2009 Year-End Wrap-Up

2009 was kind of mediocre as far as movies were concerned – I wasn’t terribly impressed by very many theatrical releases, plus I was in something of a lull myself. I spent far more time this year catching up on long-dead television and keeping up with a surprisingly interesting batch of newer shows, including Fringe, Dollhouse, and Community. But the time has come to write up my annual recap of what I watched, loved, and hated in 2009. Maybe revisiting the list will spark a little inspiration.

Number of new (meaning that I hadn’t previously seen them) films watched in 2009 – 90. Wow. Much lower than last year’s count of 109, or 2007’s 112. All that television and actual real-life activity really made a dent.

As usual, just over half (54) were strictly U.S. productions. Also as usual, the runners-up were Japan and France, the U.K. and Canada. With so many international co-productions these days, it’s getting harder to sift through what is what, but as long as I can continue to make sure that the U.S.-made films don’t end up becoming more than 2/3 of the menu, I’ll be pretty happy in 2010.

Favorites? As I said above, I felt that this was a pretty lackluster year for domestic theatrical releases. There are still a number of awards-bait things I’d like to see once they show up in Chicago theaters in January and February, but just looking at the Golden Globes slate, one can’t help but feel a bit disappointed. In any case, in alphabetical order, my favorites from 2009 -

Anvil! The Story of Anvil
The Class
District 9
Gomorrah
Happy-Go-Lucky
The Hurt Locker
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains
Mother
Rachel Getting Married
Role Models
Sita Sings the Blues
Star Trek
Sukiyaki Western Django
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Up
Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Worst? Least favorite? Well, I watch a lot of crap. There was the Beyonce vehicle Obsessed, which manages to yet again waste the awesome Idris Elba, and ends in one of the most prolonged (and boring) catfights in cinematic history. Also the bizarre Fast Track No Limits, which I watched on pay-per-view in Tokyo (sometimes a girl just needs to hear some English, okay?), and is essentially a Eurotrash version of The Fast and the Furious. I typically don’t include things like Drive-Thru and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead in this category, because you have to really, really fuck up big time to land here. The character of Julie Powell in Julie & Julia made want to fly to NYC and punch her in her entitled little face, but the Julia Child sections of the film were actually quite well-done, so that’s out. Paul Blart: Mall Cop is just too routinely bad to really feel strongly about, and The Room is so very bad that it’s actually legendary (and incredibly entertaining). G.I. Joe would, in a normal year, have very little competition, but even though Joe is technically a worse film, I have to go with Watchmen, which made me so fucking angry that it easily takes the prize as my least favorite film of the year. (I would like to take a moment to recognize Benny Trecroci, with whom I watched most of the terrible, terrible movies that routinely end up in this section. Also, a special mention for Twilight, which wins for Best (Unintentional) Comedy of the Year.)

I’m going to skip over some of the disappointments and surprises – if you’re a regular reader, you pretty much know what they are, though I have to say that Precious, while incredibly well-acted, was pretty underwhelming – and try to put a positive spin on things by noting what I have high hopes for in 2010. Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon drops stateside in January, with Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet following in February. Shutter Island has me hopeful for a pure Scorsese entertainer, not the heavy-handed mess that was The Departed. Speaking of DiCaprio, Christopher Nolan’s Inception could be pretty cool, as could Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, if he remembers to put a story in there among all the visuals. Hot Tub Time Machine? Iron Man 2? Yes, please. And Nicholas Cage has FIVE films slated for 2010 release, most of which look like they’ll be terrible (two are vengeance pics, one is a live-action version of a fucking Disney cartoon, one is about the Black Death, and the last is Kick-Ass, which actually looks like it will be a lot of fun). Expect a lot of terrible wigs and scenery chewing. 2010 might be awesome.

Avatar (2009, USA/UK)

I don't know what it is about filmmakers like James Cameron and George Lucas, who match incredible visual sensibilities with a teenage boy's understanding of story and character. But at least we can be thankful for small favors - as bad as Avatar is, and it is quite bad, at least there's no Jar-Jar Binks. What there is, however, is over two and a half hours of Cameron playing with shiny toys, putting one of the blandest narratives possible into an incredibly lovely package. Nothing is the least bit interesting about this narrative, and even the aspects Cameron could have built a mythology around - how the avatars really work, the ecological connections on Pandora - are glossed over so quickly that they seem little more than inconveniences that have to be explained in order for Cameron to get back to 20-minute animated sequences.

I'd be remiss not to mention the thing that bothered me the most about Avatar (if you don't count the swaying and the chanting, though I guess those are somewhat related), which is how Cameron trots out the noble savage archetype, casting the all of the key Na'vi roles with Black and Native actors. The Na'vi, the indigenous people of Pandora, are hunter-gatherers with strong spiritual ties to the flora and fauna of their world, and function almost entirely as a vehicle for teaching white people a lesson about not killing trees. Oh, how I wish I were kidding. And here's the thing - if you're using CGI and motion capture for these sequences, so much so that Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington (Worthington especially) are pretty much unrecognizable, why do you have to keep on going, casting C.C.H. Pounder (pretty sure that was only her voice) and Wes Studi? The power of film technology should render this kind of typecasting a moot point, but to add insult to injury, there's something kind of gross about the fact that all of the characters who use avatar bodies are white folk, playacting in the savage's world. Cameron, like Lucas, seems to be colorblind in the worst kind of way, using racial stereotypes without thought of the kind of traditions he's playing into.