Top 5 Films of 2009

As the first decade of the new millennium is coming to a close (Again, I understand that technically 2010 will be the last year of the decade, but no one seems to recognize that so I join in with the rest of the herd), 2009 has proven to be a pretty decent year for movies. Decent, not great. Some critics call it the best year of the decade. Not even close. 2007 was the best year, bar none. There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Assassination of Jesse James, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, No Country For Old Men, Zodiac, the list goes on and on...

That's not to say 2009 didn't see its share of masterpieces. After the usual crap fest released during January and February, the studios' dumping ground post-Oscar season, the year started strong in March with a surprisingly faithful adaptation of "Watchmen", the first and (probably only) truly adult superhero movie. The summer season, full of tent pole blockbuster fare, was a sore disappointment to say the least (With one glorious exception), especially considering 2008's one-two punch of The Iron Man and The Dark Knight, arguably two of the best superhero films ever made.

This year's impressive big budget fare? We unfortunately saw McG Double Whopper Jr.'s abhorrent Terminator: Salvation (It's bad news when your film makes Terminator 3 look like T2). We watched Hugh Jackman cash in his gigantic check for two hours with X-Men Mediocrities: Wolverine. And we had our senses obliterated, our common intelligence significantly lowered, and lost all hope for humanity with Transformers 2: Revenge of The Sub Woofer, one of the worst movies of the decade. The only saving point was scored by JJ Abrams and his fresh take on Star Trek, the aforementioned glorious exception.

After the mind-numbing summer, we again hit a dry patch with September, the studios' second dumping ground. Then, we hit the ground running with the start of the awards season and we haven't slowed down since. An Education, Up In The Air and Invictus were welcome surprises (Especially Up In The Air, considering I hated Juno). At this point, I still haven't seen Bad Lieutenant, Crazy Heart, Me and Orson Welles and Moon, which I predict might have a shot at The Top 10, if not The Top 5.

So here it is, The Top 5 Films of 2009:

5- The Hurt Locker:

The fact that The Hurt Locker takes place during the current Iraq war is almost an afterthought. It could have taken place during the crusades and it probably would be just as effective.

Katherine Bigelow's powerful film about the lives of an elite bomb squad in Iraq is fully immersing and empathetic with its characters, without plunging too much into unnecessary exposition.

We practically live with these soldiers for two and a half hours, yet we never really know who they really are. We never find out anything really specific about them, much like the way personal relationships must be between soldiers in the field.

This was one of those rare war films that examine the soldiers' state of mind during the war rather than the politics of the specific war itself. It does what many other lesser films try to accomplish: It throws a controversial quote at us at the beginning and actually manages to fully examine the meaning and the ramifications of that quote through the rest of its running time. Yes, to some people war is a drug. It doesn't matter what side they fight and why. After a while, as crazy as it sounds, it becomes the status quo.

The Hurt Locker was the most visceral and horrifying movie going experience of the year. Bigelow handles the many bomb threat scenes with adequate suspense and bravado, yet they are never showy or arrogant.

"The Curse of The Iraq War Movie", which guarantees any fictional film made about the Iraq war will fail at the box-office, inevitably caught up with The Hurt Locker, but there is at least a good chance it will receive a best picture and director nomination. One can hope.

4- Where The Wild Things Are:

How you react to Where The Wild Things Are depends a lot on your personality. The film is, quite simply, what it is. It is a journey into a child's imagination, a wondrous and carefree land created by the child as an escape from the real world. Of course, that's not to say it is perfect. The real world always finds a way of creeping inside even our most seemingly carefree fantasies.

There is no forced plot, or a hero's journey. Max, the boy, and the wild things, are not sent away to retrieve a powerful ring, or a pair of magical shoes needed to bring Max back to his real world. Max can return any time he wants. There is no manufactured antagonist, an evil wizard, or a bad wild thing, strayed away from the pack, swearing to exact revenge. There is only Max, and his imagination.

Since the film is stripped of all conventional plotting or narrative, we are given freedom to delve into our imagination alongside Max's. Therefore, like I mentioned above, unlike many other films, your personality will determine whether or not you'll enjoy Where The Wild Things Are.

Either you think it's a wondrous and endlessly creative land full of fun and imagination, or you think Max is a brat who needs to suck it up and face his responsibilities. Both reactions would be correct in their own way. And some, like me, will not really know how to feel but will acknowledge it as one of the most unique and daring children's films to be made in ages, and one of the best films of the year.

3- Avatar:

Yes, it is a somewhat condescending white male fantasy driven by white guilt. Yes, it is Dances With Wolves in space. Yes, it is simplistic and cliched at times. And yes, we complain way too much.

What happened? Is it that classic American tradition of "all or nothing" creeping back in? Are we forgetting that the highest grossing film of 2009 before Avatar was Transformers 2, one of the dumbest films ever made? Here are a couple more yes':

Yes, it is an exhilarating adventure in the most classic sense. Yes, it restored my faith in big budget event film making. Yes, it is endlessly entertaining and breathtaking. Yes, it raises the bar in special effects in previously unimaginable ways. Yes, every frame is a wonder to behold. Yes, it creates individual characters and gives clear, universal motivations to them and then lead us into grand action set pieces where the end result actually matters, instead of randomly banging a bunch of CGI metal together. Yes, it creates a brand new world with its own set of rules and sticks to those rules instead of reinventing itself as it goes along. And yes, is it fun to watch, from the first moment to the last. Keep complaining, Transformers 3 is around the corner.

2- A Serious Man:

This was a hard choice. Is A Serious Man the best film of the year, or is it the second? The only way I was able to make up my mind was to remind myself how arbitrary list making can be sometimes. In many cases, just because we put a number on something does not necessarily mean it's better or worse than the numbers before or after it. So, A Serious Man is the "second best" film of the year. But I will not argue with anyone who claims it's the best. In many ways, it is.

Here's what I wrote about it in a previous post: "What an amazing film this was. In the middle of this shit storm of mediocrity full of bland superhero movies, bad toy/video game adaptations, sequels, franchise re-boots, unapologetically benign cutesy indie flicks, A Serious Man is truly a breath of fresh air.

Every single minute of this film is unpredictable, honest, genuinely funny, genuinely sad and original, a word that couldn't be used to describe an American film for a long, long time."

Still true.

1- Up:

I've written so much about this miracle of a film in both Turkish and English, that I'll let my blurb from the Top 10 Best Films of The 2000s (In which it placed 7th) do all the work:

"The decade ends with 2009's Up, a true animation classic. One that not only presents an endlessly exciting and breath taking adventure, it also accomplishes something seldom seen in American animation: It has real characters, with real feelings, dreams and motivations. Even though it is part of a format generally marketed to kids, not one frame of it has even a speck of that familiar pandering and condescension observed in countless animated films, especially ones that were released during the 00s.

Underneath the delightful fantasy of Carl Fredericksen, a cranky septuagenarian, voyaging to Paradise Falls with his flying house to fulfill a promise to his wife Ellie, lies a beautifully told story about a man's personal journey into dealing with his own grief and finding new purpose in his life, executed with endless empathy and compassion.

Directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson go out of their way to crush every children's film cliche known to man. Russell, Carl's unwanted child companion, is not treated as an adult in a child's body, the way children are depicted in almost every family film, but as a real child, confused, goofy and sometimes even annoying. The talking dogs don't have human characteristics or mannerisms, they simply articulate a dog's thought pattern. Balls are good, squirrels are bad. This is, quite simply, a wonderful film."

The Low 5: Five Worst Films of The 2000s

Last July, right around the time Transformers 2 came out, I read a letter someone wrote to Roger Ebert concerning the compounded amount of time lost watching Transformers 2. This person took the number of people who have seen the movie around the world and multiplied it with its mind-numbingly brutal two and a half hour running time and came up with the world-wide, communal time wasted on this piece of shit. The result was something like 300 years. Four lifetimes, wasted on Transformers 2.

We usually discard any bad movie going experience immediately after the experience itself, saying something along the lines of "That was horrible. Let's go have some drinks." But do we realize how much time we really waste sitting through moronic, inept (or unapologetically mediocre), morally corrupt, nausea and/or headache inducing and downright terrible films in any given year, let alone a decade? If we did, I'm sure we'd be much more careful with our film choices. Just this year alone, I had to sit through Gamer, G-Force, Final Destination 3D, Transformers 2, Terminator: Salvation, Night at The Museum 2, Fast and Furious... Already, that's almost an entire day. An entire day out of my year, lost.

About the time wasted during the entirety of the 2000s watching terrible movies, the number is probably too painful to bare, so I won't even attempt to find that out. But it is without a doubt that the first decade of the 00s has seen its share of crap. It is near impossible to pick only five films as the worst films of the decade when there are so many to choose, but I did my best.

Bear in mind that that the films below are ones that I find to be truly depressing, demoralizing and upsetting experiences. The kind where I used that disposable cliche, "I just wasted two hours of my life", and truly meant it. The kind of films that can actually make me lose hope in humanity and our future as a whole.

So, just as an example, The Room, which is without a doubt the worst film of the decade in the most technical sense, has brought me so much joy in the past year that it does not belong on this list. This low five is reserved only for those rare film going experiences that left me feeling disgusted, depressed and hallow. So here they are:

5- Charlie's Angels:

The first multi-million dollar movie directed by a McDonald's menu item. Here's your first clue: Any talentless, clueless, hip goatee-wearing douche bag music video director who insists on calling himself McG, will not a good director make. Combining this moron with a big screen remake of one of the dumbest shows on TV history, now that's just cruel.

For a long time after it's release in 2000, Charlie's Angels set the bench mark for utter, relentless stupidity in both action and comedy. For those of you who wondered why Terminator:Salvation sucked so much, you don't have to look any further than McG's freshman effort.

The action scenes are basically comprised of a combination of random slo-mo and bad wire-fu while McG shuffles his "hipster playlist" to blare out yet another painfully recognizable hit from the 90s. The attempts at "humor" are so obvious and inept, one scene actually involves the angels in drag. Of course, no mention of the terrible acting is necessary. All I'm saying is that when Tom Green delivers the best performance in your film, you're in deep trouble. Charlie's Angels is dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. Repeat that for two hours, you'll have a better time.

4- Date Movie:

There's a scene in Mike Judge's underrated Idiocracy, when we find out that the highest grossing film in a future populated entirely by morons is a masterpiece called "Ass". Ass, which won many Oscars the year it came out, is composed entirely of a man's ass, farting every five seconds.

If there are any movies from this decade that proves beyond a doubt that this is where we're heading, it's the "Movie" movies by the mentally challenged "comedy" team Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. The fact that I didn't even double-check to find out how their names are spelled when I shouldn't even know who these people are makes me feel incredibly depressed.

Trying desperately to cash in on the mildly successful Scary Movie franchise (Which wasn't a masterpiece but at least it contained what could be called "jokes"), the "Movie" movies such as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet The Spartans (Change of pace here, the only original move by the team) and Disaster Movie are paler than pale imitations of the spoof genre. Rather than actually exploiting the loopholes and the cliches of the popular genre they are "examining", the craptastic team merely show us random pop-culture icons of the day and have stuff fall on them.

For example: A bad actor poorly imitating Borat shows up out of nowhere, ineptly recites a line directly lifted from his movie, and a cow falls on him. Repeat until movie's over. The films are not only devoid of any sign of intelligence, or wit, or any coherent thought for that matter, they are also shameless scams designed to suck out any hard earned money from their core dumber-than-a-bag-of-dumb-bricks audience.

The films are shot on a very low budget (Which shows), they are barely 70 minutes long (With the team trying desperately to stretch out the running time with excruciatingly long credits sequences that involve very unfunny out takes) and they shamelessly grab onto any opportunity to use product placement, no matter how obvious.

If you consider that merely 30 years ago, comedy masterpieces like Blazing Saddles and Airplane were considered to be the lowest form of entertainment, we are not too far away from Ass: The Movie. By the way, the only reason I single out Date Movie is because it's the one that started this crap fest, and is therefore more responsible than the rest. Otherwise, the films are interchangeable.

3- Wolf Creek:

The 00's will go down in history as the decade that killed the horror genre. Seriously, what happened to the fun in watching a horror movie? What happened to popping in a good horror film and being thrilled and scared, while all the time realizing it's made for "entertainment"? These days, after watching a horror movie, I'm either bored beyond belief, or I feel the need to take a long shower to wash the filth off.

The two genres of horror that dominated the 00s decided to go to two opposite extremes. The slew of Asian horror remakes (Dubbed J-Horror) relied entirely too heavily on suspense without much payoff, and since they were all PG-13 it created a new audience for Horror that Hollywood could exploit. On the other side, the so-called torture porn sub-genre that became popular with the surprising success of Saw and Hostel, sucked out all the wit, fun, and the underlying dark sense of humor of the genre in order to bring us nothing but long, overdrawn, brutal killings.

I thought long and hard about why I hate Saw and Hostel (To be fair, the first Hostel is not "that" bad. At least it has some sense of humor), and all their sequels, spin-offs and knock-offs, and why I love older, sometimes much more violent and graphic horror franchises like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and even Scream. I think the main issue is that those films, no matter how violent, asked us to identify with the victim and feel their terror when they are chased by the kitchen knife wielding masked maniac.

Torture porn, on the other hand, asks us to identify with the killer, and to take pleasure out of the brutal killing of the victim. The issue is never how terrifying the murder is, it's how clever Jigsaw is in the way he drowned his victim in a tub full of pureed rotten pig corpses. How fun.

Any Saw movie could belong on this list. The reason I picked Wolf Creek, Australia's worst import since Kangaroo Jack, is because it's equally dull and despicable. NOTHING happens during its first hour of running time, and I mean nothing, absolutely nothing, nada, zip, nothing. We just watch a bunch of bimbos (One male, two female) driving around the Aussie outback, barely mentioning an almost non-existent sub-plot involving one bimbo sleeping with the other bimbo behind the third bimbo's back.

After director Aussie G'daymate, or whatever the fuck his name is, has enough time jerking us around a "story" he must have realized only merits about 10 minutes of running time, has our bimbos meet their killer. After that, we are asked to watch a girl walk over broken glass on her hands and knees for half an hour straight.

Another reason why I hate Wolf Creek and Hostel II more that their counterparts is because I do have a very big pet peeve about being asked to take pleasure in watching women brutally raped, tortured and killed in long, drawn out sequences. There must be a reason why, after the killer starts his butchering, that the director focuses entirely on the killing of the two girls and forgets about the male victim. There must be a reason why (Spoiler, if you give a shit) only the male character makes it out alive. To be honest, I don't want to know the reason.

2- Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen:

Unfortunately still fresh in my mind, there isn't much more I can write about this headache-inducing, proudly stupid, Ass: The Movie Part II, than my original review published a couple of months ago. I believe you'll find enough evidence there regarding my utmost disdain for this "film":

Click here to read my review.

Above: Mudflap and Skids. Michael Bay's response to Amos 'n' Andy.

1- Wanted:

Now we're in The Twilight Zone. Not only did this disgusting excuse for a film made a lot of money, it actually gathered some pretty positive reviews, praising its "dumb action". Roger Ebert gave it three stars, Richard Roeper raved about it. Many critics loved it. I really, really hope that they were all paid off. Because the thought of anyone liking Wanted is depressing to me.

A lot of people do like it, crazily enough. I got more hate mail regarding my incredibly negative review of the film on beyazperde than about any other review. Week after week for almost half a year, I received many facebook messages calling me a hack, a cinematic hate monger, an art-house film critic who has lost touch with the movie going public. If this is where the movie going public's pulse is, I'd rather be out of touch.

On the surface, Wanted is a colossally stupid film. It has no narrative or visual direction. The story is beyond ridiculous (Hired killers who can inexplicably bend bullets read about their assignments through messages hidden in textile), the acting is flat, and the action scenes have absolutely no purpose but to look cool, oh so fucking cool, so fucking awesome, aren't they awesome cool gnarly fucking awesome?!! So why does this single out Wanted as the decade's worst, when clearly dumber action fare was released in the last ten years?

The first reason is because in the middle of its humongous stupidity, director Timur Bekmambatorovotovodorobor (Cheap shot I know, but I really hate this guy) tries desperately to inject his film with fake artistry and make it look like something edgier and grittier and therefore worthy of more respect and cool points, when all we're watching is just another dumb action movie.

The second and much more important reason is how morally corrupt the story is. According to its protagonist, a lowly desk clerk who becomes a hired killer, we are all losers unless we become ruthless, soulless killers, brutally murdering people we don't even know just because their names can be read through a secret code in TEXTILE, FUCKING TEXTILE!!! GOD DAMN IT, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!?

Sorry, lost it there for a second. Yes, according to Wanted, we are all losers, unless we become part of a fascist killing machine and do not question authority. So much for individuality, huh? I would love for Wanted to fuck off and die but with a new video game on the shelves and a sequel in the works, not much hope of that. I am in The Twilight Zone.