listomania – the top 10 of 2009

film. see?

Every year, I put together a list of my top 10 films. Every year, I spend hours debating that list with my brother. This dedication to irrelevance is apparently hereditary. This year, I decided to do something a little different – to pick a top 10, but to write a little about them as well. I decided to write 50 words for each film. A little over 2,500 words later, I am pleased to announce Stephen King no longer has the monopoly on literary elephantiasis. Read on, and by all means add your own list – any excuse to seek out new films is a good excuse indeed.

10. The Brothers Bloom

pick a card. any card. as long as it's this one

Rian Johnson wrote and directed this sweet, quirky tale of two conmen and the woman at the centre of their final caper. His second feature after 2005’s high-school noir Brick blends silly and serious to hit the just the right note; you know early on that you’re watching a fable, one with threats that feel genuinely dangerous and mania that never becomes absurd. Keeping viewers guessing what’s real and what’s not is a neat trick, but it’s a trick that only works if they care about the various sleights of hand and mind being perpetrated on and by the film’s characters – so it’s a treat to watch Mark Ruffalo spin an inviting web of lies, Adrien Brody’s spry, pigeon-toed charm, the dizzy, dishy and determined Rachel Weisz, and Rinko Kikuchi deciding if it’s more fun to steal scenes or blow them up. The trap in store for the writer/director is one of indulgence, an inability to step back from the material and prune impartially – but even for a film with so much going on, bursting with double- and triple-crosses, The Brothers Bloom remains light as air, a delicious trifle.

9. Avatar

ah, to be a cat in love

The best review of this film is 15 words long: it’s as if the best French restaurant in the world decided to make a cheeseburger. The fact is that Avatar is extremely entertaining, lovingly made, and endlessly inventive in almost every area except for its plot – proof that Cameron is a far better storyteller than he is a writer. We know he can helm an epic set piece, and the film teems with them; but it’s so big and bright that it takes repeat viewings to appreciate little details, like how the part-human Avatars have one more digit than the natives, or the care put into even the smallest takes, like a five-second shot of Michelle Rodriguez dashing through a corridor that crackles with kinetic energy, and how the camera lingers longingly on Worthington’s useless legs after his first test run in an Avatar body. The effect work to make his legs appear wasted away is the perfect example of Cameron’s attention to detail; the limitations of the story are the perfect example that his imagination is fertile, but finite. He’s a notorious perfectionist who chooses to paint in broad strokes, and it’s a good thing those strokes add up to a flawed picture – he knows there’s room for improvement, and that’s a tantalising prospect indeed.

8. The Hurt Locker

in the immortal words of hugh grant: big badda boom

When a war goes on for as long as the current conflict in the Middle East, there’s a distinct progression in its cinematic portrayal; first come the heroics, then the satire, then the films portraying the sheer mind-numbing drudgery of it all. That’s why it’s so refreshing to have The Hurt Locker come along this late in the piece; it’s hard to think of a film that has so perfectly captured the desiccated futility of wartime in the Gulf without resorting to depictions of boredom or ennui. Director Kathryn Bigelow follows an elite bomb disposal unit in the final month of its tour of Iraq, seasoning the proceedings with some very familiar faces, some of whom pop up (and fall down) in the most surprising areas. She provides a minimum of exposition, connecting a series of vignettes with sparse character development; life for the unit is mission after sand-blasted mission, rinse and repeat, nerves stretched as taut as tripwires. The result is a riveting, lean film that ramps up the tension until the damning judgement of its final scene – that while some justify war as the price of peace, the prolonged engagement creates others who can only find peace in the heart of war.

7. Moon

look! up in the sky!

What a year for science fiction, and what a performance from Sam Rockwell. He’s in almost every shot of this resolutely lo-fi film, playing a character in various stages of his life – from bold and brash to quite literally falling apart. Any further discussion of the plot would spoil a film that handles its big reveals not with whiplash-inducing changes in direction, but with muted flourishes. At no point does Moon feel like it’s set up for a killer twist; it dispenses with information in measured doses, and each time a layer is revealed it changes not just the game, but the stakes. By the endgame, the question isn’t why or how; it’s what happens next, which feels like a gust of cool air in the age of the expository ending (I see you, Sherlock Holmes). Armed with a smart script that refers to, plays with, and then gleefully disavows various sci-fi tropes, Moon is a ridiculously assured debut from director Duncan Jones. More please.

6. Star Trek

suffer the little children

With Star Trek, J. J. Abrams has boldly managed what no director has done before – the delicate balancing act of pleasing both complete newcomers and hardcore fans. A reboot seemed a logical (!) place to start, and even if the cast was skewed a bit young, watching the crew of the Enterprise come together proved enormously satisfying – and helped elevate Trek far above a mere quest for a franchise. The time-travel conceit worked a treat, as well; it let Abrams play with the toys of the Trek universe without the burden of almost five decades of continuity, allowing the film to flit from referential to reverential with just the right amount of each. Writers Orci and Kurtzmann were responsible for the abomination that was the Transformers sequel, but their Trek script kept the barely post-pubescent leads awash with banter and had real gravitas delivered by the likes of the excellent Bruce Greenwood: “Your father was the captain of a starship for 12 minutes. He saved over 800 lives, including yours. I dare you to do better.” This Star Trek didn’t just banish the spectre of the odd-numbered curse, it proved that accessible and good shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

5. Up In The Air

the fight or flight response

George Clooney is a movie star. In the hands of a lesser actor, his character would be unbearable; this is a man whose job is to relieve people of theirs, who takes an almost sardonic pleasure in an existence free of attachments – almost, because the pleasure is in the journey, not the destination. Jason Reitman spent the better part of a decade adapting this tale of a corporate assassin, and serendipitously released it against the backdrop of a global recession. One of his many masterstrokes is to intersperse the film with real footage of the newly unemployed; another is the casting of Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, strong, smart women who go toe-to-toe with Clooney’s polished wingtips. Reitman’s brilliant direction is sometimes subtle, lingering a moment on the fragility in Clooney’s eyes or the determination in Kendrick’s chin, then it ramps up the pace with a series of quickfire cuts and hilarious montages. There are moments in Up In The Air when you sense that this is a man teetering on the edge of an epiphany; but it’s hard to tell what he learns, and whether or not he learns it. The ending is flavoured with ambiguity – curious at first, then delicious, just as soon as you remember the film’s title.

4. Inglourious Basterds

shave and a haircut. two bits

Books, covers, films, trailers, refrain from judging thereof. Brad Pitt and the titular illegitimates are onscreen for far less than the promotional materials imply, but that’s quite all right. This is a film so stuffed with characters that it’s hard to tell which ones are more fun to spend time with – the deadly, distracting Mélanie Laurent, or Michael Fassbender’s undercover Brit, and then there’s Cristophe Waltz. As I wrote in August, he doesn’t just steal every scene he’s in; he seduces it, takes it home, gleefully throttles it and mounts its stuffed head above his mantelpiece. Basterds is Tarantino’s masterpiece; it hits all the high notes of his previous films – the glorious, sensual dialogue, even in French and German; the sudden brutality; the nod to the power and glory of cinema; femmes fatale; the stylised 70s aesthetic; his signature foot fetish – and turns them into a hugely entertaining potpourri of revisionist history. This isn’t a war film, it’s an amorality play about the ethics of violence, one that toys with the idea that the only thing separating vengeance from terrorism is the fog of war.

3. Fantastic Mr Fox

quick, the flying v!

Choosing to make a film with resolutely old-school stop motion in the age of the almighty pixel is quintessentially Andersonian; so uncool as to be positively hip. Even stop-motion doyen Henry Selick’s Coraline, released earlier this year, is slick and shiny; Wes Anderson embraces the medium’s flaws to make a film about characters struggling to do the same with theirs. He looks at the bigger picture, of beasts red in tooth and claw rebelling against the domestication of their nature – then he zooms in to the characters, of George Clooney’s Fox, not as fantastic as he might think; or the rivalry between Fox’s son Ash and his cousin Kristofferson, the former stubbornly refusing to be different, the latter clearly exceptional and terrifyingly grounded. At times supremely awkward as only Anderson can deliver, at others surreal enough to make Jan Svankmajer proud, Fantastic Mr Fox is also very much in keeping with the aesthetic of Roald Dahl – magical yet cynical, cruel and true, offbeat and beguiling. For a filmmaker accused of being more parts affectation than inspiration, how fitting that Anderson’s best quirks and qualities now gleam with Dahl-inspired lustre. And if he remains intent on films about families with an eclectic supporting cast, can we have Danny, the Champion of the World next please?

2. District 9

when you wish upon a star

Galactic opera is alive and well, as is the moody solitude of space, but this is the year’s most stunningly original science fiction film – actually, the most original film of any genre. Doing away with that annoying alien habit of appearing exclusively over the US of A, District 9 is refreshingly set in parched South Africa. This immediately opens up a can of potential apartheid parallels, but debutant director Neill Blomkamp keeps his references subtle yet pervasive, visible through layers of subtext like Children of Men en route to the best science-fiction satire since Starship Troopers. Our avatar for the film is Wikus van de Merwe, tragic in his ignorance, tremendously played by Sharlto Copley in his first ever film role. The CGI is excellent; gritty and worn-down, designed to fit with the film’s faux-documentary style, it’s the thematic opposite of Avatar. Blomkamp one-ups that film with his depiction of a mech fight, and unites black and white South Africans; his clever solution for hatred is to give both sides a new, mutual target. The last shot of the film is haunting, and serves as a microcosm of the film itself – amid all the fun and fury, District 9 ends with the quiet question of what it truly is to be alien.

1. The Damned United

cups runneth over

This is the best football film ever made – and it isn’t even about football, for the most part. Sports films resonate because they deal in universal themes; glory, victory, honour. This deals in none of those, but then again it’s not really a sports film either. It’s a film about a man composed of the ingredients of greatness; a monumental ego, sheer bloody-mindedness, self-belief curdled into arrogance. It’s about pride and prejudice, grudges jealously transformed into a pearl of hatred and ambition over years and years, about how wit and charm can be wielded like a rapier – or a sledgehammer. It’s about being savagely beaten by humility, about confronting and harnessing demons, about keeping edifices intact through sheer force of will when the rest of your world crumbles around you. It asks the question of whether delusions of grandeur cease to be delusions when grandeur is achieved. It is extremely, sometimes painfully, funny, replete with a cast full of the upper crust of British character actors, and Michael Sheen performing his usual party trick of becoming the man he is portraying despite looking absolutely nothing like him – in this case, Brian Clough. And, to top it all off, it has an ending so sweet, so romantic, so utterly unexpected in its approach and resolution that it simply must be seen.

Honourable mentions:

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

Coraline

The Informant!

Mary & Max

Where The Wild Things Are

Up

Ponyo

Thirst

The Road

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince