Every year for the past 10 years I have written my ten best of the year and every year there are far more than 10 films I absolutely love. So, as is custom, the runners up, the films that were but a hairs breadth from making this list themselves. The honorable mentions in no particular order: “Taking Woodstock, The Hangover, The Informant!, Up, In the Loop, The Cove, Coraline, It Might Get Loud, Sugar, Star Trek, Food Inc., The Taking of Pelham 123, State of Play, Trucker, Bronson, Broken Embraces, Police Adjective, The Last Station and Invictus.”
And now on to the list.....
10. The Hurt Locker: The Hurt Locker is a visceral, physical, film going experience that will have you twisting in your seat, holding your breath and begging for the air to come back into the room. It is a fierce and ferocious film of that will leave you spent by the end. The walk from the theater is likely to be a somber one, but with the reward being a movie experience like few others.
9. Inglorious Basterds: Wildly violent, irreverent and strangely humorous, Inglorious Basterds re-imagines World War 2 history with the kind of blood and guts guile that only Tarantino could muster.
8. Observe and Report: Director Jody Hill's Observe and Report is the most daring and underrated films of 2009. This seeming mall cop comedy, minus Paul Blart, is Taxi Driver re-imagined as a tragi-comic suburban mall security guard. Seth Rogan stashes the stoner charm in favor of a bull-headed determined man-child and his performance walks a razors edge, as the whole movie does, of being terribly, offensively, over the top dark. With each scene Director Hill and star Rogan add a layer of outrageous behavior that threatens to tip the balance into something beyond offensive and by the end you cannot believe what they have pulled off.
7. The Girlfriend Experience: Another sensational year for Steven Soderbergh. You may have noticed his The Informant! in my honorable mentions for this list. What made me choose The Girlfriend Experience over The Informant! for this list? It was the stunning performance of real life porn star Sasha Grey. Ms. Grey delivers a complex mix of ingénue and whore that really no other actress could accomplish. Ms. Grey and Mr. Soderbergh take you inside this woman’s world in hypnotic fashion through her performance and his remarkable use of digital photography that for the first time in Mr. Soderbergh’s many experiments, doesn’t feel showy or over pretentious.
6. Up in the Air: Writer George Will flippantly called Up in the Air ‘Grapes of Wrath for the service industry.’ He’s not entirely wrong. Where that book and film defined a movement toward social justice coming out of the Great Depression, inside the romance of Up in the Air is an inkling of a cry for a just truce between greedy corporate titans and the humans they refer to as resources. It is only an inkling, this is still a modern, big star, Hollywood production, just one with a big beating heart for those who are struggling.
5. Away We Go: After the remarkably bad Revolutionary Road and the terribly overblown Jarhead, I was convinced that Director Sam Mendes was lost forever; wandering in the world of pretentious sadness. Then, seemingly out of the blue, Mendes found his sense of humor and made Away We Go a sweet, sensitive hipster romance that cruises along on a vibe all its own. John Krasinski and Maya Rudolf are the year's sweetest couple and if by the end you aren't convinced you know a version of this couple in real life, I feel bad for you. I know these people. I love these people.
4. Adventureland: The words 'from the director of Superbad' were the death knell for Adventureland. It made audiences believe they were getting another bombastic, curse frenzied, laugh a minute riot. In fact, audiences were getting so much more, a smart, sensitive romance of wit and subtle charm. Director Greg Mattola's hazy; 80's paean to summer’s spent lolling about in a menial job will evoke, in the willing audience, nostalgia for even the lamest of summer gigs. The film is so laid back that you cannot help but succumb to the quiet charm that by the end becomes a romantic longing fulfilled.
3. I have never been a fan of Peter Jackson. I loathed The Lord of the Rings movies. Yes, I admit, there are visual treasures in those films, but to me, the clumsy enterprise was a chore to endure. You can imagine then that I wasn't looking forward to Jackson's latest effort, the Alice Sebold adaptation The Lovely Bones. What a revelation. Jackson crafts a story in The Lovely Bones that is part tragedy, part mystery and part art film. Saorise Ronan, so irritating in Atonement, is perfectly cast as the face and voice of innocence lost while Stanley Tucci transforms terrifyingly into the face of evil. Add in a score by Brian Eno and you get something nearing perfection, at least for those of us not in fealty to Alice Sebold's best seller.
2. 500 Days of Summer: 500 Days of Summer is smart and sweet and in the performance of Joseph Gordon Levitt it has a beautiful, battered, beating heart. Levitt and director Webb play out his memories as embellished facts. The highs are extremely high and the lows are a little more in tune because the sadness is new and easier to recall correctly. 500 Days of Summer is a remarkably intelligent examination of one man's most significant relationship. The exaggerated highs and lows and how one comes to terms with the pain and sadness of losing something that meant so much to them. What a fabulous, fabulous movie.
1. Coen Brothers fans know that you must watch a Coen's movie more than once before you get the full experience. The third time I watched The Big Lebowski it became my favorite movie of all time. Repeat viewings of No Country For Old Men, Fargo and even Burn After Reading reveal new pleasures with each viewing. That will, no doubt, be the case with A Serious Man. For the Coen Brothers A Serious Man may be their magnum opus. The film takes the lyrical, subtext heavy style of the Coen's to its most extreme place yet and becomes something akin to a grand symphony of words and images. Though ostensibly a telling of the story of Job with a Jewish leading man, what should come clear on repeat viewings is how the Coen's weave words and images into something that goes beyond traditional storytelling.
BYLINE:
Sean Patrick Kernan is a film critic. Check him out at: http://www.myspace.com/number1ramjamfan.
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