Top Ten Movies of 2009 – Dre Rivas Edition

Dre Rivas January 3, 2010

Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine - 'Inglourious Basterds' (2009)

And here I was thinking 2009 to be a down year for film. The truth is, when I sat down to make my top 10 of 2009 list I realized there were, in fact, a whole slew of really good movies released this year. The trouble is — and I believe this is the reason I felt this to be a worse movie year than it really was — there were few truly great movies. Still, consider the following 10 films:

(500) Days of Summer

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Broken Embraces

District 9

Drag Me to Hell

The Hurt Locker

An Education

Precious

Up

Up in the Air

Where the Wild Things Are

Actually … that’s 11. And I left out a number of fine films. And I still haven’t mentioned a movie that cracked my top 10. Not too shabby a year at the movies at all. So here it goes:

Honorable Mention: Watchmen

I don’t care how popular it’s become to bash this movie, it remains one of my favorite 2009 entries; the only thing that really keeps it out of my top 10 is that awful, awful, awful “Hallelujah” love scene and another cheesy little moment at the very end. Small potatoes, perhaps, but unforgivable because, for the most part, Watchmen is a perfectly grand mess of a movie. It feels like 10 movies packed into one and I mean that as a compliment.

Thirst 10. Thirst

Just when the vampire genre was getting tired and a little too teenybopper and safe, in comes Park Chan-wook like some kind of mad carouser, crashing the party, trashing the place, turning it upside down before taking flight, scaring the little groundling Twilighters away. Despite their blood-soaked nature, Park’s films are graced with an elegance unmatched by most filmmakers working today. He joins a league of can’t-wait-to-see-what-they-do-next directors. This one — a sexy, violent tale of a priest who becomes a vampire and struggles to retain his soul — may not gain as many fans as his most accessible film, Old Boy, but it takes its rightful place in his pretty stellar filmography.

9. Star Trek

Why can’t all popcorn movies be like this? This is proof-positive that we do not need to lower our expectations when it comes to entertainment. This movie makes my top 10 because movies like these need to be celebrated more and made an example of. Yeah, I wish Eric Bana‘s character was a little more interesting, and yeah, that effects the story to some degree. Problem is, I’m having far too much fun with these characters to notice. Just try and pick one scene-stealer in this thing (OK, gun to my head: Karl Urban‘s Bones). It’s damn near impossible. Congrats to J.J. Abrams for shutting the skeptics up and delivering one of the best pieces of entertainment of 2009.

8. A Serious Man

I’ve been confounded and then haunted by this movie ever since I left the theater arguing its merits, meaning, and possible contradictions. It has not left my head. I’ve seen many movies since A Serious Man, but — with one or two exceptions — none of them has stayed with me like this one. I seriously doubted it would make my top 10 when I watched it in early November but here it is, sticking to me like an adhesive annoyance, characters and scenes running around my skull like a bad trip. This movie is a dark journey with punch line after punch line. Problem is, each punch keeps getting harder until the Brothers Coen start handing out sledgehammers, leading to a devastating, beautiful final shot — one last joke for the wicked who can appreciate it. It’s taken me a while to come to the dark side, but here I am. Here it is. Accept the mystery.

7. The Informant!

Here goes my first of many pleas to the Academy to ditch their George Clooney vote (for Up in the Air, a fine film and a solid performance) and instead nominate Matt Damon for his hilarious, sneaky good work in this film. My case is this: Clooney basically plays himself and was much better in Michael Clayton. But Damon is more than just due, he is completely transformed here. Look at the guy in the Bourne movies. Go ahead. I’ll wait here while you go look. You done? OK, now look at this guy. And I don’t mean just look at a picture. Watch him in this movie. Guess what? Same guy. Steven Soderbergh‘s movie appears tonally awkward in the beginning, but once you get your bearings this is one wonderfully bizarre trip into Kurt Eichenwald’s highly-detailed true crime account. Soderbergh could have made a movie in the vein of that masterpiece, The Insider. Instead, he and Damon went their own way, glossing over juicy details and would-be plot elements with the most inane curiosities.

6. The Brothers Bloom

My Rachel Weisz crush continues. Writer-director Rian Johnson has two films I like a whole lot under his belt (the other is Brick), but only one of them has Bloom, Stephen, Penelope, and — of course — Bang Bang. When you make a movie this highly stylized, you risk abandoning any semblance of heart, but The Brothers Bloom has a warm center. You show me one con movie and I can show you a dozen. I doubt, however, I could show you one as charming as this. There’s no real reason why this movie shouldn’t have been a hit.

5. Fantastic Mr. Fox

Just when I thought I would never fall hopelessly in love with another Wes Anderson movie, he makes a stop-motion animation film and ropes me back in. Forget the look; I don’t think I’ve seen an animated movie that felt quite like this. I thoroughly enjoyed Up (which features a montage sequence that is among the best filmmaking I’ve seen this year), but this year Pixar has been bested by Anderson’s whimsical, observational take on Roald Dahl’s children’s book. I smiled a heck of a lot throughout The Fantastic Mr. Fox. In fact, I’m smiling now just thinking about it.

4. Public Enemies

The great thing about Michael Mann‘s gangster film is how unlike other gangster films it looks and feels. So often in these movies the romantic subplot feels obligatory and dull, but Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard dig up something real here. Of course, the movie is impressively shot and the shoot-outs evoke a visceral fear of the tommy gun. Mann’s films are about men who live on the edge, but they are also about the women who love these men. The love story is where the film really draws its power; the cumulative effect sneaks up on you in the end, simple and elegant in a movie that likes to play rough.

3. In the Loop

Every time I watched this foul-mouthed British comedy it kept getting better and better and better. I can’t get enough of it either. I’ve already sang its praises (you can read my thoughts right here). It doesn’t appear to be striking a chord in the award circles, and that’s a shame.

Avatar 2. Avatar

James Cameron‘s seminal epic contains a richly detailed, visually splendid globe of alien creatures, alien natives, and a Maltese Falconish ore. It’s one part A Man Called Banshee, another part Dances With Na’vi, and one part “Whoa.” Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, and Sigourney Weaver breathe life into a movie that could have been pinned down by effects and impressive action sequences (kind of like Worthington’s earlier ’09 release, Terminator Salvation), but the difference between a guy like McG and a Cameron is evident. Call his dialogue corny or clunky and call the film a highway robbery of other past cinematic adventures. I will call it what it is: a success. Cameron makes popcorn movies and he’s very, very good at it.

1. Inglourious Basterds

I knew when the movie was over and I sat in my theater seat staring at the words “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino” with a grand smile on my face that that was that. There would be no other movie this year that could beat this shamelessly entertaining and interesting bizarro World War II flick. For all the talk of Tarantino paying homage to other movies, what always gets me are his characters (not to mention his masterful ability to create tension), and there’s a whole slew of basterds here worthy of their own movie. I said this when the movie was released, but I feel like Tarantino makes movies strictly for me. That other people enjoy them is simply a happy accident.