For a stay-at-home reader like me, seeing two films each week, one hundred annually, represents a major challenge, one I’m only gradually tackling. Even a hundred movies a year is barely sufficient for one to aspire to be a film fan. Over 2009, I managed to view 54 current or near-current movies, so I guess I should be disappointed, but I’m not. We do the best we can, I tried hard throughout the year, and 201o will be better, won’t it?
And the films I was privileged to view! From a bumper year of film, here are the highlights:
- The Hurt Locker (see my mini review), written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is simultaneously a pulsing thriller, an indictment of the occupation of Iraq, and a very human examination of risk taking
- Surely claymation cannot evince tears? Adam Elliott’s Mary & Max (review), pairing a geeky Melbourne teen girl with a middle-aged, obese Asperger’s suffer in New York, is sad and funny and ultimately redeeming
- In the Loop (review) presents a rapier-sharp satire of the British decision to invade Iraq, raising more belly laughs for me than any other film last year
- Disgrace, directed with great control by Steve Jacobs, is better than the underlying J. M. Coetzee novel. An unsparing window into the harsh reality of modern South African life, it features John Malkovich in one of his best performances
- Blessed (review), partly written by one of my favourite novelists, Christos Tsiolkas, highlights the huge talents of director Ana Kokkinos. A multi-character drama about street kids and their mothers, dovetailed with elegant precision, Blessed moved me enough to make it my favourite film of the year
- Anvil! The Story of Anvil, is one of three terrific documentaries transformed into art via narrative mastery. Director Sacha Gervasi chronicles the career of a metal band that perennially almost succeeds but never does. Who would have thought heavy metal could show the trials and triumphs of creativity so luminously?
- Standard Operating Procedure (review) by legendary documentary maker Errol Morris, a companion to the scorching same-name book by Philip Gourevich, is art and expose (once more of the Iraqi debacle, clearly a 2009 theme for me, isn’t it?) at its peak
- The Cove (review) inserts the tension of a Robert Ludlum thriller into a documentary expose of the baseless, bestial slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese seaside town
- Of the two Coen Brothers films, A Serious Man was displaced by the subversively funny and wonderfully tightly plotted Burn After Reading (review), which elicits out-of-the box performances from John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, George Clooney, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt
- Maybe I didn’t see enough foreign films but only one, the fascinating, affirming Departures, made my highlights list. A brilliant look at Japanese funeral body preparation