Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2009

The last year of any decade usually a watershed year, we come to the end of 2009 with a bounty of riches. A year that just a couple of months ago I feared wouldn't yield ten films from which to choose has, through a flurry of screeners and late-season additions, convinced me of its cinematic legitimacy. Find in the top ten three war films, five films about the state and politics of the modern family, one about a poet, and one about a cop. Discover that each of the first ten has a direct corollary in the next ten (suggesting that there's a good bit of synchronicity in 2009), and that although women directors remain a novelty, three penetrate the top ten for the first time in my decade of lists. Other threads include a continuation of the last two years' feelings of disconnection and entropy indulged, the notion that institutions of right are the ones perpetrating the bulk of atrocity, and investigations into the self that mainly fulfill Nietzsche's maxim of abysses looking into the lookers. It's a summary list, in a way, of the '00s.

As we step bravely into 2010, we see how we consume movies change for good. It's only a matter of time, really, before physical media is a thing of the past. It's only a matter of time before studios realize that critics are expensive, but uploads direct to television are cheap; rather than extinguish us, they extinguish publicists. Because the real revelation isn't that critics are expensive, but that screenings, especially loaded screenings, are. I saw five of the films on this list through Netflix's streaming video service–that's a full quarter of the top twenty of 2009. I look forward to the day a decade or so down the road when I'm given the opportunity to call up something like, say, House of the Devil for easy screening on repertory. Whether exhibition can thrive in a streaming world is part of a longer conversation we're not going to have until it's too late. It's too late already.

Evolution–ain't it a bitch?–Walter Chaw, January 1, 2010

                    WALTER CHAW'S TOP 10                    

Honourable mentions: Coraline; Baader Meinhoff Complex; Bronson; Julia; The Messenger; Moon

Dishonourable mentions: Avatar; Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen; The Blind Side; Precious… Essentially every mainstream treatment of race after a couple of great years of the same. (Not to mention Crazy Heart, which sucks no matter how good Jeff Bridges is in it, and The Lovely Bones, a disgrace.)

Notably missed: Vincere; You, the Living; Disgrace; The White Ribbon

20-11: 20. Sherlock Holmes; 19. Star Trek; 18. In the Loop (a sharp, acidic, brilliantly- written and structured political satire, if already a little musty); 17. Police, Adjective (crime procedural as stream-of-consciousness trance); 16. District 9; 15. The Headless Woman (Repulsion by way of Fellini); 14. Summer Hours (another great Gallic flick about family at the end of the world following last year's A Christmas Tale); 13. Tetro (Coppola's back, most of the way at least, with a visually audacious autobiographical freak-out starring ace creepy-guy Vincent Gallo); 12. Two Lovers (James Gray's lovely and surprisingly sticky tale of misfits in the city); 11. Tokyo Sonata

BILL CHAMBERS'S TOP 10

10. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (d. Mark Hartley) The screening ended, and I made a beeline for the videostore across the street to pick up all the "ozploitation" I could get my hands on. It probably loses some of its power to entice at home because of what a rare treat it is to see the likes of Turkey Shoot on the big screen; governments could do worse than fund something like this for every national cinema.

9. Whip It (d. Drew Barrymore) It's appalling that vile shit like The Proposal and The Ugly Truth outpaced Whip It's total box-office on opening weekend. (Yes, I'm looking at you, American Female Aged 18-49.) Consider this a form of protest if you must, but I dearly missed the movie's warm embrace when the lights un-dimmed.

8. Police, Adjective (Politist, adj.) (d. Corneliu Porumboiu) Bored me stupid, then hooked me with a riveting, droll semantics debate. I'm happy to fall in line with those who champion the whole as "Kafkaesque," but I wish our hero's deadening routine was shot with a little less detachment.

7. Public Enemies (d. Michael Mann) Johnny Depp is bland (I'm the kook who prefers Christian Bale's performance), the bank robberies feel perfunctory, and it's curiously lacking in technical finesse. Now for the good stuff: just about everything else–though I'm inclined to single out Stephen Lang's gallant lawman and the damn near spiritual pull of Elliot Goldenthal's score.

6. Inside (À l'intérieur) (ds. Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury) It's a movie I'd long theorized: a movie so utterly repulsive that the needle peaks into the beautiful range. Immediately after watching it, I learned that one of my best friends had been killed in a hit-and-run, and, I don't know quite how to put this– Inside left me feeling pre-consoled.

5. Lorna's Silence (Le silence de Lorna) (ds. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne) It has, for world cinema, an unfashionably twisty plot (an engrossing one at that), but don't tell me it's any less devastating than what we've come to expect from the Dardennes.

4. 35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums) (d. Claire Denis) Gonna be some sweet sounds/Coming down on the nightshift

3. Antichrist (d. Lars von Trier) A perfect example of what makes The Lovely Bones so jejune a portrait of grief. Fascinating in context: that Charlotte Gainsbourg here is a dead ringer for Miss Gulch.

2. Julia (d. Erick Zonca) This is exactly the movie those Babel assholes keep trying to make, driven by the most mesmerizing performance of the year. But Julia itself deserves at least as much attention as Tilda Swinton is getting–they are symbiotic, actress and film, in what finally plays out as exhilarating proof of Godard's maxim that all you need is a girl and a gun.

1. Inglourious Basterds (d. Quentin Tarantino) Key word is "basterd" (sic): Tarantino, pulling off his biggest post-modern gambit yet, has made a movie whose title refers to the people making it–to their historical revisionism and to the gleefully, infectiously obnoxious attitude behind it. I'm not convinced it's his masterpiece (Pulp Fiction casts a long, Citizen Kane-like shadow), but it is a gift that keeps on giving through repeat viewings.

Shamefully Missed: The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans; The House of the Devil; Halloween II; Thirst; Tetro

11-20ish: The Hurt Locker; Drag Me to Hell; A Serious Man; Where the Wild Things Are; The Brothers Bloom; Two Lovers; Moon; Observe and Report; Taken; The Limits of Control

I Wish I Liked: District 9; Summer Hours; Star Trek

Dishonourable Mention: Rottentomatoes.com, for enabling comments on fucking pullquotes

IAN PUGH'S TOP 10

10. 35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums) (d. Claire Denis) It may be a tad heavy-handed, but there's still great fascination to be found in "old stories" without endings and the crumbling icons of the past. And the quotidian stage upon which it's presented is undeniably hypnotic–the players' eyes, bursting with forlorn desire, do more than their fair share to explain the dynamics of moving forward, standing still, and honouring your loved ones.

9. The Hurt Locker (d. Kathryn Bigelow) The bedlam of war expressed in a seemingly straightforward fashion, only to come across as a series of abstract images, sounds, and feelings. Bigelow certainly does right by her epigraph ("war is a drug"), and you could talk all day about how she presents the lone tangible concept–the titular locker–as a gateway into that world and the only foothold available on the other side. But there's so much else going on–and, frankly, I've yet to see a more concise metaphor for 9/11 and its aftermath than the one found here.

8. Moon (d. Duncan Jones) A chilling crisis of identity is made all the more harrowing by the fact that the forces responsible are thousands of miles away, their "guilt" uncertain–not to mention the question of how you go about interrupting an endless cycle of life and death. I've run it through my mind countless times, and the only conclusion I've come to is that Sam Rockwell is one hell of an actor.

7. A Serious Man (ds. Joel & Ethan Coen) Out of the many films this year to saddle a hapless protagonist with misery upon misery, A Serious Man is uniquely eloquent in acknowledging that questions about meaningless grief, once aimed at a cruel/absent Creator, must also be posed to the pessimistic Artist. More than just the Coens' personal "Duck Amuck," it's their most obvious existential treatise after a spate of subtle masterpieces to that end. Certainly that's no accident–but oddly enough, that sudden transparency makes even their most cynical and familiar choices feel like a breath of fresh air.

6. Antichrist (d. Lars von Trier) Von Trier presents another showdown between raw humanity and detached analysis–and this time, he hits the nail on the head by paring them down to their bare essentials. Appropriately, all I can tell you is that this damned dreamscape left me a jabbering puddle of tortured thoughts and half-realized emotions.

5. Thirst (Bakjwi) (d. Park Chan-wook) A better refutation of vampire romanticism than Let the Right One In, if only because it utilizes the allegory to attack a few more of our unspoken flaws–namely, the mentality that seems to value a conscience-free death over a well-lived life. It may be another of Park's giallo nightmares, but his residual Catholic guilt pinpoints the relevant sins (remorse manufactured for absolution, altruism with the expectation of reward) with stunning precision, going so far as to dismiss righting those wrongs as moral masturbation. Thirst is frustratingly circuitous–and all the more terrifying for it.

4. Observe and Report (d. Jody Hill) Forget the sex-talk and cuss words that define a dubious "edge." When was the last time a comedy felt so exhiliratingly dangerous?

3. Julia (d. Erick Zonca) At once an impossibly tense thriller and a quiet heartbreaker where any and all human connections are undermined by myriad lies. Swinton dominates the picture with her mastery over Julia's obliviousness (just watch what happens when someone lies to her), but the whole thing is shot and edited with an urgent, emotional need–and you're never allowed to forget that the only real intimacy attends her next drink.

2. The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (d. Werner Herzog) A match made simultaneously in Heaven and Hell, two of cinema's most brilliant madmen combine their distinct talents to deliver a spectacle of astounding proportions. You can't help but marvel, mouth agape, as Cage's snarling policeman terrorizes old ladies with a revolver, imagines iguanas on his coffee table, and shuffles around the property room in search of blow. But the shadow of Katrina hangs overhead, and the film soon turns its attention to how this man can wander these streets with a clean conscience. Vulgar, insane, beautiful–2009 thematically distilled in all its misfortune and isolation. Talk about films we're lucky to have.

1. Inglourious Basterds (d. Quentin Tarantino) Haunted by grim reality, Tarantino's irresistible fantasy about how movies won the war comes packaged with a stern warning of how popular images ineffably distort our purview. Proclaiming a masterpiece, Tarantino demonstrates himself to be the cinema's most responsible craftsman while indicting himself as its most dangerous outlaw. (It's difficult to argue with him on any of those three points.) Who else could get away with likening an onscreen Hitler's hysterical laughter to an audience's hypothetical bloodlust–and who else could make that connection sting so badly?–

Notably Missed: A Single Man; Tokyo Sonata; The White Ribbon; My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Honourable Mention: Where the Wild Things Are; Halloween II; Adventureland; Drag Me to Hell; Star Trek

Dishonourable Mention: Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (bathetic pornography for the self-ennobling); Up in the Air ("No man is an island," blown up to 109 minutes and headlined by this generation's most overrated actor); Nine ("impersonal" is the last thing 8½ should ever be–"shrill" probably ranks up there too); (500) Days of Summer (the same old rom-com bullshit painted over with Allen/indie spackle); Avatar (its success the inevitable result of absurdly-lowered expectations)

Wish I'd Seen It in Time for Last Year's Top 10: Che

CONSENSUS: FILM FREAK CENTRAL'S TOP 5 OF 2009 1. Inglourious Basterds 2. Antichrist 3. 35 Shots of Rum 4. Julia 5. The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans

10. The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (d. Werner Herzog)
Herzog finds the perfect insect to essay in Nicolas Cage's dark angel of the bayou. Weird? Totally weird. Also feral and relentlessly alive. It reminds me a lot of fellow German New Waver Wim Wenders's Million Dollar Hotel, which gains in the rearview alongside Wenders's wonderful The End of Violence. (What is it about German filmmakers and cyborgs?) Predictable is Herzog taking this opportunity to go to the post-Katrina Big Easy and document the amazing corruption (governmental, societal) rampant there. It's a deeply American film; the only other filmmaker alive who could have done it as well is fellow non-American David Cronenberg.

9. The House of the Devil (d. Ti West)
The House of the Devil rocks on so many different levels that it's hard not to rave on. Start with gorgeous Jocelin Donahue as the heroine who, in this '80s-throwback slasher flick, is the spitting, heartbreaking image of Karen Allen in Starman or Jessica Harper in Suspiria. (Bonus: she can act.) She's in nearly every frame and the way we connect with her is the tether that holds us to this film all the way through to its unsurprising, but surprisingly affecting, conclusion. A moment in which she blisses out to The Fixx's "One Thing Leads to Another" is maybe my favourite in a year full of crystalline, defining moments (Watchmen's title sequence, Up's prologue)–and the tremendous tension director West achieves throughout is testament to the power of negative space. A beautiful-looking film, a smart genre exercise (note Dee Wallace's cameo), and scary as fuck to boot. As experiments go, compare it to the one-trick pony of Paranormal Activity for a treatise on how these things are done.

8. 35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums) (d. Claire Denis)
Denis's ongoing work chronicling the lazy backwards and forwards of interpersonal relationships gathers around a man and his daughter as they come to terms with the necessity of moving on without one another for the rest of their lives. It's a beautiful thing, fraught with sadness and better than Assayas's Summer Hours in restricting itself to painting in small, meticulous brushstrokes. Comparisons are being made to Ozu, but Denis is something all her own–if every bit as careful with the gravity of her objects and their interactions in holy space.

7. Bright Star (d. Jane Campion)
The image of one Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) in a field of lavender, reading a letter from John Keats (Ben Whishaw), is enough to make even the non-Romanticist swoon. From the very beginning, Campion has been an artist involved in the diagramming of how art maps out the architecture of sublimity–you see in Bright Star the floods of emotion that drench all her lovely, delicately-edged pictures. She returns here to her triumphant An Angel at My Table, porting over Kerry Fox to play Fanny's long-suffering mother, who can't quite understand the alchemy of estrogen and a season in the Lake District that would lead her daughter to fill her room with butterflies. Bright Star is Twilight for smart people–people who've actually been in love and who've read two words that actually make sense together.

6. A Serious Man (ds. Joel & Ethan Coen)
The Coens deliver an extraordinarily thoughtful, philosophical movie that speaks loud to the desire–ever-growing–for faith in a world without much evidence for such. Here their trademark nihilism is salved by what's almost a celebration of an individual who perseveres–not in the way of a Jerry Lundegaard, but in the way of someone just looking for the secret to eating as little shit as possible from one episode to the next. In that way, it becomes a lovely, borderline sympathetic film about the difficulty of existence. No accident that an abundance of humanity attends the suffering the Brothers are so fond of doling out in this, probably their most autobiographical picture. A Serious Man is their Shadow of a Doubt.

I've decided to let my reviews of

5. Antichrist (d. Lars von Trier)

and

4. Inglourious Basterds (d. Quentin Tarantino)

speak for themselves, which brings us to

3. The Hurt Locker (d. Kathryn Bigelow)
I was an avowed fan of Near Dark but wondering if, after the nominal successes of Blue Steel, Point Break, and Strange Days and the nominal–some would say outright–failures of The Weight of Water and K-19 The Widowmaker, Bigelow would ever make its equal. Along comes The Hurt Locker to finally establish her as an artist independent of Eric Red and, especially, notorious ex James Cameron. It's taken a while to shake off the yoke of the latter, but compare any ten minutes of the film against Cameron's Avatar to understand the places she's grown. Jeremy Renner does the mainstream version of his performance in 28 Weeks Later and finally wedges his way into the popular consciousness. He plays a munitions expert defusing IEDs in Iraq not as a reluctant soldier, but as a cowboy addicted to that millisecond away from oblivion. Glib to say it, but, post-9/11, aren't we all? It's the first film in my short-term memory that immediately addresses our handshake agreement with the world that airplanes fall out of the sky now with a purpose–that Day the Earth Stood Still ultimatum that we toe the line or something is going to blitz us as we sleep. The titular locker is a box containing the identifying markers of defused bombs. Keepsakes, you could say, of the pieces of our possible apocalypses we hold now against our hearts. It's pretty great.

2. Red Cliff (d. John Woo)
This refers to the complete five-hour version, not the one sanitized for round-eye consumption. John Woo's magnum opus, Red Cliff adapts one of the four Chinese epics (Romance of the Three Kingdoms)–think the Chinese Iliad–both faithfully and passionately. Its discussion of medieval battlefield tactics reminds of the same care taken in Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers, while all that chaff trimmed away for the American release reveals itself to be obsessed with the relationship between general Zhou Yu (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, one of the world's great stars), his coterie of advisors, and his pregnant wife. Though the set-pieces are predictably epic, the scope of the story is presented with the kind of focus we've come to expect from Woo and his Hong Kong pictures–the bulk of the time devoted to what men do when they love and admire each other. It's Woo's restraint here, his comfort with this material and what seems like pride, that marks Red Cliff as a defining work. Moving, stirring, and essentially Chinese, the picture is proof that big-budget, CGI-heavy epics don't have to be pieces of expensive shit, James Cameron. Naturally, it's not allowed to land on these shores without serious editing, a voiceover introduction, and title-cards identifying the guys because who can tell them apart?

1. Where the Wild Things Are (d. Spike Jonze)
Not much to add to my theatrical review, except to say that this is the exact film I'd choose as the decade's coda. It understands childhood, film as a transformative medium capable of great complexity, and how frightened we are of the kids we love. It defies easy explanations, its key hidden somewhere in the guts of the thing, and it has the grace to land its blows with a simple lack of pretension that ennobles the source material. Where the Wild Things Are is an all-timer.