Top 10 and then some of 2009

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1. Inglorious Basterds
I am far from a Tarantino fanatic so this placement is quite surprising to me if no one else. Nonetheless, when I closely examined the competition, I had seen no other film more than once willingly, nor did I enjoy a lead performance more this year than Christoph Waltz as the deranged Nazi sophisticate, Col. Hans Landa. Where has this guy been? Plus Michael Fassbender continues to blow my mind with each role he inhabits. His small bit part as a British soldier and published film theorist warmed my heart and was a dramatic reversal from his stunning portrayal last year as a skeletal IRA prisoner in Hunger. Tarantino also fortified his own obsessive love of film with countless nods to the history of the medium which somehow gelled to create a visually stunning, pseudo-intellectual, and simply fun experience.

2. Hurt Locker
Can Kathyrn Bigelow direct the next James Bond film? I really think that franchise needs to sip whatever she’s drinking. Her heroes fully isolate themselves to the point where the outside world starts to ripple with paranoia, premeditation, and evil, but unlike Quantum of Solace there is a deep understanding of politics, family, and responsibility—the real marrow of the mundane. And have no doubts, this stuff is inherently cinematic. I will take a tense, deliberate bomb defusion over a visually muddled car chase any day.

3. Humpday
Two straight, male buddies decide to sleep together over a dare–sounds like a bad joke really, but Lynn Shelton pulls off a deeply funny and effective study of the male psyche, cultural norms, and thirty-somethingness. Actors Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard and Alycia Delmore should also be given their due for making these characters believable and fully schizoid like we all really are. Our image of ourselves is rarely tested in daily interactions, so one mimics the liberal, open-minded intellectual in theory until life calls your bluff. Uncomfortable laughter was never so liberating!

4. Big Fan
Obsession is one of the most perplexing emotions to convey on screen, as it is so all-consuming—saturating every pore of the afflicted—that two dimensions seem inadequate to capture all of its wicked energy. The particular micro-world of sports fanaticism is done even less justice. However actor Patton Oswalt and writer/director Robert Siegel captured all the slovenliness, delusion, and anxiety that are characteristic of the fan drop kicked over the edge. True derangement turns out to quite funny in retrospect.

5. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Nicholas Cage has finally returned from the wilderness of depressing action films and family friendly dreck to shock us into attention. It probably won’t last, so even more reason to soak it up now! Cage shuffles about like a rabid dog motivated by a lust for drugs, guns, women, and drugs in that order. Somehow under all this vice, he creates a sympathetic sociopath who is ironically led hellward due to a good deed. When I first heard this was a Werner Herzog film I thought it must all be some joke. Why would he troll in such pedestrian fare as a cop drama? Alas now I know only one with Herzog’s sardonic view of humanity could create such an off-kilter love note to New Orleans.

6. Avatar
Despite hokey dialogue and predictable plot machinations, James Cameron managed to transport me out of my stationary seat, stale air, and awkward eyewear for what seemed like a comfortable eternity. Pandora is the most fully convincing virtual environment I’ve seen on film since Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Therefore, it is not surprising that the successful depiction of Gollum convinced Cameron that his long-gestating dream was possible. Taking cultural and natural cues from Earth didn’t manifest the fully alien, but rather the fully convincing. I await the inevitable sequel…

7. An Education
A lovely meditation on the arrogance of youth, this gem slowly reveals itself. What I like most besides Carey Mulligan’s puckish wit, is the patience and care with which the camera sweeps onto a moment in time. It feels like a memory even though all the action takes place in a present past. We are seduced along with Jenny, and we root for her even as we curse her naïveté.

8. Moon
Though a slight film by any definition of a space epic, the actor Sam Rockwell pulled off the impossible. He created two characters from the same DNA that live life in convincingly divergent health, relative age, and sanity so that I genuinely forgot he was alone on the set. Director Duncan Jones seems to have materialized from the ether with this succinct reverie on what it means to be human at a very inhumane time. My secret dream is that truly forward-thinking space operas like Space Odyssey 2001, Alien, and Solaris will make a resurgence. Hopefully Moon is a sign of the times.

9. Goodbye Solo
Lead actor Souleymane Sy Savane is refreshing as a good-hearted, immigrant taxi-driver. So rarely do we encounter hard-working transplants in American film even though reality would be a perfect source of stories. Ramin Bahrani has made a career of exploring the lives of people depicted on the edges, but who are actually at the heart of our cultural experiment. Souleymane’s personality is so infectious and endearing that his encounter with a self-loathing and bitter William, played with acerbic zeal by Red West, seems unfair for us as well as Souleymane. They both end up leeching a little bit of the other’s spirit and ultimately both learn that life is full of duplicity.

10. Up in the Air
For once Clooney’s deadpan delivery, wry smirks, and facial pratfalls equaled the sum of its parts in a film that is actually kind of serious. Everyone I know is unhappily, under, or unemployed so following around an individual who fires company lifers for a living is a hard sell. However Jason Reitman takes the opportunity to tackle the simple question: What is the meaning of life? Is it having an office to trudge to everyday or is it pursuing your dreams or is it finding a “co-pilot” to enjoy life with? The answer is obvious, but we are too stubborn to see it, so we might as well be kind to everyone we meet lest they become our bosses, lovers, or friends some day far off in the future…

The Rest of the Best

11. Gomorra
12. Up
13. Broken Embraces
14. Zombieland
15. The Road
16. Children of Invention
17. Watchmen
18. Star Trek
19. Rudo y Cursi
20. The Maid
21. Summer Hours
22. Black Dynamite
23. Antichrist
24. Fantastic Mr. Fox
25. The Messenger
26. Coco Before Chanel

Biggest Disappointments

Tyson, District 9, Funny People

What I Missed and Want to See

The Headless Woman, The Informant!, 500 Days of Summer, Where the Wild Things Are, Me and Orson Welles, Julia, Treeless Mountain, The White Ribbon, Brothers, In the Loop, A Serious Man, Two Lovers, Sugar, Crazy Heart, Collapse, A Single Man, The Exploding Girl, Medicine for Melancholy, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, Of Time and the City and The Baader Meinhof Complex