My Favorite Movies of 2009

By Josh Hornbeck

I watch a lot of movies. For anyone who knows me, that kind of goes without saying. Unfortunately, my wife and I don’t get out to the theaters nearly as often as we’d like, so we end up missing a good portion of the truly great films that are released in a given year. So, as always, my list of 2009 films is probably lacking (if I had been able to see it before the first of the year, Up in the Air would most definitely have a place here), but here are twenty of the films I did see this year that I just couldn’t bring myself to leave out.

(500) Days of Summer – It belongs up there with some of my favorite romantic comedies. Both whimsical and heartbreaking, this exuberant film sketches an honest portrait of unrequited love and relationships that were never meant to last. It’s touching, funny, and one of the most enjoyable movies I saw all year.

Avatar – I wanted to hate Avatar, I really did. It’s big-budget spectacle by the self-proclaimed “King of the World” James Cameron. But, I couldn’t help myself. It isn’t just the dazzling special-effects or the thrilling actions sequences you can actually follow, I actually found myself caring about the characters – live-action and computer generated alike.

Away We Go – A beautiful little film that was, in my opinion, unfairly trashed by most critics, Away We Go is the story of a young couple who are about to have a child and begin to worry that they don’t have their lives together. So they go on a cross-country odyssey to visit friends and family and discover that everyone else is just as messed up as they are. It perfectly taps into young adult anxiety about compromise, settling down, and the future.

Coraline – While it may not be appropriate for the youngest viewers, Coraline is one of those magical family films that manages to delight, unsettle, thrill, and frighten. Whereas most children’s fantasy encourages escape from the real world, the film’s eponymous heroine discovers that living in the fantasy and hiding from her problems is dangerous. In the end, we’re encouraged to face the troubles of life and make the real world a better place.

The English Surgeon – Powerful documentary about British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh who regularly travels to the Ukraine to lend his expertise and treat patients that the Ukrainian medical system believe are untreatable. His friendship with a local doctor is touching but what’s truly fascinating (and heartbreaking) are the life-and-death decisions he must make regarding treatment that would never be an issue for him back home.

Fados – Surprising and delightful performance documentary highlighting the world of Portuguese fado music. Singers, dancers, and musicians offer everything from traditional fado ballads to very modern interpretations of the style. Director Carlos Saura stages each unique performance beautifully, linking the past to the present and providing an enchanting introduction to the music of Portugal.

Fantastic Mr. Fox – Another children’s film that is just as much for adults as it is for the kids. Wes Anderson, the idiosyncratic director of such brilliant films as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, has crafted an exquisite world of minute detail for this throwback to traditional stop-motion animation. There are breath-taking moments of beauty and the characters’ existential questions of identity and belonging provide a surprising depth to this family farce.

Food, Inc. – An important documentary that shows how the mechanized mass-production of our food has led to enormous problems throughout America. Yes, the film comes down pretty hard on food corporations, but it really helps us connect the food we eat with the places and methods with which it is produced. And it helps illustrate the fact that a one dollar hamburger has a much greater cost than that dollar in the long run.

The Girlfriend Experience – Steven Soderbergh’s experimental film fractures its narrative structures into little shards of isolated moments in the life of a high class escort and her boyfriend. The technique is a perfect metaphor for the brokenness in these individual’s lives. While it’s a very sad look at hollow and empty lives, what’s even more revealing is the way it causes us to reflect on the subtler ways we all can end up prostituting ourselves.

Gomorrah – An engaging and energetic crime drama that looks at the poverty-stricken slums of Naples, Italy. Through five interconnected stories, we see individuals from all walks of life sucked into an all too real world of crime and corruption. Even in the midst of the film’s gritty realism, director Matteo Garrone suggests that all is not lost – there is still the possibility for hope and redemption.

Goodbye Solo – A simultaneously joyful and heartbreaking movie about the unlikely friendship between a man determined to end his life and the cab driver who is desperate to understand. Filled with simple moments and careful observation, it made me smile and laugh throughout. The film’s quiet and profound ending moved me to tears. This is what great filmmaking is all about.

The Informant! – I love the fact that Steven Soderbergh can release two wildly different movies in the same year. With The Informant! he gives us a delicious piece of whimsical insanity as he tells the story of Mark Whitacre, a corporate whistleblower who spends so much time lying to everyone that, in the end, even the complicated internal monologue he uses to distinguish between fact and faction begins to fall apart. It’s a fantastic character study and a very funny film.

Inglourious Basterds – Set “Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France,” Quentin Tarantino’s latest masterpiece is at once a surreal revenge fantasy, a love letter to the art of cinema, and a complicated indictment of our own sense of moral superiority. No one knows how to write dialogue like Tarantino, and as always, he remains able to draw out the tension in a scene until it’s almost unbearable. It’s thrilling and explosive, funny and horrifying.

Ponyo – Hayao Miyazaki is, perhaps, the greatest living animator working in film today. And his latest film, Ponyo, is just as delicate and beautiful as his greatest work. It’s an upbeat and magical retelling of “The Little Mermaid,” full of stirring images and tranquil beauty. The children in Miyazaki’s films are treated with such generosity and respect while the adults (with a few grumpy exceptions) are never the stern and repressive authority figures we see in most American family movies. It’s delightful and absolutely charming.

Munyurangabo – When I first say Munyurangabo, I really wanted to love it, but although I was able to appreciate the film, it never quite came together for me. But slowly, in the weeks since that first viewing, this special little film has kept coming back to mind. It’s the beautiful, powerful story of a Rwandan orphan crossing the country with a friend to kill the man who brutally slaughtered his father. And yet, it’s about so much more – redemption, vengeance, forgiveness. It’s a film that continues to haunt me.

Revanche – Another foreign film dancing around ideas of revenge and forgiveness, Revanche is a stunning, enigmatic, and emotionally gut-wrenching experience. An ex-con and his girlfriend attempt to flee their desperate existence, but a botched bank robbery tragically foils their plans and entwines their lives with those of a police officer and his wife. It’s as raw, moving, and suspenseful as films get.

Star Trek – Director J.J. Abrams reinvented the aging (and ailing) Star Trek franchise in this summer blockbuster. While it may not have pleased all of the Star Trek purists out there, he created a skillful, rollicking adventure that was the best summer popcorn movie of the year.

Up – Up’s opening montage is among the greatest and most moving pieces of cinema I’ve seen in the last twelve months. And the rest of the film continues to prove just how consistent the Pixar production team is over all these years. It’s very funny, full of action and adventure, but at the same time an emotional depth and resonance uncommon in family animation. It’s the best of Pixar, through and through.

Watchmen – Audiences and critics may not have been able to get past the complicated plot and the giant glowing penis, but this adaptation of Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel takes a critique of 1980’s comic books and uses it to explore many of the conventions we find in modern superhero movies. The casual kung-fu violence of Batman and Spider-Man is shown here in all of its brutality and the heroes’ compulsion to dress up in costume is seen as the psychological dysfunction it truly is.

Where the Wild Things Are – In adapting Maurice Sendak’s beloved children’s book, director Spike Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers manage to craft one of the few family films that captures all of the complicated emotions of childhood. The confusion, the fear, the uncertainty, the bouts of violence – it’s all there in a magical and heartfelt film of wit, feeling, and wild abandon.

Playing Catch-Up
Every year, I find that most of my viewing ends up being older films I never had a chance to see in the theaters – they might not have played in Seattle, I might not have had enough money to go see them when they first came out, I might not have even been born when they first came out. But oftentimes, these films I catch up on are some of the greatest cinematic experiences I’ll have all year.

Director Sidney Lumet is, at the age of 85, still one of the greatest American filmmakers and he proved it again in 2007’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a heartbreaking tale of sibling rivalry, greed, and revenge.

Closely Watched Trains (1966) was part of the Czech New Wave of filmmaking and is a sad but very funny story about the expectations of masculinity set during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) is one of the director’s finest films, exploring marriage, fidelity, and murder through the dual lenses of comedy and tragedy.

Mexico’s Deep Crimson (1997) and America’s The Honeymoon Killers (1969) both tell the shocking true story of amoral and jealous lovers who travel the country marrying and murdering rich, lonely women.

Murder and marriage are also the focus of the great Italian film Divorce Italian Style (1962), a dark comedy about dissatisfaction and the ways we try to fill our restlessness and discontent.

I saw some really fantastic documentaries over the last year: For All Mankind (1989) tells the story of our trip to the moon through interviews and actual footage taken by the astronauts; Man on Wire (2008) is a taut thrill ride that chronicles a tightrope walker’s attempt to perform a high-wire routine in between the Twin Towers; Salesman (1968) is a devastating look at the desperate lives of door-to-door Bible salesmen as they struggle make ends meet; and finally, Standard Operating Procedure (2008) is Errol Morris’ blistering look at the Abu Ghraib prison scandal through candid and revealing interviews with nearly all of the men and women involved.

Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) is a surreal and sublime retelling of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, presented as a silent ballet that is beautiful to watch and a brilliant metaphor for xenophobic hysteria.

Charlie Chaplin’s all-talking and all-sound film, The Great Dictator (1940), is an important and very enjoyable comedy made in the midst of World War II.

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) is a delightful film about a good woman and the ways she interacts with a bitter and sometimes angry world.

If I had seen In Bruges (2008) when it was first released in theaters, it would most certainly have been my favorite film of the year. It’s a violent, funny, shocking, and powerful story of redemption.

Let the Right One In (2008), another film I missed in theaters, is the perfect antidote to Twilight, a vampire story that is creepy and twisted, but sweet and very fun all the same.

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) is a scary and unsettling psychological horror film about the effects of masculine aggression and the slow descent into madness.

The Steel Helmet (1951) was one of Samuel Fuller’s first films, a brilliant and scathing look at the effects of war and an indictment of rugged American individualism.

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008) is as strange a film as you’re likely to find, a surreal and elegant meditation on the very innermost parts of our lives.

A quietly horrifying post-apocalyptic tale, Michael Haneke’s The Time of the Wolf (2003) is the antithesis to American films of the same ilk – quiet and haunting instead of bombastic and forgettable.

The Vanishing (1988), a frightening thriller from the Netherlands, is a look at obsessions and the inability to move on after a moment of grief.

Grief is also the main motivation in Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), but Bergman allows for sorrow, redemption and grace in this tragic tale of bloody revenge.

In addition to being a stinging indictment of U.S. immigration policy, The Visitor (2008) is also a rich, warm character study about finding joy and passion in your life.

Finally, I went through a period of immersing myself into the films (and obsessions) of Werner Herzog. His fictional films and pseudo-documentaries – Cobra Verde (1987), Encounters at the End of the World (2008), Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski (1999), Woyzeck (1979) – are portraits of obsession, and the documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams (1982) shows that the director is just as relentless as many of his characters.

Revisiting Old Favorites
Of course, there were quite a few other films I saw this year, many of which I’d seen before and was revisiting with family and friends. The 400 Blows (1959) is still just as brilliant and moving as the first time I saw it. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) is a beautiful and elegant film that reads almost like a prose poem. Watching old Disney classics – Pinocchio (1940) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) – and modern Pixar classics – Ratatouille (2007) and WALL-E (2008) – on Blu-Ray has rekindled my love for these brilliant animated features. With Gone Baby Gone (2008), Ben Affleck proved that he was a better director than he is an actor. Hitchcock is always a delight to revisit, especially with The 39 Steps (1935), The Birds (1963), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Ang Lee may be best remembered for Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but by far I think that his portrait of brokenness in the midst of the sexual revolution, The Ice Storm (1997), is his greatest and most insightful work. Stanley Kubrick was one of the most consistently brilliant filmmakers for over four decades, as evidenced in his chilling masterpieces A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980). I think I’m going to have to watch the sweet and delightful Once (2007) at least one or two times a year, just to bask in the glow of the film’s music and romance. Persepolis (2007) is a very funny, very insightful, and very personal look at Iran through Marjane Satrapi’s animated autobiography. And finally, Ingmar Bergman’s films hold up time and time again, especially his brilliant and moving look at the need to celebrate life against the fear of death in The Seventh Seal (1958).

Introduction
My Favorite Television of 2009
My Favorite Books of 2009
My Favorite Music, Theatre, and Visual Art of 2009

(Posted 01/11/2010)