My (Obligatory) Top 10 Movies Of 2009

(Note: I am neither a paid critic, invited to advance screenings, nor do I receive advance DVD screeners to review therefore I don’t have the breadth of viewing ‘those’ guys have. Hence my apologies to the makers of Precious, A Serious Man, Up In the Air, An Education and any other potentially terrific movie from 2009 that I didn’t get a chance to see yet.)

60 years ago last year (now) was the greatest year in movie history. We had released (in the same year!), Gone With the Wind, Wizard Of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, The Women, Ninotchka, Gunga Din…and the list goes on. Was 2009 even close? No. It wasn’t a bad year but when you have to pad your top ten with movies that were merely very good, it’s not a great year. So here’s my list, such as it is, starting with a tie for first (I’m sorry! I just couldn’t decide!):

1) Inglourious Basterds – Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited Naziploitation epic is everything we have come to expect from this self-proclaimed film junkie, long, tense scenes of dialogue, over-the-top violence, bigger-than-life characters and something to offend almost everyone. This might top Pulp Fiction as my favourite Tarantino movie and if Christoph Waltz as a Nazi colonel doesn’t get an Oscar nomination, I’ll stop watching movies, period.

1) Up – Pixar’s output is uniformly excellent, in fact the last 4 movies, (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Up), have just gotten better and after seeing each for the first time, I have declared that they can’t possibly top it…and they do. In fact, the first ten minutes of Up is, without a doubt, the BEST ten minutes I’ve seen in a movie in years, so much so that the rest of this hilarious, touching and gorgeous contemplation on aging and life tends to let me down a bit, even though it is still astonishing.

The Hurt Locker – Director Kathryn Bigelow is a bit of an outsider in Hollywood. She started out as a James Cameron protege and (thankfully) moved away to make some under-rated minor classics (Near Dark, Strange Days) but in The Hurt Locker, she has made her masterpiece. Shot in a virtual cinéma vérité style, this look inside an American bomb-defusion squad in Iraq has the most tense scenes of the year.

District 9 – Working with a budget that was probably the same as the caterer’s on Transformers 2, South African helmer Neill Blomkamp has crafted a movie that is at once a thoughtful treatise on the horrors of apartheid and a crackerjack sci-fi action extravaganza, not an easy thing to do, to be sure.

(500) Days of Summer – Zooey Deschanel absolutely shines in the best romantic comedy of the year as the titular Summer, the girl who Joseph Gordon-Levitt woos and wins…or does he? I love a movie that approaches romance with all the foibles and difficulties that REAL romance actually has. This is a masterpiece of misperception.

Star Trek – When word came that Lost and Alias creator J.J. Abrams was rejiggering Star Trek and (gasp!) making a prequel about when the original crew meets, Trekkers were all in a tizzy (since I’m not one, I wasn’t). I am happy to report that he has made the best Star Trek movie yet, a movie that is Trek enough for the fans yet very accessible for the non-fan (I can’t tell you the number of people who have told me that they loved it even though they knew nothing about Star Trek).

Sugar – It’s a good year when a baseball movie gets released but it’s a great year when a good baseball movie shows its face. Sugar is that movie. From the writing and directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who plumbed the depths of drug addiction in Half Nelson, comes this behind-the-scenes look at life for Dominican Republic ball players trying to make it to ‘The Show”, the Majors. It’s alternately heartbreaking and heartwarming and demonstrates the many hardships that these ‘strangers in a strange land’ have to endure. If you like baseball, you’ll love this one.

Away We Go – Sam Mendes once again proves his directorial abilities in disparate genres with this charming indie comedy starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph as a thirty-something couple, newly pregnant, who wander the country, touching base with friends and family, to find the perfect place to raise a family. Along the way they find out much about each other and themselves, in very funny ways. It’s the supporting cast that shines here, especially Jim Gaffigan as a tired-of-life husband and Maggie Gyllanhaal as a new age mother. Mendes’ next challenge: he’s been tapped to direct the next Bond opus…wow!

Nine – Okay, so the critics panned this. I don’t care! How could I not love a big bold musical about two of my favourite subjects, Italy and filmmaking, based on a Fellini film to boot? Sure, it doesn’t hold a candle to 8 1/2 and sure, the songs are somewhat forgettable and sure, some of the roles are somewhat miscast but this worked for me. I had fun and left the theatre in a great mood. Besides, Daniel Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard’s performances are worth the price of admission alone. This one is my guilty pleasure.

The Informant! – Steven Soderbergh is either a community of several different artists or the most talented single man on earth. He makes the afore-mentioned Sam Mendes seem genre-bound. This year alone saw the release of the small Girlfriend Experience, the epic (4 1/2 hour!) Che and The Informant!, a comedy so wacky, it could only be based on a true story. That story is about a corn production executive (Matt Damon) who squeals on his company’s price-fixing but begins to lose control of the situation, creating all sorts of difficult but hilarious situations for the FBI. Damon handles this one perfectly and the story is so incredible, I checked the internet when I got home to verify it. Yep, it’s true!

A Baseball Newbie’s List of Lesser Diamond Flicks

I wasn’t always a baseball enthusiast (my wife says “read ‘fanatic’).  For most of my life, I more or less despised team sports.  In school I was aware of my physical limitations (general clumsiness) so I never felt I could contend with most of the other kids on the team and subconsciously at least, I had a powerful need to not let people down, even if they were people I didn’t really care about (jocks).  This attitude grew into a more general hatred of and intellectual superiority over those who enjoyed sports.  Then about seven years ago, I took my seven-year-old to his first major league baseball game in Toronto and found, much to my dismay and pleasure, I was having a great time.  As a kid, I had enjoyed baseball more than the Canadian staple, hockey, but I had obviously forgotten that joy and this event, coupled with an encroaching mid-life crisis, led, no, drove me to obsess about baseball.  For at least six months a year, I became the dreaded sports dad/husband.  All this verbiage is simply to explain that my love of the game is a recent development and I’m playing catch up with life-long fans so the breadth of my knowledge and exposure may not be as great as some.  I watch copious amounts of ball during the season and then read and watch ball-oriented fiction and non-fiction during the off-season.  We all know about the Bull Durhams and Naturals but I wanted to focus on some underrated, unorthodox, even unknown titles that I’ve enjoyed.  Some of these aren’t critical darlings but in some way, they have touched me or made me appreciate the game that much more.

Kevin Costner is spotty.  He is unreliable.  He is too laconic.  He is Jimmy Stewart without the chops.  But there are two genres that he excels at, in which he seems truly at home, westerns and baseball movies (this would include movies in which he plays a baseball player but aren’t really about baseball, like The Upside Of Anger). My personal favourite of these is For the Love Of the Game.  Costner plays a Detroit Tigers pitcher in the dusk of his career, pitching the game of his life, a potential perfect game, and as he plays, he remininces about a life of missed opportunities.  There is a wonderful undercurrent of bittersweet regret comingled with wry humour and pathos that really works for me and the movie offers a terrific behind-the-plate view of the sometimes monotonous life of a ball player.  Costner gives a good (possibly great) performance and this movie gives credence to my theory that there is no bad John C. Reilly movie (although Stepbrothers comes awfully close).

Jimmy Stewart had the lanky build for a Randy Johnson-like pitcher and as one of the biggest box-office draws of the late 1940′s, was perfect to play White Sox pitcher Monty Stratton in the ‘true’ feel-good Stratton Story.  Stratton was one of the winningest pitchers in the American League in the 1930′s until an off-season hunting accident took one of his legs.  His recovery and subsequent return to pro ball, albeit the minor leagues, nonetheless is a terrific story of grit and determination.  Stewart is, as always, reliable but June Allyson shines as the perky, imperturbable Ethel, the wife who pulled him through.  A great look at baseball in the 1930′s.

“A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.” – Earl Wilson.  It has been said by many in the game that a pro ball player makes it based on mental toughness as much as talent.  A hitter has less than a second to decide whether he will swing, where he will swing and what to do once he swings and if he succeeds 3 out of every 10 times, he is considered a success.  And this with tens of thousands of people screaming at him, many not favorably.  This would be enough to drive a normal man crazy and that’s exactly what happened to Red Sox player Jimmy Piersall, documented in his autobiography, Fear Strikes Out.  His harrowing ordeal became a movie in 1957 with Anthony Perkins as Piersall and Karl Malden as the tough father with all his dreams invested in his son.  Malden is, as usual, terrific and Perkins was certainly able to convey the depression and internal struggle that Piersall fought his whole life but as a ball player, well, Perkins makes a good depressed person.  He is just too slight and weak to make us believe he was able to make it that far (and he has a terrible swing).  But overall, still a fine movie.

Possibly the greatest player with the greatest story in baseball history is Jackie Robinson.  The story of  his rise through the ranks of the white baseball world, dealing with overt racism, often from his own teammates and fans, in the most civilized and gracious way, to become one of the best players in the game would make one of the best baseball movies of all time.  Well, 1950′s The Jackie Robinson Story is not that movie.  It’s the children’s Jackie Robinson story, a simplistic and timid tale released only two years after Robinson made it to the ‘show’ and even recognizing  the time of its release, it’s abbreviated running time (76 minutes) is wasted brushing lightly on his difficulties as the first black man in a white game.  It’s almost a disservice to modern fans who watch every race participating in today’s game to view this early period through the rose-coloured tint this movie offers.  Why do I include it on this list, you may ask?  Because the man who portrays Jackie Robinson is none other than…Jackie Robinson himself.  It becomes an important historical document, one that shows us the soft-spoken, kind man who rewrote the history of the game.  Granted, though he IS playing himself, he’s not the best actor but in this performance, we can see a kernel of the great man that was and was to come.  So, in the meantime, until someone decides to retell this story properly and respectfully (please!), we’ll have to live with this.

A movie that more accurately deals with the race issue in this period is the 1996 television movie, Soul Of the Game.  Blunt, sharp, well-written and acted, this story of the Negro Leagues and their greats, Satchell Paige and Josh Gibson, sets the record straight, showing a much more confident Jackie Robinson, played by Blair Underwood, beating these other players to the ‘bigs’ because he was willing to (pardon the pun) ‘play ball’.  Delroy Lindo’s Paige is an excellent portrayal of an aging great trying to hold on to youth and fame just a bit longer.

Seeing that I’m fairly new to the game, there are doubtless other lesser known baseball movies that I could put on my off-season viewing list and I would be most thankful for some suggestions or your thoughts on the ones I’ve mentioned.  See you at the park!