Films of 2009

It is difficult for me to judge the films from 2009. The only films I’ve seen are those that have crossed the ocean to Istanbul—usually blockbusters like Avatar—or those I’ve managed to find online. Thus, I’m unable to provide explanation for what I felt were the best movies, performances, musical scores, etc. of 2009. I’ll take an intellectually lazy route by presenting this list of bullet-style reflections on last year’s films.

Avatar may have permanently ushered in 3-D. I didn’t view it in that format, so maybe that allowed me to see through the recycled plot, cliché characters, and childish, overt politics. The Golden Globes awarded this film best picture, which should either delegitimize the Golden Globes or delegitimize the American audience for not thinking that’s ridiculous.

The best scene of any film this year was the montage of the marriage between Carl and Ellie at the beginning of Up. The rest of the film is good without being special. Up does not fit into the elite tier of computer animated films with Finding Nemo and Toy Story.

The other possibility for the best scene from last year would probably be the opener of Inglorious Basterds. While the rest of the movie is exceedingly cool, Inglorious Basterds is too long and unfocused. More to the point, I’m ethically opposed to Tarantino’s depiction of torturing Nazi soldiers as entertainment. He’s neither making an argument for or against torture. The ethics are irrelevant in the scenes—he sees it simply as violence, which, for Tarantino, is naturally enjoyable. Not for me.

Star Trek and Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen each suffered from too much comical farce. Action films should include humor—it makes the characters likeable, provides reprieve from the tension, and people are paying for an all around good time. But these movies felt like they were written by sitcom writers.

500 Days of Summer was too hipster to be taken seriously.

Up in the Air seamlessly blends the buddy road-trip movie, romantic comedy, and the character study. It also skillfully walks the line between cinema happiness and the real-world apprehension of 2009. But I thought the movie suffered an identity crisis in the third act. It builds to a cliché romantic ending, which the director intelligently thwarts. Then the director shows real people describing what it’s like to lose their jobs, but the young girl gets a good job. The audience is in limbo between happy ending and a sad one, waiting for director Jason Reitman’s clarification, but the closing narration doesn’t help. It’s ambiguous and—in my opinion—meaningless.

The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man was probably my favorite film of 2009, and maybe my favorite American film since the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. It disguises itself as self-indulgent fluff from the visionary filmmakers, but in the third act the film transforms into a minor masterpiece. The best jokes in the movie aren’t between the characters, but between the directors and the audience—especially the ending.

The Hurt Locker was last year’s most solid film—it had the fewest flaws. It’s also the most tense viewing experience I’ve had in a very long time. The film delivers a minor message about the psychology of its main character with underplayed effectiveness. It lacks a larger ideology so I don’t give it the same credit as films like A Serious Man, but this movie is a powerhouse thriller.

The trailer for Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best I’ve ever seen. The movie was just good.

Like Up in the Air, the British film, An Education, leaves a well-navigated path of quality in its concluding scenes. The film depicts a high school girl swept off her feet by a mysterious and charming thirty-something. The girl rightly rejects the uptight institutions around her that say she’s making a mistake. When a skeptical audience is finally almost convinced that the heroin might not be throwing her life away, the film provides the ending social conservatives can swallow. Frankly, I would have been more impressed by a film depicting a successful romance between a school girl and an older man—making a school girl look naïve is much easier.

The best performance of the year belongs to Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man. The theatre actor uses great physicality, vocal inflections, and facial expressions to capture a man whose life is falling apart at the mercy of his ruthless screenwriters. Playing a weak character who’s trying to be strong requires nuance, and Stuhlbarg provides it.

My favorite female performance of 2009 was Carrey Mulligan’s precocious schoolgirl in An Education. I was shocked to find out that she is twenty-four years old; she’s very convincing as a high school student outsmarting all the grown-ups around her. The character is like Ellen Page’s Juno, but with more depth and fewer lines of contrived dialogue to rely on.