Best films of 2009
AJN reviewer ADAM KAMIEN looks back at a bumper 2009 for Jewish-interest films and picks his top 10 movies of the year.
Star Trek
JJ ABRAMS could find the money to make a movie about monkeys playing tennis at the moment, and with good reason. Everything he touches turns to gold and 2009 was no exception, with the silver screen’s fastest rising star turning out the best popcorn flick of the past few years in Star Trek.
Just his second film after breathing life back into a flailing franchise with the thoroughly enjoyable Mission Impossible III, Abrams’ prequel to the adored sci-fi canon pulled off the seemingly impossible, pleasing all and sundry from the Klingon-speaking devotees to your average punter and everyone in between.
Drag Me to Hell
MORE than 20 years after the ­seminal horror Evil Dead II, Sam Raimi returned to his horror roots this year with spectacular results. Drag Me To Hell is the story of loan officer Christine Brown, who is cursed by a gypsy after refusing to grant her an extension on her mortgage repayments.
After helming three uber-successful Spiderman movies, Raimi was eager to make a “smaller film” and not a moment too soon. Drag Me to Hell should serve as a reminder to all purveyors of ultra-violence that horror can be a hoot too. Raimi’s movie is good, old-fashioned fun, with some brilliantly conceived gross-out moments and a few genuine scares, including a talking goat and a regurgitated cat.
Inglourious Basterds
QUENTIN Tarantino’s status as one of the most important directors of the past 20 years is irrefutable. He is one of the filmmakers that people hold to a higher standard and Inglourious Basterds more than matched the lofty expectations leading up to its release.
Set in Nazi-occupied Paris, the film follows a group of Jewish soldiers whose mission is to brutalise German soldiers. Running concurrently with this plot line is the story of Shoshanna, a Jewish woman who has been planning her revenge on the Third Reich ever since her parents were murdered by the dastardly Jew Hunter. There is plenty of Tarantino’s rapier dialogue, a smattering of reflux-inducing violence, plenty of action and laughs. This revenge fantasy is historic revisionism, but for the good guys.
Milk
GUS Van Sant’s Milk is a deeply affecting biopic about Jewish politician and activist Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. Sean Penn was superlative in the title role and won the best actor Oscar for his brilliant portrayal of the assassinated public figure. Jewish star James Franco was also outstanding as Milk’s lover in the film.
Van Sant captures the crest of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender movement in The Castro in San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The film is equal parts life-affirming and sobering, with remarkable performances from an exceptional cast, which also included Josh Brolin and Emile Hirsch.
Rachel Getting Married
DON’T be fooled by the rom-com title or the rom-com mainstay lead (Anne Hathaway), Rachel Getting Married is a thoughtful, insightful and poignant film. Hathaway plays the emotionally damaged Kym, who is granted leave from the rehab centre where she is detoxing to celebrate her sister Rachel’s wedding.
The family of the bride is Jewish and the groom African-American, but this fact is inconsequential in writer Jenny Lumet’s (daughter of legendary Jewish director Sidney Lumet) post-racial world.
The film focuses on the deep emotional scars that haunt Kym’s family and how they cope with the pain. Rachel Getting Married is heavy on the pathos, but Lumet succeeds in being simultaneously heart-rending and joyous, without reducing the characters and scenarios to hackneyed platitude.
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
IN the mid-1980s, Anvil was touted by metalheads in the know as one of the most influential heavy metal bands in the business. Other super-groups like Guns ‘N’ Roses and Metallica looked to Anvil for inspiration. Problem was nobody ever bought their records. But the band’s founders, Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner, two good Jewish boys from Canada, never said die and the documentary charts the pair’s travails as they balance chasing the dream with a life of almost total irrelevance on the music, or any other, landscape.
Despite 30 years of mainly abject failure, Kudlow and Reiner never split up. The film, directed by former Anvil roadie and hardcore fan Sacha Gervasi, succeeds because of the heart of its stars, two honest battlers that you desperately want to win by the end of the film. The film is eerily similar to the trailblazing spoof This is Spinal Tap, only real.
Whatever Works
WHEN the news that legendary director Woody Allen had cast Larry David in the lead role of Whatever Works, everyone expected a gem. And so it was. Perhaps it isn’t quite in the class of his other “old-neurotic-man-hooks-up-with-hot-ingenue” flicks like Manhattan or Mighty Aphrodite, but it is hugely enjoyable nonetheless.
David plays Boris Yellnikoff, a super cynical misanthrope who falls for Melodie, a bubble-headed runaway from the South played by Jewish actor Evan Rachel Wood. Whatever Works takes a while to get going, but when Melodie’s family moseys into town to track down their daughter, vintage Woody moments ensue.
A Serious Man
IN their glittering careers, the Coen brothers have never mined their Jewish roots for content. Until now. Perhaps they wanted to get it all out in one go, because A Serious Man is the most Jewish movie since Yentl.
Set in 1960s Minnesota (where the Coens grew up), the film follows Larry Gopnik (played by Jewish actor Michael Stuhlbarg) as his life falls apart around him. His wife leaves him; his kids are stealing from him and doing drugs; he can’t get the promotion he so desperately wants; and his middle-aged brother is socially retarded. Larry seeks counsel from local rabbis when he can’t get in to see the most respected community elder, Rabbi Marshak.
The film draws on its desperate bleakness for laughs and the Coens seem to delight in unravelling Larry’s life for the audience.
Valkyrie
TOM Cruise and Bryan Singer are a hit-and-miss pair, but they brought their A-game for Valkyrie. Despite trying to pass itself off as a historic World War II movie (the poster says “based on the incredible true story”), the film is, at its core, a blockbuster action/thriller.
Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a Nazi soldier convinced he must save Germany from Hitler. He heads a team charged with assassinating the Fuhrer. Singer builds the tension superbly in this Hitchcockian bomb-under-the-table thriller, which results in some truly edge-of-your-seat moments. Cruise is inoffensive enough in the lead, but has a stellar supporting cast, including Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Eddie Izzard, Terence Stamp and Kenneth Branagh.
Funny People
SOME people were disappointed with Funny People because it wasn’t the standard fare usually associated with Judd Apatow (40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad). It is slightly more serious and focused on character development and drama than previous efforts, but the classically Apatowian humour in the film benefits from this.
Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, a wildly successful comedian, who takes struggling stand-up Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) under his wing when he thinks he is dying. There are more Jews than you can poke a stick at in this film, including Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman and Sarah Silverman.