Best Movies of 2009

Every year it seems like I intend to get out and see more movies, and every year I fail once again. I only visited the theater nine times, and only managed to at least catch one new movie at home before writing this. Quite shameful. It didn't exactly strike me as the best year, with only one film I'd call outstanding in addition to a handful of solid genre stuff. I should have at least seen the new Coen movie, though.

Best of 2009

7. The Men Who Stare at Goats


I'm not sure what's holding me back from really embracing this movie, but I did enjoy it quite a bit. Any time a comedy takes a few steps away from the traditional beats of the genre, it's usually worth at least a try, and this film makes for a nice mix of relevance and sci-fi absurdity. Plus it's hard to go wrong with that cast.

6. The Hangover

There really isn't that much that separates this movie from the pack of mainstream comedy, but the likability of the whole cast and especially Zach Galifianakis' breakout role just make it work. It was a bit of a risk letting him do his own thing in what is otherwise fairly standard stuff, but thankfully it seems to have been a good idea. Definitely hits the ceiling for this sort of movie.

5. Avatar


Flawed yes, but ultimately I find Avatar much easier to like than hate. It's already the second highest grossing movie worldwide ever, after of course Cameron's last movie, but I actually enjoyed this one for the most part, and it didn't do the disservice of putting me off one of the best actors currently in his 30s for about a decade.

4. Zombieland


Just a straight-up fun movie and one of the best surprises of the year. I don't know how much the writers being handed Deadpool affects the possibility of sequels going forward, but I'm not sure they're necessary. Just showing a snippet of life in the zombie apocalypse was all they had to do, and it worked out pretty well in pretty much any way you could hope. Good times.

3. District 9


I didn't love it like it seemed most of the online community did, but it was still a well done, passionate film that had something to say. It's striking how similar it is to Avatar in some ways, but District 9 isn't weighed down by a budget in the hundreds of millions and a need to make that all back, allowing it to take chances and present a more interesting, darker vision. And I won't get tired of watching people explode into splashes of red goo for a long time.

2. Star Trek


I've seen 79 episodes and seven films in this series, and I enjoyed this the most pretty easily. We'll see how much longer its success can carry my interest in exploring the decades-old franchise, but in case I'll always enjoy it for being a relatively intelligent space travel movie with a very likable cast and wonderfully paced adventure. You know, I didn't even realize Eric Bana was the villain while I was watching it? That was odd. I need to see it again now that I know Bones is awesome.

1. Inglourious Basterds


Basterds wasn't really what anyone who didn't read the script expected. And for some people that was a very bad thing. They wanted a couple hours of Brad Pitt and some Jews kicking Nazi ass, and instead they got a lot of long scenes mostly depicting extended conversations between some Europeans. And they were disappointed. For those people, I am very sorry that they didn't get it. I could have enjoyed what the trailers seemed to promise, but what I actually got was so much smarter, and better, and well, more Quentin Tarantino. He had the audacity to end the movie by having Brad Pitt look at the audience and essentially call the film his masterpiece, and you know what, I think it was. Fantastic movie.

Avatar

I was in a bit of a conundrum here. James Cameron was possibly the best action director in Hollywood for about a decade, but that decade ended fifteen years ago. The only film he made since then was one I very much did not care for, and I was very unsure about Avatar based on what I'd read and seen. I went into the theater hoping it would be awesome and expecting it to be mediocre, and it ended up being somewhere in the middle, which I probably could have foreseen.

Just to get this out of the way, yes, a disproportionate amount of the film's appeal hinges on the visuals. And they are mighty impressive, both from looking at the quality of the computer effects and the effectiveness of the 3D. I haven't seen any other movies with anything more sophisticated than the blue and red glasses, so I can't honestly say how good or bad it is by modern standards. I will say that it looked pretty awesome, though the film still would have looked very nice without it. What the 3D was attempting to do was further pull you into this world Cameron created from scratch, and for better or worse it mostly succeeded. It's not really hype to say that you mostly forget you're watching something that beyond a few pieces of set in the human encampments only exists at all digitally, and you're left to focus on the story. Whether you actually like that story is a different question. But the visuals avoided gimmickry with jumping out at you for the most part, and spent a lot of time just letting you enjoy looking at it. I feel like this will hold up a lot better with time than effects laden pictures from earlier last decade, but only time will tell if that's the case.

So to answer whether the film beyond the special effects worked for me, the answer is: sorta. It's not really a great original story beyond the setting. It is very competently constructed, though. The film makes perhaps too great an attempt to justify everything, answering a lot of questions I had about the basic premise. Important elements are introduced properly before coming back later. Despite what you may think about the long running time, and it did feel a good twenty minutes too long, there is very little that happens and doesn't serve a purpose. It's not the most elegant script Cameron's ever written, but I guess it didn't have to be with his budget, and for the most part it all fits together and works to some degree.

None of the characters will impress you with their originality or uniqueness, but they're generally likable or easy to hate where required. For some reason Sam Worthington seems to be in every big action movie now, and I thought he was fine if not too remarkable. He was much more expressive in his alien form than as a human, but I thought that worked - he's becoming increasingly detached from his original life, and his whole character is driving towards being one of the natives. People have made a lot of disparaging remarks regarding the whole noble savages thing, but I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with how it works here. The movie's fairly funny too, providing some really nerdy laughs (the MacGuffin mineral that entirely explains the human presence on Pandora is actually called Unobtainium) as well as some much broader ones. The action sequences are sprinkled throughout, with the only major battle happening at the end, and they're all suitably exciting and well laid out. Say what you want about Cameron, the man still knows how to do this sort of thing. I don't know how excited I am for sequels, but I totally respect him for crafting an entire world and story out of whole cloth (and maybe a few bits from other stories), making an extremely expensive movie with it, and successfully selling it to the world. If I'm not mistaken it made the whole budget back worldwide in the first two weeks, and this was the third straight weekend it made about seventy million bucks in the US alone. I don't really dislike adaptations, but I do like to see original work as well, and if this means more is coming, then I'm happy.

Aliens

It's a damn shame it took James Cameron fifteen years to finally get back to directing action films. In just a decade spanning the 80s and 90s, he made four of the best and most original such movies in that period, plus The Abyss which was okay I guess. Alien still holds up and is worth watching, but this is the movie I regret not seeing until now. I've heard of its influence on the aesthetic of many modern video games over and over, and that rang pretty true while I was watching. Aliens takes the setting and style of the first movie, and amps up the intensity and excitement tenfold. It begins with Ripley finally being discovered and awoken from her frozen state fifty seven years after the first movie, not long after her previously unmentioned daughter, that she remembers as being ten, dying an old woman. It's kind of a convenient way to add emotion to the revelation, but Cameron does a good job of carrying the motherhood thread through the rest of the story. A colony has been established on the planet where the first alien was discovered, and she goes on a mission with a unit of soldiers to try to prevent things from going to hell. You can guess whether they succeed.

The movie maintains some of the horror elements of the first film, but mostly establishes its own personality with the various wisecracking marines and the added danger of a species that is now mostly fighting on its own turf. They expand on the question of the creatures' biology, and where they all come from. The action doesn't have the specific complexity of more modern movies, but there's a real sense of chaos and danger as they basically wage war on each other. A few of the characters are somewhat annoying, but you come to regret each of their deaths and root for their triumphs. The aliens are generally pulled off better than in the first movie, with some clever filming to hide the fact that they're, you know, not real, and the final obstacle is a particularly impressive bit of practical effects work. The climactic moments are as strong as in any movie, and in the end Aliens is a great, satisfying action movie, dark but not as depressingly bleak as the rest of the series. Just watching it made me more optimistic for Avatar.