Back in November, I posted some anger-fueled words lamenting the country of France and the cheapshit soccer players that she breeds.

Fast-forward to right now and the following excerpt from a NY Times article on France’s World Cup no-show and early exit. As it turns out, soccer is kinda hard when you don’t use your hands:

Not everyone, though, will be sad to see France depart early. Many may view its exit as just punishment, given the way the French qualified for the World Cup. “The Irish are probably happy tonight,” said Boudewijn Zenden, a Dutch soccer player who is a television commentator for the tournament.

Even before Tuesday’s match, some corporate sponsors, including the Crédit Agricole financial services company, had begun to disassociate themselves from the French team, canceling advertising campaigns.

Le Parisien, a French newspaper, wrote scathingly: “To have the worst soccer team at the World Cup was almost unbearable. To also have the most stupid is intolerable.”

As they took the field against South Africa, France’s players were fully aware that they faced widespread contempt.

“Everyone in the world is laughing at us,” the star forward Franck Ribéry said beforehand.

Excuse me while I bask in some serious schadenfreude. Ahhhh.

The Hurt Locker

For my money, the best film of 2009 was The Hurt Locker.  The Academy Awards and dozens of critics across the nation scooped me on this one, but if I were to prop another film on the top of my list just to be different, ignoring my actual opinion, then that would make me an asshole.  Now wouldn’t it?

This film provided the most nerve-shattering cinematic experience I’ve had in a very long time.  Jeremy Renner stars as Sergeant First Class William James, the leader of an EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team in the thick of the currently still happening and 8 years young Iraq War.  Children born at the beginning of this bloody, Allah-forsaken debacle are firmly entrenched in the 3rd grade.  Quite a depressing thought, is it not?

The Hurt Locker is the first film I have seen about the current Iraq War that is not only incredibly well-made, but is also the first first that seems to take seriously the task of representing the reality of the American soldier’s experience in the war.  Yes, soldiers have questioned the veracity of some of the details, but that’s okay.  The “reality” that I’m referring to is the specific everyday deadliness of a contemporary war.  The film is hard to watch due to sweat-inducing scenes involving the disarming of improvised explosive devices created by insurgents, and therein lies the visceral power of the film: throughout the film we are waiting for the anti-hero, William James, to explode into millions of little fleshy pieces.  What is more: if and/or when he does, you can’t say that he doesn’t deserve it.

This is a good point to bring up an argument that my brother and I had with a dear friend of ours.  We and this friend had a vehement discussion at a bar in Portland, OR which lasted long enough, and became heated enough, that other people present felt ostracized and left our vicinity as we continued unabated.  My friend’s point (and he can correct me if I’m misrepresenting him) was that The Hurt Locker is an irresponsible film because it glorifies war.  According to this friend, we’ll call him David, the hero was a little bit too cool and therefore would warp the minds of impressionable youth and trick them into thinking that war is a sweet career move.  David also took exception with the POV firmly placed with the American soldiers and not the Iraqi people.

I did some Google research, and apparently David’s opinion that this is a pro-war film is shared by the Socialists as well as the Republicans.  The Socialist writer in the first of the preceding links believes that the critical praise for this film is part of a conspiracy on the part of the “ongoing and concerted rehabilitation of the Iraq war taking place within the liberal political and media establishment.”  He writes, “The presence of US forces as an army of occupation is never questioned, and the work of this fearless (frankly, psychotic) individual is presented as heroically saving thousands of lives.”    First of all, to think that there is a conspiracy on the part of the nation’s film critics to critically praise a film in order to sanitize the image of this war is batshit crazy.  (For the record, I don’t believe that David would concur with this point).  Yes, Roger Ebert and A.O. Scott and the Onion AV Club have secret meetings in order to decide which films they should pretend to like the best in order to drum up public support of this war.   Absolutely nuts.  The second point, that this is a pro-war film because the occupation is never questioned and because our hero is psychotic is also crazy, although maybe not quite so batshit.

Firstly, the fact that the occupation is never questioned does not make this a pro-war film.  It’s called nuance people.  Nobody wants a dramatic film to be a political diatribe with lots of froth and snappy, self-aggrandizing, back-patting points.  Dramatic film is much more effective when political points are made intrinsically to the story and the action.  This film is about the insurgents in the sense that our “hero” would not have a job if the Iraqi people approved of this war.  Throughout the film, Iraqi citizens look on toward the US soldiers with suspicion and ire.  They are not happy with the occupation.  The insurgents cannot be sorted out from the Iraqi citizens because the insurgents ARE the Iraqi citizens.  There is one small Iraqi boy who seems to befriend Jeremy Renner’s character.  The result of this friendship should squash any notions that this movie is pro-war, or pro-American occupation.

Secondly: Jeremy Renner’s character a war hero?  He consistently endangers every soldier and civilian around him.  His fellow soldiers hate him by the end of the film.  This man loves war.  War has become a life-affirming drug for him.  He is unable to love anything besides endangering his own life and the lives of others.  He turns his back on human connection of any kind: whether it be his fellow soldiers, his wife or his baby daughter.  This is not a hero.  This is the human mind corrupted by an absolutely fucked up war.  David mentioned that he was concerned that children would watch The Hurt Locker and become impressed with Jeremy Renner’s character.  My response was: are we supposed to make all of our films with small children in mind?  Are we to censor everything so that a child could leave the film without any misconceptions or misinterpretations?  I would hope not.  Small children aside, there is no way an adult could interpret Jeremy Renner’s character as anything remotely glorified.  He’s a nut whose life has been ruined by this war.

To say that The Hurt Locker carries a pro-war message is a strange position to take.  It feels similar to people believing that Juno is a pro-life film.  I understand that when abortion takes center stage in a film, or when war takes center stage, the hackles get raised on both sides of the fence.  Teen-aged Juno does not have an abortion, but this does not make Juno a pro-life film.  It’s the story of teen-ager making decisions in her life.  She happens to have a child.  Yes, pro-life idiots are going to take this as a feather in their collective bonnets because Juno becomes scared in an abortion clinic; pro-lifers tend to be nuance-less blockheads, so this is how they think.  The same blindered thinking is in play with the Fox News nitwit in the article linked to above.  His thinking is tantamount to: “This movie doesn’t involve Michael Moore with a megaphone, therefore it must be pro-war”.

Why is Juno scared to have an abortion?  Perhaps it’s because American teenagers are woefully uneducated when it comes to sex and reproduction.  Perhaps the problem lies within a gaping abyss in American culture and understanding  and not in the choices a fictitious teenager makes in a popular comedic film.  Maybe the problem is that abortion clinics are not federally funded and must do their best to exist on a shoestring budget.  Some pro-choicers were upset about Juno’s decision to get an abortion.  They blamed the film for daring to allow Juno to have her child, to …what’s the word?  oh, yes: to choose to have her baby.  I suppose every movie would need to involve abortions in order to make some pro-choice people happy.  Just like every war film should have the nuance of a bulleted memo in order to make some anti-war people happy.

As to David’s problem with the POV of The Hurt Locker: yes, this movie does not adopt the perspective of the Iraqi people, but this should not be held against it.  This movie is the story of an American soldier in the Iraq War.  There is an excellent movie screaming to be made about the Iraqi experience of the war, but this isn’t that film.  Every movie must decide what perspective to adopt, and this film chose the perspective of a nutty EOD man and 2 of his fellow soldiers.  They made this choice and came up with something poignant.  Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried is one of the best war novels ever written.  It adopts the perspective of American soldiers in the Vietnam War to devastating effect, and I dare anybody to claim that this novel is anything but anti-war.  Every war is filled with an endless number of atrocities and every piece of war literature, whether it be a piece of writing or a piece of film, must decide from which angle it will focus on these atrocities.  To adopt the perspective of those instigating the bloodletting does not make the criticism inherent to these works any less damning.

The Hurt Locker is an expertly edited, directed and photographed film.  The tension is primed from the first scene of the film and it only gets worse from there on out.  This film brings the mindless violence and the horrible life-destroying power of this current war onto the screen in a way that I have not yet experienced.  The Hurt Locker is heartbreaking, gut wrenching and often painful to watch: exactly the way a responsible war film should be.

For these reasons, The Hurt Locker is not only my best film of 2009, but it is a film that deserves entry into any conversation regarding the best war films of all time.

2.                 DISTRICT 9 / UP / CORALINE   (tie)

Coraline

Coraline is directed by Henry Selick, the man who birthed one of the best-looking films of the 1990s, The Nightmare Before Christmas.  Coraline represents an astounding leap forward for Mr. Selick in plot, animation, set design and editing.  The previous sentence is not faint praise from me, as TNBC is a film that I’ve rewatched perhaps eleventy billion times.  I’m happy to say that Coraline will be re-watched by me almost as many times;  probably not quite as many, as I’ll never be an insomniac undergrad again.  But you get my point.

Coraline is adapted from the children’s novel of the same name by Neil Gaiman.  While the film adaptation adds a few elements (including a central character named Wyborn) and takes few more elements away, the adaptation is on the whole very faithful.  Very few filmmakers besides Mr. Selick would be able to evoke the dark, dreary and sometimes terrifying brushstrokes of Mr. Gaiman’s story and still manage to maintain the source material’s bouyancy and casual humor.  These elements add to an overall portrait of the interior life of a child, where the world takes on many shades and attitudes, the most affective of which are mysterious and vaguely threatening.

The central premise of Coraline is that childhood can be a very creepy and oppressive place.  Children do not have the experience and knowledge that adults have, and there are many revelations that a child must experience in order to understand the world in the way that adults very quickly take for granted.   For instance, every child must come to terms with the limitations and relative pros and cons of their parents.  At a very young age, a child views his or her parents with rose-tinted baby goggles.  Inevitably, there is the realization that parents are human beings and all human beings are fallible.  This realization can lead to variable outcomes, some positive and some negative, but the initial intensity of this realization for a child can often be cataclysmic.

In Coraline, the titular heroine travels through a small door in her new house in misty rural Oregon only to discover a wish-fulfillment version of her parents.  They cook her wonderful food, let her wear whatever she wants, and most importantly of all, they lavish her with the utmost attention.  The only hook is, and its a big one, these bizarro parents have buttons for eyes and are fixated upon Coraline relinquishing her own eyes so that buttons may be sewed in their place.

As Coraline falls deeper and deeper into this terrifying rabbit hole, she must summon as much of her courage as possible in order to save her former life of negligent parents and zero friends that she had spent the beginning of her summer bemoaning.  The look and feel of the stop motion puppets and set pieces add wonderfully to the uncanny situation that Coraline finds herself in.  The strange dimension that exists on the otherside of the small doorway is familiar yet strange to this young girl, much like the advancement of childhood itself.  The more experiential knowledge a child acquires, the more skewed the once-idealized world becomes.  In Coraline, childhood is an uncanny place to be at once marveled at and recoiled from:  a fitting description of the experience of a young child coming to terms with a world that is nothing like it should be, but never as bad as it could be.

District 9

In District 9, aliens have landed in Johannesburg, South Africa and the government has reacted by sequestering the aliens (derogatorily known as Prawns) in an internment camp-like ghetto.  Sound familiar?  It’s a fairly common governmental response in dealing with pain-in-the-ass foreigners.  Sometimes we’ve seen it in the form of genocide and sometimes in the form of systematic oppression.  With the classic science fiction premise of “the aliens of landed” intermingled with an always present commentary on institutionalized xenophobia, District 9 is a glowing example of that rarely well-executed off-shoot of the noisy science fiction genre: the sci-fi social commentary film.

Geeky government agent Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is promoted to head the task force that is in charge of relocating the aliens to a new encampment that is, in Wikus’ words, a “concentration camp”.  With brute force as the general negotiation principle, the government agents storm into District 9 with their automatic weapons, helicopters and humvees in full force.  Sharlto Copley gives an excellent performance as the speciesist and cowardly agent who labors excrutiatingly for respect with his every breath; respect from both his subordinates and the prawns themselves.  He receives neither at first, and it isn’t until his life becomes intertwined with the lives of 2 prawns, a father and his young son, that Agent Van De Merwe finally earns the respect that he seeks.   I don’t want to ruin any of the surprises, but suffice it to say that the personality and emotional transformation that takes place over the course of the film for Agent Van De Merwe is the backbone of the drama here, and Sharlto Copley’s performance rises to the occasion.

Great story, great production design, great performances.  On top of all these attributes, District 9 features another accoutrement that puts this film above other examples in its crowded genre: classy and effective special effects.  A lesser movie involving alien weaponry and many scenes of combat might try to bludgeon its audience into the intensive care unit with spectacular explosions, fireworks and other overly aggressive and show-offy tactics.  Transformers, for instance, is an example of this strategy.  The special effects in District 9, however, are graceful, never gratuitous and service the story as well as the audience’s investment in the film.  I completely place the blame on producer Peter Jackson, who made similar use of special effects for his Lord of the Rings movies.  Yes, aliens and humans are blown up, limbs are severed and futuristic military equipment is bandied about.  These elements of the film do not exist simply to titillate (although they do a pretty good job of that as well); they service the story and push the momentum forward toward a blood-pumping climactic scene that does not disappoint.

UP

Once again, Pixar is able to ring deeply-felt human emotions out of a computer-generated environment.  And once again, Pixar does so with those old stand-bys, character and story.  If it wasn’t already cemented with Pixar’s previous 9 feature films (and many short films), Up is certainly the deciding blow: Pixar has the market cornered on non-cloying sentimentality.

The latest Pixar feature concerns itself with the life of Carl Fredricksen, an elderly man who is mourning the death of his lifelong wife, Ellie.  We first meet Carl when he is a small boy and jazzed up about a newsreel featuring his hero, explorer Charles F. Muntz.  Young Carl meets young Ellie and both hit it off with their shared love of Muntz and of high-spirited adventure in general.   Up is a remarkable journey from beginning to end, but there is a roughly 5 minute dialogue-less montage toward the beginning of the film that is the most touching 5 minutes in any film all year.  In just 5 minutes, director Pete Docter and the Pixar writing/animation team are able to encapsulate a lifelong relationship in beautiful, insightful, humorous and ultimately tear-jerking brevity.  If this portion of the film doesn’t move you, then your first name is either Ebenezer or you were the Vice President of the US from 2000-2008.

In his post-Ellie life, Carl is a crusty curmudgeon, firmly entrenching himself in a position that is at-odds with the world around him, not unlike his home that he refuses to forfeit despite the sky-scrapers and strip malls that occupy his once idyllic neighborhood.  Carl’s stagnated existence is launched into the stratosphere, quite literally, when he attaches tens of thousands of multi-colored helium balloons to his home in order to escape an unfair world that he sees as being in direct contrast to his beneficent, angelic wife.

The journey of Up is Carl’s journey to rediscover purpose in a what he believes to be an empty, corrupt world.  Along the way, Carl encounters a troop of talking (via electronic collar devices) dogs, an endangered South American bird named Kevin, a childhood hero who turns out to be a bust and a chatterbox of a Wilderness Explorer (think Boy Scout) named Russell.  As is par for the course with a Pixar film, the entirety of the film involves heaping ladles of imagination, humor and graceful, eyeball-popping animation.  Pixar not only makes some of the best-looking animated films around, but they also make some of the most deeply humanistic.  Up may not be Pixar’s best film (I’m thinking Toy Story 2 or The Incredibles), but it is definitely one of the masterpieces.  By taking the audience on the whimsical adventure of a lifetime and yet never losing touch with the everyday tragedy of an old person coming to terms with the death of a spouse, Up is easily one of the best films of 2009.

2009 was perhaps the richest year in film of this decade and it became agonizing to narrow down the list of films to a mere 10.  Hence, the number 3 slot and the number 2 slot involve 2 different 3-way ties.  Yes, this must be annoying to you top-10 purists out there, but let’s look on the bright side: the number 1 slot is occupied by a sole crown-wearer.

Keep in mind that the ranking of films, or any works of art, is a fool’s pursuit.  It’s impossible to empirically compare the merits of different pieces of art and then come out with a clear cut “winner”.  This is why the Oscars are so infuriating each year.  All that to say: please bear with us and the tie-happy conclusion to the 2009 year-in-film retrospective.

3.                      A SERIOUS MAN / FANTASTIC MR. FOX/ MOON (tie)

It’s no shocker that Wes Anderson the Brothers Coen are included at the top of my list this year.  These filmmakers have been among the most influential of the past decade (almost 2 decades for the Coens), and it makes for a wonderful movie-watching year when they both release movies that rank amongst the best of their respective oeuvres.  The film Moon is directed by newcomer and David Bowie progeny Duncan Jones.  If the excellence of this film is any indication, we can expect Mr. Jones to join the ranks of Anderson and the Coens in the years to come, if only in quality output and not necessarily in crowd-pleasing popularity.

A Serious Man

A Serious Man follows the downward spiral of an upstanding citizen, theoretical math professor and practicing Jew as he tries to reconcile his ideas of how a good man should exist, even when the world seems to be arranged by a sadistic and loveless God.  This movie is a wonderful study on the differences between expectations and results, with its double-barrels aimed squarely at the illogical and maddening tenants espoused by Judeo-Christianity.

Michael Stuhlbarg portrays the central character, Professor Larry Gupnik, with gusto.  This man displays frustration and bemusement with an intensity that perfectly meets the dehumanizing situations in the script that start out bad and escalate to catastrophic by the end of the film.  Every aspect of Larry’s life works to rip apart any sense of self-worth and pleasure one might expect with a decent home, a decent job, a decent faith and a decent moral bearing.  From Larry’s colleagues, students, to his wife, friends, neighbors, children,  and religious leaders, everyone seems to be conspiring against Larry, never allowing him to relax or enjoy a life of hard work.

Larry is essentially a live action version of Frank Grimes, the perma-scowling Homer Simpson nemesis featured in one of my favorite Simpsons episodes, “Homer’s Enemy”.   Although Larry Gupnik does not have the fury and the Holier-than-thou mindset of Grimey, the lives of both men are doomed to involve constant misfortune and tragedy despite the best intentions and feverish struggle of these respective souls.  While Frank Grimes fixates on Homer Simpson’s life as the raison d’etre for all that is wrong in the world, Larry Gupnik attempts to find answers with the religious leaders of his faith, Judaism, in order to discover how a decent person is to interact with a consistently indecent world.

As Larry’s life unravels in the Coen’s hilarious and cringe-inducing script, Larry becomes more frustrated with the lack of reason in the events in his life than with the events themselves.  Religion exists as a purported means of answering the fundamental human question of “Why?”.   A Serious Man shows that this is a very silly question to ask and the institutions purported to answer such a question are as silly and meaningless as fate itself.

And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the official A Serious Man trailer.  One of the best I’ve seen.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fantastic Mr. Fox features stunning stop-motion animation and a set design that in any other year would have been by far the best.  (2009 happened to feature another sterling stop-motion film that takes this prize, although only just barely).  The yellows, oranges, browns and reds of an English countryside pop in each frame and the obsessive compulsive detail that is Wes Anderson’s trademark breathes whimsical life into each scene.  The look and feel of this film adds to the moral focus of the tale, which is the moral focus of all of Wes Anderson’s films: the notion that weirdness and idiosyncrasy should be celebrated, even if said weirdness and idiosyncrasy puts one at odds with those around them who espouse the status quo.  In Fanstastic Mr. Fox, as in all of Wes Anderson’s films, we see that going against the grain can often feature an element of danger.  The presence danger is what keeps Anderson’s films from stagnating in whimsy and quirk for the sake of whimsy and quirk.

While A Serious Man focuses upon the hands we are dealt each day by exterior and uncontrollable forces, Fantastic Mr. Fox looks at the hands we are dealt at the onset of life with our biological constitution and the people whom we love that must deal with our fundamental selves, for better or worse.  Fantastic Mr. Fox involves the mischievous adventures of a fox burglar who is compelled into dangerous romps at neighboring farms even as these romps undermine the well-being of his family members and the local woodland creatures.

While I’m pained to fault such an imaginative and beautifully rendered film, one aspect that I felt could have been amped up a bit is the agency of Mrs. Fox.  While Mrs. Fox, voiced by the up-and-coming actress Meryl Streep, has a certain amount of sass and acts as an often humorous counterpoint to her husband’s flights of fancy, as a character she has very little influence on the plot of the film.  She settles into a role as basically the character that is angry with Mr. Fox, which makes for some unfortunately typical gender dynamics; i.e. the man as the doer of things and the woman as the one holding him back (nagging).

Happily, not much else in Fantastic Mr. Fox is typical.  This is a fully realized world that takes an excellent starting point — a Roald Dahl classic — and embellishes it with confident imagination and detail into something completely new and unexpected.  From a made-up sport called whackbat, and the substitution of the word “cuss” for all cuss words, to a wolfen spirit animal representing the inner-beast in all of us, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a sure classic that will be watched and rewatched by children and adults for years to come.  With the storyline of the film and with the film itself, Wes Anderson shows that while going against the grain is an inherently risky pursuit, if nobody tried the world would be a much less fantastic place.

Moon

Moon looks at the question of an individual’s autonomy, a notion explored in both A Serious Man and Fantastic Mr. Fox.  Moon, however, does so in an extreme and no-less compelling way.  While I’m hard-pressed to discuss the questions raised by a film that harbors an unexpected twist at its core, I’ll try my best to skirt those tenuous boundaries.

Sam Rockwell gives one of the best performances of the year as a moon-bound astronaut named Sam Bell who is trying to hold onto his sanity as he copes with his lonely life as a laborer far away from his former existence.  Nearing the end of his 3-year contract as a miner of helium-3, an element that is being used to counteract energy problems on Earth, Bell is beginning to regret his commitment as he bemoans the glaring distance between himself and  his young family.  Bell’s only company aboard the ship comes in the form of delayed messages from his wife and from mission control along with the ship’s main computer known as GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), an entity that shows its emotions through smiley face, frowny face and upset face emoticons.  Bell’s lonely existence is exacerbated by the onset of hallucinations that follow a vehicular accident while the astronaut is out mining helium-3 from within the moon’s surface.

Heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon explores the nature of human individuality and the meaning of life in the face of the cold and indifferent solar system that surrounds our home planet.  What makes Moon stand out from other space films inspired by 2001 is that Sam Bell is an individual whose life has been commandeered by an ultimate manifestation of alienated labor.  When a life is utilized solely for the benefit of the greater good, what is the value that is placed on individuality?  What is the difference, at that point, between an automaton and a person?  Human emotions, memory and aspirations become meaningless afterthoughts in the face of such an existence.  In Moon, we watch as Sam Bell attempts to come to terms with these questions and the film takes us in unexpected places only as the best science fiction films can.

While Mr. Fox deals with the individual’s helplessness in the face of biological make-up and inherent drives and A Serious Man deals with the individual’s helplessness in the face of the cruel randomness of fate, Moon explores the helplessness of an individual whose life is committed to labor.  As corporations grow in power, the power of the individual conversely wanes and Moon portrays a fantastical extrapolation of this process.  While Moon does not feature the dark comedy or whimsy of a Wes Anderson or Coen Brothers film, the film is every bit as riveting with the question it asks and the journey we are taken on in the form of an answer.

It’s interesting how little we Americans seem to care about the moon and our human footprints on it.  After the initial moon landing in 1969, the whole enterprise has become passe.  Last year, NASA attempted to drum up interest in the current mission by holding an on online naming contest where people could vote for the name of the new room they’re building now.  Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report urged his viewers to vote for the name “Colbert”, an effort which ultimately won the contest.  However, NASA reserved the right from the beginning to name it whatever they wanted regardless of the vote, which they did.  They decided to name it “Tranquility”.  How inoffensive.   The stir that the Colbert Report created regarding the naming of this room of the space station was probably the most buzz that NASA and its moon missions have seen in decades.  Including when water was recently found on the moon after NASA exploded rockets into the moon, causing an estimated six-mile long explosion of moon materials.

This train of thought led me to view the 1902 French film A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) written and directed by George Méliès.  This 14-minute film (which can be viewed in its entirety here) involves a group of astronomers building a rocket, flying to the moon and then heading back.  I use the word “flying” loosely, as the rocket launch is more or less a large-scale gun-firing, with the rocket acting as the bullet.  Another charming note straight out of the industrial age, and what could be the introduction of Steam Punk, is the astronomers banging away on a blacksmith anvil, crafting the pieces of their space vehicle.  The craft lands on the moon with the famous shot of the rocket in the moon’s eye seen above.   Is this a critique of man’s technology as painful detriment to man himself?  Maybe.  Or, more likely, it is just a funny and engaging way to portray a moon landing.

Upon landing, the astronomers turned astronauts exit their vehicle sans space suits, or sans anything really that would indicate any sort of atmospheric differences on the lunar surface.  They are wearing their normal genteel outfits, with top hats and overcoats.  They are all carrying umbrellas as well, just in case their is any precipitation on the moon; which there is, in the form of snow.  Along with snow, the travelers discover giant mushrooms (in fact, one of their umbrellas turns into a mushroom when planted into the lunar surface) and, of course, space people.  The space people are called Selenites and are portrayed by tumbling French acrobats.   When hit with any sort of force, usually thanks to what turned out to be very helpful umbrellas, the Selenites explode into clouds of dust.  That’s right, the humans almost immediately start killing these beings without pausing to consider whether they are hostile or not.  The Selinites have a tribal “savagery” to them, and a 1902 Western audience surely would have conjured real-life correspondents quickly enough.

That being said, the special effects utilized in the portrayal of the Selenites exploding are actually quite impressive.  The general technique is still utilized to great effect to this day — when the humans explode via alien weaponry in the 2009 film District 9, it is with virtually the same effect.  Interestingly, District 9 (a great film that will soon appear in my best of 2009 series) involves of an extraterrestrial species that, upon landing in Johannesburg, South Africa, is immediately quarantined into a kind of ethnic ghetto and subjected to the whims of a hateful speciesist government.  From the world’s first science fiction film to the world’s most recent great science fiction film (sorry Avatar), it is clear that the farther away from Earth our imaginations wander, the more closely we end up looking at ourselves.  To the point where the moon itself has a human face.

In 1902, the moon was seen as a vastly distant place where almost anything could be awaiting its first human visitors.  Now, fast-forwarding 108 years later, the moon is seen as conquered, catalogued and mundane.  Curious as to whether there were any people alive today who were around during the creation and showing of A Trip to the Moon, I did some wikipedia research and discovered that there are 79 verified living supercentenarians*.  A supercentenarian, since you asked, is a person of 110 years or more.  In the space of 1 (albeit, abnormally long) human lifetime, our feelings about the moon have changed drastically.  Not even lunar explosions, the discovery of water, nor Stephen Colbert, the last great Patriot, can make us care these days.

*According to wikipedia, there are also 57 more unverified living supercentenarians.  Of the 79 verified living supercentenarians, 76 are women.  [Read: it doesn't look promising fellas].  Also: there are 3 women alive today who were born in the same year (1895) as Babe Ruth, Shemp from the Three Stooges, Stan Laurel from Laurel and Hardy, Abbott from Abott and Costello, Rudolph Valentino, Jack Dempsey, and Buster Keaton.  These oldest of women were born during the year of the first public screening of a motion picture ever by the Lumiere Brothers who opened the first commercial cinema, and had this as their first movie poster, which as it happens was the first movie poster ever:

Scott Tobias of the Onion AV Club has written a piece on the film version of Let the Right One In as an installment in the site’s entertaining series The New Cult Canon.

Mr. Tobias, however, wrongly allows his love of horrporn films to warp his chances at an objective viewing of the movie.  Yes, Let the Right One In is going to be disappointing if you’re expecting Hostel.  Tobias writes:

It’s an arch, “classy” piece of work, something critics who regularly turn their noses up at the likes of Takashi Miike, Rob Zombie, and Eli Roth can recommend as an antidote. And while there’s plenty of grisly mayhem on display, director Tomas Alfredson isn’t inclined to goose the audience with big shocks or nerve-jangling suspense sequences; he keeps his distance, as if he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. At best, the film could be called “creepy,” but even that’s a stretch, because it mistakes general moodiness for something more sinister and disturbing.

Tobias’ use of the term “goose” is telling.  He’s the type of person who sees blood on a movie box (like the person who sees boobs on a movie box) and then expects to be “goosed” in a very particular and hamfisted way.

Sure, Tobias can respect those films for what they do, but why would you expect every film in the genre to do the SAME EXACT THING?  That’s not being a critic, that’s being a fanboy.  The next time he reviews a film, I think he should leave his Hostel II button at home.  To judge a film unfavorably against the films of Eli Roth (Eli-fucking-Roth???) is mind-boggling.

Tobias decries the “frustrating” ambiguities in the film.  Yeah, it really is too bad when a film alludes to mysterious elements in character and plot, without beating you over the head with puzzle piece answers.  The ambiguities in Let the Right One In are intentional, I can assure you, and they allow the viewer to fill in the blanks, or heaven-forbid, re-watch the movie in order to intuit suggestions and clues.  It must have been hard on Mr. Tobias to have to think about plot and characters and stuff, as opposed to receiving a nicely wrapped and lobotomy-level simplistic concept like “American tourists are kidnapped and tortured underneath a European hostel.  The end.”  Ambiguity is a bad thing in film?  Since when?  Are we to disregard the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg and David Lynch?

I get the sense that Mr. Tobias has defended the horrporn genre one too many times and it has made him bitter.  Perhaps he has heard too much about the subtleties of Let the Right One In and was determined to point out its flaws even before he watched it.  To admit its brilliance would mean turning his back on his life’s work.

What do you think?  Am I being overly-defensive?  I mean, I’ve enjoyed Rob Zombie’s films for various reasons, but I would never compare The Devil’s Rejects or Hourse of 1000 Corpses to a movie like Let the Right One In.  Yes, they come from the same rack at the video store, but they are going for entirely different things.  Sometimes “general moodiness”  is preferable in a film to simply being “goosed”, even when the film involves bloodthirsty vampires.

6.                                  AN EDUCATION

Despite griping a bit about the ending of An Education in my original review, the film is nonetheless a solid number 6 on my list.  The movie rides heavily upon the shoulders of Carey Mulligan’s performance as the young British schoolgirl, Jenny (who receives the titular “education”), and luckily for all involved, she is spectacular.  If I were giving out acting awards, I’d give her one for best actress of the year.

An Education is based on the experiences of British journalist Lynn Barber who, as a 16 year old, falls in love with a creepy man (Peter Sarsgaard) almost twice her age.  This creepy man, named David, is full of promises and schmooze, winning over the heart of the young girl as well as the approval of her over-controlling parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour).  This man builds his career and his sexual exploits upon deception and he embodies the darker sides of a world that young Jenny is only just coming to terms with.  While the ending is a bit of a sell-out, exactly because it seems to pretend that the evil in the world is gone once the creepy man is out of the picture, the bulk of the film deals with the naivete and ideals of a young woman who chooses, in David, an alternative to the future that she is being forced into everyday by her parents.

The set design is great and the cinematography even better; London (and Paris for a bit) are beautifully rendered and enlivened with plenty of 1960s period detail.  The script is sharp, although contains a few too many jokes.  These jokes are a bit confusing for a film that wants certain of its aspects to be taken dead seriously and certain others to come across as light and champagne bubbly; which is an odd tonality for a film dealing with what many would consider pedophilia.  These tonal irregularities are acceptable to me, for they ring true of the experiences of teenagerdom: life for many teenagers alternates between the glum seriousness and buoyant humor, and there is often no three-ways about it.  Although some of the notes in this film ring strangely off, there are enough true moments for me to consider it the 6th best film of the year.

As faithful readers of my blog can attest, I am a big fan of the bildungsroman (coming-of-age tale), especially those novels and films out there that deal with the theoretical trauma that initially separates the child from the familial sphere.  Often, this trauma is followed by a “big bad wolf” type character that swoops in at a vulnerable point in the child’s development and usurps the guiding role of the parents.  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield spends the novel searching for this surrogate parent, eventually finding one in his pedophilic teacher.  In Let the Right One In, this character is the young vampire, Ellie.  In An Education, Peter Sarsgaard’s character isn’t far off from a pedophilic teacher nor, for that matter, a vampire.  Instead of subsisting off of blood, however, David subsists on the trust and naivete of those around him.  While Ellie is ultimately a positive force (you can argue this, obviously) in Oskar’s life, Jenny learns that there are some vampires out there that you simply can not trust.

5.                             INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

To criticize Quentin Tarantino because he puts more effort into his individual scenes than he does into the movie as a whole is tantamount to criticizing Alice Munro for writing short story collections as opposed to novels.  Who gives a shit if the outcome is brilliant?  I rank Tarantino amongst the short list of contemporary masters because he does one thing and one thing only: make Tarantino films.  The originality of Tarantino’s vision and execution is a major factor in Inglourious Basterds becoming one of the most fun movie-going experiences I had in 2009.

Cartoonish excess, sweat-invoking tension and childish gags come heavily into play in Tarantino’s take on the World War II revenge picture.  Sort of like Spielberg’s Munich but with a sense of humor, a group of renegade American Jews (led by the very Anglo LT. Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt) tramples through the woods of war-torn Europe with one goal in mind: the accumulation of Nazi scalps.  In his own trademarked way, Tarantino is once again able to appropriate old B-movie techniques and themes, breathe new life into them, and then keep the film in that rare territory where one can be completely taken with a set-up while simultaneously finding it absurd and unbelievable.

One of the best scenes in the film, and one of the best scenes in any movie in 2009, takes place in an underground German tavern.  In this scene, several of the Basterds are undercover and attempting to rendezvous with their double-agent German actress friend, Bridget von Hammersmark.  Tarantino builds the tension brilliantly as the Basterds’ cover gets blown centimeter by tortuous centimeter.   This scene, unlike many others, does not veer into absurdity but instead maintains a firm grasp on realism; however, the manipulation on the part of the director in building the scene is comedic.  We are able to laugh at the set-up as we are taken with it.

This is to me is what makes Inglourious Basterds in particular and Quentin Tarantino in general so brilliant: he is perhaps the greatest comedy director working today.  Tarantino films are incredibly well-thought out, almost always involve excellent performances and are built on such cinematic touchstones as character development, plot detail and action; not a claim that many comedies of the last 15 years can make.  I never seem to laugh harder at what’s on the screen than during a Tarantino film — Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Vols 1 & 2, Deathproof are comedies of the highest order, and Inglourious Basterds may be the best of them all.  Okay, it’s not better than Pulp Fiction, but number 2 on that list isn’t bad at all.

PS: On Sunday, Inglourious Basterds won the top prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards: the award for best performance by a cast.  Well deserved, you basterds.  Well deserved.

4.                                  THE INFORMANT!

The Informant!, like movie #6 on this list, receives a large amount of its oomph from its lead.  Both An Education and The Informant! rely upon an engaging and realistic performance from their central characters, for if either Matt Damon or Carey Mulligan were anything less than fantastic, their respective films would simply not work.  Luckily for Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon sticks the landing with his portrayal of the sweaty, ticcy and against-all-odds Mark Whitacre.

The Informant! follows the misadventures of a corporate executive as he attempts to rid himself of certain problems via a sure-to-fail strategy of shoveling on more problems.  While Mark Whitacre paints himself into a corner, the audience, like the characters surrounding Mark, attempt to discover what it is, exactly, that makes this man tick.  As previously discussed on this blog, good ol’ American hubris is a large part of the equation.  Another part, and the part that makes Mark an endearing character, is an incessant (American?) optimism that keeps Mark going with whispers something to the effect of, “It’s going to work out.  It always has for you, and it always will,” and, “You’re the smartest man in the room.  You will always outsmart those around you.  You have a PhD from Cornell for chrissakes!”

The audience attempts to figure out how to feel about Mark and his strategory and receives an assist from a clever on-going inner monologue wherein Mark mutters to himself about anything and everything, with a notable preoccupation with the animal kingdom and the various survival mechanisms it features.  Mark sees himself as a survivor in a dog-eat-dog world, except that it never occurs to Mark that his idea of survival is everyone else’s idea of egregious greed and conspicuous consumption.  There is never enough for this man, but then again, he belongs to a subspecies of human that does not quit eating when it is full.  Mark is a product of his environment, and his environment happens to breed frumpy men who swindle the average citizen while simultaneously embezzling from their own corporation.  Most animals eat when they’re hungry and rest when they’re not.  Corporate suits, like viruses, keep going just because they can.  To hell with anything else.

The Informant! allows us to gaze into the mind of a maniac and at the same time lets us peek beneath the hood of malevolent corporate procedure.  The international price-fixing scandal would be, as they say, unbelievable if it were not true.  The general public would probably have never been aware of the misdeeds of ADM were it not for the rogue maneuvering of their golden boy.  In this sense Mark Whitacre is an unassuming hero, who is partially redeemed for he is not quite as evil as the system that meant to breed him as one of their own.

This, however, is far from a bland diatribe against corporate culture.  By highlighting the comical aspects of Mark’s situation and personality, The Informant! keeps the mood light and breezy, with help from its jazzy score.  By laughing at an insanely depressing situation, the film manages to keep its satirical teeth sharp instead of reveling in a high-handed position that has sunk many a lesser film by boring the audience with bland moral soap-boxing.

Historian Howard Zinn has also passed away.  While this blog hasn’t ventured overtly into the political terrain, it is worth noting that while Salinger is remembered primarily for his agoraphobic withdrawal from society, Zinn is renowned for the political battles on which he built his career.   Zinn cared deeply for the common person and his most well-known work, A People’s History of the United States, an historical work that gave the narrative of America back to the common man and woman, instigated the political awakening of many an American undergrad (including this humble blogger).

The world is lesser without Zinn, but his work, and its ramifications, will last for quite a while.

Here’s a link to the Boston Globe’s obituary of Zinn.

J.D. Salinger, iconographic American author best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye and his story collections 9 Stories and Franny and Zooey, has died at age 91.

Salinger’s body of work speaks for itself, but he is perhaps best-known nowadays for his stringently reclusive ways.  How he lived and his frame of mind over the last half-century can only be speculated about, but I like to think of Salinger as the grown-up version of Holden Caulfield.  Fed up with all the phoniness in the world, he simply packed it up and headed for the hills.

The New York Times has a comprehensive obit here.

Without further delay, here are movies 8 and 7:

8.                                     PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

With a gimmicky film such as Paranormal Activity, there’s always a chance that the law of diminishing returns will come into play with each subsequent viewing.  Once the gimmick is experienced once, there is no reason to revisit an essentially deflated enterprise.  For instance, nobody watches the Blair Witch Project anymore, a movie that pretty much became unwatchable after the first viewing.  While Paranormal Activity has been widely compared to Blair Witch because of their shared home-video gimmick and their similarly microscopic budgets compared to their similarly astronomical profit to investment ratios (Blair Witch is #2 all-time on return on investment to Paranormal Activity’s #1), it is my contention that Paranormal Activity will have a much longer shelf-life than Blair Witch.  Paranormal Activity is a much tighter film than Blair Witch, both conceptually and editing-wise.  PA features a scarier antagonist, a more impacting dénouement and, most importantly for the nerds at Kuddelsaus, more interesting thematic implications than its cheapy horror predecessor.

Paranormal Activity derives a lot of its terror from the horrid vulnerability one experiences when someone or something decides to make a crime scene of one’s home sweet home.  The 2007 movie The Strangers, in which a masked couple decide, for reasons unknown, to target a young couple staying in a remote cabin, did this very well.  While the mayhem in the Blair Witch Project took place in some woods, where scary shit is supposed to happen, Paranormal Activity features mayhem within the allegedly-sanctified space of a couple’s home.  And, unlike The Strangers, this is not a mere sadistic mortal (granted, The Strangers featured some very disturbed mortals), but a demon, which does not only infiltrate through the sacred barriers which separate inside the home from outside, but also the barriers separating inside one’s body from outside.  Preceding Paranormal Activity, there have been many films which have used a supernatural invasion of one’s home/body to cull gasps, some notable examples being such previously blogged about films as The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Others.  Like these other films, the Paranormal Activity demon does not stop until every nook and cranny has been desecrated somehow.  That’ s just what demons and/or malevolent ghosts do.

Notably, Paranormal Activity never leaves the space of the home.  The previously cited films all utilize a claustrophobic atmosphere as a means of amping up feelings of helplessness and despair, but all of them provide relief to these closed-in domestic spaces with excursions, sometimes only brief ones, into spaces surrounding the home, whether it be the grounds of the manor or New York City.  In Paranormal Activity, we don’t leave.  We are cursed to remain in the home, even when the couple gets a well-deserved night out toward the middle of the film.  As viewers, we become unwilling homebodies along with a demonic presence.  With the only option of escape being to flee the theatre,  I witnessed several people do just that on both occasions that I watched the movie.

Editor’s Note: For my original movie review of Paranormal Activity, please click here.

7.                                     SUMMER HOURS (L’heure d’été)

Summer Hours, a film by Olivier Assayas, begins and ends with scenes focused upon the free-wheeling behavior of children.  The final scene is a doozy and the most beautifully shot scene in an altogether beautiful film.   In between these bookends, we have a film filled with the lives of adults negotiating a much-less free-wheeling world.  The lives of 3 adult siblings are central here, as they come together in the wake of the death of their mother.  Big decisions must be made regarding her estate, which includes a mansion located on the French countryside just outside of Paris – a home that is filled with expensive family heirlooms as well as the memories of 3 intertwined childhoods that seem very far away.

Complicating factors is the globalized nature of this family’s contemporary existence.  Adrienne, played by Juliette Binoche, is a designer living in NYC and recently engaged to an American.  She will be moving to Colorado and possibly never returning to France.  Jérémie, played by Jérémie Renier, is an executive who works for the Puma shoe company and resides in China with his family for the unforeseeable future.  Jérémie’s children speak Chinese and are in love with American culture; the ties between these children and their French parents’ cultural roots have been severed, for good or ill.

Summer Hours uses the situation of these siblings as a microcosm through which to explore the changing global landscape and the ways that established cultures are falling by the wayside to make room for the dominant and overwhelmingly American global culture.  The third sibling, Frédéric (Charles Berling),  is the only one remaining in France as well as the only one attempting to hold on to any sense of heritage, whether cultural or familial.  By holding on to the family home, he believes that some aspect of the past, and the way things perhaps used to be, might be preserved for posterity.  But even his own children are not interested in what he wishes to preserve.  They have their own perspectives, and their own 21^st Century values, through which they take in the world around them.  A musty house and some paintings from long ago do not factor in.  Further challenging Frédéric’s acceptance of his changing life are the post-mortem secrets that emerge which scuff-up the memory and perceived identity of the deceased –  a person that once seemed like a solid, tucked-away and labeled entity.

Memories, culture and identity are not stagnant bodies.  They twist and morph constantly and are never the same each time one attempts to access them.  These elements don’t always appear the way they used to, or at least the way one thinks they used to, and while this can be an uncomfortable aspect of life for many, there are no better agents out there to deal with this reality than children.  The older we get, the more we look to the past as an anchor.  In Summer Hours we learn that the anchors we make up and strive for in life are illusory and there is ever only the current, carrying us through.