Favorite Movies of 2009

Well since it’s the time of year when everyone puts up their top 10 list of the year I thought I would put together my 10 favorite movies I saw in the theater this year. The list is hardly inclusive, as I think I went to the theater far less this year than any other year in memory. (I saw 46 movies at the theater this year, not counting revivals). Part of it is middle age ennui, part of it is I just don’t care for a lot of the movies coming out these days, and a large part of it is realizing I have oodles of TCM titles I’ve taped and I’d much rather watch those than make a trek to local Cineplex, which is becoming more of a crapshoot with each year. Also, I do tend to see titles at the second run shows for $3, so there’s none of the big holiday openings here. With that in mind, here are my top ten favorite movies of the year.

Ten Favorite Movies of 2009

10. “Just Another Love Story”. Modern day film noir from Denmark about an unhappy husband and father who causes an automobile accident and puts a woman in a coma. She wakes up with no memory. He takes the identity of her boyfriend, falls in love with her and ingratiates himself in her family. Bad things begin to occur when the real boy friend shows up. A unique twist on a Cornell Woolrich-type situation. While some explicit nudity and violence are present, the central plot and characters are strongly reminiscent of many great noir pictures from the 1940s and 1950s.

9. “Extract”. The latest from Mike Judge, writer and director of “Office Space” (1998) with a similar vibe. I love these workplace comedies showing the affection (tinged with a bit of irritation) at the foibles of some of these characters. Mila Kunis continues to fulfill the promise she showed in the otherwise dreadful “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (2008). Hilarious support from scene stealers David Koechner (great as a way too-friendly neighbor), .J.K. Simmons and Clifton Collins Jr. Collins gets my vote for favorite cinema find of 2009 (See “Sunshine Cleaning” entry below).

8. “The Informant!” Director Steven Soderberg’s latest, and I’m surprised it didn’t connect more with viewers. Matt Damon does it again in a spectacular performance. Is there any actor working today with a more consistent streak of good movies? I also love the Marvin Hamlisch score, and hope it’s remembered at Oscar time.

7. “Sunshine Cleaning”. One of the year’s sleepers, a slice of life picture with Amy Adams and Emily Blunt struggling to start the title business, a service that cleans up after crime scenes. Amy Adams is one of our most likeable actresses; you can’t help but like her, even when her character here is being totally irresponsible. There’s an excellent supporting performance by Clifton Collins Jr. as the owner of a cleaning supply store who helps Adams with her son that is one the year’s most overlooked, and probably my most favorite. He’s a talent to watch.

6. “Pirate Radio”. The year’s most pleasant surprise and a very agreeable slop of a movie. It reminds me a lot of those anarchic, anything goes comedies that Paramount produced in the 1930s, such as “The Big Broadcast” (1932), “Million Dollar Legs” (1932) or early Marx Brothers. Little vignettes, off the wall characters, satisfying pay offs and a great song soundtrack. Like Matt Damon, Philip Seymour Hoffman continues his hot streak of selecting strong properties. It may not have been very successful at the box office (I don’t know how it did overseas), but I have a feeling this will be a cult film. I will continue to happily support screenwriter/director Richard Curtis. His work is a glorious oasis in the current ocean of comedic mediocrity.

5. “Knowing”. I have to go along with Roger Ebert on this one by giving it four stars. Based on the trailers, I feared for the worst – a Nicolas Cage apolocalyptic thriller loaded with CGI. Instead I got a thoughtful and nail biting suspense thriller with some truly stunning imagery. I like Cage going unhinged and think he gets a bad rap for it. I appreciate that much more than some actor mumbling under his breath thinking he’s getting to the root of the character. No, he’s just mumbling under his breath and being irritating. The final images are among the year’s most haunting. Speaking of haunting, how about those strange figures following Cage’s family wherever they go? They invoke more uneasiness and dread than most horror movies. One of the year’s most unexpected surprises.

4. “The Hurt Locker”. Director Kathryn Bigelow’s apolitical look at an ace bomb disposal expert in Iraq (Jeremy Renner) who lives on an adrenaline rush of danger, this was nail biting from beginning to end. Another film that will live on long after it leaves the theaters.

3. “Inglourious Basterds”. Director Quentin Tarantino’s WWII fantasy film may be the most enjoyable movie experience I had all year. I think Brad Pitt has been severely underrated here, as I think his performance is an absolute jewel. I loved the slow buildups to the action scenes which are very cleanly shot and edited. No uber-hyper editing here, thank God. Two caveats: There should have been more of the great Rod Taylor (as Winston Churchill), and Tarantino’s use of already existing film music. I hope one day he’ll hire a composer to write an actual score for one of his movies.

2. “Adventureland”. I loved every minute of Greg Mottola’s intimate, bittersweet and lovely evocation of growing up, summer temp jobs and romance. Sold as a whacky comedy, this is much deeper and touching. Wonderful performances from Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds and Martin Starr. I especially liked Starr’s performance as the sad sack, perpetual stoner. This has been a strong year for under the radar supporting performances.

1. “Up”. Far and away the year’s most emotionally enriching experience. Pixar does it again, and was there any greater sequence this year than the first 15 wordless minutes showing joy, happiness, love, death and sadness over the course of a man’s life. Just glorious. Special kudos to composer Michael Giacchino’s glorious score, featuring – gasp - actual melody and musical devleopment. Easily the best score of 2009, which means it doesn’t stand a chance of winning the Best Score Oscar. I would dearly love to be wrong.

Honorable Mentions:

“Coraline”. A wonderfully weird 3D stop motion-animated feature with some hilariously deadpan sequences.

“State of Play”. Strong thriller about investigative reporters, a Washington D.C. scandal, and a prescient look at the declining newspaper industry. As one who loves newspapers, this one really got to me. Strong cast headed by Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams. Ben Affleck is good too, and he was good in “Extract” too, a small gem of a comedic performance. I never cared for Affleck as a leading man at all, but maybe he’s found his niche as a supporting actor.

“Taken”. Exciting B movie actioner with retired agent Liam Neeson going after the scum who kidnapped his daughter for a sex slave ring. Clocking in at 90 minutes, this reminds me of the Charles Bronson-type action flicks from 1970s. It sets up the premise, and you’re in and out with a minimum of fuss. I could do with less frenetic cutting in the action scenes, but this is hardly the worst offender out there.

Worst Films of the Year:

“Angels and Demons”. Another Dan Brown adaptation, this one louder and stupider than “The DaVinci Code.” Do Tom Hanks and Ron Howard really need the money this badly?

“The Proposition”. Another bad Sandra Bullock movie. Is there any actress who is so consistently likeable yet makes so many bad movies? That’s a star.

“Public Enemies”. The year’s biggest disappointment, as director Michael Mann, in discovering the “joys” of digital filmmaking, forgot about writing a good script.

“Year One” I saw this at a second run theater with about 30 people attending and there was not one laugh throughout the entire film. Not one. Painful beyond all endurance.

“Couples Retreat”. A so-called comedy about testing adult relationships at a beautiful Caribbean resort. No laughs, no drama and a cast full of characters in real life I would stay far, far away from. In other words, it’s like a Judd Apatow movie except it’s shorter.

“The Fourth Kind”. Probably the worst movie I saw this year. Supposedly based on a true story, as people re-enact their alien abduction experiences. So we get split screens of people re-enacting their events while under hypnosis while dramatic re-enactments are shown alongside of it. Awful beyond belief. Mila Jovovich does the best she can. I think she’s a pretty decent actress but there’s no redeeming this movie.

Most overrated:

“Star Trek”. Sometimes a movie comes out and everyone raves about it and you go to see and for the life of you can’t figure out what everyone is raving about. For me this year it was “Star Trek”, which I found a perfectly excrutiating experience. Director J.J. Abrams overdirects every scene, complete with irritating lens flares throughout (not once or twice, but through the whole movie), tilted camera angles for no discernable reason (even on normal conversations on the bridge, maybe the lens flares blinded ol’ J.J. on the set and he had no idea his camera was all askew) and over-edited frenetic action scenes (my big bugaboo). I found it about as exciting as watching cupcakes being sold at a bake sale and was mighty glad when it was over.

Most underrated:

“Pirate Radio”. See above.

Movie I couldn’t bring myself to see even if my life depended on it: “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

Adventureland

“Adventureland” is my favorite film of the year so far, a wise and winning look at the awkwardness and yearning of first love, and the struggle to carve an identity for oneself while navigating those roadblocks life throws at you.

It’s a rich, bittersweet and touching movie, quite different from the advertising campaign which makes it out to be a rowdy comedy. It’s not, and the film is better for it.

Set in 1987, James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) thinks he’s going to graduate school in New York in the fall following a summer sojourn to Europe. Reality sets in when his family faces a financial crisis, and his trip to Europe is scuttled. Without his parent’s financial help for grad school, James is forced to take a job over the summer at Adventureland, a nearby amusement park, to earn money

The park is run by an odd married couple played by Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig, both from “Saturday Night Live.” Hader is a hilarious, wigged out amusement park owner, and is nicely complemented by Wiig, an equally spaced-out wife. Reality rarely seeps into their hermetically-sealed, amusement park-centered world.

James befriends and falls in love with co-worker Em (Kristen Stewart), who has a relationship with the much older married maintenance worker Mike (Ryan Reynolds). Em comes from a troubled home but is a good person and is trying to find herself and her place.

The park’s workers are an interesting bunch. Everyone smokes pot and gets high a lot and there’s lots of sexual activity, both real and imagined.

I especially liked Joel (Martin Starr), a most likeable sad sack type who is perpetually stoned to make it through the drudgery of working at Adventureland (and, one suspects, life itself). He also utters my favorite movie line in a long time, where he and equally stoned Sue (Paige Howard) find themselves making out in a car one night.

I didn’t know who the actress was playing Sue until the end credits, and saw her name was Paige Howard. Since she was a redhead I guessed she was Ron Howard’s daughter and sister of Bryce Dallas Howard and I was right. She has a bright future ahead of her, but then I’m partial to redheads.

Many painful truths and lessons are learned before the movie is over. Writer/Director Greg Mottola obviously likes these characters, despite the damage they do to themselves and others. I also liked the fact that Terry Stacey’s cinematography is kind of grimy, looking like a film made in 1987, and not given the digital sheen typical of many movies today.

Good acting is on display all around, especially by Eisenberg and Stewart. These two characters are made for each other if they only they were wise enough to realize it.

I also liked Ryan Reynolds’ performance quite a bit. He takes a philandering character preying on impressionable young girls and makes us understand him and yes, even like him. He’s not the stock bad guy. Reynolds is one of those actors that I don’t think gets the credit he should. He makes it look so easy. Hopefully this will change, as this is some of his best work.

Much has been written by others about the smart use of songs in the movie. I’ll take their word for it. Though I was 25 in 1987, I rarely listened to the radio and was completely out of the loop when it came to contemporary music. I was more concerned with wondering when the next Jerry Goldsmith-scored movie was coming out. So I guess songs by the likes of Crowded House work just fine; indeed this is the type of movie that cries for a song-based score, so I’ll the word of the rock experts that the right songs were chosen.

I never had a summer job like working at a place like Adventureland, but I did work for two years of high school and almost four years of college at a small, local grocery store, so there was much in “Adventureland” I related to. A lot of us really didn’t like the job, or the low pay, but we liked each other and would often go to each other’s houses for parties or go bowling or have outings of some kind.

“Adventureland” has several scenes of the workers visiting with each other in the parking lot after their shifts are over. I remember those times. Many a summer night was spent hanging in the parking lot visiting with each other after work. There was strong camaraderie and because many of us were roughly the same age, there were lots of flirtations and rivalries for the guys with the new cashier or the girls with the new stockboy/bagger.

One memory came at me full force while watching “Adventureland”, a memory I hadn’t thought of in a long time. For a period of time I worked the Friday night shift and one of the cashiers was a cute girl named Gail. One summer weekend a small Jaycees-sponsored carnival set up in the parking lot of the local community college. The store closed on Fridays at 9 p.m. and the carnival was open until 11:00. Several of us decided to carpool it to the carnival that night, but by the time we closed up the store, counted the money, swept the store and prepared it for opening the next morning, it was close to 9:30. A drive to the carnival meant we had only about an hour to spend there. Gail and I broke away from the others and went wandering and found ourselves in the ride section. We stood in front of one of those machines where the seats, shaped like Tilt-o-Whirl seats, flies up in the air and down again. Nothing too strenuous like a roller-coaster, so we decided to check it out, especially since there was no waiting in line. The carnival had started to shut down but we thought we could squeeze a ride in. We went up to the operator, a young kid just a little older than ourselves, to see about going on the ride, but he said, “Sorry, we’re all done for the night.”

Indeed the carnival was shutting down and the other rides were going dark one by one. People had started to stream out to the parking lot.

We must have looked really disappointed, because he looked at us, looked up and down the midway as if looking for his boss and then said, “Get on.” He refused to take our tickets. He proceeded to give us a private ride, just the two of us, with the lights from the ride flashing brightly and the music blaring full blast in an otherwise quiet carnival. I think we were the only activity in the carnival at that time. It was the best carnival ride I was ever on. We thanked him profusely when we got off and he looked at us and said, “No, no, glad to do it.”

I have a feeling the workers in “Adventureland” would have done something similar. Behind the insults, drinking, swearing and pot use beat the hearts of hopeless romantics.

Rating for “Adventureland”: Three and a half stars.