The 20 Best DVDs of 2009

As we finish up 2009, it's time again to look back at the DVD film releases of the past year and give thanks! Again, I am talking about new films on disk, most released theatrically in 2008 (unless noted as a 2009 release).There are many fine TV series and re-releases, but that's another blog. Happily we've reviewed many of these films already on this blog, so I've included the links. Most of these films I give four shakers to unless noted as the elusive fifth shaker.

With all the chaos in life, nothing beats getting lost in a good film. So here are my picks on the best twenty. I think any film lover on your list would appreciate any of these. (Why not do a gift basket and get them all? :)

Happy Holidays and Happy viewing! (When the January rental doldrums hit, I will offer up some additional good films of the past year)

1) Anvil: The Story of Anvil - Old Head bangers keep the dream alive into middle age. Review here.

2) The Cove (2009) - A dramatic doc on the battle to save dolphins from slaughter and captivity.

3) Days and Clouds – A successful Italian couple try to keep their marriage afloat and start over in a harsh economy. Review here.

4) Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son about His Father – Began as a project to tell a son about his murdered father, director Kurt Kuenne successfully covers additional tragic twists in one of the most heart-wrenching films you'll ever see.

5) District 9 (2009) – A great sci-fi film on lost humanity that I think was totally overlooked this summer. Director Neill Blomkamp gives us an exciting story about aliens who become refugees in South Africa and how the corporation tasked with relocating them then seeks to exploit them for their weapons technology. 5 Shakers

6) Doubt - John Patrick Shanley's powerfully acted tale of the power struggle between a conservative nun and a progressive priest in a 1964 New York City parish. Our Reviews here. 5 Shakers

7) Eden - A simple but universal story of an Irish couple struggling with their ten-year marriage. Review here.

8) Frozen River - Another story of personal survival, Melissa Leo brings amazing truth and believability to her role of a mother struggling to keep her family afloat by any means possible. Jessi's Review here.

9) The Hangover (2009) - Todd Phillips directs a believable and likeable cast in a tale of the ultimate bachelor party gone bad in Las Vegas. Comedies about men who don't want to grow up are a Hollywood stable, but this one avoids the usual bathroom humor to deliver a fun and clever flick.

10) I've Loved You So Long – Another tale of family dynamics, this time two siblings who struggle to get reacquainted after a fifteen year absence. Kristin Scott Thomas is compelling as a shell-shocked woman who slowly reveals her secrets to her well-meaning but puzzled younger sister (Elsa Zylbertstein). Jessi's Review here.

11) Let the Right One In – An alternative vampire flick to the one which shall remain nameless. Original and creepy, the setting of a cold, dark, depressing Swedish town is spot on and the concept of a little girl vampire is spooky. Review here.

12) Milk – Director Gus Van Sant really captures the details and tone of the era in this timely biopic of Harvey Milk (Oscar winner Sean Penn) the first openly gay man to be voted into public office in America. A great supporting cast includes Josh Brolin who is brooding and intense as Dan White, a troubled fellow official on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who feels threatened enough to murder.

13) Revolutionary Road – Though I didn't notice the trend before this is my third pick to focus on a troubled marriage. Based on the novel by Richard Yates, Sam Mendes delivers a film not really about the homogenized suburbs but about the compromises of marriage and conformity. Very similar in time period and theme to "Mad Men", seeing April (Oscar winner Kate Winslet) framed behind a picture window like a caged bird is tragic. Review here.

14) Sin Nombre (2009) – A Honduran girl falls for a Central American gang banger on a train heading to the US border. Review here.

15) Slumdog Millionaire – Last years' big Oscar winner tells the fairy tale odyssey of an 18-year-old Mumbai "slumdog" (Dev Patel) attempting to find his lost love (Freida Pinto) by going on a TV game show. Director Danny Boyle directs this story with energy and heart and a breakout final song unexpectedly paying tribute to big Bollywood dance numbers. Jessi's review here.

16) Star Trek (2009) – J.J. Abrams reboots the franchise for new fans and old trekkers alike. A great finish to a decade of some outstanding sci-fi! 5 Shakers Review here.

17) Summer Hours - As an aging widow reunites her adult children and their families to their childhood home; she realizes her possessions and legacy will become devalued once she passes on. A subtle but powerful film on how the global economy is not only splintering families, but undermining cultures, creating a society does not value its’ own history.

18) Up (2009) – Pixar does it again with an amazingly touching film on never being too old to live out your dreams.

19) Waltz with Bashir – An "animated documentary" for adults as ex-soldiers revisit their fractured wartime memories. Review here.

20) The Wrestler – Mickey Rourke's amazing comeback film of a tortured middle-aged wrestler trying to come to terms with his life while staging a final bout. This is the wrestling picture Barton Fink should have written.

The 20 Worst DVDs of 2009

In the last month I have started blogging DVD reviews for another site! I am just trying something new. To build up content I have repackaged a lot of my reviews from SP, but I have also suceeded in adding unique posts there too. But I can swear on this one and that fucking rocks! I hope if you like what we do here - you'll also check my Seattle PI blog.

The good news this year is that where last years' list were all single shaker turkeys- this year we have more two shaker selections meaning that either there are less bad releases, or that I'm getting better at screening out the bad. Here are my year-end round-up of all those mediocre movie nights- the spoiled cream of the crop!

(Again these are only new releases, no re-releases)

1. Blindness – A virus makes everyone (except Julianne Moore) blind and they are then locked into a hospital and pitted against each other. Kind of like "Lord of the Flies" meets "The Miracle Worker" without the laughs.

2. The Day the Earth Stood Still – The classic original had benevolent aliens trying to save us; this unnecessary remake has them on an extermination mission led by Neo no less! So not excellent dude!

3. The Haunting in Connecticut - Quick cuts, soundtrack blasts and excessive CGI – it's like lipstick on a demon pig. The original 2002 TV documentary was much scarier on no budget.

4. JCVD - Jean-Claude Van Damme mocks his own image playing a version of himself having a middle-age crises only to then be taken hostage by bank robbers. Funny premise but that's basically it.

5. Medicine for Melancholy – Proves that African American indie filmmakers can be just as boring, pretentious and mumblecore as their dull white counterparts. The two leads try hard with bad material and slack direction.

6. Momma's Man - Kind of an arthouse "Step Brothers", an adult man refuses to leave his parents loft in the East Village avoiding his family and responsibilities. I wanted something else to happen here.

7. Of Time and the City - Filmmaker Terence Davies presents his "visual poem" (mostly stock footage) dedicated to Liverpool. This would have been more effective with a little less bombastic poetry recitation and venom (He hates the Queen, the church and the Beatles). Like an English Ken Burns dissing people over mushroom tea.

8. Paper Heart – Hipsters Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera try not to fall in love, because that's so funny right? (Take swig of PBR here)

9. Rachel Getting Married - Anne Hathaway is the black sheep who wrecks the wedding of her sister through her neurosis and addiction. I would have done the same; this wedding weekend is lame and overlong.

10. Righteous Kill – Although they had a brief scene in "Heat", screen legends Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro never made a film together outside of "Godfather II". (Genuflect) This unoriginal police drama proves that maybe that ship has sailed. . . ("Attica!" "You talkin' to me?")

11. RocknRolla – Wants so desperately to be cool as a dozen-or-so stock characters are paraded through this backlit piece of shite. All of them speak quickly and strive to be clever; none are developed or believable in the least.

12. Street Kings – Keanu Reeves (second appearance on this list –sorry!) is a hardened LA cop gone bad- and I'm just stopping there.

13. Synecdoche, New York - If nothing is real and the characters playing characters playing characters are neither really living nor really acting; why does anything matter? This is morose and confusing.

14. The Taking of Pelham 123 – Another unnecessary remake that is all loud and flashy without the street cred.

15. Tulpan – The critics loved it, but this Kazakhstan "comedy" left me as dry as a camel.

16. War, Inc. - Poor John and Joan Cusack who mug their way through a film that tries too hard to satire everything and ends up just a noisy mess. It wants to be "Dr. Strangelove" but instead it's another "Southland Tales".

17. Watchmen - A sadistic abomination proving that torture porn and fanboys are still ruling Hollywood.

18. Whatever Works - A creepy old neurotic, a self-described genius, finds himself cohabitating with a very young girl who he ends up sleeping with to the shock and amazement of his pals. Where does Woody come up with these ideas?

_

19. What Just Happened? - Will Bruce Willis shave and should the director cut a scene of a dog being shot? This film is just as contrived and shallow as the Hollywood culture it's mocking.

20. Zack and Miri Make a Porno - Kevin Smith tries to mix gross-out comedy with a date movie and fails both audiences. Judd Apatow has already delivered that money shot son

You've never seen a future like this

If you’re anything like me, you know the intensity of a good nightmare. No stranger to producing horror films in my sleep, I then struggle to describe my nightmares the next morning. How do you put into words... places that don’t exist and things that don’t make sense? How do you explain to someone a series of events that defy words—without boring them to death?

The 2007 French film, “Eden Log,” manages to bring all the confusion and darkness, the inexplicability of a nightmare, to film. From the start, an incomprehensible puzzle presents itself to Tolbiac (Clovis Cornillac), as he awakens in a muddy, cold, dark cave. We experience what he does, as he does, at a sometimes painstakingly slow pace.

Though the film tests our tolerance with a repetitive and uneventful first 20 minutes, it’s worth the experience to endure this for what lies beyond. Completely clueless as to where he is, what’s he’s doing there, and how he got there, he just keeps moving, upward, from what seems to be an impossibly deep system of caves, far underground.

Clues come in the form of random encounters and electronic video images, propelling him onward, towards some unknown but anticipated revelation.

I see quite a bit of science fiction and I believe this is one of the most original interpretations of a bleak future I have ever seen. There are no cliches here, no familiar futuristic conventions. This has got to be unlike anything you have ever seen before, awake or asleep.

The ending is open to interpretation and can even be quite confusing. And there was something about the audio that made it seem as though the film were dubbed into English. Still, it’s highly original premise and completely unpredictable plot make it one to see. That is, if you’re a fan of dark, foreboding dreams.

'Star Trek' time travels in to save our day!

I used to work with a man who looked and acted deliberately like Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He later moved onto vampires but I did agree with him that our office would be more fun if we all wore the uniforms like those on the show. Yet TNG movies were too serious and more of a bore than their predecessors in the eighties with the classic original cast. Although those films got worse with each entry and began to look like 'beer bellies in space', they still retained that sense of wonderful cheesiness of the original series. In the fab sixties, Kirk and the crew which included plenty of mini-skirted fembots conquered the universe. Shatner kicked ass with a shoulder-rolling brawl set to a blazing horn section; A cosmic Don Draper. He also would bed down multi-colored alien babes as Spock and Bones argued logic versus emotion like a classic psych exam. My elder brother was an old school Trekkie and I recall as a boy going to a local mall to see Leonard Nimoy. (We didn't get close).

I didn't really watch TNG or the other spin-offs much. Yet I had "Star Trek" imbedded in my brain, a cultural touchstone and an example of how sci-fi could be fun as well as cerebral. Last year as I looked around an Apple Store one of the clerks (er Associates) was running down the features and programs of a Mac, when he asked casually "Hey have you seen this?" and played the new Star Trek trailer in Hi-def. I had no idea it was being remade. Suddenly it was all there in that three minute clip: JJ Abrams of "Lost", "Alias" and "Cloverfield" fame had rebooted the franchise with an origins story. Uhura was a super hottie! The guy from "Heroes" as Spock? 'Harold' from "Harold and Kumar" as Sulu? "Shaun of the Dead" as friggin Scotty? Leonard Nimoy - Are you serious? The original sounds effects even sounded hip. We both looked at each other in a WTF moment of nerdy joy. I saw the film as soon as it opened.

This would have been so easy to mess up but outside of one CGI snow monster that didn't thrill me as necessary, I am pleased to say that Abrams and company really nailed this! Chris Pine had extra large space shoes to fill with Kirk but has done it and here is the young captain, complete with his bar fights and the bedding of green girls, fully intact. He subverts authority follows his instincts and is brutally loyal to his team who form before our delighted eyes. Spock, Bones, Chekov, Uhura, Sulu and Scotty here are all thrown together for the first time and have their own heroic moments to shine. Eric Bana as Nero is the best villain since Khan and then there's the space-time continuum, the sci-fi device that opens the parallel universe and gets old and new Trek to fit together as it should. Zachary Quinto as Spock and Karl Urban as Bones stand out and really channel their TV counterparts. So loyal to the original campy Trek but retrofitted with added adrenalin, it is as fun as the original series and is as movies should be. In these hard times it is so timely to see Gene Rodenberry's original vision of a diverse crew of young explorers attempting to right the wrongs of a sometimes evil universe. Fun for mind, body and soul, "Star Trek" is one of the best DVDs of the year.

Corrupt leaders & other runaway trains

I wanted to see me some Italian corrupt politics riddled with assassination but I got more than I needed in Il Divo. Rather than just tell the story straightforward, which would have been gripping enough, director Paolo Sorrentino goes gonzo and thinks he’s Kubrick meets Scorcese but is neither as proven by his pretentious over-direction. Lead actor Toni Servillo plays the main character of long-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti like a grotesque caricature, hunching around, an expressionless Dracula save for the stagey (but really it’s all so stagey) soliloquies where he rants rapidly like a madman. Much like 2006’s visually beautiful but hollow “The Fall” this director knows how to make beautiful pictures, he just doesn’t know when the say ‘basta’ and tell a story. Subtlety is not sin signore; see ‘La dolce vita’ instead.

The frustrating age of Bush resulted in a backlash that produced not just a satirical film in last years’ “W.”, but also a one-man show, before he had even left office. Will Ferrell’s “You’re Welcome America, A Final Night with George W. Bush” being the latter. Ferrell is as always absurd and funny, his political satire spot-on, but weighing in at almost an hour and a half the show does get tired. It seems like a drawn out SNL sketch not helped by a dancing secret service man between scenes played by Ferrells’ brother. Maybe it’s just too soon.

The remake of “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” is a textbook example of how current Hollywood does thrillers bad with Tony “Top Gun” Scott pulling out all his tricks: The macho mustachioed men from Central ‘New Yawk’ casting, loud soundtrack booms with pulsating rock riffs, intermittent slow motion with over-saturated colors, super quick cuts and zooms, the overused helicopter shots and not one ounce of honest character development in the mix. Denzel Washington goes from a coffee spilling demoted MTA boss to a superhero chasing his nemesis on the Brooklyn Bridge with gun in hand. (I would say “Spoiler alert” but the tell-all trailer for this film already gives most of this film up). John Travolta is the brains of the subway-napping who eats up the scenery and all but gives his name and address to the dispatchers. In short this movie sucks. Scott constantly cuts to police officers and SWAT teams who do nothing with the exception of getting into three (Count em!) separate car crashes in one trip uptown. The filmmakers had unrestricted access to the NY subway system so it’s a shame this film pales in comparison to the original. That 70’s film directed by Joseph Sargent was shot with real grit and intelligence as it had the meticulous Robert Shaw matching wits with the great low-key Walter Matthau. Its classic ending was near perfect. They don’t make them like that anymore as this remake proves loudly.

Why I Loved "Land of the Lost"

Did you grow up watching "Land of the Lost" when it was a television series in the mid 1970s? If so, you will remember the Sleestak, Holly's braids, and the family's little ape-like pal, Cha-Ka.
Put those cheesy memories aside so you can enjoy the current theatrical remake of the series.

Though the film has taken a critical bashing from some, I disagree. It was fun and silly and captivating from start to finish. Will Farrell as 'Marshall' leads 'Holly' and 'Will' into a tachyon- chasing adventure that catapults them back to a very unusual, ancient time.

Here's what worked:
1. Changing the original father and two children into three adults (two scientists and a beer-bellied opportunist) creates greater humor without the forced drama of children in peril.
2. "Grumpy," the scheming and vengeful dinosaur (with a sense of humor, too) was a brilliant twist on the typical, blundering giant. One could argue that Grumpy nearly steals the show.
3. Matt Lauer's cameo. Seriously, the guy can act. I see him on "Mad Men," cohorting with Jon Hamm.
4. The wonderfully creative way in which our three-some end up in the Land of the Lost is through the mouth of The Cave, a desert tourist attraction that brings visitors on a boat ride into an underground, spooky theme-park-type cave. Chasing tachyon signals to this location, all three head in.
5. A Sleestak gone bad. Very bad. Taking-over-the-world type of bad.
6. Will Farrell's dependable, lovable, hilarious bumbling scientist.
7. Danny McBride is cast to perfection as the cave proprietor turned Land of the Lost survivor.
8. Cha-Ka's life of debauchery and glory.

Silly, great fun. Sign me up.

Woody Meets Larry and it 'Works'

Is it even necessary to start out by saying that I'm a huge Woody Allen fan? Is it even possible for someone to love film without being a huge Woody Allen fan? I say, no. The man is a genius. Yes, he's become a tad predictable in adhering to the New York-intellectuals-lament-love-with-age-diverse-pairings-and-ultimately-come-together-during-celebratory-party-while-vintage-clarinet-jazz-music-colors-the-scene formula. But there's still a little magic there.

To find Larry David inhabiting the lead (the Woody role, par usual) in "Whatever Works" is Woody's most brilliant casting to date. Larry David is so lovable and believable that we can even forgive the absurdity of the prerequisite, later years Woody standard: the nubile young beauty who falls in love with the cantankerous old man. We can also forgive the silliness of 'Boris Yellnikoff' (David) suddenly addressing the camera while his friends look on, wondering if he has lost his marbles. The typically semi-natural Woody dialogue becomes butter in David's mouth. Never a pause, never a falter, never a blip in how normal it all seems.

Yellnikoff is a bitter, self-proclaimed genius who lives alone in Manhattan. When he arrives home one night to find a needy young girl on his doorstep, he begrudgingly takes her in. 'Melodie' (Evan Rachel Wood) is the starry-eyed Southern girl who pours honey all over Yellnikoff's bile. When Patricia Clarkson, as her mother, 'Marietta,' enters the scene, we're in for a wild joy ride. From a repressed, religious Southern self-righteousness, to an expressive, uninhibited, threesome-living artist, Marietta makes a delicious transformation. 'John' (Ed Begley Jr.), Melodie's father, makes a less believable transformation.

Loaded with truisms about religion, politics, and the general state of things, burdened with a familiar plot, and sugar-coated with a formulaic ending...still. "Whatever Works" works, thanks to the wit and wisdom of Larry David.