This was an interesting year insofar as it was a year that was just kind of…nice. I was writing full time on the books and the websites and was generally having a nice time. My girlfriend moved in with me and we got another cat. Her childhood cat had passed away and she felt ready to get another one. My parents’ cat Blackie, who was the mom of my cats Tim, Daisy, and Marsha, had another litter and my parents said that she could pick one of those kittens.
We went and met cats and it came down to two of them and we chose the one that didn’t look exactly like Tim so as to avoid confusion. I pushed for naming him Brian after another Spaced character, but she named him Thunder to honor her cat who had passed. So we took him home. She was working at an ice cream shop at the time and I was home most of the day writing so he hung out with me a lot.
He didn’t go much more that a few feet away from me when he was a kitten as he was afraid of the other cats and he spent most of his time on my shoulder like a parrot. I would sing the Thundercats theme song to him and he would run around in a circle. He became my little buddy very quickly and I loved him very much.
I eventually got a job at a call center at a place called Cyracom that does language interpretation thanks to my friend Jeff and I ended up working overnights, which was pretty awesome. There were very few calls at night and I did four 10 hour shifts and got a lot of productive things done during this time. I also watched a lot of youtube about conspiracy theories.
The lease came up so we moved downtown to a neighborhood I had learned about working on the books called Dunbar Springs. It was built upon the Court Street Cemetery and the bodies largely weren’t moved. We were in an apartment that was a motor inn in the 1930s and it was pretty awesome. It was nice to be downtown and I liked the apartment a lot, even if it was a bit small for us. The bedroom was small enough that the bed took up the entire width of it. There was a door in from the kitchen and a door in from the bathroom and the door you entered determined which side of the bed you would be on.
Things were pretty good during this year for the most part. I was pretty happy and I did another movie with Peter, Hunnybear, in which I was a masked slasher killer. This was another part he wrote with me in mind apparently. It was a lot of fun as I love slasher movies and it has been the gift that has kept on giving in terms of pictures for social media.
It was a good year for movies too and I went to a lot. I was writing about them a lot more for the website and started writing video game reviews for the Break It Down Blog and 10 Favorite movies and 10 least favorite movies list. Those can be found on December 2009 on this site, if you are interested. The top five is not the same and the ones that are the same are in a different order. Ah, the difference that 17 years can make. Moving forward, we will have a yearly top 10 (until we hit some dormant years for the site) so that is interesting. I have not consulted those lists for this so this will be an interesting compare and contrast exercise moving forward. Also, after the next year, when I start writing movie revies, a lot of the movies I write about will have full reviews available so that is also interesting, potentially. Anyway, get to it.
Runners up: Coraline, Fanboys, Friday the 13th, Watchmen, Adventureland, Star Trek, the Brothers Bloom, Drag Me to Hell, Up, The Hangover, the Hurt Locker, Bruno, (500) Days of Summer, Funny People, District 9, Mystery Team, Extract, I Love You Man, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Jennifer’s Body, Paranormal Activity, Whip It, Couples Retreat, Big Fan, The House of the Devil, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Ninja Assassin, Trick R Treat, The Slammin’ Salmon, and Sherlock Holmes.
If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 2009 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 17-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!
1.Avatar-James Cameron
The highest grossing movie of all time until earlier this year when Avengers: Endgame retook the title after a re-release, Avatar is the James Cameron space epic that was beloved at the time and experienced massive backlash almost immediately.
Often dubbed a ripoff of ‘Ferngully,’ Avatar is a story of deforestation and colonization on a distant planet Pandora as the forces of Earth strip-mine the planet for a mineral called Unobtanium (a term often used as a generic place holder for an asset in the same way as ‘widget’ is used in manufacturing). This obviously runs afoul of the native intelligent species the Navi, a race of 9 to 10-feet tall blue cat like people who directly commune with nature through their braids, which connect with flora and fauna alike. Their shared history is stored in a giant World Tree which is being directly threatened by the humans.
Enter Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) a bitter former soldier who lost his legs in combat and who is called into service when his twin brother is killed in an accident. Sully is sent to Pandora to take part in the Avatar program in which human consciousness is temporarily placed into synthetic Navi bodies in order to try to communicate with and gain the trust of the Navi. He meets Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a Navi warrior and they develop a relationship which leads Sully to turn on the human forces led by Col. Miles Quaritch (Steven Lang) and ultimately kick them the fuck off of Pandora. So, you know, just like Ferngully (said by people who have never seen Ferngully).
James Cameron developed a ton of new special effects tech for this movie from a new 3D filming system to new motion capture and performance processes to make the digital characters feel real. The environments were breathtaking and the 3D was phenomenal. The level of immersion achieved for this movie was so great that people started having a syndrome in which they were having withdrawls from being ‘on pandora.’ The launch of this movie was a phenomenon and led to it to take over from Cameron’s previous film Titanic as the highest grossing movie of all time (not adjusted for inflation).
So when the backlash hit, it hit hard and in many ways continues today. People argue that the movie has no cultural footprint in that you don’t see people rocking Avatar merch and that people couldn’t name the characters with a gun to their heads. To a degree, that is true. There isn’t a lot of Avatar discourse aside from people trying to convince others that it wasn’t shit.
But when Avatar sequels happen, they dominate the box office and make all the money. I know that is getting ahead of myself but the legacy this movie commands is box office receipts. It has made so much money that a narrative that people don’t care or that it doesn’t matter doesn’t particularly hold water. Now, sure, box office doesn’t equal quality but if the argument is that no one cares, the box office speaks volumes.
I think the reason for this is that Avatar is an experience more than it is a film. With the 3D, you get to go to a place and genuinely feel like you are there. There is a sense of wonder of being somewhere else. It is not really an experience you get from other 3D movies or even from Avatar at home. It rewards multiple viewings because it feels special while you are there.
I saw Avatar like five times in the theater for this very reason. I own it on 4K and I don’t know that I have ever watched it at home. I loved seeing it in the theater and I genuinely like the movie because it has a lot of Cameron touches I really enjoy, but for me, the experience was definitely where it is at and I almost don’t want to return to the movie without it.
I am really tired of fighting the fight with people about this movie from people at the time saying that the effects looked like ‘Smurfs were now playable in World of Warcraft’ to the legacy argument. It became really cool to hate the thing everyone loved and I have zero respect for that kind of contrarianism. Most arguments people have about this are lazy and only speak to disdain for the hype. If you have genuine issues with the stories or characters, fine, but spurious arguments about it being overrated just annoy me. Am I saying you have to love Avatar? No. But don’t tell me that it looked bad or that the 3D sucked, or even the Ferngully thing because that is just lazy, bad faith bullshit. This moved to number one for this year for me because I remember how it made me feel when I was sitting in the theater, often times alone, and how it made me feel was like a kid again. I even dragged my parents on a trip to Pandora so I could share it with them. It was pretty amazing.
2. Inglorious Basterds-Quentin Tarantino
A mixture of spaghetti-western and war movie with a healthy dose of revisionist history, Inglorious Basterds took writer-director Quentin Tarantino to entirely new heights.
Telling the story of a group of Jewish American soldiers who use extreme tactics to infiltrate and exterminate Nazis in World War II who team up with a movie theater owner (Melanie Laurent) whose family were slaughtered by ‘jew hunter’ Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) to strike against Hitler (Walter Wutke) himself at a movie premiere. That the mission is successful and they gun down Hitler as the theater burns around him is the revisionist history bit but is extremely satisfying to watch.
The cast of this movie is absolutely amazing with Brad Pitt leading the team as Aldo Raines, Diane Kruger as Bridget Von Hammersmark, Michael Fassbender as Lt. Archie Hicox, Til Schweiger as Sgt, Hugo Stiglitz, Daniel Bruhl as Fredrick Zoeller, BJ Novak as Pfc. Smithson Utivich, Samm Levine as Pfc. Hirshberg, Paul Rust as Pfc. Kagan, Mike Meyers as General Ed Fenech, and Eli Roth as Lt. Donnie ‘the Bear Jew’ Donowitz just to name the main cast. Only 30% of the dialogue is in English with the rest mostly German, French, and Italian and a lot of the cast speaking those languages are fluent or native speakers so you get a wide array of performances in several languages which is pretty fun to watch. Christoph Waltz, who took a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance, speaks four languages and stretched those muscles to great effect here.
The movie was nominated for eight Oscars overall including Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay but only took home the one, which is a travesty. The movie looks amazing, the dialogue is as snappy as you would expect from a Tarantino script, the action and quiet moments are each just as effective as one another, and the performances are all great. Waltz is a revelation here and absolutely owns every scene he is in. Pitt is also great with his southern drawl calling for Nazi scalps.
There is a real element of wish fulfillment here as you can see people rising up and striking back against Nazi’s. There is something very cathartic about watching the Bear Jew beating them to death with a baseball bat and seeing Hitler riddled with machine gun fire feels great. This is a fanciful take on WWII that is very loosely (VERY) based on a real mission called ‘Operation Greenup’ in which the OSS had agents dropped into Austria to gather intelligence posing as Nazi officers. Sadly that operation did not result in Hitler being taken out in a burning theater but it is nice to think about.
I saw this is in the theater and I was absolutely enraptured. At the time I saw this I declared it Tarantino’s best and I hoped that his films would continue this trajectory moving forward. Happily, they kind of did and it feels like this was an inflection point for his films in which they stepped up a bit in scope. I love all of his movies but this one is top tier for sure. I feel bad for whatever high school kid doing a report on WWII who watches this in lieu of reading the text and floats that the Basterds killed Hiler but such is life. I enjoyed the What-If nature of this movie and was happy we got more by the time Once Upon A Time in Hollywood rolled around. We will talk about that one more later though. I love this movie and I think it is a Masterpiece.
3.Moon-Duncan Jones
From a big sci-fi epic to a much smaller one, Moon is largely a character study following one character working on a moon base by himself who finds out things are not as they seem after he survives an accident on the lunar surface.
Starring Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, Moon follows Bell as he fulfills a three year contract with Lunar industries by collecting and shipping back to Earth Helium-3, the current clean energy source used planetwide. He has no direct contact with Earth and he is the sole employee on the lunar base. His only companion is GERTY (Kevin Spacey) a robot that attends to his day to day needs.
Sam wants to get back to Earth to be with his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) and his infant daughter and is getting restless on the base. With two weeks left of his contract, he is in an accident with one of the harvesters and is knocked unconscious. He wakes back up on the module and is told by GERTY that the company will send a clean up crew for the equipment. Sam gets curious and sneaks back out to the site of the wreckage and finds an unconscious doppelganger of himself. After reviving the doppelganger, the two make the startling discovery that they are clones of the original Sam Bell and they are being used as worker drones. Every time one is about to end their three year mission, they become sick and die. The two Sams decide to try to get one off the moon and blow the whistle on earth.
Moon was made for 5 million dollars and is almost a counter-point to Avatar in terms of a much smaller film succeeding through strong writing and characters as opposed to spectacle. It is a contained and almost claustrophobic movie that demonstrated just how talented Duncan Jones is as a writer/director. Any argument that he is only there because of who his father was (David Bowie) is quieted immediately with this movie.
I am a major fan of clone stories. I find them fascinating and I would love to write one myself but I have never found the right angle for me. What Jones does with Moon is right up my alley. That Sam Rockwell is the one human character that we follow is even better as I could watch him read the phone book and be entertained.
I have evangelized for Moon for years and while I haven’t gotten a lot of traction with it, I will continue to sing its praises. It is a great character study and what it does with its twist is pretty great. This also takes place in the same universe as Jones’s Mute (2018) and there are references to this movie in that one, which is also something I really dig. Check out Moon, it is a great film that is tragically underseen.
4.Zombieland-Ruben Fleischer
A fun zombie comedy about survivors trying to make it from the East coast to the West Coast in search of an amusement park(and Twinkies), Zombieland pulls off an impressive feat of being successful in the shadow of Shaun of the Dead without aping it and coming up with its own unique flair.
Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), going by the names of the cities they are from, team up out on the road following a zombie outbreak and come across Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock(Abigail Breslin) who present as being in need of help in order to hijack them. This leads to a chase/road trip movie that crosses the country in a hilarious and sometimes touching adventure.
The framing of the movie is fairly unique with Columbus narrating and providing lore drops in the form of lists and facts about Zombieland with on screen prompts and flashes of other survivors showing things like ‘zombie kill of the week’ or ‘five rules of surviving Zombieland.’ This makes it almost the Ferris Bueller of zombie comedies and it works really well.
The irreverent sense of humor carries the movie through emotionally challenging moments as well as moments of abject silliness so everything feels tonally consistent while offering unique flavors throughout. The performances go along way here as well with Woody Harrrelson providing an enormously fun turn as Tallahassee, a cowboy like figure who uses glib sarcasm and indifference to hide deep emotional pain over the loss of his son.
That they eventually stay at Bill Murray’s mansion and accidently kill him while he is pretending to be a zombie further tells you everything you need to know about how seriously the movie takes the world and it just works enormously well.
I saw this in the theater a couple of times and it quickly became a zombie favorite that I return to often. It is a really interesting take on zombie comedy, a sub-genre that has a surprising amount of entries. Zombieland earns its place amongst them and also sets up a very confusing situation for anyone who saw Jesse Eisenberg starring Adventureland earlier in the year. It joins the ranks of 28 Days, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later as the most confusing trilogy ever. Funny that zombies are involved in both situations.
5.Black Dynamite-Scott Saunders
A parody of blaxploitation movies of the 70’s, Black Dynamite tells the story of a vigilante named Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White) trying to clean up the streets by fighting drug dealers and the Man while trying to solve his brother’s murder (Baron Vaughn). This leads Black Dynamite into a web of deception as he learns that Anaconda Malt Liquor is being made and marketed to the black community with the sole purpose of shrinking their dicks. The conspiracy goes all the way to the top and leads to a fist fight with Richard Nixon and an assist from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. This is clearly a very serious movie.
One of the brilliant and unique things about Black Dynamite is that there are multiple layers at work here. It isn’t just a parody of a 70s blaxploitation movie, but it is also a parody of blaxploitation in general. Michael Jai White is not playing Black Dynamite but he is playing an actor named Ferrante Jones, was a running back for the Baltimore Colts whose career ended due to a broken neck. If you pay attention during the movie, he has a hard time turning his neck. The director, similarly, was directing as a Jewish director forced to take the work he could at the time. This is never addressed in the film itself but they talk about it on the commentary and it makes the whole thing that much more fun to watch.
The humor here is your typical parody fair but with some extra layers of filmmaking jokes on top. One actor reads the stage direction in his lines, Baron Vaughn plays his part in the beginning as a Shakespearean actor slumming it in exploitation and does so with exactly that flair. There are tons of little details that make it more than a retread of Undercover Brother or I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. It led to a cartoon that is also amazing. I saw this for the first time on blu-ray and when I was watching it my girlfriend came in and was confused when she saw Tommy Davidson in what appeared to be a movie from the 70s. If there is any evidence needed that the movie works as intended, there it is. I love this movie and watch it with fair regularity. Michael Jai White is perfect here and he needs to do more comedy (The Outlaw Johnny Black is also awesome).