{"id":1557,"date":"2009-12-21T23:54:02","date_gmt":"2009-12-21T13:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=1557"},"modified":"2014-04-26T16:59:23","modified_gmt":"2014-04-26T06:59:23","slug":"top-ten-films-of-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=1557","title":{"rendered":"Top Ten Films of 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

Its only when looking back and trying to narrow down a shortlist to ten films did I realise that 2009 has been a pretty awesome year at the cinema.\u00a0 There have been plenty of films that I enjoyed and many more supposedly great ones that I have yet to get around to watching.<\/p>\n

So I’ll kick things off with an honourable mention to the following films, all of which are awesome but I’ve chosen to omit from my list.\u00a0 You can’t go wrong watching The Cove<\/strong>, Watchmen<\/strong>, A Serious Man<\/strong>, Paranormal Activity<\/strong> or The Brothers Bloom<\/strong>.\u00a0 All of them have their merits.\u00a0 It just so happens that I watched ten films that I enjoyed more.<\/p>\n

On the other end of the spectrum, thanks to word of mouth, messageboards and Roger Ebert, I generally tend to have pretty good luck avoiding shitty films and this year was no exception.\u00a0 So I’ll just note that Bruno<\/strong> was probably the sole film I watched this year that was irredeemably bad and I would recommend avoiding wholeheartedly.<\/p>\n

With that out of the way, here are my picks for the ten best films I saw this year:<\/p>\n

\"harpot\"<\/p>\n

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think this film gets a bit of a stick because it had a pretty shitty interpretation of the book’s climactic scene involving the death of a certain high profile character.\u00a0 Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of how this film wrapped up but the weak ending aside, this is probably my favourite Harry Potter film of the series.\u00a0 Blending a family-friendly fantasy setting with the tribulations of adolescent relationships could easily have been a recipe for tedium but instead, the film strips away most of the angst from the previous three films and instead revels in humour and awkwardness of the characters and their relationships.\u00a0 The actors I think have all really found their groove playing Harry, Ron and Hermione and the special effects are now perfected to the point of creating a cogent and consistent world (too bad about the first two films).<\/p>\n

\"avatar\"<\/p>\n

Avatar<\/strong><\/p>\n

James Cameron’s blockbuster film carried more hype than it should be able to bear.\u00a0 The Most Expensive Film Ever Made, Successor To The Highest Grossing Film Ever Made and The Best Special Effects Ever should all burden the film to the point of inevitable disappointment.\u00a0 Not only that, the script is cut from the same block of cheese that made up the dialogue of Titanic.\u00a0 Despite all the odds however, Avatar is one of the most entertaining films I’ve seen in years.\u00a0 It really is a bit like Fern Gully In Space or Dances With Smurfs but that doesn’t mean its not a hell of a lot of fun also.\u00a0 In Cameron’s own words, he paints the characters with ‘a broad brush’ and instead focuses his energy on creating worlds and immersing the audience in them.<\/p>\n

For many, the film will be their introduction to 3D cinema.\u00a0 The film launched right at the turn of the decade and I wonder what things will be like years from now.\u00a0 Will 3D take off?\u00a0 Will it get introduced into home entertainment setups?\u00a0 One thing that you used to be able to count on with the film industry is a standardization in the delivery of the medium.\u00a0 Its interesting to see that as the technological arms race that exists in the video game industry starts to seep into films, it has begun to split audiences and critics.\u00a0 BBC film critic Mark Kermode appears to flatly reject 3D technology.\u00a0 So what happens when potentially half of the big blockbuster films of next year are shown in 3D?\u00a0 If Kermode rejects all of these films on the principal of the technology they use, will he have to be replaced by someone else who embraces 3D cinema?\u00a0 What happens if just as 3D cinema starts to become a mainstay, someone attempts holographic film?\u00a0 The technology driving the delivery of the medium is now suddenly as interesting as the special effects that have been used for decades in plain old 2D films.<\/p>\n

\"intheloop\"<\/p>\n

In The Loop<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although I can’t fault the faithfulness of Zack Synder’s adaptation of Watchmen<\/em>, one of the reasons I felt that film didn’t really work for me was because its politically bleak message missed its mark by about seven years.\u00a0 It really was a film that probably would’ve resonated better if it was released around the time of the Iraq invasion during the Bush administration, not during the initial period of Barack Obama’s presidency where there was a renewed sense of optimism in the White House.<\/p>\n

Instead, I found Armando Iannuci’s In The Loop<\/em> to be the perfect tonic to compliment the absurdities of global politics in 2009.\u00a0 In a year where political analysts spend incredible amounts of coverage on Birthers and Death Panels and we saw the rise and rise of Glen Beck talking points dominating the political landscape, a film that sharply skewered insecure politicians and hormonally challenged interns really struck a chord with me.\u00a0 Its incredibly funny, has a hugely talented and diverse cast of American and British actors and falls in a genre that is rarely attempted and hardly ever done with such a degree of success.<\/p>\n

\"moon\"<\/p>\n

Moon<\/strong><\/p>\n

Duncan Jones’ debut film Moon<\/em> was one of the best surprises of the year.\u00a0 The aesthetic of the film reminds me a lot of classic Seventies and Eighties sci-fi films where there was a greater sense of physicality and there isn’t the feeling of hollowness you can sometimes get when a production gets overreliant on computer effects.\u00a0 Sam Rockwell is fantastic as the lonely worker who is about to wrap up three years on the Moon with no one other than a computer drone voiced by Kevin Spacey to keep him company.\u00a0 Best of all, the film completely veered away from what I predicted the ending to be.\u00a0 More people need to see this film.<\/p>\n

\"extract\"<\/p>\n

Extract<\/strong><\/p>\n

This sort of film is custom made for me.\u00a0 For some reason, Mike Judge’s works (King of the Hill, Idiocracy<\/em>) really appeal to me, even if deep down, I know the films are actually rather terrible (Idiocracy, Beavis and Butthead Do America<\/em>).\u00a0 I think I just like the general ethos behind his films:\u00a0 that most people are complete morons.\u00a0 Judge has a knack for writing good sympathetic characters with funny one liners and even if the whole film doesn’t quite come together at the end, who cares?\u00a0 Extract<\/em> is more or less the same as his previous films in this regard.\u00a0 I love Jason Bateman in pretty much no matter what he does, Mila Kunis is smoking hot and the film consistently managed to get laughs out of me.\u00a0 Whats not to like?<\/p>\n

\"wildthings\"<\/p>\n

Where The Wild Things Are<\/strong><\/p>\n

This film is pretty goddamn depressing I must say.\u00a0 The Wild Things that Max comes across in the film all seem to be a bunch of manic-depressives and oversized bi-polar teddy bears.\u00a0 Yet Where The Wild Things Are<\/em> does it in that really skillful sort of way that Spike Jonze is capable of, where its still incredibly gratifying to watch and because of the melancholy, the moments where the film allows itself a bit of sweetness are really affecting.\u00a0 Apparently it took three years to make this wretched beast but its good soul food nonetheless.<\/p>\n

\"dragme\"<\/p>\n

Drag Me To Hell<\/strong><\/p>\n

Who knew that declining a gypsie lady her request for an extension on her mortage repayment could cause so many problems?\u00a0 This is the best possible thing that Sam Raimi could have done after making the thoroughly underwhelming Spider-man 3<\/em>.\u00a0 The film’s horror\/comedy blend harkens back to the good old days when life was simple and Raimi was making fantastic films like Evil Dead 2<\/em>.\u00a0 In some ways, this film is so entertaining, you wonder whether it would’ve been better if Raimi never got involved with the Spider-man<\/em> franchise and he’d spent his years pumping schlocky horror films.\u00a0 No one makes them quite like Raimi and this is one of his best.\u00a0 This crazy old lady was one of my favourite characters of this year.<\/p>\n

\"basterds\"<\/p>\n

Inglourious Basterds<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another director who had an awesome return to form this year was Quentin Tarantino.\u00a0 Inglourious Basterds<\/em> raises tensions to levels I’d rarely experienced watching films before.\u00a0 Although there are only actually a handful of scenes in this film, many of them are expertly crafted mental games of cat and mouse where the audience watches with baited breathe to see whether the Nazis catch out the bluffs of the Jews in hiding and the Allied soldiers who embark on a mission to assasinate Hitler.\u00a0 The back and forth dialogue is incredibly tighten woven and and there is an amazing ensemble cast acts it out superbly.<\/p>\n

\"up\"<\/p>\n

Up<\/strong><\/p>\n

It had me welling up with tears in the first ten minutes.\u00a0 Pixar work their midas touch again with the story of a grieving old man who embarks on a trip to South America via balloons attached to his house so that he can live out the dreams he planned with his deceased wife.\u00a0 This film is basically a morality lesson about what is important in life and is anchored by the emotional journey of an octogenarian who is coping with grief and a sense of abandonment.\u00a0 Somehow Pixar turned that into a children’s film and box office success.\u00a0 Their track record for quality remains exceptional (even moreso if you pretend Cars<\/em> doesn’t exist).<\/p>\n

\"district9\"<\/p>\n

District 9<\/strong><\/p>\n

District 9<\/em> is my favourite film of the year.\u00a0 I didn’t know what to expect going in but I do know that I was more entertained by this film than any other in 2009.\u00a0 Its mockumentary footage introduces us to a unique near future world inhabited by aliens who visit South Africa and then it develops into one of the most exhilerating action films I’ve seen in a long time.\u00a0 There’s not much more I care to add beyond what I wrote in my review when I saw the film originally.\u00a0 District 9<\/em> just blew me away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Its only when looking back and trying to narrow down a shortlist to ten films did I realise that 2009 has been a pretty awesome year at the cinema.\u00a0 There have been plenty of films that I enjoyed and many more supposedly great ones that I have yet to get around to watching. So I’ll …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1802,15,5],"tags":[470,471],"class_list":["post-1557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-of-the-year-movies","category-blog","category-films","tag-film","tag-top-ten"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1557"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14014,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557\/revisions\/14014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}