The Awesome & The Awful of 2009

2009. The year when Christian Bale lost the plot (as did Terminator: Salvation), Star Trek was re-born, Harry Potter continued to financially bulldoze every other film out of its way and the decades old question of whether or not the graphic novel Watchmen is actually unfilmable was finally put to rest (It is.) James Cameron returned to feature film-making with the over-hyped, underwhelming but undeniable box office champion Avatar and 3-D started to look like it's here to stay. Put simply, it’s been a rotten year for films. Many appeared to be so bad they simply had to be avoided so, for example, there’s no Dance Flick, Hotel For Dogs or Bride Wars on this list, although I have no doubt they would be here if I could summon the will to watch them. (I can’t.) Of course it wasn’t all bad, though I wonder how many of the ten best would have made the list in a stronger year. Regardless, here is my choice of the ten best and ten worst films I saw in 2009.

THE BEST.

1. DOUBT

One of the very few films of this year’s awards season deserving of its place, Doubt deftly examined notions of prejudice and the devastating consequences of gossip and assumption within a compelling story set in the Catholic Church of the 1960s. Superb performances by its three leads, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams and a fantastic script by John Patrick Shanley based on his play, made Doubt escape its theatrical origins to become one of the first great films of the year.

2. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

I’ve become very sceptical of internet buzz over the years but for once all the talk was justified. Let The Right One In is a relationship film masquerading as a horror movie, but don’t be fooled; there are some brilliant and genuinely frightening moments of horror in the film. The two children are fantastic and this film and another further down the list are tied for my “favourite final scene of the year” award. Vampire movies are enjoying a new lease of life (See what I did there?) but this stood head and shoulders above the rest. Atmospheric, unconventional and absolutely brilliant.

3. ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL

It was a choice between this and The Cove for the documentary spot but, despite writing for an environmentally aware magazine, I had to go with Anvil for its warmth, charm and hysterical lack of self awareness on the part of the ageing rockers who had a fleeting taste of mega-stardom and then lost it again. It’s like Spinal Tap never happened but what’s great is that you are completely onside with the band, willing their dreams to come true along with them. Anvil was undoubtedly one of the funniest, most enjoyable films of the year.

4. MOON

There were several points in Moon where I expected it to go off the rails, to take the predictable route, to lose its way and it never, ever did. Ambiguous, sombre but never pretentious, Moon continued the current resurgence in intelligent science fiction and boasted a great central performance from Sam Rockwell. Hugely atmospheric, thanks in no small part to fantastic cinematography by Gary Shaw and an evocative score from Darren Aronofsky’s regular composer Clint Mansell, Duncan Jones’ debut film launched what, based on this evidence, should be a long career filled with great films.

5. DISTRICT 9

District 9 wore its genre influences on its sleeve and had a political agenda that was about as subtle as Katie Price. But it makes this list because it was smart, fun, funny and exciting, basically everything that the $200 million mega movies claim to be and rarely if ever are. Newcomer Sharlto Copley excelled as the blindly faithful company man whose journey (both emotional and physical) gives him greater insight into the “prawns” who have come to Earth. An alien invasion movie where the aliens aren’t actually invading and the humans are the bad guys, District 9 was probably the best genre movie of the year.

6. UP

I have to confess a certain prejudice towards animated films. No matter how much people try and convince me they can be enjoyable for adults, I find it difficult to escape the fact that I’m watching something that’s aimed at people 25 years my junior. However Up was a really fantastic piece of work. A wonderful story, funny, genuinely touching, brilliantly written and directed, Up was considerably better and more mature than most films this year that were supposedly aimed at people my age.

7. A SERIOUS MAN

The Coen Brothers’ ability to diversify is typified by their last three films, No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading and now A Serious Man. Low key, intelligent, funny, enigmatic, the story of Larry Gopnik watching his life disintegrate around him as he wonders why, entertains and infuriates (in the best possible way) in equal measure. I liked the film from the start but in my review I wondered if it would grow on me even more and, even though I only reviewed it a few weeks ago, it already has. This is the second film tied for my favourite final scene of the year.

8. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

Paranormal Activity would have been a great film to "discover", to sit and watch with no pre-conceived ideas, as the film cannot quite bear the weight of all the hype. That said, it is easily the best pure horror film of the year and one of the best horror films in a long time, psychological in a way that stays with you and arguably becomes more frightening when you return to your own house. One of those "how has this not been done before" ideas, the film piles on the tension as ordinary couple Micah and Katie set up a camera to record the strange and terrifying goings on in their house. The finale is less than satisfying but the journey is well worth your time. Slow burning, tense and genuinely scary.

9. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

If someone had told me at the start of the year that a Spike Jonze film would be on my ten best list I would not have believed them, yet here it is. Emotional, imaginative and affecting, its lack of narrative is more than made up for by a surplus of character and emotion. The story of Max, a young boy clinging to childhood as he views both his impending adolescence and the changes within his family as sources of enormous fear, Max's adventure with the Wild Things, strange creatures who personify different elements of Max's personality and struggle, is refreshingly lacking in typical Hollywood "life lessons" and is instead honest, melancholy and very touching.

10. 2012

Every time I think of that limo outrunning California falling into the sea behind it, it makes me smile, possibly the only special effects film of the year to do so. The various stories are terrible, the dialogue is atrocious but a great cast powers through to make the moments in between the mayhem just about tolerable. Of course, it's the mayhem that got everyone to the cinema in the first place and on that front 2012 delivers in spades. Earthquakes, tsunamis, an aircraft carrier plunging into the White House, Hawaii buried under rivers of lava, a tiny plane dodging crumbling buildings... 2012 had it all! Undoubtedly one of the best films of the year.

HONOROUBLE MENTIONS

Milk, The Wrestler, Hunger, Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (More animation! What’s wrong with me?!) Angels And Demons (So bad it’s good), Drag Me To Hell.

AND THE WORST.

SIGH...

1. THE READER/REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

A Kate Winslet double bill of doom that represents everything that’s wrong with the awards season, these two films screamed “I’M IMPORTANT”!!! but neglected to tell us why. Revolutionary Road had precisely nothing new to say on its subject of American suburban decay in the 1960s and The Reader, despite having a couple of interesting ideas, seemed to be trying to set a record for the most boring film in history. If it didn’t quite make it, it came very close.

2. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

David Fincher and Brad Pitt were coming off two of the best films of their careers, Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford respectively, but both were undeserved financial flops. So what better way to get back on speaking terms with the box office than with this queasy, namby-pamby, three hour snoozefest in which Brad Pitt ages backwards and the audience wishes it could. Another Oscar contender in one of the worst Oscar line-ups in recent years.

3. KNOWING

The advertising campaign for Knowing promised a twist that would blow your mind. SPOILER: It didn’t. ANOTHER SPOILER. It’s utter crap. Once upon a time Nicolas Cage was a credible actor, but that was a long, long time ago. Knowing actually starts reasonably okay in a campy, silly kind of way but it quickly derails and plummets down the ravine in a flaming mess of weird hair, strange teeth and a truly awful script.

4. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE

A bad Summer got off to a shocking start with this bargain basement blockbuster. The story of how Logan came to be Wolverine was covered reasonably thoroughly as I recall in X-Men 2 but apparently not thoroughly enough so off we went again with Colonel Striker, adamantium claws, blah blah blah, wake me up when the whole mess is over. Boasting computer effects apparently achieved with a Commodore 64, the only consolation was that there was simply no way the Summer could get any worse…

5. TRANSFORMERS 2: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN

…Oh, right. A hideous, hideous, hideous cinematic experience, it’s really saying something when unremitting racism can emerge as the least of a film’s problems. The most blatantly cynical film I think I’ve ever seen, Transformers 2 elevated crass commercialism into an art form. Rather than cluttering up the multiplexes, this film needed to crawl under a rock and die.

6. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

Quentin Tarantino is a film maker with nothing to say which is why every film he has ever made, including this one, is a “homage” (“rip-off”) to other films in which every character speaks in exactly the same way (i.e. like Quentin Tarantino) and spends hours talking about nothing. This is not a film about the joy of cinema as some have argued, it is two and a half hours of adolescent, inane, rambling nonsense. I don’t care how popular it was, I hated this film.

7. ORPHAN

There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to include Orphan on this list. It contains a twist so staggeringly implausible that, not only does it have to be seen to be believed, really, it just has to be seen. The sheer guts it takes to come up with this ending, much less deliver it with a straight face in the manner in which it does is impressive. The previous 90 minutes is a complete waste of everyone’s time but that twist when it comes… Well let’s just say that, for all the wrong reasons, it should go down as one of the greatest endings in cinema history. Orphan is the one film on this list worth watching but only if you like to watch bad films in an ironic way and have the patience for a whole lot of nothing before reaching the punch line.

8. GAMER

Gamer pretends to make a serious point about the voyeuristic nature of modern society. Naturally, it does this in the most lurid way possible, stopping every now and then to tell us how culturally bankrupt we all are as it leers at yet another pair of breasts. Charisma bypass Gerard Butler runs around killing people in ludicrously violent ways and that’s about all there is to it. Tedious and deeply depressing.

9. LAW ABIDING CITIZEN

Hey look, it's Gerard Butler again! I thought about having a Butler double bill in the same way that I have a Winslet double bill but these films are so unforgivable, they deserve seperate places on the list. We have the success of 300 to thank for the fact that, not content to simply star in dreadful films, thespian Gerard Butler is now in a position to produce dreadful films for himself to star in. I went in hoping it would be so bad it's good and instead it's just baaaaaaaad. A crap premise, an appalling script and a twist to rival that of Orphan, Law Abiding Citizen bludgeons you across the head with stupidity and tedium. It's also further evidence that, Oscar or not, Jamie Foxx is actually not very good.

10. 2012

Exactly as above, except in the last sentence substitute"worst" for "best".

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Push, 12 Rounds, The Taking of Pelham 123, Jennifer’s Body, too many to mention