It’s embarrassing to remember each January that everyone else has finished their year-end (and, in this case, decade-end) lists as I’m just hacking out mine. Fortunately, my past editors have always indulged my rule that I never work the last two weeks of a year. I’m certainly not going to give myself a hard time over coming in late.

Anyway, here’s my ten favorite films of 2009 that didn’t require rationalizing when Leftist sentiments showed up in the script. That’s with one exception, but you won’t be able to tell if that’s my very favorite film of 2009. The following isn’t in any particular order. Lists are already embarrassing enough—although I’ll have another one up by Wednesday...

Inglorious Basterds
No surprise here, but it was fun to see how Quentin Tarantino took the momentum of his art film Death Proof—from the doomed Grindhouse project—and used several tricks from it to create a proper blockbuster. Also, it seems many hippie film critics have died off since the release of Saving Private Ryan. We didn’t get nearly as many reviews comparing Inglorious Basterds to those silly old John Wayne films.

Fired Up!
Finally, a teenage sex comedy without clingy virgins. Fired Up! has heroes who are football players enjoying plenty of sex—but still ready to give up football in favor of being surrounded by girls in teenager camp. Token Leftist moment: they’re supportive of lesbian cheerleaders. That certainly makes for a big tent.

Drag Me to Hell
This one divided horror fans dramatically. I was perfectly horrified by the scary stuff, and never really minded the comedic touches. Also, I support any film where our heroine is a banker tormented by a sleazy old woman who doesn’t care about paying her mortgage. (To provide balance, I’ll note that I wasn’t scared by Paranormal Activity, but it was a pretty good TV-movie for the big screen. It should’ve first aired on NBC as a special Halloween night episode of Dateline.)

Orphan
It was already promising that a horror movie was willing to piss off non-judgmental types by suggesting that having no parents might lead to a screwed-up kid. The Orphan then went skipping off in several defiant directions. The whole thing was sordid and nihilistic enough to have been directed by Ted Post.

Astro Boy
While the American film industry was wracked with guilt, the Japanese used atomic power as the basis for creating a really keen cartoon character back in 1951. Hollywood did a surprisingly good job of updating the futurist hero for 2009. Astro Boy is a pretty standard tale of a son being forsaken by his father, dying, and then returning to life through his sacrifice for others. You also get moronic would-be Commie robots, plus plenty of Randian moments. That’s probably best summed up when Astro Boy (still learning he’s an artificial boy) rejects Immanuel Kant in favor of studying Leonardo da Vinci.

To be fair, the idiotic Commie robots are mainly a rip-off from The Life of Brian. Also, Astro Boy features an annoying President who seems to be a perfect cliché of everything the Left loathes in George W. Bush. That’s probably the kind of indulgence that filmmakers have to include while making a movie about a little boy who believes in saying grace before dinner. On a personal note, “Secret Agent Man” came on the oldies radio station while I was driving my son to see Astro Boy. I didn’t comment on the song at the time, but I noticed he was still singing it to himself as we went into the theater. This bodes well for my plan to essentially raise the kid in 1966.

The Vampire’s Assistant
…as very recently discussed here, and I can’t believe this and Astro Boy both bombed so badly.

My Bloody Valentine 3-D
Friday the 13th
Two remales of classic slasher films—with My Bloody Valentine 3-D improving on the original, and Friday the 13th just being surprisingly fun (and not-so-surprisingly conservative, as explained here). Both films pull off a clever trick of retelling the original story in the opening minutes, and the new My Bloody Valentine had an opening credits sequence that did more with 3-D than Avatar could. There’s no real conservative content to My Bloody Valentine 3-D, but I’ll note that lead actor Kerr Smith once agreed with me that his career suffers because he reminds Hollywood types of the jocks that terrorized them in high school. Even playing a gay teen on Dawson’s Creek couldn’t fix that.

Pontypool
My favorite part of any zombie movie is the slow build to people figuring out that the world has changed around them. Not surprisingly, Zombieland skipped nearly all of that good stuff. Pontypool found a new twist, with a bitter disc jockey piecing together the terror while working out of his crappy little radio station. It might not really be correct to call Pontypool a zombie film, but it sure played like a classic one in a year where zombies were essentially an in-joke. This Canadian production—technically a 2008 release—is also part of what’s been a recent quiet comeback for veteran genre actor Stephen McHattie, who also showed up in 2012 and Watchmen.

The Hurt Locker
It’s on the list because anyone has to concede that The Hurt Locker is great suspenseful filmmaking. The script also understands the importance of military rank in a war story. Conservatives were even right to be excited that someone had made a film about the war in Iraq that actually found fault in America’s enemy. That kind of thing counts as a big deal now. I still don’t like movies that depict American soldiers as death junkies, and The Hurt Locker might as well have ended with our hero shooting up in an alleyway.

 

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