as if anybody asked me
I have a hard time quantifying and sorting favorites, but my reading habits have changed this year to include a rather large amount of film criticism, and the result is I've been thinking about what my list of 2009's best would look like more this year than I have previous years. So I figured what the hell, and I wrote down all the new movies I saw this year and I tried to sort them based loosely on which ones I liked more than the others. Then I pretended my opinion was worth a damn, and this is what I came up with:
20. (500) Days of Summer and Away We Go (TIE)
This is more an honorable mention tie than a "twentieth best" tie. In fact, both of these unconventional romantic comedies left me pretty dissatisfied by the end, but both really stuck with me, for how they failed and for where they succeeded. I know it's nitpicky, but I can't view movies through anyone else's quirks and proclivities, and so: (500) Days fails to me because its story is a hero moving from Point A to Point A and because it glamorizes textbook bad girlfriend behavior. I know movies aren't supposed be our moral guardians, but I can't help it: if the movie bugs me, it bugs me. On the other hand, Away We Go has a brilliant and wonderful message and its shortcoming is gathering a pitch-perfect cast and a nuanced, funny and touching script, and hiring as the director the crown prince of unsubtle filmmaking, Sam Mendes (Ron Howard's still the reigning king). My but Mendes paints with a broad brush, doesn't he? Squandering all that talent. Still, both films have left me with something to really chew on, and both took deliberate and well-intended steps towards making a romcom I would like, and so noble failure or not, I can't outright dismiss them.
(Previous rants here and here, respectively.)
19. Surrogates
Traditional science fiction movies go like this: there is a new technology or kind of advancement but otherwise it's still our ordinary world (maybe a little bit in the future) which has been tweaked by just this one thing, and probably there's some good action setpieces along the way. I mean, Gattaca and Strange Days and The Minority Report and District 9 and The Running Man and The 6th Day and so on. Technological advancement as cultural mirror is really one of the staples that makes science fiction so great. Well, this is another of those. There are better, but this one's got its moments. If anything, I'd say it sticks too closely to tradition to be amazing. But it's still a good watch.
18. Avatar
I think I managed to lower my expectations early on enough that I remained immune to the hype, or as immune as possible. I saw it in 2D and I was pleasantly surprised but far from blown away. There are some things this does right in its world-building and CG, and I'm willing to overlook all the bland stereotypes of story and character, but there are some dramatic missteps in the big moments which are hard for me to forgive. Cameron is maybe the best man I know to take flimsy archetypes and run them through stale, overused plot points, and make it feel if not fresh, then at least enervating and engaging. He did it for Titanic, he did it for Aliens and Terminator, and he does it here. Nothing new, but decent anyway.
(Previous rant here.)
17. Coraline
It is really, really hard for me to be at all objective about this film. Working at Laika (even at House, the commercial half) and following along the progress of this has made it something akin to my own or my friends' films, something I am inclined to view from the inside rather than impartially, from the outside. I know it's gorgeous, and I know it's engaging, and beyond that I can only see the trees, and not, alas, the forest.
16. Big Fan
"Taxi Driver for football geeks" isn't exactly the kind of synopsis that has me running to the theaters. Add on "heavy with religious metaphor" and you might as well assume I'll skip it altogether, but writer/director Robert Siegel wrote The Wrestler and Patton Oswalt is consistently worth my time. Oswalt himself pointed out how much like 70s "New Hollywood" this feels, and that nails it. Something about the story's hard edges and small scale make it feel like a breath of fresh air or cold water splashed in your face compared to the carefully cross-marketed and over-polished films we've all gotten used to.
(No previous rant, but here is a post about seeing Oswalt speak after the screening.)
15. A Single Man
Speaking of small scale and rough edges, here's another, very different story that could have come out of the "New Hollywood" 1970s just as easily as today. I only have two things I want to say here: first, the story lost me (that is, my attention or engagement with it) at several points but always won me back; and second, the story of a desperately lonely college professor in 1963 California and his awkward, burgeoning relationship with one of his students? I wish I'd seen this (or done half the research they did) before writing The World of Missing Persons, because the tone and world of this film is not very far from where I need TWOMP to live. The similarities end there, of course.
14. The Limits of Control
Jarmusch is at his best when he's writing riddles and doing his sparse, everything's-a-metaphor obtuse thing, and here's that. But it's also full of his I'm-a-little-cooler-than-you'll-ever-understand bullshit here, too, so it's not a perfect film. Still, it's gorgeous and meditative and would make a really great double feature with Burn After Reading as post-modern commentary on contemporary espionage film. It's no Dead Man or Down By Law, but I left wanting to see it again (someday).
(Previous rant here.)
13. The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Wes Anderson has been making cartoons with live action people since Bottle Rocket, with ridiculous, idiosyncratic characters and a painstaking attention to set design. For him to finally switch over to stop-motion animation is less novel than it is natural, and despite the hilarious stories of Wes living in France with his girlfriend while (former Laika director) Mark Gustafson directed the animation for him, this movie is good enough to (mostly) forgive the tragicomic hipster douchiness. It's full of bittersweet laughs and all the good parts of Anderson's bag of tricks. If anything, what we've learned from this is that Wes Anderson should adapt more: it gives him a solid story to propel things forward while he does what he does: that fun little song and dance of quips, quirks, self-doubt and daddy issues.
12. Where The Wild Things Are
All good art ought to be divisive (but try telling Hollywood that), and this one definitely was. Half the people I know hated it and the other half loved it, and it seems to hinge on whether or not you want to feel nostalgic about how difficult being a child can be. Portlander and star of Jim Strayer's Widow's Walk Lake Max Records is amazing, the effects are amazing (and surprisingly, refreshingly unshowy) and Dave Eggers's story is brilliant. Each wild thing is distinct and instantly recognizable without any of them feeling like bland stereotypes. Yeah, it's a fairly obvious armchair-psychological breakdown of one boy's psyche transferred into a bunch of oversized mopey monsters, but like I said: some of us get something out of revisiting the pain of childhood with adult eyes. Others don't.
11. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
The last couple of years have shown Nicolas Cage skyrocket back to fame not by proving he's a phenomenal leading man but by proving that nobody makes unhinged scenery chewing more fun than this guy. And here, in Herzog's remake (reboot? sequel?) of Abel Ferrara's film, Cage gets to do both: good acting AND scenery-chewing insanity. I thought I would be seeing something so crazy it'd be fun when I went to see this; I had no idea it would also be amazingly very good. But I should have known. Werner Herzog is the kind of mad poet the world needs more of.
10. Star Trek
It lacks the humanistic touch and the clever metaphors (or cheap parallels, depending on which episode/movie we're comparing to), but Star Trek has always aimed to combine overly complicated plotlines with a love-of-its-fans populism, and this reboot by a dude who's admitted to never being a Star Trek fan himself manages to stay true to at least that much of the franchise's spirit. I do admit, I am holding on to the hope that the next movie will venture back into thematically rich territory. The fact that nobody's willing to rush things just to make it happen fills me with confidence.
(Previous rant here.)
9. The Road
From the first time -- like, a million years ago -- that I heard that John Hillcoat was adapting Cormac McCarthy's beautifully dismal novel, I knew exactly what to expect. And I knew I would love it, though not in a "must watch this again right away" kind of way. Actually, if anything, I was only surprised by how palatable the despair was. Still, it's hardly a comedy. I'd say this film was perfect, in that it's everything I wanted it to be. Post-apocalyptic realism with absurdist philosophical underpinnings. Oh yes.
8. Inglourious Basterds
Honestly, this is supposed to show up on Blu-Ray like, yesterday, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it again. It was a challenge the first time through -- apparently. I left the theater not in love, but the more thought I've given it the more I've come to respect it for what it is. I doubt anything will change my initial reaction -- which is that, alas, Tarantino has joined the ranks of Stephen King and George Lucas as a writer who is too big to be told no, and who desperately needs an editor/someone to force them to refine their message to the world. Still, having only seen it once, I'm left remembering it as a series of scenes and setpieces, varying in quality from pretty good to bloody brilliant, and barely held together into a cohesive whole. I have a hunch that won't change on second viewing either, but I'm prepared now to be proven wrong.
7. Up
Every review of this film seems to be based solely on its first ten minutes. And the thing is, like the opening of Wall-E, the set-up of the character here is amazing. I am sitting in a theater wet-eyed and sniffling and we're still in the prologue? But the tears are sentimental ones, drawn masterfully out of me but still without deep caring... yet. By the end, I am still enthralled, and I like Carl and Russell quite a lot, but I'm a little burnt out on the funny-once talking dog gag, the weird bird thing, and the more-silly-than-threatening villain. As much as I like the premise -- dude ties a jillion balloons to his house to fly away to a tropical paradise chasing the dream of his dead wife in tribute -- where they end up with it feels a little... tangential. It's very, very good, and every year Pixar astounds with its ability to stay cream of the crop (and I already know that, like Wall-E again, this will grow on me with multiple viewings until I am in love despite myself). In fact I've been following Pixar with more fandom and fervor than any other animation house or production company, and I firmly believe they are the best storytellers at their level of production and budget... but I think I'm still convinced their best efforts were Brad Bird's: The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
6. District 9
I agree with a lot of people that the mockumentary thing is kind of played out, but I'm glad this one made it in just under the wire. District 9 is clever and sharp and sneaky, exciting and disturbing and amazing. It's the old science-fiction-as-social-commentary thing again, but it knows not to let that get in the way of solid dramatic storytelling. Intense, exciting, disturbing, and smart? I mean, what else do you want from a movie, anyway?
5. The Hurt Locker
Speaking of intense, exciting, disturbing, and smart: here's one more for that small list of brilliant war movies, though it feels more like a character study than your typical war movie, which tends to either show how cool war is because it's exciting and dangerous, or it shows how cool war is to trick you into seeing how bad war is. (Obviously I prefer the second category, films like Three Kings and Full Metal Jacket, over films like Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan.) This film takes a more matter-of-fact approach -- essentially the war is just the backdrop -- that lets you get trapped inside a fascinating and unsettling character, the adrenaline-junkie bombsquad soldier. Hurt Locker takes the cliché of the career hero who can't live outside of his dangerous line of work and turns it around, looks at it from all angles, makes the two dimensions into three. Things I've read so far suggest this and Up in the Air are going to clean up at the Oscars, and if so, I won't have much to criticize. ( Unlike last year.)
4. Antichrist
It's almost boring to even point out that Lars von Trier is a provocateur, or that this film is highly provocative, so let's move past that, shall we? Yes, it's got a weird and uncomfortable message about the politics and capabilities of men and women if you take the symbolism too directly, and yes it's got precious little nice to say about either gender with regard to each other. Yes, it's got a couple of moments that are so gruesome (and in two cases, so shockingly real-feeling) that they outshine the smaller, more moving moments in all the after-film discussions and film reviews. But it's also one of the deepest and sharpest dramatic stories of the year, a movie with teeth and soul that pits a blank-slate archetypal modern man and a blank-slate archetypal modern woman in a situation so contrived as to seem farcical, and then it plays out its black comedy with a straight face. Another movie this year does something extremely similar, sans the anonymous He and She: the Coens' A Serious Man (but we'll get there shortly). Any film that can be simultaneously unsettling and beautiful, can make me want more and dread more, is a real gift to the world. Who ever said art should be easy?
3. The Informant!
Several films this year have aged well, have spent time in the back of my mind since I've seen them and come out stronger and richer for it. Among them, Inglourious Basterds, Away We Go, Observe and Report, Humpday, and Che, but of everything I've seen this year, the one I keep coming back to the most is this confounding black comedy by Soderbergh. The structure and the story, the turnarounds and the sleight-of-hand... it makes me wish desperately I could have thought of it. It's a movie about lies, on so many levels. When I left the theater I would have said "good not great," but now I think it might stand as one of Soderbergh's strongest films, up there with sex, lies and videotape, The Limey, and Schizopolis. Of all the movies I only saw once this year, The Informant! is the one I'm most looking forward to seeing again.
2. Up in the Air
Truth is, off the entire list this is the one I saw most recently -- it was the last film I saw in theaters this year (this decade!) -- and so its placement on this list was partially instinctive, partially an act of faith. It's hard to say if it really belongs above some of the other films, but I think it does. I loved the shit out of Thank You For Not Smoking but I was never a fan of Juno. I recognized the problems as stemming almost entirely from the script, though, and never questioned Jason Reitman's mastery of scene, performance, pacing and style. On the surface, Up in the Air is a movie about sad people... but beneath that it's really a movie about the state of the economy and how clinical corporate mentality has usurped human dignity and compassion... but beneath that, it's really a movie about sad people. And for me, the saving grace, the thing that raised it from the teens or twenties on this list up to the #2 slot, was that third, deepest layer. This is a story about people, and those people are all of us, and that's the film's victory over that "clinical corporate mentality," that we care more about Clooney's Ryan Bingham than we care about what his character represents. It's what makes the end (that end!) meaningful.
1. Moon and A Serious Man (TIE)
I told you I couldn't quantify worth a damn, and you thought I'd be able to pick just one "best film of the year?" These are the two films that I already know I will be rewatching until there is nothing left to see in them, and then I will find something new to see regardless. In fact I am so enamored of these two films I don't know what to say about them. Moon is what I want, what I secretly hope for, every time I see a science fiction film. Short of going beat by beat through and telling you how amazing every little thing is, how meaningful on a macro- and microscopic level, I am at a loss as to what I should comment on. The same is true of A Serious Man, a film I think might be the ultimate Coen film in a lot of ways, despite or perhaps because it is so unlike most Coen films (at least in terms of plot; tonally it's resonant with their best stuff, like Lebowski and Fink and Man Who Wasn't There). Everyone makes a big deal about how "semi-autobiographical" A Serious Man is, and that's hard to ignore, but there's more to it than that. This isn't a film about a schlub trying to improve his place in the world. It's about a schlub just trying to hold on, a guy looking for answers who beautifully, pointedly comes up blank. I want to find the perfect words to tell you what the movie is, why it's special, but like Moon, I find myself only wanting to give you a play-by-play instead, I find myself thinking the story says more about itself than I ever could, and that my friends is why I'm not a film critic. (Well, that and my inability to stay on focus from the beginning to end of a single sentence, let alone maintain cohesive thoughts in essay form from paragraph to paragraph.) I love this film, and I know this film is deep, nuanced, brilliant in ways both light and heavy, but all I can do is implore you to see the film so you can see what I see. I don't have the knack for encapsulating. Just for pontificating. A Serious Man and Moon (and at least half of the rest of this list) are works of art entirely too elegant for me to sully them with my tired half-baked thoughts. Suffice it to say they are the year's brightest and best, the ones I'll be watching for decades to come, shocked you haven't seen yet, horrified you haven't heard of, the movies I'll be thrusting into the hands of anyone who hasn't yet had that privilege. As I said before, I'm simply too enamored of these to say anything more about them.
(Previous rant about Moon here. Apparently I never got around to a good rant about A Serious Man.)
Just for the sake of thoroughness, the other new films I saw this year, in no particular order, were: Duplicity, Humpday, Bright Star, Zombieland, 2012, Public Enemies, Drag Me To Hell, Bronson, The Brothers Bloom, Adventureland, Extract, Terminator Salvation, The Girlfriend Experience, Che, G.I. Joe, Pandorum, Observe and Report, Sherlock Holmes, Paranormal Activity, Watchmen, Tokyo!, and Knowing. As far as I could remember, anyway. I'm absolutely positive that list is incomplete.
The films this year that I still haven't seen and want to (some very very badly; others only out of morbid curiosity) are: Still Walking, Funny People, Gomorrah, Collapse, Sin Nombre, 35 Shots of Rum, Broken Embraces, The Men Who Stare At Goats, The Merry Gentleman, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Coco Before Chanel, Earth, Wolverine, The Box, The Young Victoria, Art & Copy, Nine, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, In The Loop, Julia, Passing Strange, (Untitled), Food, Inc., Crazy Heart, The Messenger, Whip It, Precious, Me and Orson Welles, Princess and the Frog, Pirate Radio, Tetro, Invictus, Black Dynamite, The Hangover, Tyson, 9, World's Greatest Dad, Revanche, The White Ribbon, An Education, Transformers 2, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Anvil: the Story of Anvil, and Ponyo. So if you were wondering, anything on this second list was obviously not eligible for my personal top list, because I haven't seen it yet. Alas. I say "alas" a lot.
Yes, I just started the new year decade with a massive meandering blog post about movies I liked that culminated in me saying, "Man, I like this movie so much I just can't talk about it." It's going to be one of those years decades.
20. (500) Days of Summer and Away We Go (TIE)
This is more an honorable mention tie than a "twentieth best" tie. In fact, both of these unconventional romantic comedies left me pretty dissatisfied by the end, but both really stuck with me, for how they failed and for where they succeeded. I know it's nitpicky, but I can't view movies through anyone else's quirks and proclivities, and so: (500) Days fails to me because its story is a hero moving from Point A to Point A and because it glamorizes textbook bad girlfriend behavior. I know movies aren't supposed be our moral guardians, but I can't help it: if the movie bugs me, it bugs me. On the other hand, Away We Go has a brilliant and wonderful message and its shortcoming is gathering a pitch-perfect cast and a nuanced, funny and touching script, and hiring as the director the crown prince of unsubtle filmmaking, Sam Mendes (Ron Howard's still the reigning king). My but Mendes paints with a broad brush, doesn't he? Squandering all that talent. Still, both films have left me with something to really chew on, and both took deliberate and well-intended steps towards making a romcom I would like, and so noble failure or not, I can't outright dismiss them.
(Previous rants here and here, respectively.)
19. Surrogates
Traditional science fiction movies go like this: there is a new technology or kind of advancement but otherwise it's still our ordinary world (maybe a little bit in the future) which has been tweaked by just this one thing, and probably there's some good action setpieces along the way. I mean, Gattaca and Strange Days and The Minority Report and District 9 and The Running Man and The 6th Day and so on. Technological advancement as cultural mirror is really one of the staples that makes science fiction so great. Well, this is another of those. There are better, but this one's got its moments. If anything, I'd say it sticks too closely to tradition to be amazing. But it's still a good watch.
18. Avatar
I think I managed to lower my expectations early on enough that I remained immune to the hype, or as immune as possible. I saw it in 2D and I was pleasantly surprised but far from blown away. There are some things this does right in its world-building and CG, and I'm willing to overlook all the bland stereotypes of story and character, but there are some dramatic missteps in the big moments which are hard for me to forgive. Cameron is maybe the best man I know to take flimsy archetypes and run them through stale, overused plot points, and make it feel if not fresh, then at least enervating and engaging. He did it for Titanic, he did it for Aliens and Terminator, and he does it here. Nothing new, but decent anyway.
(Previous rant here.)
17. Coraline
It is really, really hard for me to be at all objective about this film. Working at Laika (even at House, the commercial half) and following along the progress of this has made it something akin to my own or my friends' films, something I am inclined to view from the inside rather than impartially, from the outside. I know it's gorgeous, and I know it's engaging, and beyond that I can only see the trees, and not, alas, the forest.
16. Big Fan
"Taxi Driver for football geeks" isn't exactly the kind of synopsis that has me running to the theaters. Add on "heavy with religious metaphor" and you might as well assume I'll skip it altogether, but writer/director Robert Siegel wrote The Wrestler and Patton Oswalt is consistently worth my time. Oswalt himself pointed out how much like 70s "New Hollywood" this feels, and that nails it. Something about the story's hard edges and small scale make it feel like a breath of fresh air or cold water splashed in your face compared to the carefully cross-marketed and over-polished films we've all gotten used to.
(No previous rant, but here is a post about seeing Oswalt speak after the screening.)
15. A Single Man
Speaking of small scale and rough edges, here's another, very different story that could have come out of the "New Hollywood" 1970s just as easily as today. I only have two things I want to say here: first, the story lost me (that is, my attention or engagement with it) at several points but always won me back; and second, the story of a desperately lonely college professor in 1963 California and his awkward, burgeoning relationship with one of his students? I wish I'd seen this (or done half the research they did) before writing The World of Missing Persons, because the tone and world of this film is not very far from where I need TWOMP to live. The similarities end there, of course.
14. The Limits of Control
Jarmusch is at his best when he's writing riddles and doing his sparse, everything's-a-metaphor obtuse thing, and here's that. But it's also full of his I'm-a-little-cooler-than-you'll-ever-understand bullshit here, too, so it's not a perfect film. Still, it's gorgeous and meditative and would make a really great double feature with Burn After Reading as post-modern commentary on contemporary espionage film. It's no Dead Man or Down By Law, but I left wanting to see it again (someday).
(Previous rant here.)
13. The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Wes Anderson has been making cartoons with live action people since Bottle Rocket, with ridiculous, idiosyncratic characters and a painstaking attention to set design. For him to finally switch over to stop-motion animation is less novel than it is natural, and despite the hilarious stories of Wes living in France with his girlfriend while (former Laika director) Mark Gustafson directed the animation for him, this movie is good enough to (mostly) forgive the tragicomic hipster douchiness. It's full of bittersweet laughs and all the good parts of Anderson's bag of tricks. If anything, what we've learned from this is that Wes Anderson should adapt more: it gives him a solid story to propel things forward while he does what he does: that fun little song and dance of quips, quirks, self-doubt and daddy issues.
12. Where The Wild Things Are
All good art ought to be divisive (but try telling Hollywood that), and this one definitely was. Half the people I know hated it and the other half loved it, and it seems to hinge on whether or not you want to feel nostalgic about how difficult being a child can be. Portlander and star of Jim Strayer's Widow's Walk Lake Max Records is amazing, the effects are amazing (and surprisingly, refreshingly unshowy) and Dave Eggers's story is brilliant. Each wild thing is distinct and instantly recognizable without any of them feeling like bland stereotypes. Yeah, it's a fairly obvious armchair-psychological breakdown of one boy's psyche transferred into a bunch of oversized mopey monsters, but like I said: some of us get something out of revisiting the pain of childhood with adult eyes. Others don't.
11. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
The last couple of years have shown Nicolas Cage skyrocket back to fame not by proving he's a phenomenal leading man but by proving that nobody makes unhinged scenery chewing more fun than this guy. And here, in Herzog's remake (reboot? sequel?) of Abel Ferrara's film, Cage gets to do both: good acting AND scenery-chewing insanity. I thought I would be seeing something so crazy it'd be fun when I went to see this; I had no idea it would also be amazingly very good. But I should have known. Werner Herzog is the kind of mad poet the world needs more of.
10. Star Trek
It lacks the humanistic touch and the clever metaphors (or cheap parallels, depending on which episode/movie we're comparing to), but Star Trek has always aimed to combine overly complicated plotlines with a love-of-its-fans populism, and this reboot by a dude who's admitted to never being a Star Trek fan himself manages to stay true to at least that much of the franchise's spirit. I do admit, I am holding on to the hope that the next movie will venture back into thematically rich territory. The fact that nobody's willing to rush things just to make it happen fills me with confidence.
(Previous rant here.)
9. The Road
From the first time -- like, a million years ago -- that I heard that John Hillcoat was adapting Cormac McCarthy's beautifully dismal novel, I knew exactly what to expect. And I knew I would love it, though not in a "must watch this again right away" kind of way. Actually, if anything, I was only surprised by how palatable the despair was. Still, it's hardly a comedy. I'd say this film was perfect, in that it's everything I wanted it to be. Post-apocalyptic realism with absurdist philosophical underpinnings. Oh yes.
8. Inglourious Basterds
Honestly, this is supposed to show up on Blu-Ray like, yesterday, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it again. It was a challenge the first time through -- apparently. I left the theater not in love, but the more thought I've given it the more I've come to respect it for what it is. I doubt anything will change my initial reaction -- which is that, alas, Tarantino has joined the ranks of Stephen King and George Lucas as a writer who is too big to be told no, and who desperately needs an editor/someone to force them to refine their message to the world. Still, having only seen it once, I'm left remembering it as a series of scenes and setpieces, varying in quality from pretty good to bloody brilliant, and barely held together into a cohesive whole. I have a hunch that won't change on second viewing either, but I'm prepared now to be proven wrong.
7. Up
Every review of this film seems to be based solely on its first ten minutes. And the thing is, like the opening of Wall-E, the set-up of the character here is amazing. I am sitting in a theater wet-eyed and sniffling and we're still in the prologue? But the tears are sentimental ones, drawn masterfully out of me but still without deep caring... yet. By the end, I am still enthralled, and I like Carl and Russell quite a lot, but I'm a little burnt out on the funny-once talking dog gag, the weird bird thing, and the more-silly-than-threatening villain. As much as I like the premise -- dude ties a jillion balloons to his house to fly away to a tropical paradise chasing the dream of his dead wife in tribute -- where they end up with it feels a little... tangential. It's very, very good, and every year Pixar astounds with its ability to stay cream of the crop (and I already know that, like Wall-E again, this will grow on me with multiple viewings until I am in love despite myself). In fact I've been following Pixar with more fandom and fervor than any other animation house or production company, and I firmly believe they are the best storytellers at their level of production and budget... but I think I'm still convinced their best efforts were Brad Bird's: The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
6. District 9
I agree with a lot of people that the mockumentary thing is kind of played out, but I'm glad this one made it in just under the wire. District 9 is clever and sharp and sneaky, exciting and disturbing and amazing. It's the old science-fiction-as-social-commentary thing again, but it knows not to let that get in the way of solid dramatic storytelling. Intense, exciting, disturbing, and smart? I mean, what else do you want from a movie, anyway?
5. The Hurt Locker
Speaking of intense, exciting, disturbing, and smart: here's one more for that small list of brilliant war movies, though it feels more like a character study than your typical war movie, which tends to either show how cool war is because it's exciting and dangerous, or it shows how cool war is to trick you into seeing how bad war is. (Obviously I prefer the second category, films like Three Kings and Full Metal Jacket, over films like Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan.) This film takes a more matter-of-fact approach -- essentially the war is just the backdrop -- that lets you get trapped inside a fascinating and unsettling character, the adrenaline-junkie bombsquad soldier. Hurt Locker takes the cliché of the career hero who can't live outside of his dangerous line of work and turns it around, looks at it from all angles, makes the two dimensions into three. Things I've read so far suggest this and Up in the Air are going to clean up at the Oscars, and if so, I won't have much to criticize. ( Unlike last year.)
4. Antichrist
It's almost boring to even point out that Lars von Trier is a provocateur, or that this film is highly provocative, so let's move past that, shall we? Yes, it's got a weird and uncomfortable message about the politics and capabilities of men and women if you take the symbolism too directly, and yes it's got precious little nice to say about either gender with regard to each other. Yes, it's got a couple of moments that are so gruesome (and in two cases, so shockingly real-feeling) that they outshine the smaller, more moving moments in all the after-film discussions and film reviews. But it's also one of the deepest and sharpest dramatic stories of the year, a movie with teeth and soul that pits a blank-slate archetypal modern man and a blank-slate archetypal modern woman in a situation so contrived as to seem farcical, and then it plays out its black comedy with a straight face. Another movie this year does something extremely similar, sans the anonymous He and She: the Coens' A Serious Man (but we'll get there shortly). Any film that can be simultaneously unsettling and beautiful, can make me want more and dread more, is a real gift to the world. Who ever said art should be easy?
3. The Informant!
Several films this year have aged well, have spent time in the back of my mind since I've seen them and come out stronger and richer for it. Among them, Inglourious Basterds, Away We Go, Observe and Report, Humpday, and Che, but of everything I've seen this year, the one I keep coming back to the most is this confounding black comedy by Soderbergh. The structure and the story, the turnarounds and the sleight-of-hand... it makes me wish desperately I could have thought of it. It's a movie about lies, on so many levels. When I left the theater I would have said "good not great," but now I think it might stand as one of Soderbergh's strongest films, up there with sex, lies and videotape, The Limey, and Schizopolis. Of all the movies I only saw once this year, The Informant! is the one I'm most looking forward to seeing again.
2. Up in the Air
Truth is, off the entire list this is the one I saw most recently -- it was the last film I saw in theaters this year (this decade!) -- and so its placement on this list was partially instinctive, partially an act of faith. It's hard to say if it really belongs above some of the other films, but I think it does. I loved the shit out of Thank You For Not Smoking but I was never a fan of Juno. I recognized the problems as stemming almost entirely from the script, though, and never questioned Jason Reitman's mastery of scene, performance, pacing and style. On the surface, Up in the Air is a movie about sad people... but beneath that it's really a movie about the state of the economy and how clinical corporate mentality has usurped human dignity and compassion... but beneath that, it's really a movie about sad people. And for me, the saving grace, the thing that raised it from the teens or twenties on this list up to the #2 slot, was that third, deepest layer. This is a story about people, and those people are all of us, and that's the film's victory over that "clinical corporate mentality," that we care more about Clooney's Ryan Bingham than we care about what his character represents. It's what makes the end (that end!) meaningful.
1. Moon and A Serious Man (TIE)
I told you I couldn't quantify worth a damn, and you thought I'd be able to pick just one "best film of the year?" These are the two films that I already know I will be rewatching until there is nothing left to see in them, and then I will find something new to see regardless. In fact I am so enamored of these two films I don't know what to say about them. Moon is what I want, what I secretly hope for, every time I see a science fiction film. Short of going beat by beat through and telling you how amazing every little thing is, how meaningful on a macro- and microscopic level, I am at a loss as to what I should comment on. The same is true of A Serious Man, a film I think might be the ultimate Coen film in a lot of ways, despite or perhaps because it is so unlike most Coen films (at least in terms of plot; tonally it's resonant with their best stuff, like Lebowski and Fink and Man Who Wasn't There). Everyone makes a big deal about how "semi-autobiographical" A Serious Man is, and that's hard to ignore, but there's more to it than that. This isn't a film about a schlub trying to improve his place in the world. It's about a schlub just trying to hold on, a guy looking for answers who beautifully, pointedly comes up blank. I want to find the perfect words to tell you what the movie is, why it's special, but like Moon, I find myself only wanting to give you a play-by-play instead, I find myself thinking the story says more about itself than I ever could, and that my friends is why I'm not a film critic. (Well, that and my inability to stay on focus from the beginning to end of a single sentence, let alone maintain cohesive thoughts in essay form from paragraph to paragraph.) I love this film, and I know this film is deep, nuanced, brilliant in ways both light and heavy, but all I can do is implore you to see the film so you can see what I see. I don't have the knack for encapsulating. Just for pontificating. A Serious Man and Moon (and at least half of the rest of this list) are works of art entirely too elegant for me to sully them with my tired half-baked thoughts. Suffice it to say they are the year's brightest and best, the ones I'll be watching for decades to come, shocked you haven't seen yet, horrified you haven't heard of, the movies I'll be thrusting into the hands of anyone who hasn't yet had that privilege. As I said before, I'm simply too enamored of these to say anything more about them.
(Previous rant about Moon here. Apparently I never got around to a good rant about A Serious Man.)
Just for the sake of thoroughness, the other new films I saw this year, in no particular order, were: Duplicity, Humpday, Bright Star, Zombieland, 2012, Public Enemies, Drag Me To Hell, Bronson, The Brothers Bloom, Adventureland, Extract, Terminator Salvation, The Girlfriend Experience, Che, G.I. Joe, Pandorum, Observe and Report, Sherlock Holmes, Paranormal Activity, Watchmen, Tokyo!, and Knowing. As far as I could remember, anyway. I'm absolutely positive that list is incomplete.
The films this year that I still haven't seen and want to (some very very badly; others only out of morbid curiosity) are: Still Walking, Funny People, Gomorrah, Collapse, Sin Nombre, 35 Shots of Rum, Broken Embraces, The Men Who Stare At Goats, The Merry Gentleman, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Coco Before Chanel, Earth, Wolverine, The Box, The Young Victoria, Art & Copy, Nine, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, In The Loop, Julia, Passing Strange, (Untitled), Food, Inc., Crazy Heart, The Messenger, Whip It, Precious, Me and Orson Welles, Princess and the Frog, Pirate Radio, Tetro, Invictus, Black Dynamite, The Hangover, Tyson, 9, World's Greatest Dad, Revanche, The White Ribbon, An Education, Transformers 2, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Anvil: the Story of Anvil, and Ponyo. So if you were wondering, anything on this second list was obviously not eligible for my personal top list, because I haven't seen it yet. Alas. I say "alas" a lot.
Yes, I just started the new year decade with a massive meandering blog post about movies I liked that culminated in me saying, "Man, I like this movie so much I just can't talk about it." It's going to be one of those years decades.