Dart
Is there an echo in here? It’s been some time my friends. I got so far behind with my reviews, I’m in the middle of preparing a list of all the movies I saw last year and just ranking them. Sitting on my hard drive are unfinished pieces on STAR TREK, WATCHMEN and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. What do you care now? You’ve probably already seen them. I’m going to try and blog here more in 2010 but it’s hard to resist Twitter and the liberating constraint of posting just 140 characters on a film I’ve just seen.
Anyway, let’s start off on the right foot with my Top 10 Films of 2009. While 2008 felt like something akin to a cinematic void, 2009 contained within it an abundance of riches which made coming up with the final ten all the more difficult.
Anyway, here they are:
1. Let The Right One In
2. The Wrestler
3. Mesrine: L’instinct de mort / L’ennemi public No. 1 (Killer Instinct/Public Enemy No.1)
4. The Hurt Locker
5. In The Loop
6. Revolutionary Road
7. Zombieland
8. Star Trek
9. (500) Days of Summer
10. Doubt
Just outside: Moon, District 9 and Frost/Nixon.
Worst of the Year: X-Men: Origins – Wolverine
Let The Right One In was an easy choice for the top spot. A beautifully-shot ghost story, it successfully mixed understated elegance with brutal horror. The news that this film is being remade for American audiences by the director of Cloverfield chills me to the bone, it will only end in tears (probably mine).
Of the remainder of the list, Revolutionary Road is something of a controversial choice given that it is essentially American Beauty Redux but both Winslet and DiCaprio turn in stunning performances (and when did you ever think you’d hear that about DiCaprio after Titanic? If you say The Departed, so help me god, I will hunt you down and beat you to death with a copy of Infernal Affairs). It was, quite simply, a film that got to me.
Propping up the list are a few crowd-pleasers (well, except for Doubt but you know). Star Trek was the best blockbuster of the Summer by a country mile, bringing an ailing franchise back to life while Zombieland was smart, self-referential fun dressed up in guns and gore.
The Worst Film of the Year was a tough one. The hysterics of Bay’s robot sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or the cataclysmic mess of Jackman’s attempt to revive his career? In the end, both suffered from the creative asphyxiation of too much money being thrown at too many ideas. However, I’ve still got plenty of love for transforming robots and Bay didn’t get everything wrong. There was a lot to loathe (abandoning rhyme and reason so early on was perhaps not the smartest move) but it was difficult not to get a little giddy seeing seven robots combine to become one. Wolverine, on the other hand, was crippled from the off, a hideous botch that reeked of studio interference and actor vanity. Transformers may have been an intellectual violation but at least it was a vaguely entertaining one. Anyone sitting through Wolverine needed a helpline to recover from the trauma.
