The Top 40 Films of 2009 (40-36)

With this post, my last of the year (and the decade), I begin looking back on the past year's best films. 2009 was an embarrassment of cinematic riches, so much so that I refuse to submit myself to the "tyranny of ten," as the estimable critic Jonathan Keifer terms it, since there were far more than ten films that deserve recognition as great achievements. So herewith, in a nod to the great Casey Kasem, begins a Top-40 countdown of the year's best films. Everyone has their own rules for inclusion, and here are mine: if a film had or began its commercial run, or played for at least a week in New York during the calendar year 2009, it was eligible. The vagaries of film distribution being what they are, many of the films on my list were not actually made in 2009. That said, here we go.

40. Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, US, 2009)/Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, US, 2009)

A double shot of exhilarating B-movie bliss. Fleischer picks up John Carpenter’s mantle and delivers a stylish, hilarious road movie that traverses a post-zombie apocalypse America, with breathless verve and invention. The denizens of this blasted landscape include: Jesse Eisenberg (who is also in another film much higher on this list), refining his virginal-neurotic persona, suggesting a younger Woody Allen; Woody Harrelson, aces as a swaggering zombie hunter with an acute hankering for Twinkies; and the cherry on top is a priceless Bill Murray cameo. Raimi interrupts his Spider-Man movie career to return to his roots with an appealingly old-school Gothic horror that has a dash of topicality (an ill-advised bank foreclosure decision sets the mayhem into motion), but is mostly an opportunity for Raimi to prove himself a master of shock mechanics and to fuck with our heads in the way only he can.

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39. The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, US, 2009)

The curious case of Mark Whitacre: Soderbergh’s latest is a slippery object, at once mainstream star vehicle and odd experiment, at once parodic and subtly chilling. As unsettling and elusive as its protagonist (portrayed by Matt Damon in one of his best performances), The Informant! has an oddly anachronistic feel: even though the action takes place in the early 90’s, the wardrobe, production design, and Marvin Hamlisch score evoke the ‘70s, referencing such paranoiac cinema touchstones as Coppola’s The Conversation, which this film often seems like a bizarre parody of. This is the true(ish) tale of the whistleblower who dropped the dime on his employer Archer Daniels Midland, who perpetrated a massive industrial price-fixing scheme. Unbeknownst to his FBI handlers, Whitacre himself was just as deceptive about his motives and actions as his employers, if not more so. The film gives no ground to the viewer on which to stand as far as audience identification goes: almost everyone is just a different degree of a liar. As such, it perfectly reflects our post-economic collapse world.


38. Summer Hours/L’heure d’été (Olivier Assayas, France, 2008)

A sun-dappled, elegiac pastoral evoking the films of Jean Renoir, the spiritual grandfather of practically all the great French directors who followed him, Summer Hours captures the ephemeral nature of life and what we collect during it, even more accurately evoked by its French title. The death of a family matriarch (the wonderful Edith Scob) occasions a debate and familial conflict over the true value of art works, and what it really means when family heirlooms are put on display at a public museum. The grown children, who are scattered around the planet, deal with the severed family bonds in often diametrically opposed ways. As much as Summer Hours laments things lost, it is not without optimism; we are left with a strong hint that the youngest generation, who while at play in the family garden make their own life discoveries (often with a pop and hip-hop soundtrack), and who have the best hope at surviving in the current world, deciding what should be preserved and what should be discarded.



37. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, US/Germany, 2009)

Regardless of their ostensible subject matter, all of Tarantino’s films are really about his all-encompassing and unabashed love of cinema, and Inglourious Basterds expresses this love on his largest, most elaborate canvas to date. A history-rewriting, wish-fulfillment fantasy that shoehorns within it many references to German cinema of the period, it may have ranked higher on my list if there were a bit more depth to its pyrotechnics. Still, it’s a tremendous achievement, and Tarantino reveals himself to be a brilliant Hitchcock acolyte in the way he gains maximum tension from very long dialogue-heavy scenes with tense undercurrents (e.g. the brilliant opening sequence).



36. Old Partner/Wonang sori (Lee Chung-ryoul, South Korea, 2008)

This beautifully constructed documentary about an old farmer and his work ox was a surprise sleeper hit in its native Korea, and opens this week at Film Forum. It actually had a run this spring at the Imaginasian Theatre, which almost no one noticed. Now that more people in this country are aware of this film’s existence, hopefully they will discover the charms and beauty of Old Partner, an intimate elegy to a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.

The Old Man and the Ox

Old Partner (Wonang sori). 2008. Written, directed and edited by Lee Chung-ryoul. Produced by Goh Young-jae. Cinematography by Ji Jae-woo. Music by Heo Hoon and Min So-yun. Lighting by Yang Jin-young.

Lee Chung-ryoul’s documentary Old Partner was a surprise hit in Korea this year, expanding through word of mouth from an initial release on seven screens to becoming number one at the box office, beating out both Hollywood blockbusters and high-profile local releases. The popularity of the film grew to such an extent that the director made appeals to the public to prevent them from overrunning Choi Won-gyoon and Lee Sam-soon, the bickering, cantankerous husband and wife farmers who are the film’s subjects. The producers of the film worked with police to launch a special campaign to prevent illegal downloading of the film. All of this seems a rather counterintuitive fate for such a quiet, observational film concerning an old couple and their work ox, all three of whom are in the very late stages of their lives. But when one actually sees the film, which recently had an extremely brief, almost completely unadvertised run in New York at the Imaginasian Theater (me, myself, and I was the entire audience at the screening I attended), it is easy to see why the film struck such a deep chord when it was released in Korea. Many people who saw this film almost certainly saw their own parents or grandparents in this couple, whether they were farmers or not.

The dying ox in Old Partner is a huge bone of contention between the couple. Choi dotes lovingly on the ox, and talks about how important this animal is, how it helped to feed his nine children and send them to college. The couple’s way of life seems virtually unchanged from that of similar people centuries ago. There is no internet, cell phones, or television; their only connection to the rest of the world is a beat-up old radio. Lee resents her husband for taking better care of the ox than his own wife; she constantly laments her rotten luck in life, saying over and over that she “picked the wrong man,” and complains that she has been worked so hard over the years that she now cannot stand upright. The couple suffers from as many ailments as their ox: Choi’s leg was ruined by a bad acupuncture job when he was a young boy, and now awkwardly gets around on a cane. The couple has many grown children, but Lee doesn’t want to live with them, even though presumably her life with them would be infinitely more comfortable than what we see on screen. “Better to die than to have to walk on eggshells all the time,” she says. This is a hard life, but obviously one lived by choice, by a couple who puts a premium on proud self-sufficiency.

Even though the couple seems to exist in complete isolation from the outside world, the film astutely shows us that their lives are very much affected by events in the larger society. In one scene, as Choi drives his ox on the street, he passes a demonstration against the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, which among other things is helping to drive down cattle prices. This fact becomes pertinent to a later scene in which the man attempts to sell an unruly calf and is told that it is too small, and that prices are going down because the Korean markets are now being opened to American beef. When Choi passes the street protestors, a man on a megaphone yells, “Here come one of the mad cows now!” This is a reference to the massive protests that occurred last year when President Lee Myung-bak announced he would relax the ban on American beef (a key component of the Korea-US FTA), raising concerns among many that tainted American beef would enter the Korean market.

The film ends with a dedication to the farmers who fed their children and sent them to school with the fruits of their hard labor, and who have now been nearly forgotten in the modern technological world. Old Partner beautifully and movingly honors a way of life that is rapidly disappearing, and although to all appearances this is a harsh and unforgiving existence, it is unfailingly respectful and sympathetic toward the old man at its center, while not shying away from the less appealing aspects of his personality, such as his neglect of his wife and his ornery stubbornness. However, one cannot help but have admiration for Choi’s reluctance to give up on his trusted animal companion, and his refusal to use machines or pesticides on his land, even though this would make his work much easier. He lives, and will die, by his unyielding insistence on doing everything by hand, and remaining connected body and soul to the soil that literally gave him life.

Old Partner won the Mecenat award for best documentary at last year’s Pusan International Film Festival and had its US premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.