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Here are the stand-out movies I saw this year:
500 Days of Summer: A playful structure, a melancholic mood, and a conflict between the characters that I really cared about.
District 9 is great fun. An excellent action film that reinvigorated my love of movies.
The Fountain: Beautiful, emotional, and the first Aronofsky film that I can imagine myself rewatching.
It Might Get Loud: I am the target audience for a movie about how Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White became guitarists.
The Room is the Plan 9 from Outer Space of '90s indie movies. I suspect that within 2 to 10 years, The Room will be as well known as Plan 9.
Shortbus: an extremely explicit movie about people trying to overcome sexual problems in their lives. Provocative, funny, moving, and dealing with conflicts that most movies prefer to ignore. I thought this movie was fantastic.
Soul Power covers the 1974 concert in Zaire that took place at the same-ish time as the Ali-Foreman fight. Lots of great performers including James Brown, favourite-bluesman-ever BB King, and new favourite singer Bill Withers. For me it's a movie that really illustrated the joy of playing music, and the satisfaction of playing music yourself rather than receiving it from some 'star'. Great stuff.
Zombieland: a feel-good romantic comedy with an attitude that's perfectly pitched to my tastes. Taught me that interesting things can happen in a zombie movie when you dial the zombie threat down to about a 2 out of 10.
Rather than pick a best film of 2009 (whatever that means), I can see myself rewatching all of these. But the ones that I think I will continue to get something from are (500) Days of Summer and Shortbus.
3 comments:
The Fountain is awesome. I have the soundtrack too and it was my favourite of the year.
Wasn't The Fountain about 3 or 4 years ago? I saw it at the theatre which definitely makes it a pre-Dom film.
So 2009 favourite are movies you saw this year rather than ones released in 2009? Or I'm massively confused.
I agree on the District 9 front. Have not yet seen any of the others.
Interesting question, D. It's odd ... next up is a little post about books I've read in 2009. I've realised that there would be no question about that list containing books written in previous years (or centuries), yet with film I think there's a general expectation that things have to be current.
Which is my way of saying my post was poorly prefaced. Yep - it's a list of favourite movies I saw this year, rather than of what I saw that was released this year.
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