Culture

Ten Best Films Of 2009
Holly really liked Paranormal Activity!
By Holly Grigg-Spall
1. Where The Wild Things Are
This dreamy wonder of a movie made me very proud to have once loaned my Internet cable to Dave Eggers while working as an intern in the McSweeney's offices.
2. Fantastic Mr. Fox
Such a jolly tale, handsomely animated and run through with an infectious energy. The badger in the skeleton t-shirt is cute as hell, too.
3. An Education
Carey Mulligan is fantastic as the starry-eyed young girl in this British drama, a performance that will likely glean her an Oscar nomination. She's so dazzling, that her real-life romance with half-wit Shia LaBeouf seems positively bizarre.

In this sure-fire Oscar contender, George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man hired by companies to fire their employees. Or rather George Clooney plays George Clooney as a man criss-crossing the country to let people go in the smoothest and easiest way possible. The film begins, and ends, with a collage of actors and non-actors responding to being told that their position is no longer available. Clooney breaks the news, takes their abuse and then offers consolation with platitudes about the possibilities that await them once they cast off the chains of full-time employment.
Some ask in exasperation, who are you? To which, we always expect him to reply, “I'm the movie star George Clooney and I'll be using all the winking, side-smiling and head-tilting charm I've got to make you feel a whole lot better about the economic recession.” And this actually works for the full run time, plus an hour or so.

Ye gad! Guy Ritchie made a kid's movie in the same vein as Pirates of the Caribbean. Sherlock Holmes gives the feeling of a Disney ride – this Ritchie number features uncharacteristically straightforward storytelling and zero cursing. As Sherlock homes would say, “It boggles the mind.”
In the action-packed opening scene, Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) are on the tail of occult “sorcerer” Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). Their pursuit continues beyond the grave, hampered by criminal seductress Iren Adler (Rachel McAdams) and Scotland Yard's semi-bumbling Chief Inspector Lestrade (Eddie Marsan). This is not the sort of intellectual brain teasers brought forth by of other Holmes sagas nor does it feature the super sleuthing of past Holmes performances that range from the likes of Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Christopher Plummer, Nicol Williamson and even Michael Caine. Rather, Downey's depiction is a buff, brawling, self-medicating, masochistic and supremely reclusive Holmes, humorously conducting experiments on himself and Watson's bulldog.

Not often these days do we get a real “event” movie, as they are known in the business. Event movies are those that fill the theaters, provoke months of build up, endless post-viewing debate and are remembered years later. Titanic was an event movie. Most of us, even those only passively plugged into mainstream culture, will have a small folder in our minds dedicated to Leo-mania.
For all director James Cameron's assumed arrogance, he clearly understands the basics of good PR. When you pitch ideas with not just big, but record-breaking budgets, the sell means much more than the script. The frenzied build up to the release of his over a decade-in-the-making project Avatar assured, at the least, a successful opening weekend and, therefore, the money to fund his next venture. This is the kind of movie people want to have an opinion on, and it doesn't matter to Cameron whether that opinion is positive or negative as long as they care enough to pay for a ticket or two.

Director John Hillcoat likes dirt. His gritty western The Proposition and The Ghost of the Civil Dead, a dark and macabre look at brutal violence in Australian prisons, both feature flies buzzing around people's heads. Hillcoat has tackled all of his movies with collaborator Nick Cave either writing the script and/or scoring the film's music and now they undertake another dismal worldview in The Road, Cormack McCarthy's (No Country for Old Men) desperately bleak saga of the last men (and women) on earth.