Tipping the Decade
The Best and Worst Movies of 2009
By Cole Smithey
Hollywood's bland year of mediocre movies perennially aimed at 14-year-olds set into relief an abundance of important foreign and independent films that helped fill a vacuum for "adventurous" American audiences.
Films from the UK (see "Bright Star," "The Damned United," "Fifty Dead Men Walking," "Fish Tank," and "In the Loop") played a big part in giving audiences a wealth of intensely satisfying choices.
In spite of the usual barrage of torture porn, horror movies enjoyed a good year with films like "The House of the Devil," "Drag Me to Hell," and "Antichrist" building shocks and suspense.
Italian cinema underwent a rebirth with films like "Il Divo" and "Gomorrah" attracting well-deserved spectators. While the late season of Hollywood's latest Oscar-bait movies presented a pleasingly glacial facade with "Up in the Air," it was a little film with Jeff Bridges that stole the year's punch and lightening.
The Best:
10. Bright Star
"Bright Star" is an unassuming telling of the simmering romance that developed between the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and a comely clothing designer named Fanny Brawne (well played by the talented Abbie Cornish). Director Jane Campion ("The Piano" – 1993), presents a rare pleasure of unrequited love that never dips the poet's ink into the syrup of sentimentality, but rather allows its characters to invest passion from their gently articulated imaginations.
9. The Damned United
In his portrayal of famed British soccer team manager Brian Clough, Michael Sheen solidifies his status as this generation's Laurence Olivier in Tom Hooper's enthralling adaptation of Peter Morgan's 2006 book "The Damned Utd." "The Damned United" is one damned entertaining movie.
8. Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi uses everything in his bag of cinematic tricks to create a fast paced "Night Gallery"/"Twilight Zone"-styled horror movie that continuously goes much further than any expectations might prepare you for. "Drag Me to Hell" is the most fun I've had at the movies in years. It's destined to be a cult classic for all eternity.
7. Tulpan
"Tulpan" is a neorealist film of exquisite beauty and eloquence from director Sergey Dvortsevoy. The filmmaker captures the life-and-death demands of a seemingly alien landscape within the context of a generational paradigm shift in Central Asia.
6. Crude
Documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger travels to various locations in Ecuador in order to show the extensive damage wreaked by Texaco/Chevron, a company whose negligence and greed led to the raping of a 1,700 square-mile area of the Amazon rain forest–now called the "cancer death zone"–and dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste. "Crude" is a knock-your-socks-off documentary that will leave you speechless. It's the best documentary of the year.
5. Departures
"Departures" is a brilliantly written and performed story that transcends its themes of ritualized catharsis to bring the audience to a fresh understanding of man's need to make peace with the deceased.
4. Seraphine
In writer/director Martin Provost's patiently restrained biopic about the self-trained French painter Seraphine Louis, the audience is brought increasingly closer into the heart and mind of a genius whose turbulent inner life eventually envelops her conscious being. Yolande Moreau gives an earthy and compelling performance, measured by her character's direct connection to the natural world around her.
3. Inglorious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino has matured as an auteur even if he's as prone as ever to creating funny-ha-ha sequences of joyous cinematic revelry just for the sport of it. The film builds toward a new kind of World War II fantasy climax that is as invigorating as it is bittersweet for its inevitable collateral damage.
2. Antichrist
With "Antichrist," Lars von Trier creates a tense and provocative horror film bound up in terms of death, brutal violence, psycho-therapy, sexual desire, and the fury of Mother Nature. As with Alfred Hitchcock, Lars von Trier works with a direct cinematic language that allows the audience to trust in his mastery of filmic art and ability to gross them out but not break them. Indeed, Lars von Trier is a master filmmaker. His exploration into the genre of horror is a film far scarier than any Hollywood movie. As with all of von Triers' films, there's some Dogme for the audience to chew on.
1. Crazy Heart
The long course of Jeff Bridges' dazzling acting career has led him to a truly virtuosic tour de force performance as an old-fashioned cowboy singer. Bridges is a natural–singing and playing country songs with the sweat of authenticity and the spit of a drunk factory worker. Based on Thomas Cobb's novel, "Crazy Heart" is a kissing-cousin to Robert Duvall's great 1983 cowboy-singer movie "Tender Mercies." Duvall's presence as Wayne, a bartender friend, is a hat-tip to that film's inspiration. "Crazy Heart" is the best American film of the year. Jeff Bridges smokes–big time.
Honorable mention for 2009 goes to: Anvil: The Story of Anvil, The Beaches of Agnes, Black Dynamite, An Education, Everlasting Moments, Fifty Dead Men Walking, Fish Tank, Funny People, Gomorrah, The Hurt Locker, Il Divo, In the Loop, Loren Cass, Lorna's Silence, The Maid, Moon, Not Quite Hollywood, Observe and Report, Precious, Sin Nombre, Three Monkeys, Up, The White Ribbon.
My top film pick of the century's first decade is "There Will Be Blood," and my top choice for the film that best captures the decade's zeitgeist is Charles Ferguson's documentary "No End in Sight."
Best DVD: The Exiles
Director Brent MacKenzie’s black-and-white documentary/narrative genre blender about urbanized Native Americans in 1961 Los Angeles is a cold glass of cinematic water drawn from the same well as Joseph Strick’s "The Savage Eye" (1960). Bold in its visionary attempt to capture an essence of American Indian reality that is evermore significant today for its strangled condemnation of America’s betrayal of a people it murdered and displaced before such war crimes became articulated in our common vernacular, "The Exiles" is a one-of-a-kind film.
The Worst:
10. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Michael Bay's soul-sucking extravaganza of metal machine warfare is remarkable for the lethargy with which the clunky story drags from one silly sequence to another. The spectacle on display isn't even all that impressive. You might make it out of the movie with your soul barely intact, but the actors in the film don't fare so well.
9. Battle for Terra
"Battle for Terra" is an off-putting animated sci-fi flick for no one. 3-D computer generated graphics are the only thing to recommend this thematically tone-deaf sci-fi disaster.
8. Away We Go
Co-writer Dave Eggers' holier-than-thou, slacker road story of negative wish fulfillment proves toxic source material to director Sam Mendes. The movie could win a prize for worst poster of the decade.
7. Tickling Leo
Ostensibly about Holocaust guilt, writer/director Jeremy Davidson's poorly scripted, filmed, and executed drama plays out like an unfinished low budget soap opera. This film should never have gotten a theatrical release.
6. Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America
Minimalist independent cinema doesn't get much more low fidelity than debut writer/director Tony Stone's garish vision of 11th century Vikings discovering North America. Clearly inspired by Gus Van Sant's trilogy of time-in-the-desert films, Stone produces a similar cinematic dung heap.
5. Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha
Melvin Van Peebles unwatchable video collage version of his 1982 Broadway disaster "Waltz of the Stork" might work in an art instillation with plastic trash bags lining the walls, but the film fails miserably to live up to Van Peebles's reputation as the man who made the groundbreaking Blaxploitation film "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" (1971). It isn't just bad, it's gawdawful.
4. Surveillance
From the looks of her latest cinematic abomination, it seems Jennifer Lynch is doomed to forever be regarded as David Lynch’s untalented daughter. Her first film in 15 years, after the unwatchable “Boxing Helena,” is the kind of slapdash gore-fest you’d expect from Rob Zombie, although even he might take offense at the comparison.
3. H2: Halloween II
Writer/director Rob Zombie's one-note blood bath is a juvenile experiment in gore for gore's sake. It remains a mystery how such an incompetent writer could ever sell the kind of monotonous drivel that "Halloween II" represents, much less get a budget to direct it. Shame, Rob Zombie, shame.
2. The Collector
"The Collector" (no relation to the great John Fowles novel) is director/co-writer Marcus Dunstan's gratuitous attempt at torture porn after writing the scripts for the fourth and fifth installments of the "Saw" horror franchise. It's an open-handed insult to fans of the horror genre.
1. The Stoning of Soraya M.
Cyrus Nowrasteh crafts a prosaic telling of the brutal 1986 murder of an Iranian family woman, as orchestrated by her own husband in the interest of avoiding divorce payments and running off with a teenaged girl. Based on Freidoune Sahebjam's best-selling book, here is an example of on-the-nose exploitation filmmaking at its most unsophisticated level. It's one thing to illustrate social injustice, and quite a different thing to reward it.
