Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

8/10
This was on my to-watch list since it came out 4 years ago. Being sick and finding nothing else on Netflix that inspired anything in me, I finally watched it. It was pretty much what I expected it to be, with minimal twisting and turnings. Just a really well told, mostly sad story with a few brief glimmers of hope or happiness. Katie Jarvis and Michael Fassbender are both great, and the relationship that forms between them is interesting and handled well by writer/director Andrea Arnold. It's a tricky relationship with many nuances and it's to Arnold's credit that Fassbender's character especially doesn't come off as one-dimensional. The atmosphere she creates of a poor, working-class (let's go ahead and say white trash) England feels extremely real, too, without being cartoonish.

Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009)

8/10
Finally got around to this one from Refn...it was good, exceptionally stylish (becoming a trend it seems) and very reminiscent of Herzog's Aguirre so of course I liked it. Mads Mikkelsen was also pretty great in a non-speaking role and I'm looking forward to seeing him in The Hunt where he won Best Actor at Cannes. The cinematography is beautiful, making me kind of wish I watched it on Blu-Ray instead of Netflix and the sound design is sharp too.

Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009)

7/10
I've been wanting to see this movie since its release in 2009, but only got to it now. It's British director Peter Strickland's debut, though the film is set in the Hungarian-speaking part of Romania, Transilvania to be exact. Katalin Varga is a woman who has been raped, and thus is thrown out of her village by her husband. With nowhere else to go she takes her 11-year old son with her as she tries to track down her attacker. I wanted to like this movie more than I did - it felt a little clunky at times, especially with certain plot points I won't reveal for fear of spoilers. It also had a really great piece of music (piece of sound, to be more accurate) by Nurse with Wound, but overused it. There were positives though - the woman playing Katalin Varga was excellent and the rural photography and slow pace were both excellent. Strickland has a new movie coming out called Berberian Sound Studio and I'm definitely curious to see that one, even moreso now.

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)

6.5/10
I was hoping for better, but what I got was okay. It has its funny moments and inspired bits here and there, but at a certain point (especially the first half) you start to wonder what the point is. I appreciate that the movie didn't waste time on back stories or character development but it seemed starved for an excuse to throw Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson's characters together on a cross-country trek. The pacing is kind of uneven; the movie struggles to balance emotional moments with the comedy. But it's still fun, and Eisenberg and Harrelson work well together.

(500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009)

6/10
Okay movie but I was expecting a bit more, given all the hype it got upon its release. JGL is good but, as usual for a Zooey Deschanel character, there are moments when you just want to reach through the screen and smack her. I also found the chronology jumping to be more gimmicky than anything else. Couldn't the story just have been told straight? What did it add to the movie, aside from a cutesy "angle"? All that said it's a pretty good (and true enough sounding) story and there are some laughs, so it's not a bust.

Best Worst Movie (Michael Stephenson, 2009)

7.5/10
It seems like what most legendary bad movies have in common is the bloodymindedness of someone making the thing, convinced that what they're doing is genuine art. Plan 9 has Ed Wood, Battlefield Earth has John Travolta, The Room has Tommy Wiseau, and the subject of this documentary, Troll 2, has Claudio Fragasso. Though he's not the focus of the film (that would be George Hardy, who played the father), he's easily the most fascinating - utterly convinced that the recent surge in "so bad it's good" attention paid to Troll 2 is actually American audiences finally coming around to understand his "ahead of its time" masterpiece. In fact, Troll 2 has a lot of fascinating figures attached to it that make it special, and indeed worthy of a documentary - its acting and production crew a strange mix of people from those who really believe in the artistry of the work, to ones that can accept it as a terrible movie and laugh along with audiences, to others that seem slightly embarassed but are willing to go along for the ride. George Hardy seems to encompass almost all these reactions simultaneously, and makes for a good focal point. As a documentary it's mostly celebratory stuff for pre-existing fans of Troll 2, but with some nice interesting dashes of the strange personalities that went into making the thing.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009)

7/10
Decided to see the Swedish adaptation before the U.S. one. If I could describe it in one word, it would be "functional". It does a decent job all around. While I agree with a lot of the necessary storyline cuts and alterations, I do feel like something got lost along the way. I also felt there was zero chemistry between the two leads, and the movie actually starts to sag when they meet instead of crackling as in the book. The direction is average, and I'm looking forward to seeing the style and visual flair Fincher will bring to his adaptation.

Cell 211 (Daniel Monzon, 2009)

7/10
Cell 211 is a 2009 Spanish film that's finally making its way overseas, after cleaning up at the Goya Awards (8 wins, 15 nominations). Juan, a prison guard touring the facilities the day before he begins his new job there, gets caught in a massive riot and has to pretend to be an inmate to survive. Between Juan's interactions with the current prison hierarchy (led by the imposing Malamadre), the negotiators, wardens and prison officials trying to get him out, memories of his pregnant wife back at home, and the three Basque terrorists inside the prison whose presence complications negotiations and extraction considerably, the story is never lacking meat. Some suspension of disbelief is required to make the plot hum along, but it does so well enough, and the subtle character shifts generally keep you guessing at their motives or allegiances. The acting is great even when the dialogue suffers which helps a lot but for a movie with something as dramatic as a prison riot at its heart, I didn't feel much tension or suspense the entire way through. But it's smart and well-acted enough to entertain, and it's not much of a surprise to learn that an English-language remake is in the works.

Chandmani Sum (Rowan Lee Hartsuiker, 2009)

7/10
This was a short (half-hour) created by a user on a movie torrent website I visit, and it was a ratio-free download, so I grabbed it. It was nice enough to look at, shot in extremely sharp digital black and white, and featuring a Herzogian soundtrack of throat-singing which I'm always a fan of. Couldn't tell you what the hell the point of it was, but it was pretty.

Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009)

9/10
After watching Pedro Costa's first film recently (Ossos), I jumped ahead to his most recent because I thought it looked like something I would enjoy. It's a documentary in the loosest sense of the word, in that it's a movie featuring real people doing real things - in this case it's the French actress and vocalist Jeanne Balibar rehearsing, recording, and performing songs from a new album with her band. All conventional documentary elements (narration, interviews, background, context in general) are done away with, however. We're left with lengthy shots like this or this, with the start/stop soundtrack of a band attempting to coax music out of nothingness.
I guess how much you enjoy this hinges on how much you like the music but, despite having never heard anything from Balibar or her group before, I thought they were really interesting sonically, and Balibar has a great, smokey voice that lends perfectly to Costa's gorgeous black and white photography. The images and music together are extremely hypnotic, and I really liked the paradoxical dynamic Costa's shots induced...the studio space seems to be both claustrophobically enclosed and, because so much is cloaked in darkness, as wide open as the universe. I'd watch it again in a heartbeat.
The film started as a 12-minute short of the same name, which you can see on Youtube (part one here).

Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

9/10
Well-to-do parents raise their son and two daughters (all young adults) in a gorgeous, fenced-in house outside the city, teaching them that zombies are little yellow flowers, toy planes in the backyard grass are the ones they see in the sky that have fallen to earth, and that they may only leave home when their dogtooth has fallen out (left or right, it doesn't matter). Director and co-writer Giorgos Lanthimos eviscerates the idea of the family unit and the way we're raised and does it so effortlessly, as if this were a documentary study of an actual family on some other planet. Overall I found this film genuinely harrowing, and the morbid black comedy undercurrent only underscores how disturbing the whole thing is. This is squarely in Haneke/Funny Games territory, so you can use that as a barometer if you like. A couple of overtly shocking scenes, while extremely effective as you watch the movie, have me thinking the day after that maybe Lanthimos is trying a bit too hard to be memorable. But my stomach was in knots hours after seeing it, so job well done then.
Special mention should be made for the actors who played the three kids (two of the three non-professionals), especially the girls, who are brilliant.

Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)

8.5/10
After another Romanian film named Aurora turned the "revenge killer" movie on its head, I was excited to see this one, which turns the police movie on its head. Cristi is a police officer forced to follow and gather evidence on a hash-smoking teenager and his two friends. He slowly finds himself questioning his morals if he follows through with his intimidating superior's demands to arrest the kid. The movie is filled with subtle, pitch black humor and its take on language (the key to the entire movie) is very interesting and refreshing. The final scene in which Cristi is dissected by his superior using the same linguistic devices he played on earlier with his wife is incredible. Some people complained the movie was too slow but it had to be...and I really enjoyed it.

White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

7/10
I don't have a lot to say about this one except that I think I admired it more than I liked it. I also had to watch the movie with no subtitles (I speak French pretty well, but African and France French is a bit trickier) so that probably didn't help. It was very lovely to look at and it was definitely a sad story, but I couldn't help but feel removed from it most of the time. Still want to check out Claire Denis' other stuff though.

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe, 2009)

6.5/10
This is a frustrator. Gaspar Noe's interminable Enter the Void is a brazenly unique cinematic experience - especially in terms of visual style. The movie is a treat to look at, and comparisons with a drug-obsessed 2001: A Space Odyssey don't seem so ridiculous when you start watching it. After an unbelievable title sequence (watch here) and a tremendous first act, things steadily head south. The second act is less interesting but still enjoyable, but everything falls apart by the third and Noe seems to know it, throwing everything possible at the screen in any order in all manner of gratuity just hoping something good happens. A movie about the life and death of a young drug dealer and the relationship with his sister, there are lots of good ideas here but in no known universe is this film worth 2 hours and 45 minutes of anyone's time. A tighter edit could have made this a masterpiece, as it stands it's just a disappointment made all the more bitter by all the wasted talent on display.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, 2009)

8.5/10
Produced by David Lynch, directed by Werner Herzog, starring Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny, Udo Kier and Brad Dourif, at first blush it's hard to figure why this one never got any kind of release...then as you watch it and realize it's absolutely insane, it sort of makes sense. For what's seemingly a mainstream film, it must be one of the most unmarketable ones made in recent history. Inspired by true events, Shannon plays Brad, a young man who goes insane after a trip to Peru (a land where Herzog spent a considerable amount of time) and kills his mother. The film opens with her death and tells itself in flashbacks, as told to Dafoe's detective by his fiancee (Sevigny) and friend (Kier). The movie confounds expectations at every turn, and it treads a fine line between genius and self indulgence, or being weird for the sake of it. As a huge Herzog fan I leaned towards the former, but I can't fault anyone for believing the latter true. What really makes the movie is Michael Shannon's over the top, desperately serious portrayal of a man insane. I'd compare this movie to Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, shot around the same time, but with the weirdness turned up to 11 (which is what I felt lacked with that film). A lot of fun.

It's Complicated (Nancy Meyers, 2009)

5/10
Even though I'm not this movie's target audience, I like the three main actors involved and thought it could turn out funny enough. I laughed a couple of times but that was about it. I dunno, it was decent enough entertainment. Though the movie courts it only semi-seriously, it's tough to sympathize with Streep's character - torn between two handsome, successful, charming men, living in a gorgeous house, owning a successful business, three Stepford children...it's a bit much and you find it hard to really care, but I guess that's part of the fun.

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (Tom Six, 2009)

8/10
Actually a lot better than I thought it would be. The acting is pretty top notch (the German doctor in particular is like some weird Klaus Kinski/Tommy Wiseau hybrid), there's a good amount of suspense and tension throughout, the gore is as brutal as you'd expect...basically it delivers, which is more than most Fantasia movies have done for me this year. It's also surprisingly witty and totally depressing. As far as torture porn goes, it's pretty well up there in my opinion.

The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan Jose Campanella, 2009)

7.5/10
An enjoyable, very well-acted, very well directed crime/love story that just didn't really grip me enough to give it more than a 7.5. The dual stories are handled well and fluently and the dialogue was extraordinarily sharp, but I just didn't love it. I'd definitely recommend it though.

Mr. Nobody (Jaco van Dormael, 2009)

4/10
Saw this movie to kill some time before the one below. I didn't know much about it beforehand. Basically Jared Leto plays the unfortunately named Nemo Nobody, the last living mortal man in 2092, and on his deathbed he recounts 3 possible paths of his life (altered slightly by the butterfly effect). Kind of like a Benjamin Button/The Fountain/Run Lola Run mashup, 3 movies I didn't care much for. The movie has some severe problems, not least of which an opening 20 minutes that has the movie deep in Razzie-worthy territory, some of the hokiest pseudo-philosophy ever put to script, and an unbelievably obnoxious soundtrack, but it somehow settles down near the middle and gets interesting as we center around 15-year old Nemo and his incestuous relationship with his step-sister Anna. It's a good thing this plot thread takes up the majority of the movie because whenever we get away from it, the movies numerous weaknesses are brought to the fore. It's a messy, messy, movie, much like The Fountain was, that people will surely explain away to "artistry" or "unconventional storytelling". The movie has some good ideas but it desperately needs to be reeled in a bit more. I also have no earthly idea how they're planning on recouping the $46 million (!) they spent on this thing.

Fish Story (Yoshihiro Nakamura, 2009)

7/10
2009 Japanese flick that ties together stories from five different years to tell a tale about a song saving the world, and also to do a little musing on Chaos Theory along the way. It's a fun movie that provides some good laughs but it has some severe pacing issues and while its storyline should be unpredictable and off the wall, it comes together somewhat flatly at the end. In comparing Japanese films that tie together five different storylines, Survive Style 5+ is still the undisputed heavyweight champion.