Listmania ‘09! The Best Movies Of The Year
For the longest time it seemed like 2009 would be a truly dreadful year in film, perhaps as a consequence of the writers’ strike last year. By the end of it I felt like we’d had a pretty good run, once the summer was over. The early months were a desert with only Coraline making a dent in my memory, but by the time December rolled around with the release of Avatar, it felt like a more rounded experience. Even better, though we had a few horribly delayed releases (such as Up, which was disgracefully held back from UK release for six months), there are only a few movies that have yet to be released over here that have attracted our attention, and even then we’re not that bothered. The most frustrating omissions were our own fault. Jane Campion’s Bright Star came and went so quickly we missed out on seeing it, as did Lone Scherfig’s An Education. Sherlock Holmes came out this week but illness and schedule clashes mean we will be seeing it in 2010. It’s frustrating, but compared to last year’s maddening delays in seeing Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche, New York, it’s nowhere near as bad.
So anyway, here are my top 25 movies of 2009, in order. Hopefully soon I will get to post my bottom 25. It was depressingly easy to complete that list.
Best Movies of the Year:
25. Adventureland
Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age story is good enough to make me forgive it for being a coming-of-age story (a sub-genre I have little time for). Sensitive performances and a perfectly judged tone set it apart, and I expect second and third viewings will cement it as a favourite in the future.
24. A Christmas Carol
Though Charles Dickens’ novel suffers from being adapted too many times, this version was loyal enough to the source material to stand above the rest. Robert Zemeckis cleverly used his performance capture technology to create a world that looks like a living painting, and — for the most part — his thoughtful direction and stately command of pace are refreshingly old-fashioned.
23. Red Cliff: Part Two
A crushing disappointment after the genius of the first installment, John Woo’s epic finale to the Three Kingdoms story was hobbled by tedious subplots about the horrors of war, as well as an unsatisfying final confrontation with evil Prime Minister Cao Cao. Still, there were enough superb moments to save it, including an enormous conflagration, hardcore badassery from the heroes, and entertaining cunning from Zhuge Liang.
22. White Material
Working as a comment on racial identity, colonialism, and the guilt that attends it, Claire Denis’ movie is a fascinating and thought-provoking experience. It also serves as a fantastic thriller, with its air of imminent collapse building to a nerve-wracking conclusion. Isabelle Huppert is mesmerising as the plantation owner who dooms all around her with her arrogance.
21. Zombieland
While vampires became a singularly obnoxious cinematic plague, zombies went from flavour-of-the-month to pariahs. Nevertheless, Ruben Fleischer’s apocalyptic comedy was a delightful surprise, perfectly cast and thoroughly entertaining. It also featured the cameo appearance of the year, and one best left unspoiled.
20. The Brothers Bloom
For a few minutes Rian Johnson’s con-trick drama seems like a precious and finicky conglomeration of obnoxious post-Anderson tricks and tics, but thankfully it becomes a warm and humane antidote to David Mamet’s cerebral dominance of the sub-genre. The key to its appeal is an endearing central performance from Rachel Weisz, whose enthusiastic embrace of the brothers’ tricksiness grounds the film even while the plot spirals off in unexpected directions and Johnson’s camera flies around with such exuberant unpredictability. Despite faltering slightly in the final act, its ambition and seriousness of purpose were a resounding success.
19. A Serious Man
The Coens excel at taking on unorthodox projects and surprising their fans, but they also rely on a set of narrative tricks that repeat from movie to movie. A Serious Man was no different, with their familiar exploration of our cosmic insignificance coming into play again. Nevertheless, here their tricks felt fresh again, matched as they were to a plot revolving around morality and heavenly punishment. Casting unknown actors was possibly the masterstroke: it certainly made the movie feel like nothing else out there. It ranks as their most entertaining and most challenging film since The Big Lebowski.
18. Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea
Remarkable to think that Hayao Miyazaki is capable of making movies even lighter and more whimsical than anything he has previously offered us. At times Ponyo can feel too fluffy, and longueurs plague the second half of the film, but these minor errors are easily forgiven in the rush of incredible images. Ponyo’s mid-movie escape from the clutches of her misguided father is among the most visionary and exhilarating setpieces of recent times, aided by the Wagnerian stings of Joe Hisaishi’s beautiful score.
17. Coraline
Henry Selick’s stunning adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book is a feast for the eyes, as technically impressive as anything committed to film this year by Digital Domain, ILM or BUF. It’s also one of the scariest films of the year, one of those rare childrens’ movies that is unafraid to terrify its audience. Some of the imagery lingers in the memory with the upsetting persistence of the worst nightmares. Also great was the delicate use of Digital 3D. In the year of Avatar, it’s worth remembering that Selick and his team figured out how to use the technology to subtly enhance the viewing experience before anyone else.
16. The Hurt Locker
By the midpoint of 2009, it honestly felt as if the writers’ strike of 2008 had left us in the middle of a drought. Nothing truly exceptional had been released, and so when Kathryn Bigelow’s superb war thriller came out it was leapt upon as if it were a fusion of Paths of Glory and Apocalypse Now. Third act problems drain some of the energy from it, but even so, no other movie about the Iraq war has done so much to capture the futile stupidity of it, nor made such a pointed comment about the deranging effect it has had on our psyche. That it is also a nerve-wracking thriller is a welcome bonus.
15. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Expectations for Werner Herzog’s crime thriller were low, with only those few of us who revel in the unpredictability of Nicolas Cage holding out any hope. Thankfully Herzog surprised everyone with this demented triumph. Though it could have been turned into a conventional tale of depravity and redemption, Herzog, Cage, and writer William Finkelstein have little interest in following a traditional path, sketching all kinds of entertaining madness in the margins. It helps that Cage was let off the leash. His intense level of commitment to the project is the key to Bad Lieutenant: POCNO‘s success. Welcome back, you mad bastard.
14. Drag Me To Hell
While Sam Raimi’s gleeful homage to EC Comics-style moralising concerned one young woman’s efforts to avoid being sent to hell, this felt like Raimi had escaped from the kind of big-budget purgatory that he had once railed against. Though still obviously made with more money than he had once had at his disposal, Drag Me To Hell was a return to Raimi’s anything-goes ethos. No other movie made this year tried so hard to generate a response in the audience, and it was almost entirely successful. A regression for the genre, maybe, but an incredibly entertaining one.
13. Where The Wild Things Are
It looked like we would never get to see Spike Jonze’s unconventional adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s book. When it finally arrived, critical and popular opinion seemed to split right down the middle. Post-release discussion seemed to focus on subjective accounts of how the movie resurrected very specific memories of childhood, with those who were unmoved by the movie stating that it just didn’t speak to them personally. The vision of Jonze and Dave Eggers is certainly gloomy, repetitive, unfocused and pretty unappealing, but I cannot lie: early scenes brought back horrible memories from my youth, and the unflinching depiction of Max’s confused rage rocked me to my core.
12. District 9
Viewed as an allegory about apartheid-era South Africa, Neill Blomkamp’s low-budget SF action film gets tangled up in clumsy metaphorical dead-ends and ill-judged racial stereotyping that blunts the message. Seen as a misanthropic denunciation of venality across all races and species, it becomes far more palatable. Blomkamp’s exciting and imaginative tale takes the audience down unexpected paths, skillfully building to a finale of surprising emotional resonance. I won’t lie: the final sacrifice of one character made me sob.
11. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
The most pleasant surprise of 2009. Clone High creators Phil Lord and Chris Miller did the same as Spike Jonze — take a beloved but slight children’s book and adapt it into a new format with a drastic change of tone — but veered off in a different direction. Perhaps Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs accomplished less than Where The Wild Things Are in terms of illuminating the mental turmoil of childhood, but while it “merely” sets out to entertain, it did that with amazing success. Gleefully irreverent, pro-nerd, and willing to poke fun at every awful convention of lazy cookie-cutter filmmaking, it is also arguably the funniest comedy of the year.
10. Up
It’s tempting to leave Up off the list as punishment for manipulating adult audiences into crying miserable tears of mourning for an adorable animated couple and, by extension, ourselves. Nothing else this year moved us as much as that magnificently rendered and utterly devastating opening montage. The level of storytelling talent on display was humbling. The rest of the movie was wonderful too, building on that resonant set-up to deliver a winning adventure, featuring the funniest animal characters of the year. An emotionally exhausting film, but a life-affirming one.
9. Fish Tank
Avoiding the tawdry cultural voyeurism of the works of overrated ghouls such as Mike Leigh or Lee Daniels is the least of Fish Tank‘s many achievements, though one we can be most grateful for. It is also a compelling exploration of youth culture as seen through the eyes of a confused child on the cusp of adulthood. Katie Jarvis’ Mia is a fascinating and sympathetic character, aware that she is trapped in a life that offers her nothing, but eager to escape with her dignity intact. Unfortunately, she’s incapable of avoiding making some terrible mistakes along the way. It also has the grip of a thriller, cleverly changing tone in the final act without sacrificing believability. Yet another classic from Andrea Arnold.
8. Public Enemies
It’s possible to reduce Michael Mann’s adaptation of Bryan Burrough’s exploration of the 1930′s crimewave to just a period retelling of Heat, with Johnny Depp’s Dillinger and Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis as dapper versions of McCauley and Hanna, but that would miss out on his deft commentary on the narcissism of these criminals and how new technologies increased popular fascination with the outlaw. Mann marks the moment where demand for titillation grew to the extent that public attention began to fuel the events that it demanded, and this fine, exciting crime thriller ends on a memorable moment where popular culture begins to eat itself.
7. Antichrist
Lars Von Trier has finally appeared to let his obnoxious mask of superiority drop long enough to tell a tale informed by his recent nervous breakdown, and the result is one of the most affecting and disturbing horror films of recent times. Conjuring an atmosphere of dread even more upsetting than anything that master of mood Hideo Nakata could create, Von Trier pits man against woman, and humanity against nature. No one wins, except anyone brave enough to endure this remarkable and starkly beautiful nightmare vision of a world — and a grief-stricken mother — gone mad.
6. Fantastic Mr. Fox
How bold of Wes Anderson to take the work of a respected author and bolt his own style of preppy, fussy humour onto it, and your acceptance of this depends fully on your acceptance of his shtick. To those of us in love with that viewpoint — and that obsessive attention to amusing detail — Fantastic Mr. Fox was yet another success, playing with the same themes of redemption and forgiveness as his previous movies while being just as sassy and fleet-of-foot as his non-animated work. It also works as a satire on the habitual anthropomorphism of the usual animated fare, with these characters being both more human and more bestial than anything populating the movies of Disney and Dreamworks.
5. A Prophet
No matter how much Jacques Audiard maintains he was not making a political statement with this movie, his rousing prison thriller proved to be as multi-layered as the best crime movies of recent times. Malik El Djebena’s growth from callow youth to crime kingpin is fascinating and weirdly inspirational, while the world he lives in is filled with detail about identity politics, French correctional failings, and racial tensions in Europe. It’s also nail-biting, beautifully judged, and performed to perfection.
4. Avatar
While armchair critics fall over themselves to dismiss this movie for being too predictable – a criticism that is being applied with more force than with any other movie released this year – the story is told with enough energy to forgive its clunkiness. James Cameron has always been a master with pace, and here he succeeds in manipulating the audience with a magician’s touch, delivering a groundbreaking visual tour de force into the bargain. Viewing it in Digital 3D IMAX is an unforgettable and thrilling experience.
3. Enter The Void
What James Cameron aimed to do in 3D, Gaspar Noé managed in 2D just months before. His tale of one man’s journey through death is the joint most immersive movie experience of the year, a terrifying and exhilarating cinematic experiment of enormous emotional power, and a technical marvel to boot. Any reservations about its pacing problems are swept away as Noé brings an obsessive rigour to his visual template: a first-person viewpoint that doesn’t falter at any point. That this brave experiment still has no distributor is criminal. If it ever becomes the Midnight Movie phenomenon it deserves to be, make every effort to see it on the biggest screen possible.
2. In The Loop
Armando Iannucci and the Thick of It gang brought their wonderful TV show to the big screen in style, expanding its scope to include the bureaucrats and fools of America, complete with the same venality, paranoia, and incompetence. Funnier even than the original series, it was also densely plotted but lighter than air: a feat of screenwriting to match that of Martin McDonagh with In Bruges last year. None of that would matter if the new cast members were not as talented as the original crew, but the US contingent adapts to the semi-improvisational style with aplomb. A triumph that rewards repeated viewings.
1. Inglourious Basterds
More than any other movie made this year, Inglourious Basterds surprised us all with its piercing intelligence, seriousness of purpose, and deft gameplaying, all of which are applied to an emotionally complex revenge plot that confounds the viewer at every turn. Much has been made of Tarantino’s effort to make a movie in which cinema has the last laugh and reality is forced to bow to its power, but less has been said about his continued facility with character. To the immaculate roll-call that includes Jules Winnfield, Vincent Vega, Jackie Brown, Mr. White, The Bride and Stuntman Mike can be added Shosanna Dreyfus and Hans Landa, the most compelling and haunting characters of the year. Tarantino has every right to be proud of this movie: it is, quite simply, his masterpiece.
Best Documentary: Soul Power
Considered as a sister project to Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s documentary about the music festival that ran alongside the Rumble in the Jungle offers up yet more fascinating footage of Muhammad Ali in his prime, sparring with mouthy opportunists and talking about the potential impact of the forthcoming event. It also shows how the festival almost sinks under a tide of ego and bureaucracy. The worst thing that can be said about the movie is that it doesn’t show enough of the festival itself, but even then you still get to see thrilling performances by The Spinners, BB King, Miriam Makeba, and James Brown at the height of his powers. Stingy though the amount of concert footage is, it’s still some of the best music you will ever hear.
Most Embarrassing Admission of the Year: Okay, Soul Power was actually the only documentary I saw this year. Nevertheless, don’t let that put you off seeing it. Even if I’d seen a dozen documentaries this year, I doubt any of them would have been as fun or fulfilling as that one.
No time to dally with small talk: on with the listmaking! More to come when I get the time…
Listmania ’09! Music Round-Up
A persistent chest infection has rendered me incapable of doing any mental activity more complicated than Tweeting, and considering how totally I’ve garbled even those 140-character nuggets of “insight”, I shouldn’t even be doing that. Seeing as this is my major list-making time of the year, I’m very frustrated at my petrified grey matter, which is making even this simple task difficult, but luckily I’ve been keeping track of all of these albums (and films, for my forthcoming film lists), and so it’s just a matter of sorting them.
I’ll be honest, there another reason why this post is underdeveloped (compared to my usual enormous metastasising lists). There just wasn’t that much music that interested me this year. Electro-pop ladies like Lady Gaga — who was generated by the mega computer controlling the media to give lazy comedians a punchline, or politicians a pop cultural reference to make them seem human — left me cold, and bands that attracted attention from the hipsters — e.g. Mew or The Antlers — were appealing while never reaching that level that made me actually passionate about them. This is nothing to do with the music, I’m sure. Just me and my brain, pre-occupied as it was by real-world problems and my increased interest in other media.
Nevertheless, this list is utterly pedestrian and not very surprising (certainly to anyone who knows me). Apologies for not getting excited about albums by snobcore artists like The Excrescence Engine, Mike Mark and the Mock Mooks, X-Gism, or Flesh For Farm Equipment. They were all quite shit, really.
Favourite Albums of 2009:
10. Popular Stories – Yo La Tengo
9. The Ecstatic – Mos Def
8. Middle Cyclone – Neko Case
7. Real Estate – Real Estate
6. The Visitor – Jim O’Rourke
5. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix – Phoenix
4. Veckatimest – Grizzly Bear
3. Logos – Atlas Sound
2. Bromst – Dan Deacon
1. Merriweather Post Pavilion – Animal Collective
Honourable Mentions:
xx – The xx
Horehound – The Dead Weather
Beware – Bonnie “Prince” Billy
White Ink, Black Ink – Wheat
Bitte Orca – Dirty Projectors
Best Covers Album: Christmas in the Heart – Bob Dylan
Best Debut Album: Real Estate – Real Estate (featuring the amazing single Fake Blues.)
Best Packaging And Bonus Material: Together Through Life – Bob Dylan
Not only do you get the album and a DVD interview (cut from Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home), but also an entire, uncut episode of Dylan’s magnificent Theme Time Radio Hour. Can the existence of this remarkable recording be a harbinger of a complete collection of this series on CD? We can only hope.
Best Opening Song: Beware Your Only Friend – Bonnie “Prince” Billy
Most Annoying Opening Song: Outlaw Pete – Bruce Springsteen
I love Bruce like I love pistachios (i.e. a fuck of a lot), but damn this seemingly endless ballad is enough to make me think twice about listening to the album each time I put it on. There’s a good chance it will work better live, but here it fails to soar even with that anthemic “Can you hear me?” chorus. A rare song by The Boss that doesn’t make me want to rejoice.
Best Video: Must Be Santa – Bob Dylan
Best Singles:
10. Changes Is – Wheat
9. When I Grow Up – Fever Ray
8. My Lucky Day – Bruce Springsteen
7. Actor Out Of Work – St. Vincent
6. 15 to 20 – The Phenomenal Handclap Band
5. Quiet Dog Bite Hard – Mos Def
4. People Got A Lotta Nerve – Neko Case
3. Treat Me Like Your Mother – The Dead Weather
2. 1901 – Phoenix
1. My Girls – Animal Collective
iTunes Download Error of the Year: Embryonic – The Flaming Lips
Not sure I can really blame them for this, but the listening experience that is Embryonic is ruined by the inclusion of four bonus tracks whose tone is utterly different from the actual album. It’s possible to just listen to the album, of course, but if you’re ignorant of this tone change, the switch from Watching The Planets to UFOs Over Baghdad is jarring. An insignificant problem, but nevertheless not unlike someone dropping a pile of plates behind you while you meditate.
Best Song Featuring The Lyric “Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.”: Must Be Santa – Bob Dylan
Best Album Tracks:
10. Lion In A Coma – Animal Collective
9. Grizzly Bear – About Face
8. Useful Chamber – Dirty Projectors
7. Girlfriend – Phoenix
6. Beach – Mew
5. Nothing To Hide – Yo La Tengo
4. Middle Cyclone – Neko Case
3. The xx – VCR
2. Snookered – Dan Deacon
1. Quick Canal – Atlas Sounds feat. Laetitia Sadier
Best EP: Fall Be Kind – Animal Collective
Best Teleporting Dancer: Teleporting Dancing Dylan
Best Song Released As A Cheap Rock Band Download: People Got A Lotta Nerve – Neko Case
Most Fun Vocal Track For Rock Band: Treat Me Like Your Mother – The Dead Weather
Most Unsettling Album Cover: Embryonic - The Flaming Lips
Album That Creeped Me Out The Most: The House on the Causeway – Reigns
Okay, my Internet connection has decided to devolve into a dial-up situation, so I’ll call it a day. Next up, Best Films.
Summer Movies Poll: Readers Choice Bonanza
Many moons ago I asked readers to cast their votes for best and worst movies of the summer season circa 2009. First: Best.
- Eric Bana Is: An Especially Tetchy Romulan – 7 (25%)
- Quentin Tarantino Presents: Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece - 7 (25%)
- Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van Der Merwe’s Excellent Adventure – 4 (14%)
- That’s No Moon; It’s Hott Sam Rockwell’s Talent! – 3 (11%)
- Pixar’s The Bucket List – 4 (14%)
- Cover Me With Drool, Drop An Anvil On Me, Then Drag Me To Hell – 2 (7%)
- G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4%)
- Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) – 0 (0%)
- Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) – 0 (0%)
- When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 0 (0%)
- STREEP, TUCCI & LYNCH vs. a Blogger and her Annoying Husband – 0 (0%)
- Night at the Museum: Sound, Fury, & Nothing – 0 (0%)
- Futile and Fatuous – 0 (0%)
- Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 0 (0%)
- The Shaking [Cameras] of Pelham 123 – 0 (0%)
- Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 0 (0%)
- X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 0 (0%)
- Eric Bana Is: An Absentee Time-Travelling Husband – 0 (0%)
- The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 0 (0%)
- Terminator 4: When Third Acts Collapse – 0 (0%)
- Harry Potter And The Toenail of Effervescence – 0 (0%)
- Eric Bana Is: An Endearing Aussie Cuckold – 0 (0%)
- Final Destination: We’re Trying To Get Inside Your Eyeballs – 0 (0%)
- Zooey Hall – 0 (0%)
- Oh Will Ferrell. A TV Show Remake? We Want Anchorman 2 KTHXBAI – 0 (0%)
The number of high votes for Star Trek are no surprise at all. People have been calling for a light, fun movie with some substance during summer for years now, and Star Trek‘s blindingly bright visuals and hectic tone hit the spot, disregarding the fact that all of the fun surrounds the genocide of several billion Vulcans in the middle of the film. Yay summer movies! I’m a little more surprised that Inglourious Basterds (or, as the TV spots would have us believe, Inglourious!) got that many votes. Not because it doesn’t deserve them: more because many who liked it only seemed to just about like it, not love it with a passion. Perhaps there are more of us out there who think it’s a flat-out masterpiece and one of the greatest movies of the decade. Did the former camp vote for it because they thought “good enough” made it better than everything else on the list?
It was a great summer for genre fans, with the release of two audacious low-budget SF movies that were good enough and popular enough to stop nerds complaining about the success of less intellectually ambitious mainstream SF movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and — later in the year — Avatar. Ha ha! Only kidding. Nerds will never stop being mad about mainstream filmmakers making money off their beloved genres. For a while there it felt like the only reason Moon and District 9 were being praised by nerds was that they were not Michael Bay movies, and indeed Duncan Jones’ film was the anti-thesis of big budget pyro-movies. The rush to praise them for what they were not meant it took a while for anyone to spot that there were problems with both of them. Moon‘s considered pace was refreshing, but at times faltered on the wrong side of slow, and it was perhaps not as surprising as it thought it was. District 9‘s problems were more glaring: the sub-plot about how Nigerian gangs dabbled in prostitution and cannibalism was horribly ill-judged. I could see where Neill Blomkamp was going with it — i.e. painting a picture of all of humanity as a broken, venal species with no compassion to spare — but by explicitly stating it was Nigerian gangs running the show in District 9, that bleak message of living creatures as selfish and brutal became unpleasantly specific.
That said, despite those flaws, both movies were terrific, and I would never argue that those flaws overshadowed the things Jones and Blomkamp got right. Moon was a lot of fun even just to look at, with those Gerry-Anderson-esque production designs and lo-tech FX. It also featured possibly the best performance of the year, with Hott Sam Rockwell giving what might be his best work ever. For that alone, I’ll be eternally grateful Jones took us on his genial ride. District 9 risked more, caused me more agita over its racial politics, but in the end thrilled me far more. With all of humanity — and Prawndom — portrayed as singularly awful, the whole movie boils down to a single act of sacrifice. The final action scene of District 9 was powerful enough to overshadow my concerns over Blomkamp’s tone-deaf error, and even managed to make me cry, completely catching me by surprise. All of that despite sitting next to the most inconsiderate woman in film-going history, who spent the entire movie narrating the onscreen events to her annoyed boyfriend, and then got pissy with me when I asked her to be quiet an hour in. The kind of behaviour that makes me wonder why I bother going to the cinema.
The other three movies gaining votes were Up (a movie I didn’t care for on first viewing due to terrible projection in a crappy NJ cinema, but loved when seen in IMAX), Drag Me To Hell (Sam Raimi’s delirious instant horror classic), and G.I. Joe: Road To Nowhere. Seeing that get a vote made my soul cry. Still, it got another vote, in the Worst Summer Movie List, as seen below:
- Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 7 (30%)
- X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 6 (26%)
- The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 4 (17%)
- When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 2 (9%)
- G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4% )
- Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) - 1 (4%)
- Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) - 1 (4%)
- Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 1 (4%)
The rest of the movies on the list got no votes, so let’s just move on. It doesn’t surprise me that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen topped this list. It had been treated like a soiled nappy long before it was even released, and though I wasn’t crazy about it, I certainly didn’t hate it either. If people really hate it that much, more power to them (and certainly whenever I think about those fucking racial-stereotype-bots I feel like putting it at the top of this list as well), but I suspect a lot of Internet commenters who rail against it just haven’t seen enough bad movies this year. Of course, if that’s the case, they’re lucky. We’ve seen so many shitty movies this year that T:ROTF doesn’t even get on our bottom twenty list, let alone bottom ten.
It certainly doesn’t beat out X-Men Origins: Wolverine as worst movie of the summer. Who’s to blame for that farrago? I’m willing to let director Gavin Hood off the hook, as his work was so often compromised by Fox executive Tom “Nerd-Sauron” Rothman. He has long interfered in the making of Fox’s slate of superhero movies and been rewarded with high box office grosses despite the shitty quality of those films. X-Men Origins was the worst yet. David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script was impossibly bad. Could there be a draft of it that wasn’t a morass of cliches and tired jokes? Did there ever exist a single line given to Sabretooth that wouldn’t make me risk breaking bones through convulsive super-cringing? Compared to this disaster, T:ROTF was a source of almost endless delight. I truly wish it killed off the X-Men movie franchise, because now it has made money we’re looking at yet more soulless, brainless movies soiling our memories of those fantastic original stories.
I also have no problem with the simply appalling Ugly Truth getting some votes, and would like to think that my renaming of it helped. Gerard Butler is not very good in that film, but he’s Rudolph Valentino compared to Katherine Heigl. Her appeal is completely alien to me. Spiky, charmless, and unable to sell even the most basic of jokes, her continued success is a mystery. I know Grey’s Anatomy is very popular, but even if every fan of that show traipsed out to the cinema to catch the latest Heigl movie, would that account for the high box office The Ugly Truth managed? (We’re talking a worldwide gross of $203m on a budget of $38m.) Rail against the success of T:ROTF all you like, but that did everything it could to attract and entertain a certain sub-section of the audience (i.e. fans of BIG). The Ugly Truth did the bare minimum to get the job done and is technically far more profitable. Yay for cheaper movies, but boo for movies that are crafted with such lazy indifference towards their audiences, that said nothing about gender politics, that think a lumbering joke about vibrating panties was classifiable as entertainment.
What else got votes? Two for Angels and Demons, which was a passable enough thriller, and was certainly more entertaining than the flat-as-Holland Da Vinci Code. I can’t get angry with it, even when it was being very silly (i.e. for much of its length). A vote for The Hangover, which ranks alongside Up In The Air as most overrated movie of the year. The one thing I liked about it — that it is a comedy with a well-developed script and fascinating initial premise — meant nothing when the jokes were so lazy and the characters so unappealing (other than Zach Galafianakis’ Alan Garner, who was a delight). Watching Graham Linehan rail against it on Twitter during the summer made me feel a lot less alone. After that we get a vote for G.I. Joe, a movie I did not like at all, and single votes for Public Enemies and G-Force, both of which I liked to varying degrees.
Thanks to everyone who voted. What now? No poll for a bit (I usually add polls after the Oscar nominations are announced), but more lists. Been working on the damn things all year.
One Last Post About That Decade List That Took Forever To Write
I have been asked to compile my misshapen and illogically calculated decade list into an easy-to-peruse straight list, which gives me a chance to highlight those inclusions from 1999 (well, those that got a major release in the UK in 1999 despite being released elsewhere first, such as Being John Malkovich, Galaxy Quest, and Princess Mononoke). Feel free to mentally remove those movies from the list if you want, and insert some of the missed movies, which I will also list below. Remember, nothing here from 2009. I’m still working on my best of the year list, though I reckon the top five are set in stone. (Movies from 1999 in red.)
106. Avalon
105. Kung Fu Hustle
104. The Mothman Prophecies
103. Moulin Rouge
102. The Rundown (aka Welcome To The Jungle)
101. Solaris
100. Mushishi
99. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
98. I Heart Huckabees
97. Shanghai Knights
96. Michael Clayton
95. Mulholland Drive
94. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
93. The Prestige
92. The Chronicles of Riddick
91. eXistenZ
90. Spartan
89. South Park: Bigger Longer &Uncut
88. Curse of the Golden Flower
87. Syriana
86. The Matrix Reloaded
85. Hot Fuzz
84. Jindabyne
83. Once
82. The Hunted
81. The Orphanage
80. The Constant Gardener
79. [Rec]
78. No Country For Old Men
77. There Will Be Blood
76. The Darjeeling Limited
75. Red Road
74. Speed Racer
73. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
72. A Scanner Darkly
71. Spirited Away
70. The Wrestler
69. Sideways
68. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
67. Spider
66. Iron Man
65. The King of Kong
64. Spider-Man 2
63. Lantana
62. Redbelt
61. Lost in Translation
60. Gomorrah
59. City of God
58. Primer
57. Inside Man
56. The Mist
55. A History of Violence
54. Waltz With Bashir
53. Pineapple Express
52. Monsters Inc.
51. Casino Royale
50. Serenity
49. Paprika
48. Hidden (Caché)
47. Idiocracy
46. Limbo
45. Capturing The Friedmans
44. Infernal Affairs
43. Lady Vengeance
42. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
41. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
40. In Bruges
39. Morvern Callar
38. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring
37. Princess Mononoke
36. Team America: World Police
35. Black Book
34. Brokeback Mountain
33. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
32. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
31. The Descent
30. The Bourne Ultimatum
29. The Insider
28. Unbreakable
27. Magnolia
26. The Fountain
25. Kung Fu Panda
24. Rushmore
23. Three Kings
22. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
21. Galaxy Quest
20. X2: X-Men United
19. Rachel Getting Married
18. Zodiac
17. Memento
16. Elephant
15. Oldboy
14. United 93
13. Munich
12. The Dark Knight
11. Ratatouille
10. Children of Men
9. Fight Club
8. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
7. Being John Malkovich
6. Lord of the Rings
5. Anchorman
4. Before Sunset
3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
2. The Incredibles
1. The Matrix
Extra Movies I Missed Out Either By Accident Or Design But Felt Deserved A Mention:
The Room
Ringu / The Ring
Way of the Gun
Birth
Joshua
Beowulf
Elf
Blade II
Hellboy 2: The Golden Army
Minority Report
Red Cliff: Part One
Battle Royale
School of Rock
2009 lists are coming up, hopefully.
A Much Longer Review of Avatar
Warning: Avatar spoilers litter this review like Ikran droppings across the rocks of the Hallelujah Mountains.
As I mentioned earlier, Avatar is a movie made almost specifically for me. It’s directed by a man whose obsessive attention to detail and fanatical devotion to technology has provided us with some of the most clearly designed and thrillingly executed movies of recent times. It’s about exploration of alien worlds and has an anti-imperialist message of clunking obviousness but surprising emotional power. It features the most startling visual effects ever committed to the big screen, and constantly pulls the rug out from under you with its dedication to outdoing itself. It’s filmed in beautifully rendered and cleverly composed 3D, and for once puts paid to criticisms that the format is a gimmick (even the sceptical Roger Ebert has been won over). It’s got a big battle between space marines and space monsters, and features a world that looks like a Yes album cover come to life (thanks to Anne Billson for the apt comparison). Basically, if it was going to make me hate it, it would have to try hard.
Luckily for me, after all of that anticipation, it didn’t piss me off — at least on first viewing, which was an overwhelming experience — but I can’t praise it without addressing some of the concerns raised by it. In the post-experience discussion I had with Daisyhellcakes, we kept coming back to the depiction of the Na’vi as a race of Native Pandorans treated so poorly by the colonial humans that they weren’t even offered beads for the rights to their sacred grounds. It’s problematic, to say the least. They are portrayed as simple, honest folk who hunt (but apologise to their prey before stabbing them in the heart, so that’s okay) and pray to a tree-god, and need to be rescued by one of the oppressors who just happens to be smarter and even more in tune with nature than they are. Scenes where the Na’vi cede control over their destiny to Jake Sully’s avatar make for queasy viewing, even if he did just land in their sacred space on the biggest, baddest, coolest multi-coloured dragon thingy you could imagine.
As Daisyhellcakes said after seeing it, she didn’t want to admit to liking the movie as much as she did because the wrongness of Cameron’s attitude to his noble alien race was so glaring. As Charlie Jane Anders points out here, this is a race that is so unfailingly noble they come across as a clumsy patronisation of the Real-World indigenous races that Cameron wants them to metaphorically represent. Apart from some douchebaggery from one guy early on, they’re all so great that they treat the imminent death of a human with the same amount of grieving and solemnity that greeted the destruction of their home and the death of their leader. Hey, I’ll bow to no man in my admiration for the eternally awesome Sigourney Weaver, but if I was an alien who had just lost the cornerstone of my culture and my civilisation, I’d be a bit more concerned about that than the death of some missionary who had been nice enough to hand out useless medicine that one time.
Still, as we talked we came to a sort of conclusion that although it made us uncomfortable, what the hell else was Cameron supposed to do? It’s tempting to think he is not up to the task of adding subtlety to any story he tells, but then he’s telling stories that fall apart when subtlety is introduced. He has his work cut out getting a lot of story and scene-setting out of the way, and at times the rush of exposition — either via voiceover or clumsy explanations by the various scientists studying the planet — means we’re really getting broad strokes already. This superb “nature documentary” about Pandora contains almost as much information about the planet and the creatures on it than is found in the movie.
As well as the Na’vi culture, some of the human relationships are sketched so lightly that their progression feels like a hint rather than an arc. Cameron was obviously ruthless in the editing room, and it stands to reason that he was already aware that portraying internecine battles within the Na’vi clan that embraces Jake would just bog the movie down further. We lose something to gain something else, and your enjoyment of the movie will likely depend on which you would rather have: sensitivity or bombast. If you think Cameron missed a trick not giving us tales of the ascerbic Na’vi arrow-maker or the cranky Na’vi mother who longs to join her lifemate on the hunt and is annoyed by his retrograde gender politics, you’re watching the wrong movie. This is good versus evil, and he’s going to make damn sure you know which is which.
Also, he might oversimplify the Na’vi, but so much thought has gone into the creation of the world and the people and their intertwined relationship that he can’t be accused of not giving a damn about the small stuff. Kudos to the production designers and astrobiologists and astrobotanists who came up with the convincing flora and fauna of Pandora. Their work is the most impressive thing about Avatar, and makes it feel like a real place. Even when doubts about the effectiveness of Cameron’s story began to itch at my brain, the secondary story — of Pandora and its ecology — was far more successful. I suspect that repeat viewings might make the problems of Cameron’s plotting seem more glaring. This morning Mr. Beaks from AICN quoted Kenneth Turan, who said Avatar would be the Jazz Singer of the 21st Century, a movie that changed everything but was widely disliked ten years after release. I expect my considerable affection for this movie will follow a similar trajectory to my opinion of Titanic, which I loved on first viewing, but disliked more and more with each revisit. Nevertheless, while the narrative clumsiness will likely annoy in time, the level of detail in this stunningly realised world will continue to hold my interest, and seeing new interconnections between them will become more interesting to me.
Of course his interest in creating a complex faux-eco-system is part-and-parcel of his environmental message, which is heavily pro-nature and anti-strip-mining. This too has come under scrutiny, especially by those who think a movie that features this much CGI has been burning through rainforests worth of energy to keep its computers humming along. The pro-tree message is rammed home with such relentlessness that the mid-movie action scene is the lengthy destruction of a single tree, though to be fair it’s a pretty goddamn awesome tree. Complaining about how Cameron paints his political pro-environment message is fair enough, but where were these complaints last year when Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E told a similarly unsubtle story? That got a free pass, but Cameron gets pilloried. Not everyone has done that, and I speak as someone who was pleased to see Stanton’s messages stated so clearly, but the double-standard still irks. I guess that’s what you get when you make an action movie instead of a Pixar movie.
Besides, Cameron’s ideas about why Pandora should be left untouched are far more interesting than mere tree-hugging. The central idea of the movie is that all lifeforms on Pandora are linked together in a way that expands even upon James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, or Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere concept. Pandora is a kind of brain, and the creatures that live upon it can access that brain through a neural connection. The Na’vi are also able to connect to the minds of the creatures around them, and control them in much the same way the humans connect themselves to their machines, except the Na’vi also form emotional bonds with the creatures and treat them as equals. It might just be an expansion of the idea that we are connected to all other living things, but when taken literally like that it is enormously appealing and deepens what might have initially seemed like a wishy-washy justification for the Na’vi’s special nature.
It also means that the “God” they worship is actually a kind of world-mind/flesh-internet that allows them to upload and download memories. Note that their culture doesn’t seem to have a history told via words or pictures: it’s stored inside the network of life on the planet. I’ve heard the movie referred to as Luddite as it praises New-Age-style philosophy over reliance on technology, but the biotech of Pandora works as a metaphor for the connectivity we currently enjoy thanks to the Internet. Though some scenes with the Na’vi plugged into the ground and radiating outwards from the Tree of Souls look kinda dippy, they have an unexpected emotional charge. The great revelation of our age is that we work better when we’re aware of each other, and seeing this network of co-operation represented in glowing visual style is a powerful reminder of how lucky we are.
It’s an idea that makes Avatar more nuanced than a mere Dances-With-Space-Wolves and more like Dune-In-A-Forest, especially as Sully can be seen as a Space Marine/Kwisatz Haderach hybrid. That said, no matter which pop cultural artifact Cameron was influenced by most, when necessary he pulls out all the stops and tops the action work he has done in the past. With the goodness of the good guys and the badness of the bad guys clearly explained, he can go all out with an emotionally satisfying final act where heroes are forged, villains are killed, and revenge is taken. This is what Cameron does best, and the final half an hour is some of the most thrilling cinema I’ve ever been lucky enough to witness. Any reservations we had earlier melted away in an onslaught of last minute rescues, defiant last stands, and tragic slow-motion deaths. Cameron’s facility with action serves him well, with skillfully handled set-ups paying off in a series of sub-setpieces that are layered together with a master’s touch.
Praise is also due for an earlier scene where Sully captures and tames a wild Ikran on top of the Hallelujah Mountains, and then goes on his first flight with Neytiri. It’s a stunning sequence, featuring visual effects of such complexity and clarity that I choked up. At that moment I knew I loved the movie with very nearly all my heart. It also helps that Cameron has elicited such strong work from his cast. Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi are deliriously evil but enjoyably hissable, with Lang’s Quaritch getting a couple of cool moments in the finale that drew murmurs of great pleasure from the audience. You expect Sigourney Weaver to be great — and she is — but I was surprised at how good Joel “Hottie and the Nottie” Moore and Michelle “Ana-Lucia” Rodriguez were. Even better were the heads of the Na’vi clan, played by the ever-reliable CCH Pounder and Wes Studi. Praise is also due Laz Alonso as cuckolded Tsu’tey, and Sam Worthington makes good on the promise shown in Terminator Salvation with an impassioned and charismatic turn.
Best of all is Zoe Saldana, who gives an astonishing performance as Neytiri. With the performance-capture technology now developed to the level Robert Zemeckis has always aspired to, it feels as if there is no intervening layer of CGI between us and the actor, and of the entire alien cast, it is Saldana who seizes the moment with the greatest relish. Her manifestation of this serious and tragic character was the heart of the movie. If she had failed, our suspension of belief would have fatally faltered, but thankfully she exceeds beyond our wildest dreams. About twenty minutes after her introduction, I was amazed to find that I believed with all of my heart that Neytiri was real, and it is as much a testament to her skill as to the effects chaps at WETA that this mental conversion occurred. Thanks to this — and her entertaining work as Uhura in this summer’s Star Trek — I now look forward to her future work with much enthusiasm.
It’s an unfashionable statement to say I gave myself over to Cameron’s sincerity, especially as we’re dealing with a filmmaker who is considered to be a crass populist who can only bombard audiences with glossy imagery that hide a hollow core. I’d argue that Cameron believes deeply that the message of his movie is meaningful, and will be happy to have touched the hearts of millions rather than appealed to the refined intellects of a handful of joyless twerps. If so, I reckon he’s right. As for Avatar‘s status as the most advanced display of CGI wizardry yet made, and whether this is enough to qualify it as a great movie rather than one that is just okay but pretty, my own bias intrudes. Artistic merit is attributed to movies for many reasons, many of them nebulous. Such concrete things as effects work or production design are often not included among these criteria, as it’s surely obvious that they are base and do nothing to reveal human truth (often considered the least thing that great art should do).
In my eyes, though, the technical work done on Avatar in bringing to life an entire world filled with believable creatures in a series of interlocking relationships is as close to perfection as we’re going to get at the moment. If the breathtaking design work and detailed effects work displayed here isn’t allowed into the leather-and-mahogany drawing room called Art, then no design or effects work ever will be. At its best this is a moving sculpture, a dynamic tapestry, a web of interlaced speculative concepts and exquisitely rendered visual representations that literally dazzle. Ignore the faults, and forgive it for being clumsy. You need to see Avatar so you can experience the feeling of having your point-of-view float through the most beautiful landscape painting you’ll ever see.
Why I Am In The Grip Of Something Similar To The Pon-Farr
London is currently being coated in a veneer of snow, which means the usual travel screw-ups and delays, but fingers crossed they won’t affect tonight’s viewing experience. Myself and Daisyhellcakes should — weather, fatigue, and Acts of God notwithstanding — be seeing Avatar tonight. There’s always a chance something will go wrong, but if not, I’m hoping for an unforgettable experience. I’ve engaged in numerous Twitter conversations with people over the past few weeks, many of whom are terribly sceptical of James Cameron. Much of it seems to be aimed at his previous movies, with others just pushed past the limit of tolerance by all of the hype. I can see that, although as I’ve said before, susceptibility to hype is not a problem with the movie and wherever possible they should be viewed with as much resistance to the effect of the publicity onslaught as possible.
That said, it’s become clear that the overwhelming opinion people have of Cameron is that he is a shitty filmmaker and pretty much always has been, so there is no way Avatar can be any good. I can understand the anger people feel towards Cameron, as I will explain below, but I remember a time when Cameron’s movies were lauded and adored, with critical and popular acclaim for his first two movies, followed by a break for The Abyss, and then back again for Terminator 2. How soon we all forget how exciting and advanced those movies felt, how brilliantly Cameron edited and filmed the action scenes. After that he did True Lies — half of a good movie and half of an almost unwatchable one — and then Titanic, which was three halves of a good movie and seven halves of a bad one. I personally don’t think these two films were bad enough to invalidate his earlier, excellent work, but then Cameron made the terrible mistake of becoming very successful and very pleased with himself for becoming successful. As I say, I like the guy, but even I thought, “Shut up, you arrogant moron” when he started strutting around like King Shit.
It went beyond braggadocio. He does come across as an obnoxiously confident man and quite a bully, but then he did make a movie that grossed $1.9bn worldwide after a year of armchair critics laughing at his folly and predicting the fall of two studios. I’d be pretty obnoxious if I’d done that too. He is also willing to spend time and money developing new technologies, including new underwater 3D cameras, just to make the movies he wants to make. He’s a perfectionist who will not stop until he has done everything in his power to entertain audiences, even if that means pissing off his critics or yelling at anyone who gets in his way. It might be galling to hear him refer to himself as “King of the World” in an Oscar speech, or hear reports about appalling behaviour on set, but he delivers. I have to respect that, even though I’d hate to work for him.
As for his movies, Avatar has already been damned for presenting a simplistic moral quandary at the heart of his film (should we destroy native cultures in order to steal the resources on their land? Erm, yes? I mean no! No!), and for Cameron’s terrible dialogue. It’s impossible to argue against these. He cannot write a joke to save his life, but then many writer-directors are incapable of doing that (Guillermo Del Toro has yet to get the tone of his adventure movies 100% right, and no one seems to mind that). The messages in his movies are hammered home with little subtlety, but as Simon Pegg tweeted after he saw (and loved) Avatar, these are action movies. There is no time for vacillating with these messages. If you need to have characters break free of their normal behaviours and risk life and limb, you have to put them in situations where they are pushed as far as they can be. Life or death is a pretty good motivator for action heroes, and reflection ruins the one thing action movies have to do: move like a runaway train.
And hell, Cameron puts his action heroes through the bloody ringer. In the past he has created numerous beautifully edited and designed action scenes, like the truck/bike chase in T2, or the submersible chase in The Abyss, or the Harrier sequence at the end of True Lies, or the last forty minutes of Aliens (possibly the most thrillingly sustained suspense finale to any movie ever). At his best, Cameron can conjure up stunningly well executed action scenes. If the least he does in Avatar is come up with some great setpieces, I’ll be more than happy.
Therein lies the rub. The point of this post is to set some background to my own views on Cameron. I’m a fan, though fully aware that he has flaws. He writes bad dialogue, but then he’s a filmmaker and effects pioneer who is not making radio plays, so a few dodgy lines are tolerable. He’s an action filmmaker who seems to love military hardware but makes movies with clunky messages about environmentalism and nuclear disarmament. Okay, but I think his love of hardware is more to do with being a big kid who likes machines, rather than a gung-ho attitude to the military (many of his movies have had an ambivalent relationship with warmongering types, and T2 is a rare action movie that addresses the problem of dispatching human obstacles while also preserving life). He’s also very talented, very driven, and willing to go the extra thousand miles to get his vision onscreen.
So Avatar is right up my street already. Consider this a baseline, and now you can judge my opinion against that. Nevertheless, one review has rattled me. Keith Phipps doesn’t seem to be as big a fan of Cameron’s as I am, but even so his criticisms are more nuanced than the popular “Cameron writes bad dialogue” kind. My enthusiasm remains, but this one review has really made me question whether Avatar will indeed thrill me. If you’re approaching his movies from a position of respect and still don’t like this, there could well be a problem. If there is, I won’t apologise for him. Even filmmakers I adore will get both barrels if they make bad movies, even when it pains me (Superman Returns has left scars that have yet to heal over). We shall see whether Cameron will satisfy or disappoint in a few hours.
The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (5-1)
The last installment of this epic list-making enterprise comes a day after the Times ran their own 100 movies of the decade list, and as expected, within moments of looking at it I regretted missing out two fantastic films: Battle Royale and School of Rock. Actually, the first movie is one I’ve only seen once, and though I remember loving it it’s been so long I’d like another chance to reappraise it at some point.
This is something that has come up frequently in our house, which contains two hardcore fans of Suzanne Collins’ fantastic Hunger Games series. Though Battle Royale — itself based on a novel by Koushun Takami — has high dementedness value, it’s arguable that Collins’ YA novel features a similarly hardline ethos. When I read it I was surprised by Collins’ willingness to take her characters to some extremely dark places. That said, Battle Royale does have one thing over Hunger Games: Chiaki Kurigama as the deadly Takako Chigusa, in a performance so eerily amoral that Tarantino hired her to play GoGo Yubari in Kill Bill Part 1. She is terrifying.
There’s a good chance watching that again might convince me it should have reached the top 100, but I already know for sure I screwed up with School of Rock. It’s one of my all-time favourite movies, and one I had only just recently had a chat about with friends of Daisyhellcakes, so there really is no excuse for missing it off. I’m a fan of Jack Black and tend to ignore criticisms of him, especially when he has recently excelled as my beloved Po in Kung Fu Panda: a role that he was born to play. I even liked him in the not-great-but-not-terrible-either Year One, and thought pairing him with Michael Cera was an inspired choice that needed to have been made on a better movie. So yeah, considering School of Rock is the perfect vehicle for him, mixing his endearing/obnoxious immaturity and his sincerity better than almost anything he has been involved with.
I’ve heard some people criticise Richard Linklater for selling out and making a mainstream movie, but the level of commitment from everyone involved — and Linklater’s surprising facility with the most likeable cast of teenagers ever assembled for a movie — marks this as a triumph for dedicated filmmaking no matter what studio it was made for. I’m so pissed that I missed this off: it would definitely have been in the top 30, maybe even top 20. This omission tells me it’s been too long since I’ve seen it.
And what do you know, Jack Black appears in one of the top five movies as a very angry biker, and Richard Linklater directed another of them. It’s as if it was meant to be. Remember, this list has been built with one important caveat: I’m not including movies from this year as I’ve not yet had time to get acquainted with them. As a result I’m going from 1999 – 2008. This might seem silly considering everyone else is doing it from 2000 – 2009, but I feel safer sticking with movies I know well instead of including stuff from this year that I’ll just go off in time, and if I started it in 2000 I’d only be considering 9 years of films. Also this timeframe matches my arrival in The Big Smoke, and so has subjective value. The reason why this special list-ruining rule is important now will become clear very soon…
5. Anchorman
What had seemed, before release, to be little more than a one-joke movie about 70s fashion and workplace sexual prejudice was something much, much more than that: a Dada-esque parody of a vast number of cinema and TV cliches, racing past the dreary pastiche of the 70s that it could have been, and coming to rest in a parallel universe where all bets were off. Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay slaved over the script and rehearsed with their incredible cast for months before shooting began to come up with as many alternate lines as possible, and even had two B-plots, allowing them to construct a “sequel” — Wake Up, Ron Burgundy — from the leftover scraps. Freed of storytelling logic, and willing to play with audience expectations, the viewer has no idea what will come next. A crazed Yazz Flute solo? A huge fight between rival news teams? A dog talking to a bear? No matter what they threw at you, it made a kind of twisted sense in this baffling world. At the risk of sounding like boring nerds, it’s a rare day when we don’t quote Anchorman in some capacity, which is either testament to our lameness, or the almost infinite genius of this film. It deserves a place in the Comedy Hall of Fame alongside Blazing Saddles, Duck Soup, Sleeper, This Is Spinal Tap, and Airplane!
Best Moment: There are countless wonderful scenes and lines in this, but this moment from a deleted scene shows how even the alternate versions of the finalised movie featured incredible moments. Not only is Ferrell’s hysteria inspired, check out how Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) races into the studio. Perhaps that’s what I like about this: every time there is an opportunity for a stupid joke, Ferrell and co. take it.
4. Before Sunset
Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise was the perfect romantic movie for those who shared the ages of the onscreen couple of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Their impulsive and idealistic romance would most appeal to those who had not yet reached a point in life where hopping off a train in Vienna to spend time with a complete stranger would seem like a terribly risky idea. Going back to that movie as I grew older, its appeal remained, but more and more it seemed like a fantasy. The sequel came at exactly the right moment, just as I had suddenly decided to take an impulsive step of my own, and so my first experience of seeing it was already ripe with subjective emotion. Even to those who were not embarking on their own journey of romantic discovery when first seeing this, surely its intelligence and careful expansion of the themes of the first movie would impress them. Bravely showing how Jesse and Céline have changed and matured in the nine years since their first meeting, Linklater uses its real-time format to cram in as much discussion about the nature of love, regret, and the effect of time on memory as he possibly can, with his two leads improving on their already impressive work from the first movie. Without a doubt, it’s the most profound and most life-affirming romantic movie ever made.
Best Moment: For much of its length it feels like a realistic riposte and negation of the flighty romanticism of the original, pitching it perfectly at an audience that had been optimistic when seeing the first film, but were maybe feeling less romantic when seeing the second. Linklater’s masterstroke comes in the final moments, where he shows those who might have “grown up” that maybe that impulsiveness was still something to aspire to. Objectively, an amazing note to end on. Subjectively, it was an unnervingly accurate depiction of what I was going through there and then. I will be eternally grateful to all who worked on it.
3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
If ever a movie was crying out to be made into a franchise, it’s this one. Peter Weir’s phenomenally entertaining adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series is pure joy from beginning to end. Russell Crowe was criticised by fans of the series as being wrong for the role, but he is utterly believable as a man who is a fool on land but a genius at sea. Paul Bettany as the stiff Maturin is less of a stretch, but his work is just as endearing, and the relationship between them both is perfectly played. With Aubrey as Kirk and Maturin as an amalgam of Spock and Bones, it’s almost like watching an episode of Star Trek, though easily the best one ever made. With a humbling attention to detail only matched by Peter Jackson, a mastery of mood and pace borne of years of making underrated classics, and the understanding of cinema’s power that would drive even the most cynical audience to the edge of its seat, director Weir has created a modern marvel with seeming effortlessness. A repeated refrain — from myself, Daisyhellcakes, film critic Anne Billson, and several other people who I have seen this movie with and watched their indifference transformed into awestruck adoration — is that it could have continued for another two hours and it wouldn’t have been a chore. On the contrary. I, and many others, would love to see this series go on for as many movies as can be made from O’Brian’s books, and have leaped on every scrap of sequel news as if it were a liferaft. If I ever win a EuroMillions rollover, bankrolling a new movie will be my first — and biggest — splurge.
Best Moment: Too many to mention, with multiple high notes including Crowe’s bluff performance, Bettany’s lovable snootiness, exquisitely rendered battle scenes, and an amusing side-trip to the Galapagos for Stephen Maturin, here portrayed as a proto-Darwin. It’s impossible to find clips that haven’t been tampered with, so let this review from Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper stand in their place. Basically, what they said, and then some. It’s a magnificent adventure.
2. The Incredibles
The only bad thing I can say about Brad Bird’s superhero movie is that it renders moot any attempt to make a Fantastic Four movie, which of course didn’t stop 20th Century Fox from trying and failing to do just that. Twice. In the space of a single movie Bird showed us how flexible Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original creations were by adapting the “Superfamily” metaphor into the tale of an actual family of Supers, forced (like the JSA) to hide their powers from an increasingly hostile public. From there Bird is free to satirise our litigious culture, paralysed by bureaucracy, all while providing entertainment on a level even the best of Pixar had yet to achieve. Though criticism has been levelled at him for making a movie that seemed to celebrate Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy — with the exceptional people of the world forced to curb their efforts to change the world by those who are less exceptional — as with Ratatouille Bird is merely interested in seeing people using their knowledge and skills to help others instead of taking shortcuts and chasing fame and fortune (Syndrome and Linguini both over-reach, misunderstanding the importance of experience and intelligence, though at least Linguini learns his lesson and finds a way to excel in the final act).
What could be more inspirational than saying you should be true to yourself and then use your talents to make the world a better place? And what could be more thrilling than Bird’s staging of some of the greatest superhero moments ever committed to film? With the help of Michael Giacchino’s rousing, playful score, and some of the best voicework of recent times (No surprise that Craig T. Nelson’s best performance is found here, but could this be Holly Hunter’s finest moment too?), Bird delivers a series of bravura setpieces, respectfully paying homage to early James Bond movies and classic 50s and 60s superhero tales while still keeping things fresh. As I’ve said before, this was the decade in which the superhero genre came into its own, but it was The Incredibles that represented the ultimate expression of the things that make superheroes appealing: it’s inspiring, it’s fun, and it’s spectacular. Pixar will struggle to top this beautiful moment. If I was compiling a list of movies released between 2000 and 2009, it would be number one with a bullet.
Best Moment: An early trailer for The Incredibles made it seem like a mere superhero spoof. Though those movies can be fun (Kinka Usher and Neil Cuthbert’s entertaining adaptation of Bob Burden’s Mystery Men was another movie that could have found a place on this list), I had hoped for more from Pixar. As it progressed a seriousness of purpose became apparent beneath the brightly-coloured surface, but when Helen Parr and her children Dash and Violet are fired upon by Syndrome it becomes clear that the stakes here are deadly serious. At that moment, The Incredibles went from being a good movie to a truly great one, something that touched on every emotion in the spectrum. I was utterly smitten, and have been ever since.
1. The Matrix
For those who know me, this is no surprise (and before anyone accuses me, my fudging of the parameters of this list was not an intentional move to allow me to wax rhapsodic about it). However, to anyone who has come through this list expecting a more respected movie, this might come as a disappointment. Though it was admired on release, familiarity and two unloved sequels have made it easy to forget how groundbreaking this was. SF fans who were once thrilled to see a cerebral and exciting science fiction film have long since decided that this is as embarrassing and soft-SF as other unloved and bone-headed mainstream efforts. It’s not hard-SF, I have heard. It’s just a pastiche of Philip K. Dick’s ideas, a brainless and shallow action flick that pisses faux-profundities down its leg like a village idiot dressed like a goth. Admitting to loving this movie has proved as fraught as saying I loved Titanic. Which I didn’t. But I’ve heard enough anti-Matrix complaints to last a lifetime, and that’s before we get to the knee-jerk criticisms about how Keanu can’t act. Yes yes, that’s very perceptive of you all.
None of this matters to me. Seeing The Matrix for the first time was an epiphany. The Wachowskis collected ideas about the nature of reality, society-as-form-of-oppression, anarchic resistance to control structures, and the power of self-belief, and then mixed them up with cutting-edge visual effects, explosions, and martial arts action. It was as if they had made the movie I had been waiting my whole life to see, and since then nothing has matched that feeling of awestruck recognition, something akin to a waking dream. It was as if a movie had ravished my brain and injected my heart with adrenaline. I walked on air for months after.
Ten years later, it might be time to give The Matrix another chance. The Wachowskis might be amateur philosophers giving Cliff’s Notes abbreviations of challenging philosophical ideas, but as a primer for further exploration, it can’t be beat. It’s no coincidence that after seeing this I read Baudrillard and Debord and Chomsky, my interest in political and moral philosophy finally overtaking my previous fascination with epistomology. This may not have turned me into Christopher Hitchens (thank God), but it made me — and many others — take note of the injustices intrinsic to the structure of our society, and how it has become increasingly difficult to escape that Black Iron Prison. It deepened my appreciation of PKD as well, and the rest of the decade saw me expanding my reading habits. In that way it is laid the groundwork for Lost, probably the most thematically complex pop culture artifact ever. Another reason to love it.
It’s no exaggeration to say it changed cinema. Many of the visual conventions that the Wachowskis borrowed from anime have since been “borrowed” from them and overused to the point of cliche, but we should only blame the brothers for being smart enough to recognise the appeal of these images. It was probably the first time famous actors were expected to undergo intensive martial arts training in order to perform many of the stunts themselves. Its visual effects were not just technically impressive but also looked unlike anything else, and represented a break from the traditional SF conventions of space battles and giant monsters. And it also featured some of my favourite characters ever: treacherous Cypher, lovestruck Trinity, naive Neo, deadly Mr. Smith, and — best of all — Morpheus, the man who sets it all in motion, played by the coolest cat in cinema, Mr. Laurence Fishburne. As with many other movies on this list it technically doesn’t belong in this decade, but to me this decade started the moment I saw this, and everything since has been a post-script. Even the sequels cannot ruin it.
Best Moment: I’m sure this cod-Buddhist speechifying will make a lot of people cringe, but when I first saw this, and Morpheus says the big line, it took all of my energy to not leap to my feet and scream “YES!” at the top of my lungs.
And that’s that. A big big thank you to all of those who have checked out these posts and sent me kind comments on Facebook and Twitter. Hopefully, though a lot of my choices were pretty obvious, there have been a couple of mentions here or there that have inspired you to go back and check out a movie you’ve forgotten or avoided, and I certainly hope that you enjoy whichever film it is you end up watching. There are more lists to come at the end of the year as I go over the movies I’ve seen in 2009. Fingers crossed those don’t get out of hand, though I already suspect they will.
The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (10-6)
Nearing the end of this list, I still find myself remembering movies that should have been included here. A recent Twitter chat about John Woo’s Red Cliff made me re-examine my decision to leave the first half of the two-part series out of the list. I loved it dearly last year, and it made me insanely excited for the second movie this year, but I couldn’t in good conscience include it. Part of that is because of my “nothing from 2009″ rule. As half of the complete tale came out now, it can be excluded, though that’s a bit mean. The main reason is that while the first part promised much, the second didn’t deliver.
Don’t get me wrong, it still features high drama, enormous battles, cool character moments, and intimate emotional interludes, but there is a terribly annoying sub-plot featuring Sun Shangxiang, and the final act runs out of energy before the final inconclusive moments. It’s a great deal of fun, and taken together with the first is still a remarkable achievement, but there is nothing to rival the Battle of Eight Trigrams from the first half. It’s possible I will enjoy it more on second viewing, but that’s not happening any time soon. This list is taking up a lot of my time right now and after that I’ve got a full couple of weeks. Something to do with this big Hexmass thing everyone is celebrating.
Getting down to the last ten movies, it gets harder and harder to rank them. I spent about an hour on Friday just moving numbers 8, 9 and 10 back and forth, agonising over the choice as if it were a grievous error to get this wrong. By now, the difference in affection for these movies is almost insignificant: I very nearly think of all of these movies as the best of the decade, and each viewing of them would push them towards the top of the list without causing much grief. It will probably always be in flux, but these ten will almost certainly remain in some capacity, with only maybe Ratatouille usurping any of them.
10. Children of Men
Alfonso Cuaron’s thrilling adaptation of P.D. James’ novel came from nowhere and took me completely by surprise. With no advance word and only a hastily released trailer, I ended up seeing this cold and couldn’t believe my eyes. Commenting on topical concerns with an accuracy that must have been the result of some kind of supernatural prescience during its filming, this retelling of the myth of Christ’s birth says more about modern British life than any number of hand-wringing state-of-the-nation mini-series on UK TV, and certainly with more confidence than anything from the terminally ill British film industry. More than that it’s a bravura piece of cinema, with Cuaron trotting out numerous technically accomplished setpieces as if it ain’t no thing. It rewrites the rules of the action genre, strengthens the argument that SF is the genre best capable of commenting on contemporary issues, and restores your faith in humanity’s capacity for goodness.
Best Moment: Our hero (Theo, played by Clive Owen) and his pregnant companion Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) are trapped in the decrepit Bexhill-on-Sea concentration camp when a riot breaks out. As the British army moves in to quash the rebellion, the camera follows Theo through the carnage in a single shot. Cineastes everywhere had seizures of pleasure at the technical brilliance on display, but only the ones who don’t understand how sight works, of course. [/bitter]
9. Fight Club
Apparently this was the movie that was going to be responsible for the downfall of society. Upon release David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Pahlaniuk’s uproarious novel was famously treated like radioactive material by Alexander Walker, but embraced by almost everyone else as a breath of fresh air. On the surface it can be taken as a celebration of empty-headed machismo and fashionable nihilism, but the surprisingly wacky tone and endearing slapstick performances by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton expose it for what it really is: a satire on anarchic impulses and male narcissism, and an exploration of how paranoia can lead disaffected men into doing terrible deeds. Until Chris Morris’ Four Lions comes out, this is the funniest movie about terrorism made. Nevertheless, I’ll be honest. The thing I love most about it is the visual imagination, with Fincher gaily tearing apart the rulebook and treating his audience to an audio-visual collage of joyful unpredictability.
Best Moment: After the reveal of Tyler Durden’s true identity, our narrator gets to indulge in a panicky race against time to thwart his evil plan. For something as potentially dark as this, it’s amazing to think that Fincher manages to create such a fun movie, and the final twenty minutes of the movie are arguably the most entertaining. Edward Norton has never been as likeable as he is here, brandishing a gun while in boxer shorts and yelling about “lead salad!”
8. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
When Ang Lee’s martial arts romance was released in the UK, there were complaints that it was nothing special. Just another wuxia movie, except this time it’s directed by a “respectable” filmmaker, which means critics suddenly suddenly take note of the genre. To martial arts fans in the West, Hong Kong productions were often rough and ready, and arguably part of their appeal was reconciling our cultural expectations with what — to us — seems like bizarre sidetracking (anyone who has seen a Chinese wuxia horror movie like Encounters of the Spooky Kind or Mr. Vampire will know what I’m talking about). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was, to some, a betrayal of that clumsy aesthetic, but that argument is borne of madness. This emotionally rich tale of duty and love would have been an exceptional historical romance already, thanks to Lee’s elegant visuals and his command of his superb cast. The breathtaking martial arts action was the cherry on top, and to see these beautifully choreographed fight scenes filmed with such care and reverence should have delighted fans of the genre. In his review, Peter Bradshaw said, “Frankly, this is what Phantom Menace was supposed to feel like.” This sums up my post-screening euphoria perfectly. If only all five books in Wang Dulu’s Crane-Iron series had been filmed like this, I would have been first in line for each.
Best Moment: When I first saw this movie, the earliest fight scene between Zhang Ziyi’s Jen and Michelle Yeoh’s Yu Shu-lien brought gales of laughter from a cynical London audience, enraging me so much I very nearly stood up to berate the hooting idiots around me. It’s a testament to the scene’s power that a moment later I was drawn back to the battle raging onscreen. Woo-ping Yuen excelled himself with what could be the most exhilarating and thrilling fight scene of the decade.
7. Being John Malkovich
A movie about people taking over a celebrity’s body, written by a former sitcom writer, and directed by a guy famous for making videos about talking dogs? I was certainly looking forward to seeing it, but I expected little more than a fun diversion with a John Malkovich cameo. The movie I saw was possibly the biggest surprise I’ve ever had in a cinema, one that detonated a bomb inside my head. What we were given was a complex, coherent fantasy unlike anything ever made before, something with a faultless internal logic that seemed to have been beamed in from another universe. Instead of a meta-textual pop cultural frippery we got a treatise on identity, love, obsession, celebrity culture, jealousy, and control, all while Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze told a hilarious and creepy story about a group of immortals using a metaphysical bridge to colonise new bodies. Describing the crazy ideas makes it sound like a game, but it was more than just intellectual trickery for the sake of itself. There was real reflection on what humans are, telling self-lacerating truths about how awful we could be, which built to a tragic finale. Even better than the rush of ideas driven to logical but unfamiliar conclusions, or its emotional fearlessness, was the sense that the rules had been changed. Any kind of story was now fair game, if it could be done as well as this.
Best Moment: Just the short description of the central idea — a portal allows you to control John Malkovich’s mind — could fuel a movie, but Kaufman is willing to explore every possible storytelling avenue of that idea, sending the plot in directions no one could have predicted. Part way through the movie, he gives us an utterly logical variation on the portal trick, but one that surprises right until it happens. Of course Kaufman had to send Malkovich into his own mind, but you only realise he had to do that after he has done it. It’s simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, and totally unforgettable.
6. Lord of the Rings
A cheat to combine the three movies as one, but a cheat that makes a kind of sense. Peter Jackson filmed all three films back to back, and stuck together they work as a complete movie, especially in their extended forms. Considering them in this way also mitigates objections about the length of Return of the King‘s final act — with its endless goodbyes — and the compromises in structure necessary to make The Two Towers feel like a complete film. Not that those problems were ever in danger of overshadowing the successes of this project, which stands as possibly the most ambitious and thrilling movie trilogy ever made. Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens did such great work adapting Tolkein’s dry prose into a living, breathing vision that it’s tempting to say the books never achieved all they could until these New Zealanders came along.
It is to Jackson’s credit that he did the one thing necessary to make it all work: he had to take it seriously. Without a shred of cynicism, he portrayed numerous wrenching emotional moments with total conviction and treated his characters like the Middle-Earth heroes we always dreamed they would be. For that alone the trilogy would signify a welcome sea-change after years of half-hearted and jokey action men diluted the idea of noble heroism, but Jackson’s masterstroke was simple: he merely brought his usual intelligence and meticulous nature to the table instead of just doing the bare minimum to get the film made. He gave 100%, and 100% Jackson commitment is the nearest thing we have to a guarantee of total satisfaction. If you don’t buy into it, fair enough. If you do, the trilogy stands like the Eighth Wonder of the World. Can its spectacle ever be topped?
Best Moment: Jackson is the master of the big setpiece, usually by breaking these huge scenes down into smaller, still satisfying setpieces that add up to a greater whole. The Mines of Moria sequence features the superb cave troll fight followed by the race down crumbling stairs and then Gandalf’s showdown with the Balrog. The Siege at Helm’s Deep includes shenanigans with Aragorn and Gimli, the arrival of the elves, and Legolas going batshit. Best of all, the enormous Siege of Minas Tirith is followed immediately with the Battle for Pelennor Fields and then the Ride of the Rohirrim. When I saw this for the first time at Leicester Square Odeon, you could hear the sound of 1500 people sobbing over the thunder of hooves and clashing metal. It was a perfect moment.
A few minutes later, after Legolas did this, our cheering and applause almost brought down the roof:
And we’re almost there. If you have any complaints about my decision to take the Lord of the Rings trilogy as one movie, please address them to my ASS. (I’m kidding. The comment box beneath is just fine. Feel free to argue your cases: I welcome the debate.)
The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (15-11)
I’d hoped to finish the final installment of this list today, but ongoing problems with cranky computers and the impossibility of getting WordPress to work faster than a cart dragged by a three-legged horse has scuppered me, so I’ll just add these five now and finish the rest over the next few days. I had originally planned to write one quick post about how I wasn’t going to compile a list, and look what happened. Of course I rushed it, and in the process missed some movies off and had to make quick decisions on others. Two that I considered for inclusion but ended up making a strict decision against were Steven Spielberg’s SF collaborations with Tom Cruise: Minority Report and War of the Worlds. Both movies contained some of Spielberg’s strongest filmmaking as well as displaying his terrible impulse control, as both suffered from poor endings that undermined a lot of what had come before.
Minority Report was a brilliant redefinition of Philip K. Dick’s short story, with Scott Frank taking Dick’s ideas and running with them, as well as providing Spielberg to indulge his new-found fascination with the joys of the Weird Segue. What could have been a very conventional chase movie became sidetracked with bizarre slapstick, eccentric performances, and crazy ideas. It also showcased some amazing futurism, pre-empting concerns about targeted advertising and giving us wonderful motion-recognition setpieces with a Voguing Tom Cruise that have made me long for the time I never have to use a keyboard or remote control ever again. I want this future right now!
Sadly the oddness and imagination made way for a deeply unsatisfying final act that hinged on that hoariest of thriller conventions: the secretly taped confession. What could have been a bleak movie about fate became a dull crime thriller, and as a result missed this list. Only just, though. The same happened with his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel about alien invasion. For the most part it’s a commendably bleak depiction of the end of civilisation, told in Spielberg’s trademark small-scale style. Focusing on three characters, he is able to depict the devastating effect of the breakdown of society just by showing how it affects them. This is best shown in the scene in which the family are separated from their car by a mob, and a terrified Cruise has a breakdown in a diner.
More effective than any number of admittedly terrifying and beautifully choreographed scenes of FX carnage, that scene would get into a top ten of my favourite scenes of the decade. Of course, Spielberg fluffs it. As soon as Justin Chatwin disappears over a hill top, you just know that Spielberg is going to orchestrate a reunion at the end of the movie, and even though the movie’s darkest sequence is yet to come — Cruise protecting his daughter by killing the crazy man they are forced to take shelter with — the knowledge that Spielberg is unable to kill off a family member for fear of bringing the audience down too far neuters the movie. I don’t think any other movie I’ve seen this decade has frustrated me so much. It was so close, and yet so far. As for AI, I wasn’t crazy about it when I first saw it and have yet to revisit it.
One day I will, and hope to get over my objections to the final ten minutes. At the very least, even though all three movies irked me, I am grateful to Spielberg for making such unique SF movies. Their rough edges do not completely invalidate them, and the genre has benefited greatly from their existence. I suspect time will be kinder to them than I have.
Right, no more vacillation. Here is the next installment of the list. As I’ve said each time, there are no movies from this year, although there is at least one movie from 2009 that I think would crack the top fifteen. I’ll see how I feel about it in a few weeks.
15. Oldboy
The middle installment of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy is based — unlike the other two movies — on a manga by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya, concerning the quest of a loathsome man for vengeance and redemption after being held captive by a mysterious nemesis for fifteen years. It owes much of its power to Choi Min-sik, whose iconic presence and unhinged commitment to his role is utterly riveting. Without him the dazzling puzzle plot would still draw you in. With him (and his crazy hair), it achieves true greatness. A shattering masterpiece with a truly horrifying final act.
Best Moment: The revelations in the final act are shocking, and the notorious scene where Oh Dae-su devours a live octopus certainly shocks, but who can forget the brutal one take fight scene in a cramped corridor:
14. United 93
The terrible events of September 11th, 2001, defined the decade. The scale of the horror, and the manner in which it unfolded before our eyes, was unprecedented. It scarred everyone who experienced it. Paul Greengrass’ project to document the events of that day horrified many, eliciting the cry of “Too soon!”, but this story needed to be told as soon as possible. It’s lucky Greengrass — who had a documentary background and had already done a magnificent job cataloguing the horrific Bloody Sunday massacre — chose to take on this task, as his meticulous attention to detail led him to interview every relevant living person involved in the hijacking of United 93. Time dulls these memories, and the urge to derive some hope from 9/11 meant the story was already being manipulated to suit political ends by the time Greengrass started work. Not long before he had finished, a TV film about the same events was aired, but this was more than just a cash-in. It was an attempt to create a definitive historically accurate account of that moment, free of emotional distortion.
Best Moment: Something as sensitive as this doesn’t have any moment that makes you want to cheer. It just attacks your soul and wrenches your heart from your chest. On a personal level it has been important to me simply because I slept through that day (night work does that to you), and so I can attest to its value as a document of the day’s events. The nausea and emotions I would have felt on that awful day hit me as I watched this. I completely understand why many won’t want to watch it: it’s the most harrowing experience I have ever had in a cinema, and I’ve not been able to rewatch it since. Nevertheless, I’m glad I did see it.
13. Munich
Steven Spielberg has spent much of his career exploring the events of WWII, at first as a backdrop for shenanigans (1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark), then as the setting for commentaries on the darkness that conflict exposed both in our enemies and ourselves (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan). It seemed likely that this fascination with the era was a consequence of his Jewish upbringing, and in biographies his late-career interest in Judaism certainly informed his work on Schindler’s List. He wasn’t finished exploring his cultural and ethnic heritage, though. As you can imagine, his effort to depict the dark side of Jewish history was not received with as much acclaim as his movie about Schindler. Munich‘s nightmarish vision of the awful moral corruption faced by a group of former Mossad agents — given the task of wreaking vengeance on the men behind the Munich Olympics massacre — is unflinching, a sentiment definitely not shared by many right-wing supporters of Israel’s foreign policies. Arguments rage over the veracity of the movie, but Spielberg is obviously expressing anger at the way this ongoing conflict is poisoning all of our lives, and to do that he has taken liberties with facts to create a warning to us all that “an eye for an eye” is not a viable policy.
Best Moment: As with United 93, this is not a triumphalist movie, but Spielberg is too much of a showman to make something that completely eschews manipulation of the audience. Early in the movie the team of assassins place a booby-trap inside a phone in the hope of killing a Palestinian translator, but in a nerve-wracking scene they realise they are about to kill his daughter as well. It’s a thrilling suspense setpiece with dark undertones that come to the fore as the movie progresses.
12. The Dark Knight
The praise-backlash-praise cycle for The Dark Knight seemed to flash past quicker than usual. Blame the Internet. Now that things have settled down, and debates about whether it should have qualified for a Best Picture Academy Award nomination have become moot (though it should have), one can look back with fresher eyes and see if Christopher Nolan’s crime epic stands up to scrutiny. Concerns over some of the editing remain, but it still manages to do several things better than almost any other purely fictional movie released this decade: it addresses contemporary concerns over the effect of terrorism on society, it condemns recent foreign policy and domestic security mistakes using crystal-clear metaphors, and it finds a way to make the fantastical superhero genre work in a contemporary setting without losing what makes that genre so appealing. It’s also ridiculously exciting, and features two of the most thrilling performances of recent times from Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart.
Best Moment: As Batman battles to stop a SWAT team from killing a group of innocents, the occupants of two booby-trapped boats have to make a terrible decision. The deadlock is broken by a convict whose actions show that, despite the terror caused by The Joker and his minions, the people of Gotham will not buckle under the pressure. I saw this in an IMAX cinema in New York, and the applause that broke out at this moment was more than just an acknowledgement of good cinema. It was defiant approval. Terror won’t win out. We won’t let it.
11. Ratatouille
It’s a film about a talking rat who loves cooking. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker it could have been nothing more than a fun diversion, but in the hands of Jan Pinkava and Brad Bird, it is instead a treatise on what it is to be an artist. Celebrating self-knowledge, commitment to excellence, and thoughtful artistic criticism, it’s one of the most profound movies about the creative impulse ever made, all while being artistically accomplished in its own right. No mean feat. It’s also a love letter to Paris and to great cuisine (choosing Thomas Keller as a consultant shows Brad Bird knew what he was doing), not to mention a wonderful comedy. In other words, a pure triumph.
Best Moment: Curmudgeonly critic Anton Ego finally arrives at Gusteau’s ready to destroy its reputation once and for all. What happens next might be my favourite scene of the entire decade.
As I’m going a bit bigger with these last fifteen, might as well split this into three sets of five too. Apologies for dragging this out even further: it was beyond my control. Next two parts will materialise either over the weekend or on Monday.
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Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
