The best and worst of 2009

The year is almost over, which can mean only one thing - lists! Lots and lots of lists! The Indie Movies Online team reflect back on 2009, picking out their favourite – and least favourite – films from the last twelve months.

2009: A Space Between the Ears Odyssey
by Paul Martin

One thing and one thing only reigned supreme in Hollywood this year: stupidity. Having carefully bided its time in recent years, establishing a solid power base, 2009 was the year that stupidity really struck home and began running every other game out of Tinseltown. And it was not solely the honking great blockbusters that were involved in this headlong lurch towards idiocy.

Though let's not beat around the burning bush about it, some of this year's summer event movies were supremely dumb. The likes of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and X-Men Origins: Wolverine plumbed quite astonishing nadirs of nonsensical uselessness, as the overemployment of eye-singeing CGI failed to obscure monatomically slender characterisation and sloppy turd stories. Yet even supposed prestige productions disappointed at least six times as regularly as they delighted. Worst of the bunch was David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which saw the Big F taking every shred of goodwill he had garnered with Zodiac and ejaculating it all right back up the noses of his poor unsuspecting audience, in the dullest, most irksomely whimsical manner conceivable.

Though far better that boring old Benny Button, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds still only delivered sufficient quality to prop up about 20% of its excessively elongated running time (continuing the trend of the third millennium to date, 2009 was another bad year for editors, as length was all too regularly mistaken for a watermark of excellence and economic storytelling was inexplicably viewed as a sign of weakness), while the existential indie-dreck served up by Jim Jarmusch in his woeful The Limits of Control represented nothing, aside from a convincing late bid for the mantle of Worst Film of the Year.

Also performing truly Herculean feats in that particular category of awfulness was The Spirit (released way back on New Year's Day in the UK, after our transatlantic neighbourhoods had been abused by it in the final week of December 2008), an especially wretched entry into the chronically overloaded sector of awful comic book adaptations. Combining fetishistic sexism, cringeworthy juvenile action, a central performance from unknown actor Gabriel Macht which suggested he had all the tools in his dramatic armoury to remain unknown for a long time to come, and a tasteful smattering of Nazi iconography (for no apparent other reason than it must have seemed a bit of a transgressive giggle at the time), The Spirit was as disastrous as walking in on your mother in bed with the milkman, and almost as embarrassing for all concerned parties.

Spirit helmer Frank Miller had seen his own comic book 300 turned into a hit film two years previously, and the director of that feature, Zack Snyder, returned this spring with a much-hyped cinematic take on the Watchmen graphic novel, in which wonderful special effects were undermined by a paralysing reverence for the source material. “It's as close to reading the comic as you can get while watching a movie.” cried Snyder. “You're missing the point, you useless arse!” countered the public. Well, at least those did who actually went to see the lousy thing. Which, as it happened, was far fewer than anyone had predicated.

But, as noted, it was not only comic book movies, blockbusters, and comic book blockbuster movies that had been drinking their idiot juice and munching their moron cookies. Oh no, this was the year when even the acclaimed releases were thicker than a whale draught excluder. Irritating, naval-gazing, pop culturally literate slackers were everywhere. Self-pitying, stinky-pants jerks, pathetically hiding behind a shield of geek. Goons of the this noxious ilk featured prominently in the likes of (500) Days of Summer, Adventureland, and Funny People, which all attracted plenty of critical love, in spite of respectively being shit, shitter, and shittest. Okay, maybe that's a little bit harsh (though that sliding scale does hold true), but surely something has gone seriously wrong if the protagonist who is meant to be 'saying' something true and relevant to his audience about the young male experience only carries the equivalent appeal of a carrier bag filled with sick?

Comedy was a not genre well-served by the year as a whole, with Ricky Gervais delivering the most dismal offender in the shape of his co-written and co-directed The Invention of Lying. Much castigated for staggering levels of product placement (one scene is basically Gervais holding up a Pizza Hut box, logo front and centre, to the camera for ten minutes), the film also failed to make any coherent sense out of its “What if?” starting premise, and was less fun overall than having Nikolai Valuev stand on your foot. And then punching you in the mouth when you complained.

Aside from the chumps on-screen, the year was also marked by a ravenous hunger amongst critics to anoint fresh behind-the-camera heroes; a tendency which saw two good-but-not-great first-time features, Moon and District 9, make instant stars out of their respective directors, Britain's Duncan Jones and the South African-born Neill Blomkamp. Personally, I gleaned greater enjoyment from cinematic debuts served up by two, already well-known, figures - In the Loop by the British TV comedy writer and director Armando Ianucci, and Synecdoche, New York from the Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.

Though there may not have been much that was truly cinematic about Ianucci's dialogue-intensive movie, the script, performances and vituperative barbs of spin doctor Malcolm Tucker were all hilarious enough to identify In the Loop as the year's best comedy, and perhaps one of the funniest satires expressly set in the political milieu ever to make it to the screen. Kaufman's movie meanwhile (which he stepped in to direct when regular collaborator Spike Jonze elected to instead tackle a live-action version of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are) was an absorbingly multi-layered affair, and one of the very few movies in 2009 that hadn't completely blown its wad by the end of the first viewing.

As far as foreign language releases were concerned, The Class and Martyrs were wildly different but, in their own ways, equivalently punchy slices of French cinema, while Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces was slightly harshly dealt with by the critics I felt, with quite a few seeming to have simply decided that the hour had come for the Spaniard to receive a bit of a kicking. Though the film eventually peters out with a pretty feeble whimper, I actually preferred Broken Embraces and its noir atmospherics to Almodóvar's much-praised 2006 offering Volver. One of the year's most fascinating movies was Il Divo, which served up a less than flattering portrayal of the Italian politicial survivor Giulio Andreotti. Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino painted the seven-time Prime Minister (superbly played by Toni Servillo) as an Arctic-veined underworld lurker in a film of equivalent-parts style and substance.

Wicked spirits were invoked too in the brilliant prologue for the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, which attempted to familiarise the filmmaking siblings' metropolitan fanbase with at least a few of the more arcane trappings of the Jewish faith. For me this tale of cosmic ennui in 60s suburban Minneapolis was the Coens' best movie in a decade (much better than their Oscar-garlanded No Country For Old Men), without it ever soaring to the sublimely vertiginous heights of Miller's Crossing or Barton Fink.

The biggest surprise of the year was also 2009's best blockbuster, as J. J. Abrams (whose previous directorial outing, Mission: Impossible III, was as bad as a dysentery-addled hamster claiming squatters' rights in the pocket of your best jacket) and Star Trek (pompous sci-fi hell spread over nine-thousand hours of TV programming) combined to inexplicably brilliant effect. The time-jumping, reality-bending plot of Abrams' Star Trek reboot was totally crazy and simultaneously completely inspired, a bit like Syd Barrett's Bike given cinematic form, while the film's narrative expediency and light tone exposed pretty much all other event movies this year as stodgy, imagination-starved monuments to money-grabbing cynicism.

Money-grabbing was hypocritically portrayed as the universe's chief evil in James Cameron's Avatar; subject of more pre-release hype than all the other movies ever released in history put together. But while Cameron's hyper-expensive adventures in 3D delivered a truly dazzling technical spectacle, again the script was stupid enough that it could lose itself in an aeroplane toilet.

My 5 Best Films of the Year
5. Il Divo
4. Star Trek
3. In the Loop
2. A Serious Man
1. Synecdoche, New York

My 5 Worst Films of the Year
5. The Limits of Control
4. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
3. The Spirit
2. The Invention of Lying
1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Special “Did I really see that?” Award for the Most Averagely Forgettable Film of the Year
The Taking of Pelham 123

Special “I've got something in my eye” Award for Heart-String Tugging by a Non-Human Character
Carl Fredricksen becomes a single man again in the opening sequence of Up

Runner-Up
Carol makes a frantic dash to bid farewell to Max in Where the Wild Things Are

The Year in Popcorn
by Emma Rowley

However we slice it, dice it or julienne it, 2009 was not a vintage year for films, a fact that can be exemplified by the hopeful advertisements championing surprise hit The Hangover for Best Picture at the upcoming 82nd Academy Awards. Yes, it was funny but – oh, come on. Surely there’s no need to continue. Still, the year did bring us some fascinating flicks, though the most interesting of these were often unexpected oddities, while the most anticipated films often turned out to be tedious disappointments. In my top titles of 2009, Moon and In The Loop are the only perfectly crafted little gems – Moon was the standout: beautiful, economical and thought-provoking in a Phildickian manner, with a wonderful central performance. My next top pick was anything but perfectly crafted. Enter The Void is a giant, messy monster: a near three-hour assault on the senses. But Gaspar Noé’s use of extreme cinematic techniques in this, a twenty-first century katabasis, was intensely visceral and will surely prove inspirational to young filmmakers. Likewise, Bright Star was included for its emotional intensity and lyricism.

My Top Five (in no particular order):
1. Moon
2. Enter The Void
3. Bright Star
4. In The Loop
5. Cold Souls

(A special mention goes to the inky black comedy Down Terrace, which won this year’s Raindance Award and had a freshness to it that was lacking in many other films. I would also have added Synecdoche, New York, except that I saw it last year and have been banging on about it for months, so it feels like cheating.)

So much for the good. I’ve thought long and hard about which flick to nominate as the worst of the year (it’s so much more fun than analysing the best of the flicks). My first runner-up was the grim Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. In my geeky way, I was looking forward to this flick as Michael Bay had promised you’d see more of the Transformers transforming, which is really all anyone cares about. Instead, with a camera that buzzed about like a gnat, we couldn’t really see anything except walls of unidentifiable, metallic GCI. The film itself played like an interminable variety performance, with comic interludes and skits throughout (mom gets stoned! Robot humps girlfriend’s leg! Member of audience puts pistol in mouth!). I half expected it to end with all the Transformers and Megan Fox lining up and doing the can-can. Films like this depend on the goodwill of fanboys and girls (and nostalgia-affected toy lovers) and frankly, Mr Bay, you’ve been exploiting this for long enough now.

But the movie that got my goat more than any other goat-getting movies this year was Terminator Salvation. It’s the fourth in the series, which brings with it the opportunity to show John Connor leading the resistance in the future – the money shot, basically. The third film was dull, but it stuck with the formula and left the franchise with a bleakly brilliant twist for McG to exploit all hell out of. Brilliant: let’s do it. Or, hang on, why not instead bump Connor into a supporting role and add a load of extraneous characters we couldn’t care less about? Now that’s how you eff up a franchise.

2009 From a Fantasy Lover’s POV
By Angela Burton

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2. Public Enemies
3. Cold Souls
4. District 9
5. Coraline

Anyone who knows me will not be surprised with my top film of 2009. Anyone else will probably be slightly confused. I love (yes, love) the Harry Potter books, I grew up with my nose in every one as they were released. When the films started coming out I refused to like them; as a true fan of the books, I declared them null and void. Until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince which won me round to onscreen Potter.

The rest of my top five goes like this. Johnny Depp is the go-to man for any popular movie right now. Public Enemies wouldn’t have made it into my top films without him, I’m afraid to say. District 9 made it into my top five, partly thanks to Movie-Con, where it was a surprise secret viewing. Watching it in a small packed cinema filled with excited people (who went collectively mental once it became clear what the film was to be) was a rare experience. Coraline filled my Nightmare Before Christmas needs: I loved the book and loved the film even more for its look.

Worst
1. Fantastic Mr Fox
2. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
3. Terminator Salvation
4. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
5. Dead Snow

Despite all the love for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox, it has a very comfortable spot on the top of my worst films list. I didn’t like the idea from the start, then the torrent of posters and clips started and my dislike heightened. Finally the film graced the cinema screens and my frown may as well have been tattooed onto my face. Yuck.

Spots number two and three are pretty much interchangeable – as were the films. They’re higher up the hate list then Wolverine purely because my expectations were higher. What a disappointment. After the four massive blockbuster disasters that make up this list, spot five was surprisingly difficult to fill: there are quite a lot of okay-but-not-quite-good-enough films that could sit snugly in that space. In the end I went with Dead Snow, on the ground that derivative zombie flicks have had their day. Enough now. Really.

The View From the States
By Kimberly Gadette

The top films all share a special coupling. Both Up and Up in the Air address the tantalizing concept of escaping the misery and disappointments of life that go hat-in-hand with plodding on terra firma. However, freeing oneself of the shackles, traveling up into the heavens, doesn't mean that you're literally home free. Or, as is quoted in Buckaroo Banzai: "Wherever you go, there you are." The Hurt Locker and The Messenger take a no-prisoners look at the horrors of war, both immediate and long-lasting, both on foreign soil and back at home. Coming in as a tie is An Education and The Brothers Bloom, in which con men entice strong-willed virgins, only to discover that they themselves have been unwittingly swept away.

My Top 5 Films (in no special order):

1. Up
2. Up in the Air
3. The Hurt Locker
4. The Messenger
5. An Education/The Brothers Bloom

The Worst Film of 2009 (it's a three-way tie):

While Cirque du Freak (budget: $70M) and Land of the Lost (budget: $100M) are just bad, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen gets a special booing because the bloated cost to film such a scrap heap (budget: $200M) is simply unconscionable.