A Scrapbook of Memories: My 10 Best of 2009

Below are my picks for the top 10 best films of 2009. Enjoy, and please feel free to comment with what you think of the list, what your favourite movies were this year, etc.

Honourable Mentions (that just missed my list):

Capitalism: A Love Story; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; The Hurt Locker; I Love You, Man; Polytechnique; Star Trek; Sugar

10) The Brothers Bloom

(Director: Rian Johnson)

Finally, a con man movie with more than just tricks up its sleeve. This gem from red hot writer/director Rian Johnson (Brick), about the last grand scam of two con-artist brothers (Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo) as they try to cheat an eccentric hobby-collecting heiress (Rachel Weisz), is a thrilling and hilarious caper picture. With equal parts of wit, heart, charm and tomfoolery, Brothers blooms with enough quirky ideas, sly jokes and inventive (albeit relatable) characters to make the “one last big job” idea seem bracingly new. The cast is sublime – especially Rachel Weisz in a role of comedy gold – and the postmodern look is exquisite. But what surprised me most was how remarkably fresh the comedy was; in fact, for the deft, surprising barrage of deadpan, slapstick and bizarre twists of humour, this may be the funniest film of the year. Largely ignored at the box office, let’s hope it blooms on DVD.

A Little Trivia: To portray the eclectic Penelope, Weisz learned how to do the following: play piano, violin, banjo and accordion, break-dance, juggle, do Karate, play Ping-Pong, ride a skateboard and even how to unicycle. She also spent a month practicing an advanced card trick, which was eventually shot in one long take.

9) Precious

(Director: Lee Daniels)

A blisteringly powerful and undeniably courageous film about an overweight, illiterate, 16-year-old African-American teenager named Claireece “Precious” Jones, who (oh, yeah) is also pregnant with her second child. It sounds squalid, and it is. Some may find the subject matter to be simply unendurable. But this film festival favourite (re: Sundance, Toronto), adapted from a novel by Sapphire, contains staggering performances, especially from newcomer Gabourey Sidibe as the title character, and Mo’Nique (electrifying as the abusive mother). Moreover, director Lee Daniels manages to inject a fierce dose of inspiration into this feature. He looks past the trauma by showing us her fantasies and helping us understand the fiery elements behind Precious’ stern expression that drive her character – intelligence, an endurance to work hard and an everlasting commitment to her children. What makes this film so precious is that by the end, there’s a diamond sparkling from within the mud.

A Little Trivia: Gabourey Sidibe’s mother, singer Alice Tan Ridley, was approached to play the role of Mary (Precious’ mother) in an earlier production that never came to fruition. Also, Mo’Nique appeared in Lee Daniels’ earlier film, Shadowboxer, as a character named… Precious.

8) Coraline

(Director: Henry Selick)

Enchanting, beautifully designed, and downright petrifying, Henry Selick’s adaptation of the beloved Neil Gaiman novel is a triumph of animated cinema. It follows a precocious girl named Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) as she retreats from her oblivious parents to a parallel universe through a hidden door in her new townhouse. However, once she adventures to this intoxicating world, her experience turns awry and our feisty protagonist has to escape back to her real home. The stop-motion animation is wondrously captured with no-holds-barred imagination. The look is dreamlike, even if young children are almost guaranteed to have nightmares from the film’s spookier set-pieces. But this is not just a visual splendor. Coraline is one of the shrewdest and bravest, but also one of the most imperfect, heroines in modern animated cinema. The spunky protagonist - more Juno than Alice in Wonderland – is the crown jewel of a film with its fair share of spooky, yet fantastical treasures.

A Little Trivia: At 100 minutes in length, it is the longest stop-motion film to date. It is also the first stop-motion animated picture to be shot entirely in 3D.

7) Up in the Air

(Director: Jason Reitman)

The 3rd feature from Canadian writer/director Jason Reitman is a smooth-sailing satire for our turbulent times. George Clooney is Ryan Bingham, a debonair corporate executioner who is hired to fire employees for numerous companies. The perks include spending much of his time in first-class armchairs and airport terminals, which Bingham relishes. He’s a cold smart-aleck who puts his aspirations for collecting frequent flyer miles ahead of his family, but it would be hard to root for him if not for the polished charm and everyman quality of George Clooney. He’s perfect as Bingham, and his supporting ladies – Vera Farmiga as a suave business-lady he romances, and Anna Kendrick as the keen, determined protégé who’s developed a system that fires people through a computer screen – are equally impressive. Reitman and Sheldon Turner’s tightly wound script balances snappy cynicism with tender compassion. But the film’s greatest asset is that it keeps itself grounded in our Western civilization at this current moment of technological over-reliance and economic downfall.

A Little Trivia: With the exception of the famous actors, every person we see fired in the film is a real-life recently laid off person. The filmmakers put out ads in St. Louis and Detroit posing as a documentary crew looking to document the effect of the recession. When people showed up, they were instructed to treat the camera like the person who fired them and respond as they did or use the opportunity to say what they wished they had.

6) A Serious Man

(Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen)

The Coen Brothers’ exploration of a Jewish middle-aged physics professor – a modern-day Job played brilliantly by Broadway vet Michael Stuhlbarg – as he looks for peace and love, but mostly understanding, may be their most intriguing work since Barton Fink. Our cursed protagonist, Larry Gopnik, has a series of unfortunate events (divorce, death, professional sabotage) plague his life. He wants a reason for all the "tsuris" and seeks to become a righteous, serious man, hoping that clarity will come to him. It’s richly textured with Biblical allusions, and the closest thing to an auto-biography the Coens have ever released (they were raised in the apathetic, acculturated Minnesota suburbs where the film is set). Its comedy is as fiercely bitter as vegetables on a seder plate, and the existential aspects are engrossing and wildly original – done through psychedelic rock lyrics and a masterful sequence involving a Jewish dentist, for instance. Some may be turned off by the seemingly abrupt ending, but it's one that ensures that we will keep figuring out the perplexing philosophical drama – and it’s a dandy. Seriously.

A Little Trivia: The names of the characters who ride the school bus with Danny Gopnik, the protagonist’s son, are the names of children that the Coen Brothers grew up with.

5) The Cove

(Director: Louie Psihoyos)

A little-seen documentary, The Cove is both an astonishing piece of eco-advocacy filmmaking and an unflinching thriller: think Michael Moore meets Michael Mann. It follows a team of ecologists and deep-sea divers in a mission to penetrate a hidden cove in the lakeside town of Taiji, Japan. Unbeknown to the town’s citizens, the tightly surveilled cul-de-sac lures in hundreds of dolphins a year by sonar (to confuse the mammals, whose hearing is remarkably acute), only to have them slaughtered. Not only is this doc packed with information regarding the mistreatment of dolphins (and their subsequent mispackaging on grocery store shelves), but it has the breathless excitement of a thriller. We root for Psihoyos and his crew - carrying state-of-the-art cameras and underwater microphones - to uncover the truth. The results are unnervingly powerful and quite grisly. Even more memorable is the fascinating story of Richard O’Barry, a member of the undercover troupe in the film, and the dolphin trainer for the original Flipper TV series. The Cove focuses on his shift from being a success through popularizing the image of dolphins to a full-fledged advocate of dolphins held in captivity around the world. His story is unforgettable. The film is, too.

A Little Trivia: It won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival last year, a rarity for a non-fiction film.

4) (500) Days of Summer

(Director: Marc Webb)

Marc Webb’s film debut is (95) Minutes of Pure Cinematic Bliss. Joseph Gordon-Levitt – the best actor under 30 working in Hollywood today – is Tom, a charming greeting-card writer who falls for an alluring young girl named Summer (the entrancing Zooey Deschanel). That’s day 1. Flipping through time in an out-of-order fashion (we’ll be at, say, tumultuous day 290 and then skip backward to glorious day #50), Webb captures the moments in their relationship that are wondrous, bittersweet, and everything-in-between. It’s a romance that’s done with an impeccable amount of intelligence, hilarity, and verve. One sequence – my favourite of any movie this year – evolves from Tom joyfully strutting to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams” into an orchestrated song-and-dance number with dozens of extras. Another scene uses a split-screen to show how a pivotal reconciliation scene works out: Tom’s Expectations are on one side, while Tom’s Actual Experience is on the other. But this is not just a stylistic tour-de-force. The writing, while lively and smart, nails the disappointments of lost romance and the pitfalls of human relationships (major props to screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber). The opening voice-over warns: this is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know up front, this is not a love story. Regardless, it’ll be hard not to fall in love with (500) Days of Summer, Generation Y’s answer to Annie Hall.

A Little Trivia: In the DVD commentary, writer Michael H. Weber explained that roughly 75% of the events in the film actually happened to him.

3) Where the Wild Things Are

(Director: Spike Jonze)

It’s rare for a mainstream to have such a bitterly divided response from audiences: either you were roused to applause or bored to submission. I take the former position on Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 338-word classic – although it took time. The more I think about the film, the more I’m floored by its intricate emotional textures, its invigorating sense of imagination, and its sensitive but honest exploration of childhood. Its protagonist, the young Max (Max Records), is manic but misunderstood (kind of like the film). He escapes to an island, populated by a small team of tall, furry creatures known as Wild Things who crown Max as their king. The parallels between Max’s world and the island of the Wild Things are numerous – a much-needed second viewing uncovered more depth than I originally inspected. And Max Records gives a mesmerizing, complex performance – his very first – handily grasping his character’s joy, pain, anguish and pride with ease. It’s raw and quite frustrating at times, but that’s a tribute to how Jonze (and writer Dave Eggers) follow their unconventional visions and take risks to deliver a deeply personal message. It’s certainly more arthouse fare than Nickelodeon fodder, but it is also whimsical and tender. To paraphrase one of the Wild Things: I eat it up, I love it so.

A Little Trivia: Initially, Warner Bros. was so unhappy with Spike Jonze’s final movie, they wanted to re-shoot the whole $75 milion project in early 2008. Jonze was eventually given some more time and money by the studio in order to make the final product satisfying to both, the studio and himself.

2) Fantastic Mr. Fox

(Director: Wes Anderson)

From one independent director tackling a mainstream adaptation of a beloved children’s book to another… Wes Anderson’s foray into the world of stop-motion animation made me realize how much better the zany personalities and offbeat eccentricities common in his other films would be if they were drawn as cartoons instead. Ranking among the upper pantheon of Pixar’s modern classics, Fantastic Mr. Fox tells the story of a sly fox (voiced by George Clooney) who sneaks into three nearby estates and steals produce to feed him and his family (including his wife, Meryl Streep, and son, Jason Schwartzman). At a brisk 87 minutes, Fox is as endearing as it sublimely dazzling. The stop-motion animation is simply groundbreaking, full of scruffy stop-and-start motions that are delightful. The voice cast is simply delicious (Bill Murray as a badger and Willem Dafoe as a pesky rat round off an exceptional ensemble). But while there’s a lot of stop-motion wizardry at work, the story never lags beneath it. Anderson’s quick-witted dry humour and wacky energy mix effortlessly with family-friendly morals as warm and fuzzy as our clan of forest creatures. It’s Anderson’s most gleefully enchanting and raucously entertaining film to date.

A Little Trivia: The film was shot at a rate of 12 frames per second rather than the more fluid 24, so that viewers would notice the medium of stop-motion itself.

1) Up

(Directors: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson)

Several films I saw this year made me laugh. But Up did something that only one film – Disney’s The Lion King – has ever made me do: cry. And I’m proud to say it came from a feature by Pixar Animation Studios, who have done to computer-generated animation what Shakespeare did to theatre. It chronicles the adventure of 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner), who sets off on his lifelong dream to visit an oasis called Paradise Falls as a tribute to his late wife Ellie. After lifting off – oh yeah, for the two of you who didn’t know, he travels by tying thousands of balloons to his house - he’s joined by a young Asian-American wilderness explorer named Russell (Jordan Nagai provides the voice). The adventure that drives the second half of the film is spectacularly thrilling, and the oddball set of supporting characters – a lovable talking canine named Dug who’s petrified by squirrels and a colourful squawker named Kevin – are downright hilarious. But there’s one thing that makes Up one of the best films Pixar (or any animation company) has ever released: the relationship between Carl and Ellie, shown in the film’s shattering prologue. Set to a simple yet sensationally moving score by Michael Giacchino, the introductory scenes show the couple meeting as kids, getting married, growing up through triumph and turmoil, and eventually getting old. As effortlessly buoyant and exhilarating Up is, it’s mere entertainment without that lovely, wordless, profoundly moving opening. The “Married Life” sequence may be the most poignant scene to ever be featured in an animated film. Cross my heart.

A Little Trivia: In June 2009, 10-year-old Colby Curtin from Huntington Beach, California, was suffering from the final stages of terminal vascular cancer. Her dying wish was to live long enough to see "Up." Unfortunately, Colby was too sick to leave home and her family feared she would die without seeing the film. A family friend contacted Pixar, and a private screening was arranged for Colby. The company flew an employee with a DVD copy of "Up," along with some tie-in merchandise from the film. Colby couldn't see the screen because the pain kept her eyes closed, so her mother gave her a play-by-play of the film. Seven hours after viewing the film, Colby passed away.


Post your favourite movies of the year, and thoughts of the above list, below.