New Poll: Overlooked Oscar-Worthies

Aaaaaaand, I’m back…

So yeah, the Oscars. An interesting set of nominations, and an even more interesting set of frontrunners. It looks like The Hurt Locker could well win more than just a cursory nod for being a good movie while a series of empty but worthy feel-good movies sweep the boards, which is thrilling. Though my favourite direction of the year was Tarantino’s masterly handling of Inglourious Basterds, I’m 100% rooting for Bigelow, as much as for a career of challenging, distinctive, and superbly well-made movies as for her work on The Hurt Locker. There’s a very good chance she will win. There will be much rejoicing Chez SoC if she gets it.

Even more amazing were the nominations for District 9 (Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture: the latter something I would never have predicted in a million years) and In The Loop. That nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay is the most surprising one of all: who would think something as profane, complex and challenging would get noticed by the Academy? It’s so exciting that I temporarily didn’t care about all of the awful writing nominations, by which I mean all of the clangingly obvious writing on Precious, An Education, and Up In The Air (to a lesser extent).

I’m really quite serious when I say that this year’s most universally loathed screenplay (James Cameron’s Avatar) struck me as less clunky than Precious and An Education, but because those movies are TERRIBLY SERIOUS they get a free pass whereas hating on Avatar for not being more sophisticated is the go-to criticism cynics trot out when trying to explain why they were immune to its appeal. I’m certainly not saying Cameron’s writing has some hidden nuance: it’s an efficient engine with almost no nuance or poetry. Nevertheless, it has enough energy to distinguish it from any number of dreary plotting-by-numbers efforts in respectable movies, where characters regularly give little speeches to tell the audience what they are thinking.

Anyway, that’s what my brane says. It also says that odd perfect nomination doesn’t really make up for some of the most egregious snubs, of which there were many. Last year I did this same poll, with the result that SoC readers voted overwhelmingly for Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man Best Actor snub, though hey, at least he got a Supporting Actor nomination, and a Best Actor Golden Globe for his outrageously entertaining take on Sherlock Holmes. And so, in 2010, I return to this poll format and ask you, dear reader, to take your pick of what I consider to be the most egregious snubs this year.

• Best Picture: In The Loop
• Best Director: Jacques Audiard – A Prophet
• Best Actor: Hott Sam Rockwell – Moon
• Best Supporting Actor: Michael Fassbender – Inglourious Basterds
• Best Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg – Antichrist
• Best Supporting Actress: Melanie Laurent – Inglourious Basterds
• Best Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle – Antichrist
• Best Costume Design: Jim Henson’s Creature Shop – Where The Wild Things Are
• Best Original Score: Elliot Goldenthal – Public Enemies
• Best Visual Effects: 2012
• Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay: Scott Z. Burns – The Informant!
• Best Writing – Original Screenplay: Greg Mottola – Adventureland
• Best Animated Feature: Ponyo on a Cliff By The Sea

Once I stop faffing around with PollDaddy’s coding, the poll should settle down, and I invite you to choose which one you agree with most.

Listmania ‘09! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Two

I technically started writing these lists months ago, when I began compiling a list of all of the movies we had seen in 2009 that had been released that year. In my head I was trying to assess where everything was going to go before the year ended, so I could save myself the problem I had in 2008 when writing these posts took forever despite their lack of actual content. And yet here I am, over a week into 2010, and I’m still going. At least this miscellaneous bunch of observations represents the last of it. And most of it is pictures, so it will only take about three minutes to read. Go crazy, dear reader…

Scene of the Year: Lt. Archie Hicox makes the mistake of holding a meeting in a basement bar (Inglourious Basterds)

Honorable Mentions:

Carl and Ellie Frederickson share a wonderful life (Up)
Det. Terrence McDonagh is visited by a couple of Iguanas (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans)
Jake Sully tames an Ikran and flies it around the Hallelujah Mountains (Avatar)
Mark Bellison reveals his “Ten Commandments” (The Invention of Lying)
The Demon haunting Katie finally gets a little handsy (Paranormal Activity)

Action Scene of the Year: Space Dragons + Space Tigers + Space Rhinos + Blue Giants vs. Rapacious Capitalism (Avatar)

Honorable Mentions:

Clive Owen vs. assassins in the Guggenheim (The International)
Sniper vs. sniper in the desert (The Hurt Locker)
Optimus Prime vs. three Decepticons in a forest (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
Christian Bale raids Johnny Depp’s forest hiding place (Public Enemies)
Wikus Van Der Merwe dons a “Prawn” Battlesuit (District 9)

Most Satisfying Ending: Inglourious Basterds

Honourable Mentions:

A Prophet
District 9
Public Enemies
Enter The Void
G-Force

Least Satisfying Ending: Terminator Salvation

Dishonorable Mentions:

All About Steve
The Boat That Rocked
The Brothers Bloom
The Box
Twilight: New Moon

Best Hero of the Year: Carl Fredericksen (Ed Asner - Up)

Honorable Mentions:

Neytiri (Zoe Saldana - Avatar)
Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine – Star Trek)
Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington – Terminator Salvation)
Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson – Zombieland)
Sam Sparks (Anna Faris – Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs)

Best Villain of the Year: Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds)

Honorable Mentions:

César Luciani (Niels Arestrup – A Prophet)
Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang – Avatar)
Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer – Up)
Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim - Thirst)
Linton Barwick (David Rasche – In The Loop)

Worst Hero of the Year: Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk – Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Goku (Justin Chatwin – Dragonball Evolution)
Duke (Channing Tatum – G.I. Joe – The Rise of Cobra)
Jimmy (Mathew Horne – Lesbian Vampire Killers)
Wolverine (Hugh Jackman – X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Roger (Vincent Gallo – Metropia)

Worst Villain of the Year: Bison (Neal McDonough – Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh - The Boat That Rocked)
Sabertooth (Liev Shreiber – X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Piccolo (James Marsters – Dragonball Evolution)
Ryder (John Travolta – The Taking of Pelham 123)
Nero (Eric Bana – Star Trek)

Best Ambiguous Hero/Villain of the Year: Mia (Katie Jarvis – Fish Tank)

Most Passive Character of the Year: Bella Swan (Kristin Stewart – Twilight: New Moon)

Gupta of the Year: Fletch (James Corden – Lesbian Vampire Killers)

Dishonourable Mentions:

Sean (“S.J.”) Tuohy, Jr. (Jae Head – The Blind Side)
Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper – The Hangover)
Mary (Beth Grant – Extract)
Eric Powell (Chris Messina – Julie and Julia)
Micah (Micah Sloat – Paranormal Activity)

Highest Concentration of Guptas of the Year: Away We Go

Only Maya Rudolph’s Verona de Tessant survives the film as a likable protagonist, coming to terms with her familial strife without histrionics, just noble acceptance. Everyone else in the film is a dreadful caricature, and that’s on Sam Mendes, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida more than on the talented actors, who are forced to do some terrible things. I still wake up in the middle of the night after terrifying nightmares about how Allison “Wonderful” Janney was made to play a squawking redneck shrew. Horrible.

Badass of the Year: Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White – Black Dynamite)

Honorable Mention: One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen – Valhalla Rising)

Honorary Happy-Go-Lucky Award For Services To Unbearable Characters Whose Optimism Is Actually A Kind Of Mental Illness: Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock – All About Steve)

“What Was Your Name Again? Oh Well, Doesn’t Matter. He’s Only Along As A Chauffeur And Potential Husband” Character of the Year: Gordon Silberman (Thomas McCarthy – 2012)

Best Talking Animal of the Year: Dug the Dog (Bob Peterson – Up)

Honorable Mention: Steve the Monkey (Neil Patrick Harris – Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)

Worst Talking Animal of the Year: Mr. Fox (George Clooney – Fantastic Mr. Fox) (He’s a really selfish dick, if we’re being honest here.)

Dishonorable Mention: The Chaos Reigns Fox (Antichrist)

Best Non-Talking Animal of the Year: Kevin the bird (Up)

Honorable Mention: The various ratbirds plaguing Swallowfalls (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)

Worst Non-Talking Animal of the Year: The yappy dog in 2012 that gets saved in a moment robbed from all of Roland Emmerich’s other movies.

Best Lizard Cameo: Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Best Alligator Cameo: Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Best Crack Pipe: Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Best Couple of the Year: Julia and Paul Child (Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci – Julie and Julia)

Honorable Mention: Brian Clough and Peter Taylor (Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall – The Damned United)

Worst Couple of the Year: Julie and Eric Powell (Amy Adams and Chris Messina – Julie and Julia)

Dishonorable Mention: Sara and Brian Fitzgerald (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric – My Sister’s Keeper)

Most Doomed Couple of the Year: He and She (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg – Antichrist)

Honorable Mention: Micah and Katie (Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston – Paranormal Activity)

Least Convincing Couple of the Year: Leonard Kraditor and Michelle Rausch (Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow – Two Lovers)

Dishonorable Mention: Leonard Kraditor and Sandra Cohen (Joaquin Phoenix and Vinessa Shaw – Two Lovers)

“I Hope These Guys Make It” Couple of the Year: James Brennan and Emily Lewin (Jesse Eisenberg and Kristin Stewart – Adventureland)

Honorable Mention: Columbus and Wichita (Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone – Zombieland)

“God, Just Split Up, Will You?” Couple of the Year: Derek and Sharon Charles (Idris Elba and Beyonce Knowles – Obsessed)

Dishonorable Mention: Mathieu Liévin and Maya (Yvan Attal and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi – Les regrets)

Most Tedious Love Triangle of the Year: Bella Swan, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black (Kristin Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner  - Twilight: New Moon)

Dishonorable Mention: Kate Curtis, Jackson Curtis, and thingy. You know, the guy. The one who flew all those planes. With the glasses. (Amanda Peet, John Cusack and Thomas McCarthy – 2012)

Best Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the Year of All Time: Ellie Frederiksen (Elie Docter – Up)

Worst Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the Year: Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel – (500) Days of Summer) (ETA: With caveats. See comments for further discussion.)

Funniest Apparition of the Year: Wayne Mead (Michael Douglas – Ghosts of Girlfriends Past)

Least Funny Apparition of the Year: Whatever the hell was haunting Katie (Door-Opening Grip #3 - Paranormal Activity)

Sort of Funny, Sort of Horrifying Apparition of the Year: The Chaos Reigns Fox (Antichrist)

Most Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Fish Tank)

Honorable Mention: Anna Friel (Land of the Lost)

Least Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Megan Fox (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)

Runner-Up: Gerard Butler (The Ugly Truth)

Most Pallid Lust Object of the Year: Robert Pattinson - Twilight: New Moon

Worst Wig of the Year: Taylor Lautner - Twilight: New Moon

Most Improved Hair of the Year: Amy Adams’ pixie-cut – Julie and Julia

Scourge Of Cinema in 2009 – Sandra Bullock

Best Insult of the Year: In The Loop (comes at 0:36)

Running Joke of the Year: Det. Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) mentioning the name “G” (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans)

Honorable Mention: “Steve!” (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)

And that, my friends, is that. Thank you for all the comments and discussions. The blog will be taking a bit of a break, becoming more sporadic in 2010 while I deal with other things, though I’m sure once the Oscar nominations are announced I’ll be back to complain about the inevitable nods for Precious and Up In The Air. So at least there’s that to look forward to, eh?

Listmania ‘09! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part One

I had hoped this would be the last post, but as ever, I run off at the mouth. Fingers. Whatever.

Most Underrated Movie of the Year: The Invention of Lying

It’s not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination. It’s poorly directed, sloppily structured, paced badly, and apparently the original script is much stronger (I have yet to read it, sadly). Nevertheless, it’s also terrific brainfood, features an incredibly ballsy middle-act satire on religion that drew gasps of surprise from the audience we saw it with, and happily skewers the idea of romantic love as depicted in the movies. As expectations of real-world romantic love are often distorted by expectations generated by the fake movie world, it was nice to see this subverted with such glee. Ricky Gervais also surprised us with an emotionally powerful scene in a hospital. Real tears flowed down my shocked face. Who knew he had it in him?

Honorable Mentions:

G-Force (A clever spoof of action movie cliches mistaken for an empty and noisy kids movie.)
A Christmas Carol (As I said before, a loyal and thoughtful adaptation with a lovely painterly look.)
Pandorum (A committed performance by Ben Foster and a consistently bleak atmosphere make this worth watching.)
Land of the Lost (Horrible final act but we laughed a lot on the way there. I also laughed a fair bit at Year One, especially at Oliver Platt. What?!??!)
Duplicity (A very entertaining con-trick movie with a ton of very entertaining performances, especially from Clive Owen, star of the also-very-entertaining The International.)

Most Overrated Movie of the Year: Up In The Air

By the end of the year it felt like only a handful of critics had seen through the glossy, heartwarming sheen of polish that coated Jason Reitman’s phony feel-good confection. A quick look at Rotten Tomatoes shows Armond White didn’t like it, and along with his rant against Precious is probably the only other time I’ve agreed with him this year. Dana Stevens, Stephanie Zacharek, J. Hoberman, Karina Longworth and Keith Uhlich also resisted its sickly charms, along with a few other choice reviewers. I’m honestly not sure what I can say to top Will Leitch’s elegant takedown of the film, except that this is the one movie this year that almost had me all the way through to the end and then just lost me completely in the final act. The ridiculous U-turn of one character — as clunky a “twist” as anything I’ve seen in poorly plotted action movies — was the final straw.

Some great work from the cast still deserves praise, and there were enjoyable moments throughout, but I cannot forgive it for all the clangingly obvious metaphorical messages, its sneering distrust of anyone’s desire for isolation (Ryan Bingham is portrayed as a kind of crazy person for not wanting to hang out with his awful family), its attempts to streamline Walter Kirn’s unorthodox (and horribly overwritten) novel, or its final message. Yes, I can attest to the fact that unemployment can indeed have the unintended consequence of allowing a person to reconnect with his family, and the support and love that they can give is a wonderful thing. I’m a better person for that experience. However, as wonderful and as welcome as that is, there is still the gnawing uncertainty and fear that remains underneath it. Unemployment is not a betterment opportunity. It’s an absolutely fucking terrible and distressing situation. The mawkish attempt to spin it as a kind of freedom — using non-actors who had in fact just been laid off — made me want to set fire to the screen. When this wins 20 Oscars later this year, I will be saying the swearwords I reserve for special occasions.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire (This year’s Slumdog Millionaire. I just want to forget it happened.)
Mesrine (I heard some people compare this rather average and overlong crime flick to The Godfather. Without irony! It’s a kind of madness.)
The Hangover (A comedy with a structure but no jokes. Its success has left me utterly baffled.)

“Trying Too Hard” Direction Of The Year: Tom Hooper (The Damned United)

Some great performances and a nifty script by Peter Morgan forced to contend with all kinds of tricksy and unnecessary compositional flash. A shame, as it’s a good enough movie that even someone who hates football/soccer as much as myself was riveted throughout. This “award” might not seem like it, but consider this a recommendation. Ignore the attention-seeking framing. Enjoy the performances instead.

Best Movie of 2008 That We Saw in 2009: Rachel Getting Married

Nothing I can add to this post, really. It knocked our socks off and the memory of it lingers on. Simply an instant classic.

Honourable Mention:

Synecdoche, New York (Wrenching to watch, but fascinating nevertheless. I’d rewatch it to get a better view of it, but I’m too scared to endure it again.)

Worst Movie of 2008 That We Saw in 2009: The Reader

Lest this comment turn into a profane rant, let’s just say that letting this profoundly awful and ethically dubious piece of crap go past greenlight — let alone onto screens and into awards ceremonies — is a black moment for culture in general. I watched the whole godforsaken thing in a state of apoplexy, horrified at its weak moral arguments and shitty veneer of classiness. It’s the worst kind of empty Oscar-bait. I may have hated Crash, but it’s worth ten Readers. Bury it under a mound of salt. ::spits on movie::

Dishonorable Mention:

Punisher War Zone (One of the dumbest and most tedious superhero movies of recent times. The Punisher accidentally kills a cop and mopes in his lair for 80% of the movie? Yay fun!)

Most Baffling Movie of the Year: All About Steve

Even weeks after seeing it I have just no idea what the hell this movie was supposed to be doing. Appreciation of humour might be a completely subjective thing, but even taking its “comedic” efforts off the table, I’m still just not sure what was going on from one scene to the next. Are we meant to dislike Mary? Admire her? Love her? Hate Steve? Root for them both? Root for her and DJ Qualls’ nerdy character? What the hell was the sub-plot about the three legged baby? The worst comedy metaphor for abortion ever? What the hell is funny or logical about people protesting the amputation of a baby’s vestigial third leg? What tone was it going for? Why did a tornado appear in the middle of the movie? Oh God, it made my head hurt trying to keep up with it. I doubt even a re-edit could save this pitiful mess.

Dishonorable Mention: Yatterman

Takashi Miike’s version of the old anime series was certainly garishly coloured, hyperactive, and featured several cartoonish elements. That much he got right. It also featured a giant robot dog being attacked by a giant robot woman with missiles for nipples. The robot dog then sends an army of robot ants to attack the robot woman, and they agitate the nipple missiles so much she begins to have an orgasm. This makes the robot dog horny, and he proceeds to start kissing the woman, who by this point is yelling, “I’m coming!” She then explodes. It also features a man being absorbed into the butt of a creature called the God of Thieves, much buttock-exposure from one character who is creepily obsessed with his female boss, and a completely baffling love triangle plot that bogs down the entire movie and doesn’t seem to get resolved at the end. And yet it still it makes more sense than All About Steve.

Most Obtrusive Product Placement of the Year: Up in the Air

(The photo shown above is sponsored by MacCutcheon whiskey.) When we saw Up In The Air at the London Film Festival, the screening was sponsored by American Airlines. I barely noticed this fact. Half an hour into the movie, I was convinced I was watching an extended and expensive advert for the company. And Hilton Hotels. And Travelpro luggage. I’m not railing against product placement in movies: that would be futile, and besides, though something like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is full of fetishised footage of hot cars and gadgets, it has a kind of pointless gloss and trivial air about it that the commercial nature of it can be ignored as business as usual. In Up in the Air the product placement sometimes feels like the reason the movie exists. Some might argue that this is product placement done well, but during scenes where Clooney and Farmiga compare hotel keys and executive passes in airports, it was easy to forget that the movie was an adaptation of a novel, not the outcome of some godawful synergistic meeting of minds between AA and Hilton and Paramount. The product placement is woven directly into the DNA of the movie like some kind of awful high-budget Mac and Me, with characters even eulogising those products in their dialogue. If that’s that way it’s going to be done, fine. Just don’t expect me to listen to your heartwarming tales of connectivity at the end.

Dishonourable Mention: Love Happens

Walter (John Carroll Lynch) is grieving because his son has died after falling off some scaffolding at his construction site, and he blames himself. It has stopped him working, and he is close to financial ruin. And here comes Burke Ryan (Aaron Eckhart) to get Walter out of his emotional slump by taking him and their therapy group to Home Depot, where he buys him a huge pile of tools for just under $3000, and this magically fixes his crippling emotional wound! Hey, you can kit yourself with everything a handyman needs for just under $3000 at Home Depot? Thanks, movie! That’s not at all horribly manipulative and staggeringly tasteless!

Most Disappointing Movie of the Year: The Men Who Stare At Goats

Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed this adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book. George Clooney is great value as the delusional Lyn Cassidy, and Jeff Bridges is even better as Bill Django. It is occasionally very loyal both to the book and the TV series Ronson also made (The Crazy Rulers of the World), and some of the setpiece moments are nicely done. However, when you go back and revisit the original materials, you realise how Grant Heslov and Peter Straughan waste a lot of energy on making the material seem wacky when it’s already mindbogglingly odd just on its own. Even worse, the final act is a complete disaster, full of childish slapstick that undercuts the two minutes of serious subtext. The hastily added battle-against-the-antagonist doesn’t help. By the end the tone wore on me. With the benefit of hindsight I’d find it hard to recommend it to anyone. Best to stick with the book and TV series. They’re funny and disturbing and rage-inducing, all in the right proportions.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Outlander (Really really long and kinda boring, though it gets some scenes really right.)
Les regrets (Well made and absorbing, but too similar to director Cédric Kahn’s earlier movie L’ennui.)
Two Lovers (Well observed and very well performed, but as with James Gray’s other movies, the emphasis on style and tone comes at the expense of dramatic oomph.)
The House of the Devil (OMG it’s the scariest movie of the year! Except it’s actually just really slow and the ending is silly rather than scary. A damn shame. I really wanted to like it.)
Franklyn (As with House of the Devil, the kind of low-budget labour of love I really wanted to support, but just couldn’t. I look forward to future films by both filmmakers, though.)

Not Disappointing, Not Great, But Still Worth Watching Movie Of The Year: Extract

As with Office Space, Mike Judge expends a lot of energy introducing a plot that gets abandoned two thirds of the way through and then just sort of gets resolved in a half-arsed manner. Also, lots of great character actors do terrific work, but often get given some rough material and unfinished arcs to work with. Nevertheless, this is the charm of Mike Judge’s work. It’s not polished or finessed, and even in this rough diamond state allows for more laughs — and satirical heft — than most comedies released. It’s just a shame that the energy peters out with such predictability (with the caveat that Ben Affleck is hilarious all the way through). Though it’s not fashionable to say it, I’m increasingly of the opinion that his strongest movie is coincidentally his angriest: Idiocracy. Every revisit to that movie makes me laugh more. Maybe in time it will be considered his best work.

Most Tediously Conservative Remake of the Year: Race To Witch Mountain

That’s right, it’s not The Taking of Pelham 123. That was indeed a terrible and pointless remake, but it at least had some awareness of what made the original memorable. Tony Scott and Brian Helgeland kept some moments that worked, threw out the rest, and added some very annoying modern accoutrements (post-Die Hard banter between villain and hero, swearing, the Internet). That sucked, but the latest remake of the Witch Mountain stories was a different kind of crappy remake. More mediocre than bad, but formed by a series of stupid and unadventurous choices. The original movie — directed by the quirky British director John Hough — was a peculiar beast, made during a period when Disney’s live-action movies felt like they were made by people who were thinking their story through instead of just glomming bits together from other films. Not all of those movies were great, but they were certainly lively. This remake dropped all of the atmosphere and ambiguous plotting in favour of a predictable Fifth Element carbon-copy complete with cab driver. It’s horribly boring, makes fun of SF fans, and completely wastes two of the hottest and most appealing lead actors ever (Dwayne Johnson and Carla Gugino, who should be running Hollywood by now). Avoid like the plague.

Okay, one more to go. It’s really trivial. That’s a warning.

Listmania ‘09! Crew Contributions Of The Year

Time to praise (and not-praise) crew contributions to cinema in 2009. A quick caveat: though it probably renders these “awards” moot, I’d like to give a shout-out to all of the crewmembers and professionals who are about to win Worst whatever awards or dishonorable mentions. For the most part, I know that these men and women are very talented people whose contributions to other movies have been worthy of praise. It’s very rare that I think someone who worked on a film is completely beyond hope, and that’s certainly the case here. I just think that their work has been compromised by some bad choices or decisions by those higher up, and have only attached their names to the ignominious Worst awards for clarity.

Case in point: last year I selected Anthony Dod Mantle’s work on Slumdog Millionaire as the Worst Cinematography of the year, knowing full well that he is a remarkable cinematographer with a long list of great projects behind him. However, I thought his work on Slumdog was hideous. That was either because of choices he made, or because of decisions made by director Danny Boyle. Saying someone’s work represented the worst cinematography or editing of the year is not meant as a diss against them personally. It’s just a way of saying that their work here was not up-to-scratch, for any number of reasons. I’m sure this little Get-Out Clause will make everyone feel so much better about what I say. [/delusion]

Another thing. Some of the technical categories such as Production Design and FX are there to praise more than one person or FX company, but for brevity’s sake, I’ve chosen to mention just the most prominent names responsible. Certainly, big FX movies feature work from dozens of different FX houses, and I feel really bad for just choosing to mention the one or two biggest names involved. If the movie is on the FX list or the Production Design list, rest assured I liked all of the work done on those movies, and everyone who worked on them deserve praise. My apologies for not going through every name. Just know that I am filled with respect and gratitude for all of the work done on those movies.

Right, on with the show, and I start with a completely unsurprising choice…

Best Director: Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)

Honorable Mentions:

Gaspar Noe (Enter The Void)
Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
Armando Iannucci (In The Loop)
Sam Raimi (Drag Me To Hell)
Jacques Audiard (A Prophet)

Best Screenplay: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Ian Martin, Tony Roche (In The Loop)

Honorable Mentions:

Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!)
Greg Mottola (Adventureland)
Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Thomas McCarthy (Up)
Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach (Fantastic Mr. Fox)

Best Editing: Jeffrey Ford, Paul Rubell (Public Enemies)

Best Soundtrack: Joe Hisaishi – Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

Honorable Mentions:

Elliot Goldenthal (Public Enemies)
Alexandre Desplat (A Prophet)
Michael Giacchino (Star Trek)
Michael Giacchino (Up)
Mark Mothersbaugh (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)

Best Use of Music: Street Fighting Man - Rolling Stones (During the Terrible Tractors segment of Fantastic Mr. Fox)

Best Visual Effects: WETA / ILM (Avatar)

Honorable Mentions:

Uncharted Territory / Digital Domain / Many many many other FX workshops (2012)
BUF (Enter The Void)
Digital Domain / ILM (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
ILM / Digital Domain (Star Trek)
Image Engine / The Embassy Visual Effects / Zoic Studios (District 9)

Best Production Design: Rick Carter / Robert Stromberg (Avatar)

Honorable Mentions:

Scott Chambliss (Star Trek)
Jess Gonchor (A Serious Man)
David Wasco (Inglourious Basterds)
Alex McDowell (Watchmen)
Denise Pizzini (Black Dynamite)

Best Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle (Antichrist)

Honorable Mentions:

Dante Spinotti (Public Enemies)
Robbie Ryan (Fish Tank)
Benoît Debie (Enter The Void)
Morten Søborg (Valhalla Rising)
Steve Yedlin (The Brothers Bloom)

Funniest Cinematography: Shawn Maurer (Black Dynamite)

Most Gimmicky Cinematography: Dan Mindel (Star Trek)

I’m not sure whether I liked or disliked Mindel and Abrams’ insistence on using lens flares in about 89% of the movie. All I know is nothing else looked like it this year, for better or worse.

Best Cinematography Wasted On A Terrible, Uncinematic Movie: Caleb Deschanel (My Sister’s Keeper)

Best Sound Design: Ben Burtt (Star Trek)

Burtt, who last year excelled himself with his incredible work on Wall-E, did another great job this year in redesigning the sound effects from the original series of Star Trek. At once retro and futuristic, familiar and new, his work here was a joy to listen to. Here’s a fascinating interview with the great man.

Runner-Up: Ken Yasumoto / Thomas Bangalter (Enter The Void)

Immersive, ambient, constantly in flux. Yasumoto and Bangalter’s audio work here is as impressive as the visual work done by the rest of the crew.

Worst Director: Phil Claydon (Lesbian Vampire Killers) (The rest of the movie is exactly like this except more blue, to denote night-time.)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Lee Daniels (Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire)
Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop)
Robert Luketic (The Ugly Truth)
Chris Columbus (I Love You, Beth Cooper)
Richard Curtis (The Boat That Rocked)

Worst Screenplay: David Benioff / Skip Woods (X-Men Origins: Wolverine)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Paul Hupfield / Stewart Williams (Lesbian Vampire Killers)
Justin Marks (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li)
Brandon Camp / Mike Thompson (Love Happens)
Brian Helgeland (The Taking of Pelham 123)
Richard Curtis (The Boat That Rocked)

Worst Editing: Jeff Freeman (Paul Blart: Mall Cop)

Worst Use of Music: Sabotage – Beastie Boys (Star Trek)

Worst Cinematography: Russell Carpenter (The Ugly Truth)

Dishonorable Mentions:

David Higgs (Lesbian Vampire Killers)
Ken Seng (Obsessed)
Tim Suhrstedt (All About Steve)
Robert McLachlan (Dragonball Evolution)
Danny Cohen (The Boat That Rocked)

Most Annoying Sound Design: Chang-seop Kim and Suk-won Kim (Thirst)

No offense to either sound designer. They did exactly what was asked of them by director Chan-park Wook. Unfortunately that meant two hours of slurping sounds. After about five minutes it became unbearable. Then came the gristly snapping sounds. ::feels ill remembering it::

Worst Directorial Decision: The Nigerian Gangsters – Neill Blomkamp (District 9)

Blomkamp and co-screenwriter Terri Tatchell hobbled their movie with the controversial decision to depict the Nigerian gangs ruling the District 9 slum as cannibalistic criminals. The Nigerian government took steps to ban the movie in their country, and debate over the potentially racist overtones of this depiction detracted from Blomkamp and Tatchell’s message about the venality of all humans no matter what their race. Certainly the cannibalism of Nigerian gangs is meant to be equated with the white South African’s fondness for vivisection, and Wikus’ treatment by both his white compatriots and the dreadful gang leader Obesandjo is similar, but did Blomkamp have to make them specifically Nigerian? Wouldn’t he have managed to make the same point if he had just had a generic gang in District 9? Or is that just a mealy-mouthed way for me to feel a bit better about this depiction, by making it diffuse instead of specific?

When I left the cinema my overall positive experience of the movie was tempered by this one directorial decision. Though Blomkamp has been bluff about it (to this blogger’s disgust), his choice — whether wrong in my eyes or right in his — has lingered in my mind ever since. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with it. Maybe that was the point, to shock this liberal out of his complacency instead of just giving me an easy, toothless fix of self-congratulatory righteous anger against the evils of racism, as the utterly empty Blind Side did. Nevertheless, it left a bad taste in my mouth. He got so much else right, but I can’t help but fear he went too far on this one point.

Runner-Up: Endless Starfuckery, Nepotism, and Navel-Gazing – Judd Apatow (Funny People)

There’s a really good 105-minute-long movie hidden inside Funny People. A really good movie that manages to capture the exact James-L.-Brooksian aura that Judd Apatow was trying for. Sadly it’s buried under endless, pointless cameos, home videos, and poorly edited introspection. Some critics complained that the movie changes tone and direction too drastically once Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen turn up on Leslie Mann’s doorstep, and Apatow should therefore cut a lot out of those scenes, but to be honest there is more interesting and funny material in the final hour than there is in the previous six months or however long that shit is. If Apatow had tightened the first part of the movie up, he could still have retained the observations about the uncertain and insecure life of the comedian and still have that entertaining plot about chasing your past. It was a movie we liked a lot, but damn if it wasn’t a frustrating experience.

Best Poster:

Runner-Up:

Worst Poster:

Most Sexist Poster:

Runner-Up:

Best Response To Said Sexist Poster: From The Frisky…

Strangest And Worst Poster Change: First poster for Moon…

…and the second, uglier poster for Moon

Nastiest But Most Accurate Poster That Reduces A Complex Work Of Art Down To A Single Controversial Moment: The Australian poster for Antichrist

Best Promotional Campaign: District 9

Now lauded as the movie launched by Twitter, it was a perfectly judged idea to screen the entire movie to fans and journalists at the San Diego Comic-Con. Journalists were forced to observe an embargo on full reviews, but the word spread via Twitter and Facebook, and it wasn’t long before the film rolled into theatres on a tidal wave of viewer-generated hype and enthusiasm. Paramount did a similar thing by showing Star Trek at the Alamo Drafthouse to an audience primed for a screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but that was a film that owed much of its success to a typical PR blitz on top of a bunch of very enthusiastic reviews. Sony Pictures used a smaller promotional budget with greater skill, building word of mouth through that first screening, creating funny teaser posters (a necessity considering how the movie had no name recognition and no well-known stars), and airing thrilling and mysterious TV spots. District 9 is a good enough movie to deserve its high box-office take, but it was the beautifully judged PR campaign that really pushed it over the edge.

Worst Promotional Campaign: Inglourious Basterds

Hey look everyone! Quentin Tarantino has made another of his mad pastiches of genre cinema from the past! There’s a comedy Hitler and Brad Pitt’s all silly and there’s gonna be a ton of violence of action all the way through! It’ll do for WWII movies what Kill Bill Vol. 1 did for martial arts movies! Yeeeeeeeee-hah! Except not. Tarantino’s maturity has been hidden behind some entertainingly silly post-modern pyrotechnics for a while now, but his intellectualism has been bubbling up to the surface. The most dramatic example of this is the difference between the Grindhouse and non-Grindhouse cuts of Death Proof. While the former moves faster and works well enough as an exploitation piece with a nifty sting in the tale, the longer version features much subtext about both groups of women targeted by Stuntman Mike and their relationship to him. It’s a slower movie but a much richer one.

Inglourious Basterds is richer still, and looks and feels nothing like the action-packed diversion the trailers and posters make it seem. The PR campaign also plays up the Basterds as the main characters when in fact they’re mostly secondary to the main plots involving Landa, Dreyfus, Hicox, and Zoller. Though enough people liked it enough to make it a reasonably sized hit, who knows whether it might have made even more money if it had pre-empted the oft-heard complaint that Brad Pitt wasn’t in it enough. Or maybe it worked perfectly in getting bums on seats? What do I know? I’m just a shlub with a blog.

Okay. If there is any more list-making to be done, it’ll be haphazard, even more trivial, and will arrive whenever I can get around to it. I’d forget about it but the world must know what I considered to be the best insult of the year.

Listmania ‘09! Performances Of The Year

As ever I got carried away. This post was going to cover my picks for cast and crew in 2009, but I ended up going on about performers at such length that I figured it’s best to save the rest for later.

Best Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist)

Honorable Mentions:

Rachel Weisz (The Brothers Bloom)
Isabelle Huppert (White Material)
Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Star Trek)
Melanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds)
Alison Lohman (Drag Me To Hell)

Best Actor: Hott Sam Rockwell (Moon, G-Force)

Honorable Mentions:

Nicolas Cage (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, G-Force)
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)
Peter Capaldi (In The Loop)
Willem Dafoe (Antichrist, Fantastic Mr. Fox)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt ((500) Days of Summer)

Best Supporting Actress: Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air)

Honorable Mentions:

Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds)
Gina McKee (In The Loop)
Mimi Kennedy (In The Loop)
Lauren Ambrose (Where The Wild Things Are)
CCH Pounder (Avatar)

Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)

Honorable Mentions:

Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds)
Billy Crudup (Watchmen)
Tom Hollander (In The Loop)
Zach Galafianakis (The Hangover, G-Force)
Ben Affleck (Extract)

Breakthrough Actress: Katie Jarvis (Fish Tank)

Breakthrough Actor: Tahar Rahim (A Prophet)

Best Voice Cast For An Animated Movie: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

Anna Faris, Bill Hader, James Caan, Neil Patrick Harris, Andy Samberg, Mr. T, Bruce Campbell, Bobb’e J. Thompson, Benjamin Bratt, Lauren Graham and Will Forte, all perfectly cast and all funny. Even Al Roker is good in it. It’s a kind of miracle.

Most Surprising Dramatic Performance From An Actress Better Known For Her Comedic Work: Maya Rudolph (Away We Go)

Most Surprising Dramatic Performance From An Actor Better Known For His Comedic Work: Ricky Gervais (The Invention of Lying) (It’s not a drama, but he sells the dramatic beats better than I could ever have imagined.)

Best Performance From An Actress In A Really-Not-That-Great Movie: Meryl Streep (Julie and Julia)

Best Performance From An Actor In A Really-Not-That-Great Movie: Vincent Cassel (Mesrine)

“Surely This Will Be The Year This Actor Becomes A Superstar” Performance Of The Year: Chiwetel Ejiofor (2012)

Most Committed Performance That Transformed A Diverting Movie Into An Totally Absorbing Experience: Ben Foster (Pandorum)

Best Performance From An Actor I Was Never Keen On Before But Now Think Is Capable Of Miracles: Karl Urban (Star Trek)

Funniest Performance From An Actor Who Has Been Sorely Underused For Years: Eric Bana (Funny People)

Worst Actress: Cameron Diaz (The Box, My Sister’s Keeper)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side, All About Steve, The Proposal)
Katherine Heigl (The Ugly Truth)
Beyonce Knowles (Obsessed)
Kristin Kreuk (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)
Rose Byrne (Knowing)

Worst Actor: Chris Klein (Street Fighter: Legend of Chun-Li)

Dishonorable Mentions:

James Corden (Lesbian Vampire Killers)
John Travolta (The Taking of Pelham 123)
Tim McGraw (The Blind Side)
Peter Sarsgaard (Orphan)
John Krasinski (Away We Go)

Worst Supporting Actress: Betty White (The Proposal)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Melanie Lynskey (The Informant!, Up In The Air)
Fionulla Flanagan (The Invention of Lying)
Ali Larter (Obsessed)
Malin Akerman (Watchmen, The Proposal)
Rosamund Pike (Surrogates)

Worst Supporting Actor: Eli Roth (Inglourious Basterds)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Tom Sturridge (The Boat The Rocked)
Sam Riley (Franklyn)
Neal McDonough (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li)
Bobby Canavale (Paul Blart: Mall Cop)
Geoffrey Arend ((500) Days of Summer)

Most Thankless Role: Jayma Mays as Paul Blart’s love interest in Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

All she is allowed to do is frown or open her eyes wide. She barely gets any dialogue, and certainly no jokes. It’s deeply frustrating as she can do so much when given the chance.

Runner-Up: Amy Smart as Chev Chelios’ girlfriend Eve Lydon in Crank: High Voltage. Last time she was forced into having sex with Chelios in public against her will. This time forced to wear stripper’s clothes for the entire movie, as well as be licked and molested by a crazed prostitute and then athletically shagged on a racecourse in front of a large crowd of baying men. Is she a glutton for punishment? She really needs to fire her agent.

Scenestealing Actor Of The Year: Woody Harrelson (Zombieland)

Scenestealing Actress Of The Year: Carrie Preston (Duplicity) (Couldn’t find a picture of her in Tony Gilroy’s delightful con-trick movie. Here she is at an awards ceremony with her husband, World’s Greatest Actor Michael Emerson.)

Scenestealing Duo Of The Year: Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig (Adventureland)

Most Glorious Ham: Michael Sheen (Twilight: New Moon)

Most Wasted Actress: Naomi Watts (The International)

Honorary Manuela Velasco Award for Services to Scream-Queen Culture: Katie Featherston (Paranormal Activity)

Best Cameo: You know who (Zombieland)

Runner-Up: Ralph Fiennes (The Hurt Locker)

Worst Cameo: Every celebrity that showed up in Funny People and bogged down the first thirteen hours of the movie

Runner-Up: Mike Tyson (The Hangover) / Lou Ferrigno (I Love You, Man)

Weirdest Cameo: Geri Halliwell as Chev Chelios’ mother in Crank: High Voltage

Where The Hell Have You Been? Actor of the Year: Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill (Inglourious Basterds)

Biggest Disparity In Quality of Performance By An Actress From One Film To The Next: Kristin Stewart – charming in Adventureland, deeply irritating and boring in Twilight: New Moon.

Biggest Disparity In Quality of Performance By An Actor From One Film To The Next: Ryan Reynolds – extremely charming in Adventureland, obnoxious in The Proposal.

And he shouldn’t have been cast as Hal Jordan. I say this as a fan of Ryan Reynolds: he really was fantastic in Adventureland, and was very funny at the start of X-Men Origins: Wolverine before his character got dumped over by the mindless buffoons who wrote it. But he’s not Hal Jordan! [/GL fanboy] Okay, I’m rambling now. More to come, amazingly enough. Got to give props to the crew on this year’s films.

Listmania ‘09! The Worst Movies Of The Year

It’s arguable that I shouldn’t pick over the very worst movies of the year, that I should concentrate on the good and embrace positivity, but hell, I sat through these clunkers out of curiosity and got a whole heap of pain in return, so I’m going to make something of that experience. If that means writing a lot of words about how dreadful and misguided these films are, then so be it. Sadly, I know for a fact that this list contains movies that are loved by family members, friends, and Twitter acquaintances. Conversations about these films have previously been conducted with care, as I attempted to not give away my feelings about said films for fear of causing offence. As a result, pre-emptive apologies are due to all those who love movies on this list. If you derived pleasure from these films, that’s awesome. I’m genuinely glad that you had a great time with them. I’m just recounting my subjective experience of these films, and if they differ from yours, it is not a personal thing. Though it should go without saying, I feel it necessary to state that I consider it bad form to judge a person because of their opinion. I’ll like you or love you no matter what, and my disagreement doesn’t reflect a judgement upon you. Unless you like the number one movie on this list. If you do, there’s no helping you.

And so, with that defensive caveat in place, on with the hatred:

Worst Movies of the Year:

25. Angels and Demons

Ron Howard’s second attempt at breathing life into Dan Brown’s clunky prose was far more successful than The Da Vinci Code, and even managed to hold our attention for its duration. Only after the credits roll do you realise how extravagantly silly the movie was, and how little had actually happened. A harmless and entertaining failure, maybe, but a failure nonetheless.

24. Surrogates

Adapted from a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, Jonathan Mostow’s satire on the lure of social media and fears of modern disconnection was ill-served by two things: being directed by Jonathan Mostow, and being a satire on the lure of social media and fears of modern disconnection. Luddite witterings about the awful effects of reliance on new communication technologies are irksome already before being further mangled by Mostow, whose dead eye for action renders the movie as lifeless as its robotic characters. Any good ideas from the original comic are sadly buried under a layer of drabness.

23. The Hangover

A nervous nerd, a socially inept madman, and a gigantic, charmless wanker act like pricks in Las Vegas for two hours, and we pay millions of dollars to see it. Irreverent behaviour like this is always going to be appealing, but Todd Phillips has never been able to bring these moments to any kind of life in any of his previous comedies, and he fails again here. Jokes fall flat, comedic situations are resolved in witless fashion, and convicted rapist Mike Tyson is brought on as an ostensibly daring addition to an overstuffed cast, and succeeds in doing nothing but making the whole enterprise unpalatable without being funny. The main trio — all talented guys — are utterly wasted here.

22. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it was far more entertaining than Stephen Sommers’ leaden-footed series of explosions and bellowed exposition. Poorly staged action, predictable character arcs, boring tech designs, and most regrettably no spark of Bay-style madness. It also gives Channing Tatum more unwarranted screentime and squanders the talents of Rachel Nichols, Christopher Ecclestone and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The worst toy-based movie of the year, by a nose. GO JOES! GO FAR AWAY!

21. Orphan

George Ratliff’s fascinating Bad Seed thriller Joshua was only given a small release a couple of years ago, but is good enough to warrant chasing it down. Ostensibly similar, but far inferior, Jaume Collet-Serra’s hysterical and misjudged horror movie brings an Eastern-European Other into an affluent family with A Dark Past and runs through a litany of thriller cliches with excessive energy. Crashing unsubtlety is only the beginning of Orphan’s problems. Narrative implausibilities pile up the further in we progress, leading to a hysterical finale with a truly demented and silly twist. Kudos to Dark Castle for getting Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard onboard to lend a veneer of respectability, but boo to them too for making those actors look so horribly lost.

20. Paul Blart: Mall Cop

In 2008 Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions did the world a great favour and produced the delightful House Bunny, starring the ever-magnificent Anna Faris. The world didn’t really seem to be bothered by this excellent gift, and it made minor money at the box office. In 2009 Happy Madison bankrolled Kevin James’ simplistic mall cop movie, despite the fact that the script contained no jokes even though it was obviously meant to be playing with the Die Hard template. Fertile ground, you’d think. However, when this short Ben Stiller sketch contains more funny lines than your entire movie, you know you’re in trouble. And yet it grossed way way more than House Bunny. ::sadface::

19. The Box

Richard Kelly attempts to redeem himself for the failure of Southland Tales by making a straight adaptation of Richard Matheson’s excellent short story, exploring the moral quandary therein with thoughtfulness and maturity. Only kidding! He garbles the whole thing with a needlessly complicated and confusing plot about aliens and morality tests and dimensional portals and the afterlife and chickens and sentient masonry and water and water and water and water and oh God, someone please stop him. (Warning: it does not feature chickens and sentient masonry. Please don’t watch it because that makes it sound more interesting.)

18. Knowing

How depressing to see a technically ambitious and interesting SF director like Alex Proyas trot out something so illogical and exploitative. With Nicolas Cage asleep and Rose Byrne in shriek-mode, there is little here for an audience to empathise with, and if this tale of extinction and salvation works at all, it’s because of a couple of grandiose setpieces, especially a poignant moment at the end set to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Other than that, it’s a muddle of poorly explained philosophy and New Age and Christian symbolism, and ends up as nothing more than a religious wet-dream, with the odious and smug conversion of our atheist protagonist at the last-second. Remember, the caves won’t save the Chuldren! Only blindly trusting the Sky-People will!

17. Away We Go

What could have been a vaguely interesting article in The New Yorker about Dave Eggers’ experiences during his girlfriend’s pregnancy was instead turned into a bloated and pointless road movie, an exercise in narcissism filled with unpleasant stereotypes broadly played by an array of actors far too talented to be left adrift here. At its best it could have been vaguely diverting, but then Sam Mendes horribly misjudges the tone of the film. His flat visuals and clunky control of pace consign this movie to oblivion.

16. The Taking of Pelham 123

It’s bad enough that anyone thought it necessary to remake this story, one already told twice before and one of those times in remarkable fashion, without it being tackled with such cack-handed aggression. Tony Scott’s sledgehammer style removes almost all of the character from John Godey’s original story, and then Brian Helgeland rubs salt into the wound by adding needlessly coarse dialogue. It’s also hobbled by a depressingly low-energy performance from the usually dependable Denzel Washington, and an even more depressingly high-energy performance from a never-worse John Travolta. It gets more wrong than it gets right.

15. I Love You, Beth Cooper

Larry Doyle’s screenplay probably had some interesting things to say about teenage life, expectations, and sexuality, not to mention referencing pretty much every great (and not so great) teen comedy of the past couple of decades, but you would never know that under the usual empty gloss of Chris Columbus’ direction. All subtlety or purpose is crushed by Columbus’ predictably awful take on the subject matter, with his tone-deaf approach being too crass to make the sweet moments connect, or too prudish to make the bawdy stuff go far enough to become memorable. It’s also utterly unfunny. Not a single joke lands. How is this man still making movies?

14. The Blind Side

Michael Lewis is a smart man and I reckon his book — upon which John Lee Hancock’s feel-good drama is based — is far more interesting than this. It will also have the benefit of not being a trite and patronising two-hour-long pat-on-the-back for affluent white Christian folk who took in lost youngster Michael Oher even though he is depicted here as an African-American Lenny sans rabbit. Wrong-headed in the extreme, this film contains less wit and insight into human behaviour than any randomly selected three-minute-long scene from any episode of Friday Night Lights. FNL also has the benefit of not featuring the dreadful Tim McGraw or Jae Head as the most annoyingly precocious child actor in film history.

13. Dragonball Evolution

Pretty much nothing in this horrible, joyless commercial product works, but it is especially irksome to see something that mangles another cultural work being made by James Wong. His X-Files work had always been so entertaining, the first Final Destination was an endearingly bleak project, and The One was an interesting project that could have worked with a few rewrites and a bigger budget. Since then he has floundered, and this awful sub-Matrix Kung-Fu pastiche is a true lowpoint. It made Chow Yun Fat almost unwatchably smug too. Horrible from overcomplicated beginning to incomprehensible end.

12. Twilight: New Moon

Even the world’s most powerful supercomputer, when given the requisite raw data and a million years to generate alternate scenarios with it, could not create a movie as tedious as this. A stagnant narrative mess filled with singularly unappealing, navel-gazing brats, this pop culture phenomenon continues to fascinate millions while doing little more than running on the spot. It takes an especially bad franchise to alienate a nerd such as myself, but Twilight: New Moon managed it by celebrating dysfunctional romantic relationships while being even less entertaining than the dreary original. The only bright spot was a demented performance by Michael Sheen. Other than that berserk cameo, there is nothing to recommend the most sloppily constructed movie of the year.

11. The Proposal

Romantic comedies are going through a really bad patch. The genre was represented by more cynical and shoddily made exercises than ever before. With only The Invention of Lying and (500) Days of Summer attempting to do anything new with the genre, this year’s commercial enterprises at least tried to do one thing that the genre does really well: explore the gulf in behavioural expectations between men and women in an age where we are more aware than ever of our differences and similarities. This is not to say this was done well, though. The Proposal was essentially a by-the-numbers trainwreck of comedy misunderstandings, last-minute changes of heart, and hilarious grandmothers, this time played by an unwatchable Betty White crushing jokes underfoot with obnoxious relish. Yet another terrible Sandra Bullock movie in ‘09.

10. Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire

As with The Blind Side, life for poor African-Americans is here depicted as a kind of hell that even Heironymous Bosch would shrink from painting. Lee Daniels’ tawdry and exploitative adaptation of poet Sapphire’s novel of urban deprivation and depravity is a relentlessly nightmarish vision. If it were a kind of satire on the Boy-Called-It phenomenon of tell-all child abuse memoirs Precious might hold some tasteless appeal, but instead it is an insult to those who suffer real abuse every day. This racially insensitive melodrama’s only worth — other than in giving a showcase to a strong cast who work hard to make Daniels’ scattershot direction seem better than it really is —  is in celebrating those who strive to maintain support systems in America’s most deprived areas. Those hardworking Samaritans deserve a better tribute than this, though.

9. The Ugly Truth

The Proposal was marginally successful by dint of having Ryan Reynolds in the cast. The Ugly Truth, however, is a disaster on every level. Its odious reinforcement of cultural stereotypes about gender behaviour would be bad enough without featuring a mugging Gerard Butler defining “comedy timing” as “jutting out your chin at certain points in a sentence”. Nevertheless, compared to the joyless charm-void that is Katherine Heigl, he’s Spencer Tracy. While Butler tries to tell jokes, Heigl says every line with the same intonation and emphasis, making it impossible to tell where she is meant to be funny. Maybe she’s not meant to be. Bad-movie legend Robert Luketic has no idea how to modulate tone (or light or frame shots), saving his energy for the big vibrating panties scene: a joke so laboured and cringe-inducing that it should have killed this reductive mess on the spot.

8. Love Happens

Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel Up In The Air struck me as an insincere and mechanical exercise in sentimentality. I was deeply disappointed by it. Then I saw Love Happens and for a few minutes I felt like writing a letter to Reitman thanking him for every choice he made that stopped him from making something as wholly empty as this. Though Jennifer Aniston looks right at home in such uninspiring fare, Aaron Eckhart is wasted as a man dealing with that romance genre staple: the loss of his wife. Judy Greer, John Carroll Lynch, and Martin Sheen look like they’re praying for someone to rescue them from this openly manipulative farrago. Tricky to get stories about traumatic grief right. This didn’t even try. It makes Nights in Rodanthe look like Gone With The Wind.

7. Obsessed

Somehow a guy who directed episodes of The Wire and Deadwood thought it would be nice to launch his film career by directing a Hallmark Channel movie about evil temps written by the guy who wrote Star Trek V. The nicest thing that can be said about it is that it seems to have been made with a post-racial America in mind. The sympathetic protagonists are African-American and the evil antagonist is Caucasian: a fact that generates no discussion about race or the exploitation of black people in contemporary America. Sadly, I doubt that the filmmakers thought we had progressed beyond the point where this wasn’t worth commenting on: they just didn’t really know what to say, and so ignored the narrative minefield. That left us with a neutered Fatal Attraction clone with flat performances, ugly lighting, and ten minutes of an otherwise unused Beyonce beating up Ali Larter in the signposted finale.

6. My Sister’s Keeper

All I’ve experienced of Jodi Picoult’s work is her terrible run on Wonder Woman, where she revealed absolute ignorance of everything that made the character exciting. This syrupy and insincere adaptation of her novel doesn’t make the idea of reading her books any more appealing. A terrific cast — plus Cameron Diaz in full-on squawk mode — battle with a mountain of disease-of-the-week cliches, all served up in an unconventionally fractured narrative that could be considered avant-garde. I suspect it’s actually just that Nick Cassavetes didn’t really know what he was doing. Yet another shitty movie cynically treating emotional turmoil as grist to the mawkish mill. It gets added evilness points for misrepresenting scientific endeavour as morally compromised by inventing a fantasy scenario designed to scare incurious people into distrusting doctors.

5. The Boat That Rocked

Richard Curtis seems to think that English history is a Lego set that he can use to construct any old fantasy about our cultural past that he likes and no one will mind. When garbling historical events for obvious comedic effect in Blackadder, the result was a superb sitcom. Here it is just another exercise in using the devalued Cool Brittannia brand to hide the fact that England is painfully uncool, and making respectable actors put on drainpipe trousers and do the Twist on the deck of a boat for no reason is like watching the Queen trying to crunk. Curtis also seems to have forgotten how to tell a story: the meandering digressions featured here do not count as narrative. Pointless, needlessly hectic, overlong, unamusing and shoddily filmed, The Boat That Rocked almost represented the nadir of Britain’s film output in 2009. Almost.

4. All About Steve

The Year of Bullock was not a 100% financial success, but it was a total washout. This baffling movie represented the lowpoint of her Trilogy of Awful, and stands as a true curio. Why was this film made? The judgement of everyone involved must be called into question, because it honestly feels like no one knew what was going on at any point during its development and production. Was it an attempt at Farrelly-Brothers-style gross-out comedy? A celebration of the outsider? A denunciation of the outsider? A pro-life pastiche? A remake of Twister? All that is certain is that Bullock is insufferable here, stalking an embarrassed-looking Bradley Cooper across America while his colleagues enable her for no easily-identifiable reason. No one behaves like a human being until the sentimental finale where the grinding tone change paints protagonist Mary Horowitz as an admirable hero and everyone who has previously resented her falls into line to praise her. It’s utterly incomprehensible and nigh-unwatchable.

3. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li

Steven E. DeSouza’s original Street Fighter movie is treated like cinematic dog-doo by game fans and non-fans alike, but hopefully it will be revisited in the wake of this franchise revamp and seen as the light and entertaining diversion it actually is. Because this new Street Fighter movie sure isn’t light, and it sure isn’t entertaining. While the game features exaggerated movements, fantasy elements and imaginatively rendered characters, writer Justin Marks and director Andrzej Bartkowiak make the mistake of treating the game to a Batman Begins / Casino Royale-style revamp that strips every appealing element from the source material and leaving a tedious revenge plot against an unscrupulous entrepreneur in its place. Easily the most boring action movie of the year, it also features one of the worst performances, from oily Chris Klein. To be honest, he’s almost bad enough to earn a recommendation. His oleaginous demeanour and hilarious tough-guy mannerisms are the most entertaining things to be found here.

2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Arguably the worst, most misguided and compromised big budget summer action movie ever made. To fanboys it represents yet another slap in the face from Tom Rothman, yet again mangling the things about a franchise that make that franchise appealing in the first place, as well as cutting budgets, altering the shooting script, and overriding director Gavin Hood. However, it’s not just nerd-preciousness that powers this rage against the money-making machine. Nothing in this cynical enterprise works, from the set design to the dialogue to the hideous effects to the casting (not counting Ryan Reynolds or Taylor Kitsch). The broad-strokes narrative desperately tries to match up Marvel’s Origin story with the beginning of the X-Men trilogy, but manages to taint all of the movies with its half-arsed stink. I can’t remember ever feeling so cheated by a superhero movie, or so horrified at how brazenly my love of these characters was being manipulated by a man who does not care a jot about their history.

1. Lesbian Vampire Killers

Someone shoe-horned everything that is wrong and miserable about British culture into one movie for the convenience of those of us who cringe at the thought of lad-mags, shoddy horror comedies that are neither funny nor scary, piss-poor “gentle” sitcoms (i.e. they contain no jokes), and traditional British directorial ineptitude. Horne and Corden — who are to Morecambe and Wise as dysentery is to tasty dessert toppings — mug their way through a joke-free and plagiaristic “romp” in which very nearly all women are sexually voracious and scantily-clad gay hotties who appear to be filled with what could be semen, considering how they explode in a shower of white goop when they are “amusingly” killed by the horny protagonists. It doesn’t even have the courtesy to be outrageously tasteless like the horror comedies it emulates so ineptly. It’s just tacky, stupid, gormless, tedious, misogynistic, and puerile. It also single-handedly negates all of the good will generated by British movies made by BBC Films and Film4, dragging the British Film Industry back in time to a period when Carry On films represented our most visible contribution to the world of cinema. If it could be deported, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Worst film of the year? Fuck that. Worst film of the decade, more like.

More to come, hopefully, including Best Actor and Actress, Worst Actor and Actress, and “awards” for directors, writers, and a cinematographer that I dissed last year.

Listmania ‘09! The Best Movies Of The Year

For the longest time it seemed like 2009 would be a truly dreadful year in film, perhaps as a consequence of the writers’ strike last year. By the end of it I felt like we’d had a pretty good run, once the summer was over. The early months were a desert with only Coraline making a dent in my memory, but by the time December rolled around with the release of Avatar, it felt like a more rounded experience. Even better, though we had a few horribly delayed releases (such as Up, which was disgracefully held back from UK release for six months), there are only a few movies that have yet to be released over here that have attracted our attention, and even then we’re not that bothered. The most frustrating omissions were our own fault. Jane Campion’s Bright Star came and went so quickly we missed out on seeing it, as did Lone Scherfig’s An Education. Sherlock Holmes came out this week but illness and schedule clashes mean we will be seeing it in 2010. It’s frustrating, but compared to last year’s maddening delays in seeing Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche, New York, it’s nowhere near as bad.

So anyway, here are my top 25 movies of 2009, in order. Hopefully soon I will get to post my bottom 25. It was depressingly easy to complete that list.

Best Movies of the Year:

25. Adventureland

Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age story is good enough to make me forgive it for being a coming-of-age story (a sub-genre I have little time for). Sensitive performances and a perfectly judged tone set it apart, and I expect second and third viewings will cement it as a favourite in the future.

24. A Christmas Carol

Though Charles Dickens’ novel suffers from being adapted too many times, this version was loyal enough to the source material to stand above the rest. Robert Zemeckis cleverly used his performance capture technology to create a world that looks like a living painting, and — for the most part — his thoughtful direction and stately command of pace are refreshingly old-fashioned.

23. Red Cliff: Part Two

A crushing disappointment after the genius of the first installment, John Woo’s epic finale to the Three Kingdoms story was hobbled by tedious subplots about the horrors of war, as well as an unsatisfying final confrontation with evil Prime Minister Cao Cao. Still, there were enough superb moments to save it, including an enormous conflagration, hardcore badassery from the heroes, and entertaining cunning from Zhuge Liang.

22. White Material

Working as a comment on racial identity, colonialism, and the guilt that attends it, Claire Denis’ movie is a fascinating and thought-provoking experience. It also serves as a fantastic thriller, with its air of imminent collapse building to a nerve-wracking conclusion. Isabelle Huppert is mesmerising as the plantation owner who dooms all around her with her arrogance.

21. Zombieland

While vampires became a singularly obnoxious cinematic plague, zombies went from flavour-of-the-month to pariahs. Nevertheless, Ruben Fleischer’s apocalyptic comedy was a delightful surprise, perfectly cast and thoroughly entertaining. It also featured the cameo appearance of the year, and one best left unspoiled.

20. The Brothers Bloom

For a few minutes Rian Johnson’s con-trick drama seems like a precious and finicky conglomeration of obnoxious post-Anderson tricks and tics, but thankfully it becomes a warm and humane antidote to David Mamet’s cerebral dominance of the sub-genre. The key to its appeal is an endearing central performance from Rachel Weisz, whose enthusiastic embrace of the brothers’ tricksiness grounds the film even while the plot spirals off in unexpected directions and Johnson’s camera flies around with such exuberant unpredictability. Despite faltering slightly in the final act, its ambition and seriousness of purpose were a resounding success.

19. A Serious Man

The Coens excel at taking on unorthodox projects and surprising their fans, but they also rely on a set of narrative tricks that repeat from movie to movie. A Serious Man was no different, with their familiar exploration of our cosmic insignificance coming into play again. Nevertheless, here their tricks felt fresh again, matched as they were to a plot revolving around morality and heavenly punishment. Casting unknown actors was possibly the masterstroke: it certainly made the movie feel like nothing else out there. It ranks as their most entertaining and most challenging film since The Big Lebowski.

18. Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea

Remarkable to think that Hayao Miyazaki is capable of making movies even lighter and more whimsical than anything he has previously offered us. At times Ponyo can feel too fluffy, and longueurs plague the second half of the film, but these minor errors are easily forgiven in the rush of incredible images. Ponyo’s mid-movie escape from the clutches of her misguided father is among the most visionary and exhilarating setpieces of recent times, aided by the Wagnerian stings of Joe Hisaishi’s beautiful score.

17. Coraline

Henry Selick’s stunning adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book is a feast for the eyes, as technically impressive as anything committed to film this year by Digital Domain, ILM or BUF. It’s also one of the scariest films of the year, one of those rare childrens’ movies that is unafraid to terrify its audience. Some of the imagery lingers in the memory with the upsetting persistence of the worst nightmares. Also great was the delicate use of Digital 3D. In the year of Avatar, it’s worth remembering that Selick and his team figured out how to use the technology to subtly enhance the viewing experience before anyone else.

16. The Hurt Locker

By the midpoint of 2009, it honestly felt as if the writers’ strike of 2008 had left us in the middle of a drought. Nothing truly exceptional had been released, and so when Kathryn Bigelow’s superb war thriller came out it was leapt upon as if it were a fusion of Paths of Glory and Apocalypse Now. Third act problems drain some of the energy from it, but even so, no other movie about the Iraq war has done so much to capture the futile stupidity of it, nor made such a pointed comment about the deranging effect it has had on our psyche. That it is also a nerve-wracking thriller is a welcome bonus.

15. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Expectations for Werner Herzog’s crime thriller were low, with only those few of us who revel in the unpredictability of Nicolas Cage holding out any hope. Thankfully Herzog surprised everyone with this demented triumph. Though it could have been turned into a conventional tale of depravity and redemption, Herzog, Cage, and writer William Finkelstein have little interest in following a traditional path, sketching all kinds of entertaining madness in the margins. It helps that Cage was let off the leash. His intense level of commitment to the project is the key to Bad Lieutenant: POCNO’s success. Welcome back, you mad bastard.

14. Drag Me To Hell

While Sam Raimi’s gleeful homage to EC Comics-style moralising concerned one young woman’s efforts to avoid being sent to hell, this felt like Raimi had escaped from the kind of big-budget purgatory that he had once railed against. Though still obviously made with more money than he had once had at his disposal, Drag Me To Hell was a return to Raimi’s anything-goes ethos. No other movie made this year tried so hard to generate a response in the audience, and it was almost entirely successful. A regression for the genre, maybe, but an incredibly entertaining one.

13. Where The Wild Things Are

It looked like we would never get to see Spike Jonze’s unconventional adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s book. When it finally arrived, critical and popular opinion seemed to split right down the middle. Post-release discussion seemed to focus on subjective accounts of how the movie resurrected very specific memories of childhood, with those who were unmoved by the movie stating that it just didn’t speak to them personally. The vision of Jonze and Dave Eggers is certainly gloomy, repetitive, unfocused and pretty unappealing, but I cannot lie: early scenes brought back horrible memories from my youth, and the unflinching depiction of Max’s confused rage rocked me to my core.

12. District 9

Viewed as an allegory about apartheid-era South Africa, Neill Blomkamp’s low-budget SF action film gets tangled up in clumsy metaphorical dead-ends and ill-judged racial stereotyping that blunts the message. Seen as a misanthropic denunciation of venality across all races and species, it becomes far more palatable. Blomkamp’s exciting and imaginative tale takes the audience down unexpected paths, skillfully building to a finale of surprising emotional resonance. I won’t lie: the final sacrifice of one character made me sob.

11. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

The most pleasant surprise of 2009. Clone High creators Phil Lord and Chris Miller did the same as Spike Jonze — take a beloved but slight children’s book and adapt it into a new format with a drastic change of tone — but veered off in a different direction. Perhaps Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs accomplished less than Where The Wild Things Are in terms of illuminating the mental turmoil of childhood, but while it “merely” sets out to entertain, it did that with amazing success. Gleefully irreverent, pro-nerd, and willing to poke fun at every awful convention of lazy cookie-cutter filmmaking, it is also arguably the funniest comedy of the year.

10. Up

It’s tempting to leave Up off the list as punishment for manipulating adult audiences into crying miserable tears of mourning for an adorable animated couple and, by extension, ourselves. Nothing else this year moved us as much as that magnificently rendered and utterly devastating opening montage. The level of storytelling talent on display was humbling. The rest of the movie was wonderful too, building on that resonant set-up to deliver a winning adventure, featuring the funniest animal characters of the year. An emotionally exhausting film, but a life-affirming one.

9. Fish Tank

Avoiding the tawdry cultural voyeurism of the works of overrated ghouls such as Mike Leigh or Lee Daniels is the least of Fish Tank’s many achievements, though one we can be most grateful for. It is also a compelling exploration of youth culture as seen through the eyes of a confused child on the cusp of adulthood. Katie Jarvis’ Mia is a fascinating and sympathetic character, aware that she is trapped in a life that offers her nothing, but eager to escape with her dignity intact. Unfortunately, she’s incapable of avoiding making some terrible mistakes along the way. It also has the grip of a thriller, cleverly changing tone in the final act without sacrificing believability. Yet another classic from Andrea Arnold.

8. Public Enemies

It’s possible to reduce Michael Mann’s adaptation of Bryan Burrough’s exploration of the 1930’s crimewave to just a period retelling of Heat, with Johnny Depp’s Dillinger and Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis as dapper versions of McCauley and Hanna, but that would miss out on his deft commentary on the narcissism of these criminals and how new technologies increased popular fascination with the outlaw. Mann marks the moment where demand for titillation grew to the extent that public attention began to fuel the events that it demanded, and this fine, exciting crime thriller ends on a memorable moment where popular culture begins to eat itself.

7. Antichrist

Lars Von Trier has finally appeared to let his obnoxious mask of superiority drop long enough to tell a tale informed by his recent nervous breakdown, and the result is one of the most affecting and disturbing horror films of recent times. Conjuring an atmosphere of dread even more upsetting than anything that master of mood Hideo Nakata could create, Von Trier pits man against woman, and humanity against nature. No one wins, except anyone brave enough to endure this remarkable and starkly beautiful nightmare vision of a world — and a grief-stricken mother — gone mad.

6. Fantastic Mr. Fox

How bold of Wes Anderson to take the work of a respected author and bolt his own style of preppy, fussy humour onto it, and your acceptance of this depends fully on your acceptance of his shtick. To those of us in love with that viewpoint — and that obsessive attention to amusing detail — Fantastic Mr. Fox was yet another success, playing with the same themes of redemption and forgiveness as his previous movies while being just as sassy and fleet-of-foot as his non-animated work. It also works as a satire on the habitual anthropomorphism of the usual animated fare, with these characters being both more human and more bestial than anything populating the movies of Disney and Dreamworks.

5. A Prophet

No matter how much Jacques Audiard maintains he was not making a political statement with this movie, his rousing prison thriller proved to be as multi-layered as the best crime movies of recent times. Malik El Djebena’s growth from callow youth to crime kingpin is fascinating and weirdly inspirational, while the world he lives in is filled with detail about identity politics, French correctional failings, and racial tensions in Europe. It’s also nail-biting, beautifully judged, and performed to perfection.

4. Avatar

While armchair critics fall over themselves to dismiss this movie for being too predictable  – a criticism that is being applied with more force than with any other movie released this year – the story is told with enough energy to forgive its clunkiness. James Cameron has always been a master with pace, and here he succeeds in manipulating the audience with a magician’s touch, delivering a groundbreaking visual tour de force into the bargain. Viewing it in Digital 3D IMAX is an unforgettable and thrilling experience.

3. Enter The Void

What James Cameron aimed to do in 3D, Gaspar Noé managed in 2D just months before. His tale of one man’s journey through death is the joint most immersive movie experience of the year, a terrifying and exhilarating cinematic experiment of enormous emotional power, and a technical marvel to boot. Any reservations about its pacing problems are swept away as Noé brings an obsessive rigour to his visual template: a first-person viewpoint that doesn’t falter at any point. That this brave experiment still has no distributor is criminal. If it ever becomes the Midnight Movie phenomenon it deserves to be, make every effort to see it on the biggest screen possible.

2. In The Loop

Armando Iannucci and the Thick of It gang brought their wonderful TV show to the big screen in style, expanding its scope to include the bureaucrats and fools of America, complete with the same venality, paranoia, and incompetence. Funnier even than the original series, it was also densely plotted but lighter than air: a feat of screenwriting to match that of Martin McDonagh with In Bruges last year. None of that would matter if the new cast members were not as talented as the original crew, but the US contingent adapts to the semi-improvisational style with aplomb. A triumph that rewards repeated viewings.

1. Inglourious Basterds

More than any other movie made this year, Inglourious Basterds surprised us all with its piercing intelligence, seriousness of purpose, and deft gameplaying, all of which are applied to an emotionally complex revenge plot that confounds the viewer at every turn. Much has been made of Tarantino’s effort to make a movie in which cinema has the last laugh and reality is forced to bow to its power, but less has been said about his continued facility with character. To the immaculate roll-call that includes Jules Winnfield, Vincent Vega, Jackie Brown, Mr. White, The Bride and Stuntman Mike can be added Shosanna Dreyfus and Hans Landa, the most compelling and haunting characters of the year. Tarantino has every right to be proud of this movie: it is, quite simply, his masterpiece.

Best Documentary: Soul Power

Considered as a sister project to Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s documentary about the music festival that ran alongside the Rumble in the Jungle offers up yet more fascinating footage of Muhammad Ali in his prime, sparring with mouthy opportunists and talking about the potential impact of the forthcoming event. It also shows how the festival almost sinks under a tide of ego and bureaucracy. The worst thing that can be said about the movie is that it doesn’t show enough of the festival itself, but even then you still get to see thrilling performances by The Spinners, BB King, Miriam Makeba, and James Brown at the height of his powers. Stingy though the amount of concert footage is, it’s still some of the best music you will ever hear.

Most Embarrassing Admission of the Year: Okay, Soul Power was actually the only documentary I saw this year. Nevertheless, don’t let that put you off seeing it. Even if I’d seen a dozen documentaries this year, I doubt any of them would have been as fun or fulfilling as that one.

No time to dally with small talk: on with the listmaking! More to come when I get the time…

Listmania ‘09! Music Round-Up

A persistent chest infection has rendered me incapable of doing any mental activity more complicated than Tweeting, and considering how totally I’ve garbled even those 140-character nuggets of “insight”, I shouldn’t even be doing that. Seeing as this is my major list-making time of the year, I’m very frustrated at my petrified grey matter, which is making even this simple task difficult, but luckily I’ve been keeping track of all of these albums (and films, for my forthcoming film lists), and so it’s just a matter of sorting them.

I’ll be honest, there another reason why this post is underdeveloped (compared to my usual enormous metastasising lists). There just wasn’t that much music that interested me this year. Electro-pop ladies like Lady Gaga — who was generated by the mega computer controlling the media to give lazy comedians a punchline, or politicians a pop cultural reference to make them seem human — left me cold, and bands that attracted attention from the hipsters — e.g. Mew or The Antlers — were appealing while never reaching that level that made me actually passionate about them. This is nothing to do with the music, I’m sure. Just me and my brain, pre-occupied as it was by real-world problems and my increased interest in other media.

Nevertheless, this list is utterly pedestrian and not very surprising (certainly to anyone who knows me). Apologies for not getting excited about albums by snobcore artists like The Excrescence Engine, Mike Mark and the Mock Mooks, X-Gism, or Flesh For Farm Equipment. They were all quite shit, really.

Favourite Albums of 2009:

10. Popular Stories – Yo La Tengo
9. The Ecstatic – Mos Def
8. Middle Cyclone – Neko Case
7. Real Estate – Real Estate
6. The Visitor – Jim O’Rourke
5. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix – Phoenix
4. Veckatimest – Grizzly Bear
3. Logos – Atlas Sound
2. Bromst – Dan Deacon
1. Merriweather Post Pavilion – Animal Collective

Honourable Mentions:

xx – The xx
Horehound – The Dead Weather
Beware – Bonnie “Prince” Billy
White Ink, Black Ink – Wheat
Bitte Orca – Dirty Projectors

Best Covers Album: Christmas in the Heart – Bob Dylan

Best Debut Album: Real Estate – Real Estate (featuring the amazing single Fake Blues.)

Best Packaging And Bonus Material: Together Through Life – Bob Dylan

Not only do you get the album and a DVD interview (cut from Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home), but also an entire, uncut episode of Dylan’s magnificent Theme Time Radio Hour. Can the existence of this remarkable recording be a harbinger of a complete collection of this series on CD? We can only hope.

Best Opening Song: Beware Your Only Friend – Bonnie “Prince” Billy

Most Annoying Opening Song: Outlaw Pete – Bruce Springsteen

I love Bruce like I love pistachios (i.e. a fuck of a lot), but damn this seemingly endless ballad is enough to make me think twice about listening to the album each time I put it on. There’s a good chance it will work better live, but here it fails to soar even with that anthemic “Can you hear me?” chorus. A rare song by The Boss that doesn’t make me want to rejoice.

Best Video: Must Be Santa – Bob Dylan

Best Singles:

10. Changes Is – Wheat

9. When I Grow Up – Fever Ray

8. My Lucky Day – Bruce Springsteen

7. Actor Out Of Work – St. Vincent

6. 15 to 20 – The Phenomenal Handclap Band

5. Quiet Dog Bite Hard – Mos Def

4. People Got A Lotta Nerve – Neko Case

3. Treat Me Like Your Mother – The Dead Weather

2. 1901 – Phoenix

1. My Girls – Animal Collective

iTunes Download Error of the Year: Embryonic – The Flaming Lips

Not sure I can really blame them for this, but the listening experience that is Embryonic is ruined by the inclusion of four bonus tracks whose tone is utterly different from the actual album. It’s possible to just listen to the album, of course, but if you’re ignorant of this tone change, the switch from Watching The Planets to UFOs Over Baghdad is jarring. An insignificant problem, but nevertheless not unlike someone dropping a pile of plates behind you while you meditate.

Best Song Featuring The Lyric “Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.”: Must Be Santa – Bob Dylan

Best Album Tracks:

10. Lion In A Coma – Animal Collective

9. Grizzly Bear – About Face

8. Useful Chamber – Dirty Projectors

7. Girlfriend – Phoenix

6. Beach – Mew

5. Nothing To Hide – Yo La Tengo

4. Middle Cyclone – Neko Case

3. The xx – VCR

2. Snookered – Dan Deacon

1. Quick Canal – Atlas Sounds feat. Laetitia Sadier

Best EP: Fall Be Kind – Animal Collective

Best Teleporting Dancer: Teleporting Dancing Dylan

Best Song Released As A Cheap Rock Band Download: People Got A Lotta Nerve – Neko Case

Most Fun Vocal Track For Rock Band: Treat Me Like Your Mother – The Dead Weather

Most Unsettling Album Cover: Embryonic - The Flaming Lips

Album That Creeped Me Out The Most: The House on the Causeway – Reigns

Okay, my Internet connection has decided to devolve into a dial-up situation, so I’ll call it a day. Next up, Best Films.

Summer Movies Poll: Readers Choice Bonanza

Many moons ago I asked readers to cast their votes for best and worst movies of the summer season circa 2009. First: Best.

• Eric Bana Is: An Especially Tetchy Romulan – 7 (25%)
• Quentin Tarantino Presents: Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece - 7 (25%)
• Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van Der Merwe’s Excellent Adventure – 4 (14%)
• That’s No Moon; It’s Hott Sam Rockwell’s Talent! – 3 (11%)
• Pixar’s The Bucket List – 4 (14%)
• Cover Me With Drool, Drop An Anvil On Me, Then Drag Me To Hell – 2 (7%)
• G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4%)
• Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) – 0 (0%)
• Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) – 0 (0%)
• When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 0 (0%)
• STREEP, TUCCI & LYNCH vs. a Blogger and her Annoying Husband – 0 (0%)
• Night at the Museum: Sound, Fury, & Nothing – 0 (0%)
• Futile and Fatuous – 0 (0%)
• Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 0 (0%)
• The Shaking [Cameras] of Pelham 123 – 0 (0%)
• Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 0 (0%)
• X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 0 (0%)
• Eric Bana Is: An Absentee Time-Travelling Husband – 0 (0%)
• The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 0 (0%)
• Terminator 4: When Third Acts Collapse – 0 (0%)
• Harry Potter And The Toenail of Effervescence – 0 (0%)
• Eric Bana Is: An Endearing Aussie Cuckold – 0 (0%)
• Final Destination: We’re Trying To Get Inside Your Eyeballs – 0 (0%)
• Zooey Hall – 0 (0%)
• Oh Will Ferrell. A TV Show Remake? We Want Anchorman 2 KTHXBAI – 0 (0%)

The number of high votes for Star Trek are no surprise at all. People have been calling for a light, fun movie with some substance during summer for years now, and Star Trek’s blindingly bright visuals and hectic tone hit the spot, disregarding the fact that all of the fun surrounds the genocide of several billion Vulcans in the middle of the film. Yay summer movies! I’m a little more surprised that Inglourious Basterds (or, as the TV spots would have us believe, Inglourious!) got that many votes. Not because it doesn’t deserve them: more because many who liked it only seemed to just about like it, not love it with a passion. Perhaps there are more of us out there who think it’s a flat-out masterpiece and one of the greatest movies of the decade. Did the former camp vote for it because they thought “good enough” made it better than everything else on the list?

It was a great summer for genre fans, with the release of two audacious low-budget SF movies that were good enough and popular enough to stop nerds complaining about the success of less intellectually ambitious mainstream SF movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and — later in the year — Avatar. Ha ha! Only kidding. Nerds will never stop being mad about mainstream filmmakers making money off their beloved genres. For a while there it felt like the only reason Moon and District 9 were being praised by nerds was that they were not Michael Bay movies, and indeed Duncan Jones’ film was the anti-thesis of big budget pyro-movies. The rush to praise them for what they were not meant it took a while for anyone to spot that there were problems with both of them. Moon’s considered pace was refreshing, but at times faltered on the wrong side of slow, and it was perhaps not as surprising as it thought it was. District 9’s problems were more glaring: the sub-plot about how Nigerian gangs dabbled in prostitution and cannibalism was horribly ill-judged. I could see where Neill Blomkamp was going with it — i.e. painting a picture of all of humanity as a broken, venal species with no compassion to spare — but by explicitly stating it was Nigerian gangs running the show in District 9, that bleak message of living creatures as selfish and brutal became unpleasantly specific.

That said, despite those flaws, both movies were terrific, and I would never argue that those flaws overshadowed the things Jones and Blomkamp got right. Moon was a lot of fun even just to look at, with those Gerry-Anderson-esque production designs and lo-tech FX. It also featured possibly the best performance of the year, with Hott Sam Rockwell giving what might be his best work ever. For that alone, I’ll be eternally grateful Jones took us on his genial ride. District 9 risked more, caused me more agita over its racial politics, but in the end thrilled me far more. With all of humanity — and Prawndom — portrayed as singularly awful, the whole movie boils down to a single act of sacrifice. The final action scene of District 9 was powerful enough to overshadow my concerns over Blomkamp’s tone-deaf error, and even managed to make me cry, completely catching me by surprise. All of that despite sitting next to the most inconsiderate woman in film-going history, who spent the entire movie narrating the onscreen events to her annoyed boyfriend, and then got pissy with me when I asked her to be quiet an hour in. The kind of behaviour that makes me wonder why I bother going to the cinema.

The other three movies gaining votes were Up (a movie I didn’t care for on first viewing due to terrible projection in a crappy NJ cinema, but loved when seen in IMAX), Drag Me To Hell (Sam Raimi’s delirious instant horror classic), and G.I. Joe: Road To Nowhere. Seeing that get a vote made my soul cry. Still, it got another vote, in the Worst Summer Movie List, as seen below:

• Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 7 (30%)
• X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 6 (26%)
• The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 4 (17%)
• When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 2 (9%)
• G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4% )
• Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) - 1 (4%)
• Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) - 1 (4%)
• Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 1 (4%)

The rest of the movies on the list got no votes, so let’s just move on. It doesn’t surprise me that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen topped this list. It had been treated like a soiled nappy long before it was even released, and though I wasn’t crazy about it, I certainly didn’t hate it either. If people really hate it that much, more power to them (and certainly whenever I think about those fucking racial-stereotype-bots I feel like putting it at the top of this list as well), but I suspect a lot of Internet commenters who rail against it just haven’t seen enough bad movies this year. Of course, if that’s the case, they’re lucky. We’ve seen so many shitty movies this year that T:ROTF doesn’t even get on our bottom twenty list, let alone bottom ten.

It certainly doesn’t beat out X-Men Origins: Wolverine as worst movie of the summer. Who’s to blame for that farrago? I’m willing to let director Gavin Hood off the hook, as his work was so often compromised by Fox executive Tom “Nerd-Sauron” Rothman. He has long interfered in the making of Fox’s slate of superhero movies and been rewarded with high box office grosses despite the shitty quality of those films. X-Men Origins was the worst yet. David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script was impossibly bad. Could there be a draft of it that wasn’t a morass of cliches and tired jokes? Did there ever exist a single line given to Sabretooth that wouldn’t make me risk breaking bones through convulsive super-cringing? Compared to this disaster, T:ROTF was a source of almost endless delight. I truly wish it killed off the X-Men movie franchise, because now it has made money we’re looking at yet more soulless, brainless movies soiling our memories of those fantastic original stories.

I also have no problem with the simply appalling Ugly Truth getting some votes, and would like to think that my renaming of it helped. Gerard Butler is not very good in that film, but he’s Rudolph Valentino compared to Katherine Heigl. Her appeal is completely alien to me. Spiky, charmless, and unable to sell even the most basic of jokes, her continued success is a mystery. I know Grey’s Anatomy is very popular, but even if every fan of that show traipsed out to the cinema to catch the latest Heigl movie, would that account for the high box office The Ugly Truth managed? (We’re talking a worldwide gross of $203m on a budget of $38m.) Rail against the success of T:ROTF all you like, but that did everything it could to attract and entertain a certain sub-section of the audience (i.e. fans of BIG). The Ugly Truth did the bare minimum to get the job done and is technically far more profitable. Yay for cheaper movies, but boo for movies that are crafted with such lazy indifference towards their audiences, that said nothing about gender politics, that think a lumbering joke about vibrating panties was classifiable as entertainment.

What else got votes? Two for Angels and Demons, which was a passable enough thriller, and was certainly more entertaining than the flat-as-Holland Da Vinci Code. I can’t get angry with it, even when it was being very silly (i.e. for much of its length). A vote for The Hangover, which ranks alongside Up In The Air as most overrated movie of the year. The one thing I liked about it — that it is a comedy with a well-developed script and fascinating initial premise — meant nothing when the jokes were so lazy and the characters so unappealing (other than Zach Galafianakis’ Alan Garner, who was a delight). Watching Graham Linehan rail against it on Twitter during the summer made me feel a lot less alone. After that we get a vote for G.I. Joe, a movie I did not like at all, and single votes for Public Enemies and G-Force, both of which I liked to varying degrees.

Thanks to everyone who voted. What now? No poll for a bit (I usually add polls after the Oscar nominations are announced), but more lists. Been working on the damn things all year.

One Last Post About That Decade List That Took Forever To Write

I have been asked to compile my misshapen and illogically calculated decade list into an easy-to-peruse straight list, which gives me a chance to highlight those inclusions from 1999 (well, those that got a major release in the UK in 1999 despite being released elsewhere first, such as Being John Malkovich, Galaxy Quest, and Princess Mononoke). Feel free to mentally remove those movies from the list if you want, and insert some of the missed movies, which I will also list below. Remember, nothing here from 2009. I’m still working on my best of the year list, though I reckon the top five are set in stone. (Movies from 1999 in red.)

106. Avalon
105. Kung Fu Hustle
104. The Mothman Prophecies
103. Moulin Rouge
102. The Rundown (aka Welcome To The Jungle)
101. Solaris
100. Mushishi
99. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
98. I Heart Huckabees
97. Shanghai Knights
96. Michael Clayton
95. Mulholland Drive
94. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
93. The Prestige
92. The Chronicles of Riddick
91. eXistenZ
90. Spartan
89. South Park: Bigger Longer &Uncut
88. Curse of the Golden Flower
87. Syriana
86. The Matrix Reloaded
85. Hot Fuzz
84. Jindabyne
83. Once
82. The Hunted
81. The Orphanage
80. The Constant Gardener
79. [Rec]
78. No Country For Old Men
77. There Will Be Blood
76. The Darjeeling Limited
75. Red Road
74. Speed Racer
73. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
72. A Scanner Darkly
71. Spirited Away
70. The Wrestler
69. Sideways
68. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
67. Spider
66. Iron Man
65. The King of Kong
64. Spider-Man 2
63. Lantana
62. Redbelt
61. Lost in Translation
60. Gomorrah
59. City of God
58. Primer
57. Inside Man
56. The Mist
55. A History of Violence
54. Waltz With Bashir
53. Pineapple Express
52. Monsters Inc.
51. Casino Royale
50. Serenity
49. Paprika
48. Hidden (Caché)
47. Idiocracy
46. Limbo
45. Capturing The Friedmans
44. Infernal Affairs
43. Lady Vengeance
42. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
41. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
40. In Bruges
39. Morvern Callar
38. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring
37. Princess Mononoke
36. Team America: World Police
35. Black Book
34. Brokeback Mountain
33. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
32. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
31. The Descent
30. The Bourne Ultimatum
29. The Insider
28. Unbreakable
27. Magnolia
26. The Fountain
25. Kung Fu Panda
24. Rushmore
23. Three Kings
22. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
21. Galaxy Quest
20. X2: X-Men United
19. Rachel Getting Married
18. Zodiac
17. Memento
16. Elephant
15. Oldboy
14. United 93
13. Munich
12. The Dark Knight
11. Ratatouille
10. Children of Men
9. Fight Club
8. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
7. Being John Malkovich
6. Lord of the Rings
5. Anchorman
4. Before Sunset
3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
2. The Incredibles
1. The Matrix

Extra Movies I Missed Out Either By Accident Or Design But Felt Deserved A Mention:

The Room
Ringu / The Ring
Way of the Gun
Birth
Joshua
Beowulf
Elf
Blade II
Hellboy 2: The Golden Army
Minority Report
Red Cliff: Part One
Battle Royale
School of Rock

2009 lists are coming up, hopefully.