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 Pacifist’s Love Of War Movies

I call myself a pacifist.  I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a time when killing swaths of your fellow humans could be justified.  I can’t think of a war that 1) couldn’t have been avoided if the right people were in charge, 2) didn’t go terribly wrong in terms of casualties, civilian and military and 3) bring out the worst in human behaviour.  But I have a dark, dirty secret (that isn’t so secret to those who know me well)…I LOVE war movies.  I don’t just mean the anti-war classics like All Quiet On the Western Front and Paths Of Glory.  I mean good old-fashioned jingoistic flag-wavers with John Wayne and Van Johnson.  I mean modern classics like Saving Private Ryan and Platoon.  I know this seems like a disparity and I suppose it is, in a way.  But in war movies, I often see men (and women) rising to humanitarian heights, overcoming physical limitations and demonstrating partisanship and cooperation, bringing out the man’s best in the worst of circumstances.  This week is Remembrance Day here in Canada and in Britain and Veteran’s Day in the United States and at this time, I always feel led to watch a few of my favourites as well finding one or two I may have overlooked.  As I grow older however, I become more aware of my mortality and more appreciative of the sacrifices made  by others who chose to go into harm’s way for the ideal of freedom and this year in particular, I have been thinking of people I have known who were connected to war in some way and of course, the movies their situation brings to mind.

Although my dad was a couple of months shy of active service in World War 2 (he joined up on his 18th birthday but all he saw was basic training outside Toronto and weekend furloughs in Toronto), I have several uncles who saw a great deal of action.  My uncle Mike was shot down behind German lines early in the war and sat through the war in a POW camp.  As a child, when he and my aunt Kaye would come over for a swim and he would take off his shirt, I would marvel at the foot long scar rippling across his left shoulder from stray bullets during his capture.  The Canadian military was ultimately very generous, providing him with a pension and a cushy job chauffeuring military types around Southern Ontario until his retirement but that would be a small price for the indignities he must have suffered and horrific sights he must have been privy to in those years in the German camp, as in the quintessential POW movie, The Great Escape.  Although this rollicking and exciting adventure strays sometimes from the source material, the book by Paul Brickhill that outlines his own experiences as a prisoner at the infamous Stalag Luft II, the truly amazing thing is that the most unbelievable parts in the film are those that actually happened with Steve McQueen’s unpredictable behaviour and demands accounting for the bulk of the changes from the book.  Another great movie (and book) from this same event is the British classic, The Wooden Horse, the true-life story of how an escape tunnel was dug essentially using only a wooden gymnastic horse and the ingenuity of dozens of prisoners.

My uncle Harry was one of the 76,000 Canadian troops that participated in the invasion of Sicily and ultimately Italy and spent many long months working his way north to free Italy from the fascist grip of Mussolini.  On a recent trip to Italy, we were in Salerno, where the disembarkation of the Allied invasion of Italy took place and and as I walked on the boardwalk next to the Mediterranean, I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of young men who lost their lives where I was walking.  The invasion of Sicily brings to mind the Oscar-winning film about the man who led the great invasion, Patton.  General George Patton was an imposing, brash, egotistical man but a brilliant tactician and the ideal fodder for a movie biography.  Francis Coppola and former military man Edmund North wrote a terrific script that perfectly captured the enigma that was Patton.  George C. Scott would not give a better performance, even if he felt it necessary to turn down the Oscar that came with it and the movie would famously become Richard Nixon’s favourite.

Many years ago, I watched what was essentially another rip-off of The Dirty Dozen, The Devil’s Brigade.  An entertaining romp, this one held a place of importance  and pride to me though because it concerned a ragtag U.S. commando unit drummed into shape by Canadian Special Forces officers, led by Cliff Robertson.  For once, the Canadians were the real heroes.  It was many years later that my dad informed that not only was the Devil’s Brigade a real World War 2 unit, but the best man at my parent’s wedding, George Stocking, was a former member of the Devil’s Brigade.  I promptly rushed home and watched it again and got a copy for my dad, who had never seen the movie.

My favourite war sub-genre is the submarine movie.  The idea that a small group of men from every background works together for the greater good (and their own safety) inside a giant tube, constantly facing stress and danger is a formula that never gets old for me.  Purists will list Das Boot and Run Silent Run Deep as the classics of the genre but my favourite is a propaganda piece that may lack in realism, but more than makes up for it in heart, Destination Tokyo.  Released at the start of the Second World War to give audiences a glimpse into the heretofore unknown world of the silent service, it stars Cary Grant as the skipper of a sub that has the unenviable task of sneaking into Tokyo Bay on an espionage mission, providing us with humour, pathos, excitement, and sheer bravado in spades.  Yeah, it’s old-fashioned but it’s old-fashioned fun.

Many may feel, even with the advent of ultra-realistic movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, that war movies diminish the great sacrifices the men and women who have served have made but I know that during virtually every war movie I watch, I have at least a moment of reflection when I’m thankful uncles Mike and Harry and all the other uncles, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives and aunts were willing to make the decision to serve their country so that pacifists like myself can enjoy the freedom they fought for.

From Italy With Love or My Week In Italy Through Film

It was just one week ago (this very moment!) that I was driving home from the airport, fresh (or fatigued, depending on your outlook) from my first visit to the beautiful, exasperating, exciting, strange and wonderful county of Italia, a whirlwind week of food, art, history, and friendship.  As if the jet lag wasn’t enough, we made sure we wore ourselves out, drinking in (literally and figuratively…I still don’t know how I functioned each morning after the wonderful bottle or so of wine I polished off every dinner) everything we could in the short time we had.  Our motto: Do it now, process it later.

I live in Southern Ontario, not exactly Hollywood North (although a fair bit of filmmaking does take place in Toronto and isolated areas) so when I see my environs captured on celluloid, it’s usually Anyplace, U.S.A. over top of places familiar to me with all the requisite flag and sign changes.  I can still however, scream and point as I see these poorly disguised landmarks in movies like Short Circuit, To Die For and Dawn Of the Dead (shot in the mall I used to work at and okay, I simply screamed in pain at Short Circuit).  But here was a country so steeped in history, so utterly familiar to those who have never been there that the very names conjure up vivid images, Trevi Fountain, St. Peter’s Basilica, Pompeii, the Colosseum, mozzarella, pizza, Michelangelo.  And so I found in my travels that so much of what I was seeing in person revived memories of movies both recent and long forgotten.  It seemed as though each sight, taste or smell elicited a film flashback  and so I will give a day-by-day reminisce, mingled with the movies brought to mind.

Day One: Rome (the airport at least)-Flying into Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport in Fiumicino, a suburb of Rome, I was reminded of the opening scenes of Avanti!, the Billy Wilder-directed Jack Lemmon comedy about an American businessman wrested from his golf-and-martini life to fly to Italy to facilitate the shipping of his father’s body back Stateside, even as he is engulfed by ‘amore’.  The opening scenes are the pilot’s view of the approach to Da Vinci Airport and I looked out the small window over the wing (why does it seem I’m always over the wing?) at the vast sprawl of suburban Rome, feeling somewhat more excited about the prospect than Jack Lemmon did.  As I climbed into my tiny Fiat Grande Punto and raced down the Autostrade on the 3 1/2 hour journey to our hotel, I felt at times like Matt Damon racing through the countryside in The Italian Job or one of the Bourne movies, until my wife told me to slow down or the GPS bleated its insistence that I was in fact speeding.  We arrived at our hotel, jet-lagged and apprehensive about this strange new country.

Day Two: Paestum-A mere four kilometres from our hotel (although the guide book said one kilometre so we decided to ditch the car and get a taste of the countryside…boy, did we ever) is the ancient Greek town of Poseidonia, which the Romans later named Paestum, where lay what most historians consider the best-preserved Greek ruins in the world.  Beyond the quiet humility I felt as I thought about my relative insignificance in the long dance of history that played out on this plain, I also felt awed as I envisioned a 40-foot-high Laurence Olivier sitting in the enormous temple of Zeus in the Ray Harryhausen ‘classic’, Clash Of the Titans.  But what I was most reminded of, sadly, was the movie that played on the plane the day before, the latest Nia Vardalos fiasco, My Life In Ruins.  The (unfunny) story of a Greek tour guide finding romance with the hunk bus driver while showcasing the beauty of Greece, I was saddened for a fleeting second by the thought of the wasted potential of Vardalos, who wrote and starred in the wonderful My Big Fat Greek Wedding then squandered that with Connie and Carla and this latest dreck.  Fortunately, the glory of my surroundings woke me from this sad reverie.  After our sojourn at the ruins, we stopped for our first lunch in a small bar/gelateria (a bar in Italy is the North American equivalent to a coffee shop) and it was here that one of the real differences between Europe and North America becomes most evident, the food.  In North America, we have a philosophy that more and bigger is better.  Grocery stores have become supercentres with several dozen varieties of, well, everything.  Buffets are ubiquitous, obesity is on the rise and processed is the word of the day.  In Europe, however, they still seem to take pride in their food, both growing and making it.  Everywhere we went, from the wonderful hotel restaurant to the Autogrill, Italy’s expressway rest stop, the food was terrific and made with care from fresh ingredients.  Virtually every local pizzeria featured what I would term ‘artisan’ food.  Which leads me to…

Day Three: Rome-We rose at 4:30 for the 3 1/2 hour drive back to Rome.  I know, “Why are you driving all the way back to Rome?”, you ask.  Well, you see, we had tickets for a papal audience at the Vatican at 10:30 and I had never driven in Rome proper so I wanted to get there in plenty of time, for that as well as REAL reason for the trip back, a 12:45 appointment at the top of the Spanish Steps to have our wedding vows renewed (yes, I’m such a romantic)!  Well, we made great time (again, Italian Job) and it seemed, as we approached the outskirts of Rome and the GPS informed us that we had a half hour to drive just 13 kilometres to reach our exact destination, that we were on the cusp of possibly the greatest day of our lives and everything was falling into place.  Then we hit the famed Rome traffic jam, five packed lanes as far as the eye could see!

(In the spirit of my beloved serials)…What dastardly deed had the populace of Rome foisted on our hapless hero and his blushing bride-to-be (sort of)?  Would they make it to their appointment with destiny?  Are their upcoming nuptials in jeopardy?  Would the marriage be consummated (okay, ewww..)?  Find out in the next spellbinding chapter of From Italy With Love or My Week In Italy Through Film at this theatre next week (or whenever I get the rest done)!