As you can see I’m doing a top 10 of ‘09 list for movies because I saw a lot of them and I feel passionate about my choices. The trick of it is… I didn’t see all of them so really this is just the best of 2009 based on what some dude in New Jersey saw. Then again, aren’t all Best of lists a variation of that?
So without further handwringing…
Like Up, the title of Sam Raimi’s low key horror comeback Drag Me to Hell is not an easy sell. Last time I checked not a whole lot of moviegoers enjoy being dragged to hell. Aside from some residual post Spiderman buzz and goodwill leftover from three Evil Dead movies released over a decade ago, Drag Me to Hell, the story of a female loan officer who is cursed by the grungiest gypsy in film history, never became the smash hit Raimi-ites were hoping for. Instead, it’s destined to rise in cult status as people discover the joys of watching gross things go in and out of Alison Lohman’s mouth. Whether you choose to see Drag Me to Hell as a straight forward horror romp or a tragedy about a delusional formerly overweight country girl struggling with an eating disorder and self image problems the simple fact is the movie is a joy from start to finish. It’s a goofy, gross, good time.
Even the title of Pixar’s Up is a risk. Just one, single syllable word and one predominantly used as an adverb at that? Preposterous! Like 2008’s Wall-e, which was dialogue free for a good 45 minutes into its runtime, Up dares to start its adventure story on a complete downer. The movie opens by introducing us to a boy and girl who could well be the plucky main characters of any generic coming of age saga in which animal friends are met, bad guys get their comeuppance and pirate gold is found. But none of that happens. Instead the boy and the girl, grow up, get married, and face difficulties that propel them farther and farther out of the orbit of their childhood dreams.
Full deliriously awkward title: The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
The very existence of this movie is proof that the universe has a sense of humor. Not quite a remake and not quite a sequel, this re-quel to the 1992 article-deprived original Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel as a morally and chemically compromised officer of the law, is batshit insane. Nicolas Cage has never been more Nic or more Cage than he is in this movie. It’s very nearly a cosmic event.
Watchmen oozes cool. The end is so punk rock it makes me want to smash a TV with an actual rock in a show of solidarity. It deconstructs the American hero/superhero and exposes all the gooey messed up insides that compel them. Zack Snyder, auteur behind the extremely watchable 300, doesn’t so much adapt the subversive graphic novel for the screen as directly lift scenes from its pages and bring them crackling to life. The result is a mess but it’s a wonderful mess that I find myself increasingly eager to romp in again and again.
Underneath the “knocked up at 16″ afterschool special premise of Juno was a movie about a girl struggling to define what a family is and whether love really exists. In the same way, Jennifer’s Body has the equally schlocky premise of a demon-possessed, man-eating, cheerleader skank when in actuality it’s more about the phenomenon of “best friends forever” and the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes toxic nature of those relationships. It’s far more interesting than the TV ads and reviews would have you believe.
Rob Zombie’s Halloween II is not a great film but it’s an interesting one. Like his first remake of John Carpenter’s original, his sequel stares death in the face with a sick, clinical fascination, only this time death stares the fuck back.
One thing I applaud Zombie for is his willingness to make unpretty scenes. The movie starts with the aftermath of Michael Myer’s legendary killing spree and almost immediately strips the glamour away; the grunt level police officers mumble complaints about having to lug the bodies around and the survivors struggle for a life that may not be worth returning to when they realize just how scarred and crippled they’ve been left by their chance encounter with the devil. Later scenes in the movie reveal a Zombie that wants to know why we find this ugliness entertaining.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine starts out with promise. We see young Logan as a sickly boy which is a nice bit of juxtaposition to the unkillable immortal thresher he will later become.
And that’s about it. From the moment he kills the man he thought was his father to the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold turn at the end for Sabretooth things just keep getting stupider and more meaningless. It probably began with the simple dilemma of having already spent two Xmen movies fleshing out Wolverine’s backstory so much so that this solo outing is mostly redundant at best and retconned at worst.
There was probably a cool story to be told about two brothers who live through 6 wars together and slowly lose their humanity but this was not it. I could have probably salvaged a “fun time” out of the movie if it hadn’t been so lazy in its plot execution. There’s just no connective tissue between scenes and when there is it often doesn’t make a damn lick of sense. Take for example the scene where they revive Logan as the Wolverine, and Wolverine overhears Striker speaking in a hushed whisper about “erasing his memory.” The writers use this as an excuse for Wolverine to bolt and for Striker to track him down but the motivation isn’t there. As an audience we do not yet know that Striker has extraced all the information he apparently needed from Wolverine to make his Weapon XI super soldier (Deadpool). So the scene reads false. As we see it, Striker still needs Wolverine alive despite giving Zero a kill order. And how exactly did he think he was going to kill him anyway?
It’s called a plothole, and this movie had so many too large to drive around that it sunk us all.
I am not ashamed of my admiration for the Saw films although I choose carefully the company to whom I will confess it. Something as pulpy and genre as Saw is guaranteed to be dismissed. The label people tend to dismiss it with is “torture porn.”
I get that.
It’s basically the progenitor of torture porn, or at least, it began the modern revivalist movement. The issue is that I am really tired of pretending like I agree with people who dismiss things in such easy and, more importantly, uninteresting ways.
If you actually watched Saw V and told me that Saw sucks I would be inclined to agree. Any rational person would. That is one shitty movie so full of exposition that it plays like one of those issue #0 comics you used to be able to get for free if you sent in your proofs of purchase. I could accept that, as a lover scorned, you no longer were accepting love calls from Jigsaw and thus were not planning on ever watching Saw VI.
However, if you’ve never seen any of the Saw movies and yet insist upon sitting in your judgey chair and casting dispersions on the very idea that such movies exist, well, your opinion is worthless. Everyone is entitled to an opinion so go ahead and have at it, but do so assured that yours has no value. For instance, I believe that Africa is scary and not a good place to raise a family but I wouldn’t go around to people from Africa making blanket statements about the region having never lived there and never raised a family there. It seems like courtesy to me.
I like Saw because it quenches my bloodlust, sometimes delivers a killer twist or two, and has become like a serialized comic book I look forward to every year with its labyrinthine plotting and uroboros like timeline cannibalism. In fact, Saw VI is the best in a long while because it advances the story in the present day and rather than fill in blanks that were already assumed it answers several of the series purposefully “unanswered” mysteries.
But the argument is bigger than Saw actually. It extends to a conversation I had this weekend at a party about Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. If you didn’t like the aliens at the end because they were introduced in a clunky way, fine, I can live with that. If, however, your objection to the film stems entirely from the notion that there were aliens at all then we have a problem.
That problem is you.
It’s happening again… (vague Twin Peaks reference)
After a long period of active inactivity, which is the kind of inactivity where I’m killing myself behind the scenes to get things done but I have nothing yet to show for it, things are, well, happening. Dare I say actively.
We’ve shot all but two scenes for the short horror movie I’m starring in and I’ve heard rumors of a February 2010 premiere (though I feel like a goon calling it a premiere since it’s not a feature.) I’ve never acted in anything that wasn’t just me goofing off before. The experience was… oddly exhilarating. Once you’ve acted a thing, in my case serial killing, you carry it with you ever more. Not in a traumatic way, but the emotions were so real for me that I feel like I really did kill and disembowel those girls. On an emotional level there was no real difference between playing at the act and doing it for real. I felt oddly aggressive and confident coming out of that weekend’s shooting. Actually, the phrase “I am the Bengal Tiger and I will eat your fucking heart” just kept popping into my brain at the strangest times.
I can’t wait till people see this movie because it was a lot of fun to shoot. We have a great cast and crew, and I’m going to miss our shenanigans.
In other news… F is for Film series 2 started. Episodes for Doubt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Twilight are out now with two more on the way. It’s such a huge leap in production values and yet it still has that “mommy I made this” feel of the first series. Damn it, just go watch these are some of my favorite things that I’ve done ever, and we’ve all worked super hard on them. Please comment on the F website and tell us what you think.
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