Revolution #2009

Oh no. Yoinks. How has this happened? Another year, not to mention another decade has gone by. Some confessions off the bat that may be to my disservice. First off, I know no one’s been clamoring for Josh Moorhead’s top 10 of 2009 list except for Josh Moorhead. But, and second off, Josh Moorhead (that’s me again) has been doing this for about ten years. I realize this has been pretty me-centric so far, but any list of opinion will be. And me of 2000 was in the 8th and 9th grade and didn’t see whatever indie du ans was toast of Cannes that year, and Josh blogger and recent transplant to LA of today has yet to see The Last Station or Nine or Food, Inc. or whatever you or the critic at The New Yorker thinks I should have seen before I made this list, but this list is mine, and you may or may not have yours, dear reader (I know surely I’m not just talking to myself). So me and some other film junkie friends of mine (even my grammar is selfish) have been doing this for a long time — arguing, debating, sharing — and that’s why we do all these lists, for ours and each others’ entertainment. If you make a strong enough case to me that Food, Inc. is the film of this year, chances are I’m going to check it out. Hopefully I make a good case here — at least one that holds up to argument — that is honest…or at least honest to, yup, me.

As for my first point – well, I even thought about not doing a list this year at all. But you know what? Eighth grade me that did it for no other reason than to apparently not attract women would be pissed if 2010 Josh, with his LA address and e-zine access didn’t try to get his opinion to the web-surfing world. So, more as an extension of instinct and without more ado, my 2009 as it boils down to my essential pastime, the magic of the movies, and why…

1. The Fantastic Mr. Fox

I’m a little shocked this is my number one. But since I waltzed out of the theater seeing it, it has not left my mind. Not its amber colors, not Mr. Fox’s meticulously hand-crafted smile, not Meryl Streep’s kind, patient voice behind Mrs. Fox, not its charisma, camerawork or adult voices coming out of a child’s cartoon cuddly world. Not the folk rhythms or The Beach Boys or The Stones. Not a story that, critically, seems barely there but is really all there in the fox hole, sly as Wes Anderson’s work usually is. You fall in love, and damned if you can’t quite explain or shake it. I’m listening to the soundtrack right now and it reminds me of what the film does, what it convinces you of as it depicts it — a world that, at a glance, seems made of dirt ruled by much taller, meaner foes, but one that can be fully conquered by confidence and cool if you can keep it. The world might slow down enough to control if you breathe for roughly 90 minutes in the theater where Fox and films of its ilk play out, or if you pause to stare at the wolf at pause in nature, or if you choose to dance in the grocery store aisle. There is a fox in all of us, an animal trim and debonair — teeth, claws and tail at the ready for living — and the only thing that could ever really trap that beast and its cunning from its true potential is no number of Boggis, Bunce and Beans but ourselves. What The Fantastic Mr. Fox says in all its flair and color and technical astoundingness, through the voice of a children’s film, is that as adults, we only truly stop living when we put the fox away. And Mr. Fox is so fantastic for simply refusing to do so.

Ten years ago, I discovered Wes Anderson by watching a library VHS copy of Rushmore. That is now one of my favorite movies ever. Ten years later, I saw his Fantastic Mr. Fox on the 20th Century Fox lot after getting off work at Paramount Pictures in the shadow of the real-honest-to-God-there-it-is Nakatomi Building from Die Hard, one of my other favorites. I have no idea what the building is actually called over on that side of L.A., but this exemplifies the other use of a great movie: as a historical marker. It seems almost appropriate, then, to close out the past ten years relatively how I started them but different enough to say I’ve grown. But enough about me…

2. Adventureland

I haven’t seen this movie since it’s opening night in April, and that pains me. I miss it. Which is also some evidence that it’s great. There was a brief article in January 6th’s Hollywood Reporter or Variety where a screenwriter said Adventureland gripped him in his adulthood as much as it gripped his son who was turning 17. That’s a high compliment and a truth. Adventureland is a great coming-of-age tale where uncertainty is tackled through great characters, through comedy, through adoring cinematography and, most importantly, sincerity — sincerity that relieves you in your own uncertainties for going, “Oh my gosh! Someone else gets it!” Greg Mottola, the auteur of note here, is more likely to be remembered for Superbad, but I’ll love the dude for this. Like The Wackness a few years before, Adventureland perfectly captures the bittersweet haze of nostalgia when you look back, and the fog in the moment that, at the time, blinds you from what will someday seem like obvious answers. Although I’ve made that sound heavy, here we have a movie about a boy in a theme park that, yeah, is fun…but fun like real life, which isn’t always escape but doesn’t always need to be. Jesse Eisenberg rules here, as he will again shortly later down the list…

Doesn’t hurt that this movie about a lost college post-grad stuck in his hometown got served up to me in the exact same circumstances either…

3. Up

I am neither a 78-year-old man nor a young, vaguely Asian boy, so all my rants may stop here. Up is a fantastic thing. Make no mistake it’s even more an adult venture than The Fantastic Mr. Fox is, and it puts on more convincing sheep’s clothing as a kid’s flick. But since I watched it in tears, laughter, and a sense of renewed adventure, I have come to sense it’s not as readily re-watchable as Pixar’s other classics (robbing it of the top spots). But a feat animated feature implausibly about old men and balloons and chubby kids is a feat nonetheless. And I still laughed and cried and got invigorated and dragged my family to the theater to see it in the same week that I saw it on opening day with friends. Up is as improbable as a house tethered to balloons sailing to South America, but all the more full of and sharing of hope for landing it. Up is a great movie that does what only movies can really do that no squirrel could distract from.

4. Zombieland

I did not see a more entertaining movie this year. I may have not seen a more entertaining movie in many years. And it’s not even the zombies. It’s the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness, the tension, the comedy, the nicknames, the shotguns, the pretty girls and, oh boy, the Bill Muarry. In the interest of saving text space, go to the original review or, better yet, just go watch Zombieland again and again and again. Oh hey, look, Jesse Eisenberg again! Man that kid gets me…

5. A Serious Man

I’m not sure I’ve seen a movie as unapologetically, uncompromisingly bold as the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man. It has audacity. It exists on its own and has no use for audience. Unabashedly religious while squarely focusing on the mundane travails of secular life, Man dares only to be solely what it is. It doesn’t try to woo you. It dares to be boring even, at points. It brushes up on, in a ho-hum manner, everything from metaphysics and the Almighty to folklore and Jefferson Airplane, and maybe even nothing at all. And then it just ends. A Serious Man is the other movie this year that would not deny ground in my consciousness. I’m not even sure what it all meant, but I couldn’t be more convinced it meant something…which is maybe life anyway. I saw the Coen brothers at lunch earlier this week, no joke, sitting a few tables away. Maybe I should have asked them. But as the film’s main character is forced to confront in his alter-job existence, and as the movie determinedly proves with such impartial ease, life ain’t all about — and hardly ever is about — answers. Sometimes it just happens. Maybe how it does depends on what you do, or maybe not, but when it does keep happening, what will you do? Believe? Give up? Or just keep going?

6. District 9

As smart and original a sci-fi flick as there’s ever been — one that doesn’t obsess with filling plot holes for fan-boys and message board-hounding enthusiasts, that doesn’t get lost in details thanks to its clever presentation as a documentary about a man. And so it is that this movie isn’t really about aliens but men and their prejudices and maybe, just maybe, what we’d really do if aliens really happened. With a budget that might pay for five minutes of Avatar, it is so real. From the spot-on first trailer prior to release to its closing moments, District 9 manages to be a perfectly cooked smorgasbord of genre tastes, drama and action and sci-fi and documentary and gross-out and yarn. District 9 can get weird or uncomfortable at points, it’s not always necessarily purely enjoyable…but that’s kind of the idea. This isn’t Independence Day. It’s not about Bill Pullman speeches in the darkest of midnights. It’s about what man has done in the starkest daylights without remorse, yet somehow it still manages to be a fan-boy wonderland, regardless of its true aim. Director freshman year, Neill Blompkamp may have just graduated early and with honors.

7. Watchmen

Zack Snyder’s thankless task in adapting a dense, previously thought unadaptable work that is also considered the beloved epoch and definitive work of its medium comes out as well as I could estimate it could have…which is making no apology for it because, source material unaccounted for, it is a wonderful, detailed, sprawling and ambitious film, endearingly and slavishly made. There are tweaks, but tweaks that make this a movie and not a graphic novel. This is the movie and should be appreciated as such. As far as movies-as-historical-markers goes, personal or otherwise, Watchmen applies to the zeitgeist (relax, it’s a word I pretty much get to use once a year). Our last decade or so of movie making will someday be typified by the superhero genre and, as Alan Moore’s graphic novel did for comics in the ’80s, running head-on into the problems that would really come with superheroes and the problems they would have themselves deconstructing the genre, Snyder’s movie does for the films of today. The plot still stands, but, surprisingly, it and the issues it approaches are still timely. It’s evident, in Snyder’s styled approach, that he was aiming for something great, perhaps even a masterpiece. I’m not entirely willing to say he’s got it, but I am totally willing to reach with him.

8. Inglourious Basterds

I hear Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine from the trailers yelping, approaching camera, “Sooooouuuund good?!” He not so much asks out of a sincere curiosity but rather asserts. As an audience, we stand at attention. Sure does, Aldo. Sure does. Inglourious Basterds is nothing but a complete disappointment if you watch it hoping to see the movie Quentin Tarantino said he’d been writing for years or the one trailers promised. You know, the one about a group of Nazi body-baggin’ righteous judgment exactin’ mean Jews whose sheer cruelty makes them heroes because the meanness isn’t unpleasant or a negative but a catharsis, because the real bastards, as we have all always known and are ready to admit, were really those Nazis. And in places in Europe, that still brings a very real and great and sometimes debilitating shame. It’s true. But Basterds, even in being a “dubya dubya two” movie, was going to be fun. It still is…but it’s just not that movie. Not the one we were expecting. This isn’t for history buffs but for film buffs. It would have been more accurately called “French Girl and Black Guy Open A Theater.” This is a movie from a man who loves movies and is a movie about movies. It’s so bold as to say movies could have even killed Hitler, and no matter if they missed their chance then, since they’re timeless, they can now. And timeless Tarantino’s Basterds may be. His other work can only continue to make less and less sense over time, or be more readily identified as of its moment. Basterds is an intricate doozy of a flick. A bunch of episodes carefully strewn together, a showcase of great performances, and a usual palate-pleasing course of dialogue, but it all ends up with, and amounts to, what could only happen in a theater.

9. Paranormal Activity

This also is what movies can do. Terrify, certainly. They’ve always had a chance to do that. But at 11,000 dollars? On some guy with time and a camera’s whim? Welcome to film-making as it’s never really been possible before. After a long slog that started almost three years ago now at the competing film festival in Utah, Slamdance, Paranormal Activity has slowly climbed its way up to a booming financial success that took leaps not just in film-making but in the way that films are marketed and reach their audience. Three years ago in Utah, I turned down the chance to see Activity. After all, I was there for Sundance – and how scary could it be? Uh…very. I literally had to take to my car and pray to my Lord afterward. I literally do not know if I ever will watch this movie again. And I won’t try to. I’m not sure it’s necessarily better than a smattering of other movies released this year, but for me, maybe none was so purely effective at what it set out to do, even as I knew what that was and could properly brace myself for it. But it scared the pigment right out of my skin. I know plenty of people that think this thing was terrible. But for all its ingenuity and execution, from playing perfectly realistic while dealing with something altogether unnatural, to its perfect structure and smart use of the camcorder gimmick, Activity, against my best wishes, has clawed its way and earned its way onto my list — the uninvited guest I cannot shake. For what it’s worth, neither could Steven Spielberg. Dude watched a screener, felt the same way, then shipped it out to theaters across the country – seemingly doing anything to be rid of its presence.

10. Up In The Air

I hesitate here. Other picks for this slot are perhaps…easier. But Up In The Air impresses me. I didn’t expect to like it. Oscar bait smells funny to me. I don’t like it when I’m expected to like a movie to seem intelligent or cultured or whatever. I don’t like it when a movie tries to pass off loose ends or a piss poor mood for the kind of ivory tower ambiguity that makes the critical effete swoon. “Oh gray areas!” Gray areas should be easy. When a comedy’s really, really funny, it’s more impressive to me. If a movie can sufficiently capture love or joy, that’s something. When it can do an old thing in a new way, I’m impressed. So often the films you hear most about this time of year, you will not hear once about in just a few years, if not a few months from now. I’m talking about the lost indies and anointed ones of my early “Oughties” middle school years. I’m talking about the forgotten best picture and screenplay noms of 1993, when all anyone really cares about now is Jurassic Park. So I can’t say with certainty that Up In The Air will survive, but I can say I wouldn’t mind if it did. Although George Clooney’s movies tend not to make a lot of money, he is a movie star, and here he proves it in a role Grant or Bogart may have flinched at. His Ryan Bingham is charming but not necessarily pleasant…but he is a character that captures a moment, as this movie does, and that moment is ours. As a metaphor, as a type, it could be a proper time capsule for 2009. Some laughs. Some tepid hope. A bustle of people and new inventions to connect with them, but a loss of connection — lost jobs and an inventory of what’s really important. Director Jason Reitman has proven himself by now, and here we have a movie that is honest while remaining entertaining. It is bittersweet and real. There’s an expression that says Ohio, where I’m from, is “fly-over country.” But it is home, and what escapes Bingham, as it escapes many in our ever-updating, scrolling and refreshing world, is that that’s where the heart is. Up In The Air does seem to say, though, that we can still land if we choose to.

Some just misses/potential ties: The Informant!, Star Trek, 500 Days of Summer, Invictus, The Hurt Locker, Pirate Radio.

So there you go. Another 365 in so many words. Now on to my decade list, eh? Typically, this space is reserved for personal reflection. A few more glimpses of what you already saw about why these films meant what to me and where I was and hope I’m going. But you might not know much or care to know much about Hartville, Ohio or Josh Rogers and Julie Myers’ impending weddings, or Lindsey Nelson and her month in Alaska and our drive to California, or the TOMS shoes house with my friend since I was 8, Shamus, a block from the ocean, or Adam Rex and the Paramount lot, or Chris Comeau and his dear departed Mum, or my family and Grandma, for that matter. No, all that probably wouldn’t matter much to you. So I’ll just say I know where I’ve been and I’m excited about where we’re going – and I know I’ll see you there, stranger, in that theater up the street or the one on the other coast, watching another story unfolding, written by light and motion in a place where the world stops and starts turning again at the rise and fall of a curtian, at the unspooling of a projector. End reel.