I like being subjective, but that might just be me

Opening with the mandatory This is My Blog post:

This is my blog.

It will be a running commentary on film specifically and media in general, founded on the principle that nothing is too insignificant to merit serious over-thinking (or if it is, the internet is the perfect place for it). Basically, everything from the latest Hollywood blockbusters to art films to whatever the hell is happening on Lost can become the stuff of sincere cultural criticism.

Welcome.

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Normally, the posts will be short. But opening the whole thing with a short post seems like an anticlimactic beginning, not to mention no fun.

So to begin, and in the spirit of year-end retrospectives, I present my Top 16 Movies of 2009 (15 was too few and 17 would be excessive). List-making is a shady and hazardous business: numerical rankings are kind of reductive, and I haven't seen everything. But this should at least be a start.

Most people I talk to seem to remember 2009 as a lost year for movies—not to mention the year when Zak Snyder turned Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" into a dirge at the funeral for subtlety. But looking back on it, there were also a lot of very good movies filling in the cracks and closing out the decade in style. I'll say "favorite" because "best" is a loaded word, and one that doesn't acknowledge personal preference. (Not to mention that by 2009, I mean a film's theatrical release in America, though some have been making the festival rounds for longer). And so, my eclectic favorites of 2009, and the ones that positively defined the year for me:

16. Avatar
As it becomes a box office sensation, I’ve heard Avatar charged with many things, from ushering in a new era of cinema, to being over-hyped non-art, to (oddly enough) leading our children towards the day-glo allure of paganism. My own take on it: its lead actor has one facial expression; it has its fair share of holes and convenient coincidences; it hits all the familiar plot points with clockwork regularity; its environmental message feels neither novel nor organic (pun intended); and if I never hear “I See You” playing from the car next to me, I’ll be happy. But right from the opening shots, Avatar can pull you in with an earnest dedication to its own hokum, and I’m willing to drink the Kool-Aid and praise the film for what it is: a gloriously detailed technological marvel, and a fun (if familiar) adventure story with a metaphysical twist. And in a tentpole era where Transformers 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 go in circles for gruelingly excessive lengths, here’s a two and a half hour flick that can more legitimately claim to be epic rather than just long. (Plus, its “foreign race needs a white male hero” subtext is less overtly troubling than it is in, say, The Last Samurai, because we can pretend it’s all about aliens rather than a reflection of deep-rooted ideology. Fun times.)

15. Summer Hours
You can generally spot a foreign art film by a simple, lyrical title about something found in the everyday/natural world, like Wild Strawberries or An Autumn Afternoon. Summer Hours, in this vein, moves with an episodic structure that dips in and out of its characters’ lives—covering a period of time and moments of conflict without breaking from the naturalistic feel. Along the way, it waxes insightful about the purpose of art, the trends of globalization, and the torch being passed from one generation to the next. Beautifully acted and filmed.

14. Up
I loved Up, but not without reservations. Mainly, I feel that there are two sides to it. The opening section (Carl growing old) is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen in any category—children’s, adult’s, animated, live-action, anything. But during the jungle adventure—concerning a mad explorer and a hundred talking dogs—I felt that it turned into a far more ordinary children’s cartoon. Not a bad one, and certainly entertaining, but also unsurprising, a bit incongruous, not fully fleshed out (a rarity for Pixar), and nowhere near the heights of the opening. So for me, there are two ways of looking at Up: either it retreats from its weightier themes, or it takes a kid’s flick and gently slips in a gorgeous meditation on old age. I prefer to think the latter, and either way Up is another winner, with some of the most touching and memorable moments of the year.

13. The Brothers Bloom
At the very least, the latest from Rian Johnson (Brick) deserves notice as one of the more unfairly critically maligned movies of the year, getting mixed reviews and disappearing fast. In all fairness, it’s likely to lose anyone looking for a comic caper a la Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. But we already have a Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and that’s really not what this is. It's not about who gets the money, but about storytelling. It’s a fable about living in fiction versus living in reality, with a surprisingly potent emotional core of brotherly love. It’s not a perfect movie. It may be too bright, shiny, and cute for its own good, a few jokes seem a bit off, and the end is a tad muddy. But it’s smooth and energetic, full of lively and heartfelt performances.

12. Star Trek
Star Trek, with all its many offspring, is one of the few properties of traditional American geekdom that I’m not very familiar with, so I can only judge it as a movie, not as part of a franchise. And as a movie, it’s not so much a masterpiece as what, in a perfect world, every Hollywood blockbuster would be: a well-structured story carried by an engaging cast. More importantly, it knows how to use special effects: not just to throw in tons of visual stimuli (though there are plenty), but to flesh out a detailed fantasy world, which is what special effects have always been necessary for. The glowing space-scapes—and the camera’s roving path inside the ship—shoot for a sense of wonder that only adds to the fun. Anyone who doesn’t like blockbuster tentpoles (the in-jokes, the third act predictability) is unlikely to be won over by anything new. But Star Trek started the summer on a high note that the rest of the season never lived up to. Plus, you have to give credit for using dubious time travel mechanics to make a sequel and a reboot at the same time.

11. Where the Wild Things Are
The sort of movie you love not just in spite of its flaws, but because of them: a beautiful and strange monster that came rumpus-ing out of the studio system. The beginning captures the energy and loneliness of childhood like no other movie I’ve seen. The ending—a view of familial love that’s warm but not cheap—is a thing of beauty. And the journey in the middle is a unique vision of the pros and cons of anarchy: the joy of the letting the wild things out, and the need to rein them in. Likely too abstract and scary for children, but too fantastical for adults, Wild Things hits a kind of zeitgeist in the in-between. By the way, is this something new? We seem to be living at a time when the 18-to-25 demographic is embracing their inner child en masse. People my age look forward to Harry Potter, Pixar films, and Disney princesses as much as any kid. Have young adults always been this nostalgic? Did something change? Is it a reflection of young people reluctantly entering adulthood in a volatile world, or is that just too poetic to be true? I’ll leave that question to sociologists. On a similar note, moving into the Top 10…

10. Coraline
Exhibit X that we live in a golden age of animation: a fairy tale from Neil Gaiman by way of Henry Selick. It’s dark, as fairy tales are, and it writes its plucky-but-self-absorbed heroine accordingly (most movies cast children as either adorably precocious or adorably naïve, but Coraline knows better). And the beautifully moody creepiness certainly captures something of childhood: the phase of your life when something as patently absurd as “people with buttons for eyes” could keep you up at night.

9. The Hurt Locker
What first struck me about this year’s Oscar frontrunner was how straightforward it was. It’s rooted in action movies right down to the banter, and its interpersonal drama can largely be reduced to the age-old conflict between the straight-arrow and the maverick who plays by his own rules. So I can’t really say that it’s that interesting of an approach to the War Movie, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It’s thrillingly well put-together, and its lack of political posture on a heavily politicized issue gives it a kind of character-driven purity. Its mood of tension and chaos, of no visible enemy but a constant pending threat, certainly evokes a different kind of war zone. After all, the movie isn’t structured around any overarching mission—just a countdown to the end of the tour.

8. In the Loop
Focused on the mid-level political strata, In the Loop is, essentially, a back-and-forth screwball comedy where what’s on the line is nothing less than whether or not a war breaks out. Most importantly, this British comedy cleverly avoids the two main pitfalls of failed movie satire: it doesn’t go too far (making its point so heavy that it feels abrasive), and it doesn’t pull away at the last minute (giving a pat happy ending, as if to take it all back). One thing that struck me, though, by the time it opened this summer, was that it felt like a victim of timeliness: six months into the Obama administration, when everyone’s worried about bailouts, health care, and economic death-spirals, a satire of Bush era foreign policy already seemed surprisingly out of date. And this late arrival, if I had to guess, could be a big reason that it didn’t cause more of a stir. But the script is fast and funny, and the cast is perfect. James Gandolfini, as a weary general, may be the movie’s grounded, emotional center. But special notice also has to go to Tom Hollander, as a British politician who’s been handled by PR men for so long that he isn’t sure where he actually stands. Not to mention Peter Capaldi, as the foul-mouthed Scotsman who does the handling.

7. Up in the Air
I remember that when this came out, the all-wise Tomatometer said that it had “just enough edge for mainstream audiences,” and it occurred to me that “just edgy enough for the mainstream” is a fine description of director Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking, Juno). His main characters start out as too cool for school and invariably have sentimental epiphanies. And films like Smoking—and, to a certain extent, Up in the Air—mix sharp satire with an unchallenging reverence for the American Way. However, this mixture of sentimentality and (softened) edge is not inappropriate for a film about humanism triumphing over more “shark”-like impulses. The script snaps, crackles, and never slows down or wastes time, and all three leads earn their Oscar buzz. I know a lot of people found the movie to be a downer, which in large part it is. But it’s ultimately as uncertain as its title, and strangely enough, I see it as hopeful.

6. Gomorrah
A decade of “hyperlink” dramas (Traffic, Crash, Syriana, Babel) closes with one of the strongest: five loosely connected stories set in a Naples crime clan. It doesn’t really try to force melodrama; it prefers a kind of detached realism. It doesn’t really try to bring everyone together; in fact, the fragmented narrative makes the characters feel small, separate, and helpless. Many people will undoubtedly find it boring. But for those inclined to hop on its wavelength, it cultivates a bizarrely mesmerizing atmosphere of dread, loneliness, and chaos, with tiny moments of grotesque comedy. And it has some of the most perfect photography of the year, with a camera that simultaneously feels cut loose and always in the right place at the right time.

5. Inglourious Basterds
I can never tell how significant Quentin Tarantino means to be, or if he’s really just having fun. Case in point is Inglourious Basterds, which raises all sorts of disturbing, provocative questions about the fascistic nature of action films—but then, instead of answering the questions, it shoots them 50 times in the face and burns the motherfucker down. Its ballsy affront to history is, oddly, one of the more truthful things about it: movies are not history, even the more prestigious ones that claim it as their basis. And so long as it’s all wish fulfillment, why not go all-out? If anything, Tarantino is a man for his time and place because he makes clear that reality has been replaced by a (reality-ish) dream world as the subject for films. But all of that just makes Inglourious Basterds one of the most interesting films of the year. What places it high on this list is that it is, well, one the best: an engaging plot full of vivid characters, smooth direction, sharp humor, and a knack for suspense-building that Sergio Leone would approve of.

4. An Education
When I saw the trailer, I dismissed An Education as the kind of bland gentility that gets pumped into arthouses every awards season (period costumes, British accents, etc.). But how unfair I was. The film, in a nutshell: an intelligent but naïve teenage girl, stifled by school and her parents’ ambitious hopes, gets seduced by an older man who’s so charming that you can almost forget he’s clearly up to no good. And along the way, she learns that mistakes don’t ruin you, that she’s stronger than she expected, and that adults are people like any other—both wiser and more clueless than she gives them credit for. If that all sounds like a cliché, it is. But here’s a movie that can give its truisms dramatic vitality, which is a rare thing, even at Oscar season. It does get too pat at the end, but the script by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) cleverly balances humor and drama to make for a beautifully observed coming-of-age story. And Carey Mulligan, brilliantly convincing as the teenage Jenny, gives arguably the Leading Lady performance of the year.

3. Fantastic Mr. Fox
Wes Anderson’s departure from live action—which for him was always a little cartoony to begin with—is lovingly animated and beautifully detailed. Best of all, with his last film almost completely overrun by mannered bourgeois ennui, Fox reclaims the mischief of his earliest works: the Bottle Rocket vibe of imaginative dreamers who come up with needlessly complicated schemes because simple ones are no fun. Stellar all around, from the animation, to the music, to the script, to some of the most heartfelt deadpan to grace an indie age where irony is starting to feel cheap. All of which is not to shortchange how well it accomplishes a simple goal. The fact that this didn’t find much of an audience at the box office—when really, it offers everything a family film is supposed to, and more—stands as one of the bigger injustices of the year. Though it’s too soon to make such a drastic statement, Fox (brace yourself) may replace the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka as the best Roald Dahl adaptation.

2. The White Ribbon
In a small German village on the eve of World War I, a surface of pastoral innocence hides an undercurrent of private lives, secrets, and repressed desires. And this quietly simmering tension slowly but surely finds an outlet in a series of unsolved, seemingly random acts of violence. Austrian director Michael Haneke (Cache), who won the Palme d’Or for this film, excels at making the personal political, and belongs to a rare group of filmmakers who can grip you with a slow pace and unnerve you with silence. Tense, tragic, and hauntingly inconclusive, The White Ribbon is an allegory of denial, of oppression and control, of violence being passed down through the generations. It’s also a reminder that black & white can be as vivid as color: its palette is made up of the blackest blacks and the whitest whites and every ghoulish shade of grey in between. (For arthouse mavens, it rivals anything I’ve seen from Bergman.) See it on the big screen if you can, preferably in a near-empty theater.

1. A Serious Man
Oh boy. I know I’m going to catch some flak for putting this at #1. About half the people I know who saw it absolutely loved it, and the other half were completely put off, so definitely chalk this up as a not-for-everyone movie. But as the Coen brothers’ latest (and arguably most personal) film gets overlooked for a lot of the major awards, I feel like I have to stand by it. It's one of the saddest and funniest movies of the year. And to what extent a movie--any movie--can be seen as both at the same time depends very much on the audience.

In a small Jewish community in suburban Minnesota, a fairly secular college professor, spurred on by personal problems, goes on something of a spiritual quest to make sense of his life. Essentially, the Coen brothers present the Big Questions (about meaning, about god) as a kind of cosmic joke, where the punchline is that there’s no answer. It’s an unpredictable film, a twisting narrative filled with bizarre comedy and the Coens’ knack for dialogue and characterization. And it makes good use of its 1960s period setting: a lilywhite Age of Innocence suburb, with Summer of Love anarchy calling like a siren from off-camera.

The Coen brothers' work has long been filled with ambiguous symbolism and a dedication to formal pleasure—which is something I've seen them criticized for, with the argument that it comes at the expense of emotional insight. Arguably, A Serious Man coheres the ambiguity and formal pleasure into a potent statement. It’s a comedy of uncertainty, where science and faith both come up short, societal standards can't be trusted, and the ultimate truth is nothing that can't be learned from a pop song.

The Coens maintain the sort of distance from their characters normally reserved for Kubrick, which is likely to put off a lot of people. But it feels almost ruefully fitting symbol of its time and place: an escalating series of woes that at first play out like grim camp, but strike home at the end. At the very least, it shows that somewhere between the modern and postmodern eras, existential pain grew a wicked sense of humor. It is, if not their best film, a thematic capstone in the Coen brothers' career.

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There are many strong movies this year that aren't on here: great movies that missed a spot list, small gems, or otherwise noteworthy films. So for making moviegoing in 2009 worthwhile, stand up and take a bow: District 9, Drag Me to Hell, 500 Days of Summer, The Girlfriend Experience, Goodbye Solo, Humpday, Moon, Public Enemies, and You the Living.

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There it is. A decade is gone, and will soon undoubtedly be the subject of American Graffiti-style nostalgia films featuring iPods and Paris Hilton. Bring on the new decade. Come on, we can take it.