Brian's Favorite Movies of 2009

For me, the two sure things in movies right now are Tarantino and Pixar. Any time Quentin Tarantino and the people at Pixar release a movie, I can expect greatness without fear of being disappointed. 2009 saw both Tarantino and Pixar produce arguably their best work yet.
Overall 2009 was decently strong with a couple powerhouses and good showings from comedies, animation and documentaries.
Below are my favorites of the year. I will first briefly mention eight movies (in alphabetical order) I want to recognize and then I will lay out my 10 favorite films.


Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Based on a popular kids book, this movie updates the original story with new characters and very entertaining gags. The animation is very clean and the visuals are excellent. It's easily one of the funniest movies of the year.
 
Crazy Heart
Jeff Bridges plays a washed-up country musician who spends his time performing in dive bars and bowling alleys. On the way he meets a young journalist (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and starts a complicated romance with her. The formula's been done before (see 2008's The Wrestler) but Bridges is as good as ever and will probably earn his first Oscar for the role.


An Education
Carey Mulligan stars as an English teenager in the 1960s destined for college and great things who gets caught up in a romance with an older guy, played by the frustratingly underrated Peter Sarsgaard. Their romance makes her happy, but begins to deflate her grades because her dad (played by another underrated actor Alfred Molina) puts in her head that marrying a man who can support her is more important than earning a career of her own. It's a good look into a very different time.


In the Loop
Filled with rapid-fire dialogue and that dry British humor, In the Loop moves at a very quick pace. The story begins when the British Minister for International Development lets slip in an interview that he thinks "war is unforeseeable" in the Middle East. This starts a domino effect that involves both American and British officials. The film honors the amount of responsibility a government official has while mocking the system in which one works.


Invictus
The story of Nelson Mandela's quest to unite the South African people by means of the national rugby team in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Mandela (Morgan Freeman, in the part he seemingly was born to play) begins a relationship with team captain Matt Damon in hopes of pushing the team to a World Cup championship. Director Clint Eastwood shows Mandela as the honorable man we've heard he is, and then some. This movie got jipped out of a best picture nomination and was replaced by a much weaker movie, The Blind Side.


Star Trek
I'm very surprised I enjoyed this as much as I did. This film is extremely well made and lacks that overuse of unnecessary computer graphics. Chris Pine is great as a young James Kirk in the days leading up to him becoming captain of the Enterprise. The movie uses time travel for plot convenience, but tells a compelling, entertaining story as well.


Whatever Works
Throw in Woody Allen and a type-cast Larry David and you get an intelligent comedy about a disgruntled old man who thinks he's better than everybody. David shows off his surprising acting chops, and of course is as funny as ever. He marries a much younger girl, played by Evan Rachel Wood, who believes all of the arrogant stuff he says about himself, thus she is infatuated with him. There are plenty of goofy characters and unusual relationships in this one to keep you laughing until the credits roll.


Zombieland
Now here's a movie that knows exactly what it is and unfolds as it should. There are several movies with plenty of potential, but lack a certain stability because it can't put a finger on what kind of movie it's trying to be. Zombieland is downright hilarious. It's the funniest movie I've seen in a while. It takes you on the voyage of four survivors in a country of zombies. If you're looking for a creative comedy that doesn't hold back, look no further.

10. 500 Days of Summer
Memory doesn't work in chronilogical order. Some of our most vivid memories might have happened 15 years ago while we might forget what we had for lunch yesterday. 500 Days of Summer is in the order of Tom Hansen's memory which centers around the 500 days he knew Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). The scenes are, more-or-less, laid out in the order of importance or relevance rather than the order in which they happened. Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a surprisingly good performance) is a romantic and enjoys the notion of his romances having a future. Summer likes Tom and willingly begins a very close friendship with him, but avoids the labels and prefers their relationship to be its own entity without a title. Though it can be cheesy at points (like the title), the movie has a true charm and is very believable, which is important with a story like this. Unlike some movies, the out-of-order layout is beneficial to the viewer because we think we know where the film is headed while at the same time being unsure of how we'll get there. With two very different, but equally likable characters, this movie's core is extremely sweet.

9. A Single Man
Colin Firth (in one of my favorite performances of the year) plays George, a 50ish college professor who after the sudden death of his boyfriend (Matthew Goode) struggles to return to his normal life. While deeply wounding him, the tragedy also allows him to see beauty almost everywhere he goes, simply because he stops long enough to see it. The true triumph in this movie is the camera and Colin Firth's facial expressions when he holds a flower with a soft tenderness or slowly scans a school secretary's face before commenting on how beautiful she always looks. Acting students can learn a lot in the scene when George is informed his lover is dead. The camera zooms in on his heart broken face and doesn't cut for what seems like an eternity. Firth subtlely breaks your heart thus allowing you to truly care about his character. Director Tom Ford uses close-ups and long takes to give this wonderful film a deep, personal touch.

8. The Hurt Locker
The challenge every war movie faces is the necessity to tell a believable story, but produce it in a manner that sets it apart from a million other movies about similar subjects. The Hurt Locker pulls that off. Jeremy Renner plays the leader of a three-man Army bomb squad, which is easily one of the most dangerous jobs in the military. SSG William James (Renner) is an expert at defusing bombs but could improve in the art of earning the trust of his team members Sgt. JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). Since they're dealing with bombs, there's not much combat in this movie, but alot of quiet, tense scenes in which James attempts to defuse a bomb, or in some cases, several bombs. They do learn to stick together, only because they're in a town in Iraq where everyone they run into seems to want them dead. Renner and Mackie are the acting standouts with great cameos by Guy Pearce and, one of my favorites, Ralph Fiennes. Director Kathryn Bigelow gets a bit fancy for my taste with unnecessary closeups and slow motion, but overall she tells a fascinating, and sometimes deeply disturbing, story about the mentality of soldiers in wartime.

7. The Hangover
Calling The Hangover the funniest movie of the year actually devalues it. It's a better movie than that. Yes it's insanely funny, but it moves like a suspense drama with bonus laughs at every corner. In most movies, it's a bad idea to allow a big moment or important event to happen off camera. The Hangover has fun with that idea. We witness what happens before the Las Vegas bachelor party directly followed by the painful morning after. Seemingly, the situations you usually build your movie on were somewhere in between. And that's the beauty of this movie. The viewer knows as much as the three hungover groomsmen (Zach Galifianakis, who steals the show, Ed Helms and Bradley Cooper) and we get to tag along as they uncover what happened the night before and, more importantly, what happened to the groom-to-be.

  6. Fantastic Mr. FoxWes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox is absolutely wonderful. Based on Roald Dahl's classic children's book about a fox who messes up his family's life, as well as the lives of other animals in the area, by getting caught stealing from the three men who run the town, Boggis Bunce and Bean. The men attempt to rid the animals of the area, but Mr. Fox and his fellow animals won't go down without a fight. I have to admit it took me a second to get used to the stop motion animation, but once I did, it was smooth sailing. With the likes of Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe and Anderson regulars Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson supplying voices, this movies contains so much comedy and clever dialogue that I was literally smiling throughout the entire movie. The pure bliss I felt watching this caused me to buy the book, which I can't wait to read.

  5. A Serious ManMichael Stuhlbarg. If there's any justice in Hollywood, Michael Stuhlbarg will be a household name some day. He put together my favorite performance of the year and if the right people take notice, there will be plenty more to come. He plays a midwestern college professor named Larry Gopnik who lives a normal life until his wife (Sari Lenneck) tells him she wants a divorce. She admits to having fallen in love with their friend Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed) though she never slept with Sy, but she wants a divorce so she can. This comes at a time when Larry's inept brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is staying at their house. So if Larry leaves to stay at a hotel, Arthur must come with him. Add in a couple crazy neighbors, a student attempting to blackmail him and the upcoming decision on whether or not he gets tenure and Larry is nearly at the end of his rope. This might sound like heavy drama, but this is a Coen brothers movie and they do dark comedy better than anybody. If it weren't for Quentin Tarantino, I would consider the Coen brothers to be the best dialogue writers working today. The conversations they write are all about timing. If two characters are talking, at the perfect moment a third character will pop in and sometimes from offscreen. The pacing is spot on and there's an ebb and flow that moves the scene perfectly. A Serious Man has scene after scene of such dialogue. The foundation of this movie is Judaism and growing up in it. The Coens are Jewish so their experiences growing up certainly helped authenticate the feel and emotion of the story.

4. The Cove
I wasn't ready for this movie. I popped it in the DVD player knowing only that it was a documentary about dolphins. A little more information would have gone a long way in properly preparing me for this sad, sad story. In Japan there is a secret monstrous, inhumane situation happening on a regular basis. Fishermen in a cove in Taijii routinely catch dolphins. Then trainers come and pick out the ones they want for performances at Sea World and zoos and aquariums across the world. And since dolphins use sonar, being trapped in a small pool surrounded by a raucous crowd is torture. But that's not the worst part. You see when they catch these dolphins, only some are chosen to be show-dolphins. What happens to the ones they don't chose, you ask? They're killed. Why wouldn't they just let them go, you say? Great question. I wish I knew the answer. Film maker Louie Psihoyos  profiles dolphin trainer Ric O'Barry who essentially started the world's infatuation with dolphins. O'Barry was the original dolphin trainer for the tv series Flipper. After making a living on it in his younger years, one of the dolphins who played Flipper died in his arms. That moment affected him so much that he's been trying to stop dolphin catching, and killing, ever since. Psihoyos, O'Barry and the crew take a tremendous risk with this film. Their number one goal is to expose this in hopes the Japanese government will stop it. There are caper-like scenes in which they sneak into the cove in the middle of the night to plant rock-shaped cameras around the area and in trees to hopefully film what actually happens everyday. And that's where the strength of this movie is. While the viewer as well as the film makers know these dolphins are being killed, nobody has been able to get real footage of it. Near the end of the film they show you the horrifying truth in a jaw-dropping 10 minutes that feels like several hours. If you want to see this movie, you should. But please be prepared for those final scenes. If you don't think you can handle it, don't watch it. And I haven't even mentioned that these fishermen sell the dolphin meat in stores in Japan, but label the meat as something else because, let's face it, who wants to eat a dolphin. Documentaries tell us facts and truth. I wish this one was lying.

3. Up
Now here's a more up-lifting movie (pun fully intended). Pixar is the undisputed champion of animation right now. Not only are they beginning to dominate animation awards, six of the ten Pixar films have been nominated for best screenplay at the Oscars. They consistently produce movies with the perfect combination of superb story telling and dazzling animation, and they keep getting better. Up is arguably their best film to date, and it's not like it doesn't have stiff competition. It's about Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), a widowed old man who refuses to sell the house he owned with his wife so he ties thousands of balloons to it and heads toward South America, where he and his wife had always dreamed to go. Young boy scout Russell (Jordan Nagai) is on Carl's porch upon takeoff giving Carl no choice but to take him along for the ride. As always, golden comedy follows. Along the way they encounter talking dogs, a large, colorful bird Russell names Kevin and Carl's favorite explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer) who might not be as great as Carl once thought. It really is just another master work by the folks at Pixar which makes me even more excited about Toy Story 3!

2. Up in the Air
Generations from now, people will watch Up in the Air and know what American life was like in 2009. The suffering economy, the rising unemployment rate and continued frustrations at the airport are all on display in this movie. Ryan Bingham (the always brilliant George Clooney) fires people for a living. Large companies hire him to fly around the country and fire their employees so they don't have to. Sounds unpleasant, but he is good at it and he's found pleasure in the routine of traveling in and out of airports collecting a record number of frequent flyer miles. In walks young spitfire Natalie Keener (Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick) who plans to save the company money by firing people using webcams as opposed to firing them in person. Bingham, of course, is against this, not necessarily because it's wrong or disrespectful, but because he's made a living the other way. To earn his respect, Natalie tags along on a firing trip to see how hard the job really is. The true emotion of this movie is in the firing scenes. They are all very realistic, so much so that I wasn't surprised to learn that some of the fired people in the movie are real people who were laid off and asked to relive getting fired for this movie. Clooney's character starts to shed his cool loner image when he meets Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) because what else would bring it out of him. The emotions in Up in the Air are sometimes subtle, but they build up and build up and become overwhelming by the time the credits role. It's a real heartfelt, relatable 21st century masterpiece by Jason Reitman.

1. Inglourious Basterds
And he does it again. Quentin Tarantino is the best filmmaker out there. I know I throw the word masterpiece around some times, but Inglourious Basterds is indeed a masterpiece. It's set in the latter years of World War II and involves a troop of Jewish American soldiers who as Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) puts it are going to be doing "one thing and one thing only ... killin' Nazis." The killing he refers to includes scalping and sometimes smashing a man in the head with a baseball bat, courtesy of the Bear Jew (Cabin Fever and Hostel director Eli Roth). The ones they don't kill get a swastika carved into their foreheads. The story also involves Tarantino's best character to date, Nazi Col. Hans Landa played expertly by Christoph Waltz. Landa is called the Jew Hunter and the opening scene has Landa interrogating a French farmer suspected of hiding Jews. Any uncertainty about how good this movie was going to be was erased in this brilliantly tense and gripping scene. Melanie Laurent plays Shoshanna who escaped from Landa, not before he had her family brutally killed. Four years later she owns a movie theater in France and lives under a different name. The rest of the story involves Adolf Hitler himself (Martin Wuttke), a British officer who knows German (Michael Fassbender), a double agent German actress (Diane Kruger), a Nazi soldier and soon to be movie star (Daneil Bruhl) who is infatuated with Shoshanna, a badass Nazi turned Basterd named Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) and a cast of wonderful German and French actors that are new faces to American movies. The plot mainly circles around Shoshanna's movie theater. Since France is occupied by Nazis, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's number two and head of the German film industry, wants to hold the screening of his new film at Shoshanna's theater. Both the Basterds and Shoshanna plan to take advantage of this event and attempt to potentially end the war in one night. As I mentioned above, there is no better place to find impeccable dialogue than in a Tarantino movie. Dialogue is Tarantino's fuel. His movies literally run on the conversations as opposed to action sequences and special effects. A scene between Landa and Shoshanna in a French restaraunt is as absorbing as the opening scene. Another scene in the basement of a bar with the German actress, three Basterds disguised as Nazis and an aggressive Gestapo officer (August Diehl, my second favorite performance in the movie) is one of many scenes where Tarantino proves he doesn't need a Brad Pitt in every scene to keep you watching. Speaking of him, one of the things I hope people take from this movie is how gifted a comedy actor Pitt can be. From his great quotes to his sorry Italian accent, Pitt is surprisingly the comic relief in an otherwise serious movie. As the narrator (Samuel L. Jackson) says at one point in the movie, nitrate film is three times as flammable as paper. Inglourious Basterds is on fire and as you watch you can feel it burning itself a permanent place in cinema history.


Thanks for reading and stay tuned for my 100 favorite movies of the 2000s as well as my Oscar predictions.