2009
Closing things out. Soon we'll get started with "Best of the Best" Awards, Decade Long Awards, and my top 25.
TOP GROSSING
1.
Avatar
2.
Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince
3.
Ice Age: Dawn of the
Dinosaurs
4.
Transformers: Revenge of
the Fallen
5.
2012
6.
Up!
7.
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
8.
Sherlock Holmes
9.
Angels & Demons
10.
The Hangover
UPON FURTHER
REVIEW: The staying power of the pretty hum-drum Ice Age series is surprising.
The staying power of that dismal Dan Brown series is more surprising.
Best
Picture:
The Hurt
Locker
Avatar
The Blind
Side
District 9
An Education
Inglourious Basterds
Precious
A Serious
Man
Up
Up in the
Air
Upon
Further Review: Worst Nomination: Avatar. Avatar turns out to have been a
neutron bomb dropped on cinema. Technologically revolutionary, huge impact at
the time, killed all the life, but left everything else intact. In the end, it’s just not a good
movie.
Most
Overrated: Avatar. Seriously, this movie in regular-d is terrible.
Most Underrated (Then): Crank: High Voltage. It’s likely you
haven’t been watching Jason Statham’s movies. Someone is, because they keep
getting made, but odds are, it’s not you. This is the Statham movie to watch.
It starts at the end of the first film: with him falling from a helicopter to
his death (partly in VGA video game format). He survives. Asian gangsters
arrive and snowshovel him into the back of a van. Cut to a newsbroadcaster, the
underused Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who relays these events to us,
essentially commenting, “Shit is about to get crazy.” And it does. There’s a
Godzilla monster suit fight in there somewhere. So basically, it’s
semi-autobiographical.
Most
Underrated (Now): Up!. Wall-E is everyone’s darling for being both wordless
for long stretches and yet still oppressively didactic. Up! is less preachy,
made half the theater cry in the first 10 minutes, and looks better too. I’m in
the minority, I’m sure, but I think Up! is Pixar’s best.
Most
Influential: Avatar. As of this writing, they’re still selling us 3D
tickets. Half the sci-fi films that followed had to be refilmed to take
advantage of 3D. Then came the wave of movies rushed out to cash in on 3D
gimmicks. Even odds 3D is either gone or the standard in a decade.
Most
representative of the decade: The Hangover. Much like Vegas, movies kind of
reached the point where they stopped trying to sell something to kids that
wasn’t for kids.
Best Scene:
The Hangover
– The Wolf Pack
Inglorious
Basterds – The pipe scene
Inglorious
Basterds – The pub scene
Up! – the
love story
Zombieland –
the Bill Murray cameo
WINNER:
Inglorious Basterds - The pub scene
BEST FILM
1.
Up!
2.
Inglorious Basterds
3.
Sherlock Holmes
4.
The Hangover
5.
A Serious Man
6.
Up in the Air
7.
Black Dynamite
8.
Star Trek
9.
The Hurt Locker
10.
Taken
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