Kinematoscope

My favorite films of 2009. Since they're already semi-covered in detail in my preferred Oscar nominations and since we have best of the decade stuff coming up, let's go with some best-of particulars in lieu of paragraphs about why they're each awesome.


10. In The Loop

Best quote: "..it falls well within my purview!"
-"Within your 'purview'? Where do you think you are, some f**king regency costume drama? This is a government department, not some f**king Jane fucking Austen novel! Allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your purview and ram it up your sh**ter with a lubricated horse c**k!"

Best Quote Safe For Work: None.

Best Post-Script: When you, presuming you're an ignorant American like myself, are informed by Wikipedia that In The Loop is a spinoff of the BBC series "The Thick Of It," which means there is at least nine more hours of Peter Capaldi as Malcom Tucker.


9. Broken Embraces

Best Left Field Soundtrack Selection: "Werewolf" by Cat Power


Best Plot Twist: Most of the plot, for once, seems plausible, which is rare for Almodovar. But late in the film we find out that someone is someone else's father, in a familiar soap-operatic moment that is never adressed again. It made me chuckle.

8. Inglourious Basterds

Best Film Within A Film: There's a German propagande movie in the big premier at the end of IB about a sniper that kills 300+ Allied soldiers, and it seems to be entirely composed of hilarious pratfalls and Wilhelm Screams.

Best Mangled Italian: "A-ree-ver-DARE-chee."

Best Mangled English: the title.


7. Sherlock Holmes

Best Victory Of The Rational: Spoilers: much of Sherlock Holmes points toward a villain that controls the Dark Arts, but the big ending reveals it was all trickery. I nearly clapped: I'm sick of things coming down on the supernatural side anytime there's a question- even if its mostle religous horror films (The Reaping, Stigmata, The Exorcism of Emily Rose) or every episode of "The X-Files" (was Scully's skepticism ever prudent?).

Best Broken Instruments: To give the score more "edges" to be in tune with the mid-Industrial-Revolution period film, Hans Zimmer just up and broke stuff. From an interview: "A lot of the percussion in the movie isn’t percussion...It’s someone totally mistreating their upright bass."

And what became of the out-of-tune piano they used? "...then I thought, rather than use big drums what would a piano sound like if you dropped it down a flight of stairs? ...We rented 20th Century Fox’s underground car park one Sunday and did hideous things to a piano."

6. District 9

Best Pre-Emptive Strike: I think an underrated part of the Best Picture race is the degree to which District 9 stole Avatar's thunder some months beforehand- who would have thought it would only be the second-best sci-fi actioner in which a human betrays his own kind to save an alien race, ultimately becoming one of them? It makes it easier to argue for The Hurt Locker, which is truly one of a kind this year.

Best Dodged Bullet: Does anyone really think that a movie based on the "Halo" video game series, which fell apart and led to District 9 instead, would have been anything but a big-budget disaster? When has a video game movie ever worked? Seriously, try to read the plot summary for "Halo" without your eyes glazing over.


5. Up In The Air

Best Trailer Of The Year: The first teaser was craftily edited to Clooney's motivational speech:


Best Scenes Of Destruction: For me, the most resonant images of our economic times from Up In The Air weren't the real people they worked into the firing scenes, but a few images of ravaged workplaces- our heroes arrive to fire the last few people in a stripped empty cubicle pool, or seeing Kendrick sitting in a room full of unused chairs.

4. Star Trek

Best Flawed Science: Though the time-travel logic in Star Trek is sound, nearly everything else is completely backwards. Among many innaccuracies, there's no way to conceivable drill to a planet's core without the hole collapsing, a black hole made out of a planet would only be the size or a marble, how big Vulcan would be in the sky on Delta Vega, supernovas can't really "threaten the galaxy," and there's no way the warp core explosion would have saved them at the end.

But you know what? It was too awesome for me to care.

Best Terrible Pun: "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?!"


3. Fantastic Mr. Fox

Best All-Purpose Curse Word Substitute: Expressions uttered by claymation animals in this film include "Cuss yeah," "The cuss you are," and "A real cluster-cuss." That's how you keep it PG.

Best Vague Anthropomorphism: The Fox family and friends all walked, talked, and listened to Burl Ives records, but I wasn't clear if they could speak directly with humans- at one point there's a recording of an animal hostage, but there's no dialogue. They do communicate in notes written with cut-out magazine letters, though.

2. The Hurt Locker

Best Abrupt Snap To Reality: One of my favorite lines from The Hurt Locker comes about halfway through- Anothony Mackie's staff seargeant, after a night of dunken bonding with his renegade superior Jeremy Renner, asks him if he thinks he has what it takes "to put on the suit," the protective gear of the OED squad leader.

In a boilerplate sappy war film or Hollywood action movie, he would of course reply: "Someday," or whatever, but instead Renner snorts a derisive "Hell no."

Best Stand-in For Civilian Banality: the grocery isle at the supermarket:





1. The Brothers Bloom

Best Opening Sequence In Rhyming Verse: "What kind of cave? -A Cave..Of Wonder! -Psh! -Shut up, Dave."

Best Card Trick: None of this is CGI:



True story.

The economy being what it is (which to say, terrible) and myself being who I am (which is to say, a former English major), I’ve seen disappointingly few movies in theaters this year. Fortunately, that’s kept the quality to quantity ratio of 2009 pretty high. Mini-reviews follow, reverse order again:

The Hangover:



What I Liked: The long-overdue stardom of Zach Galifiankis, and the less overdue but still enjoyable stardom of Ed Helms. Those two, along with generic every dude Bradley Cooper, elevate what pretty much is an hour and a half “What Happens In Vegas Stays In Vegas” commercial into an enjoyable farce from the director of Old School. It’s telling that my sides hurt not during the ridiculous farce, look-how-Vegasy-this-is moments (A tiger in the bathroom! Que ridiculo!), but during the character moments, like when Helms tells Galifianakis he is “literally too stupid to insult.”

What I Didn’t Like: The “villain,” of the film, such as it is, is an Eddie-Murphy-in-Norbit level Asian stereotype, and there were plenty of other cheap attempts at laughs here and there, but it wasn’t as if I had expected to see Woody Allen type sophisticate humor.

The Verdict: Two And A Half Stars. Maybe I’ll kick in an extra half in hindsight if it elevates Galafianakis, who’s nearly an Andy Kaufman-level comic persona, to bigger and better things.

The Brothers Bloom:



What I Liked: Everything.

Every time Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenabums, The Darjeeling Limited) releases a movie, critics tend to rouse a chorus of minor variations of the theme “He does the same thing every time!” And while I agree whole-heatedly that yes, he does, I hope he keeps right on doing it. It’s not as if whimsically detached, artfully symmetric pastiche-pieces are clogging the screens at the Majestic every week. And if more filmmakers dive headfirst into the Anderson indie-twee style of filmmaking (like Rian Johnson with his sophomore film The Brothers Bloom), then it will still be a long time before I start complaining.

On the heels of his new cult classic Brick, Johnson got the funding for a beautifully shot ode to con men and European intrigue, and brought the same raw energy to a twisting, bantering screenplay for stars Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody, and Rachel Weisz to work with. The plot might get a little too cutesy for some near the end (mostly leaving us guessing whether or not people have been shot), but The Brothers Bloom is too much fun to ask questions, and too well-made to get mad at.

All that and a great, rambling score had me waltzing out of the theater.

What I Didn’t Like: There were two songs in the movie that weren’t on the soundtrack I downloaded from Amazon? Seriously, the combination of Rian Johnson’s raw enthusiasm for film with an Andersonian (Andersonish?) sensibility hit all the right notes for me.

The Verdict: Four Stars, and one derby hat slickly rolled onto my head. Watch the first seven minutes of it here, and then tell me you don’t want to catch it at the Downer Theater before it’s gone.

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Star Trek:



What I Liked: Again, pretty much everything. As a casual fan of the original series, and only a fan-in-general of later incarnations (except for Star Trek: Voyager, which premiered whilst I was in middle school and I briefly thought was the BEST SHOW EVER), I was more than ready for J. J. Abrams to re-imagine the Star Trek universe, unlike some older critics more tied to the past, perhaps.

ST reminded me a great deal of Pirates Of The Carribean: Curse Of The Black Pearl in the way it seemingly effortlessly accomplished the introduction of several characters, incorporated several different action set pieces, maintained a break-neck pace, and kept the audience laughing or oohing and aahing at all the right points. The cast was largely spot on, although that depends on your attachment to certain characters since they were all different levels of homage to each original portrayal- they ran the gamut from Karl Urban’s absolutely spot-on (and scene stealing) Bones, to John Cho’s largely businesslike Sulu.

Without getting too much into the plot, the writers also explained the reason for a new look at Star Trek in a way that not only made sense, but provided an excuse to include Leonard Nimoy.

What I Didn’t Like: The film’s villain, Eric Bana’s Nero, was reasonably well-done, but I was left wishing that the Enterprise might get involved in more than a conflict with a very traditional Star Trek trope: the lone despot with a powerful ship. Doesn’t the Federation function as a galactic peace-keeping organization?

I suppose that might be best left for some other series, however. But what would it be called? “Star Galactic Peace Keeping Operations?” I feel like it’s on the tip of my tongue.

The Verdict: Four Stars! I’ve seen fewer movies, but rarely do I find three of my year end top ten (probably) before it’s half over (Bloom, ST, and Coraline, if you’re counting with me).

The Soloist:



What I Liked: Robert Downey, Jr. as a journalist at the end of his rope, delivers another quietly solid performance, opposite Jamey Foxx’s more obviously dramatic schizophrenic homeless cellist. I enjoyed the script, at least in the way that it patiently depicts a friendship that falters as often as it grows, and doesn’t overdo any redemptive element- Foxx’s character never has any sort of Hallmark life-turnaround, nor does Downey reconnect with his ex-wife.

Joe Wright continues to develop as a visual filmmaker, abandoning the sweeping tracking shots of Atonement for grittier montages of Los Angeles street-life: The Soloist is about the plight of the homeless and mentally handicapped as much as it is about music. I also loved a scene mid-way through the film when Foxx hears an orchestra rehearse- he closes his eyes and Wright brings us on a journey with him, punctuating each crescendo of the music with bright visual flares on a blank screen. It might qualify as an indulgent touch, but I’m a fan of the orchestra (I’m even a sucking for the cool “warming up” noise) so it worked well.

What I Didn’t Like: Despite admiring the unhurried way the plot moved, The Soloist could have been paced a bit better- it makes the most of it’s nearly two-hour runtime. The minor subplots (the ex-wife, the animal urine (?) Downey orders to protect his garden from scavengers) weighed it down, and the brief looks at Foxx’s childhood and subsequent unraveling were more voyeuristic than they were necessary.

The Verdict: Two And A Half Stars. It might have been higher if there were more Bach and less Beethoven. Personal preference, sorry.

State Of Play:



What I Liked: A passably fun thriller about evil corporations, idealistic reporters, and possibly corrupt politicians. Russel Crowe was gravelly, Helen Mirren was a fun mean-spirited editor. Jason Bateman had a fun cameo. The plot twisted and turned.

What I Didn’t Like: Not to say that it was predictable, but it certainly felt rather familiar. In fact, the only unique part of the film was the most overblown and hackneyed- a constant emphasis on the death rattle of print journalism and how sad that is. Rachel McAdams plays the young reporter who runs the newspaper’s blog, and just doesn’t get how things should be done, Crowe uses an ancient DOS-based black-screened thing, and the film ends with a big story being printed, step by step, on an industrial printing press and delivered to newsstands. I get it. End of an era. Yawn.

The Verdict: Two Stars. Kept me watching, didn’t go anywhere unexpected, could’ve taken itself a little less seriously.

Observe And Report:



What I Liked: There’s a certain amount of downright insane edginess you just sort of have to admire, in that you wonder how they got film studio’s to agree to fund it. I’m sure it mostly had to do with Seth Rogen’s still rising star, and he does an admirably believable job as a suburbanized Taxi Driver-style psychotic mall cop.

What I Didn’t Like: With that edginess always seems to come a pervasive distaste for every character in the film, or at least that’s what we’re left with. Even cameos from some of my favorite comedy stars (like Patton Oswalt!) usually are for little purpose other than to act awful and expect laughter. And even though the abrasive wackiness gets laughs, it’s nice to have a straight man here and there.

The Verdict: Two Stars. Seemed a little too proud of itself for being risqué, with lots of musical montages and slow motion, but honestly the trailer sold that sensibility pretty well.