Where the Wild Things Are (2009): B

To those who fell instantly head over heels for Where the Wild Things Are, I can only say I'm envious. Occupying that realm somewhere between a complete mess and a flawed masterpiece (a second viewing will hopefully clarify things), Spike Jonze's audacious adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic storybook gets major points for an altogether sublime recollection of childhood's growing pains (the film had me from the pivotal snowball fight), best articulated in the rapport between Max Records and Catherine Keener as the distraught young boy Max and his exasperated single mother. Alas, after their shared, poignant early scenes, necessary (read: plot-forwarding) drama kicks in with a disingenuously deliberate level of spontaneity; the defining scuffle feels less like real people flying off the handle than preorchestrated mayhem. Such misguidedly careful emotional definition extends to the otherworldly paradise of Max's imagination, a far-off island he flees to in the night and where he ascends the throne as ruler of the Wild Things (astonishing creations of - makeup and CGI? I'd rather not know, although I could have done without the celebrity voice casting). Rather breathless in execution, the film's elemental visual textures and rigorous character developments nevertheless feel overly thought out, polished within an inch of their grunge-infused life, what Keith Uhlich refers to as "a forced paradise". I don't doubt that the film will eventually become something of a modern classic - only that it might not really deserve it.

Best of Decade: Part I

I suspect that those who follow my work even scantly will already be well aware that my love of compiling lists knows no bounds, and so, of course, the already prominent trend of announcing the best films of the decade was one I wanted to weigh in on as soon as possible. Alas, the Part I I've added to the title above is meant to indicate that this is, quite deliberately, a work in progress, and is meant to reflect my selections as they stand at the moment before I jump off the deep end in attempting to catch up on the literally hundreds of highly praised works from the past ten years that have so far eluded these eyes. Rentals, screeners and screenings galore await me for the next two months as I attempt to compile as complete a list as possible, both for my own purposes and for the in-development poll at Slant Magazine. Here, I encourage readers and friends to suggest additional titles for consideration, although it must be understood that only so many will ultimately be gotten to: from The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein to Jackass 2, the stacks of DVDs that await my consumption already abound. For the time being, I present this rough draft, a loose representation of the films that, more than any others these past ten years, I simply cannot live without.

1. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

2. THE NEW WORLD

3. MIAMI VICE

4. A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

5. MULHOLLAND DR.

6. THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU

7. AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE COLON MOVIE FILM FOR THEATERS

8. LOST IN TRANSLATION

9. SPEED RACER

10. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

11. There Will Be Blood (pictured)
12. Zodiac
13. Wendy and Lucy
14. Gangs of New York
15. The Wild Blue Yonder
16. 25th Hour
17. Into Great Silence
18. Inland Empire
19. Youth Withouth Youth
20. Donnie Darko

21. Before Sunset
22. Apocalypto
23. Code 46
24. Munich
25. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
26. L'Enfant
27. Death Proof (pictured)
28. Forty Shades of Blue
29. Five Dedicated to Ozu
30. Mission to Mars

31. No Country for Old Men
32. The White Diamond
33. Big Fish
34. Mysterious Skin
35. Spider (pictured)
36. House of Flying Daggers
37. Kill Bill: Volume 2
38. Reprise
39. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
40. The Royal Tenenbaums

41. A History of Violence
42. My Blueberry Nights
43. Waking Life
44. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
45. Femme Fatale
46. Revolver
47. Punch-Drunk Love
48. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
49. Paranoid Park
50. Wolf Creek (pictured)

51. Rachel Getting Married
52. Ghost World (pictured)
53. W.
54. Last Days
55. The Edge of Heaven
56. Dogville
57. Paprika
58. Marie Antoinette
59. Rescue Dawn
60. Two Lovers

61. WALL-E
62. A Prairie Home Companion
63. The Fog of War (pictured)
64. We Own the Night
65. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
66. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
67. The Triplets of Belleville
68. The Duchesss of Langeais
69. The Manchurian Candidate
70. Saraband

71. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
72. The Company
73. The Fountain
74. Happy Feet (pictured)
75. A Serious Man
76. Letters from Iwo Jima
77. Brokeback Mountain
78. Bad Santa
79. Grizzly Man
80. Junebug

81. In America
82. Millennium Actress
83. Cast Away
84. War of the Worlds (pictured)
85. The Proposition
86. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
87. Catch Me If You Can
88. Casino Royale
89. Adaptation.
90. Eastern Promises

91. Boarding Gate (pictured)
92. Lilo & Stitch
93. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
94. Public Enemies
95. Married Life
96. Ratatouille
97. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
98. The Squid and the Whale
99. Million Dollar Baby
100. Narc

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009): D-

Back in 2006, I decided it would be wise to simply let the demographic at which Night at the Museum was aimed enjoy it, leaving my hat out of the proverbial ring. Having just endured the Happy Meal come-to-life sequel Battle of the Smithsonian, I now wish that I'd maintained that outlook. Shawn Levy reprises his directorial post in one of the most purely inept cinematic contraptions in recent memory, a parade of witless eye candy, weightless special effects and watered-down cultural references that threaten to make the Shrek sequels look desirable by comparison. Ben Stiller's Larry Daley has retired from his career as a night guard and now markets useless schlock pitched by George Foreman on early-morning informercials; a visit to his old stomping grounds reveals that the exhibits - which come to life whenever the sun goes down - are to be shipped out the following morning, permanently stored away and replaced by easier-to-maintain holograms. As a resurrected Amelia Earhart, the always-reliable Amy Adams is the lone saving grace to be found herein, which is a nice way of saying she's all that kept me from pondering "to be or not to be" during the film's contemptuous dumbing-down of every cultural corner it manages to lay its greedy hands on (which is to say nothing of its failure to establish anything in the way of basic spacial relationships or remotely believable timing in its action setpieces). From the revealingly inane decision to portray Al Capone in black and white to the should-have-been-hilarious-but-they-dropped-the-ball-anyway sequence involving Oscar the Grouch and Darth Vader to the inclusion of half the supporting cast from The Office, Battle of the Smithsonian isn't a movie even half as much as it is a feature-length advertising campaign for its idiotic self.

The Hangover (2009): C

The Hangover is a cheat, and not just because it's the latest, altogether lousy production to take the box office by unprecedented storm (already enough to reserve its status as one of the great overrated comedies of our era, and rest assured, this thing will only become more ungainly on DVD). Even viewed apart from its sterling reception, its disappointment stems from an inability to ever fully take off, like a airplane bolted to the runway. An amusing set-up - in which three friends (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis) find themselves in the Nevada desert the morning after a bachelor party gone awry with the soon-to-be-married guest of honor nowhere to be found - ultimately goes all sorts of nowhere, the screenplay an overly and obviously scattershot attempt to cover as many broad humor bases as possible and one whose attempts at randomness instead bear the comparable spontaneity of a deliberately dropped anvil. With it, Todd Phillips cements his status as perhaps the most lethargically unironic comedy filmmaker working today (only the cheeky, self-reflexive Road Trip seems worth watching outside the walls of an alcohol-flooded frat house). Despite a few instances of legitimate comedic shock value (the end credits photo montage is an easy high water mark, albeit one that comes far too little too late), The Hangover stinks of committee production values; that the preview for the film is infinitely better than the final work says as much. Worse than its paint-by-numbers execution, however, is its total lack of empathy. Exclusively defining its characters via their non-femininity and non-homosexuality, the lack of scrutiny or definition given to their behavior slowly drowns the proceedings in a sludge of astonishingly obnoxious self-righteousness. You might call these guys flamingly straight, but you'd be just as well off saying they're unrepentant dicks. In a world with Superbad and I Love You, Man, The Hangover's witless regression is unforgivable.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009): C

Seemingly intent on pleasing even those members of the audience who would otherwise be offended by its implicit lampooning of the American military complex, trademark wartime idiocy and all comparable areas of interest, The Men Who Stare At Goats comes to us as the latest political satire to have inadvertently sliced off its own pair. Concerning a military unit (the "New Army") developed post-Vietnam with the intention of creating psychic-enabled super-soldiers (referred to as Jedi Warriors, thus making the very decision to cast Ewan McGregor as the surrogate straight man some kind of desperate joke), the film follows McGregor's Bob Wilton as he decides to take his journalism career to Iraq during the dawn of the War on Terror, hoping to salvage his ego in the midst of an impromptu marital incineration. Fate, it would seem, brings him to Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a New Army veteran traveling to Iraq for his own, often misleading, purposes. What follows is part road movie comedy, part new age existentialism with a forcibly ponderous tone that strikes all the wrong notes (the opening credits assure us that "more of this is true than you would believe", but even this seems less intent on actual enlightenment via humor than a mere conditioner for the detached, altogether "safe" black comedy to follow). A bit of research on the original book - unread by myself - suggests that whatever changes were made en route to the screen were surely for the worse. Either way, one must stand in a sort of awe at the skill it must have taken to waste the talents of Clooney, McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey in the same film, let alone the same scene.

Law Abiding Citizen (2009): C-

While preferably to the typical Saw entry by about a five-to-one ratio, Law Abiding Citizen still isn't any good. Drab and borderline lethargic from virtually any cinematic standpoint (only the climactic image, which involves a character in a locked cell, offers something in the way of lyrical creativity), the most fascinating aspect of this modest train wreck is that anyone decided to give so embarrassingly nonsensical a script the green light. At the outset, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is the titular character: a loving husband and father who, after the tragic murder of his family, can only find comfort in the thought that the guilty will receive their due punishment at the hands of the state. Alas, when D.A. Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) strikes a deal with the assailant in exchange for testimony on a much bigger fish, Shelton snaps and spends the next handful of years planning his revenge. So commences a string of murders beginning with the systematic torture and dismemberment of the sicko who killed Shelton's family, the intended and heavy-handed lesson being that the constitutional rights of known (but not convicted) killers should be seen as subservient to the lives of the innocent still in harm's way, with Shelton ultimately offering himself up for theoretical sacrifice in something of an inversion to Seven's harrowing climax. Even without taking into consideration the relatively black and white outlook on justice herein, Law Abiding Citizen is about the last argument one would want to seriously represent such a cause; as a moral thesis, it amounts to little more than heavy-lifting lip service, while the flaunting of so much purported violence (Shelton sends a videotape of the aforementioned dismemberment to Rice's home, etc.) confirms the film's interest in physical brutality over moral scrutiny. Seemingly able to orchestrate violent events from behind bars in a blatant manipulation of the legal system (made only to subsequently call out its flaws), Shelton's serpentine plot against the government is only sparsely made believable; at least Christopher Nolan's Joker seemed capable of pulling all the strings necessary to put the squeeze on an entire city, even if the particulars were never laid out in the open. As braindead entertainment, Citizen proves to be camp of the inadvertent kind; as philosophy, it's pure mistrial.

Surrogates (2009): A-

Star Trek might be the year's sci-fi rage, and while a fine space opera it may be, that it holds the upper hand amidst the competition only highlights how the exquisite work of Jonothan Mostow seems fated to go unappreciated in its time. With the WWII fable U-571 the only blemish on his resume (and that particular film's only flaw being the fact that it isn't great), his genre craftsmanship - while never as rapturously perfect as his predecessors (John Carpenter, James Cameron, Blade Runner-era Ridley Scott) - is nevertheless far and away from the typical studio worker. Surrogates joins Spielberg's sci-fi contributions and Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 as one of the defining dystopic visions of the decade, eschewing special effects glamour for a well-worn world in which the decidedly alien is an accepted given. The deliberate banality employed in the presentation of progressive robotic technologies renders the scenario with exponentially greater moral scrutiny and, concurrently, a creepy disconnection from human reality. As unfolds via an opening newsreel montage, the near future holds for us the development and mass social acceptance of surrogates: synthetic, humanoid robots used by the populace for their daily goings-on while their living flesh-and-blood selves pilot them from home; small groups of naturalist humans have quartered themselves off from the larger world and maintain an uneasy peace treaty (the plot centers around a terrorist weapon capable of destroying a surrogate in such a way that the host, too, is terminated; unlike those plugged into The Matrix, these things are supposed to be safeguarded here). Mostow's big budget B-movie draws exquisite everyman performances from the cast (in addition to eerie, necessarily artless performances as their characters' respective surrogates); Bruce Willis, as a cop not entirely unlike Blade Runner's Harrison Ford, is as flesh-and-blood empathetic as any role he's helmed since Die Hard. Scaled as if to suggest a budget even smaller than the actual, Surrogates seems less like a 21st Century would-be blockbuster than a lost 80's relic only just rediscovered. Either way, we're lucky to have it.