2009 in movies

The main problem with being an avid fan of Mark Kermode and the Kermode/Mayo "Wittertainment" brand is trying to avoid basing my opinions exclusively upon his. I try not to always agree with him, but such is the strength of his character that I find myself
absorbing his views by an odd kind of osmosis.

Take Inglourious Basterds, for instance. Even though I really enjoyed the movie and it had those two incredible sequences (the opening one in the house and the one in the bar), I share every criticism the good Doctor made of that film and its creator - overlong, undisciplined, self-indulgent in the extreme, etc. It's just that I love Tarantino's style so much that I can forgive him an awful lot (I've not seen Death Proof, to be fair).

Basterds wasn't my film of the year though. Film studios and critics everywhere will be devastated to know that I haven't really decided on one. All the big Oscar-fodder came along in January in what has become the annual tradition, and Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler were both very enjoyable in their own ways - the latter perhaps wouldn't have made such an impression if it wasn't based around one of my pet interests. I found Milk rather average despite Sean Penn's tremendous central performance, and I didn't bother with Benjamin Button as it really does sound like nothing more than Forrest Gump with pretentions (oops, channelling Doctor K again).


Up was clearly amazing. Everyone has quite rightly focused on the emotional impact of the marital montage sequence (for "emotional impact", read: I struggled not to blub like a baby), but what really struck me was the wild imagination which went into the bulk of the movie. A big old multicoloured bird, a house being pulled along by balloons, talking dogs with malfunctioning voice boxes - if you stopped and thought about any of this you'd surely conclude it was total nonsense, not to mention defying just about every law of physics going. But Pixar are so cunning in the way they weave an emotional story arc from beginning to end that you are utterly absorbed in their world.

I saw some good foreign-language stuff, most notably Le Premier Jour du Reste de ta Vie, a lovely, perfectly judged French family comedy/drama. Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces was one of his lesser works but still provided some high melodrama and a reliably excellent turn from Penelope Cruz (she's basically great in Spanish films, terrible in American ones). One which really disappointed me though was 35 Shots of Rum, which I found to be off-puttingly slow and opaque, despite the wonderful sequence where the characters dance along to Night Shift.

Dancing of a far more visceral kind occurred in Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold's raw study of the crappiness of a working-class council estate existence. Young Katie Jarvis had never acted before and was apparently "discovered" whilst having an argument with her boyfriend on a train platform, which goes a long way to explain the truthfulness of her performance.

Another working class slice-of-life piece was Ken Loach's Looking For Eric. I've not seen most of Loach's films so I've no idea whether this was as gritty or hard-hitting as a typical Loach movie should be - all I know is that I appreciated it as a lovely, surreal postmodern fairytale.


I pretty much stayed away from blockbusters this year, having finally reached the Grumpy Old Man threshold whereafter I'm no longer impressed by whizz-bang FX and OTT action sequences and suchlike by themselves and will sit and moan "where's the bloody story?" throughout instead. I mean, Avatar - a film which even its defenders admit has a hackneyed plot and awful dialogue, but ooooooh look at the cool blue aliens! Er... no thanks. Being a sad old Trekkie/Trekker/whatever though, I did go and see Star Trek, and lo! it was actually funny and smart and exciting and hey, maybe it did piss on Gene Roddenberry's legacy a little but really, did you see the last couple of movies?? If the Trek franchise is going to lumber on then this was exactly the shake-up it needed.

Talking of funny, The Hangover certainly wasn't, at least to me. Films of all genres rely on you connecting with the characters and buying into their world, and comedies particularly so. I couldn't stand the protagonists in that film, but completely rooted for the stoners and slackers of of Adventureland, for example - a far smarter and funnier film. Poor Jesse Eisenberg already seems fated to be typecast in that kind of lovably wimpish loser role in Land-suffixed movies though (see also his turn in Zombieland).

I couldn't buy into An Education either. This film was praised to the skies but because I did not care one iota for any of its central characters it left me completely cold. I'll grant that Nick Hornby's script contains some very funny lines. And Carey Mulligan's performance is fantastic too, but this is part of the problem - her Jenny is so exasperatingly precocious that I just wanted to scream at her the whole way through. Plus Peter Sarsgaard looks so much like a young Kiefer Sutherland that it proves fatally distracting.

Anyway, that just about covers everything I saw this year off the top of my head. Having said all that, my abiding movie memory of 2009 was sitting in the cinema tent at Glastonbury, watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off while sitting next to a drunken fool who kept insisting that Michael Jackson had just died. I didn't even believe him at the time, but yes - in answer to the question of "where were you when you heard that fateful news", no doubt to be asked ad infinitum in years to come, I can say that I was in a tent full of drunk people going "Bueller... Bueller..." all night. It's a funny old world.