Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The Book of Eli



The biggest mystery about The Book of Eli is why they didn't just openly market it as a Christian film. I mean, Christians aren't exactly a minority in this country and this is easily the most overtly religious film I've seen in theaters since 2004's The Passion of the Christ: the hero gets his goodliness from his faith and his strength from Jesus, he gives hope to the hopeless by teaching them to pray, protecting the last copy of the Bible is portrayed as tantamount to saving the human race, and there are lengthy discussions about said Bible and quoted passages from it. Sure, the explosions and gun battles and rape and cannibalism would have elderly churchgoers stumbling shellshocked towards the exit (although I don't think that crowd goes to the movies much anyway), but it could have made a killing with the young hip Christians.

But if what The Book of Eli is is religious, what it isn't is science fiction. Some websites absentmindedly shuffled it into that genre because of its post-apocalyptic settings, but outside of a few extremely vague references to an event called "the flash" that destroyed the world a few decades back there's no sci-fi trappings to be found at all. Don't expect any robots — hell, don't even expect any internet. If my memory serves, the only technology that appears in the entire film is guns, a water pump, a printing press, the protagonist's iPod, and a few cars (how exactly they get gasoline in this desolate wasteland would have to be the film's second biggest mystery).

What The Book of Eli is is a Western in the Man With No Name mold that happens to have automatic weaponry. Denzel Washington is a man wandering the lawless desert on a mysterious mission who rolls into a frontier town ruled by vile gangleader Carnegie, played by the always awesome Gary Oldman. If you've watched the old Eastwood Westerns you know how this goes: our protagonist isn't exactly a nice guy, in fact, he's kind of an asshole with no qualms about killing, but our villain who runs the town is still way worse so the two gotta end up in conflict. Expect standoffs and shootouts and tense confrontations! Just with an extra religious gloss to it this time, as Oldman desperately wants the holy book that Denzel carries as means to marshall the easily-led masses and expand his empire across the broken world.

Taken as a Western, the film is a flawed but mildly entertaining venture that achieves its modest success almost entirely on the strength of its two leads. You don't have to obsessively follow cinema to know that Denzel and Gary Oldman both rule and it's entertaining simply to watch them go up against each other. The supporting cast doesn't fare as well, particularly a spectacularly miscast Mila Kunis as a town girl who joins Denzel on his sojourn and fails to the point of it actually being funny any time she's asked to be badass. There's no hyper-speed cutting or shakeycam but there's no innovative or incredibly compelling action scenes either; the bloodshed is at its most entertaining whenever Denzel busts out his machete. The cinematography of the destroyed world is good but visually I preferred the silvery wasteland of Terminator Salvation.

All in all I don't think I'll ever watch The Book of Eli again, but I'd recommend giving it a rental if you're into post-apocalyptic settings, Westerns, or Christianity. I'm not interested in religion but I still marginally enjoyed the film as a violent shoot 'em up Wild West flick with cool stars enough that I didn't feel I'd totally wasted my time when the credits rolled round. Also, between Terminator Salvation, 9, 2012, The Road, and now The Book of Eli, I gotta ask, what's the deal with all the apocalypse, Hollywood? Lighten the fuck up!


2 Stars out of 5

Friday, March 26, 2010

Youth In Revolt



The problem with Michael Cera's latest vehicle Youth in Revolt is that it's a 90-minute adaptation of a 500-page source novel and even to someone like me who hasn't read the book it really, really shows. Potentially interesting characters flit in and out of the narrative with a few minutes of screentime apiece, subplots are glossed over so quickly you wonder why they even bothered introducing them, and the central romance has no time to breathe, let alone genuinely invest you. After the film my foremost thought was that I wish the concept of the miniseries was more prevalent in America, because told over four or five hour-long episodes I think Youth in Revolt could have been a much stronger work.

Although the trailer attempts to position the movie's tone as something more like Superbad than the low-key, dry quirkfest it actually is, it faithfully represents the plot: Michael Cera plays Nick Twisp, an aspiring novelist, horny virgin, and pushover omega male who's not only the biggest pussy Cera's ever played but almost a parody of his typical screen persona. In order to hold onto the love of his short life, the adorable Sheeni Saunders, he willingly plunges headlong into schizophrenia by creating an alter ego named Francois Dillinger, an ultra-suave hedonistic Frenchman who helps him with his girl problems but, like Fight Club's Tyler Durden, creates far worse problems with the law.

The film has an episodic feel, almost perfectly divided into frantically-paced fifteen-to-twenty minute segments that lead into one another but otherwise stand alone, each taking place in different locations with different narrative thrusts and even different sets of supporting characters. The first segment takes place in the trailer park where Nick meets Sheeni, the next back at Nick's house where he creates Francois to get himself in trouble and sent back to Sheeni, one at Nick's new school, one on an impromptu road trip to sneak into Sheeni's new private school to see her, one involving his final run from the law, and so on. Episodes. Again, I can't emphasize how much this average movie feels like a missed opportunity to make a great miniseries.

While Nick Twisp is a lukewarm retread of Cera's previous characters, Francois Dillinger is hilarious, almost to the movie's detriment as it only truly comes alive when he's onscreen and you spend the long stretches without him (nearly twenty minutes at some points) waiting for his return. As I said in my Year One review I continue to really like Michael Cera despite the predictable internet backlash against him, but with the increasing caricature of himself he's become since Arrested Development and Superbad occasionally making that fandom tough to defend it was nice to see him expand a little bit with the glorious dick that is Francois. I'd just like to see him expand in a better movie next time. Youth In Revolt isn't bad but fails to be memorable, and I'd skip it unless you're as big a Cera fan as I am.


2 Stars out of 5

Saturday, March 20, 2010

The Ghost Writer



There's a strange elephant-in-the-room dichotomy when it comes to reviewing any Roman Polanski film. On the one hand, this is the sublime craftsman who gave us Rosemary's Baby, The Pianist, and in particular Chinatown, arguably the greatest cinematic mystery in the long annals of the medium. On the other hand, he, you know, rapes children. Well, The Ghost Writer is thankfully free of minors so you don't have to wonder how Roman suppressed his onset boner, but like the man itself there's a strange dichotomy at work; the film can't decide if it wants to be a classy little mystery thriller or heavyhanded political allegory and tries to keep one foot in each pond to mixed results.

Ewan McGregor plays our pointlessly unnamed protagonist, a ghostwriter offered years worth of cash for one month's work to step in and finish the memoirs of disgraced former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, played by Pierce Brosnan, after the previous ghost washes up drowned on a beach near Lang's home. The movie sort of splits down two parallel paths here, each with Lang at the center but otherwise tenuously connected: in one, Lang is being prosecuted for war crimes for illegal detention, waterboarding, torture, and starting a possibly illegal war during his ministership. Yeah. It's not super-subtle. In the other, the ghostwriter turns up evidence during research for the book that his predecessor's drowning death may have been — insert gasps here — no accident. Perhaps the man... knew too much. Oh shit!

These two narrative threads are so disparate that they call to be reviewed separately. As for the political message, I sort of don't care anymore. I mean, look, the Iraq War was clearly a bullshit and heinous mistake. I thought that was plainly obvious seven years ago, and while it's great that most Americans and probably even more Brits have come to gradually recognize what I easily could as a high school kid, I'm well over applauding works of fiction for pointing it out unless they do so in a particularly interesting or original way, which The Ghost Writer does not.

The thriller story fares considerably better (at least until the very end, which we'll get to momentarily). It's a classy and understated affair, the closest it comes to action at any point being when Ewan McGregor has to use a little deception to give some enforcers following his car the slip, and is skillfully and effortlessly guided along by Polanski who as I stated before knows how to make a goddamn film when he's not busy slipping roofies to preteens. It's got twists, investigation, murder, plenty of wry humor, and even an elegant twist on the femme fatale in the form of Olivia Williams' sexy former British first lady, who gives the best performance in the film by a long shot. Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan are passable if a bit nondescript once you can get past the awesomeness of imagining Obi-Wan Kenobi and James Bond teaming up to destroy evil, while Kim Cattrall has one of the worst fake British accents I've heard in years and is terrible as Brosnan's executive secretary.

But it's in the end — as in the very, very end, like the final sixty seconds — when the movie spins off its axis with an ending that seems like it's trying to be profound but is instead random to the point of being almost funny. I won't spoil exactly what happens, but in terms of conclusiveness I was having some serious flashbacks to the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (sans fourth wall breaking). I read a couple reviews calling it brilliantly Polanski-esque and one even favorably comparing it to Chinatown, which is fucking hilarious to me. That's as much a grotesque stretch as saying that Eragon's ending is brilliantly Star Wars-esque because it ends with good defeating evil.

The Ghost Writer is almost certainly going to be Polanski's final film now that he's under house arrest and 76 years old, and as a career-capper I'd give it a wavering thumb sideways. It's watchable enough if you like a sleek murder mystery thriller or Pierce Brosnan playing a Prime Minster or if, god forbid, you still need external validation for your anti-war views, but while Chinatown will live on long after me and the next five generations after me (who Roman Polanski would like to rape), The Ghost Writer will be long forgotten.


2 Stars out of 5

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Best Movie Years of the Decade


In the epic finale to my five-part best of the decade series, I will be breaking down my top 100 list to figure out which years of the last ten contributed the most and least to the art of cinema. What surprises lurk within? What plot twists? What dramatic revelations? You must read onward to find out! All my years come from Criticker, not IMDb, because I find IMDb's habit of counting a movie's festival premiere as its release date annoying; for example, IMDb lists Memento as a 2000 film even though only like a few hundred people saw it at festivals before it actually came out in 2001. Which is stupid. Now that that's cleared up, let's list things out one year at a time:

2000 - 5 Movies
23. Dungeons & Dragons
38. American Psycho
76. Requiem for a Dream
88. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
94. George Washington

2001 - 5 Movies
1(split). The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
3. Memento
50. Amélie
56. Y Tu Mamá También
59. Ocean's Eleven

2002 - 12 Movies
1(split). The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
4. Minority Report
14. Better Luck Tomorrow
17. Funny Ha Ha
19. The Rules of Attraction
24. Gangs of New York
33. Adaptation
48. Catch Me If You Can
52. Hero
58. Spider-Man
60. 25th Hour
89. The Bourne Identity

2003 - 10 Movies
1(split). The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
8. City of God
20(split). Kill Bill: Vol. 1
30. The Last Samurai
36. Oldboy
43. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of Black Pearl
73. X2: X-Men United
84. Finding Nemo
92. Bad Santa

2004 - 14 Movies
9. Collateral
11. Spider-Man 2
15. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
20(split). Kill Bill: Vol. 2
25. The Incredibles
28. Downfall
37. Before Sunset
45. Shaun of the Dead
47. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
55. Friday Night Lights
65. Sideways
78. The Girl Next Door
85. Mean Girls
93. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

2005 - 13 Movies
7. Batman Begins
12. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
26. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
27. Good Night, and Good Luck
34. Brick
40. Serenity
54. Kingdom of Heaven
62. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
72. Mutual Appreciation
74. Brokeback Mountain
79. Syriana
82. Match Point
100. Transporter 2

2006 - 7 Movies
6. Casino Royale
10. The Departed
13. Children of Men
53. Rocky Balboa
63. United 93
83. Letters from Iwo Jima
98. Stranger Than Fiction

2007 - 15 Movies
5. Superbad
16. Ratatouille
18. No Country for Old Men
31. Knocked Up
39. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
42. There Will Be Blood
57. Hot Fuzz
66. Zodiac
67. Planet Terror
68. Enchanted
87. Stardust
90. Gone Baby Gone
91. 3:10 to Yuma
96. Eastern Promises
99. Once

2008 - 12 Movies
2. The Dark Knight
21. WALL•E
22. The Wrestler
32. Slumdog Millionaire
46. In Bruges
49. Iron Man
61. Gran Torino
69. Burn After Reading
77. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
86. Let the Right One In
95. Sex Drive
97. Tropic Thunder

2009 - 11 Movies
29. Star Trek
35. Up
41. District 9
44. Observe and Report
51. Inglourious Basterds
64. Adventureland
70. Avatar
71. Moon
75. Sherlock Holmes
80. In the Loop
81. Where the Wild Things Are

Analysis: First off, I should note that with the series I lumped together into one entry (Kill Bill and The Lord of the Rings) I went ahead and counted the collective ranking for all individual films within the series, even if said movies wouldn't actually rank as high by themselves. For example, with 2002 I counted The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers as #1, even though Minority Report is actually the better movie. Consistency just helps keep things streamlined. Moving on!

The first thing that leaps out is the soft representation from 2000 and 2001; 2000 in particular only has two films in the top fifty (and only one, American Psycho, that's legitimately good and not a so-bad-it's-good kitsch personal favorite). But despite having the worst Best Picture winner of the decade and one of the worst in my lifetime (the tepid, utterly generic A Beautiful Mind), 2001 is substantially stronger, with two films in the top three of the decade, one of them, Memento (#3), being the thrilling low-budget indie original that introduced us to the staggering talent of Christopher Nolan.

Outside of that, these years seem a slow start to the decade, but in all fairness, I couldn't drive to the theater during 2000 and most of 2001 and I didn't have Netflix, so the problem might be less that these years lacked great movies than that I just wasn't a serious student of film yet. 2000 also had several films in the runners-up category (Thirteen Days, Battle Royale, and High Fidelity).

Things pick up heavily in 2002, however. In fact, the degree to which things pick up in 2002 was probably the biggest surprise for me in compiling this entire list; I had always mentally filed 2002 as a mediocre year probably thanks to Chicago winning Best Picture, but it turns out it's anything but, with an impressive eight films in the top fifty and one more (Hero, #52) just missing the cut. What's interesting is how many of these films are of the low-budget, low-grossing indie nature, ranging from studio indie with a few stars (The Rules of Attraction, #19, and Adaptation, #33) to microstudio with a tiny budget (Better Luck Tomorrow, #14) to literally funded out of some dude's pocket and starring his friends (Funny Ha Ha, #17).

2002's greatest historical contribution to cinema however is without a doubt the release of Spider-Man (#58), not because it's a masterpiece of its own accord, but because that film's breakout box office success confirmed what studios had suspected with X-Men in 2000 and is the genesis for the massive slate of superhero movies over the rest of the decade, increasing the number of films in the genre to well over ten times what it had in the 90s. Without Spider-Man there's little chance we would have ever gotten Chris Nolan's new Batman movies, and without Batman Begins proving the power of the reboot who knows if we would have Casino Royale or the 2009 Star Trek in the form they exist today.

The standouts of 2003 are The Return of the King (#1) and City of God (#8) in the top ten, the mighty resurgence of Quentin Tarantino's career with Kill Bill: Vol 1 (#20), and the creation of arguably this decade's most iconic new original movie character with Jack Sparrow in the first (and still best by a huge margin) Pirates of the Caribbean (#43), but '03 was merely an appetizer for the stunner that was 2004.

I had always thought of 2004 as being the best movie year of the decade and one of the best in my lifetime, and looking at this list I see nothing to refute that. With fourteen films on the list and an awesome nine in the top fifty, that year saw the thriller perfected with Collateral (#9), the romantic drama perfected with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (#15), the popcorn superhero flick perfected twice over with Spider-Man 2 (#11) and The Incredibles (#25), brought new life to the redundant zombie genre with Shaun of the Dead (#45), and even perfected the historical WWII drama with Downfall (#28). Add onto that Friday Night Lights (#55), a movie which would be reworked into my absolute favorite current TV show, a pair of great high school comedies in The Girl Next Door (#78) and Mean Girls (#85) and even the only Harry Potter movie with legitimate cinematic merit, and you have one crackerjack movie year. Shit, even that year's Best Picture Million Dollar Baby was pretty damn good, although not quite good enough to make my list.

2005's biggest contribution to the art for me was the cinematic emergence of Judd Apatow with The 40-Year-Old Virgin (#12). An inevitable and predictable internet backlash has developed against Mr. Apatow over time (which wasn't helped by his admittedly lukewarm 2009 movie Funny People), but he's responsible in some form as writer, director, or producer for an impressive four movies on my list and the jovial vulgarity and likable bromance he injected into cinematic comedy has been amazingly beneficial to the genre, even in movies he has nothing directly to do with like last year's I Love You, Man, not to mention his eye for talent and seeming ability to make a movie star out of anyone he damn well pleases.

2005 also saw the decade's only truly great Woody Allen movie (Match Point, #82), the beginning of Nolan's Batman series, Robert Downey Jr. reemerging from obscurity to remind the world that he's one of the best actors alive in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (#26), and Heath Ledger giving an amazing performance out of nowhere in Brokeback Mountain (#74) which led directly to Nolan casting him as the Joker a couple years later. The year is also interesting for having a film, Kingdom of Heaven (#54), that I deemed mediocre upon initial theater viewing and then upped into greatness upon viewing the director's cut DVD which turns it into a whole different movie. If only Ridley Scott had cast someone more interesting than Orlando Bloom as the lead who knows how high it could be risen?

2006 is a strange animal. I'd always considered it among the weakest movie years of the decade, and at first glance that seems true with only seven movies ranked and only three in the top fifty. However, those same three — Casino Royale (#6), The Departed (#10), and Children of Men (#13) — are also all in the top thirteen, more than any other year on the list. 2006 was a year heaving with a mediocrity, a sparse handful of good and great movies, and then a trio of masterworks, one of them a reinvention of my all-time favorite film series. On the strength of those three films alone I cannot deem it a weak year.

I said a few years back that 2007 was probably the strongest year of the decade outside of 2004. Looking at the list, I'll stick with that claim; it does after all have fifteen ranked films, more than any other year. However, looking a little more closely it only has six in the top fifty (two of them Judd Apatow comedies, Superbad, #5, and Knocked Up, #31), same as 2003 and 2005 and fewer than 2002, 2004, or 2008, so it seems that 2007 was a year with a lot of greatness but only a few that broke through to the top echelon of cinema. It did, however, give us Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men (#18), one of the most singularly badass movie characters of all time in a rare Best Picture winner you can feel good about.

The standouts of 2008 are The Dark Knight (#2), WALL•E (#21), The Wrestler (#22), and Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire (#32). It seems like a certain backlash has developed against Slumdog Millionaire, but I still really like it and think that it's a creatively written and vibrantly directed work. I mean, what else did people want to win out of the nominees? Milk and Frost/Nixon were both very good and both made my runners-up, but they were both safe and not particularly challenging or original. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? Please. The Reader? Lol. No, it had to be Slumdog out of the choices the Academy gave us, but I think we all know that Nolan and Ledger's Joker was the single best thing on movie screens all year.

Which brings us to the year that just ended, 2009, with an impressive eleven films ranked between #29 and #81. However, it's the only year of the last decade besides 2000 without a single movie in the top ten or even the top twenty; it seems that 2009 was a year we oft treaded the water of greatness without ever truly exploding upwards into masterpiece territory. I know there are people who would plead masterpiece status for Inglourious Basterds (#51) or even the decade's breakout sci-fi / fantasy phenom Avatar (#70), but while I obviously understand where they're coming from or else those movies wouldn't be on my list, I don't quite agree in either case.

So ultimately, I maintain my belief that the best movie years of the last decade are indeed 2004 and 2007, with extremely impressive showings from 2008 and 2002. However, if you could only watch about fifteen films from the last ten years, underdog 2006 would strangely and improbably emerge as the best year of the decade. Who would have thought? I'm also gonna stick with my guns and declare that the weakest movie year of the decade is indeed 2000. Maybe filmmakers thought the world was going to end as the millennium turned so they didn't bother writing many decent scripts at the end of 1999.

So here's hoping for another good decade of movies from now to 2020. This time ten years ago I never would have predicted the meteoric rise of the superhero film, so who knows what surprises we have in store for us this time around.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Middle 100 Movies of the Decade


These are the middle 100 neither best nor worst movies released between the dates of January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2009. If these movies went to high school, they'd be B- or C+ students. If these movies were politicians, they'd be milquetoast blue dog Democrats from red states. If these movies were superheroes, they'd be Ant-Man or maybe some of the more forgettable X-Men. If these movies did martial arts, they'd rise to the rank of yellow belt. If these movies were James Bond movies, they'd be Diamonds Are Forever.

These are the movies where when you're leaving the theater with your friends you say "that was, uh, that was pretty good," but then when you're asked about it a few days later you shrug one shoulder and say "it was okay, I guess," then when you're asked about it five years later you're like "I don't really remember that movie." This is the nonoffensive but forgettable theater filler that you describe in glowing terms like "watchable." The best part of all is that every single movie on this list is probably a beloved favorite to at least one person out there.

1. Meet the Parents
2. Wimbledon
3. The Italian Job
4. Ocean's Thirteen
5. State of Play
6. Finding Neverland
7. Defiance
8. Invictus
9. Cinderella Man
10. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
11. Baby Mama
12. Bolt
13. Capote
14. Red Eye
15. The Forbidden Kingdom
16. Hidalgo
17. Elephant
18. Austin Powers in Goldmember
19. Eight Legged Freaks
20. The Transporter
21. Orange County
22. Pieces of April
23. Ninja Assassin
24. Finding Forrester
25. Hellboy
26. The Girlfriend Experience
27. The Legend of Zorro
28. Death Proof
29. Bend It Like Beckham
30. The TV Set
31. American Wedding
32. Shoot 'Em Up
33. One Hour Photo
34. The Notorious Bettie Page
35. Transformers
36. Man on Fire
37. Gamer
38. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
39. Bedazzled
40. About Schmidt
41. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
42. The Descent
43. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
44. Step Brothers
45. A Knight's Tale
46. Secretary
47. Son of Rambow
48. I Am Legend
49. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
50. Fun with Dick and Jane
51. The Phantom of the Opera
52. The Illusionist
53. Closer
54. Ghost Town
55. I, Robot
56. Run Fatboy Run
57. The Wackness
58. Thirteen
59. Super Troopers
60. The Terminal
61. Spider-Man 3
62. Crash
63. 30 Days of Night
64. The Score
65. Swimming Pool
66. Valkyrie
67. Kissing Jessica Stein
68. The Bourne Supremacy
69. The Musketeer
70. The Good Girl
71. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
72. Sunshine Cleaning
73. War of the Worlds
74. X-Men: The Last Stand
75. A Beautiful Mind
76. The Men Who State at Goats
77. Joy Ride
78. Enemy at the Gates
79. Cold Mountain
80. The Interpreter
81. An Education
82. Get Smart
83. Frailty
84. Empire
85. The Constant Gardener
86. Lilo & Stitch
87. Frequency
88. Donnie Darko
89. Happy Feet
90. 12 Rounds
91. John Q
92. The Devil Wears Prada
93. The Chronicles of Riddick
94. Rent
95. Paranormal Activity
96. Monsters vs. Aliens
97. Saw
98. Blades of Glory
99. The Great New Wonderful
100. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones

Runners-up: Chicago, Jennifer's Body, The Protector, Beowulf, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Law Abiding Citizen, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Cooler, Holes, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Old School, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Bring It On, Sherrybaby, The Rocker, 9, Frida, Eagle Eye, Surrogates, Legally Blonde

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Best & Worst TV of the Decade


No need to stop with movies; let's keep this decade train going! These are the best and worst television shows that aired between January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2009. I'll keep this one terse and to-the-point.

The Best: The best TV shows of the last decade are The Wire, Friday Night Lights, and Arrested Development.







I also like The West Wing, The Office, Freaks and Geeks, Band of Brothers, Community, and Mad Men!




The Worst: The worst TV show of the last decade is motherfucking HANK.



UGGGGHHHHHH HANK. UGH.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Bottom 100 Movies of the Decade



I had fun throwing my Top 100 Movies of the Decade list together, so I figured, fuck it, let's make like Hollywood and do some quick turnaround on a much shoddier sequel. These are the 100 worst movies I saw released between the dates of January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2009. Unlike my worst of the year list, being a theatrical release isn't mandatory; all feature-length films qualify. Obviously there are tons and tons of shitty theatrical releases I don't see without even getting into the shocking amount of horrible comedy and B-horror peddled straight to DVD every single week, so I'm sure that if I saw all of that nothing beyond this list's top twenty or so would remain. But that's not to say that these movies aren't all really bad, because they are.

1. An American Carol
2. Manderlay
3. 18 Year Old Virgin
4. Dreamcatcher
5. Van Helsing
6. Babylon A.D.
7. Son of the Mask
8. FeardotCom
9. Disaster Movie
10. Date Movie
11. The Hot Chick
12. Soul Plane
13. The Stepford Wives
14. The Real Cancun
15. House of the Dead
16. Epic Movie
17. Bewitched
18. I Love You, Beth Cooper
19. Scary Movie
20. Norbit
21. Alexander
22. Havoc
23. Robots
24. Gigli
25. Taking Lives
26. Frostbite
27. Cruel Intentions 3
28. Mulholland Drive
29. Lady in the Water
30. Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life
31. A Walk to Remember
32. Fantastic Four
33. White Chicks
34. Final Destination 3
35. Grandma's Boy
36. Paparazzi
37. Whipped
38. Men in Black II
39. Super Size Me
40. Thumbsucker
41. The Tuxedo
42. Pokémon: The Movie 2000
43. You Got Served
44. King Arthur
45. The X-Files: I Want to Believe
46. Slackers
47. The Hillside Strangler
48. King Arthur
49. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
50. The Final Destination
51. Jason X
52. The Perfect Score
53. National Lampoon's Adam and Eve
54. Ace of Hearts
55. Thirteen Ghosts
56. Vertical Limit
57. Little Nicky
58. The Happening
59. The Cell
60. American Psycho II: All American Girl
61. Black Knight
62. The Time Machine
63. Digimon: The Movie
64. Original Sin
65. Year One
66. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
67. Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God
68. Easy
69. Along Came Polly
70. The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea
71. First Daughter
72. Team America: World Police
73. Pearl Harbor
74. Kissing on the Mouth
75. American Pie Presents: Band Camp
76. College
77. The Village
78. Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight
79. Attack Girls' Swim Team Versus the Undead
80. Babel
81. Osmosis Jones
82. Say It Isn't So
83. The 6th Day
84. The Notebook
85. Anger Management
86. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus
87. Leatherheads
88. Daredevil
89. Cruel Intentions 2
90. Hollow Man
91. The Alamo
92. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
93. The Island
94. Sorority Row
95. 13 Going on 30
96. Timeline
97. The Producers
98. Reindeer Games
99. The Reader
100. Knowing

Runners-up: Get Carter, Tears of the Sun, Raising Helen, Post Grad, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Scream 3, Shark Tale, Hannibal, Dragonball Evolution, I Am Sam, Eragon, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Men of Honor, Charlie's Angels, American Pie Presents: The Book of Love, Hell Ride, Red Planet, Swimfan, The Da Vinci Code, Star Trek: Nemesis

Analysis: The actor with the collective highest-ranked films on each list is a tie between Morgan Freeman, starring in The Dark Knight (#2 best) and Dreamcatcher (#4 worst), and David Wenham, starring as Faramir in The Lord of the Rings (#1 best) and also in Van Helsing (#5 worst). The silver medal goes to Isaach De Bankolé, starring in Casino Royale (#6 best) and Manderlay (#2 worst), and the bronze, not counting Freeman a second time for Batman Begins, belongs to Willem Dafoe for his roles in Spider-Man 2 (#11 best) and Manderlay (#2 worst).

These are all supporting roles, however. The actor with the collective highest-ranked films in which he is the (debatable, in both cases) protagonist is Tommy Lee Jones for No Country for Old Men (#18 best) and Men in Black II (#38 worst). For an actor playing the lone, clear-cut, indisputable protagonist in each, it's Guy Pearce for Memento (#3 best) and The Time Machine (#62 worst).

Anne Hathaway is the only actress to expose her breasts on both lists, in Brokeback Mountain (#74 best) and Havoc (#22 worst).

The only directors with movies on each list are Martin Campbell, director of Casino Royale (#6 best) and Vertical Limit (#56 worst), and George Clooney, director of Good Night, and Good Luck (#27 best) and Leatherheads (#87 worst). Ron Howard also directed a runner-up on each list, Frost/Nixon on the best, The Da Vinci Code on the worst.

The two series to formally have entries on each list are Dungeons & Dragons (#23 best) and its sequel Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God (#67 worst) and American Psycho (#38 best) and its sequel American Psycho II: All American Girl (#60 worst). In both cases the original was a theatrical release and the sequel straight-to-DVD. If you count runners-up, there's also Star Trek (#29 best) and Star Trek: Nemesis (runner-up worst), both theatrically released. I probably could have also found room for X-Men Origins: Wolverine on the worst list to match up against X2: X-Men United (#73 best), but I chose not to.

The most critically savaged film on my best list is Dungeons & Dragons (#23 best), with a 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. The most critically acclaimed film on my worst list is Super Size Me (#39 worst), with a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The highest-grossing movie on my best list is Avatar (#70 best) with a worldwide box office total of $2,729,711,510, while the lowest-grossing is Funny Ha Ha (#17 best) with a worldwide box office total of $77,070. The highest-grossing movie on my worst list is Pearl Harbor (#73 worst) with a worldwide box office total of $449,220,945, unless you count runner-up The Da Vinci Code and its worldwide box office total of $758,239,851, while the lowest-grossing one on my worst list is impossible to say because many were released straight to DVD.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Top 100 Movies of the Decade



These are my top 100 movies released between the dates of January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2009 (a brief lament for These are my top 100 movies released between the dates of January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2009 (a brief lament for Galaxy Quest, released December 25th, 1999). No pictures or blurbs, because that would take forever, just a straight list. For series in which every movie was filmed concurrently (i.e. Kill Bill and Lord of the Rings) I went ahead and collapsed the whole series into one slot each; if anyone thinks that's bullshit cheating, my bad. I threw this list together in less than five minutes so it's super rough and super unofficial and if I did a second draft movies could easily rise or drop by as much as twenty ranks, so don't take it too serious.

1. The Lord of the Rings
2. The Dark Knight
3. Memento
4. Minority Report
5. Superbad
6. Casino Royale
7. Batman Begins
8. City of God
9. Collateral
10. The Departed
11. Spider-Man 2
12. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
13. Children of Men
14. Better Luck Tomorrow
15. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
16. Ratatouille
17. Funny Ha Ha
18. No Country for Old Men
19. The Rules of Attraction
20. Kill Bill
21. WALL•E
22. The Wrestler
23. Dungeons & Dragons
24. Gangs of New York
25. The Incredibles
26. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
27. Good Night, and Good Luck
28. Downfall
29. Star Trek
30. The Last Samurai
31. Knocked Up
32. Slumdog Millionaire
33. Adaptation
34. Brick
35. Up
36. Oldboy
37. Before Sunset
38. American Psycho
39. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
40. Serenity
41. District 9
42. There Will Be Blood
43. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of Black Pearl
44. Observe and Report
45. Shaun of the Dead
46. In Bruges
47. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
48. Catch Me If You Can
49. Iron Man
50. Amélie
51. Inglourious Basterds
52. Hero
53. Rocky Balboa
54. Kingdom of Heaven
55. Friday Night Lights
56. Y Tu Mamá También
57. Hot Fuzz
58. Spider-Man
59. Ocean's Eleven
60. 25th Hour
61. Gran Torino
62. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
63. United 93
64. Adventureland
65. Sideways
66. Zodiac
67. Planet Terror
68. Enchanted
69. Burn After Reading
70. Avatar
71. Moon
72. Mutual Appreciation
73. X2: X-Men United
74. Brokeback Mountain
75. Sherlock Holmes
76. Requiem for a Dream
77. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
78. The Girl Next Door
79. Syriana
80. In the Loop
81. Where the Wild Things Are
82. Match Point
83. Letters from Iwo Jima
84. Finding Nemo
85. Mean Girls
86. Let the Right One In
87. Stardust
88. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
89. The Bourne Identity
90. Gone Baby Gone
91. 3:10 to Yuma
92. Bad Santa
93. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
94. George Washington
95. Sex Drive
96. Eastern Promises
97. Tropic Thunder
98. Stranger Than Fiction
99. Once
100. Transporter 2

Runners-up: Thirteen Days, Into the Wild, Battle Royale, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Extract, Rambo, The Pianist, Watchmen, High Fidelity, Milk, Zombieland, Hot Rod, Munich, Pan's Labyrinth, Frost/Nixon, Charlie Wilson's War, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, Freddy Got Fingered

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

2009 Kraemer Movie Awards Part II — The Best


It didn't clearly occur to me until compiling this very list that 2009 was a really, really good year for movies (and an almost absurdly good year for cinematic sci-fi, among the best ever). No, there was no singular film that I loved as much as 2008's The Dark Knight, but movies as far down as the low teens on this list would have been easy top ten contenders last year and it was painful not to have room for some flicks that I enjoyed the hell out of. Let's have a brief moment of silence in memory of A Serious Man and The Princess and the Frog, the top two movies I tried to squeeze in but just couldn't.

Okay, moment passed. So now that we've seen the Oscars fumble around and fuck it up, let's get crackin' on the real top movies of 2009.

TOP 25 BEST MOVIES OF 2009

#25 - TAKEN


Take heart, wayward Republicans, for the spirit of the Bush administration lives on! Liam Neeson storms into France — that most hated of all countries for real Americans — and to rescue his kidnapped daughter does more damage to the Geneva Convention in 48 hours than George W. managed to pull off in eight years. He executes unarmed prisoners with glee and he tortures with a smile (and not just criminals and terrorists, but in one scene, a corrupt cop's innocent, ignorant wife! God bless America) and after the film culminates with him mass slaughtering hundreds of Muslims he faces absolutely no legal repercussions for his murders; exactly how the world should be according to Hannity and Beck. Taken is straight up right-wing porn and one of the most absurd and hilarious guilty pleasures in years.

#24 - BIG FAN


A phenomenal sports movie without one frame of actual sports in it, Big Fan is a pitch black comedy and character study of a man like many Americans for whom football is religion, the stadium his chapel, and sports radio his preacher, with his favorite team's star player filling the role of Jesus Christ himself. I'd go more into the plot but I doubt many people have seen this movie and I don't want to spoil the dark and fascinating direction it goes in, so I'll just say that Patton Oswalt gives a fearless performance and leave it at that.

#23 - (500) DAYS OF SUMMER


I don't think I'm being controversial when I say that no film genre is more formulaic and more ass than romantic comedies. I see commercials for The Ugly Truth and Valentine's Day and it takes all my willpower not to slash my eyes out with a straight razor. So (500) Days of Summer, while occasionally dipping a little too far into the post-Juno well of quirkiness, deserves kudos and applause for injecting a fresh dose of imagination and unique storytelling into its usually terrible genre. It helps that leading man Joseph-Gordon Levitt is easily one of the best actors of his generation, debatably the best.

#22 - PRECIOUS


There's definitely a part of me — that part that retches and shudders with revulsion at anything that smells of Oscar bait — that would love to hate Precious, which I still refuse to refer to by its absurd full title of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. I mean, this is a movie that seems to hurl every issue it can think of at you, from poverty to rape to incest to abuse to inner-city education to Down syndrome babies to HIV and AIDS, and yes, it was nominated for several Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director and won a couple others for it, but fact is it's actually a really good and phenomenally well-acted movie that dredges up all these topical issues in service of a compelling central character, and it's made with a true filmmaker's eye moreso than any small-scale inner city drama is required to be. It's hardly light viewing (and seems destined for to join Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda on that list of great movies that sit in their Netflix slips on top of people's televisions for months), but its Oscar nominations aren't bullshit.

#21 - THE BROTHERS BLOOM


A little bit comedy, a little bit heist film, a little bit romance, a little bit bromance, director Rian Johnson's second movie The Brothers Bloom carries on with the miniature tradition he established in 2005's outstanding high school noir murder mystery Brick of fusing genres seemingly at random to produce something fresh and original and wholly entertaining. It's not a comedy that aims for megapunchline belly laughs so much as smiles and chuckles, but it's a breezy and completely charming experience capped off by an unexpected and hugely memorable ending that makes the whole flick; not a forced, artificial "plot twist," but a flawless moment of thematic full circle. It seems obvious, but so many filmmakers don't seem to get that if your final two minutes are the most evocative of your whole picture then it lifts the entire experience. Rian Johnson gets it.

#20 - UP IN THE AIR


What is it? Is it a character study arbitrarily hung on the framework of the struggling modern economy? Or is it a sociological film about the impact of recession on the contemporary American worker that happens to be carried along by George Clooney? Director Jason Reitman himself claims it's the former, but I remain unconvinced — if the film ending with real laid-off workers giving documentary-style confessionals to the camera isn't a summation of a theme, then I don't know what is. At the same time, the movie takes about twenty minutes away from workers getting fired for Clooney to attend his sister's wedding, so I dunno. It's a solid dramedy though, funny, interesting, well-acted by both Clooney and Anna Kendrick. Liked it a lot.

#19 - THE MESSENGER


The first of two extremely different Iraq War movies on this list, The Messenger features no onscreen war of any kind — as a matter of fact, every second of it takes place in American suburbs — but is a thoughtful, interesting, and occasionally moving depiction of a wounded vet reassigned to duty as a casualty notification officer. For years it seemed that Iraq War movies could only exist on the two extremes of being either turgid, preachy bores or jingoistic farce, but with 2009 American filmmakers seem to have finally jumped that hurdle.

#18 - BLACK DYNAMITE


One of the greatest new fictional characters of 2009, Black Dynamite is super cool and he know kung fu. He drives a $5000 car and wears a $100 suit! And when it comes to the ladies... he's out of sight. It goes entirely without saying that Black Dynamite is the best blaxploitation spoof ever made, but I'd go further than that and say that it surpasses the vast majority of its straightforward brethren to become simply one of the best blaxploitation movies ever made, period. Consistently hilarious, massively quotable, and packed with mad kung fu, this is among 2009's most purely enjoyable cinematic experiences and would have made a much better second movie in 2007's Grindhouse double feature than Tarantino's Death Proof ended up being.

#17 - I LOVE YOU, MAN


Man, what's the deal with how this movie didn't seem to catch on while the far inferior The Hangover became the ultimate comedy smash hit of the year? I mean, I Love You, Man didn't bomb at the box office, but no one's talking about it anymore, and it's hilarious as all hell and deserves to be talked about. Paul Rudd and Jason Segel are two of the most wholly likable comedic actors currently working and scenes as outwardly mundane as them sitting around shooting the shit end up hilarious. This film's deft grasp of filthy dialogue and casual vulgarity and intense bromance made it — despite having no connection whatsoever to Judd Apatow other than using a few of his favorite actors — end up being a much better "Judd Apatow movie" than 2009's actual Judd Apatow movie Funny People.

#16 - THE HURT LOCKER


So much has been written about 2009's official Best Picture that I feel like there's really nothing left for me to add beyond reiterating for probably the millionth time that it's an incredibly tense, well-directed and well-edited war film. As opposed to the quiet drama of The Messenger set entirely in American suburbs, The Hurt Locker is an adrenaline-fueled action thriller set entirely in Iraq, which makes the two films a perfect yin and yang of Iraq War cinema to watch together (although Hurt Locker is the one soaking up all the attention). Also, I wish everyone would can it with their fascination about this film being directed by a woman, because the "oh, look, a woman playing in a man's world! That's super!" tone of all those articles and news stories is condescending and a lot more antifeminist than just letting the film be.

#15 - THE INFORMANT!


This cinematic portrait of Mark Whitacre, the highest-level executive of a Fortune 500 company ever to become an FBI informant, is an absolutely hilarious film that raises the question of why biopics always seem required to be stodgy, deadly serious affairs, which in fact a lesser filmmaker than Steven Soderbergh might well have tried to do with this very source material (and of course that lesser, much more generic alternate universe film would have been nominated for many awards, which The Informant! was not). The Informant! makes one of the absolute best, most creative uses of the dreaded voiceover narration trope that I've ever seen and has some of the greatest incredulous reaction shots (particularly from Joel McHale) since the heyday of Arrested Development.

#14 - ZOMBIELAND


Some people insisted on making the Shaun of the Dead comparison, but while Shaun and Zombieland are both zombie comedies I feel the analogy falls apart when you look at intent. Shaun was always stated by its creators to be a "romantic comedy with zombies," with a very British pacing and sensibility, while Zombieland's intent is right there in the title: it's a theme park ride. An astoundingly goofy, rollicking, freewheeling theme park ride. A nominal horror comedy that's 99% comedy and 1% horror, Zombieland is a crazy fun flick and with its lightning runtime you really have no excuse not to watch it unless you are The Fun Hater, officially state-sanctioned hater of fun.

#13 - WATCHMEN


The crowds were decidedly mixed on Watchmen — and not just newbies to the story, but hardcore Watchmen fanatics too. I've heard people call it an unwatchable piece of shit and I've heard people call it a full-blown masterpiece. Not being one prone to silly hyperbole I'd stop well short of masterpiece, I but enjoy the hell out of this film and definitely lean closer to that side than the other. There are some flaws, unnecessary alterations to the ending and Matthew Goode's baffling performance as Ozymandias chief among them, but by and large I found it a visually sumptuous and massively ambitious enough undertaking to more than justify its existence, with a ferocious performance from Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach.

#12 - EXTRACT


Maybe it's just residual fondness for Jason Bateman carried over from Arrested Development, but Mike Judge's newest comedy, the story of a man who hires a male whore to try to seduce his wife to see if she'll cheat on him and then horribly and hilariously loses control of the situation, truly clicked with me and is absolutely one of my favorite movies of the year, and that's coming from someone who isn't even a huge Mike Judge fan (I like Office Space alright, although it is overrated, but nothing else in his filmography really does anything for me). Ben Affleck takes a shit all over everyone who spent the last half-decade insulting him with one of the best comedic supporting performances of the year, and the movie somehow even manages to make the hoary "guys sitting around smoking pot" trope hilarious. Arguably the most underrated movie of 2009.

#11 - WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE


One of the ballsiest adaptations of any source material in the history of film, Spike Jonze took a legendary children's book that any other studio would have lazily and profitably adapted as some juvenile joke-a-minute CGI cartoon nonsense and instead meticulously crafted a melancholy art film about the childhood condition. America didn't get it, but then again, America also believes that Obama has secret concentration camps for old people, so that's really just to the movie's credit, isn't it? So we got unintentionally hilarious articles with dumb parents gobsmacked that the film dared to actually show children as human beings — angsty, inarticulate human beings churning with volatile emotion, you know, the way it actually is to be a child — rather than fun-sized adults popping out one-liners and witty catchphrases written by a 40something screenwriter. Fuck 'em. This is a profound, gorgeous, brilliant movie, and one of the best films about childhood ever made.

#10 - IN THE LOOP


Although Iraq is never mentioned by name, this fictitious tale of British and American political maneuvering and deception in the build-up to a war in the Middle East could easily be counted alongside The Messenger and The Hurt Locker as 2009's third great Iraq War movie. A spiritual fusion of the politics in the highest corridors of power of The West Wing, the naturalistic vérité comedy of The Office, and the cynical nihilism of Dr. Strangelove, In the Loop is one of the most simultaneously hilarious and depressing movies I've seen in ages (I don't think I'm spoilering anything to reveal that the movie ends with efforts to thwart hostilities failing and war being declared), exposing how the behind the scenes of international politics can be every bit as petty and jaw-droppingly stupid as the most banal office job and also featuring some of the most creative profanity in all of motion pictures. Fuckity bye!

#9 - SHERLOCK HOLMES


I'll be honest and say that I had to suppress subjectivity to rank Sherlock Holmes even this low. I understand, acknowledge, and won't argue with a lot of the gripes that many critics made about this awesomely cheesy movie which reinterprets Arthur Conan Doyle's ace detective as an action hero, but this movie just clicked with me. I loved it. Loved its depiction of Holmes's minutiae-centric sleuthing, loved its Victorian London settings, loved Holmes and Watson sharing the most homoerotic onscreen male friendship since Frodo and Sam, loved Hans Zimmer's brilliant musical score, loved the fisticuffs, loved the whole flick, and I plan to buy it on DVD and damn well can't wait for the sequel.

#8 - MOON


The spirit of the Golden Age of Science Fiction lives on, and it can be found in director Duncan Jones' debut film, Moon. Tears of nostalgia will spring to the eyes of anyone who longs for the days of Asimov and Heinlein short stories as they watch this lean, brainy, creative piece of hard sci-fi, and while I try not use the phrase "tour de force" because critics who overuse it rob it of its power, in this film Sam Rockwell gives a tour de force performance as the only onscreen human with more than a minute of screentime. Brilliant film.

#7 - AVATAR


God, what can I possibly say about Avatar that hasn't been said? Every movie news site and movie blog that I read has had Avatar stories and articles literally every single day for the last four months; no one will shut up about this movie! There's nothing more for me to add to the Avatar dialogue, so I'll just say that it brings epic spectacle back to the big screen in a way unseen since The Lord of the Rings and leave it at that.

#6 - ADVENTURELAND


When I'm reading movie forums and they get going with making fun of Twilight, I either chuckle along or ignore it (more likely the latter, because making of Twilight has become as dull and played out as Twilight itself these days, but that's for another post), but when they turn to making fun of Kristen Stewart I feel the need to point that Ms. Stewart does other things besides Twilight and was actually in one of the best films of 2009, Greg Mottola's incredibly underrated coming-of-age story Adventureland. As a semiautobiographical film based on Mottola's brief career as an amusement park attendant and embarrassingly old virgin after graduating from college in the 80s, the tone, warmth, and understated, relatable humor of Adventureland reminded me a hell of a lot of Paul Feig's semiautobiographical TV series about his experience as a Michigan high school nerd in the 80s, Freaks and Geeks (both even feature Martin Starr in a major role), and I dig that vibe. Only like seven people saw Adventureland in theaters but it ain't too late for you to check it out on DVD.

#5 - INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS


Nazi ain't got no humanity! And they need to be destroyed! After briefly scaring me into thinking he'd lost his touch with 2007's Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino came roaring back to life with arguably the second best film of his illustrious career, a demented and brilliant World War II epic that casually and happily shits all over history and painstakingly milks tension unlike few movies I've ever seen. As anyone who even casually reads my writing well knows, I'm an enormous villain fan, and as an enormous villain fan it goes without saying that the highlight of Inglourious Basterds for me was Colonel Hans Landa, Nazi detective, whom Tarantino arrogantly and correctly called one of the best characters he's ever written and one of the best characters he'll ever write. Christoph Waltz rightly won Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the Colonel, which after Javier Bardem winning for Anton Chigurh in 2007 and Heath Ledger winning for the Joker in 2008 basically makes Best Supporting Actor the Oscars' unofficial Best Villain category, a new tradition I endorse with roaring applause.

#4 - OBSERVE AND REPORT


Theatrically released comedies just don't get this dark, this crushingly bleak and utterly nihilistic, which is why critics and audiences alike found themselves baffled by Jody Hill's brilliant Observe and Report. Using Scorsese's 1976 masterpiece Taxi Driver as a template, Observe and Report is a rich character study of a sociopathic fascist mall cop played by Seth Rogen who dreams of dispatching evil with swift violence, even as his definition of "evil" shifts through the film as his sanity declines from thugs and criminals and perverts to people parking their cars wrong to loitering skateboarders to, finally, the actual police. This movie is truly demented and uncomfortable, and I'm equally shocked and ecstatic that a studio was willing to take a chance on it — a chance which did not pay off financially, but sure as all fuck paid off artistically.

#3 - DISTRICT 9


That Moon and Avatar somehow aren't the best sci-fi movies of 2009 is a credit to both the year and specifically to this film. District 9 makes two fundamental and brilliant alterations to standard aliens-on-Earth formula: one, shifting the location that aliens touch down from the cinematic norms of New York or Washington D.C. to Johannesburg, South Africa, and two (and this is the one that many seemed to miss the importance of in their reviews), having the aliens touch down back in the 1980s and then shifting the story's time frame forward to present day in a world that has long since adapted to their presence and altered its policies accordingly. The film brilliantly mixes a rich mythology with a compelling protagonist (while most sci-fi films can only handle one, or neither) while also mixing sociological commentary with balls-out action, all carried along by staggeringly good special effects for any budget, let alone the $30 million it was made with. The fact that this assured work is director Neill Blomkamp's first feature is stunning.

#2 - UP


Pixar's got the magic touch. They've always had the magic touch, but at risk of offending any Toy Story aficionados, they've somehow just gotten better and better as time has gone on. Setting aside the lukewarm misstep that was Cars, look at this sequence of film releases since 2004: The Incredibles. Ratatouille. WALL·E. And now Up. I mean, what is that? What genius juice is in the water over there? Up mixes pathos, humor, freewheeling adventure, and dazzling visual creativity to produce yet another film that casually swats aside the notion of the family-friendly category being a lesser ghetto for lazy producers and shitty writers to shovel crap into, making me really excited for this year's Toy Story 3.

#1 - STAR TREK


J.J. Abrams' Star Trek is somehow the greatest Star Wars movie since 1983. Sure, it says Star Trek on the tin and it has Kirk, Spock, and the USS Enterprise, but honestly, look at the spirit of red-blooded adventure and the planet-destroying superweapons and the goofy character comedy and the heightened angst and melodrama of this film and tell me that J.J. Abrams isn't trying to do a new Star Wars and do it right this time. Which he does! The only thing missing is lightsabers and a John Williams soundtrack (the latter of which is actually a shame... imagine how epic that would be). Anyway, I love classic Star Wars more than just about anything and Star Trek reminded me of Star Wars and because of that it's my favorite movie of 2009 by far and if you don't like it then I hereby decree that you report to my house to suck on my balls. Hell yeah, this movie fuckin' rules!



TOP 5 LEADING PERFORMANCES OF 2009

#5 - Matt Damon, THE INFORMANT! — It was agony deciding on Patton Oswalt from Big Fan, Seth Rogen from Observe and Report, or Matt Damon for this spot, but in the end Damon does the best job capturing the comedy and the sadness, and his awesomely ludicrous voiceover narration clinches it. Absurdly, the Academy nominated Damon for his rote and boring supporting performance in Invictus and not for this actually great leading one. Whatever, Academy.

#4 - Peter Capaldi, IN THE LOOP — I've heard a lot of profanity in my day, but as Malcolm Tucker, British Director of Communications, Peter Capaldi somehow weaves profanity into an art form, coming up with new combinations of swears I never before imagined. I bow to him.

#3 - Michael Jai White, BLACK DYNAMITE — The coolest movie character of 2009, Black Dynamite is a bad mothafucka with franchise potential. He exists in a heightened satire of blaxploitation, but played straight and with higher production values I could easily watch a big-budget action flick starring this cat. Michael Jai White owns the role from the starting gun, creating an aura of 70s cool that rivals James Bond.

#2 - Sharlto Copley, DISTRICT 9 — It's a shame that genre movies have an innate bias weighing against them when it comes to awards, because Sharlto Copley's amazing work (from any actor regardless of experience, let alone a first timer thrust into a starring role as Copley was) in District 9 captures the callousness of his character's initial worldview, the panic of his situation, the adrenaline of his fight back against his former allies, and his sense loss and desperation as acutely as pretty much any contemporary performer could aspire to. Amidst all the aliens and mechs and starships it was Copley's work that I kept thinking about after the film was over.

#1 - Sam Rockwell, MOON — Okay, this one is bullshit. The Academy not nominating Sam Rockwell for his stunning one-man show performance in Moon is bullshit. It's not quite Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood or Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, no, but it is the best leading performance of 2009.



TOP 5 SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES OF 2009

#5 - Collette Wolfe, OBSERVE AND REPORT — The nice girl romantic interest that our leading man can't see through his focus on the sultry sexpot is an old trope, but Collette Wolfe finds new life in it in Observe and Report while providing the lone bright spot of hope in a hopelessly bleak film. I was surprised to find out that she's the director's wife because that kind of nepotism usually ends badly, but in this case it gave the movie its heart.

#4 - Mo'Nique, PRECIOUS — Whatever critics or awards shows may claim, Mo'Nique doesn't "find the humanity" in her nightmarish child abuser; she's basically a Disney evil stepmother with a little bit more baby-throwing and facilitating of serial incestuous rape. But it's a powerful, fiery, fearless performance devoid of any ego, effortlessly one of the most memorable of the year, and she deserves Best Supporting Actress and every other award she's gotten for it.

#3 - Zachary Quinto, STAR TREK — Okay, maybe you think this counts as a leading performance and I'm cheating, and if that's the way you feel you're probably right as Spock has no more than ten minutes less screentime than Jim Kirk. But Zachary Quinto grabbed this movie and absolutely ran away with it to the extent that it's hateful for me to picture it without him. To play a half-Vulcan you have to find that perfect balance of emotionlessness while letting that annoying humanity always lurk on the edges, and I'm gonna piss off some Trekkies by saying that Quinto did so as well as Leonard Nimoy himself.

#2 - Jackie Earle Haley, WATCHMEN — I can't imagine a more perfect onscreen interpretation of a classic literary character. Okay, okay, maybe Gandalf, but that's damn near it.

#1 - Christoph Waltz, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS — There's a moment about fifteen minutes into Inglourious Basterds where Nazi Colonel Hans Landa is interrogating a French dairy farmer he suspects of sheltering Jews. The audience had just gotten done laughing a few seconds earlier at Landa's absurd Sherlock Holmes pipe and the mood was one of levity. Waltz then shifts his expression very subtly but with infinite impact — a nearly imperceptible hardening of the eyes and the corners of his mouth — and asks, "You're sheltering enemies of the state, are you not?" and you felt the mood in the theater instantly swerve into icy dread. At that exact moment I knew I was watching an all-time great cinematic character who will fifty years from now be regarded as one of the classics.



TOP 5 SCREENPLAYS OF 2009

#5 - UP — Pixar movies stand untold miles above the rest of the animated crowd because of the care and the craft that goes into their stories and characters and dialogue, and this is no exception. A precarious balancing act of comedy, tragedy, and adventure, Up is a great work even entirely removed from its visuals.

#4 - OBSERVE AND REPORT — A movie as bleak and dark as Observe and Report could have easily lost control of its tone and felt like it was just trying too damn hard to be offensive, but every beat of this script develops Ronnie's character in some way, making it the best character study of 2009.

#3 - IN THE LOOP — As I stated above, The West Wing meets The Office meets Dr. Strangelove. Ridiculous. Brilliant.

#2 - MOON — While being decidedly modern in terms of its special effects and vernacular, this film captures the mood and the vibe of classic Golden Age sci-fi short stories so perfectly that if I didn't know better I would have looked it up to find out what story it was adapted from after getting home from the theater.

#1 - INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS — Surely the biggest farce of this year's Academy Awards was denying Quentin Tarantino his Oscar for the best screenplay of 2009 and quite possibly one of the top ten of the decade, up there with the likes of Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. An epic, original, irreverent, funny, tense, and daring work that reminds you that this dude wrote Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds is that rare script that can be called important.



TOP 5 DIRECTORS OF 2009

#5 - James Cameron, AVATAR — Well, I mean, no shit. Look at all the candy on the screen!

#4 - Spike Jonze, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE — Spike Jonze isn't the first director to try to visually capture the inside of a child's imagination, but he's by far the most successful. Movies made with child protagonists yet aimed at adults are very rare — Pan's Labyrinth and Empire of the Sun and maybe two or three others come to mind — but by choosing to repackage Maurice Sendak's book as something moody and dark and ethereal Jonze has done just that and produced a piece of art that will stand the test of time.

#3 - Quentin Tarantino, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS — With a mixture of chapter breaks and onscreen text and graphics and freeze frames and anachronistic music and random narration from Samuel L. Jackson bizarre by even Tarantino standards, Inglourious Basterds' filmmaking is nearly as gutsy as its script, and it pays off in the form of a truly unpredictable experience.

#2 - J.J. Abrams, STAR TREK — With this film I believe J.J. Abrams has found what we feared lost since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989: red-blooded adventure on the big screen. This film, not Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or the prequel trilogy, is the modern reinvigoration of the spirit of the adventure serial, painted in broad strokes with primary colors but thrilling and grand and exciting and making me want to watch it again the second the credits roll. My inner child salutes you, Mr. Abrams, and I truly hope you can recapture in Trek 2 what you did here.

#1 - Neill Blomkamp, DISTRICT 9 — I cannot believe that this movie was made on a $30 million budget, i.e. $8 million less than The Ugly Truth and one-fifth of what X-Men Origins: Wolverine cost. The special effects are so seamless that I was initially squinting in confusion trying to figure out whether the alien prawns were costumes or CGI. Beyond that the violence in this movie is sudden, shocking, and gruesome in a way that will give a jolt of adrenaline incredibly foreign to modern cinema, and the performances are directed to a caliber way, way beyond what we associate with sci-fi action. I said above and I say again that the fact that the rich, complex, visceral experience that is District 9 is a debut film made on an indie budget is mind-boggling to me. I cannot fucking wait to see what this guy does next.



SPECIAL PRIZES 2009

Best Score: SHERLOCK HOLMES — Is there even any realistic debate on this? I knew the second the opening strings of "Discombobulate" hit the screen under the production company logo that I was listening to the freshest, most original, most exciting musical score of 2009. Hans Zimmer is cinema's greatest post-John Williams composer and looks likely to hold onto said title for some time.

Best-Implemented Special Effects: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE — Note that this is different than plain old best special effects, which is so obviously Avatar that to entertain any debate otherwise is just silly. But in Avatar I found myself actively thinking about the onscreen CGI for nearly the entire runtime, whereas the Wild Things' brilliant combination of traditional on-set costumes with only the faces animated via computers in post-production made me entirely forgot I was looking at CGI almost immediately and for the duration of the film.

Most Improved Harry Potter Character: Draco Malfoy, HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE — Draco was just kind of there but with little memorable impact in the first five films, so I dunno what happened or where he came from to suddenly become the best part of the sixth, overshadowing not just all the teen romance but the backstory of Lord Voldemort himself. Nice work, Malfoy!

Best Nude Scene: Betsy Rue, MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D — Five minutes. Full frontal. Three dimensions. 'Nuff said.

Best Performance in a Terrible Movie: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA — I considered going with Chiwetel Ejiofor in 2012, but all I have to do is remember subtle, nuanced indie darling Joseph Gordon-Levitt wearing a hilarious Darth Vader wannabe gasmask and snarling with cartoonish malevolence about how he must destroy the Joes and I start laughing all over again. Surrounded by a cast of dry planks of wood, Gordon-Levitt alone seems gloriously alive and completely aware of the action figure trash he's slumming in and he plays the kitsch to such a heightened caliber that you wish the stupid Joes would just get out of the way and make way for Cobra Commander: The Movie. I can't wait to see what Gordon-Levitt can do in a non-shitty sci-fi movie with this summer's new Christopher Nolan film Inception.



TOP 10 BEST MOVIE MOMENTS OF 2009Spoilers!

#10 - The ending, THE BROTHERS BLOOM — I'm serious about the spoiler thing! Skip ahead if you haven't seen The Brothers Bloom! Anyway, after a series of reversals that make you think Mark Ruffalo's character Stephen has faked his own death, the moment when Adrian Brody's Bloom realizes his brother was faking the faking and really is dead is an incredibly moving ending to what up until then had been a breezy comedy. God, I told you not to read that!

#9 - "Giants suck!," BIG FAN — Hardcore, mentally unstable New York Giants fan Paul Aufiero disguises himself in a Philadelphia Eagles jersey and ventures across state lines to track down his sports radio rival Philadelphia Phil on game night at a bar for some unknown revenge. The scene that follows as Paul hesitantly joins in chanting "Giants suck!" with the rabid Eagles fans, their behavior indistinguishable from the Giants fans we've spent the movie with, is suffocatingly claustrophobic and intense as it builds dread over what Paul plans to do about his petty sports rivalry.

#8 - The final battle, AVATAR — Maybe it's kind of cheap to count this as a "moment," since it's like half an hour of fighting spread across many scenes and locations, but seriously, it's aliens and dragons versus gunships and mechs. Thousands of 'em! That's some nerdvana shit right there.

#7 - Bill Murray cameo, ZOMBIELAND — One of the greatest cameos I've ever seen in film or television, Bill Murray's appearance is somehow both incredibly random and seamlessly integrated into the story. When he's mistaken for a zombie and shot in the chest and with his last breath laments doing the Garfield movies, any lingering question over whether Zombieland is comedy or horror is pretty well taken care of.

#6 - Sniper battle, THE HURT LOCKER — In a film that's about IED technicians, the standout scene actually has nothing to do with bombs as our main characters get trapped by insurgent sniper fire. The several minutes that follow are violent and intense and swat away every other sniper duel I've seen onscreen to claim the crown for this kind of scene. Pretty impressive, seeing as the movie isn't even about snipers. You hear that, Enemy at the Gates? You just got served sniped.

#5 - Birth of Dr. Manhattan, WATCHMEN — Although Rorschach is the greatest character, the film's highlight is the powerful ten-minute sequence of Dr. Manhattan on Mars contemplating his past life as Jon Osterman and his transformation into a god while haunting Philip Glass music overwhelms. It's also probably not coincidentally the segment of the film that follows the novel most closely, corresponding damn near panel-to-shot and line-for-line with chapter four. The film is an indisputable case of "the book is better," but I'll go out on a geek limb and say that this one segment of the film is in fact superior in emotional impact to its counterpart on the page.

#4 - Ronnie shoots the flasher, OBSERVE AND REPORT — Simultaneously the darkest moment and single hardest, loudest, and longest laugh I had at a movie last year. After weeks of detective work, mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt finally comes face-to-face with the mall flasher and his penis. Ronnie then pulls out his gun and shoots the offending pervert in the chest. As blood pumps out across the floor, Ronnie's supervisor shouts "Jesus Ronnie, you killed him!!!" and Ronnie nods proudly, I again wondered how on earth a comedy this pitch black ever made it through the studio system.

#3 - TWO WAY TIE! Hans Landa interrogates Perrier LaPadite & Hitler meets his end, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS — This was too tough to call (not to mention there were another four or five moments in Basterds easily worthy of this list) so I just had to split it between the film's beginning and its end. The introduction of Colonel Hans Landa is the greatest establishment of a film villain since, well, the Joker just the year before, but you get my point, and how in the world could I not include seeing uncle Adolf get a faceful of hot lead? Yep, it's gotta be both. That's a bingo!

#2 - Opening space battle, STAR TREK — This certainly isn't among the most artistically or intellectually ambitious scenes of 2009 — it's basically just an evil starship blowing up a good one — but on the other hand this scene grabbed me the balls and didn't let go unlike anything else onscreen last year. In fact I'll go as far as to say that few movies in my life have yanked me into their worlds with such immediate ferocity. I won't quite say it's the best space battle of all time, a title still held by Return of the Jedi's Battle of Endor, but it is the best one-on-one battle between two ships I've ever seen. My heart rate was still elevated half an hour later.

#1 - Carl and Ellie's life together montage, UP — Arguably the most heartwrenching montage in the history of film, the opening minutes of Up show us Carl and Ellie meeting as small children and marrying as young adults and then a whirlwind tour of their life together set to Michael Giacchino's already-iconic score; the small joys and heartbreaks of an ordinary suburban couple as they grow up together, then grow old together, then Ellie dies and Carl is left alone forever. Wait, what? Pixar, what're ya doin' to us, man?! The shackles of what a "kids movie" is supposed to entail are shattered as all of America weeps together at this incredibly bold, striking, and memorable opening to a film that had been advertised as a fun balloon house adventure, and it stands as the best filmmaking of 2009.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

2009 Kraemer Movie Awards Part I — The Worst


I won't waste time with a lengthy intro. You guys are smart; you know the drill. These are the worst goddamn movies I saw in 2009. For the record, I have not seen Paul Blart: Mall Cop, The Ugly Truth, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Miss March, Old Dogs, Bride Wars, Halloween II, All About Steve, or Land of the Lost, and this list only includes theatrically-released pictures, i.e. no American Pie Presents: The Book of Love or Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. I hate protracted preambles almost as much as I hate these movies, so let's get on with the show.

TOP 10 WORST MOVIES OF 2009

#10 - PUBLIC ENEMIES


Okay, so I think we can all safely agree now that Michael Mann was replaced by a pod person at some point between 2004's brilliant Collateral and 2006's awful Miami Vice. His commitment to reality which once gave us the brilliantly intense gunfights of Heat has come full circle to yield some of the nastiest visuals I've ever seen onscreen and perhaps the dullest imaginable depiction of a real-life bank-robbing master criminal. Oh, I'll give it to him: the flat lighting and grainy digital photography is realistic. Why, it looks just like a home video shot on a store-bought camcorder by your grandma!

#9 - X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE


Oh good, an origin story. Because superhero cinema doesn't have enough of those. *makes jerking off motion*

#8 - POST GRAD


File this one under "First World Problems." Our protagonist, the unfortunately named Ryden Malby (seriously, say it out loud, it's fucking ridiculous), graduates from college and has to work service jobs for a couple months before being handed her lifelong dream position at LA's top publishing firm. Throughout this ordeal she is unconditionally supported by her family and best friend / romantic interest. Wow, that's some intense drama right there. I only watched this because said best friend / romantic interest is played by Zach Gilford, who plays my favorite character Matt Saracen on my favorite TV show Friday Night Lights, but it turns out that watching a favorite actor debase themselves in an indefensible shitpile is just kind of depressing.

#7 - THE BLIND SIDE


Of all the films on this list, this is, while not the most incompetent, easily the the most insidious. A swelling tribute to the greatness and singular compassion of white people, The Blind Side boils its teenage interpretation of Baltimore Ravens offensive tackle Michael Oher down to a sickeningly condescending cypher, a hulking, idiotic man-infant for Sandra Bullock's ghastly southern matriarch to save with her sass and her charm and her wisdom, at one point even reading the po' black eighteen-year-old a preschooler's bedtime story before he goes to sleep(!!). The movie aims for the heart of white suburban America and septuagenarians everywhere by giving Oher no personality whatsoever beyond mumbled, demure compliance, carefully avoiding a single moment of actual tension or emotional resonance, and even making its football scenes limp, lifeless, predictable timesinks. Needless to say, it was an enormous box office hit.

#6 - STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI


I'll say straight up that this may objectively be the second worst movie on this list. It's truly, truly awful; a dizzying mess of horrid dialogue, horrid action scenes, horrid storytelling, and acting somehow even worse than all that. It doesn't even have the decency to feature any music or settings or iconography from the video game series it's supposedly based on! But it plummets so far into "so bad it's good" territory that it actually becomes perversely enjoyable partway through. No, not nearly as brilliant as my all-time favorite bad movie, Dungeons & Dragons, but still goofy and absurd enough that there's no way I can rank it any higher (lower?) on this list. A big part of this is due to the awesome performance of Chris Klein, who we'll discuss again momentarily.

#5 - DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION


A childish and stupid anime is against all odds converted into an even more childish and stupid live-action American movie. You wouldn't think they'd be able to stupid up Dragon Ball, but it turns out that reimagining Goku as a sexy teen is just the fucking way to do it.

#4 - KNOWING


When I reviewed Knowing nearly a year ago I commented that it was "definitely an early contender for my bottom ten movies of 2009," but that "a barrage of shittiness at year's end may allow it to wriggle free." Well guess what? Nope. Not even close, in fact. This movie is a real piece of shit that's just gotten worse and worse as I've replayed it in my mind over time, and I think I'm ready to officially declare its ending one of the top five worst I've ever seen in my entire life, the kind of plot twist that makes you regret that the plot twist was ever invented. It's the motion picture equivalent of pulling off your hot date's panties to reveal a big purple vein dick.

#3 - YEAR ONE


Now this one's a heartbreaker. In 1993 Harold Ramis directed a masterpiece called Groundhog Day — and make no mistake, it is a masterpiece, standing toe-to-toe with virtually anything on AFI's top 100 — and now, sixteen years later, he directs a film that misunderstands the very building blocks of comedy at such a basic and fundamental level that it only just marginally rises above Aaron Seltzer & Jason Friedberg's "_____ Movie" series. Absent any structure or meaningful punchlines all you can do is try your damndest to be amused by the antics of Michael Cera and Jack Black, but it's tough to laugh at even the funniest dude on Earth if he isn't given anything funny to say or do.

#2 - SHITTY HORROR MOVIES
The Final Destination, Sorority Row, & Friday the 13th



Terrible, terrible, terrible! And yes, all three made money at the box office (although Sorority Row admittedly made less than the other two). Sure, it's a bit of a cheat to list all three together, but why the fuck should I waste three slots on my beloved list on three separate movies that all suffer from the exact same lack of any creative spark whatsoever and the exact same barrage of vapid, talentless "actors" and unimaginative violence and eye-rolling sudden-loud-noise scares? We see the exact same shit a dozen times a year, sometimes packaged under other names like Prom Night or Halloween or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, and god almighty do they all suck. I understand there are actually horror buffs out there who primarily watch this shit, which I find mind-boggling, because how could you maintain fandom in a genre that's 98.5% feces? (Pardon me while I hide my fantasy novels.)

But in all fairness I should note that, while not exactly a good movie, My Bloody Valentine 3D is actually surprisingly watchable as go slashers, with clever kills and probably the only five-minute 3D full frontal nude scene in the history of mainstream theatrical releases. Hell, it came shockingly close to being a fresh tomato. So it's cleared of all charges. Not these other pieces of shit, though. No way.

#1 - I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER


This is it. This is the Terrible American Movie, the end point, the reckoning. Screen I Love You, Beth Cooper at the next G8 Summit and no one on Earth would question for a moment the entire rest of the world simultaneously nuking us into a flat plane of dead ash. If you plan to watch I Love You, Beth Cooper then you must first securely lock away any and all knives, ropes, and pills you may own because you will desperately attempt to kill yourself immediately afterward. Wracked by sobs, shivering in horror at the cold and cruel eternity that could have gathered all its dark and evil energies to commit such an atrocity as bringing this movie into existence, your voice will crack as you cry "why?!!" at the heavens, seeking answers that will never come. The only question remaining is whether or not a space-time continuum that could have produced I Love You, Beth Cooper was ever worth saving in the first place, and the only certainty left is that nothing will ever be good or pure again.

What's particularly bizarre about this mind-blowingly miscalculated attempt at recreating the John Hughes teen films of the 80s is that its director Chris Columbus actually once worked directly with Hughes, filming Hughes' script Home Alone back in 1990. He even brings in Ferris Bueller's Alan Ruck — Cameron Frye himself! — to play the main character's father and apparently to make my brain start to bleed out my ear. What happened? Has Chris Columbus lost all his talent? Did he ever have any talent in the first place? All I know is that this is the only time in my life that a movie was so profoundly unfunny that I actually began to feel physically nauseous during its duration. Not only are literally all other comedy movies funnier, but so are the vast majority of webcam YouTube videos and cereal box blurbs. I Love You, Beth Cooper makes American Pie Presents: The Book of Love look like a timeless fucking masterpiece.


SPECIAL JURY PRIZE — MOST OVERRATED MOVIE OF 2009

AN EDUCATION


An Education isn't bad enough to make the cut for my top ten worst, and I certainly don't have the patience to do a top twenty, but there's simply no way I couldn't talk about this movie one more time. That this mechanical, by-the-motions, completely unspectacular coming of age drama has a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and a Best Picture nomination is some serious Twilight Zone shit. Sure, Carey Mulligan gives a respectable performance if you can ignore the fact that she's about a decade older than her sixteen-year-old character, but beyond that the movie is a turgid bore. I'm completely positive that if you took this exact script and set it in America, changing only the city names and the accents, it wouldn't have gotten a tenth the hype and attention.



TOP 5 WORST PERFORMANCES OF 2009

#5 - Christian Bale, PUBLIC ENEMIES — I know for a fact that Christian Bale can give a vibrant, spellbinding performance. I've seen American Psycho. So I'm going to go ahead and blame director Michael Mann for interpreting FBI agent Melvin Purvis as a mask-faced plank of wood with all the personality of a door. No performance in this movie was particularly energetic but Bale was a black fucking hole.

#4 - Quinton Aaron, THE BLIND SIDE — Apparently, teenage Michael Oher couldn't do anything except avert his eyes from and mumble his compliance to any white person in the room. Absolutely appalling. The only thing missing was a "yessa massa" or two.

#3 - Channing Tatum, G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA & Kristin Kreuk, STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI — Pardon my two-for-one cheat, but these performances are pretty much identical, 2009's true brother-sister duo, each perfectly mirroring each other in absolute rice cake blandness. Watch Channing Tatum see his best friend get blown up, or watch Kristin Kreuk see her father murdered before her eyes, and their facial expressions of dismay identical to that of yours when you see that your yogurt has expired. Emoting? Who needs it!

#2 - Matthew Goode, WATCHMEN — Nevermind the novel's insistence that he's an immensely charismatic golden god superhero figure, which would have actually made the ending shocking; apparently, Adrian Veidt is a lanky, creepy, thickly-accented German who might as well have "villain" tattooed on his forehead. This performance came perilously close to sinking the entire movie.

#1 - Chris Klein, STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI — Now this performance is something special. Something unique. Something immense. I spent days wrestling with whether to list this as the worst performance or the best supporting performance of the year, but the undeniable fact is that this is the worst acting of 2009. But it's also spectacular. The director seems to have carefully instructed Klein to perform every line, every gesture, every look with one motivation and one motivation only: "FUCK. YOU." And how! He sneers. He leers. He delivers every horrible line like he believes he's coining a classic catchphrase that will be quoted for decades to come. Without Klein the movie would be unwatchable, with him, it's essential. Thankfully, some kind soul has uploaded this performance to the internet, and it's something I do not recommend you miss.



TOP 5 WORST MOVIE MOMENTS OF 2009

#5 - Wolverine examines his claws, X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE — I saw X-Men when I was fourteen years old and I still specifically remember thinking that Wolverine's claws looked really, really good. Now, nearly a decade later, we get a close-up of the same claws as Wolverine examines them in a bathroom and the CGI looks so, so, so bad that the audience I saw this movie with was cracking the fuck up, which I haven't seen happen at a special effect in years. How did this Reagan-era CGI slip into a 2009 big-budget summer blockbuster? How does that even happen?

#4 - Jenny receives the banana, AN EDUCATION — Okay, so sixteen-year-old Jenny is dating an adult man, and in one incredibly bizarre and out-of-nowhere scene he hands her banana and tells her to fuck it so her virgin vagina is loosened up for them to have sex for the first time. I'm dead serious. This actually, literally happens. I immediately went online when I got home from the theater to find out if I imagined this scene in some kind of nightmare, and sure enough, I wasn't the only one who felt brainfucked by it.

#3 - Michael Oher learns to tackle, THE BLIND SIDE — You see, according to The Blind Side, Michael Oher is a gigantic, mentally challenged toddler who can't do anything by himself. He fumbles around at football practice like a blind deaf sack of shit, bringing humiliation onto himself and his people, until Sandra Bullock storms out onto the field and tells him to pretend that the quarterback is her, his adopted momma, and he has to take down anyone trying to hurt "her." Instantaneously, starting with the very next play, Michael Oher is a football prodigy who can block anything and anyone. That's so nice how the movie diminishes any hard work and practice Oher put in down to the condescension of a sassy southern white woman.

#2 - Optimus Prime vs. Megatron, TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN — The ultimate good robot and the ultimate evil robot finally do battle after two and a half hours of build up and Optimus Prime tears Megatron apart in about fifteen seconds with the ease that you or I would shoo a fly. Thanks for wasting my time, Michael Bay. Asshole.

#1 - The ending, KNOWING — I don't have the energy to think about this ending any longer. I just don't. So I'm just gonna copy and paste this directly from my Knowing review:

"It's difficult to explain how much I hated this movie's climax and ending ... but it's about as shockingly bizarre, random, and incongruous with everything that's led up to it as if Se7en had ended with Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey growing gigantic ala Power Rangers and doing battle with flaming broadswords. Watching the final act of Knowing I was trapped halfway between choking back laughter and cringing in embarrassment; it's quite possibly the worst ending of the decade.

The film climaxes with the revelation that the girl who wrote out the numbers had the information planted in her mind by aliens who can read the future and have foretold the world is going to end on October 22nd, 2009. They have come to Earth with a fleet of crystalline spaceships to take one human boy and one human girl away in each to repopulate new planets, and Nicolas Cage's son is one of the "chosen." He flies off on the spaceship, a solar flare destroys Earth, and the movie ends with Cage's son and a girl being beamed down onto an ethereal far-off planet and running towards a giant tree. No, I am not fucking with you, this is actually how Knowing ends."