Life and laziness sort of got in the way, but I’ve finally made my Top Ten of 2009 list and SPOILER alert—Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will not be making the list.
I should mention the five Oscar-nominated films that I haven’t seen yet. These are my unseen also-rans (“never-rans?”)—condolences to Il Divo (1), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2), The Last Station (2), The Secret of Kells (1) & The White Ribbon (1) as they won’t be making my list but possibly could have if I lived in a larger market.
Here’s a complete list of the 205 movies from 2009 that I’ve seen and are up for my prestigious list.
And without further ado…
My Top 10 Films of 2009
Actually, there’s just a little more ado…
I want to give an honorable mention to Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It probably deserves to be on this list as it was one of the eight 
star films I saw in 2009, however as I was making this list, there was a 
movie that was just a little bit more memorable, so Cloudy fell down to the #11 spot.
And NOW, without further ado…
10. Everlasting Moments
This film deserves to be a bit higher, but as it’s just a tiny Swedish film no one has probably heard of, I figured I’d use it to fill my #10 slot. It’s an elegant period drama that deals with class struggles, alcoholism, sexism, feminism, WWI, labor unions and so much more. IMDb sums up the plot simply and beautifully: “[A] young working class woman, Maria [Maria Heiskanen], wins a camera in a lottery. The decision to keep it alters her whole life.” That may not sound too exciting, but as long as you don’t have an aversion to reading subtitles, I highly recommend you rent this as it truly was one of the best films I saw last year.
9. Every Little Step
It just wouldn’t feel like one of my “Best of the Year” lists without some fantastic documentary, and 2009 had several great docs trying to make the list. Food, Inc. or Capitalism: A Love Story could easily have filled this spot, but Every Little Step just barely beats them out because its subject matter is so fascinating to me. Every Little Step follows a handful of actors and dancers who audition for Broadway’s revival of “A Chorus Line.” Since I had recognized some of the faces as cast members, a little of the drama about who will make the cut was lost, but it was still fascinating getting a glimpse behind the curtain at the lengthy Broadway audition process & hearing the original tapes Michael Bennett recorded when researching for his new musical.
8. Me and Orson Welles
Here’s another film that features a lot of acting, auditions, rehearsals and theatre—and that may be part of the reason I enjoyed it so much. The story alone would probably be worthy of my Top 25, but what bumps it up to #8 is the phenomenal performance of Christian McKay as Orson Welles. He completely embodies the legendary actor/director and deserved an Oscar nomination (although I believe in either category he’d lose to Bridges or Waltz, so maybe the point is moot). Zac Efron is the titular Me—a young wanna-be actor desperate to work with Welles in his famous 1937 Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar. The supporting cast (including a beautiful Claire Daines as Orson’s assistant) is an ensemble of great performers playing great performers (e.g. Norman Lloyd, Joseph Cotton & George Coulouris). However, the greatest performer here is definitely Mr. Welles—I mean McKay—himself. I kept hoping there would be a scene featuring some frozen peas.
7. In the Loop
Based on a UK television series “The Thick of It,” In the Loop is a political mock-vérité comedy where one unfortunate verbal slip-up puts US and UK politicians in a tizzy. A UK politician (Tom Hollander) states that “war is unforeseeable” and that while peace is desirable, occasionally one must “climb the mountain of conflict.” All of this seems harmless in his eyes, but the press believes his is the view of the Prime Minister and that the UK and US are planning to invade some unnamed Middle Eastern country. Soon, several British ministers are flown to DC to meet with other heads of state so they can try to formulate a actual stance on war, with these two phrases already out there in the ephemera. This may sound really dry, but the writing is extremely funny—especially the one press official Michael Tucker (Peter Capaldi) who curses more than that bartender with Tourette’s in Boondock Saints.
6. An Education
Nothing like a little pedophilia to gain some Oscar buzz. An Education is the coming-of-age story of 16-year-old Jenny (Oscar nominee, Carey Mulligan) whose father (Alfred Molina) relentlessly pushes her in an attempt to get into Oxford; however, Jenny has other aspirations—to live in France, for instance. Jenny meets David (Peter Sarsgaard) one afternoon, when he spots her lugging her cello home in the rain and offers her a lift—and this girl is half his age (really surprised The Police didn’t make the soundtrack)! At first, David begins introducing Jenny to cultural events she’s only read about or listened to on her hi-fi. As she continues to ditch schoolwork with her classmates for nights out at ballets and bars with David and his friends, the relationship grows into something more. Mulligan does well here, but I never once believed she was only 16—she played Jenny as an intelligent, beautiful 20-something which is why I feel her nomination is a little unfounded. That may be the reason why the relationship here didn’t really bother me—Jenny seemed 18-22 while David seemed 25-30 and it was just the telling of a sheltered girl falling for a slightly older, more sophisticated man. There were, of course, a few moments that reminded you how taboo this relationship was supposed to be, but the film deals with it deftly and this joins Hard Candy, Little Children and The Woodsman as another excellent film featuring a pedophile.
5. Moon
As I said in my blog about the Best Acting of 2009, Sam Rockwell gives two of the best performances of last year (another Oscar snub). Moon is a claustrophobic mystery-thriller featuring Rockwell as Sam Bell, an astronaut in the final three weeks of his three-year solo mission on a lunar mining station. His only company is a HAL-like computer system named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) due to a communication malfunction with Earth. After an accident on one of the moon harvesters, Rockwell discovers someone else on the station claiming to be Sam Bell. He starts to wonder if his long time solitude is affecting his mind as paranoia starts to set in. The film does feature some classic space-movie clichés, but somehow none of them are too contrived, leaving a simple character study, in which Rockwell is out of this world.
4. Up in the Air
Jason Reitman has a pretty damn good track record as director, following up Thank You For Smoking & Juno with this little look at the recession and big corporate downsizing. Oscar-nominee, George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham lives life with an empty backpack, with little holding him down anywhere. He’s on the road 300 days each year firing employees for companies who have enough money to pay for his services but not enough to keep their workers. He’s good at his job and enjoys banking thousands of frequent flier miles every week. Oscar-nominee, Vera Farmiga plays love interest Alex, who describes herself as “[Ryan] with a vagina,” and Oscar-nominee, Anna Kendrick plays Natalie, a young up-and-comer with radical new ideas that would put the professional firer out of a job. The dialogue is witty, the plot has a third act that I didn’t fully expect, and the film is filled with fantastic characters. The only complaint I have with the film is some of the featured extras who play the people getting fired—given only a small amount of screen time they might not need to be the best actors ever, but some of these line readings were just horrible. Thankfully, these most painful scenes are near the very beginning and were forgotten about quickly once the main actors got started.
3. Inglourious Basterds
Tarantino has written a fantastic pseudo-historical piece of WWII drama here, featuring a Bear Jew, a Jew Hunter, an Apache, a Little Man and a lot of other interesting (but not as interestingly-named) Basterds. I am simply amazed by the ingenuity of Tarantino to come up with a story like this—a band of Jewish behind-enemy-lines Nazi killers?! How has this not already been done?! (cue a comment pointing to a film where it has already been done.) There are at least three fantastic setpieces (the opening scene pictured above, the basement bar & the final “Revenge of the Giant Face”) along with some brilliant cinematography and scoring. And, how it’s taken me six whole sentences to mention the acting, I’ll never know. First, you have Best Supporting Actor Christopher Waltz (notice I’m not saying “nominee” because this award is his, and if he loses I’ll eat Werner Herzog’s shoe!) as the menacing Col. Hans Landa. Next you have Brad Pitt, Eli Roth and Michael Fassbender each doing some of their best work ever (although Fassbender was also excellent in last year’s Hunger). Finally, Mélanie Laurent and Diane Kruger are as beautiful as they are talented and Laurent’s warpaint scene while Bowie sings “Cat People” is another unforgettable scene. One of a few 2009 films I actually went to see twice because it’s a bingo!
2. Fantastic Mr. Fox
Another film I saw twice in theaters is Wes Anderson’s kooky animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox. Based on a Roald Dahl novel (which I’ve never read), here is a story of some woodland creatures defending themselves from Boggis, Bunce and Bean—three farmers who, themselves, were terrorized by Mr. Fox. I’m a fan of Anderson’s work (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) but here, his style takes a leap I never imagined possible. Anderson is known for working with many of the same actors, often portraying quirky characters who live in a bright, primary-colored world. And while I’ve mostly always enjoyed these traits in his live action films, stop-motion animation allows everything to climb to a whole new level. The voice acting here (Clooney, Streep, Murray, Schwartzman, Wilson, Gambon, Dafoe & even Anderson himself) is cussing brilliant as is the writing (“cuss” really needs to catch on because it’s hilarious) and scoring (I’m hopeful this will be the Oscar winning score).
And my favorite film of 2009 is……
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1. Star Trek
My most watched 2009 film (twice in theaters and once on Blu-Ray) deserves to be #1, doesn’t it? I still remember going to see this at midnight on opening night and being blown away by the sheer awesomeness of it. You see, I expected great things from Tarantino and Anderson, but Abrams hadn’t yet proven that his skills as producer (“Lost”, “Fringe”, Cloverfield) would make him a good director (M:i:III was decent but not great). Plus, while I absolutely loved ST:TNG, I was never a huge fan of TOS or many of the other incarnations, so this reboot of the original wasn’t too high on my radar—at first. Some decent trailers got me to the midnight showing, however, and from the very first scene I was on the edge of my seat like some uber-Trekker-fanboy. The writing was clever—a lot of hardcore Trekkers may be lamenting the time travel subplot and how it changed “history,” but I thought it was a brilliant way to wipe the canon slate clean so that Abrams and the screenwriters could tell the story they wanted to without contradicting Season 2 Episode 4 of TOS. Abrams also did a great job casting the film—each character is perfect, most notably Chris Pine as Kirk, Anton Yelchin as Chekov and Karl Urban as Bones (although I didn’t quite buy Nimoy as Spock[/sarcasm]). They also made sure to include some throwbacks to the series (e.g. Red Shirt), which made it all the more enjoyable for a semi-fan of the show. The only thing keeping this from being perfect is that clunky pit stop on the ice planet featuring a large vagisaurus chasing Kirk. What the heck was up with that?!
So… What was your favorite movie of 2009? Think any of my choices above have a chance at winning an Oscar next weekend? Leave your thoughts and comments below!
