The moviefone article has a little preamble about how Steven Seagal is not as popular as he once was and then consists of nothing more than a list of his direct to DVD movies using the exact same format: release date, DVD cover or poster, tagline, tongue in cheek summary.  To author Kevin Polowy’s credit, however, he doesn’t copy our format any further by continuing with actual writing.  So here’s the moviefone version:

I guess the similarities speak for themselves.  Oh, and yes, we did do a series on the direct to DVD videos of 80’s action stars including four of Seagal’s films. So it’s not like moviefone even came up with that aspect of it.  The format is tweaked slightly in our version of the direct to DVD reviews.  For those, we still have the taglines, but the summaries are longer.  Also, we decided not to use the box covers as much to try to freshen up the format.  I guess freshening up the format is less important if, like Polowy, you are just stealing your format from someone else and hoping nobody will notice so that it will seem fresh.  But, other than that… see for yourself.  Here’s our review of Out For A Kill.

Moviefone's Kevin Polowy

Of course the joy to be found in later Seagal has been explored in several other outlets, like The Film Fiend as well, and everybody fucking knows about these movies and making fun of them is a very common internet past time. Polowy didn’t just stumble upon this incredible discovery, as he tries to represent. He’s dumbing down and regurgitating content from all across the web and pretending to do something original. He is however, specifically ripping off our format to do it.

Obviously, this pisses me off because it involves our site.  But there’s a trend towards very big sites like this one and The Huffington Post simply stealing content from smaller sites and communities and passing it off as original articles.  In the case of moviefone, they actually bothered to rephrase our stuff rather than copying and pasting it.  Kudos to them!

The net is a huge, stupid clusterfuck and one function of the high traffic outlets should be to cull some of the better, but more obscure content out there and bring it to their readers.  But be fucking honest about it and don’t steal.  Maybe include one whole sentence saying “here is some cool shit I found at another web site” or “let’s use the Ruthless 80s Action formula for a quick glance at some of Seagal’s recent work.” Then, everyone is happy. Don’t pretend to have made it up yourself, because then you reveal yourself to be a hack with no integrity.  Or worse still, one day, you might just push the wrong man too far. Polowy, I’m gonna take you to the fone.  The blood fone.

Somehow I got the notion that The White Ribbon is meant as an explanation of Nazism, probably because I’m an idiot.  It isn’t that, but it does provide some food for thought about the relatively recent roots of authoritarianism and oppression. Set in the Greater Fatherland Area around the turn of the century, our thoughts naturally turn to Hitler, who the kids in the story would likely grow up to support.  With rigid totalitarianism on the brain, we notice nuances of life in German village upon which we might not otherwise immediately focus. Particularly, when authority becomes pernicious in such a setting, there isn’t really anywhere to appeal. Dad is diddling the daughter? She will just have to deal with it. The alternative is to create a modern, liberal social structure, establish a child welfare agency, invent the telephone and use it to call them. And even then, she will still have to deal with it.

At the center of the film is an unsolved mystery as the village is afflicted by several acts of naked cruelty. The mystery remains unsolved and is meshed with other acts of negligence, malice and abuse of power. For variety, there is a charming, old world love story set under the guidance of a kind and benevolent patriarch. Loving Dad, Rapist Dad: it’s all in the luck of the draw. One of Haneke’s big points is that the abusers of power and freelance sadists will almost invariably get away with it, because it is so difficult to produce a suitable response. Without going into detail, several of his films seem to involve the ease with which we can destroy someone and the near impossibility of justice, if justice is action that restores some kind of equilibrium. From the Nazis down to one sexually terrorized daughter, whether some of the perpetrators are hanged or they live to beat off to the memories of their crimes in old age, there isn’t any way to really counterbalance irreparable harm.

We can, however, fuck things up even further by reinvesting in still greater authority, hoping that the newly strengthened social hierarchy will finally protect us or at least make things right again. In this film, that means a culture based on severe Protestantism that comes with more abuse. When the kids grew up, they’d try to double down on dad yet again. The historical context is only one of multiple, conflicting sources of tension in this film that provide the quality of a complex thriller. The cinematography is so impressive that you could use it as a tiebreaker in determining this to be the best Haneke film. Maybe Haneke uses disabled children because they represent the most basic level of injustice, but some of the shots of a retarded boy in this movie just seemed like a cheap way to be unpleasant, which is my only complaint.

#1 Big River Man

Matt has been singing the praises of John Maringouin’s earlier work, Running Stumbled, since he saw it at some festival. But because of legal concerns, it’s very difficult to track down a copy by hook or by crook. I did find Big River Man, however, though I’m not sure if it was by hook or by crook. Whichever the bad one is. It’s lucky that I did so, because even though I haven’t seen all that many of 2009’s films, I can award first prize with total confidence. Willie, you can throw out the other projects.

My first inclination is to just copy down this entire move word for word and post about 150 screen caps. Like this:

Many Slovenians are drunk and drivers. We are top in Europe by statistics. And my father, Martin, is one of them.

But I’m pretty sure that is illegal, and it is certainly unethical and the last thing I want to do is provide you with an excuse for not seeing The Best Film Of The Year (keep an eye out for it on The Discovery Channel). Maybe even The Next Step In Documentaries. The film is about a Slovanian endurance swimmer, Martin Strel, and his attempt to swim the length of The Amazon. Strel has repeatedly shattered his own endurance records, including swims down the polluted Mississippi and the horribly polluted Yantze, where he was sharing the water with corpses. Given that Strel is in his 50s, quite overweight, an alcoholic, subsists largely on horse burgers and has an old country, slavic way of thinking, the entire film is basically one great quotation, abundant in the kind of hilarious idiosyncrasies that recent “independent” films have failed so badly, so frequently to simulate.

“If piranha, for example, start attacking or something like that, we would threw bucket of blood, or whatever, on the other side and the piranhas will just redirect there.”

Comparisons to Herzog are pretty obvious, as this is a doc focusing on an unusual individual, struggling against nature (Grizzly Man) and the Amazon in particular (Aguirre, etc.) and I don’t think there is any disputing His influence. Also, like Herzog, Maringouin intentionally leaves his fingerprints all over the subject and it is anyone’s guess how much of it he has orchestrated.  But this is an Anglo version of Herzog’s approach with a layer of self awareness and and playfulness of which the mirthless German mind is incapable (see The White Ribbon). Martin claims that he is largely motivated by promoting environmental awareness, which leads to one of the film’s masterstrokes. One reason for the destruction of the rain forest is the value of mahogany, often used in musical instruments. As this information is shared, Marnigouin mixes deadpan documentary technique and an ironic juxtaposition of images that could well be rooted in this very same internet, to solemnly accuse rock stars with over-sized guitars of being a major cause of deforestation.

Another stroke of genius has a deeper impact on the film. Rather than narrate the film himself or God fucking forbid, have a celebrity handle the job, Maringouin has Martin’s son, Borut, narrate, a decision that adds tremendously to the film with maximum economy. Instantly, the film also becomes a study of a father son relationship and we have a narrator with extensive, firsthand insight into the other elements of the story. We learn that Borut is the one man PR maven behind his dad’s enormous local fame, which makes him a natural for the role, explaining, for example, how Strel’s status allows him to park on sidewalks, or anywhere else he likes, while driving around hammered, practicing breathing exercises, eating and listening to instructional English tapes without fear of a ticket. Given that Borut’s English, while good for general purposes, is a cut below the normal standard for narrating a 100-minute documentary, there is a whole new level of humor and charm brought to the narration. This is like a great Simpsons episode. It’s so entertaining and it nails all of the glib elements so hard that most people will overlook the fact that this film is enormously sophisticated and that Maringouin as a grand master at this particular game of discourse.

The Fall of Tiger Woods

Never has an athlete fallen so fast, completely, and satisfyingly. Touted at once as a history-changing black man and the whitest man on the planet, he has managed to disappoint his most ardent supporters by being, well, black in their eyes. In the course of a long weekend he went from being the bright-eyed savior and living embodiment of the game of golf to a tabloid joke sending sports writers like Rick Reilly into hissy fits and hand-wringing worthy of a neurotic Jewish grandmother. Read between the lines of the commentary and you’ll find the khaki and loafer crowd dipping their heads in disappointment as the one black guy to whom they could all relate let them down by having even worse taste in whores than they do.

Andre Agassi’s Open

Most jock books follow a basic formula of airing some dirty laundry about fucking broads on the road, telling a coach to fuck off, and doing drugs in the bullpen. Rarely do they eviscerate the essential myths that hold up the construct that being a professional athlete is a dream come true. Andre Agassi’s blistering portrayal of himself is nothing less than exhilarating and refreshing and gives me reason to enjoy the sports world again. For all the bullshit and pomp we’re subjected to, sports are not simply unscripted competitions that challenge the essence of human endurance and focus, they are entertainment for the masses. Agassi’s frank admission that he not only spent an entire year on the ATP tour smoking and snorting meth while he tanked matches, but absolutely loathed the game of tennis, is an affirmation that not only is the grass not greener on the other side, but that your neighbor’s yard hides far more bodies than you would care to imagine.

LeBron James: King of the NBA

The general conceit is that professional athletes are childish dunces incapable of making any decision that does not revolve around choosing which club trollop they want to bring home each night. LeBron James is the best and brightest hope for destroying the myth that because you can play ball you cannot make moneymen do your bidding. Shortly after entering the NBA, James fired his professional handlers and agents and replaced them with friends and associates who were deemed amateurs and rubes. Now, one year away from free agency, those same rubes and supposed hoodlums have helped put James on everything from billboards to Nike commercials while helping to put him in position for the greatest free agent contract in the history of the NBA. Make no mistake; James is the greatest business talent to enter the NBA. Michael Jordan needed David Falk. James only needed himself.

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Hubris is the enemy of success and the Patriots, of all teams, should have known better. Never before had a team come so far and done so much only to lose it all when it mattered most. The New England Patriots were on the doorstep of becoming the greatest team the NFL had ever seen, but they spent the lead up to their Super Bowl match up with the New York Giants inviting them to their victory party and talking about how the trip to Arizona was more like a vacation than a business trip. Whereas John Matuzsak and the Raiders spent the week before Super Bowl XV taunting the Eagles by brandishing their cocks and drinking Jack Daniels on Bourbon Street, the Patriots spent theirs granting interviews to Sports Illustrated behaving as if greatness was owed to them and speaking as if the Giants were rejects from the USFL. When they lost, Bill Belichick didn’t even have the decency to shake Tom Caughlin’s hand proving that the character of a man is displayed best when he fails, not when he is successful. Especially when he brings it upon himself.

Kobe Fucks a White Girl in the Ass

In the summer of 2003, Kobe Bryant traveled to Colorado to undergo some routine surgery on his knee. At the time, he was as big as Tiger Woods. He was doing McDonald’s commercials in Italian and was gracing Wheaties boxes, but after he fucked Katelyn Faber in the ass after she made it clear that her pussy would suffice, he was reduced to a childish dipshit who blew his slim chance to supplant Michael Jordan as the most popular basketball player of all time. Then, after the Lakers traded for Karl Malone and Gary Payton and financed the private plane rides back and forth to Colorado to deal with the courtroom drama, Kobe had the nerve to make public comments about Shaq doing the same sort of the thing but just paying the women off. In the end, Kobe got what he wanted – being the man in Los Angeles – but he lost everything he could have been.

Barry Bonds

Oh, Barry, my old friend, every time I think of you I smile. Sometimes I think back to that magical season in 1998 when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were stealing your thunder. Remember how you were the best player in the game, but two piece-of-shit hitters with huge holes in their game supplanted you in the press and dominated the headlines? Remember when you literally said, “fuck it,” in 1999 and did what every other asshole in baseball was doing and decided to go on the juice? I do. I loved every page of the leaked grand jury testimony that I read. I loved every second of the BALCO scandal. And I was in absolute rapture as you broke both the single-season and career home run marks while Bud Selig sat watching helplessly. And my heart sings every time I think of you because, without you, I never would have gotten to hear some pontificating dummy named Lance Williams from the San Francisco Chronicle tell me that it is crude to think that athletes will do whatever it takes to win no matter the legal consequences or the threat to their image or legacy. Barry, you will always be my hero.

The End of The Curse

Losing is an art, and for 85 years, no one did it with more style, class, panache, and inventiveness than the Boston Red Sox. Giving up game-winning home runs to overgrown midget shortstops, bumbling managers starting an ace on two days rest, letting Bob Stanley warm up – much less pitch – in a World Series game, selling Babe Ruth, humiliating Jackie Robinson during a tryout; yes, that was the Red Sox. However, in 2004 the greatest practitioners in the art of choking, fucking up, blowing it, and shitting the bed came all the way back from a 3-0 deficit to the Yankees in the ALCS to shock every sports fan on the planet before easily winning their first World Series since 1918. In game four, after decades of bad jokes and horrendous insults, you could actually hear the baseball gods say, “Enough is enough” and swing the momentum Boston’s way. Before anyone knew it, the Yankees were on the wrong end of the greatest comeback in the history of sports leaving their fans in the Bronx depressed and physically ill. That role reversal made for easily the most tangible proof that the world is not all evil.

Charlie Weiss: Charlatan, Con Artist, Fat

Notre Dame never knew what hit them. After being part of a coaching staff that won three Super Bowls in four years, Charlie Weis parlayed devising offensive game plans for Tom Brady into running one of the crown jewels of college football. After the Irish dumped Tyrone Willingham three years into a rebuilding project, Weis was feted as though there was a bidding war for his services even though no other team in football showed the slightest interest in hiring a guy who just had bariatric surgery and needed to be driven around in a gold cart. During his first two years, using talent procured by Willingham, Weis managed to convincingly lose two BCS bowl games and secure a 10-year multi-million-dollar extension. Over the next three years he embarked on a journey of mediocrity and failure that ended with him alleging on national radio that Pete Carroll was shacking up with 20-something-year-old grad students at the beach while he, of all people, was hounded by 60 Minutes for using foul language. There’s bitter and disappointed and then there is just plain classless, untalented and dumb, with Weis illustrating perfectly that success is not dependent on saying the right things at your first press conference. Not bad for a guy who never even played Pop Warner football.

The Oakland Raiders

Warren Sapp, sage, said it best: “Al Davis knows football. 1970’s football.” The problem with historical success is that when failure comes, you think it’s not your fault. Surrounded by pathetic enablers and yes men, Davis has provided some of the finest entertainment in sports by essentially firing Jon Gruden, re-hiring Art Shell, drafting JaMarcus Russell, and gracing us with the spectacle that is Tom Cable. Davis was once an iconoclast whose instincts and willingness to gamble brought him enormous success, but his dementia and his family’s unwillingness to put him a home has reduced the Raiders to a laughingstock on par with the Clippers. It’s sort of sad to see his corpse propped up and dressed in tacky tracksuits, but there is no better window into what the future ultimately holds for Jerry Jones.

Roger Federer is a Boring God

Not since Bjorn Borg wielded a wooden racket and wore grape smugglers has a player so dominated the game of tennis the way Roger Federer has. Though he is now on the wrong side of his prime, but still formidable, there was a five-year stretch where he was simply unbeatable. While players like John McEnroe, Borg, Andre Agassi and Jimmy Connors were painfully human and easy to root for because of their respective emotional outbursts and personal foibles, Federer has cultivated a business-like persona centered around the calm perfectionism, faux class, false modesty, and rigid professionalism that oozes from his perfectly tailored warm up suits and monogrammed socks. Winning his 15th Grand Slam title rocketed him into the stratosphere of the greatest professional athletes. His game is versatile, well-rounded, effective on all surfaces, and essentially perfect, but watching him – save for his matches against Rafael Nadal – is passionless, boring, disaffecting, and devoid of soul, making Ivan Lendl look like a rock star by comparison.

Adendum: Sports Related Youtube of The Decade

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a work of the most supreme audacity. A Western with little action, a history lesson without any heroes, and a character study that uses contemplative silence rather than the roar of gunfire, the film is everything I had hoped it to be and more; one of the few movies all year that actually got better as it went along, reducing its 160-minute running time to a mere flash of brilliance. Who could imagine that in 2007, a time when Hollywood is in such an advanced state of decay that every move seems pre-approved by focus groups and teams of cautious lawyers, we would be honored with such risk and bold artistry? After all, here’s a film concerning one of the most famous figures in history, an outlaw known by young and old alike, and rather than pander to the obvious with a romp of hard riding and gunplay, that very man is reduced to a supporting character; a symbol, yes, but not at all the driving narrative force. Thankfully, blissfully, this is not a tale of bank heists and train robberies, showdowns at high noon, or cat and mouse dramatics that reduce the untamed frontier to clever criminals and no-nonsense lawmen. Instead, this is a film about nothing less grandiose than America itself — its myths, its illusions, its raw, wounded identity — with the necessary sense of wonder to pull it off. Such ambitions are fraught with peril, of course (resentful glances and accusations of unjust pretension, to name a few), but each and every frame is a testament to the overall success, and by the final act — a coda concerning the days and nights of Robert Ford after the infamous assassination that stands as some of the finest filmmaking I’ve ever seen — we are not exhausted, or burdened, or bereft, but thankful at having lived to see it all. The decade has seen its masterpiece.

The Wrestler (2008)

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, a film that on its face doesn’t sound like much at all, is not without convention, or cliché, or even a hint of familiarity, but its brilliance is not in its ability — or desire — to revolutionize the medium. Through one simple character, the washed-up slob that is The Ram, America itself is laid bare (and where Jersey has never looked so Jersey). And who knew that when the chips were down, Mickey Rourke would come to set things right? His performance is a revelation to be sure; a realization so penetrating, wise, and achingly authentic that it deserves to sweep Oscar off its feet. It is greatness in raw, unflinching defiance, both as a physical embodiment and through sheer emotional resonance. It’s the epitome of the Method’s still unsurpassed approach to the art. Rourke never overreaches, or plays to the cheap seats, or asks us to find him appealing. His faded has-been is a bastard through and through, as well as the sort of man incapable of breadth, scope, or even a moment where he isn’t out to prove his worth through the channel of an appalling self-loathing. His is the vanity of utter stasis; where, preserved in amber like a prehistoric insect, he bathes in nostalgia to keep the world from penetrating his tomb. He lives as he did, stunted for all time, unable to grapple with the parade that long ago passed him by. He’s a muscular, scarred Norma Desmond; the ring his musty, cobwebbed estate.

United 93 (2006)

It’s the film that was never supposed to work. It simply couldn’t. Every conceivable minefield was glaringly apparent; it would function as little more than propaganda, a rallying cry, a spur for Bush’s approval ratings, or a perverse, exploitive justification for invasion and revenge. Heroes would be oversimplified, villains even more so, and the audience would be invited not to observe and recoil as we must in the face of unthinkable tragedy, but bare its teeth and believe, absurdly, that we would have acted more forcefully ourselves. No, this is not that movie, and for that alone, it deserves recognition as the most restrained account of actual events ever filmed. It would be more fitting to describe what we see, what we hear, and hell, what we feel, as just shy of cinema verite; a peeking behind the curtain of an event we think we know from top to bottom, when of course we could not possibly have any idea. It’s all terrifyingly real, for we know the grisly outcome, and the film wisely presents every moment leading up to the actual hijacking as routine, banal, and just this side of boring. It had to be. Our perspective, so viciously unfair as the worst sort of hindsight, screws the tension tighter than we can handle, and we wait it out; a death watch that damn near drives us to the brink. But again, and why this masterpiece will last beyond the raw wounds it portrays, this is above politics, and war, and terrorism itself; these are human beings, fragile and fearful, confused and astoundingly brave, doing whatever they could, which, sadly, was very little, to simply survive. Simply, when it’s everything? But fight on we do, brutes of a single-minded devotion, even when the whole damn enterprise is doomed. More so.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

It’s the sweetest example of a cinematic valedictory – Robert Altman, aging, frail, yet still teeming with wit and insight – faces the cold breath of mortality with A Prairie Home Companion, a delightful ode to endings; some happy, some not, but all unfailingly inevitable. Given that I was not at all familiar with Garrison Keillor’s radio broadcast (nor much of his career, period), I expected little from the movie, and must admit that I was moved to go only out of an obligation to Altman, one of the true giants of the art form. I figured that at best I would be distracted by a few corny jokes, a silly song or two, and that unmistakable overlapping dialogue that has been much imitated, but never equaled. Who knew that Altman (along with Keillor’s charming script) would focus so intently on the matter-of-factness of death itself; that while it will come for all of us, it need not be the only way in which to punch that final clock. In many ways, the film understands that before we’re carted off for the last time, we can release ourselves from the passions that drive us, and the noblest among us know when it’s time to give it a rest. This may in fact mean the end of life for many, but stepping aside can be as simple as a gesture; the nod of agreement that yes, my time in the sun is no more. There are others waiting for their shot. And there always will be.

Before Sunset (2004)

As the rarest of birds – an intellectual engagement between two adults without a trace of pretension or suffocating irony – the film stands as the decade’s most insightful romance, even though our couple remains physically uninvolved throughout. More than unrequited love, or a revisiting of what could have been, these are two older, and not necessarily wiser characters who have arrived at true adulthood with little but quiet resignation to bind their wounds. Jesse and Celine, perhaps the only cinematic pair that warranted a sequel, have an effortless grace together, while their hesitations and despairing glances reveal not the will of a screenwriter, but the hazards of the engaged life. It’s all talk, yes, and elevated beyond our normal unbearable exchanges, but the words rely not on the esoterica of the self-appointed elite, or the instant wit of the smirking wiseacre, but actual ideas learned not in the armchair of youth, but through experience and survival. It’s as if these two, slightly hardened by idealism’s inevitable decline, come together to spend a few hours in a cocoon slightly more tolerable than the ones they already inhabit. Marriage and family, as Jesse has discovered, are not “what adults do” per se, but are the only acceptable escapes left us in a world ever-intolerant of genuine solitude. Celine and Jesse work, such as it is, because they’ve never faced the actual scrutiny of life beyond the glow. At last, a film where one listens, one learns, and one recognizes all too well that our accidental encounters make the routine bearable.

Miranda July

Born in 1974 in Barre, Vermont, likely to a bearded mid-wife as the winter wind whipped a patriarchal moon, Ms. July, merely responsible for the criminal act otherwise known as Me and You and Everyone We Know (“merely” in a way that Stalin merely purged his republics of entire generations), is perhaps the decade’s most emblematic atrocity; a self-absorbed, self-involved, dull-witted razor across the wrists of a dying culture who so upped the quirk quotient that we’ll likely never again witness a straight face. Her maiden cinematic effort, the type where her sweet-tempered cancer of a character asks only that you call her at 3am, utter the word “macaroni”, and return to your obsessive navel-gazing, left me reeling for the better half of the decade, and at last gave the Mark David Chapman in me my own personal John Lennon. And then, as if to nudge us ever closer to the brink, she released a collection of smirking short stories, No One Belongs Here More than You, coupled with the short film, Are You the Favorite Person of Anyone?, which posits that if someone, somewhere isn’t thinking about you every minute of every day, it’s best to fill the gap yourself, preferably with doodle-ridden post-it notes. Among her other accomplishments, she wears funny hats, goofy glasses, and wide belts, and isn’t above going out in public sans bra. She also believes that if it can’t be done with a dollop of gay, a cup of whimsy, and a bucket of menstrual blood blessed by an Apache medicine man, it isn’t worth doing at all. Thankfully, she’s left us the world’s worst website (www.mirandajuly.com), which obnoxiously shifts everything to the right side of the screen, while proving that any revolution worth its salt must first figure out the ideal daily affirmation to leave on one’s pillow. I’d wish a brutal rape upon her vile soul, but she’d only turn it into an award-winning performance piece.

Erin Brockovich

Every decade needs its feminist icon, and who better than a self-righteous, screeching slab of entitlement fury portrayed by Julia Roberts? Oh, that Erin, having all those kids by all those different fathers, flying into a rage when her free babysitter has the audacity to move away, or believing that big tits and a gaping vagina are reasonable substitutes for a law degree. She’s the All-American gal: pushy, vain, and compensating for her mental midgetry with sassy put-downs and the kind of reverse-snobbery only a white trash mother could love. And why not? While others slave away with the actual heavy lifting, she’s sitting on assorted couches listening to sob stories and bullying boob-struck men into letting her photocopy sensitive documents. By all means pay her millions of dollars! Yes, she’s the kind of woman who fucks degenerate bikers, quits jobs where she’s not allowed to dress like a prostitute, drops out of school in the 3^rd grade, and nastily rebukes anyone who isn’t charmed by her abusive demeanor, all while bemoaning the unfairness of a cruel world. And yet, she’s consistently rewarded for her efforts, as if to argue that because women aren’t cut out for life with accountability, they should chug any cock that will sign their paycheck. It’s not a bad argument, if only the film meant it. No, Erin is the bulldog heroine in the best populist tradition; the relentless bur in the backside of corporate greed and masculine indifference. In reality, she’s the decade’s flowering of femininity: the world will forgive your hateful, bitter, brain-blasting ways so long as you look good in a mini-skirt. Act like this with the mug of Betty Friedan, and guess who’ll be collecting unemployment.

Garden State

We all know a guy like Zach Braff –  hip, smug, indifferent to the world’s turn – but how many secure the necessary funds to write and direct a motion picture? Fortunately, the world is unkind, though this film and its rush of imitators are enough to degrade our collective taste all on their own. Yep, there’s adorable Zach in the corner of the classroom, gripping his dog-eared notebook while he chews pensively on his writing instrument. He stares at the ceiling for a moment, flashes that unmistakable grin yet again, and quickly jots down another idea.  He’ll recall bits of a conversation he had the week before, adding a dash of color to push it along just so into the realm of the unbelievable. Here a scene, there a scene, all lacking continuity, of course, but making for brilliant set pieces in search of an idea. Year after year, Zach collects these tidbits and morsels of twee for the movie to come; the one he feels compelled to make, and will most assuredly bring him the fame promised by guidance counselors and smothering Jewish mothers alike. The hero, a drug-addled young man coping with loss, who believes recovery can only be found in the mad eyes of an eccentric epileptic who conducts hamster funerals when she isn’t collecting your tears in a Dixie cup. And be sure to add the kid who wears a full suit of armor at the breakfast table, or the Gulf War trading cards, or screaming with cathartic release next to a boat that’s been turned into a house, or maybe even a rich kid who invented something he calls silent Velcro. Or match the hero’s shirt with the wallpaper while a sad pop song plays on the soundtrack. Or even the odd duck of a black guy who becomes a detective to find out who exactly urinated on his video game console. My god, how we loved them all. Representative of no one, reminding us of even less, we were transfixed in no uncertain terms; imagination unhinged in the face of cruel conformity. He spoke at last for a generation that can’t stop talking about itself.

Zooey Deschanel

She first came to my attention in the fevered nightmare of All the Real Girls. She told me she had a dream where she invented peanut butter. Then she stood – like that – in the bowling alley. You know, the way one does when they want the whole fucking enterprise to shut down and look in their direction. She demanded love, and got it, because every man on earth should want the girl most likely to leave you 634 voicemails on the Friday you don’t call her back. She’s the girl who speaks in riddles, sing-song blather, and allusions to college radio. And then in Yes Man, where she fronts a group called Munchausen By Proxy, a bar band with three fans, just in case you wondered how she could afford to live in Los Angeles. And in case she didn’t have you convinced of her authenticity, she put a seahorse on her head to, you know, separate herself from someone who gives a damn. But again, you’ll love her, because she’s so cute and cuddly and warm and fuzzy and, well, psychotic, but in a way that might lead to anal. And then, in (500) Days of Summer, she’s the new Annie Hall, a la-de-da sweetheart for a new generation unaccustomed to sanity in their women. She has you at hello because she’s unpredictable, zany, and prone to chronic unemployment. She’s the girl who doesn’t have to try, falling back on soft tones, warm eyes, and a paycheck that involves leading joggers at 6am as they learn how to take pictures as they sprint. A fuckable Miranda July who loves video games, comic books, and your kind of music which is so fucking cool, if only you don’t mind the crying fits, bizarre disappearances, and requests to dance naked in the rain. She’s hot, but not too hot; approachable enough for desperate nerds everywhere who don’t mind a pink, spangle-dusted boot heel on the groin whenever you fall and fall hard. She’s irony incarnate, and gone by breakfast. She was also in my favorite movie of the past 25 years, which might be her most devious crime yet.

Juno

When the history of this most appalling decade is written, few need consult a source outside the comfy confines of Diablo Cody’s ode to the improbably articulate teenager; the one film of its time so pre-occupied with being clever and smarmy and whip-smart that it failed to realize its own rich status as the most conservative slice of American culture since the slasher film equated sex with violent death. But that’s our Diablo: so desperate to jam in allusions to cartoons and TV icons that pre-date our heroine’s birth by mere decades that she becomes the only pro-life advocate with pink hair and a guild card. Sure, young people do in fact speak in sly slogans and tele-speak, but the ones who get pregnant don’t exactly have two working parents around to gently poke their ribs. Hell, they don’t even stay in school. But rather than delve into the reality of teenage motherhood, with its poverty, neglect, and decided humorlessness, our sweet Juno makes it so damn appealing that we’d gladly submit our own for insemination if it meant they’d be as well-read and up to speed on classic rock. It’s the Hollywood gloss that grates, and the insistence that language should get us nowhere but the next witticism. There’s also a creepy condescension afoot, where Diablo’s sense of superiority is voiced by the stepmom-cum-nail tech, a stand-in for the armchair populist’s sense that expertise or accomplishment are diminished in the face of knowing the names of He-Man’s comrades. Where being flippant can get the job done just as well as training, education, and dedication to craft. And where even the most sarcastic, mean-spirited demon can’t Shop-Vac her spawn because being smart is always a cover for being scared shitless. Oh yeah, and Michael Cera. And the Daniel Johnston-inspired soundtrack. And the track team motif. And a mailbox overrun with Tic-Tacs. Because we all know the corner store that stocks them by the thousands.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Slumdog Millionaire – Because the most beautiful woman in India shall be sold into prostitution and remain a virgin.

Wes Anderson – Because you forever ruined “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”

Adrienne Shelly – Because she’s dead and gone and I want to kill her myself for Waitress.

Lady in the Water – Because having a character named Cleveland Heep was not the worst thing about it.

Jennifer Hudson – Because she now has exactly one more Oscar than Stanley Kubrick for bleeding out eardrums worldwide in a ghetto fright wig.

The Pursuit of Happyness – Because homeless black men so rarely become millionaires. Or demand sole custody.

Rent – Because transvestites with AIDS should pay for their own damn cups of coffee.

A History of Violence – Because William Hurt is not Irish. Or a gangster. Or an actor.

The Passion of the Christ – Because I don’t like to mix my anti-Semitism with my homoeroticism, at least not in public.

The Brown Bunny – Because the biggest assholes always have the biggest cocks. Always, I says.

What the Bleep Do We Know? – Because New Age is the new Christianity. And stupid is the same stupid.

Chop Shop – Any of Ramin Bahrani’s films would make this list, but this is his most tightly focused and genuinely moving, with one of the few child characters in the cinema that has the feel of reality. Each day is a dawn to dusk hustle, and sleep or entertainment can occur only if time allows. Alejandro Polanco turns in a punishing and raw performance as a young street hustler who persuades drivers to use his employer’s chop shop, and is willing to sell anything to build up his savings and realize his dream of owning his own food cart. It doesn’t sound like much, but for a child who has nothing, and no future prospect of anything beyond a daily grind of poverty, this dream is as vast as an empire. Bahrani deserves credit for creating a bleak film that resonates with the viewer regardless of their background, with a thin veneer of hope. This is above all about the survival instinct within us all, and the daily failures and tragedies offset by the occasional small victory that political philosophies and media soundbites fail to grasp. An involving film about those who live every day on the edge, with nobody there to catch them if they fall.

4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days – Though set in Romania in 1987, this story could take place anywhere that reproductive rights are not guaranteed. Avoiding political statements was a wise move for any film about abortion. Those involved – the protagonist, her pregnant friend, and the abortionist – are risking their lives to serve this need. Regardless of your stance on the issue, there will always be women who will require termination of their unborn child, and going to back-alley specialists need not be the price for society’s lack of understanding. 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days eschews grandstanding in favor of going through those excruciating moments necessary to have an abortion in a nation that has made them illegal, pure and simple. The people present are not lionized or damned in the process. At the end, they are just people forced by circumstances to what they must.

Burma VJ / Control Room – A splendid double feature of documentaries that present a scathing indictment of modern commercial news, though neither really intend to. Burma VJ presents the work of reckless citizens who desire a free media so badly that they risk (and subsequently lose) their lives to create one in the hopelessly backward and closed nation of Burma. While spineless news readers in democratic societies collect fat paychecks for telling viewers what they already know and avoid news snippets that could upset their corporate owners, the journalists of Burma VJ truly understand what freedom means, and its cost. Control Room tells the story of the widely reviled reporters of Al-Jazeera, all of whom are a smidge baffled about the attention they have received. Former Defense Secretery Donald Rumsfeld sneered that these people were the voice of Al-Qaeda, despite that most of them were former BBC employees, and often were still British citizens. Ironically, they made just as many enemies in the Arab world for speaking truth to power on both sides of the ocean, and for utterly failing to edit out the footage that would piss people off. While journalists from the west embedded themselves in the rectum of the military and passed on whatever they were told as sterling fact, these guys brought raw video of the fighting in Iraq, and the atrocities committed by both sides. One Al-Jazeera reporter was killed by an American pilot in an event contemptuously dismissed by the Bush cabinet as ‘unavoidable’; no less hateful an act than the murder of Daniel Pearl. Celebrate these people while you can, for their days of operation outside the bounds of corporate media are numbered.
http://english.aljazeera.net/

An Inconvenient Truth – Al Gore became the target of a smear campaign involving his extracurricular consulting activities and the size of his house, among other irrelevant points after this documentary became a hit. The data is there, and it has become quite clear to those who still maintain a measure of respect for information that the climate is changing to a warmer and less stable one on average. Though the Earth has had profound swings in temperature before, these changes occurred over hundreds of millions of years, enabling the flora and fauna to adapt. Humankind has created a true mess on slow boil since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and the planet is not prepared for such a change over only a couple hundred years. Even if you hate polar bears, bear in mind that nearly every major city on the planet has an ocean port, and if these are underwater, it could be disruptive to business. We take for granted that the economy will remain stable forever, but if we change the planet so it sustains a significantly smaller population, exactly why are we being so cavalier about it?

Kinsey – another period piece that remains strikingly relevant, this biopic about the revolutionary researcher who removed the veil of shame from human sexual behavior takes a close look at this flawed but essential man. It is easy to take for granted our current understanding about sex, but before Alfred Kinsey, our laws were shockingly regressive and our knowledge of sex based entirely upon the whims of the clergy. And Kinsey was no genius, nor did he unravel any impossible puzzles; he simply collected data about what people did or felt sexually, and published it. Period. Consider Alfred Kinsey our patron saint on the unassailable value of data, and how it can cause a seismic shift in how we view ourselves. So why is this still relevant? Even today, conservatives consider his work among the most dangerous ever, and would so dearly desire to bury it forever and return to those halcyon dark ages of religion-based views about sex. Before Kinsey published his masterworks Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Female, people actually believed that masturbation was psychologically devastating, homosexuality was a psychiatric disease, and that there was only one sexual act that could be termed normal. He did not just add to human knowledge, he made life more tolerable.

Munich – In the age of the superpowers, between the decline of the American empire and the rise of the Chinese one, global wars are a thing of the past. Not that we are in an era of peace – our conflicts are now smoldering, dominated by geographic disputes and low-tech attacks that have left entire regions in chaos. Though economic issues drive the majority of these contentions, the self-renewing fuel that provides a steady burn is that of retribution. Regardless of your take on Israeli-Palestinian relations, if you were to find an actual reason for the most recent rocket attack or reactionary return salvo, it would rest with revenge for the last attack. Under the guise of a thriller, Spielberg has crafted an immaculate film that quickly becomes lost in the fog of reprisals. War justifies itself under such circumstances, and arguing right or wrong simply does not apply anymore. Most crucial to this masterpiece is the intuitive sense that ultimately the direction of vengeance cannot be predicted as the cycle of retribution removes itself from any party’s control.

Taxi to the Dark Side – On the surface, this is one of those hated liberal screeds against the policies of the Bush administration, but this is taking an exceedingly narrow view. Taxi To The Dark Side is about the compromise of the United States Constitution by those charged with defending it. Beginning with profiled kidnappings of suspects of terror attacks in the Middle East and moving to operations on United States territory, legality was forever shed as anyone vaguely suspected of doing… something… could be put in a hole forever and tortured until they confessed to the predetermined script placed before them. No oversight, no legal precedent, no structure to the metastasis of the power of the executive branch except that which ambition provides. And if you think about it, it did not take a great deal to spur this abandonment of law and order. Three thousand Americans dead is a blip on any graph, and pales next to the importance and uniqueness of the document that formed the cornerstone of our system. Even the ramifications of this has been lost on most Americans, who have the attitude that as long as they are not the ones in the naked pyramid, then such actions just don’t matter. 9/11 was a turning point in more ways than we have realized.

The Class – The teacher who wrote this winner of the Palm D’Or was also cast as the teacher in this essential film about the state of our education system. Though based in Paris, it could have been filmed anywhere. As the quality of education for the lower classes continues to decline as it does all over the world, and the cultural melange of the world’s largest cities becomes increasingly complex, it will be the classrooms where the fuse is allowed to continue burning. Rooms of education represent the place of greatest potential for understanding, teaching, and most of all learning about one another. But since they are really just holding pens for disaffected youth who are only learning their relative irrelevance to a system that does not want them, the classroom becomes a cauldron. Overtly, The Class deals with France’s identity crisis as immigrants from the Middle East and Africa floods the shores of Europe. The children are rude and ignorant, and the teacher utterly fails to reach them, whether due to their insolence or his inability to understand them does not matter. The Class, as with all universal films, deals in a simple way with innumerable subjects regarding discontinuities. Generational, ethnic, informational, gender-based, and economic gaps abound; in The Class you see a microcosm of our society, and the direction it is heading will not be easy to predict.

The Corporation – One of the most depressing films ever crafted, The Corporation takes an exhaustive look at the birth of the modern corporation, and the insidious way it rules every aspect of our lives. Starting with an obscure law that allows an organization to classify itself as an individual, we see how such arcane definitions allow corporations to take on an identity of their own and thus deflect responsibility from those who run the business and make the money. When executives are caught fudging numbers or breaking the law, they can always hide behind the opaque wall of the corporate structure and proclaim ignorance. The corporation itself can be to blame, and so culpability is passed on to shareholders, and from there blame is diluted until it no longer exists. This is how Union Carbide, Chevron, and Halliburton manage to continue chugging along despite being the cause of untold amounts of suffering the world over. When the Supreme Court redefined a corporation as a person, elevating property rights to the same level as human rights, the battle was over before a single shot was fired. Nobody is to blame, you see, unless you cannot afford the shield of incorporation. Then you are just an individual who goes to prison. The Corporation leaves you feeling utterly helpless by its end, detailing the creation of a system from which there is no escape.

Traffic – equal to the classic miniseries Traffik, this film concerns the drug trade and the sheer magnitude of the odds the Drug Enforcement Administration is fighting against. While agents patrol the borders, risk their lives to intercept less than 5% of the drugs imported into the United States, and send hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and weaponry to Columbia to combat drug lords, the people of this country pay handsomely to keep the supply coming. You will find few subjects better to demonstrate the cognitive dissonance between a nation’s elected officials and citizens. Equal parts entertainment and cautionary tale, Traffic dramatizes the schizophrenic approach to the drug trade and the impossibility of continuing to fight it.

IOUSA – The end of American exceptionalism is about to strike us full in the face not due to a conflict, but from the overwhelming size of the national debt. As it mushrooms, the United States approaches the point where tax revenues will be less than the interest payments on the American debt amassed since George W. Bush entered the White House. Reagan-era conservatives argued that this did not matter, and they may have been right before other nations aspired to superpower status. The policy of deficit spending while cutting taxes is a sure winner for incumbents, and poison to pragmatists who understand the danger of allowing other nations to own the debt of your country. If you are in the mood for a horror story, look no further than this adroit and straightforward documentary that will detail just how much time the United States has left before it will simply be owned outright by foreign interests.

Jesus Camp / The Education of Shelby Knox – No matter how many exposes, lost elections, or awareness of their insinuation into the political power structure, religious fanatics are here to stay in democratic society. And they have no interest in democracy, equality, or egalitarian ideals – they want an irreversible slide into theocratic institutions. There will be no bargaining, no reasoning with these people, as per the definition of ‘fanatic’. They want power, and their foot soldiers are the next generation. Easily led and indoctrinated, the children of fanatics are being born and bred to become political organizers, and best you believe they will be working overtime. The children of Jesus Camp are sad cases in victims of child abuse, taught to be deathly afraid of every waking moment in their worship of a just and loving God who hates their fucking guts. Consider it fair warning. The Education of Shelby Knox makes a interesting, though similarly heartbreaking companion piece in the extraordinary struggle of one Texas girl to bring sex education to her school. Read that sentence again, because their school actually teaches that abstinence is all there is, and sex simply isn’t an option. That her town has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the nation is ignored completely by the town leaders. Just a nice example of the social conservatives’ penchant for inventing whatever reality works for their insane beliefs. That Shelby Knox made it out of that town with her sanity intact is a testament to the strength of the human spirit, but woe to those children left behind, breeding copiously to provide additional fodder for the bible warriors and the army recruiters.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room – No list of films about the most disposable decade ever would be complete without this cross section of conservative economic theory crossbred with American entitlement. These assholes not only perpetrated a massive scam – Ken Lay and the rest of his cronies truly believed that they had unearned wealth coming to them. Though the cries for their heads were sang around the world, don’t believe for a second that the board of directors of this fake Fortune 500 company was anything but a hero to the populace… until they got caught. Nobody gets this rich without ripping people off. From doctoring books to lend the appearance of vague but opulent success to manufacturing an energy crisis in California for profit, this is the true manifestation of the free market when unfettered by pesky regulators. Naturally, once the perpetrators were caught and prosecuted, everyone learned their lesson that when the books look too good to be true, they probably are. Well, until the next hot trend of housing subprime loans and fake financial products hit the streets.

Dirty Pretty Things – an instant classic the year it was released, Dirty Pretty Things took an unflinching look at the difficult, compromised lives of illegal immigrants living invisibly in the shadows of their adopted nation. Performing tasks that natural citizens thought beneath them, they live dangerously, having nobody to turn to if exploited. The most extreme example of what an illegal immigrant will sell to get a green card is in the field of organ donation – give up one kidney and you have your freedom (if you survive the procedure), and someone lucky enough to have been born in the right place gets a working organ. And yes, this all happens in real life. The perfect blend of suspense, drama, and social commentary, Dirty Pretty Things is a snapshot in time. Extraordinary risks are taken to remain surviving each day, and there is no safety net beneath them.

Flow – A crushing and obliviously hopeful documentary about the drive to privatize the world’s fresh water supply, Flow addresses a subject that would once be thought ridiculous. Privatize the supply of water, that which fills the rivers and has always existed as a public trust? As it turns out, if you appoint the right judges and amass enough wealth, you can claim ownership and sell or lease rights to anything you want. In Bolivia, the grip of multinational water companies was so tight that peasants in rural areas would be threatened with prison if they put a bucket out in the rain. Even in the United States, companies that sell bottled water can simply purchase publicly owned lakes and rivers and suck them dry before a single legal claim is filed. And as one state Supreme Court judge ruled, a multinational corporation is immune to prosecution for these transgressions. As the population rises and the efforts to legally take water and other public assets gains ground, people will discover just how strong the sense of entitlement of the upper classes can be.

District 9

For sheer entertainment value, nothing touches this gritty and cynical sci-fi  masterpiece with a grim outlook on human nature. Based in the violent and  compromised urban slums of Johannesburg, it provides the perfect crucible in  which racial and economic issues create a melange of subtext  that provides food for thought. Despite the alien characters, it is a  consideration of what makes us human, as well as questioning whether humanity  has any value in itself. This allegory about apartheid also regards the devastating impact of losing an intellectual class and the cannibalistic nature of populations under pressure. Most of all, it was dead entertaining, with action to spare. In the coda, there is suggestion of either hope amidst the  decayed setting, or perhaps that we are most human when we betray our nature. Neill Blomkamp is a talent to watch, crafting a film for our times. In a year with homogenized films and lifeless CGI, a gory B-movie that runs roughshod over racial stereotypes in an unphotogenic city while playing with complex themes gave life to an utterly dead year. It would be hard to imagine a less marketable film. Perhaps there is hope for the medium after all.

Goodbye, Solo

A meditative work by one of America’s finest filmmakers, featuring flawless  acting by amateurs in a masterfully made character study. Ignoring any larger  point to be made, watching the two leads play off each other is endlessly  entertaining. Bahrani came into his own with the truly magnificent Chop Shop;  here the perfectionist director considers larger questions of humanity and  identity. Red West and Souleymane Sy Savane turn in natural performances in  one of the best films of the year. Any further attempt at description only seems to diminish its impact, so I will not even try.

Burma VJ

The future of journalism will not be the newsmodels who hide behind desks and monitors – it will be in the hands of impoverished and powerless guerilla  reporters armed with digital cameras capturing world events. Burma VJ tells  the story of one cell of journalists who managed to film the uprising in Burma in 2007 as the monks led the charge against the military junta that has maintained an iron grip since a coup in 1962 removed the elected leader. Many of these men  and women joined those monks in prison and shallow graves after the rebellion was crushed by the military. You will not see a more electrifying film this year, starring nameless people who have a far more profound understanding of the importance of democracy than we do.

Beaches of Agnes

This sublime documentary by and about the most unique and iconoclastic of the  French New Wave auteurs is a true work of art in its exploration of a  compulsive artist. The director of such diverse works as Vagabond and The Gleaners and I makes for a fascinating figure even when talking about herself. As she considers people and places important to her life, you get a feeling for who Agnes Varda is, without really knowing her at all; this is a recurrent theme in her work. This is a reflective film of a life fully lived while reviewing some of her better known films as signposts along the way. Beaches of Agnes is a free flowing essay about the life of Agnes Varda, a poem without rhyme or meter, nor underlying purpose, other than an expression of life. At least the way she sees life. As she gets older, she expresses the regret that memory begins to fade, and our recollections fall to dust as do our bodies. “Our memory ultimately fails. But it is still ours, and nobody knows us.” The director and numerous actors spend time walking backward in an expression of reflection without nostalgia. Varda is 80 going on 18, and has a great deal to say, even if we could only brush the surface of understanding her, or anyone else in our lives. “While I live… I remember.”

Summer Hours

This film makes subtlety its medium in an exploration of the meaning of the  things in our life when time and context change. Olivier Assayas evokes the  immortal Jean Renoir with his delicate touch and an intuitive sense of human  nature. As such, there is no real plot apart from how three siblings who have  drifted apart handle the estate of their departed mother; this description  hardly does justice to the depth of characterization that makes this an  absorbing film. As the destructive power of time works on our frail vessels,  the meaning of our lives and the objects we own (which in turn help define us)  changes dramatically. This becomes clearer in a final, seemingly irrelevant  scene in which the next generation appears to take a beautiful but worn  country house for granted, while one youth regards it with greater value than perhaps her predecessors did.

Sugar

The traditional sporting film dies a deserved death in this sublime tribute to  the sheer effort required to simply endure in the face of mounting pressure to  perform. The grand question is, if talent and hard work is not enough to  succeed, what then? Sugar goes toward this dark corner of the American psyche,  as we have become accustomed to ignoring the possibility of failure. Finding a  way to succeed despite failure shows greater character than winning. Sugar interweaves threads of cultural disconnect, the plight of the immigrant, and  establishing a sense of home. These threads intersect in the understated  ending in which a mere gesture speaks with greater resonance than any  dialogue.

In The Loop

Probably one of the most dense and economical films in recent memory, In The  Loop packages the political machinations at work during the run-up to the war  in Iraq. As a fictionalized account, it is just chaotic and stupid enough to nail how politicians act under pressure and how what appears to  be government business is the sum total of an army of individual bureaucratic  drones feeding their own ambitions. It answers a great many questions as to how war can be declared under such dubious circumstances, why the public was fooled, and why nobody seemed capable of stopping the monster that had been set in motion. The acting is flawless, the dialogue  demonically funny, and the intuitive screenplay is sharp as a laser. Peter Capaldi has a nomination (at minimum) coming for his part, as few have fashioned a more  magnetic and hateful cunt.

Crude

Texaco-Chevron spent the last two decades pumping oil out and pumping toxic  waste into a remote section of the Ecuadorian rain forest, causing billions of  dollars in damage and precipitating an epidemic of skin diseases, cancers, and  gastrointestinal hemorrhages amongst the indigenous people who live in that  forest. Sounds like a clear cut case that should result in a judgment against  the company, but in Crude you get a front row seat to the power of  multinational corporations to evade responsibility. Via payoffs, coercion, and  massive spending upon attorney fees, Chevron’s strategy has been to simply  stall until all of the plaintiffs living in that part of the forest have died.  And it is working. You will seldom see a more powerful and frustrating film  about the legal arena and how it can represent the potential to both redeem and destroy people’s lives.

The Informant!

The standard parable of corporate corruption is inverted in this deceptively  simple story of a whistleblower who is as corrupt as his bosses, and has a  great hunger for fame. Matt Damon disappears into a role that is scrupulously  effective, yet not flashy enough to garner much attention. The constant goofy  and relentlessly irrelevant narraration becomes one of the few useful windows  into the rather opaque Mark Whitacre. As a liar he is peerless, if for no  reason other than that he is utterly convinced of his own bullshit. It is left  to the viewer to decide what the ultimate motive is, since money hardly seems  to adequately explain the lengths to which he risked his family and fortune.  Even if one stands to lose everything, it seems to be worth the risk just to  be seen as a star.

OSS 117 -Lost in Rio

James Bond has been interpreted by many actors and directors, but only Roger  Moore seemed to come close to the essence of Bond as a smug know-it-all  dipshit who coasts on charisma and bumbles into terror plots. In OSS 117, Jean  Dujardin gets it right: he is an obtuse dumbass. This is how people around  Bond see him, ignorant of history and culture, disinterested in any subject  unrelated to poon. Beneath the comedy is a thug who ‘enjoys fighting’ and  pushes a colonial agenda, among the more clever jokes amidst the insane  mugging and underwear sparring. Compulsively watchable, goofy without being  distracted, OSS 117 is that rare comedy that will grow in your estimation with  repeat viewings.

And number eleven: Star Trek

This film deserves to be on a year-end list not despite its flaws, but because  of them. The wildly uneven theatrical franchise gets a reboot in the best way  possible with a pseudoscience mess of a time warp that by itself redefines the entire canon. The drill, the black hole weapon, the whatever science used to explain each improbable way that the story is set back on track; these things are logically indefensible, and along with awkward fistfights and aliens with variant forehead wrinkles make Star Trek what it is. So this film has it all in spades with solid action, surprisingly good acting (Zachary Quinto deserves a medal for his interpretation of Spock while standing next to the legend), and a playful feel  for science that keeps the geeks happy. After all, playing with science and the strange laws on its margins is what sci-fi is all about.

Near Misses:
Inglorious Basterds should be on the list above, but since Cale will do greater justice to its synopsis, I have deliberately left it off. Other strong films from 2009 include Outrage, Revanche, Munyurangabo, Katyn, Food Inc., Jerichow, 35 Shots of Rum, and Somers Town.

Lest I forget:
There have been many films unavailable for viewing due to our increasingly retarded film distribution system. Surely, some of these would have made the list if they ever crossed the fucking ocean or played in more than one theatre nationwide. Skin, Disgrace, Seraphine, Red Cliff (the full film, not the oddly butchered version), Bronson, Waterlife, Afghan Star, and the list goes on. And these assholes wonder why people download movies illegally.

Houston @ Miami -3

Tony: Nice try, Sax. Like I’m going to spend any energy trying to pick this piece of shit. Miami will win this game by 24.

Dick: Houston is talented, dynamic, and young, but also incredibly inconsistent and unreliable. Andre Johnson is making noise about bailing if the Texans don’t make the playoffs. Even though the Dolphins have been reduced to Ricky Williams and a cloud of dust, they have better coaching than the Texans and play every game as if Bill Parcells will personally castrate them if they take a play off. Dolphins.

Sax: Kubiak is done. Sparano is not. It doesn’t take a particularly perceptive imagination to figure out which team is going to bring it in week 16. Dolphins are at home, spread is low, no-brainer. Which means Houston will probably win just because God hates me, but fuck it.

Jacksonville @ New England -7.5

Tony: New England is undefeated at home this year ant they’ve won two in a row. Jacksonville is 2-4 on the road, and they’ve lost two in a row. Also … Jacksonville Jaguars. Patriots.

Dick: Aside from Maurice Jones-Drew, the Jags are outclassed at every position by the Patriots. This is the sort of trap game the Patsies have become susceptible to because, frankly, they lose their focus unless they have the press breathing down their neck. Thanks to Randy Moss having a bad game and then being accused of being a washed-up pussy and loser, they got both. Expect gore. Pats by a lot.

Sax: The Pats are still coasting on the reputation they built in seasons past. Brady is hurt and even when he was “healthy” he was kind of a mess, their O-line is the most overrated unit in the history of football, and their secondary is absolutely hopeless, which wouldn’t be that much of an issue if they had any semblance of a pass rush. Which is not to say they will lose to the Jaguars, who are terrible. I just think this spread is too high.

Baltimore @ Pittsburgh -2.5

Tony: Everyone is saying how this game is supposed to be some Boise State – Fresno State barn burner because both defenses are hobbled. I think both of these teams have given up on life and this game will be less 45-42 and more 13-10. I guess Pittsburgh should win by at least a field goal.

Dick: Pittsburgh got away with one last week against Green Bay. They caught the Packers flat-footed early on and then got flat out lucky with a touchdown on the last play of the game. Baltimore is schizophrenic and incapable of carrying any sort of momentum over from one week to the next. They are also missing Ed Reed which means Ben Roethlisberger is going to eat the Ravens for lunch if he can extend some plays. I want to take Baltimore, but the Steelers are pulling one of their patented late-season dashes in spite of having almost no chance at the playoffs. Steelers.

Sax: Hines Ward is a fucking tool, Ben Roethlisberger is fat, Troy Polamalu is injured, and 10% of the population of the greater Pittsburgh area knows how to read. They will still beat the Ravens this weekend. If they weren’t division rivals, I might be inclined to take Baltimore just because, at 8-6, they actually have something left to play for, but the Steelers still probably harbor delusions of making the playoffs and they want to play spoiler for the Ravens anyway. Because they are dicks.

Denver @ Philadelphia -7

Tony: Mother of fuck, Corch Irvin Majors is resigning after the Sugar Bowl, citing health issues. Apparently, Mike Shanahan is on the short list of potential replacements. For those of you too lazy to Google, Shanny was the OC at Florida from 1980-1983. All of this clearly means Denver will cover at Philly this week. CLEARLY.

Dick: Donovan McNabb could beat the Broncos by six points by himself, but if he has Brian Westbrook and his fully intact brain in the backfield, the Eagles will win by 10. Denver’s early-season run was a fluke because they kept getting incredible breaks and weird plays going their way, but the reality is that they are thin on talent on offense, their coach is not that bright, and they get to play the Raiders and Chiefs twice a year. Eagles by a lot.

Sax: Philly is going to fucking destroy Denver whether or not Brian Westbrook plays. I just like putting these games on the slate because Tony will pick Denver no matter what and he is raping me.

Standings
1. Tony (31-24) (2-2 last week)
2. Dick (27-28) (1-3 last week)
2. Sax (23-32) (1-3 last week)

Dare me to hate a movie, and I’ll be damned if I don’t do just that, especially when I’m also asked to forgive a bounty of head-slapping clichés simply because the director has the ability to stare down the naysayers into a stupefied silence. Invictus is simply The Mighty Ducks with Gandhi as the zamboni driver, or Little Giants featuring Mother Teresa in zebra stripes. Here, the sport is rugby, which only makes matters worse, as the game will be incomprehensible to the only people who will bother to show up for this monstrosity. Yeah, the South African team wins the World Cup in the end, but I’d have no idea had the scoreboard not flashed the final tally in bold, clear numbers, or Eastwood not resorted to the slo-mo standby. From where I sat, people formed some huge huddle, passed the ball around, and kicked it through some uprights while playing grab-ass from time to time. For all the fucking sense this made, they could have been engaging in nude wrestling for the future of mankind and I would not have been the wiser. As expected, the final match is against the Best Team in All the World, a New Zealand unit reduced to a handy symbol: the Maori superstar who grunts and powers his way forward with one dynamic set of thighs. Still, as dehumanized as they are, they’re still kindred spirits in emptiness with the South African team, even if they’re presumably the ones we care about. Thank goodness we have Matt Damon to bond with, even if he does have that funny accent.

The big game, stripped of joy, excitement, and coherence, comes about due solely to Mandela’s need to heal the country after being elected president. Rather than dismantle this once damning bulwark of apartheid, Mandela uses it to unite the races around a central point of pride and self-respect. It’s a wholly populist move, one that reveals Mandela’s understanding of the power of political symbolism. Such keen insight might mean something in a deeper, more ambitious picture, but as translated by Freeman, it’s more a ticking of the clock until the necessary third act denouement. Freeman’s Mandela is no more a flesh and blood man than had he been created by computer, and it’s a testament to his own powers of persuasion that he’s allowed to get away with it (and secure the expected Best Actor nomination). I didn’t buy this shuck and jive for a single minute, and for a film centered around such an engaging real-life personality, the film actually suffers whenever he appears. Freeman’s Mandela is in a state of perpetual winking; always more clever than anyone else in the room, not because he proves it, but because he’s not to be questioned as Africa’s Jesus. My god, the man even pours his own tea! And partakes of a nightly jog with only two bodyguards! The lone attempt to render him real – a scene involving a question about his estranged family – is brushed aside so quickly we can’t be sure it actually took place.

Given the setting and subject matter, it should come as no surprise that, outside of the rugby matches, there are but two types of scenes left us: the smiling, cheering facades of anonymous blacks as they gather around the radio or TV, and black and white members of the new administration eyeing each other warily, usually as they mumble under their breath. And yes, such silliness culminates in the only possible culmination, where the two biggest adversaries on the security detail come close to hugging after the championship match, only to agree to a hearty handshake. Elsewhere, a young black boy, whom we are led to believe is about to rob a taxi, is actually just trying to hear the game on the radio, and darn it all, is he not lifted to the sky by a once-sneering Afrikaner after the final whistle? Speaking of red herrings, what about the one where we think this shady white dude is casing the stadium for an assassination attempt, only to become an even shadier pilot we think is about to crash a jet onto the field, only to be revealed at last as the ultimate rugby fan by virtue of the cheerful message he has written on the underbelly of the plane? Regardless of the historical record, I refuse to believe this shit ever happened, and shame on Eastwood for perusing the screenplay and raising no objections. That it’s dopey is beyond dispute, but it also stands as one of the most manipulative elements of a movie that thinks little of having you in a vicious choke hold for over two hours. Why not have the mostly white rugby team visit Mandela’s former prison cell while you’re at it? Or play some Lion King shit on the soundtrack whenever black people appear, or that Ladysmith Black Mambazo from that Paul Simon record? Wait, what? Really? Fuck me again.

And does Freeman recite the poem that gave us the film’s title in a soaring voiceover? What was it old Red said as he got busy living? You goddamn right.