old castles to crashed weddings, working their way through various levels of annoyance, class warfare, and petulant erotic tension.

The director, Anand Tucker (Shopgirl), leaves things relatively uncluttered, which I appreciated. At the same time, I could have put that less generously - as in, not very much surprising happens. Tucker keeps the emerald travelogue images crisp and clean and the emotions modest, so that the entire movie hinges, more or less, on the charming/ cantankerous love-hate tangles of its dueling stars. If the young Ann-Margret had been allowed to wiggle her brain as much as her bod, she might have come off something like Amy Adams. Is there an actress today who can suffuse a single scene with so many infectious mood swings? As Anna, she's fiery and vulnerable, wistful and exuberant; she lends a rare dignity to the portrayal of a woman who doesn't know what she wants.

Anna believes she's going to sweep herself into happiness with her leap-year proposal, but Declan sees her grand folly, and also her designer-luggage pretensions. Goode, a deft but recessive actor (he's Colin Firth's lover-in-flashback in A Single Man), is an expert at soft-pedaled contempt. As Declan lets his guard down, though, the film's appealing tart-tongued fluffiness starts to flatten out. Leap Year could have used more pizzazz. Yet you're never in doubt that these two like each ? other - or, just as important, that they don't. B-

'Daybreakers'
By Bill Goodykoontz

“Daybreakers” puts a nice spin on the usual horror movie, offering a world where the bad guys don't win, exactly, but who we think of as the good guys have definitely lost.
'Of course, this calls into question your perception of good guys and bad guys. Typically, since Bram Stoker wrote "Dracula," vampires have occupied a curious middle ground in storytelling. Yes, they kill people, suck their blood, and rob them of their very humanity. When you put it like that . .

On the other hand, they're just so . . . cool.

Michael and Peter Spierig, who wrote and directed "Daybreakers," place their story in a world in the near future, when whatever plague caused people to turn into vampires won out; there are few humans remaining, and they hide, so that they won't be used as the bottom rung on the food chain.

But, unlike "I Am Legend," which is the story of one man's quest for survival in a similar world, "Daybreakers" is the story of the vampires trying to stay alive. With so few humans left, the blood supply is dwindling.

The trouble with the dwindling blood supply is, besides starvation, the transformation the vampires undergo when they try to feed on each other (or, in extreme cases, themselves). Then they become true monsters, the stuff of nightmares. Just ask Edward (Ethan Hawke), who finds a neighbor in his house, or at least what used to be a neighbor. Now he's a savage, winged creature desperate for blood. You might feel sorry for the guy if he wasn't so intent on ripping Edward's head off.

Edward is a researcher trying to come up with a suitable substitute for blood. He works for Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), who would of course love to corner the market on a working blood-type product.

Oh, and they're both vampires. So is Edward's brother, Frankie (Michael Dorman), a vampire soldier who hunts humans, so that they can be captured and farmed for their blood, (the contraption the vampires have rigged for storing and "milking" humans is haunting).

Yet, thanks to an encounter with a human (Claudia Karvan), who is part of an underground network of survivors trying to stay alive while working up a possible cure, Edward now sides with the humans. It's an interesting film, despite the wild overacting by Willem Dafoe as Elvis, a human with a personal line on a cure who wields a crossbow (as well as a ridiculous Southern accent that's as scary as anything in the movie).

Hawke is suitably moody and brooding as a man - a former man - tormented. Neill is goofily effective as the oily Bromley, whose attention to the bottom-line trumps . . . what? His humanity? He doesn't have any left to begin with. Dorman's also good as a heartless sort who comes to realize the error of his ways.

The Spierigs create a nicely eerie atmosphere, one fueled on either side of the vampire equation by a desperate need for survival. "Daybreakers" isn't a great film, but it's a good one, and in a market oddly lousy with vampire tales, it's an original

'Youth in Revolt'
By Bill Goodykoontz

The easy description of "Youth in Revolt" is that it's Michal Cera as we've never seen him.

Yes, well, sort of. But it's mostly Cera as we always see him, as the wide-eyed innocent of "Arrested Development," "Juno," "Superbad" and wherever else he shows up.
Which is fine. Cera's good at it, and Miguel Arteta's film, based on the novel by C.D. Payne, is funny. And it does give Cera a chance to play at being a bad boy. But it's just that - playing at it.

To explain: Nick Twisp (Cera) is a virgin and, like so many teenage boys who fit that description, looking to change his status. Artistic-minded, a budding writer, he lives at home with his mom (Jean Smart), a trashy sort who depends on child-support payments from her ex-husband (Steve Buscemi), as well as the favors of whatever boyfriend is staying in the house. As the movie starts, it's Jerry (Zach Galifianakis), but his sale of a bum car to a group of sailors necessitates a quick vacation.

At the trailer-park community the family escapes to, Nick meets Sheeni (Portia Doubleday), who has blond hair, similar tastes, a sassy-yet-flirty personality - and a boyfriend. When his family goes back home, Nick is determined to get back to Sheeni. He's not the first, but perhaps the latest, to observe that women seem to pick the bad boys over the good, so he sets about to change his ways - and to get himself kicked out of his mom's house.

That's where the "different" Cera comes in. Nick invents Francois Dillinger (Sheeni's into all things French), an alter ego with a wispy mustache, a smoking habit and a more-colorful vocabulary, all of which accentuate his all-around badness. Francois leads Nick to do increasingly desperate things until, indeed, his mom and her latest boyfriend, a cop named Lance (Ray Liotta, satisfyingly low-rent), boot him. But his plan to reunite with Sheeni runs into various problems, including, but not limited to, her being sent to a French boarding school downstate.

The supporting cast is uniformly good, particularly the always-reliable Fred Willard as a neighbor, Justin Long as Sheeni's drug-addled brother and, especially, Adhir Kalyan as Vijay, Nick's friend who accompanies him on some of his (mis)adventures. But the film really relies on Cera and Doubleday. She has to make Sheeni appealing enough so that Nick would upend his life for her; he has to make Nick both resourceful and confused enough (read: desperate to have sex) that he'd be willing to do so.

Good on both counts. Doubleday's Sheeni is charming, smart, and pretty and has just that hint of knowing danger that drives teenage boys insane. And Cera? No one does this kind of thing better, which is presumably, why he keeps doing it. Francois is funny enough, up to a point, but Cera's sure portrayal of Nick is a much bigger part of what makes "Youth in Revolt" a rewarding film.

back to top