My Decade in Crap, #50-41

Since my main squeeze Picasso Blue is covering the best music of the decade, I figured I'd do the same for movies. I'm interested to see the reaction this list gets, in that it's split between films that are out-and-out in poor taste, and films that aren't campy but are still regarded as bad by some. There are movies that are "ironically" bad, if you will, except I legitimately love them. I paid money to own them on DVD. I bring them to parties and try to do missionary work for films like 12 Rounds and Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. But then there are films like Garden State, which people either love or hate without irony in either direction. Haters might argue that it still fits into the realm of bad movies, which this blog covers, but I've gradually lost an understanding of what that means, because I don't like Garden State for ironic reasons. Sure, I feel that there should be more interaction between the main character and his father, but I still generally enjoy the picture from start to finish. I put it on the same footing as Adaptation, a movie that some would say is legitimately well-made, and The Marine, a movie which some would say is legitimately campy.

Between the above paragraph and a conversation I had with a friend yesterday about how I generally wish movies had more explosions, I think I might have bad taste in films. But Megalodon is sooooooooooo good!

Top 50 Films of the '00s, #50-41

50. Let the Right One In (2008)

I can’t believe I almost forgot this one (sorry, Stick It)! In the states we have Twilight for all of our romantic vampire story needs, but the Swedes did it way better with Let the Right One In. Set in 1982, young boy Osker (Kåre Hedebrant) gets bullied quite a bit at his school, but he does manage to make one friend – Eli (Lina Leandersson). Except Eli doesn’t go to Osker’s school. In fact, he only sees her around his apartment complex, at night. Also, she occasionally eats people. They gradually develop a romance, saving each other from their loneliness. Let the Right One In is proof that you can make vampire movie that’s light on gore, heavy on romance, and not the least bit cheesy.

49. Adaptation (2002)

Adaptation is a filmed version of Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief by Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze that just happens to get way, way off topic. Nicholas Cage turns in a brilliant performance as the film’s scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman, who is struggling to adapt the book, and as his twin brother Donald, who is Hollywood’s next big thing thanks to his cliché-ridden script for a psychological thriller called The Three, in which the good guy, bad guy, and kidnapping victim ARE THE SAME PERSON. Kaufman (the writer) gets to riff on the filmmaking process through Kaufman (the character), making Adaptation gut-bustingly hilarious in spite of its heady meta-flavor. I cannot criticize this film, not because I love it so dang much, but because everything that happens is so clearly constructed to comment on what storytelling means that no plot point is worth condemning. The film just builds and builds into a frenetic farce as the tone shifts from Charlie’s reserved style to Donald’s big action set pieces.

48. American Psycho (2000)

You can’t realize how accurately American Psycho, The Office, and Office Space satirize work places until you’ve been there. I worked as an office temp throughout 2008 and 2009, and all of the pettiness that informs the humor of these works is dead-on. In the case of American Psycho, that’s a little scary. When my dad got a new business card, he asked me what I thought of it. “My God, it even has a watermark,” I said. My father was so, so excited that I noticed that. But I was kind of gently ribbing him, as I was quoting American Psycho. This film doesn’t register as a horror movie in my brain; it’s more of a summary of all the reasons why I don’t want to work that kind of a job ever again. It’s a black comedy about how faceless you are to a corporation that you could (in this case literally) kill people and get away with it, because no one matters. The film also gave me my first inkling that star Christian Bale was an actor to watch (Newsies notwithstanding).

47. Garden State (2004)

Time hasn’t been the kindest to Garden State. It’s turned out to be the harbinger of dopey movies with needlessly indie soundtracks. The story avoids its true conflict – Andrew’s (Zach Braff) strained relationship with his father (Ian Holm) – in favor of pairing Braff with Manic Pixie Girl Sam (Natalie Portman) for an endless series of cutesy bits. Plus, that scene with The Shins wasn’t really that great.

But here’s the thing: For all the stupid movie critic complaints I level at Garden State, it’s still a pretty sweet movie about overmedicated twenty-somethings trying to figure their shit out. It’s funny and touching, and the soundtrack is good. What, you got a problem with Nick Drake? This one sucks me in every time I watch it.

46. Wanted (2008)

Star Angelina Jolie signed on specifically because she wanted to make a ridiculously fun movie. Lo and behold, she did! Wanted stars James McAvoy as a rookie member of a league of international assassins looking to avenge his father's death. And ogle Jolie. And maybe engage in the occasional overblown action setpiece. The film is perhaps best summed up by the image of McAvoy hitting a guy in the face with a keyboard, breaking off letters that spell out “Fuck you” in midair.

45. 30 Days of Night (2007)

Twilight might have kicked off the vampire revolution, but 30 Days of Night did it better. Sure, these vamps ain’t sextastical, but they are awesome. Awesomeness is a crucial element to my favorite movies. Josh Hartnett has never been a well-regarded actor, but his work in Sin City, Lucky Number Slevin, and Night made me realize that he does have an eye for fun flicks. Of course, co-star Ben Foster, my favorite crazy character actor this decade, steals his scenes as “The Stranger.” Dude’s come a long way since Flash Forward (which also starred Jewel Staite from Firefly. I’m glad they’re both doing OK).

44. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Holy crap, a well-regarded movie? I’ve never thought of myself as having ironic taste in movies. I just legitimately enjoy movies about sharks as much as I do ones about, well, the Spanish Civil War. Guillermo del Torro has always specialized in modern day fairy tales, the menacing kind that humans used to write. While The Devil’s Backbone and the del Torro-produced The Orphanage were pretty great, I think my favorite of his flicks is Pan’s Labyrinth. The story of a young girl trapped with an abusive military stepfather who escapes to (or at least imagines) a fairy tale world at times both dreamlike and nightmarish, it’s a stunning fantasy picture from start to finish.

43. 12 Rounds (2009)

What else can I tell you about 12 Rounds… it was directed by Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master). Did I mention it’s my girlfriend’s favorite John Cena film? Yeah? OK.

42. Juno (2007)

A lot of people can’t stand Diablo Cody’s hyper-trendy pop cultural puns that double as dialogue, but honestly, I dig her writing. United State of Tara’s first season was great, and the same goes for Juno, the alternately adorable and deeply uncomfortable tale of a smart-alecky teenage girl who can’t use irony to get out of an unwanted pregnancy, and her struggle to find a family to give the love and care for her child that she could never provide. Don’t get me wrong, the soundtrack is a guilty pleasure, in that none of the songs have anything to do with the title character save for “Anyone Else But You,” which leads Ellen Page and Michael Cera cover, and Cody’s dialogue can be a bit much in the opening scenes. The dialogue establishes Page as someone who thinks she’s cool and awesome because she’s forcibly quirky, but her word choices change considerably as she matures and deals with her pregnancy. She strips away her hipster bullshit, so to speak. Juno is rewarding upon multiple viewings, as the twists are way more effed up once you know they’re coming.

41. Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Dammit, I love quirky indie comedies. Greg Kinnear plays Richard Hoover, the pitiful self-help guru/patriarch of a family, on a road trip to take daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) to a child beauty pageant. Rounding out the family are Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Alan Arkin, and Steve Carell, each with their own eccentricities. Some critics got too caught up in the character’s believability (or lack thereof) to feel the film’s central thesis – that life doesn’t have to be a competition and you don’t have to be a product.

TOMORROW: movies about muay thai and sharks, #40-31.

My Year in Crap 2009

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

Michael Bay’s second go at the Transformers franchise is both better and worse than his original. Better in that Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) kicks more butt. Worse in that the movie sucks so hard almost every time a human being speaks. If I could edit the fight scenes from the two films together and cut out Shia LaBeouf’s college scenes, I would have such a sweet movie of metal-on-metal ass-kickin’. As is, my love for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, while still quite potent, is pretty dependent on my DVD player’s fast-forward button. Loving you ain’t easy, Optimus, but it ain’t something I can give up either.

10. Paranormal Activity

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.

8. The House of the Devil

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 South Africa, which is no stranger to segregation, the film depicts a refugee camp for aliens 28 years after they were marooned on Earth. Most “first contact” movies are about just that, first contact. District 9 goes skips to the next step, which is, “What do we do now?” Star Wars was innovative for portraying futuristic technology as worn out and commonplace, and I’d put District 9 in that same pantheon (but only because I was never that big on Alien Nation or V), only replace “futuristic technology” with “meeting aliens.” You get these bizarre-looking creatures with incredible machinery, and they’re treated as an inconvenience no different from any other outcast class on the planet.

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 Flint the power to make it rain any food ever. Weird comic adventures ensue. The cast includes Anna Farris, James Caan, Mr. T, Andy Samberg, and Bruce Campbell, plus Neil Patrick Harris as a screaming monkey. While Cloudy borrows some elements from Up, it’s way, way funnier. I felt like I didn’t truly have a favorite comedy for 2009 (Adventureland is more of a drama), and then I caught this flick in the second week of December. This is the funniest movie I saw in 2009.

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