By Loc
The debate raged on for quite some time. Is 2009 the end of the decade? Well, of course it is! But wasn’t 2000 the end of the millennium? No, that was 1999. But when you count to ten, you go 1-10, not 0-9. Good point. These are the thoughts that roared through my mind as I violently fought with myself to determine the correct temporal assessment of the first decade in the 2000s. Yes, this means I have too much time on my hands. Regardless, 2009 will mark the end of the decade, after all, the 80s and 90s are defined as 80-89 and 90-99 respectively. Just because the whole millennial thing gets wonky doesn’t change common practice. So it is said, so it is done! What does that mean? Decade in Review is coming!! This might take a little longer, as I need to do some heavy lifting with filling in the missing reviews. Plus, we want to give some time to let the end of 2009 sink in. But its coming!
Back to 2009, a year if there ever was one. You could say that about any year, and you should. More precisely, 2009 was marked by a nondescript winter, a pretty blazing spring and summer, and then a whimper of a fall. I don’t recall another year where a three month gap dominated the fall like this one. But that was fine since it let me catch up on the DVD viewing of all the crappy movies I missed in the winter. It’s like a karmic movie viewing cycle.
OK, enough rambling, on to the numbers. We saw a solid 25 movies this year, or just under 1 every other week. If we could have squeezed in Sherlock Holmes this holiday season, we would have hit that magical 26 mark, but alas, pithy Robert Downey Jr hijinks will have to wait. Yet, 25 isn’t a bad haul, considering last year was 22, and the year before was 29, which included the infamous Summer Movie Blockbuster contest.
Of the top 10 grossing flicks, we caught 6, with Transformers, Harry Potter, and Star Trek being the notable blockbusters. Some that we missed: Twilight, Monsters Vs Aliens, and Ice Age 4. BMF has a lot of missing holes it needs to fill, but the most recent are the Twilight flicks. It pains me to admit that, because it means I will be forced to partake in the mania that is pale English guy and pale Emo chick pretending to be vampires. Sigh, it’ll come, I promise…I guess.
Out of the top 20, we caught 11, so a little more than 50%. Stuff like GI Joe, Fast and Furious, and The Proposal were beneficiaries of $1 rental boxes at the market. Otherwise we’d be sitting on a very low top 20 haul.
It was a weird year because we saw flicks that just missed the arbitrary cutoffs in each bracket. For instance, we never look at the top 30, but there was a Terminator 4, District 9, and Inglorious Basterds. In all, maybe the box office was more evenly distributed this year than past years. Whatever the case, there was a nice mix of movies that landed beyond the top 20 range, including I Love You, Man, 17 Again, Bruno, and Bride Wars. Actually, most of those movies sucked, so poo on me for wasting my time.
On to the awards!
The Why Bother Award:
I know this can easily be extended to the majority of movies every year, but this year was particularly ripe in crap. The Boondock Saints II…really? Because we needed another installment of this? Really?? How about Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li? First of all, I doubt Chun Li is legend…ary. Second, Street Fighter does have a built-in fanbase, and if properly presented, I bet a flick could do well. Proper presentation doesn’t include a blond-haired Bison, a Black Eyed Pea Vega, or anything else in that stupid movie. But the award goes to…Dragonball Evolution!
Congratulations on taking a property like Dragonball, turning it into absolute horsecrap, and releasing it with all the enthusiasm of a vegan at McDonalds. Seriously, why even bother making a movie if you completely destroy the property and ruin any chance of appealing to A) the hardcore fans or B) casual audiences. And deservingly so, this is probably the most press the flick received…and that’s actually punishment for me to have to write it, ugh!
The Just Because It’s Dark Doesn’t Make It Good Award:
No suspense here, Observe and Report wins this one with my absolute hatred attached as a bonus gift. A flick about a misguided, highly delusional loser mall cop, this movie veered from satire to misplaced fantasy to random idiocacy, and that was in the first 10 minutes. There was nothing redeeming about this flick, it wasn’t clever, it wasn’t smart, it wasn’t dumb, it wasn’t funny, it wasn’t disturbing, the only thing it was: annoying. I’ve hated some movies in this life, and Observe and Report just joined the club. How bad is a movie when it gets you to consider watching Paul Blart: Mall Cop because you think it would be better?
How sad is this, I just realized I never posted a review of this flick. And I remember why: because reliving the movie to write a review would have been too painful and masochistic. That’s how bad this movie is.
The Movie That I Almost Saw And Never Would Have Considered It Before Award:
Michael Jackson: This Is It. Yeah, that’s how weird this flick became for BMF. No, there is no overwhelming, tear-inducing love towards Michael Jackson. And while many have said it, I will reiterate: it’s eerily strange that the public gave this entertainer a morality “pass” after his shocking death. However, the reviews were strong and the fascination with true performers excelling at their craft is always an interesting proposition. In the end, we never saw it, but we did consider it, which was saying a lot.
The Way To Regress Women’s Rights Award:
Hello Bride Wars, how are you today? Sure, the subject matter of films continues to amaze me. Romantic comedies centered around divorces: Definitely, Maybe. Thrillers built on completely fictionalized religious portrayals: The Da Vinci Code. I mean, we had The Passion of The Christ a couple years back, and now we have a mullet-sporting Tom Hanks running around with Magneto and Amelie? Weird. But Bride Wars helped reinforce the worst stereotypes of women since we were debating over Suffrage Rights. Yup, Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway collected paychecks for playing superficial, materially possessed idiots warring over a wedding reservation at the fabled Plaza Hotel. Seriously, you could try to come up with a more offensive plot, but you wouldn’t succeed. One quick hint to Hollywood: when the audience wants to all the characters to perish in a fiery blaze and consume all the vapidness spewed forth, that’s not a good sign.
The Lack Of Conviction Award:
Watchmen, or specifically Zach Snyder. You recreate the hallowed story in almost frame-by-frame detail, but you cop out in the end because it’s not a cinematic finale? Um, none of it is cinematic, but you still filmed it. In the end, there’s only one thing to say: where’s the f’in squid?
The Roger Rabbit Scene Stealer Award:
There’s a lot of bad things about X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The story is horrible, some of the casting is bad, the Airwolf cameo is hilarious, but one scene encapsulates the entire effort. When Wolverine is admiring his claws in the bathroom, it’s straight out of a Looney Tunes, Space Jam, Roger Rabbit scene. The claws are gigantically funny, he sharpens them like Goofy getting ready for a meal, then we chops up the sink accidentally. Holy crap, it was bad just retyping that. I guess it’s good that Disney bought Marvel, these types of mash-ups will be better in the future!
The Worst Movie of 2009:
Looking back at the awards, there wasn’t a whole lot of noteworthy stuff for 2009. After all, Will Smith didn’t even make an appearance in this year’s award ceremony! And honestly, Observe and Report or Bride Wars were probably the worst movies of the year. But this year, for BMF, two flicks hold wrestled this title from the most unworthy contenders.
Your winners: Transformers and GI Joe. How could this be, Transformers was the number one grossing movie of the year! I don’t care, this goes back to killing childhood memories. Transformers and GI Joe were arguably the most popular toylines of the 80s. And in 2009, Hollywood created ungodly pieces of horsecrap and presented it to you as “feature” films. Nope, these were horrible. They made you dumber from watching them. They lowered the bar of quality flicks. And worse, they took the easiest way out to placate the studios. Why make a cooler, deliberate movie with a good story and a great cast? It’s easier to throw poop at the screen and trick people into watching it. Seriously, you could treat the material with more conviction and create viable franchises. Or you could deliver robots with testicles and Cobra Commander played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Thank you Stephen Sommers and Michael Bay, you helped sully my innocent childhood memories with mindless drivel.
And moving on to more positive notes! The top 3 movies of the year!!
The little indie sci-fi flick that made good. It was funny how the mainstream press latched onto the “political allegory” aspect. Yes, there was that, for about 15 minutes. Then it was a full-on kick in the pants, alien weapons, man-on-the-run ride. There was some fun gross-out moments, some fun intense showdowns, some fun video-game weapon displays, some fun mech-suit fighting, and overall, entertaining stuff. This is what the Halo movie might have been if the studios didn’t get stupid and refuse to allow Neill Blomkamp to direct. Once they forced him, producer Peter Jackson told the studios take a long dive off a short pier, and told Blomkamp to direct something else, and District 9 was the result. Nice job idiot studios!
Wow, what a surprise. Quentin Tarantino hit the scene with the Reservoir Dogs and followed that up with the groundbreaking Pulp Fiction nearly two decades ago. Not only did Pulp Fiction reintroduce John Travolta to mainstream success, which can be a mixed proposition with crap like Wild Hogs nowadays, not only did it make Samuel L Jackson’s BMF character his trademark, not only did it reinvigorate a waning Bruce Willis career, Pulp Fiction changed the indie-scene forever. It brought an underground story to light, it mixed violence with dialogue, and it made “indie” flicks the vehicles for mainstream actors to chew on some “real” scenery.
After that, you had a bunch of pet projects that were “eh”. Sure, you could see the Tarantino touches in the dialogue or the scenes, but stuff like Jackie Brown and Death Proof were average at best. Even Kill Bill, while good, was never astounding. And there was always talk of a WWII flick that he was going to make, but it always seemed to be in the distance.
Inglorious Basterds might be the best Quentin Tarantino film. Bold statement, I know. Basterds is all the good Tarantino with very little bad Tarantino. Good: great actors chewing up scenes, like Christoph Waltz’s Colonel Landa. If he doesn’t get an Oscar nomination, screw the Oscars. Good: intense scenes, just sit through the opening 30 minutes and try to not be intrigued. Good: over-the-top zaniness, hello Brad Pitt and the entire team of Basterds. The missing bad? Overly long speeches that do nothing but show off Tarantino has access to a pop culture almanac. Or the cartoonish violence meant to elicit squirming rather than drive anything in the story. Or the really random scenes that serve as companions to the pop culture dialogue and add no value.
Nope, Inglorious Basterds is like you’re A+ final draft from English class. You wrote and rewrote this paper, and for some reason everything clicked. You got rid of all the superfluous crap, the flowery stuff that you usually like but no one else really enjoys. Instead, you got right into the meat of things and then delivered something so engaging and intriguing that the professor singled it out and read it to the class. This is Inglorious Basterds, and it is better than the lame example I just compared it to.
Color me impressed. Rebooting the notoriously stodgy Star Trek franchise with the iffy JJ Abrams at the helm did little to inspire confidence. Abrams had success with Alias on TV, but really, that was the pinnacle. Before that was Felicity, which is not action-packed super stuff. Lost was great, but was he really the driving force or just the gatekeeper to Jeff Lieber and Damon Lindelof. Then you had Mission Impossible III, which was serviceable, but extremely boring. Plus, he wrote the unproduced draft of Superman which can only be described as horrid: quick recap, Lex Luthor is a federal agent who hounds Clark Kent, only to reveal that he is actually a fellow Kryptonian which leads to the climatic mid-air battle…uh, what?
But all those concerns disappeared with Star Trek. Talk about a slick, well-produced revamp, Star Trek had absolutely everything. Very engaging cast, with the new Kirk and Spock holding their own against the iconic predecessors before them. You had a more rounded cast and writing that helped develop characters beyond a collection of the multi-ethnic club. After all, have you ever really thought about how valuable a linguist might be before the new Uhura showed why it would be important when traveling the stars? Then you had really nice action, finally modern special effects, and to top it all off, a nod to the continuity-masters while rebooting the entire series. Just an amazing effort that hit on every note and worked in so many ways.
