2009: Must-See Films

Through its note-perfect use of laughter, tears, and some of the best character building you're going to see all year, UP IN THE AIR is a film that can be watched repeatedly, and each time, you'll discover something new and remarkable. There's an easy flow and dignity to this movie that made watching it the most effortless and enjoyable experience I had all year, but it still made me ponder (and often reaffirmed) my definitions of connections, relationships, family, and friends. There's a genuine pleasure to watching UP IN THE AIR that I got from so few other films this or any other year, and I truly can't wait to revisit Ryan and the circle of acquaintances that clutter his life.

This seriously well-made science fiction epic combines politics, social commentary, aliens, extreme cartoony violence, and one of the best classic Hitchcock-ian, wrong-man-pursued plots in recent memory. Above all other things, DISTRICT 9 is endlessly entertaining. I don't even know why you're reading this; you know you're going to see this three or four times in theaters and then go buy the DVD the day it comes. Yes, folks, it's that good. And I think without anticipating it, I've stumbled upon my favorite movie of the summer of 2009. I love when that happens.

MOON is one of the finest works of cinematic science fiction that I've seen in a very long time. I've been telling people that it's the best sci-fi work I've seen in five years, but that timeframe isn't really tied to a particular movie. For all I know, it's the best science fiction film made in 20 years. I keep searching my personal databank to think of a film set in the future that I've enjoyed more, and I have to go back to some major league classics to find one. People are going to draw all sorts of comparisons between MOON and such classic films as SILENT RUNNING, ALIEN (more for the ho-hum quality of space living than the presence of any actual aliens), OUTLAND, even 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, but rather than look for plot or tone similarities, look at what great company this film is keeping in the minds of critics and fans alike. This is a film made for people who grew up loving great science fiction films and literature, especially works made during the 1960s and '70s. There's a timeless quality to MOON that drew me in and gave me no choice but to have a deeply emotional reaction to this beautiful movie. I have little doubt this film will end up on my best of 2009 list, and you should see it just as soon as it lands in your neck of the woods.

Holy sweet Jesus dipped in molasses. OK, I had no freakin' idea that this film was going to kick quite this much behind. But knock your ass into your shoes is exactly what happens when you take a familiar title, turn it into a franchise (this is no remake, re-imagining or retread of the Abel Ferrara BAD LIEUTENANT), and hand the reigns over to visionary Werner Herzog, who really has to go out of his way to make a bad movie these days. So here's the upshot: if you claim to be bored with formulaic Hollywood movies, this is a film custom made for you. Nothing about this movie is conventional, acceptable or easy to watch, but, man, is it insanely entertaining. I don't know who to heap the most praise upon--Herzog or Cage--so allow me to bow to them both and hope they make many more films together. They clearly belong in each other's company. And together, the two capture New Orleans so completely, you can actually smell the dank, moldy pockets that existed after Katrina. Just thinking about it gives me the vapors. Just go see this movie if you really need a cinematic experience that will take you way the hell out of your comfort zone and wake you the *beep* up.

I walked into this fantastic little British production knowing next to nothing about who was in it or what it was about. So as each new layer of the story revealed itself, I was more and more impressed as time went one. The film is, at times, lighter than air and heavy beyond words. For such a small film, it takes you on one of the biggest life journeys I've seen in ages.

Abrams and screenwriters Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman breathlessly push the story forward while still leaving room to get to know the film’s heroes. It’s a warp 10 adventure, but one anchored by characters whose clever banter patches over a tendency to ache and bleed. (Sometimes in green.) Is it Star Trek? The many callbacks to the past—don’t choose the red jumpsuit—don’t really disguise an only-clever-enough plot or a shortage of Trek’s penchant for social subtext. But it is the sort of Abrams-patented combination of gripping action and vulnerable heroes writ large. It boldly goes somewhere different and makes it hard to leave the film not hoping for a return voyage soon.

After a thrilling hour, the film starts to lose faith in its ability and gets caught in the convoluted tangles of its own plot, as the style becomes increasingly beholden to the films of Wes Anderson—stop-on-a-dime dolly shots, Cat Stevens songs and all. Johnson sets viewers up for greatness, but ultimately offers much milder pleasures. The film isn’t an outright con, but it’s easy to feel a little misled by the end.

(500) Days Of Summer’s free-flowing structure allows for a funny, pointed interplay between the sweet and sour states of the relationship, as well as a thoughtful deconstruction of how love flourishes and unravels. And a handful of sequences are standalone classics, like a Hall & Oates-fueled outpouring of post-coital bliss and a devastating split-screen that measures the expectations of a moment against its reality. So why did Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber need to keep in so many scenes that are merely cute for cute’s sake, like having an Abigail Breslin type dispensing wisdom, or tacking on third-person omniscient narration with the tone of a Pushing Daisies episode? The film winds up in a no-man’s land between Hollywood and something real.

Adventureland captures with humor and heart the way workplaces can become encapsulated universes with elaborate traditions, unspoken rules, and loose hierarchies. It’s a poignant, very funny Graduate-like immersion in post-collegiate angst that only begins to devolve into Some Kind Of Wonderful/Pretty In Pink melodrama in its last half hour. Reynolds, who has thankfully shed the frat-boy smirkiness of his early performances, does a nice job conveying the duality of a character who’s a rock star and the epitome of cool to the teens and early twentysomethings he works with, but a big loser to pretty much everyone else. In a lesser film, his character would be a villain, but Adventureland refreshingly inhabits a world without clear-cut heroes or bad guys, just richly realized characters struggling to get by. In Adventureland, Eisenberg learns the hard way that amusement parks aren’t the only place with games rigged so the honest and trusting always lose.

Dad is wickedly observant about the way the dead become blank canvasses upon which the grieving can project their fantasies, insecurities, and aspirations. In life, Sabara is a sentient ball of hate and perversion; in death, he becomes all things to all people. He ceases to be a human being and becomes a malleable symbol of squandered potential and the beautiful suffering of teen life. Williams lends enormous pathos to a man whose literary dreams come true in the worst way imaginable; he now has the curious distinction of having starred in Dead Poets Society and the anti-Dead Poets Society. The film’s tonal shifts between vulgar comedy and heartfelt drama aren’t always smooth, but that doesn’t keep it from being simultaneously funny and deeply sad. With Dad and his last writer-director effort, Sleeping Dogs Lie, Goldthwait has accomplished the formidable feat of making wry, tender, fundamentally sweet comedies about the human condition that just happen to center on acts of autoerotic asphyxiation and bestiality, respectively. That isn’t easy.

Zombieland leans heavily on the comedy side of the horror-comedy equation. For a zombie movie, it’s largely devoid of suspense and scares; instead, it focuses on the comic possibilities of four misfits indulging their most cherished fantasies under the bleakest circumstances imaginable. Though Eisenberg’s excessive voiceover narration bogs down the first act, the film quickly evolves into a crackling zombie romp powered by a clever script, goofy physical comedy—the filmmakers get a lot of mileage out of Harrelson’s amusingly over-the-top means of dispatching the undead—and the yin-yang comic chemistry of the eternally adorable Eisenberg and good-ol’-boy Harrelson. The four protagonists aren’t about to let something as minor as the complete breakdown of society get in the way of having a good time, and their fun proves infectious.

While the story is modeled on a traditional fairy tale and a traditional love story, it’s more primal than it looks. In keeping with Miyazaki’s usual motifs, Ponyo’s attachment to Sosuke is an unthinking force, as avid and single-minded as the decapitated forest spirit in Princess Mononoke, or the crazed, murderous Ohmu in Miyazaki’s Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind. Miyazaki never lets viewers forget that Ponyo is human-shaped but not actually human; her shape shifts and dissolves back toward fish-dom whenever she exerts her magical powers. In this and other things, the story operates on a fluid dream-logic, or the storytelling logic of a very small child: Events melt into each other without urgency, and a simple act like making and drinking tea is treated with the same complacent, wondrous gravity as magic that calls wave-monsters into being. Even so, older kids and even adults are unlikely to get bored, thanks to the story’s unforced sweetness, giddy highs, and stunningly beautiful visuals. Even in the unspoiled Devonian, real life never looked this good.

Shedding moral qualms like layers of dead skin, Song and Shin create a nation of two where they imagine themselves untouched by the laws that govern the rest of the world. But one look at Song’s eyes, which reflect kindness and doubt even when he’s chowing down on a victim, reveals that their world is in danger of crumbling from within. In spite of some memorable setpieces, Park’s film concerns itself as much with those moments of doubt as with the sight of blood spattering under harsh fluorescents. Consequently, Thirst never picks up the momentum of Park’s best-known work. But its turgid pace creates a queasy fascination all its own, drawing viewers into an ever-darkening locus of sin and obsession where even the wish for redemption comes at a terrible cost.

Many terrible happenings follow Ribbon’s opening incident. Some of them are brought to the public eye, while others remain confined behind closed doors. But as the incidents pile up, and the film reveals the source of at least some of the trouble, it becomes obvious that each is the fruit of the same infected soil. Looking back to the beginning of the century, Haneke’s rebuke to nostalgia takes no comfort in the notion of a simpler time. Of course, the particular place he lands in the past offers little comfort. While developing the details of village life, Haneke never puts too fine a point on the fact that the generation we’re watching come of age will soon put its dark mark on the world. Quietly working together to erase the limits of the permissible, they begin a course toward the unthinkable.

And so it goes, with the couple wending through Montreal and Miami, getting a strong sense of what to expect when they’re expecting. As the film progresses, the straight, almost cartoonish comedy of the first few encounters shifts into a subtler, more enriching study of parenthood—its joys, its surprises, and the sheer heartbreaking fragility of the whole enterprise. Though Away We Go lacks the screwball unpredictability of something like Flirting With Disaster, it compensates with a unexpected depth of feeling, a novelist’s (or memoirist’s) sense of detail, and a panoramic view of what home means.

There’s a lot of Gilliam in Plummer’s tragically ineffectual character, a man with a ramshackle aesthetic and a hopelessly square message about the magical powers of imagination. Gilliam has been pushing this aesthetic and message since his Monty Python movie days, and Imaginarium is yet another film in the same vein, with a smart concept, gorgeous cinematography, some terrific performances (particularly from the ever-reliable Waits) and tons of energy, but undisciplined execution and a sloppy storyline. Ledger in particular improvised a lot of dialogue, and it shows in his babbling, frantic performance. But the garish framework aside, it’s unquestionably a Gilliam project, with vast ambition and humor carrying it past the weak points, and an air of tragic majesty that comes as much from Gilliam’s career as from anything specific here. In a real sort of way, Gilliam is Parnassus, carrying his tatterdemalion show forward from year to year and trying to get people to pay attention, and the mingled sense of bitterness and hope in his story makes this whole crazed fantasy into something far more real.

The early scenes in Sin Nombre, before the two leads have crossed paths, at least have some mystery, but once they meet up on the rails, their characters are defined more by their circumstances than their particulars, and their destinies are precooked. Fukunaga paints better outside the lines, working with cinematographer Adriano Goldman to offer vivid shots of the poverty and despair cutting through Latin America, of gang rituals and territorial skirmishes, and of ordinary people taking dangerous routes to a better life that may be a mirage. Next time, a few rewrites please.

The premise is the mirror image of Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste Of Cherry, which had a driver asking passengers to assist in his suicide, but Bahraini goes the conventional route by detailing the give-and-take between these two men and the painful understanding they have to reach with each other. What distinguishes Goodbye Solo, beyond Savané’s larger-than-life personality bumping up against West’s intractable curmudgeon, is the continued particularity of Bahrani’s work. In just three films, he’s introduced us to a Pakistani street coffee vendor (Man Push Cart), a Latino orphan working in a black-market body shop, and now a Senegalese cabbie. It’s been nice—and certainly novel—to make their acquaintance.

I genuinely can't remember the last time I felt as torn about a documentary's subject matter as I did after watch director James Toback's penetrating and sometimes scarily intimate profile of former boxing champion Mike Tyson--he of the rape conviction, ear biting and bas-ass face tattoo. It's clear from the extensive interviews that Toback conducts that Tyson, now in the early 40s, is still somewhat confused and torn about his past, and he seems somewhat eager to set the record straight while still confounding us with his views on women, money, boxing, family, and his fractured state of mind. Odds are you won't have a clue how to look upon Mike Tyson, which in no way is a discouragement to this extremely important film. Quite the contrary, you should attempt to see this on a big screen. It's worth it to see such a bold and vengeful piece of filmmaking. Check this one out, even if sports in general and boxing in particular aren't that your favorite thing.

Within the portrait of Anvil’s endurance, we also see why they never made it huge: The band is too nice. The movie’s most significant relationship is between Kudlow and Reiner, who bicker like brothers and bond like soldiers. Reiner loves Kudlow too much to abandon him, even though both of them could’ve given up Anvil and become successes elsewhere long ago. Kudlow’s messianic fervor can be hard to live with, but he makes a valid point when he suggests that it would cheapen his life’s work if he quit before he gave it his all. Yet in his despair, there’s something Kudlow misses, and it’s what makes Anvil! as moving as it is hilarious. If adult life is about working hard so we can afford to do what we want, then what’s the word for a group of musicians who’ve toured the world for three decades, making music for appreciative fans? Maybe… “success”?

Stephenson, Hardy, and assorted other Troll 2 luminaries embark on an odyssey that finds them soaking up the approval of midnight audiences in cities across the country, but Best Worst Movie starts getting interesting when they hit bumps in the road. Hardy’s eagerness to celebrate his underground fame starts to curdle after a couple of dead conventions and the umpteenth shouting of his famous line “You can’t piss on hospitality!” And things get worse whenever Claudio Fragasso, Troll 2’s temperamental director, turns up at screenings with an ambivalent (at best) attitude about why everyone’s laughing at his movie. Though it’s a ramshackle piece of filmmaking, Best Worst Movie is an honest one, too, staying open to awkward, humbling moments while still making a solid case for the film’s immortal badness.

That said, The Cove offers a lot to think about in terms of the future of fishing, and Psihoyos’ gift for using fiction-feature conventions does make a seemingly unpalatable subject entertaining. While dropping facts and arguments left and right, Psihoyos is simultaneously staging a slick, nail-biting caper film. Yet The Cove hews so close to the mode of an action-adventure film—right down to the clichéd villains and show-stopping confrontations—that after a while, it begins to feel like too much of a movie, not an exposé of an actual problem. Real-world crises require the intervention of real people with legitimate disagreements and personal flaws, not characters yanked from spy movies and two-fisted TV adventure shows.

Prada readers might wonder why a figure as legendarily image-conscious and remote as Wintour might open herself up to the scrutiny of a documentary, but the fashion/publishing icon makes it through September with her privacy and secrets intact. Director R.J. Cutler maintains a respectful distance from Wintour and similarly compelling subjects, like model turned Vogue creative director Grace Coddington and towering, iconic editor-at-large André Leon Talley. Cutler is in the enviable position of having arguably too many fascinating documentary subjects, but while September is never boring, it’s also superficial. The internal machinations of Vogue might be too much for a single documentary to handle; a multi-part TV documentary series might have given the folks behind the camera more time and space to flesh out these colorful characters and let audiences decide for themselves whether they love or hate Wintour, or fall somewhere in between.

In keeping with the pragmatism of the Obama era, Food, Inc. doesn’t agitate for vegetarianism or a complete overhaul of the system, though like Upton Sinclair’s simpatico novel The Jungle before it, it’s destined to inspire some short-term vegetarians. Its heroes are realists who’ve found a way to be relatively humane within the system, like a farmer who kills his animals the old-fashioned way or an organic outfit that sells its wares through Wal-Mart. Like many social issue documentaries, Food, Inc. is better at addressing problems than offering solutions: its endorsement of organic food in particular feels a little flimsy. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining and fast-moving enough to make audiences intermittently forget they’re consuming cinematic health food.

Saying more about Rebney’s state of mind would spoil the surprises that animate Winnebago Man, which is one of those thrilling instances where reality grabs a filmmaker by the lapels and drags him (and us) to unexpected places. Though Steinbauer is sometimes guilty of the glib Michael Moore-isms that dog many first-person documentaries—only Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) seems to get the tone right—he and Rebney square off in a battle of wills that’s revealing of both men and of the irony-choked culture of viral phenomena. Steinbauer’s eagerness to draw information—and, let’s face it, exclusive new clips—out of his recalcitrant subject borders on exploitation at times, but the smart, cagey Rebney has an agenda of his own that Steinbauer can’t entirely control or define. The documentary gives him a forum to be his funny, irreducible self, which is a luxury the accidentally famous are rarely afforded.

Starting with a hilariously protracted confrontation between Lohman and the old woman in the parking deck—it may be the first time anyone has been in danger of being gummed to death—Drag Me To Hell piles on the cartoon horror setpieces in rapid succession. That PG-13 rating may sound like a liability for a director who once hosed Bruce Campbell with torrents of blood shooting out of the walls, but Raimi makes a sly asset of this limitation. Just like other PG-13-rated horror movies, the film relies on shock effects instead of blood, but Raimi pushes those effects to a full-on visceral assault. He wants viewers to jump out of their chairs, to laugh and scream and cheer, and to nudge each other over the transcendent ridiculousness of what they’re witnessing. This is junk filmmaking at its finest.

The world can be cruel to crusty old veterans like Bridges’ character, but the universe smiles on him here: Farrell doesn’t let his former boss’ resentment of his success keep him from lending a helping hand, Duvall is loyal and true, and Gyllenhaal and her adorable son offer him a lifeline to happiness as he staggers out of an endless funk. Bridges brings a battered, weary dignity and a suitably weathered voice to the juicy role of a survivor learning to value himself and his gifts after decades of neglect and abuse. Crazy Heart could use more rough edges, but while it’s a little too sentimental and tidy, Bridges’ humane, deeply empathetic lead performance makes it easy to root for one man’s redemption.

Fish Tank’s groaningly obvious passages wouldn’t be so aggravating if Arnold didn’t get so much right. The movie is unusually sensitive to the ways young people pick up their cues on how to act like adults, and how awkwardly they practice what they’ve learned. Jarvis looks like a lovely young woman at times, then comes off as small and fragile when she’s riding in the back seat of Fassbender’s car, or when she’s pretending to be asleep while he tucks her into bed. Arnold understands how teenagers act tougher than they actually are, and the way their seduction rituals often involve running around like preschoolers. But Fish Tank’s subplot about Jarvis’ dream to be a street dancer hits these points too hard, overemphasizing Jarvis’ lack of confidence in her own sexuality. In that way, Jarvis is a lot like Arnold: an artist who knows the steps, but doesn’t yet have all the moves.