Looking back over the past twelve months highlights what a strange year this has been in cinema. Transformers 2 swept up at the box office, Terminator 3 nearly killed the franchise. (500) Days Of Summer‘s incredible trailer resulted in an incredibly dissapointing film, Where The Wild Things Are dared to be even better than its Arcade Fire powered trailer suggested it would be. So, even though the year hasn’t been the best quality wise, there have been some absolutely terrific films released. In fact for every Blue, Antichrist or Dead Men Running there has been a film of great quality to counter it to the degree I struggled wittling down my list of favourites to the standard ten entries. So I didn’t bother. Each of the films in this list debuted cinematically in the UK in 2009 with the exception of Cyborg, She which was a direct to DVD release.
My Top 13 Films of 2009 in alphabetical order are:
Adventureland represents one of the year’s most subversive films – as (500) Days Of Summer was gaining plaudits for it’s forced kookiness, Greg Mottola’s coming of age tale had something that its contemporaries lack; real sincerity. Set over the course of one summer in a theme park, the film chronicles the burgeoning romance between two teens trying to find their place in the world. Not afraid to do something as unfashionable as wear its heart on its sleeve, Adventureland is one of those rare films that manages to be moving without being manipulative, romantic without being contrived and genuinely humorous. One of the most perfect teen romance films since Say Anything…
Long-listed in the Academy Awards for Best Documentary feature, Burma VJ is a film I have already described on this site as incorporating “the best of journalism and cinema into one emotionally exhausting documentary”. In chronicling the September 2007 uprisings against the military regime in Burma, Anders Ostergaard’s film represents everything a documentary can be. It is a brave, political film making which humanises the struggle of the repressed and acts as a crucial reminder of the human rights abuses that often go unreported or ignored. Truly breath taking.
The third film in Kwak Jae-Yong’s “bizarre girl” series, Cyborg, She is as original a romantic comedy as is likely to be seen until the Korean director embarks on his next project. Known for telling love stories across a number of hybrid genres, Jae-Yong’s latest, filmed in Japan, splices together time travelling science fiction with the tenets of romance; the end result is a film that exists somewhere between Primer, The Notebook and The Terminator. The plot sees Jirou Kitamura (Keisuke Koide) celebrating his birthday alone in a restaurant until an erratically behaved, mysterious girl (Haruka Ayase) joins him, enchants him and then just as suddenly disappears leaving the poor birthday boy utterly bemused. Exactly one year later a spitting image of the girl meets Jirou telling him she is a cyborg sent from the future by himself to save him from an accident. A hilarious film unravels as Jirou falls for the girl who, as a cyborg, can not love him back and leaves him questioning who the girl from the year before actually was. Following My Sassy Girl, The Classic and Windstruck, Kwak Jae-Yong has proven himself an incredibly versatile director and, in this humble writer’s opinion, the greatest active film maker in the world right now.
The Jury Prize winner at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival isn’t exactly an easy watch. Andrea Arnold’s latest focuses on a troubled 15 year old aspiring dancer (Katie Jarvis) and her relationship with her mother’s apparently charming boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender). Shot with a keen eye for depressing detail by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, Fish Tank is a dark drama which establishes Arnold, who also wrote the feature, as being amongst Britain’s premier talents.
For almost a decade South Korea proved one of the most unlikely success stories in world cinema. Following a financial crisis in 1997, South Korea rebuilt its film industry which resulted in an unprecedented level of critical and commercial success for the country’s movies. As signs of collapse began to show in 2007, this year has seen a revival in the country’s fortunes with films such as Thirst, A Frozen Flower and My Girlfriend Is An Agent all performing well at the box office. The best Korean film to make British shores this year, however, is Kim Ji-Woon’s latest. Having directed in genres as disparate as Horror (A Tale Of Two Sisters – remade as The Uninvited in the U.S.), Gangster (A Bittersweet Life) and Wrestling (A Foul King), Ji-Woon turned to an entirely new genre by creating the Eastern Western. Starring Jung Woo-sung (the Good), Lee Byung-hun (the Bad) and Korea’s premier character actor Song Kang-ho (the Weird), the film sees the three battle it out with each other and the Imperial Japanese Army in the wilderness of 1930s Manchuria for the possession of a treasure map. Whilst referencing Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western’s, The Good, The Bad, The Weird was totally unlike anything released last year in terms of its unrelenting creativity.
When director Peter Strickland came across a lump sum of money in an inheritance he realised he could do one of two things with the cash – a) buy a flat in Bracknell or b) make a film in Transylvania. Plumping for the latter option would appear an even more bizarre choice considering that Strickland didn’t speak the local’s language. Yet against the odds the director managed to make a stunning and elegiac revenge film that is as beautiful as it is tragic.
In a year where vampires where almost omnipresent in popular culture there was, to say the least, a wide range of quality. Representing the dross was the misanthropic, nihilistic, misogynistic Twilight Saga: New Moon and the abysmal Lesbian Vampire Killers. Thankfully then there was a brace of excellent vampiric films. Chan Park-Wook’s Thirst was as impressive as his back catalogue suggests but the crown must go to Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In. The creepy, slow moving tale set in early eighties Stockholm, is a cold, clinical film powered by a stunning score by Swedish composer Johan Soderqvist.
This stunning picture, by David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones, has just picked up the British Independent Film Awards top honours and it is easy to see why. Sam Rockwell stars as the sole lunar employee who begins to experience more and more strange events as his solitude seemingly instigates some form of mental collapse. However, a surprising discovery suggests that his existence may not be as it seems. A remarkable debut that recalls retro Sci-Fi fare such as Silent Running, Moon illustrates that Jones is an incredible talent who should be around for some years.
A modern day The King Of Comedy, Jody Hill’s latest film is as dark as comedy can possibly get. Pushing jokes far past the edge of where humour should end, Observe and Report is as shocking as any mainstream movie I can recall. And in an age where Adam Sandler is still one of the most popular comedians in the world and Eddie Murphy’s family films are still making profits, it is truly refreshing to see such a dark, bold film released in cinemas. Seth Rogen pushes himself as an actor to De Niro in Taxi Driver levels of insanity, Anna Farris finally makes a second good film (the other being Lost In Translation) and Aziz Ansari once again steals the show in a small cameo. Also kudos must be given for the best use of a Queen song since Shaun Of The Dead.
Despite being released in the U.S. in October 2008, Charlie Kaufman’s sprawling, epic feature did not arrive in U.K. cinemas until the following year. Marking Kaufman’s first foray into helming one of his own screenplays, Synecdoche is an incredibly cerebral piece of cinema as is to be expected. With inferences to Carl Jung, the slightly surreal sight of a house continually on fire and meta-references aplenty the film is certainly not for everyone. A profoundly morose debut by Kaufman.
Every summer like clockwork Pixar create a new feature of such ambition and precise, heart-breaking quality that it would be easy to compare the studio to a car production line if each of the films weren’t so wildly different in content and form. After the game-changing, bar raising, absolutely perfect Wall-E, Pixar had set them selves a daunting task of trying to follow such a miraculous work. Thankfully in Up, Pixar have yet again proven to be an unprecedentedly creative studio seemingly incapable of turning out a movie any worse than an instant classic (with the unfortunate exception of Cars). Pitched as an old man’s coming of age tale, Up is a delightful feature that tackles the very adult themes of grief and coming to terms with loss whilst delivering slapstick laugh out loud humour.
A wait of several years for Spike Jonze’s third feature was getting unbearably tense. Thankfully then, Where The Wild Things Are didn’t disappoint; not only was the film able to match his previous two works, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, but somehow managed to top them. Based on Maurice Sendak’s 1963 book, Where The Wild Things Are is a true modern classic coming of age tale, full of ecstatic melancholy. The bittersweet tone of the marvellous screenplay, co-written by Jonze and David Eggers, is matched with perfect synergy by lead actor Max Records who delivers my favourite performance of all year. It would be a travesty were Records not nominated for an Academy Award for his nuanced, layered turn as the lonesome lead.
For a full review please click here.
So glad to see Adventureland and Let the Right One In on this list! Well done, sir!
"Observe & Report'…..yes. YES.
Cheers guys!
their is a problem in the first place.