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 2009 — Spoilers!

#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.

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."

American Pie Presents: The Book of Love - DVD Review

First things first: why in the bleeding fuck would you watch the fourth straight-to-DVD American Pie movie?

Well, there are three answers to that. One, I'm a moron with terrible taste in film. Two, I already watched the first three and you can't just jump out a train while the ride's still going, can you? And three, there's a certain blissful freedom to watching a terrible movie with full knowledge that you're embarking on a journey of shit. Sure, I should probably get around to finally seeing Gone With the Wind, but then I would be obligated to mentally engage and analyze and formulate well-researched and articulated thoughts about the film as a piece of American cultural history. On the other hand, I can Netflix American Pie Presents: The Book of Love and sit stupidly eating Cheez-Its in front of the glowing screen for ninety minutes and no one gives a shit whether or not I can form a single coherent thought about the experience afterwards. What could be more liberating?

Fair enough. Who are the dramatis personae?

We got a real Shakespearian lineup going on here. We open the film with our protagonist Rob masturbating, of course. He spies a peanut butter sandwich and decides to have sex with it, followed by his dog approaching and licking the peanut butter off his penis. His resistance melts away and he begins moaning the dog's name. His little brother videotapes this on his camera phone and emails it to their mom and the entire high school. I'd love to say that this scene doesn't flawlessly set the tone for the rest of the picture, but it does. It really, truly does.

So Rob is our awkward nice guy protagonist who ends up in embarrassing sexual situations (ala Jim from the original film), his friend Nathan is the one with the girlfriend who isn't ready to have sex yet (ala Kevin from the original film), and their other friend Lube is the desperate horny one who only thinks about sex all the time (think Stifler from the original film, except with the cockiness removed and thus what made him entertaining and not just a skin-crawling creep). The trio is desperate to lose their virginities before their looming high school graduation and hatch various boneheaded plots to do so while being dogged by another antagonistic Stifler cousin who does an absolutely grotesque impersonation of Seann William Scott from the original trilogy.

As you can probably tell, The Book of Love is all but officially a straight remake of the original film, covering many of the exact same subplots and the exact same thematic territory and same sexual embarrassment jokes just with a straight-to-DVD shit-colored polish to it. I'm not claiming that the original American Pie is a masterpiece by any means, but if nothing else all four of the central guys plus Stifler did have distinct personalities. Given a scenario and five responses to said scenario, you could easily match each response up to each character after just one viewing of the film. The same cannot be said for Rob, Nathan, and Lube — other than Lube being a little bit more perverted, they all have the same identical bland nebbishy nice guy persona. I literally got Rob and Nathan confused at points (see the two guys on the left in the picture above).

And Eugune Levy's back, right?

You'd better believe it mofucka. Not only does Eugene Levy return, run blandly through the motions, and pick up another cool paycheck for his seventh consecutive film appearance as Jim's dad Noah Levenstein, but he's actually not the only recognizable actor this time around. None other than Rosanna Arquette plays Rob's mom, and, well, I'm certainly not a member of any Rosanna Aquette fanclub or anything like that, but she was in Pulp Fiction for crying out loud, so it's a little disheartening to watch her tell her cinematic son not to get blowjobs from the family dog or confusedly hold up a cum-soaked sock and try to figure out what it is. Tim Matheson, who played the vice president in NBC's The West Wing, also shows up, so you can feel patriotic while retching.

Tell us about the-

-the plot? Glad to! Well, you remember the sex Bible from the original American Pie, right? Hidden in a secret compartment in the East Great Falls High library, which Kevin used to give his girlfriend the forbidden "Tongue Tornado" cunnilingus technique? Well, Rob, Nathan, and Lube find this sacred tome in the remnants after a library fire, but it has unfortunately been ruined save for a few scraps and the list of its previous wielders. They resolve to contact this list one by one to restore the text (Jim's dad is revealed to have created the Bible, which is where he fits into this mess) and use its contents to finally get laid.

Now, this is probably the stupidest plot I've ever heard of for two reasons: One, a physical written book of sex techniques was already edging towards archaic back in 1999 (but was forgivable, being a relatively small part of the film), but in 2010 it's absolutely absurd. Search for "sex tips" or "sex techniques" on Google and very literally tens of millions of words worth of all the arcane Kama Sutra knowledge you can possibly imagine is presented to you free of charge or effort in two seconds. And two, the point of the Bible in the original film was that Kevin already had a girlfriend but didn't know how to please her; some teenaged nerd can have encyclopedia of every single sex technique and secret and position in existence in his mind but that has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on his ability to actually attract a girl.

But reconstruct the Bible they do, and it evidently teaches them everything they need to know. On the school ski trip Nathan's girlfriend finally agrees to do it, Rob confesses his love to his female friend and they do it, and Lube tells the uber-hot cheerleader he's been lusting over all movie about how he knows everything about her and remembers how great she was in all the school plays and a litany of other information and she's so smitten that they do it too. Lube's story is a particularly great life lesson — if you're a chubby, sweaty high school nerd who thinks about nothing but sex all day, all you have to do to make the head cheerleader fall in love with you is tell her how you've been stalking her her whole life.

The class then locks Scott Stifler outside the cabin in the nude and he gets chased down and raped in the ass by a giant CGI moose, while the entire senior class points and laughs uproariously at what in real life would be a brutal and incredibly painful death. No, I am not fucking with you.

No, tell us about the boobs, Tim! The boobs!

Oh, my bad. Well, you'll recall that in the original American Pie theatrical trilogy the guys' romantic interests never exposed their breasts; only alluring foreign exchange students, sexy naughty neighbors, and strippers. But any respectable connoisseur of straight-to-DVD trash well knows that as of 2006's American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile the producers said "fuck it!" and from that movie on the romantic interests peel off too with the solitary exception of the main protagonist's innocent female friend who he's secretly in love with. That tradition stands here, in addition to various other flashings, streakers, miscellaneous sex scenes, and hookers.

So while that aspect of the film doesn't disappoint, if that's your primary concern you'd be much, much better off renting 2007's American Pie Presents: Beta House, which basically abandons any semblance of narrative or structure and morphs the series into a college party Skinemax softcore flick with occasional hints at comedy. The Book of Love actually would still be a complete movie with a plot and jokes with the boobs removed, whereas Beta House would be about four minutes long.

So... is any of it actually funny?

No.


1 Star out of 5

Jennifer's Body - DVD Review

The theatrical run of Jennifer's Body fell in that nebulous grey area where I found myself curious but not quite curious enough to make that extra push to drive out to the theater and lay down green for the privilege of sitting through it. So I watched from the sidelines as it was critically shredded, bombed at the box office, and quietly forgotten, and I shrugged and figured that I had made the right call. But it recently floated to the top of my Netflix queue so I figured "what the hell?" and popped it in, and at risk of destroying any credibility my opinions ever had... I kinda liked it!

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the critics fucked up or didn't get it or anything like that. I'm not even saying that the A.V. Club was objectively wrong for ranking it as the nineteenth worst film of 2009 (man, am I selling this movie!). But the thing is that I can only truly dislike a film when it bores me, and whatever Jennifer's Body may be — a huge mess stuffed with obnoxiously overwritten Diablo Cody dialogue — it ain't boring. In fact it might just be the least boring movie of 2009. Every few minutes something bizarre and / or interesting happens, be it murder, arson, cannibalism, Satanic rituals, Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried making out for absolutely no reason, or hot chicks flying around in their prom dresses like it's Dragon Ball Z. This is a bizarre fucking movie. I saw a lot of dead teenager horror flicks in 2009 — Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine 3D, The Final Destination, Sorority Row, etc. — and the reason Jennifer's Body trumps them all is because I usually had no idea what was gonna happen next at any given moment. My attention was rapt.

Summed up, the movie is about an intense friendship between two high school girls, the groan-inducingly named Needy, played by Amanda Seyfried, and Jennifer, played by Megan Fox. Jennifer is the popular sexpot hottie while Needy is her (of course) needy sidekick and our protagonist. When they go to a local concert the indie band mistakes Jennifer for a virgin and attempts to sacrifice her to Satan for musical success, but since she's not a virgin the ritual backfires and she merges with a demon from hell. Seriously. She proceeds to kill and eat all the boys in school that are sexually attracted to her one by one while Needy uncovers the truth and has to figure out what to do with the knowledge that the killer is her lifelong best friend. The movie is broadly aiming for the same "high school as hell" allegory that Buffy the Vampire Slayer already executed a lot more skillfully.

What makes the movie almost work isn't so much the plot or the horror or the comedy as the friendship between Needy and Jennifer, alternately strange, intense, codependent, antagonistic, and more than a little romantic. I always love when the hero and villain have or develop a bona fide thematically and plot-essential relationship through the course of a film — see Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, or Indy and Belloq, or Bond and Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye, or Max and Vincent in Collateral. A disconnected villain like Sauron just doesn't interest me as much. So while the other characters such as Needy's male romantic interest, a few teachers, Needy and Jennifer's parents, and the boys Jennifer kills are quickly forgotten, it's okay, because these two are the story's backbone.

The most memorable and eye-popping scene occurs approximately two-thirds of the way through the picture when we're well into the thick of gruesome killings and feasting on entrails and you'd think the movie would be focused on plot, but it instead makes a very strange pit stop when Needy and Jennifer meet and rather than discussing the murders french kiss hello for approximately a full minute (over 1% of the entire movie!) of screen time. And I'm not using hyperbole when I say french kiss; you can actually see Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried's tongues going to work on each other in tight close-up. Then they move on and start talking about the plot again like nothing happened and you're like "what the what?!"

Many critics and Megan Fox herself have posited that it's basically just meant to be a little soft erotica to lighten the mood, but I don't buy that for a couple of reasons: One, the movie is written and directed exclusively by women, who don't usually stick lesbian erotica in the middle of films for no reason, and two, seeing as the film is entirely about the friendship of these two girls, this scene (along with dropped hints that this is neither the first time they've done this nor necessarily the furthest they've gone together) fundamentally changes the nature of their relationship and thereby the undertones of the entire story, making it almost a jilted romance tale about them resenting each other's boyfriends and certainly making it impossible to do any meaningful contextual analysis while brushing it aside. Plus, you know, hot chicks making out is awesome, and in this case incredibly random.

It's that spirit of sheer randomness that made me enjoy the overall picture quite a bit. Accuse Jennifer's Body of being dumb, of being base, of being shallow, of being a mess, of lacking any merit as cinema, but please. Don't accuse it of being dull or slow or saying that nothing happens. Because this movie is a happening, for better or for worse.


3 Stars out of 5

Precious

Precious, which I refuse to refer to by its absurd full title of Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire (I guess we should be thankful that Return of the King wasn't called The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Based on the Novel "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" by J. R. R. Tolkein), is the extremely rare if not the only prestige movie of this awards season that damn near lives up to the hype surrounding it. I liked it a lot, depressing as it may be, probably in no small part due to my inherent fondness for high school movies and movies with teen protagonists. Some have accused the film of being poverty porn for white liberals to sit through so they can feel good about having spent a couple hours in an air-conditioned theater with those po' black folk onscreen (and indeed, if there were any non-whites in my screening I sure didn't see 'em), but while there may be a nugget of truth in that I don't think it changes the fact that it's a good if tragic story with good if tragic characters.

Let's run down the litany of abuse heaped on our misfortunate heroine: Claireece "Precious" Jones is a dirt poor, morbidly obese, functionally illiterate 16-year-old still in junior high school. She's pregnant with her second child, from the same father as her first child, her own father, both children the product of repeated rapes. Oh, and her first baby has Down syndrome. She lives with her abusive mother, a chain smoking welfare queen who beats her and screams at her and treats her as a slave. And that's all backstory not even getting into what happens during the film, which includes disease and beatings and abuse of her and her baby. Shit! In high school I thought I was having a bad day if I forgot to record my TV shows!

Now I don't blame anyone who blanches and says "no thanks" in response to that plot summary, but the surprising thing about Precious is that it's not at all without relief, hope, or even flat-out levity, particularly in scenes set in the remedial school Precious begins attending taught by a somewhat generic but still very likable Hollywood inspiring teacher played by Paula Patton, one of the precious few (PUN MASTERSTROKE) legitimately good people in the otherwise bleak narrative. We get to know and like Precious's teacher and classmates as she does in a very natural, unforced way that gradually sheds some of the hopeless gloom we begin the film in the muck of. The story lacks a conventional three act structure culminating a spectacularly dramatic climax; instead, we begin at the lowest point possible and gradually move uphill from there.

Unlike most movies about soul-crushing poverty, Precious is anything but stodgy or languid in its pacing. There's a genuine director's eye behind the film, managing to make our trips inside Precious's mind interesting and vibrant, her classroom inherently and undeniably ghetto but still bustling with a certain hope and teenage energy, and the apartment she lives in with her mother so palpably foul your skin will crawl. Whenever her mother forces her to cook some pigs feet or fried chicken the way director Lee Daniels focuses on the sizzling grease running down the food ruined my appetite in a brilliantly visceral way. I usually groan and roll my eyes when relatively small-scale character studies get Best Director nominations (see last year's Frost/Nixon, a good movie, but still one about two guys sitting in a room talking that had no fucking business getting a directing nomination), but Precious is a huge, deserving exception.

Which brings us to actors, of which two stand out. Gabourey Sidibe as Precious embodies a quiet yet consuming depression that gradually morphs into equally quiet yet uplifting hope as we follow her through the film. It's not a flashy performance but it's a very good one. But not surprisingly, most of the critical and awards attention is being directed towards Mo'Nique as her abusive mother, which is a flashy performance. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking that this is a deep or complicated character — she's no less a monolith of absolute, unfettered evil than Ledger's Joker or Anton Chigurh, basically no different than a Disney evil stepmother except for facilitating pedophilia and rape — but it's a fiery and powerful performance that's near-impossible to look away from, and I won't complain if Mo'Nique sweeps up all the supporting actress awards. Anyone who reads my stuff with any regularity knows that I always applaud a good villain, which Precious has in spades.

I'm not gonna tell anyone who thinks the subject matter sounds like the last thing on earth they want to watch that they must go see the film regardless, but I will say to anyone who has some vague curiosity but isn't sure if the hype is just critical smoke and mirrors masking a mediocre film like An Education or Babel or The Reader that it's definitely not. Precious is actually pretty great in my opinion, not one I'll go back to over and over again, but one I was pretty riveted with throughout its duration. Check it out.


3 Stars out of 5

Up in the Air

First things first: Does Jason Reitman's Up in the Air deserve the Best Picture Oscar it seems to be barreling towards? Nope. But is it a really good movie anyway? Yep. It's a dramedy (hate that word if you must, but it's so useful) where George Clooney plays a suave, cool bachelor who I think has a character name but who might as well just be called George Clooney and who gets paid to fly around the country firing people whose bosses lack the balls to do it themselves. Despite the recession — indeed, probably because of it — his business is booming, and he happily stays more detached from human contact than ever as he jetsets from city to city. But when he falls in love with a businesswoman named Alex he meets in an airport and is assigned a young professional named Natalie to mentor, he gradually learns the joy of human connection and becomes a better person.

Or does he?

It's tough to explain free from spoilers why I came out of Up in the Air liking it so much (and while I'll avoid specifics you might as well stop reading here if you haven't seen the movie and don't want to know anything at all), so I'll just say that as someone who has nothing but disdain for humanity this movie had me thinking "this is well-made and all, but way too uplifting and feel-goody," until right near the end when it pulls the rug out from under all that in a sort of brilliant way and very suddenly makes the black and white "George Clooney discovers FRIENDSHIP! :-)" storyline into something considerably more gray and interesting. Oh yes, I dug it.

Pacing issues alone hold it back from being one of my top ten of 2009. Among those not gushing with love for the film there seem to be two nearly opposite schools of contention; some preferred the topical firing people storyline and found George Clooney's arc a little generic, while others wanted more time with the characters and thought the firing story (particularly when we get The Office-style asides with people lamenting their unemployment) bordered on preachy. I'm with the first crowd. I was pretty fascinated with Clooney's bizarre job but a third-act vignette where he attends his sister's wedding gums up the momentum pretty bad and tried my patience in a way not at all unlike Adam Sandler's visit to his ex-girlfriend's house in last summer's Funny People. Up in the Air already clocks in at a relatively brisk 109 minutes but I bet some judicious editing could make it 95 minutes and a better film.

Interestingly, George Clooney's performance stands in the shadow of the young and relatively unknown Anna Kendrick as his protégé Natalie (every other performance is quickly forgotten). It's not that I don't like Clooney — he's perfect in Ocean's Eleven — it's just that his personality is so large and distinct that his performances are ultimately very predictable. Sometimes he's a little sillier, sometimes a little more serious, sometimes a little cooler, but he never disappears into the character. You never see anything except Clooney, ever, which kind of harms a movie that's half character study. Kendrick on the other hand brings a strange dichotomy to Natalie, making her simultaneously ultra-professional and nearly robotic as she goes about her business while remaining by far the most emotionally unguarded character in the film, wearing her fears and foibles on her sleeve in a really winning way. She deserves to and will be nominated for Best Supporting Actress and it's kind of hilarious that thanks to the magic of contracts she'll have to go from that back to her shitty supporting role as Bella's ditzy friend in the Twilight movies.

Between Kendrick, creative direction married to snappy editing, a topical and interesting storyline, and plenty of chuckle-worthy lines and moments, I ultimately give the film a solid recommendation despite some blemishes. It won't lose anything in the transition to home video and if you lack the inclination to drive out you'll be just fine with the DVD, but definitely get around to it.


3 Stars out of 5

An Education

Hype bandwagon, thy name is An Education. One of the most overrated movies of this or any other year with a ludicrous 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and only eleven brave critics on earth willing to point out the fact that the emperor has no clothes, An Education is a made-for-TV melodrama dressed up with some outdoor location shooting in London and Paris, a few minor movie stars, and an admittedly good leading performance. I'm baffled beyond all measure where this film's awards season hype is coming from. It's nowhere near as bad as last year's The Reader, one of the worst films in my lifetime to be nominated for Best Picture, but at least with that one you could see the Academy going glassy-eyed and groaning "Holocaust... masterpiece..." in the same tone with which a zombie goes "braaaaiinnns...", while An Education is just glossy mediocrity, like being served fancily prepared tofu. You can acknowledge the effort, but you're still eating fucking tofu.

Let me see if I can find enough plot to even talk about: Carey Mulligan plays Jenny, a bright 16-year-old schoolgirl in 1961 England who dreams of attending Oxford. She's seduced by a 35-year-old playboy played by Peter Sarsgaard who introduces her to art, films, jazz, nightclubs, and Paris. Jenny, enchanted by all this culture, has to decide whether to stay true to her dreams of Oxford or get married and live life for love and art. And that's damn near fucking it. I've left out of the final fifteen minutes or so out of respect for the spoiler code, but that's a tragically complete synopsis up to that point. We spend untold stretches of time watching Jenny make lovey-dovey eyes at Sarsgaard or being awed by all the culture, and holy fucking yawn. There's a few other characters but they've fled my memory so quickly I'm half-convinced I was zapped by that Men in Black red-light device immediately after the screening.

The film contains possibly the most boring virginity loss subplot in the history of onscreen teen characters losing their virginities, only saved from the precipice of completely forgettability one of the most awkward and bizarre movie scenes of 2009 in which Peter Sarsgaard gives Jenny a banana and tells her to loosen her vagina with it before they have sex for the film time. This is not played for laughs. It just happens. I am not making this up; here's an IMDb thread about it. It was so fucking inane I was half-convinced I was having a fever dream right there in the movie theater, but looking back on it, no, even my darkest subconscious couldn't come up with a scene like that. No one could come up with a scene like that, except, evidently, screenwriter Nick Hornby.

Whatever else the film does wrong (everything), Carey Mulligan is quite charming and charismatic in the lead role and managed to keep me awake through stretches that would have been cinematic warm milk with pretty much any other British actress I can think of young enough to play a teenager. I'm sure she'll do just fine in Wall Street 2 this April. But nonetheless, don't see An Education. If I could talk to any critic championing this film I would love to ask which scene exactly they think will linger in memory (either collective cultural memory or their own) by 2011, because every second of this film is leaking out of mind like water through wicker.


2 Stars out of 5

The Messenger

It's ironic — in an Oscar season clogged with overhyped and instantly tired films (albeit nothing nearly as bad as last year's The Reader), one of the few legitimately very good dramas, Oren Moverman's The Messenger, seems to have flown completely under the radar with an almost-hilarious box office total of $654,000, no awards hype, and only a selection by the AFI as one of 2009's ten notable films to show for it. But it's got the Tim Kraemer vote, and any serious student of the ciné knows that's the one that matters.

The film is an Iraq War drama — no, wait, hold your groans! — about a wounded vet played by Ben Foster back ashore assigned to fill his remaining months of service as a casualty notification officer. Under a strict code of conduct, i.e. no hugging the next of kin, he and his superior officer played by Woody Harrelson have to knock on several doors a day to inform perfect strangers that their child or spouse has been killed in action in the Middle East. Needless to say, the film isn't a comedy, although you'd be surprised how many moments of dark, understated humor there are in the interaction of Foster and Harrelson. Of course the entire film can't just be a series of casualty notifications (although there are plenty, with reactions ranging from hysterical shrieking to attacking the notification officers to straightforward denial to the vacant, shellshocked politeness of those who can't quite process what they're hearing), so Foster ends up falling for a war widow whose husband's death he informed her of, which is obscenely against military protocol, and oh dear, conflict.

If your reaction to that plot summary is a shrug, a grimace, or a generalized "I dunno..." I don't necessarily blame you, but remember, it's all in the execution, not the idea, and despite skirting dangerous closely to cliché (the film even ends at a wedding, but not in the way you may fear) The Messenger fastidiously avoids swelling melodrama and presents the experience of a veteran in a more interesting, thoughtful way than any Iraq film to date. It's helped along immensely by Ben Foster, who you may remember as the no-name actor who somehow stole 3:10 to Yuma out from under both Christian Bale and Russell Crowe. Coiled tension and hidden pain always lurks just beneath the surface of his performance, one that doesn't seem to be getting the awards hype it warrants.

Earlier in 2009 we got the first genuinely worthwhile Iraq War film, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, a film that took place almost entirely within Iraq, and now as a nice parallel we have the next worthwhile Iraq War film, The Messenger, every frame of which takes place on American soil. The films are completely different genres — The Hurt Locker an action thriller, The Messenger a quiet human drama — but both are alike in their utterly apolitical treatment of the war as a constant no longer requiring any sociological commentary. It's here, it blows, and get use to it liberals, it's probably gonna stay awhile. But if nothing else it produced a pair of worthy films last year. I'm assuming no one reading this is among the 65,400 people who saw The Messenger in theaters, but I'd easily recommend a rental.


3 Stars out of 5

Invictus

There's a specific subgenre of film that I like to call "oh, that's nice" cinema. Yes, the "oh" is mandatory. I don't make the rules*. An "oh, that's nice" film is a slick package, well-produced by every technical standard, probably quite well-acted, often mildly inspirational, almost always a biopic, incredibly safe and by-the-numbers, never earns any visceral emotional reaction of any kind, and is released at awards season and lauded by critics far beyond what the film itself actually warrants. The list of last decade's Best Picture nominees is absolutely fucking flooded with these movies — Ray, Capote, The Queen, Finding Neverland, Seabiscuit, Erin Brockovich — and they occasionally even win (see A Beautiful Mind, 2001). Despite their critical fellatio, these films fall out of cultural memory very quickly (I would kill to see the confusion on the face of any critic who called A Beautiful Mind a masterpiece eight years ago asked today to describe a single scene from the film), and indeed, beads of sweat are already peppering my forehead as I strain to recall the details of Clint Eastwood's Invictus, the new pinnacle of "oh, that's nice."

It's 1994 (after a brief prologue in 1990). Newly-inaugurated President Nelson Mandela seeks to mend the bitter rift between black and white South Africans through the uniting power of sports and encourages South African team captain Francois Pienaar to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup to help heal the country. Inspirational sports movie time? Hell yeah it's inspirational sports movie time. We got the team starting down and out on a losing streak, we got training, we got swelling speeches, we got last-minute comebacks, we got slow motion, we got the audience shooting to their seats at a key moment as the sound fades out. There's a racial component to the story, but all played incredibly safely and with nary a moment of genuine tension to be found lest the blue-haired septuagenarians in the audience experience a moment of discomfort. Needless to say, the film ends with all racism being eradicated from the world, so you can smile and go home and ignore the millions of subsentient gun-toting rednecks in 2010 demanding that the President of the United States of America be led off in chains (always in chains in their fantasies) for the crime of being black.

What the film does right can pretty much be summed up in two words: Morgan Freeman. I'd never make any claims of being a Mandela scholar, but as far as I can tell he was pretty much the real thing just slightly more photogenic and with twice the gravitas. Man can act his ass off, and for once he's no one's mentor this time around. Matt Damon gets the job done and is instantly forgotten as Francois Pienaar (personally, I preferred Leo DiCaprio's South African accent in Blood Diamond) and I don't remember anyone else except for Damon's comically racist dad who becomes a better man in one of the film's most "oh, that's nice"-inducing subplots. The sports sequences are all laughably by the numbers. Basically, Invictus is Disney's The Mighty Ducks with rugby instead of hockey and Nelson Mandela occasionally coming in and saying something inspiring. Nonetheless, it will be nominated for Best Picture, because, you know, the Academy.

Eastwood's next movie is apparently a supernatural thriller called Hereafter starring Matt Damon and Bryce Dallas Howard, and I'm glad. I fucking loved last year's Gran Torino, and comparing that with the dryness of Invictus I'd just as soon see Eastwood stick exclusively with trash for the rest of his career because that's clearly where his true talents lie.


2 Stars out of 5


* I make the rules.

Sherlock Holmes

Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with me and my taste in film well knows that I'm a fawning, obsequious fanboy for the James Bond franchise. Don't matter none which Bond actor it is or what decade it's from, put any one of those flicks in front of me and I'm all set for the next couple hours. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that I enjoyed the hell out of a movie about a British detective pursuing a flamboyant supervillain while stumbling into action scenes and dropping one-liners, even if it may not be legitimately great cinema by any stretch of the imagination. Oh yes, Sherlock Holmes rocks.

Sure, some cranky critics and bloggers have griped that the new Holmes has little in common with Arthur Conan Doyle's classic novels and shorts stories beyond its setting, era, and the names and professions of its leads, and it's true — the tone and humor is a hell of a lot closer to Pirates of the Caribbean than Hound of the Baskervilles. But really, there's no signs that Conan Doyle ever saw his most popular works as high literature, and I think it's perfectly fitting that pulp literature was adapted into a pulp film. And even if I have it all wrong, I can't even pretend to give a shit. Maybe you think that makes me an illiterate rube, which is fair enough, and I'm certainly not here to tell annoyed Conan Doyle fans they have any obligation to love the flick, but I'm such a sucker for the vaguely Bondian pacing and structure of the thing that I'm already game for sequels.

Where this film differs from Bond this decade (as well as Star Trek, Star Wars, Batman, Spider-Man, and pretty much every single onscreen superhero) is that Sherlock Holmes is in no way, shape, or form an origin story. In fact, it's kind of the opposite: the film assumes that everyone knows who Holmes and Watson are well enough that it's comfortable beginning with the dissolution of their partnership. After years of adventuring and sleuthing together, Dr. John Watson got himself a lady and is getting hitched, moving out of 221B Baker Street, and returning to the respectable fold of medicine. Between this and a lack of cases, Holmes is despairing and drinking and drugging himself into a stupor (all played for comedy, of course). It's a bleakly hilarious way to start the film and I think it's ultimately for the best that we didn't have a film about Holmes getting his sleuthing skills, meeting Watson, their first case together, and so on. It just wouldn't have been necessary.

But of course it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Watson will be back once the shit hits the fan, albeit with reluctance and him and Holmes squabbling nonstop like a pair of a pair of jilted lovers. A London-based supervillain named Lord Blackwood, who's a combination of Jack the Ripper and pretty much any comic book or Saturday morning cartoon or Roger Moore era Bond villain you care to name, seems to have risen from the grave following his public execution and is a-schemin' and a-killin' once again. Is the supernatural real or is there some explanation? The game is afoot! And that's pretty much all you need to know — this is a character piece, not a tour de force of mystery storytelling.

I hope that at this point no one is surprised to learn that Robert Downey Jr. is up to the task, enduing Holmes with all the eccentricity and genius and wisecracks and occasional pathetic slovenliness you could hope for (and with a pretty good British accent, to boot). Up until May 2008 Downey Jr. was arguably the most underrated actor in the goddamn world, starring in great films that were also enormous box office bombs like Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, and Iron Man's greatest legacy may just be his upgrade to full-blown movie star. In a country that often chooses to elevate some of the blandest and shittiest people to star status, Downey Jr. is a resounding exception. And Jude Law, while not normally one of my favorite actors, has super-snappy chemistry with Downey Jr. (not to mention brazen homoeroticism; this is easily the most gay technically non-gay onscreen male friendship since Superbad, they wanna blow each other so bad) and thankfully doesn't give in to the appalling Nigel Bruce-founded tradition of playing Watson as an enormous dumbass. And that is much closer to Conan Doyle's books.

The real third lead in the film isn't Lord Blackwood or Inspector Lestrade and it sure as hell isn't Rachel McAdams' shoehorned-in-so-we-have-a-female-lead Irene Adler (who may have one of the smallest ratios of plot relevance to screentime I've seen in a movie this year), but the awesome 1890s London that director Guy Ritchie creates with a clever combination of location shooting and CGI, instantly recognizable as the rainy, moonlit London of cobblestone streets and eerie gaslight lamps that we all think of upon hearing the name Sherlock Holmes. I doubt that it's "realistic," per se, but it creates a mood and a vibe in broad strokes that serves the film's comic book tone perfectly. Beyond that, flick's got all the fights, cool action, exaggerated minutiae-centric sleuthing, and Robert Downey Jr. being a smug asshole you could want, so what more is there to say? Sure, I could gripe about some occasional wonky CGI, too many of the mysteries having random fictional chemicals as their solutions, and one scene where a dog farts for comedy, but to hell with it. This is pure popcorn pulp, and it gets the job done gleefully.

The film ends with an incredibly heavy-handed sequel hook (think Gordon showing Batman the Joker card in Batman Begins, but extended over five minutes and with tons of flashbacks and it having been revealed that the Joker was behind everything all along) making it super-obvious that another Holmes outing is planned in two or three years, and I say shit yeah. I've eaten crow for thinking this before (i.e. Pirates of the Caribbean), but it seems like it can only get better from here.


4 Stars out of 5