Keith's Top Films of 2009

You're probably wondering why I'm just getting around to doing a top 10 list of films from 2009 now, when 2010 is already 25% over itself. My main reason is simply that I knew there were a number of significant releases I had yet to see. I felt my top 10 list wouldn't be terribly relevant without having had those film viewing experiences. But time is more than up, and it remains the case that I can name close to two dozen films that I wish I had seen as I considered this list.

That said, I'm moving ahead. So here are my favorite films of 2009, with apologies for the late delivery. I'm also including a few additional categories with my list, and would like to thank Chris Zois, a former student of mine who reviews film for Roosevelt University and (I'm proud to say) is getting better and better at it, for coming up with some of these categories. And, so that you don't necessarily have to say "but what about...?", I'm including a list of movies I intended to get to before making this list. I'm sure there's something on it that could bump off what I have here. I still plan to see those films, and there's nothing wrong with a revisit down the road.

Keith's Top 10 Favorite Movies of 2009
1. The Hurt Locker
2. Inglorious Basterds
3. An Education
4. A Serious Man
5. Fantastic Mr. Fox
6. The Messenger
7. Un Prophete (A Prophet)
8. Star Trek
9. In the Loop
10. Up
Honorable Mentions: District 9, Every Little Step, Precious, This Is It, Up in the Air

The "Messy Masterpiece" Award: Avatar
(This goes to a film that is equally brilliant and bad and is therefore hard to categorize but unworthy of pure dismissal.) "Avatar" was a game changer, visually. The script? Not so much...

Overrated: Coraline, Where the Wild Things Are
"Coraline" felt too much like an Alice in Wonderland rip-off and the humor was cruel. "Where the Wild Things Are" let the wild rumpus start, but the rumpus never took off and it left me cold.

Underrated: Humpday
Dismissed as indie film mumblecore, "Humpday" came closer to speaking for me as a dreamy white guy in my mid-30s than any other film this year. True pathos, true heart, and equally as believable as its premise was ridiculous.

Guilty Pleasure: The Proposal
Sandra Bullock won an Oscar this year. Too bad "The Blind Side" didn't have Betty White! Or Ryan Reynolds, an emerging master of the charming smart alleck character. For a paint-by-numbers rom-com in a year when most films in that genre were pure disaster, everything clicked with this one. It was as fun and satisfying as a Hollywood romance should be.

Biggest Disappointment: The Lovely Bones, The Soloist
I don't even want to write about "The Lovely Bones" anymore...what a mess! As for "The Soloist," you would think that putting Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. together in a movie about a homeless cello prodigy would be award bait. Not.

Most Pleasant Surprise: Zombieland
Zombie films and horror aren't typically my cup of tea, but I laughed my ass off through almost all of "Zombieland." The movie falls apart at the end, but by then, so what?

Worst Movie of 2009: He's Just Not That Into You
The only thing good about it was that the title worked as an already-written third person review.
Honorable Mentions: Antichrist, Monsters vs. Aliens

Still to See (Movies I planned to see from 2009 but haven't had the opportunity...yet):
Away We Go, Big Fan, Broken Embraces, Extract, The Informant!, The Last Station, Me & Orson Welles, Moon, Paranormal Activity, The Road, Sin Nombre, A Single Man, Sunshine Cleaning, Tetro, Watchmen, World's Greatest Dad, The Young Victoria

Bright Star (2009)

In 2009, Jane Campion was the "other" Oscar-nominated female director to release a film. This is, of course, because of "The Hurt Locker," which scored Kathryn Bigelow the first Oscar statue for a woman in the directing category. But in the modern era, Campion was the first to have a shot at the podium with "The Pianist," her 1993 stunner that I knew, even at the age of 20 when it was released, was something beautiful and special.

Campion is no Terrence Malick, but she puts herself in the running with her lazy pace of film releases. For this reason alone, serious movie lovers welcomed her back this past year with BRIGHT STAR, a biography film of sorts about the blossoming romance between 19th Century Romantic poet John Keats, who died young at the age of 25, and his brief romance of a few years with a neighbor girl, Fanny Brawne, who was known to be the inspiration for some of his greatest poems. Campion, who writes her own screenplays, is said to have taken inspiration from the letters that Keats and Brawne sent to one another, in addition to the literary output of Keats itself.

I can say with confidence that BRIGHT STAR is every bit as lovely as anything else Campion has done. I might even go so far as to say that it is the most gorgeous film of 2009 on a purely romantic visual level. It seems as though Campion took great pains to make her film look as beautiful as the poetry of Keats sounds. Unfortunately for me, this was the extent of my love for BRIGHT STAR.

Even for someone as patient and literate as I would like to think I am, I found BRIGHT STAR to move at a snail's pace and thought the romance was hard to grasp. I am certain that my last phrase will cause some to think of me as a bit of a lug, but I should clarify that I don't need a sex scene in a film to buy into an onscreen romance between two characters. So restrained was the interaction between members of the opposite sex in this time and culture, however, that I struggled to feel that passion myself. Don't get me wrong - I detected it whenever the words of Keats were being read or spoken in the film. I just couldn't get into it the way this story was being told.

Campion's formalist and lingering filmmaking style, as much as it bored me, seemed to be the right choice for this story, and I'm not sure she should have done anything differently. As I've stated before, the cinematography here is just stunning. I could point to any of a dozen moments in this two hour film as visuals that will flutter in my mind long after I've forgotten the film's plot details.

I think BRIGHT STAR is just one of those examples of a situation where someone is selling something and just didn't feel like buying it. And there was nothing wrong with what was being sold. I just wasn't terribly interested. Maybe I'm not supposed to respond that way, but I feel entitled to do so every now and again.

I can certainly recognize that BRIGHT STAR was directed with control and precision by a true master of her craft. I have a lot of respect for Campion and for what she accomplishes here. But the pacing of the film made it hard to ignite a fire in my interest that wasn't there to begin with. In fact, I only really found the film's final half hour to be engaging.

BRIGHT STAR is, indeed, beautiful. But it's also boring.

2.5 out of 4

How To Train Your Dragon (2010)

It will be hard for me to say much about HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON that hasn't already been said; I feel like I need only let you know which camp I fell into when watching this movie: the one that loved it or the one that found it to be the same old, same old. Nobody bashed the film, but some were more enthusiastic than others.

What sent me to the theater to see the film (aside from my son's interest), was the promise that the use of 3-D was as good as "Avatar," probably the only movie up to this point for which the use of 3-D felt like an enhancement of my movie-going experience rather than a gimmicky hindrance. I have been more than a little vocal about how unnecessary I find 3-D to be and how it does more to throw me out of the world I'm trying to be a part of than it does to draw me further in.

There's also the added cost of 3-D; it's obnoxious. Also obnoxious is the fact that this is what the kiddies want. So, in the past year, I believe I've seen five or so films in 3-D. Some of them were just plain bad in the format ("Monsters vs. Aliens") and most of them didn't seem to need the 3-D or the format did nothing to make the film a better viewing experience ("Alice in Wonderland"). "Avatar" was my one exception, a film that is exceptional BECAUSE of its 3-D (which makes its upcoming 2-D-only DVD release a mystery to me). Now I have two exceptions.

Very much like "Avatar," HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON is: a) a mostly-recycled story about someone who treats the creatures of his land differently than everyone else and b) a good movie from a visual standpoint that turns into a great one whenever the inhabitants are seen flying through the air.

The story told in HTTYD is well-tread children's fare with a new, and darker, coat of paint. Here we meet Hiccup (voiced with sass and contemporary comic timing by Jay Baruchel), the son of a respected Viking and feared dragon killer, Stoick (Gerard Butler, in "300" voice). Hiccup - big shocker - is an embarrassment to his rugged father because he is a wisp of a thing, uninterested in learning to kill dragons himself and, therefore, in violation of the attitude of generations of Vikings. Stoick essentially rejects his son to the point where Hiccup has no other choice but to train to kill dragons after all if he has any chance of even being able to hold a conversation with his dad again. That's not what he wants to do, though, and of course his more truthful urges soon get the best of him.

It turns out that Hiccup is a Nordic Cesar Milan; in an effort to prove his worth he captures and wounds one of the most dangerous and elusive of all of the dragon varieties and, instead of killing it, befriends it. I'm simplifying this process here, but I also found this sequence to be one of the most warmhearted and sincere in the film and think you should experience it for yourself rather than having me describe it fully here.

No one will believe that Hiccup has even seen this variety of dragon, though, let alone entertain the notion that Hiccup has fitted the thing with a prosthetic tail fin to enable it to fly again and now frequently saddles up on the thing and rides it like the offspring of Pegasus and Seabiscuit. He calls the black dragon with a round head and green cat eyes Toothless, a nod to an early - and dead wrong - observation that the dragon had no teeth.

Before long, Hiccup is showing mercy to the other varieties of dragons being used to train his peers to kill them. Before long, one of them, the tempestuous Astrid, is on to him. And the rest is standard operating procedure. Yes, the boy will prove his father wrong and teach the town a lesson. Yes, he'll nearly die doing it. And yes, there will be a dramatic capture and subsequent rescue. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

With my most critical reviewer's brain on, I don't think I could give HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON much credit. It's not original to anyone who's seen as many movies as I have, and you only have to go back as far as the last major 3-D triumph in theaters to find too many close similarities. But I have to tell you - watching this film made me feel like a kid. I had fun watching it. I smiled, I laughed, I gasped, I said "aw!"

I loved Toothless. The film's animators gave the dragon the mannerisms of a tough-t0-train dog (and reminded me a lot of my own dog, actually). I loved the wit of Hiccup. And those flying sequences? Yeah, they live up to the billing. For someone who hates 3-D, this one disarmed me. What worked might not have been Earth-shattering, but it worked well. And sometimes, that's the most you can hope for in a movie. How well did everything they were trying to do work? It's a question we should be asking more frequently than whether or not a film suits our personal tastes.

With these thoughts in mind, the otherwise-average HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON is much better than that. My kids enjoyed it and, doggone it, I did too!

3.5 out of 4

Astro Boy (2009)

The story of Astro Boy has been around since 1952, when it was first published as a Japanese magna (comic book) and then became a television series there a decade later. I, however, knew nothing about this. After a bit of online research, I also learned that Astro Boy is credited with being the first comic to employ the visual aesthetic that would become known as "anime."

It seems odd, then, that it would take almost 60 years to get a feature film out of the story, but in 2009, director David Bowers ("Flushed Away") released ASTRO BOY in both 2-D and 3-D formats with an all-star voice-over cast that includes Freddie Highmore in the title role and Nicholas Cage as his father, Dr. Tenma.

For those of you who know as little as I did, ASTRO BOY is the story of wunderkind Toby, a boy who is too smart for school because his father, Dr. Tenma, is a robot inventor. In this futuristic society, a group of humans literally broke a chunk off the Earth and elevated it into the sky, dubbing it Metro City. There, Dr. Tenma and his companions at the Ministry of Science have helped to nurture a tradition of the most amazing robots, all performing in service to the humans. When better technology is created, the robots are unceremoniously dumped off the edge of Metro City to the Earth below. It will be virtually impossible to watch this without thinking about "Wall-E," which also gave us an Earth-as-scrap-metal-wasteland landscape. In both situations, this situation is created by human consumerism.

When Toby tags along with his father unannounced at the top secret revealing of a scientific breakthrough by one of Tenma's co-workers, he ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. There, two forms of energy are revealed: a "good" blue energy source and a far less stable, or "evil" red energy source. The good blue guys and bad red guys are a not-so-sneaky sign that the liberal Hollywood film machine is alive and well. The political message, however, is not going to be visible to children. As an adult, I immediately detected it and groaned, and to enjoy ASTRO BOY, one must truly ignore this dippy allusion for the remainder of the film, which I somehow managed to do.

With that digression out of the way, back to the story... Toby ends up getting killed when a power-hungry politician (voiced by Donald Sutherland) attempts to commandeer the red energy source. A grief-stricken Dr. Tenma responds to the tragedy by creating a robot in the image of his son and implanting his son's memories and experiences, via a strand of hair found in his ball cap, into the robot. Almost immediately after this experiment proves "successful," however, Tenma realizes that robot Toby is not a true replacement for his son. And just as the aforementioned physical set-up of ASTRO BOY recalled "Wall-E," this moment clearly echoes "Frankenstein." In similar fashion, the "monster boy" is rejected by Tenma and cast out into the world, where he ends up below Metro City on the Earth's surface.

One problem with ASTRO BOY is how very derivative the story is of other stories, though again, little kids won't notice. On Earth, Toby hides his robot identity from a band of orphaned kids who run everything (a la "Lord of the Flies"). The kids are supervised by an adult, Hamegg (Nathan Lane), himself an outcast scientist from Metro City who refurbishes robots and sets them to battle one another for human entertainment in a gladiator-style ring (a la "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence"). As one could predict, Hamegg turns out to be not as nice as we think he is when he discovers Toby's secret and reveals it to the kids who have befriended him. Soon, Toby (now dubbed "Astro") is in a fight for his life to escape one situation while trying to enter another as the situation with the Metro City president and the red energy source has escalated and Toby/Astro sees his involvement in the problem as his true calling and purpose.

Obviously, I didn't see ASTRO BOY in 3-D in theatres, but I thought it looked fantastic, and my son and I really enjoyed the film and the story, as tired and derivative as it was. The hardest part for me was probably in turning off the encyclopedia in my head that found so many connections to these other films. Indeed, the whole experience is derivative of "Pinocchio," which is also the literary reference for "A.I." But no matter. I thought this was a fun family animated film, nowhere near the Pixar level of "Up," but far better than 80% of last year's animated releases like "Monsters vs. Aliens." In fact, I think it was robbed of more recognition.

I don't know how good fans of the original Astro Boy story felt about this film version, but I thought it was a fun, stylish and exciting kids' film, one that I will likely watch again with my son. Some critics have gone after the film for being too grim, especially because Toby/Astro Boy dies repeatedly in the film. I can see that, and this would be my one worry as well. However, my 4 year-old didn't worry about it, so I won't either.

3.0 out of 4

Un Prophete (A Prophet) (2009)

Winner of the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival and Oscar nominated for Foreign Language Film (where the also-rans are usually better films than the winners), UN PROPHETE is an electrifying film about a weak young man who rises through the ranks of the mafia underworld into a person of strength to be feared. It is probably one of the best mafia films a gangster movie-loving viewer could ever see, and I fear it won't get its due because the film is French: foreign and subtitled.

I say this because, in the film classes I teach, there is still a definite aversion to foreign language films, not to mention a provincial scope when it comes to a teenager's definition of "quality." The good news is that when you ask a teenager what the greatest gangster film of all time is, you typically hear either "The Godfather" or, even more frequently, "Goodfellas." The bad news is you are also more likely to hear "Boondock Saints," "Scarface" (DePalma's remake) or "American Gangster." Few teens have even heard of "Donnie Brasco."

What I'd bet almost none of my students could do is identify the fact that three amazing gangster films - I'd say three of the best of all-time - were released in this past decade. They make up, according to Brad Bevert of RopeOfSilicon.com, a sort of de facto modern mafia trilogy. They are all as action-packed, gripping and, yes, violent as any crime thriller could hope to be and any teen viewer could hope to encounter. So why are they under the radar? You guessed it; they're foreign.

I'm speaking, of course, of Fernando Meirelles' "Cidade de Deus (City of God)," a Rio-based film from 2002, Italy's "Gomorra (Gomorrah)" from 2008 as directed by Matteo Garrone, and now last year's A PROPHET, directed by Jacques Audiard. So loved is "City of God" in particular that, at last check, it stood at #17 on the all-time list at IMDB. I ranked that film in my top 5 of the past decade. And, from an educational standpoint, this "trilogy" of young men involved in drug trades and the treachery of crime gives us one film in Spanish, one in Italian, and one in French. The romantic languages are covered!

Needless to say, I'm cheerleading for recognition for these three films and will be pushing them to my students. But I should take a few minutes to talk about A PROPHET specifically...

When we first meet Malik, a scrappy-but-handsome 19 year-old, he is entering prison. We don't know what for, and though Malik answers a brief battery of personal questions amidst his strip-search and entry paperwork for incarceration, we learn precious little about who he is or why he's there. About the most Malik tells us is that he's innocent, but they might as well print that on the uniforms; everyone says that.

Not long thereafter, however, we get a key piece of information thanks to the social pecking order of the French prison; Malik is Arab, or "a dirty Arab," as he's referred to by the prisoners at the head of the institution's internal power structure, a Corsican gang led by Cesar Luciani, who is not going to allow Malik to peacefully serve his six year sentence and be quietly released. Instead, Cesar, a sadistic, prison-bound don, enlists the Muslim boy, convincing him that only under his wing will the boy even survive his sentence. But as all Arabs are unworthy of trust in the eyes of the Corsicans, Malik must prove his allegiance by killing a fellow Arab prisoner hated by Luciani.

Though we never learn what put Malik in prison in the first place, we learn quickly that he's not there for murder. In fact, it's clear that he's never killed before. But he learns that truly has no choice. I have read other critics' reviews of this murder scene and feel that they've said too much, so all I will say here is that this baptism-by-blood for Malik is one of the most harrowing scenes in any film from 2009. It is uncertain, risky, messy, and in danger of being unsuccessful. And I'd put money on the fact that anyone who sits through it will be hooked for the rest of the film.

Director Audiard does better than simply telling a compelling crime story with A PROPHET. The man Malik kills becomes a ghost in his life, an other-worldly cellmate who offers advice to Malik and exhales cigarette smoke through the slit in his neck that Malik provided him with. Malik then seems to begin to hallucinate on occasion, the film's tie-in to its title. It's not an in-your-face style like Tarantino, but it's stylish and exciting in its own right.

Niels Arestrup is chilling as Cesar, a much less even-tempered Don Corleone. And newcomer Tahar Rahim is sneakily magnetic as Malik. It could be the breakthrough debut of the year; you can't take your eyes off of him. As Malik's good behavior allows him the privilege of day-long furloughs, Cesar co-opts them as his own, forcing Malik to travel great distances within France and complete dangerous outside assignments for him. It's during these adventures that Rahim allows Malik to slowly develop a bit of a swagger, leading up to a cold-blooded final encounter between Malik and Cesar that is anything but a typical show-down. Cesar has used Malik, but by the film's end, it's clear that Malik got something out of it himself: a purpose and a confidence. It is not until the final moments of the film that Malik would even find himself in a position to decide that he doesn't need Cesar anymore.

UN PROPHETE has a great subplot, too, concerning a friend Malik meets in prison who is battling cancer and, after straightening himself out upon release and starting a family, is sucked back in to a life of crime at the request of Malik, who has no one else to turn to in his efforts to complete the ridiculous tasks Cesar demands of him.

Don't call yourself a fan of gangster/mafia/crime movies and turn your nose up to A PROPHET. It is a gripping film with a fantastic script, quality acting and stylish direction. It's proof that the mafia genre gave us more this past decade than Scorese's "The Departed." It's one of the best crime thrillers in recent memory, and one of the finest films of the past year.

4.0 out of 4