Top 10 of 2009: #'s 10-6

            So, after doing a little research for this post, and trying to put the year in movies in perspective, I realize that I might have a problem.  I’ve seen 55 movies that were released in 2009.  55.  I’ve seen 55 movies from 2009.  Look again…that’s not the number of movies I watched in 2009…that would probably be somewhere in the range of, oh, ~175.  Seriously, how am I still married?  I’m baffled.  Yes, there are a couple of award winners that I have yet to see (including BP nominee Precious, and foreign-film The White Ribbon (which I would kill to see)).  But overall, when you read blog entries like this one, you can be pretty sure that I’ve at least seen enough movies to have perspective on the issue.  The only thing I ask is that you keep reading my blog so that least I can justify watching that many movies.  If I can justify it, then I might stay married a little longer.  So in essence, by you reading my blog, you’re really saving my marriage.  Are we clear?  Thanks.  Today I’ll discuss my 10-6, and tomorrow or the next day I will release my 5-1.  As always, everyone feel free to comment on mine and give me your personal top 10. 

#10. Fantastic Mr. Fox

            I’m not a huuuuuuge Wes Anderson fan (I liked Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, but loathed The Life Aquatic and was ambivalent about The Darjeeling Limited and Bottle Rocket).  Fox, though, is probably now my favorite of his films.  It’s a great commentary on the male desire to be a “fox” while simultaneously being a great husband and father.  Somehow, Clooney gives one of his best performances just by using his voice, and the stop-motion animation is nothing short of spectacular. 

#9.  Up In the Air

            Following Fox is Clooney’s live action film directed by Jason Reitman of Juno and Thank You For Smoking fame.  The story and directing are pretty good, but what really pushes it over the top for me is the acting.  Clooney gives the second best performance of his career (behind Michael Clayton) and Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick are stellar.  All three were nominated for Oscars.

#8.  Inglorious Basterds

            I can’t resist Quentin Tarantino films, and although this isn’t my favorite of his by a long shot, it was a really enjoyable movie.  The thing with Tarantino is that you know what you’re getting when you walk in: gratuitous violence and great dialogue.  This one doesn’t disappoint with either.  Christoph Waltz gives an amazing performance as the villain Nazi colonel, and is the frontrunner for the best supporting actor Oscar.  What really makes the film is the dialogue-heavy scenes that are riddled with tension; it keeps you on your toes about what is going to happen next.

#7.  In the Loop

            One of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time.  Based on the British TV show by the same name, this political satire has some of the wittiest (and dirtiest) dialogue of any film I’ve ever seen.  It’s sort of shot in a mockumentary style, which really works because it almost makes you believe that politicians really are this clueless.   If you are into smart comedy, this is the movie for you.

#6.  Up

            Pixar strikes again with this one.  Of all the good things I could say about this movie, let me just say that the first 10 minutes of the film is possibly the best, most emotional 10 minutes of film as there is out there.  The only reason it’s not higher up on my list is because I felt like some of the more “kiddie” aspects of the film got in the way a little too much, like the talking dogs and the huge bird they were after.  Having said that, this is the only film since I can remember that made me cry…(alright, fine, besides Marley & Me).

Come back tomorrow for #'s 5-1

2009 Movie Awards

I’m not gonna lie: there’s not just a whole lot that made me excited to be a fan of cinema in 2009.  In a couple of days I will release my top-10 of the year list and talk about this a little bit more, but since it didn’t particularly excite me to make that list, I thought I’d mix it up a little and make some of my own special awards.  This is what I came up with; hope you enjoy. 

Worst Movie: Whatever Works

Best Comedy: In the Loop (honorable mention: Zombieland)

Most Underrated movie you’ve never heard of: Big Fan

Most Underrated movie you have heard of: The Informant!

Biggest Letdown: Public Enemies

Best Guilty Pleasure: Paranormal Activity

Best Extremely, Utterly Embarrassing Guilty Pleasure: 17 Again (judge me)

Most Ridiculous Premise: Did you Hear About the Morgans?

Best Documentary/Only Documentary I’ve Seen: Food, Inc.

Best Movie Directed By an Annoying Actress With a Lisp: Whip It (Drew Barrymore, in case you were wondering)

Two of the Best Child Performances I’ve Ever Seen That Didn’t Get Enough Recognition: Kodi Smitt-McPhee (The Road), Max Records (Where the Wild Things Are)

Best Movie That Makes Women Look Like Complete Morons: Bride Wars

Most Quotable: Tie, The Hangover & In the Loop

Best Popcorn Flick: Star Trek

Best Actor in a Leading Role: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

Best Actress in a Leading Role: Carey Mulligan, An Education

Most Original: Inglorious Basterds

Most Unoriginal: Avatar (duh)

Biggest Douche in Hollywood: James Cameron (just had to throw that shot out there)

The Diving Bell and The Butterfly and New York City

              I got so tired after writing 500-word essays about each of the Top-10 films of the 2000’s that I had to take a 12-day sabbatical to regain my blogger strength.  Between that post and today, I took a 4-day weekend trip (sorry, law school) to Washington D.C. and New York City to visit my two best buds and, despite the worst weather of the winter forcing me to improvise my plans a little bit, was still a pretty epic weekend.  To waste time on the plane, I watched a movie that I’ve wanted to see for awhile, 2007’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.  This French film is based on the true story of a French magazine editor who suffered a stroke and became fully paralyzed, save for one eye.  The movie flashed back to his pre-stroke life, but mainly focuses on his post-stroke life—how he learns to communicate through blinking and writes a book with the help of a very patient scribe who writes letter-by-letter.  If I had to go back and redo my top-10 foreign language films of the 2000’s list, this one is easily be #2 behind City of God, and if you know me at all I wouldn’t take something like that lightly. 

            Basically, I’ll put the movie in these terms for you:  in a weekend where I got to hang out with my two best friends in D.C. and Manhattan, went to the top of Rockefeller Center, had some great laughs at one of NYC’s premiere comedy clubs, ate the best crepe of my life, saw Ground Zero, went to Century 21, ate some authentic NY pizza, hit some of Greenwich Villages hotspots, rode the 4AM train out to Long Island Sunday morning with the drunkest/craziest of New York’s crazies, and generally had an amazing time just talking about the good ole’ days and busting each other’s chops for girls we used to date, I would STILL place watching The Diving Bell and The Butterfly in the top-10 best parts about the weekend. 

            So there’s a glowing recommendation for you.  

Top-10 1/2 of the Decade: #1

1.  The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003)

Three Rings for the Elven Kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

            Well, I guess technically this list is a top 13, but whatev.  These movies are all part of one, singular story…albeit a 10-hour story (13 if you have all of the extended versions, which of course, nerds like me do).  Anyway, like I said in my No Country post, my choice to put this at number one is obvious and somewhat uninspired.  But what are you gonna do?  I mean, LOTR is simply an amazing cinematic feat, and much like my viewpoint of Avatar, even if you didn’t particularly enjoy it, the level of achievement is undeniable (in fact, it was only after James Cameron saw LOTR that he felt it was possible to make Avatar). 

            Let me just say at the outset that the films have their flaws, most notably the wooden acting in some parts by Elijah Wood as Frodo and Sean Astin as Samwise Gamgee, although these would have been very difficult and challenging roles for anyone.  Many times when I go back and watch the films I find myself tuning out during the Frodo-Sam-Gollum scenes in The Two Towers and Return of the King (they’re all the same…Gollum tries to get Frodo to do something, Sam gets mad at Gollum and tries to get Frodo to not listen to him, Frodo stands up for Gollum while staring into the camera with a glazed look in his eyes, Sam comes back and saves the day eighty times, etc…).  But I am willing to overlook a few flaws and I’ll tell you why: where in a movie like No Country For Old Men you have something as close to film perfection as there is out there, its aim was not nearly as high as LOTR was.  Picking No Country over LOTR would be like saying that someone who successfully climbed one of the Rocky Mountains unscathed did a better job than someone who successfully climbed Mount Everest with a few cuts and bruises (14K feet to 29K feet by comparison).  Attempting to touch a sacred work such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Rings trilogy took some serious cajones by Peter Jackson, and the fact that he did it justice is almost as amazing as the books themselves.  It’s as majestic, grandiose, spiritual, touching, subtle, mystic, fantastic, human, and downright entertaining as any movie out there.

Welp, that’s my list.  Hope your favorite movie of the decade made the cut.  In case you were interested, here are my top-10 films that almost made the cut, in no particular order:

The Departed

Ratatouille

Kill Bill: 1&2

Finding Neverland

Into the Wild

Michael Clayton

Pan’s Labyrinth

Snatch

In Bruges

4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Top-10 1/2 of the Decade: #2

2.  No Country For Old Men (2007)

 “I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how theyd've operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I surely don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."        

                                                  

                        —Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, “No Country For Old Men.”

            This is going to be my longest review 1) because NCFOM is my personal favorite movie and I could talk about it until I’m blue in the face; 2) because my number 1 isn’t that exciting and doesn’t need as much defense; 3) because many people don’t like, appreciate, understand, or comprehend this movie; 4) because I’d rather pretend I was a movie critic than a law student; and 5) because frankly, it’s my blog.   If you haven’t seen the movie, you should probably not read any further, first because of spoilers galore, and second because this is a challenging movie that requires one to form their own thoughts or opinions about it before reading someone else’s.  But afterwards, come back here and read my persuasive, poignant analysis of the second-greatest cinematic achievement of the decade. 

            People always ask me how this could be my favorite movie.  It’s an understandable skepticism; I mean, the movie is only two years old.  The best way for me to explain it is that I think the movie catered to my exact movie-going needs and desires, both technically and thematically.  Let’s start with the former.  First, you’ve got the book by Cormac McCarthy (of The Road and All the Pretty Horses fame), master of the modern western, as a blueprint for the script.  Then, you’ve got the Coen brothers directing—the perfect directors for capturing McCarthy’s stark realism.  Acting-wise, Javier Bardem effortlessly slaughters every second of his screen time as Anton Chigurh, one of the best villains to ever hit the silver screen (we’ll get back to this character in a minute).  Josh Brolin and Tommy-Lee Jones hold up their end of the bargain as well, playing “mouse” to Chigurh’s “cat” and the Sheriff caught in between the two (see above).  One interesting note: these are the three focal characters of the story, yet none of the three share any screen time with the other.

            One of the major themes of the movie is the idea of fate, emphasized by the ever-becoming-legendary “gas station scene,”  when an unassuming west Texas gas station owner involuntarily puts his life on the line at the hands of Chigurh’s coin flip.  His hypocrisy is exposed, however, in conversations with his victims as well as his untimely brush with a bit of fate himself.  As cool as this aspect of the movie is, it is eclipsed by the major theme of the movie, the idea that, well…this is truly “no country for old men.”  And that’s where the biggest complaint I hear about the movie comes in, the complaint that makes me turn green and do a Hulk-Smash, the complaint that makes me lose faith in humanity…

(I don’t know if I can say it…)

(ARRRRRGHHHHHH!!!!!!)

“The movie was great until the ending, which sucked.”

            If you think this about the movie, then let me just break it down for you:  THIS MOVIE WAS NOT ABOUT LLEWELYN MOSS, IT WAS ABOUT SHERIFF ED TOM BELL.  THIS MOVIE WAS NOT ABOUT THE CAT AND MOUSE CHASE; THIS MOVIE WAS ABOUT AN “OLD MAN” COMING TO GRIPS WITH SOCIETAL CHANGES!!! ARRRGHHHHH!!!!!!

….ahem.  So.

            When Llewelyn dies, we see a shift in perspective for the rest of the story.  It becomes evident that Sheriff Bell is the focal point of the movie, and the cat and mouse chase is the backdrop to Bell’s inability to understand and catch up to an ever-changing world.  But don’t act like this was some sort of “surprise.”  Look at the quote at the top: this was the beginning of the movie!  Right after he says these words, the title flashes across the screen.  This should have been a huge indication to you about what this movie was trying to say.  Instead, you got up in arms that the resolution wasn’t what you thought it would be, that the good guy died, the bad guy got away, and the sheriff couldn’t catch him or make any sense of what happened.  While you were so preoccupied with being pissed that these things happened, you missed a beautiful, profound ending…one that will make an impression on you if you let it.  See, Bell chalks up his inability to understand the ever-changing world (and thus his inability to catch Chigurh) to the downfall of society…”As soon as sir and ma’am go out the window, the rest is soon to foller.”  What he fails to realize, until his conversation with his uncle near the end, is that the world has always been this way.  People from older generations have always viewed societal change as bad, thinking that our country is “going to hell in a handbasket.”  What his uncle makes clear to him is that his generation felt the same way, and the generation before that, and the generation before that.  Whether or not society actually is getting worse and worse, people have always thought that.   You can’t stop what’s coming.  No one ever has. 

            After some time has passed, and Bell has retired, we see in the last scene both Bell’s acceptance of these things, and ultimately death itself.  The last monologue of the movie is Bell recounting two dreams about his father that metaphorically represent this acceptance of death, and, in my humble opinion, it is some of most brilliant and haunting writing of any movie of this decade.  Read it, think about it, then go watch the movie again, as I am about to do.  You won’t be disappointed.

             Alright then. Two of 'em. Both had my father in 'em . It's peculiar. I'm older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he's the younger man. Anyway, first one I don't remember too well but it was about meeting him in town somewhere, he's gonna give me some money. I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin' through the mountains of a night. Goin' through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past... and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there….and then I woke up.

-Oh, and while we're at it, top-5 villains of the 2000's:

1. The Joker  (Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight)

2. Anton Chigurh  (Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men)

3. Bill the Butcher (Daniel-Day Lewis, Gangs of New York)

4. Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington, Training Day)

5. Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix, Gladiator)

I know I probably missed some good ones here so let me know yours!

Top-10 1/2 of the Decade: #3

3.  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

          Guess who actually likes romantic comedies?  This guy, that’s who.  Trouble is, Hollywood rarely makes a good one.  That’s because the people that go see romantic comedies don’t see them because they relate to them, or because the acting is good, or because the writing is good, or the plot is believable, or because the characters have more than one dimension.  No.  All they want is to see Matthew McConaughey or Zac Efron shirtless (heck, who doesn’t?).  So when a good rom-com does come around that is actually decent, it makes me happy.  Vicky Christina Barcelona, Knocked Up, About a Boy, these are just a few that come to mind when I think of good romantic comedies from the 00’s (actually, for a great list of rom-coms from this decade, read this article—and look what’s number one!).  I wouldn’t call any of these movies particularly great, but they are evidence that the romantic comedy genre can be done well with a little time and care given to writing characters and exploring real human thoughts and emotions about what love is.     And that’s where we get to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (hereinafter “ESOSM”), everyone’s favorite memory-erasing, hipster-glorifying romantic comedy, epically written by Charlie Kauffman and directed by Michael Gondry.  (By the way, if you’re ever watching a movie and you ask yourself “What kind of weirdo came up with this plot synopsis?”,  the answer is almost always “Charlie Kauffman.”  Thought I’d save you some trouble there).

            Anyway, ESOSM movie defines an element of relationships that is completely overlooked by the majority of filmdom, which is the element of “we have no idea what the heck we are doing.”  Many movies would have us believe that if it “feels right” then everything will work out in the end.  Does anyone even know what feeling right feels like?  I don’t feel like I know what feeling right feels like.  Whatever.  The point with ESOSM is almost the opposite—it may not feel right, it may feel close to right, or it may feel completely wrong—but underneath all of the BS fighting and bickering that tends to happen in any relationship (not mine though, duh), there may be something beautiful, something worth cultivating, and we are shooting ourselves in the foot if we don’t give it a chance.  Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet do a superb job of harnessing this conflicted mindset.  Enough cannot be said about their acting and on-screen chemistry in this movie. 

             When Joel sees Clementine on the train to Montauk at the beginning of the movie, he asks himself, “Why do I fall in love with every girl who gives me the slightest bit of attention?”  (Although, if Kate Winslet gave me some attention, I’d probably fall in love too).  The cool part of that scene is that it can only be really understood on a second watching, because at that point in the story we didn’t know that they had a relationship before they erased each other out of their memories.  So when he makes that statement, it wasn’t that he fell in love with her because she showed him attention; rather, it was because his subconscious was painfully aware of her—his immediate affection for her was something far deeper than he could explain or understand.  (Side note—guys, when your significant other asks you why you love her—as an alternative to your usual BS-ing, I recommend saying, “Honey, my love for you is so much deeper than I can explain or fully understand.”  It works.) 

            I’m realizing while writing this review just how hard being a *real* writer would be.  There is so much more I would love to say about this movie and I can’t seem to fit it in an appropriate length.  It speaks to me on so many levels, and its honesty and charm are second to none. 

Plus, Kate Winslet is hot, even with orange, blue, or bright red hair. 

-I’ve already mentioned some of my favorite romantic comedies from this decade, so this time I’ll let you guys list your top-5.  Ready. Go. 

Comments & Note

Some of you guys have mentioned problems with commenting--I think I fixed the issue so let me know via facebook if you are still having trouble.  You are now free to argue with me to your heart's content.  

Also, I plan on finishing up the countdown by this weekend at the latest.  I will save you the suspense right now: Avatar didn't make the list.