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!

The Blockbuster and the Death Of Hollywood (?)

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the big boom as much as the next guy. Cinematic thrill rides still move me.  A great fight  makes me walking out of the theatre looking to get in one and a great car chase makes me push the pedal a little bit harder.  But honestly, is that all there is?   I watch a lot of classic movies and by classic, I don’t mean the original Star Wars trilogy (although those are classics for their time).  By classic, I mean movies in black and white, with actors who, for the most part, are now deceased.  My favorite era is 1935 to 1945, a fertile period unmatched for sheer great film quantity and quality, but that is another blog entirely.  My point here is that when others (my family and those I work with and for) are forced to watch these movies, they invariably say the same thing, “They’re just so sloooow.”  (To which I respond, in my head, “No, it’s just the person watching.”)  To be honest, it’s not their fault.  This generation (and to a large extent the last) has been weened on a relatively recent development in the movie world, the blockbuster.  Fast-paced, plot-anemic blockbusters.

The term ‘blockbuster’ stems from the theatrical world where, it is said, a popular and high-grossing play would ‘bust’ the other theatres on the block and drive them out of business.  In the movie world, the term came into use in the mid-1970′s, coinciding with the release and subsequent success of the first bona-fide movie ‘blockbuster’, Jaws.  Before Jaws, there were massively popular movies, like The Sound Of Music and Gone With the Wind (which, if tickets prices are adjusted for inflation, is far and away the biggest grossing movie of all time.  Take that, George Lucas!) and the term would refer to their box office gross but Jaws started a trend that would change the way movies are made and marketed.  These movies would be termed ‘event movies’ and eventually ‘tentpole movies’, meaning that a large portion of the studio’s money and power would fall behind one movie, usually opening in the summer that would be expected to carry the studio through the bulk of the year, thus the ‘pole’ that holds up the ‘tent’.  This thinking has so changed the way we see movies and the movies that we see that the studios fight, sometimes years in advance, over what weekend their ‘blockbuster’ will open (now movies are called blockbusters before they have made a single penny) so generally, only one movie will open each weekend throughout the summer, especially in the first two months. 

This attitude has changed the way movies are made as well.  Each ‘blockbuster’ has to be bigger, faster and more fantastic than the last which increases the budget through special effects almost exclusively to the detriment of the story and acting.  The story has become secondary, something to hang on the glorious effects.  Granted, last year’s Iron Man and this year’s Star Trek show you can have a successful marriage of story and effects but unfortunately, these are the exceptions to the rule.  Before the 1970′s, movies seemed to be more intelligent, to speak more to the audience.  There wasn’t the need for wall-to-wall because there were characters that we wanted to spend time with between the action.  Film excellence and popularity were not mutually exclusive and here’s some numbers to back that up.  In 1945, the Oscar for Best Picture went to The Lost Weekend which was the number nine box office grosser that year.  In 1950, Best Picture All About Eve was also number nine.  The Ten Commandments, 1956 Best Picture winner was number one and 1960′s Oscar choice, The Apartment was number eight.  Conversely, last year’s winner, Slumdog Millionaire was a somewhat respectable number sixteen, however the previous year was thirty-six (No Country For Old Men), 2005 was forty-nine (Crash) and 2004, twenty-four (Million Dollar Baby).  Get my point?

Attendance numbers have also drastically dwindled and continue to do so.  Although box office groses often range in the hundreds of millions, the fact is that the ticket prices have grown exponentially in the last 20 years.  The average North American movie ticket price in 1980 was $2.69 and this year promises to top $7.50.  In 1960, though, the average ticket price was a measly 75 cents.  Factoring in box office, Gone With the Wind had 206 million admissions, The Sound Of Music had 154 million and The Ten Commandments had 131 million.  Modern day?  Last year’s box office giant, The Dark Knight, had just 72 million while 2004′s Shrek 2 had 74 million and Pirates Of the Caribbean 3 had a (relatively) measly 64 million.  Now I realize that there is so much more to occupy our easily distracted minds than there was 50 years ago but conversely, the population of North America has doubled in that time yet the movie attendance numbers continue to dwindle.  The advent of home theatre and DVD will continue to cut into these, as well.

So, is this the death of Hollywood?  Well, I don’t think we have to pick out a black suit yet but the fact is, the times, they are a-changin’ and Hollywood is going to have to change as well.  The phoenix-like resurgence of 3-D is certainly a good sign that someone in La-La-Land is thinking but it will eventually take more than a pair of goofy glasses to stay alive.

The Curious Case of Forrest Gump…err…Benjamin Button

A man, both simple and simplistic, moves through time and the world, touching those he comes in contact with without seeming to be touched by them.  He meets a girl in his youth, loses her to a world he is not a part of, but eventually wins her when she tires of that world, only to lose her again but he is left with a greater legacy.  How I loved…Forrest Gump?  Yes, but also The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.  From a script written by the same scribe as Gump, Eric Roth, Oscar-winning Benjamin Button is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and directed by someone I greatly admire whose work I don’t always like, David Fincher.  Seven may be my favorite crime thriller and I think that although flawed, The Game is a minor masterpiece.  Even Panic Room and his ‘kitchen sink’ movie (as in he throws in everything but), Fight Club, though inferior still are a joy to watch, if only once.  Always overly ambitious but still a fabulous visual storyteller, Fincher tries to fashion his greatest masterpiece, an epic about a man with a strange malady, he is born old and grows younger through time.  Benjamin is abandoned at birth but found and raised by a loving black woman (Taraji Henson) who works at then appears to run an ‘old folks home’, where he seems to fit in just fine, thank you very much.  He becomes a seaman and sees the world, experiencing history as it unfolds, always naive regardless of the breadth of his experience, once again mirroring that lovable simpleton, Gump.  The woman he pines for is Daisy, luminously played by Cate Blanchett.  In fact, every supporting role is so well written and played that it only serves to point out the hollowness of Pitt’s character.  Although he is in virtually every scene of the movie, there is no real arc to his character, no change at all really, as if he is just too flummoxed by the bizarreness of his life that he simply cannot grow as a person.  At least Forrest Gump grew, albeit in small ways, from his experiences.  By the time the movie finishes its almost two and a half hour run, you don’t really know anymore about what makes Button tick then you did at the beginning.  But surrounded by such rich set pieces as Button’s romancing a diplomat’s wife in a Russia that is imploding or a terrifically thrilling stint fighting on the seas during World War II, it is easy to forget and almost forgive this minor quibble.  So, by all means, see it for the superb supporting characterizations and often startling visuals but don’t expect a lot from Benjamin Button himself, especially for him to start yelling, ” Jenny!”.  After all, her name in this movie is Daisy.