Top Movies of 2008/09
To be honest, I don’t see a lot of movies. I didn’t see the following, but I saw various promotional materials, which are noted after each title. Since these media usually don’t tell you the ending, I’ve interpreted and extrapolated what I think would be a reasonable wrap-up for these movies to save myself time and money.
- MARLEY AND ME (posters and preview): A new yellow lab puppy drives an otherwise-unfettered couple to jump through hilarious hoops. At the movie’s major climax, they face the difficult decision of staying in their small but cozy single-bedroom apartment, or moving to a larger (but no-pets-allowed) condo. They put Marley to sleep and move on. After a fight over income and spending, they realize that they are still strangers to each other and that Marely allowed them to overlook their astounding personal hang-ups. They split up, move out, and start seeing other people, sadder and wiser after their failure in both human and humane love.
- THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (posters and preview): Brad Pitt is a beautiful man who ages backwards. He walks around with beautiful music constantly playing around him. Cate Blanchet is also beautiful, and they fall in love, presumably because both have eyes bluer than lapis lazuli. Something incredibly symbolic and beautiful is revealed about human nature over the course of their strange relationship, which ends with Blanchet dying a normal death and the newborn Pitt reverting into a fetus, then into a single cell, then a drop of semen on a human ovum, then nothing—until a man passing by (who looks vaguely like Pitt) looks at a woman (also looking like Pitt), and his azure eye twinkles.
- THE READER (production stills): Cate Winslet (the inferior English Cate) lies around naked looking hungover, premenstrual or what she must think is languid. She looks directly in the camera and offers $10 million for an Oscar.
- BOLT (posters): Another slick animated feature offers a neat and non-ethnic plethora of stock characters necessary to family movies. The eponym must accomplish something, and learns about himself by doing so. The movie ends, and Daddy’s eyes are red as we go to the car. Mommy discovers that the only way he got through two hours with his family was a surreptitious quart of rye. After a scary, shouty ride home, mommy and us kids stay with Aunt Edna. Daddy is sick, she tells us, and we’ll see him when he’s better.
- WALTZ WITH BASHIR (preview): Israel wins the War in Iraq. A guy runs around the desert with his arms up, delirious with pain, sorrow or a poignant mixture of the two. Some stray dogs are also running around (see “Bolt”).
- UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS (preview and posters): The William Wallace of Werewolves (played by that hot Eastern Bloc chick who’s not Mila Jovavich, you know, oh, the one from the Scottish Road Warrior ripoff, the chick with the robot eye—you didn’t see that one? Nevermind.) must overcome the Darth Vadar of Vampires. No Vampira means probably the worst vampire movie ever, again.
- BRIDE WARS (poster): Two women face off with California voters as they struggle to be heard in their fight for gay marriage. They lose.
- INKHEART (poster): Brendan Fraser pretends he’s in a Spielberg movie, but to no avail.
- HOTEL FOR DOGS (poster): With Jurgen Prochnow, Max von Sydow, Bruno Ganz. An inner core of Nazi officers plots to eliminate Hitler, in order to save their soldiers and their country. Much of the planning happens in Berlin’s famous “Hundenhotel”, until Tom Cruise gets involved and ruins everything.
- FROST/NIXON (poster): Nixon rises from the dead to retrieve the title of “Most Hated American President” from Bush. He fails by showcasing his sinister cunning, which the modern citizen can appreciate over Bush’s bland obliviosness.
- MILK (preveiw, poster, endless babble from friends): A bunch of handsome heterosexual actors pretend to be gay, to the endless delight of the female viewership. Josh Brolin is allowed to to kill at least one other character, per his contractual rider, to prove he isn’t gay.
- WALL-E (preview and poster): A machine very like the movie’s main character creates an animated film to explore mankind’s foibles. It succeeds in luring mankind into an empathetic era of openness. The cold, unfeeling machine then finds its bloody conquest of such a weakened and ovine species all the more facile.
- DOUBT (preview): Fell asleep during preview, apologies.
- AUSTRALIA! (posters): Hugh Jackman hits fire with a whip. Nicole Kidman runs toward a green camera filter. Baz Luhrman humiliates an entire continent by making it look 100 yards across.
- CORALINE (preview): A young girl with blue hair arouses guilty feelings of attraction in men across the nation. This feeling is exacerbated when men see this picture of 14-year-old Dakota Fanning, the voice of Coraline:
- THE DARK KNIGHT (movie): Saw this one, liked it better when my opinion was informed by promo stuff alone. ALT ENDING: While trying to win a bet on NSA procedures with “I’m-too-principled-to-be-using-cell-phones-as-radars” Morgan Freeman, Batman finds his true calling as a law-enforcement surveillance litigator. He learns in the courtroom that life provides no absolutes, everything is relative, and good guys lose with astonishing regularity. This jaded outlook leads to the realization that simply killing dangerous supervillians is a lot easier than trying to bring them to “justice”, a nebulous term under whose aegis more egregious acts than murder have been perpetrated (if not perpetuated). Joker dies from a “bat-bullet” to the brain, delivered at point-blank range.
