Saturday Night Crap-o-Rama is less than a year old, and I’ve already sort of gotten away from my mission statement. What began as a quest to catalogue the world’s dumbest movies (Helloooo, Robot Holocaust) has morphed more into a love-in for any film that’s remotely disreputable. I contemplated providing a list of the most awesomely bad movies of the year, but I also wanted to celebrate 2009’s films that were actually good without any semblance of irony. It wasn’t the best year for cinema, but dang it, 2009 kept me entertained all year long. Here are my…
Top 15 films of 2009
15. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
I’m as shocked as you are to see this one here. Ghost of Girlfriends Past is a hateful, misogynistic movie. You think Ernest Hemmingway hated women (and by “hated women” I mean “wrote awesome books”)? Strap in for some hi-larious sexist hijinx from Matthew McConaughey and Michael Douglas, in which this Scrooge remix has McConaughey visited by visions of ex-lovers (Are they dead? That’s never quite addressed) in an attempt to redeem him. This one gets instant nostalgia points because Nate from Left of the Dial and I had to attend a screening for a newspaper we were working for at the time. It was a surprisingly good date, with the clear highlight being the film’s introduction by some Bachelor contestant: “We’ve all been there. We’ve all been ghosts of girlfriends past.” As much as I hated this movie, I find myself referencing it more than any other film on this list.
14. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
I was pretty excited to see the backlash against the G.I. Joe backlash, if that makes any sense. It seems like everyone was ready for this movie to blow chunks, so it was great to read so many middling, faintly supportive reviews (When you’re in the bad movie business, “middling” is the equivalent of Citizen Kane). Get past the lame CGI, and G.I. Joe is basically the story of two ninjas fighting. There’s a ton of other stuff going on, but really, it’s ’bout the ninjas. If the sequel is called G.I. Joe: Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow Fight for 90 Minutes, I am so in.
13. Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi made his triumphant return to horror with Drag Me to Hell, the tale of one woman’s attempts to reverse a curse that will damn her soul to, like, hell and stuff, and its got all of his touchstones – creepy old ladies, demons, and stuff so disgusting it becomes comical. Like a lot of Sam’s best films, Drag Me to Hell harkens back to another era of cinema, when gypsy curses were a dime a dozen and Satan was always up to something. There’s plenty of comedic timing as well, and the film’s PG-13 rating ensures that the comedy and horror are on fairly equal footing. Spider-man 3 really shook my confidence in Raimi, but it’s clear his days making blockbusters haven’t dulled his cult sensibilities.
12. Trick 'r Treat
Speaking of cult sensibilities, Trick ’r Treat feels like it was made for a cult following. A horror anthology a la Creep Show, the film sat in a vault for two years despite strong test screenings. It finally got dumped on DVD this year, and it’s a heck of a lot more appealing than the latest Saw sequel. I’m not saying this film would’ve cleaned up in theaters like Paranormal Activity, but it didn’t deserve to languish in obscurity either, as its DVD sales have revealed. It’s a love letter to horror movies and Halloween, and a mighty fine one at that.
11. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Paranormal Activity is this year’s little indie that could, thanks in great part to its number one fan, Steven Spielberg. Writer/director Oren Peli and cast members Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat deserve the bulk of the credit for creating this story of one woman’s pseudo-haunting by a demon and her dickhead boyfriend’s attempts to film/stop it. But it was Spielberg who championed the film and edited it down a bit for public consumption. Paranormal Activity is admittedly a pretty slow, gore-less film, but its scares, however slight and subtle, will dig in deep if you accept the film on its own terms.
9. Adventureland
I hated Super Bad. Is that a bad way to introduce Adventureland, the follow-up from Super Bad director Greg Mottola? Set in the late ’80s, it chronicles a bum post-college summer for James (Jesse Eisenberg), as he attempts to work up the funds for grad school by working at a rundown amusement park. The film pushes the idea that someone is always wanting someone else, no matter how happy they get, which isn’t a terribly romantic thing for a rom-com to push, but given how fleshed out the characters feel, it’s a welcome idea, even if Mottola disproves it by the end. I’m a sucker for brilliantly exploitive soundtracks, and Adventureland features The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” and Hüsker Dü’s “Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely,” so of course I’m game. Bonus points for finally making me see why people like Kristen Stewart so much.
Here’s another quiet indie horror flick, this time set in the ’80s. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) takes up a babysitting assignment only to end up attacked by Satanists. The plot is pure B-movie mania, but the acting (Tom Noonan!), pacing, and cinematography give the film much more gravitas than its script might warrant. I prefer The House of the Devil over Paranormal Activity because of these things; plus, House gives me characters I actually get invested in, whereas I feel invested in the characters’ situation in Paranormal Activity.
7. District 9
Sci-fi has always been great for exploring race relations, as evidenced by District 9. Set in
6. 12 Rounds
John Cena’s more cerebral follow-up to his seminal film The Marine was quite the psychological thriller. This blog’s mission statement is to celebrate any disreputable film, especially if my girlfriend hates it. So imagine my surprise and delight when she told me that 12 Rounds was her favorite Cena flick. She loves those intellectual thinkpieces. Or maybe it’s the way Cena embodies the everyman as the down-on-his-luck New Orleans cop Detective Danny Fisher, who must stop terrorist Miles Jackson (Aidan Gillen) from killing his girlfriend (and a bunch of other people). Yeah, maybe that’s it…
5. Star Trek
This is the last screener I attended for The People’s XPress before it ate shit and died, and it was (sort of) worth the parking ticket I got in the process. J.J. Abrams and pals Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci masterminded this reboot of the franchise that’s both a prequel to the original series and a sequel to Star Trek Nemesis. Time travel disrupts the lives of future heroes James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto), and they must fight to save the whole dang universe from crazed Romulan nutjob/tattoo enthusiast Nero (Eric Bana). The whole cast is awesome, the scenes are whiz-bang delightful, and while the script occasionally glosses over some Trek rules, I’m having too much fun to care.
4. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
My cousin Anthony introduced me to this wonderful little oddball. Adapted from the children’s book of the same name, Cloudy tells the story of awkward inventor Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) and how he accidentally created a machine that turns water into food. When said machine ends up floating in the sky, it gives
3. Inglourious Basterds
Cat and mouse for 152 minutes. That’s Inglourious Basterds. Criticize writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s way of borrowing from cinema – the title is a copyright-dodging steal from The Inglorious Bastards; the use of David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” is both a rip from Cat People and pretty unwarranted for a WWII film – but that dude writes excellent dialogue. Almost er’rybody in this picture is under cover somehow, and scene after scene finds these characters bumping into each other and trying to keep their identities secret. The film itself is supposed to be about the Basterds, a Jewish-American strike force designed to enact guerilla warfare on the Nazis. But the film is just as much about Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish-French girl out to seek revenge on the Nazis, and Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz), a notorious “Jew Hunter” for the German forces. No disrespect to lead Brad Pitt, but it’s Laurent and Waltz who I found most captivating. This is the most intense movie I saw in 2009.
2. Up
For all of the stellar action, sci-fi, and horror movies I enjoyed, I still found myself getting the most entertainment out of children’s films. First up is, uh, Up. Pixar really pushed themselves last year with Wall-E, a meditation on robot love and the future and eco-friendly business practices and fat people. The only problem with Wall-E? Never killed anybody. So what does Up do in the first like 10 minutes? Introduce lovebirds Carl (Ed Asner/Jeremy Leary) and Ellie (Elizabeth Doctor), show their lives together in all their joys and sorrows (including a miscarriage. In a children’s film. Yeah), and then kill one of them (Ellie). I barely made it through Up’s prologue and I was already crying. Then I cried again halfway through, in a full theater with strangers and friends. In public. This is not what adults do. Up examines the aging process and what it means to lose the things you loved to do and how to get them back. This is the most emotionally charged movie I saw in 2009.
1. Coraline
Studios are finally starting to try out alternatives to CGI for children’s movies, which, oddly enough, means going back to older methods. The best of that small batch was Coraline, a stop motion-animated film from Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). The title character (Dakota Fanning) moves into a new home with her writer parents, where something sinister waits for her. This force beckons Coraline into another dimension identical to her own, except everyone has buttons for eyes and everything is awesome. The textures Selick achieves with stop motion are more stunning than anything Pixar or Dreamworks have come up with, though the film utilizes a decent amount of CGI to smooth out its rough edges. Coraline is not a perfect film – its third quarter drags, there are hiccups in the animation – but its world is so completely and perfectly conceived that I cannot help but love it. This is the first film I’ve seen that’s really made a compelling argument for 3D’s resurgence, as the visuals are twice as stunning in RealD without subtracting from the story. This is the most imaginative, most stunning, simply best movie I saw in 2009, period.
NEXT WEEK: The Top 50 Films of the Decade
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