Well it’s finally happened: I can’t come up with ten movies to put on my year-end Top Ten list. I mean, I can’t even come close. I have three deserving titles and one that I’d throw in at number nine or ten because it made me laugh so hard I had trouble breathing. And that’s it. My standards are high, yes, but this can’t camouflage the fact that 2009 has just been a horrible year for movies. Making a top ten list seems like it should be an easy task: just throw a list of the ten films from the past year that I liked the best and publish it. However, I feel that there’s a little bit more to it than that. To me, including a film in my year end top ten list is the highest form of praise that I could offer to it. There’s something to being one of the ten best of the year that goes beyond the number. Labeling a film as one of the year’s ten best is an honor and a feather that will always remain in its cap, much the same way it is when a film is nominated for an Oscar or guild award.
In 2008, I had some trouble putting together my top ten list. Come early December, I was scrimping to find titles that I thought deserved recognition. I finally compiled a list that included two films, The Lucky Ones and In Bruges, that didn’t really have anything in common with the other eight movies on the list. Sure, they were good, solid B+ movies, but for the same reasons that graduating with a B+ average doesn’t get you honors, I find it hard to put B+ films on my top ten list.
2009 is a whole other ball of wax. As of December 1, I had seen two films that I knew deserved to be on my top ten list: The Hurt Locker and Coraline.
The Hurt Locker is an exceptional film and is, hands down, my film of the year. The tension that director Kathryn Bigelow creates throughout the movie is simply amazing. She never overplays her hand, never goes for too much and delivers a film that had me on the edge of my seat for two continuous hours.
Coraline is yet another bit of stop-motion genius from director Henry Selick. Taking full advantage of the broad horizons the stop-motion world gives him, Selick created a glorious looking film with an enthralling plot courtesy of Neil Gaiman. More on both films in a bit.
And that was it.
I’d missed a couple of films during the year—500 Days of Summer and Inglourious Basterds to name but two—and spent the next six weeks watching anything and everything (save for Precious) I could find that was A) released during 2009 and B) remotely critically acclaimed. At the end of that six weeks, I was left with a top ten list that still wasn’t remotely close to having ten films on it.
I turned to some industry friends, asking them—begging them—to recommend movies for me to see. Maybe a small indie film with good festival buzz or something off-the-beaten-path. “Did you see The Hurt Locker?” I was asked time and again.
“Did you see Synecdoche, New York?” another asked me. I hadn’t. I watched it and grew quite irritated with Charlie Kaufman’s metaphysical tomfoolery. Not only that, after suffering through the mind-numbingly hard to follow plot, it turned out that the film had come out in 2008. I called my friend back and asked him about this. “Hmmm,” he said, looking on imdb to confirm my statement. After a minute he said, “Well, it opened in Greece this year.”
My back to the wall, I e-mailed my brother a plaintive cry for help. He asked to see the list I had compiled thus far. It included The Hangover, Bruno, Taken AND Sherlock Holmes… and I still had two spots to fill. He gulped and told me, “You’re right. It doesn’t look good.”
I felt bad. Genuinely bad. How could a film writer not be able to compile a top ten list? Roger Ebert has two! To say nothing of the year he had a top 69 list. I felt almost unprofessional. The latter feeling stemmed from the fact that I’ve never made a point to watch three or more movies a day like most film critics do. Not only do I travel a fair amount to do interviews and the like, but I also value my time more than that. However, that said, I’d still seen well over 100 films that were released this year. I just didn’t like many of them.
During my intense six weeks of movie screening, I added one film to my top ten list: Avatar. Everything else fell short.
During the last twelve months, I saw Up and thought it was the worst Pixar film since A Bug’s Life. It paled in comparison to Wall•E. I saw Inglourious Basterds and wasn’t really taken with any of Tarantino’s on-screen stories and didn’t get it. I saw A Serious Man and felt rather empty. I saw The Messenger and spent the entirety of the movie thinking about how tired I was of Iraq War movies with a message. Don’t blame The Messenger? Not in this case. Moon left me saddened, as did An Education and District 9. I didn’t see Invictus or Precious—I got bored reading the plot synopsis for Invictus and absolutely hate movies like Precious. Public Enemies was well produced but seemed like a less interesting, 1930s era knock-off of Heat than anything else. I hope the plot for Sherlock Holmes will be explained in the sequel and Taken, while fun to watch, didn’t seem to go far enough to make it worthy inclusion on my top ten list. Up in the Air was good, but I am so disgusted by movies where people learn that it’s okay to love, that I couldn’t add it to my top ten list, no matter how much I needed to fill spaces. I hated, hated, hated 500 Days of Summer. I hated it almost as much as I hated Juno, which is saying something, because, walking out of the screening room after seeing Juno, I was ready to kill someone. The only movies I’d seen and loved were The Hurt Locker, Coraline and Avatar. (I should also probably mention that I laughed so hard at Bruno that I had trouble breathing).
Perusing over my list, a list that would easily be the worst top ten list I’d ever created, I sighed and realized that I had two options: lower my standards or the number of movies on my year end list.
Thus I present to you, the Top Three movies of 2009:
