The 21st Best Movie I’ve Seen This Year

#21 Funny People

 I almost don’t want to comment on this movie because, since I saw this movie in theaters, I’ve been trying to remove it from my memory entirely.

Now, this movie is not that bad. But it’s not good, and it’s frustratingly not good, as what seems to be a good premise is combined with standout performances from both Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen into a movie that is somehow completely lousy at accomplishing any of the goals it sets out for itself.

I’ve been as stalwart a supporter of Judd Apatow as there’s been in the past few years, for several reasons:

A. His good movies – both movies he’s produced (Anchorman, Superbad) and directed (40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up) are hilarious and incredibly rewatchable. If you were to list the Ten Best Comedies of the Last Ten Years, that list would include at least four Judd Apatow movies. In fact, let’s make that list (Apatow movies are marked with a *):

Best Comedies of the 2000s

1.  Anchorman*
2. Old School
3. Shaun Of The Dead
4. The 40 Year Old Virgin*
5. Wedding Crashers
6. Borat
7. Napoleon Dynamite
8. Superbad*
9. Meet The Parents
10. Talledega Nights*

I’m sure everyone’s got favorites in there, as well as ones that they hated and feel shouldn’t be on the list, but just below these movies would go:

   11.   Zoolander
   12.   The Hangover
   13.   Team America: World Police  
   14.   Tropic Thunder
   15.   School Of Rock
   16.   Knocked Up*
   17.   Dodgeball
   18.   Step Brothers*
   19.   Road Trip
   20.   Van Wilder

All good comedies, but all clearly a slightly lower tier than the aforementioned movies.  Either way, Apatow was involved in six of these 20 movies as either a director, writer, producer, or all three, and so he’s earned our good graces. I’m inclined to give him a pass.

B. Funny People was a failure of trying too hard, which is the sort of failure I appreciate. I hate sloppy filmmaking. I hate half-efforts, and poorly executed jokes. I hate seeing movies where the actors didn’t quite nail the bit, but the director moved on anyway. This movie was none of those things – everyone was clearly giving it their all, it just didn’t work out.

The problems with Funny People relate more to narrative momentum than anything else. No one in this movie is particularly likable – most noticeably Seth Rogen’s character, who really needs to be – and without anyone to root for, the whole movie just sits there, limply. There’s no interplay between a cold, closed-off Sandler and a warm, awkward Rogen, because the film makes them feel like they’re sort of the same person in different situations, which totally destroys the whole point of the movie. More damningly, Apatow forgets a key element of storytelling – he never creates a protagonist. Rogen and Sandler sort of share the protagonist’s load, each of them doing just enough to make you think the movie might be about them, and not quite enough where you don’t know which one you’re supposed to identify with.

People have knocked the film’s third act as the point where the movie derails. But the truth is that movie hadn’t actually built up enough speed to derail – it just chugs along, vaguely keeping our attention. The little engine that couldn’t. </train metaphor>

The problem is plot structure more than anything: Sandler’s efforts to win back his ex-girlfriend come too late in the story – almost two hours (!) into the movie. No one’s willing to start caring about a love story at that point in a film.

 This pains me to say, but in a more capable director’s hands, this could have been a much better movie. But Apatow invested too much of himself in the movie – his wife plays the love interest, his kids play the children, his ex-roommate (Sandler) is the protagonist (maybe), and it’s loaded with videocassette footage that Apatow himself had shot – of Sandler back in the day, of his child’s performance of CATS, etc. He can’t see the difference between what’s actually moving and what’s merely moving to him.

 If there’s a good way to fail, it’s this way: trying to go deeper, trying to make a comedy that’s more emotionally compelling than your average boner joke fare (though, wow, there are a lot of boner jokes in this movie). And that’s why I’m trying to pretend it never happened. Apatow’s earned the right to have us dwell on his successes rather than failures.

For now.

The 22nd Best Movie I’ve Seen This Year

#22. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
 
You know how every year you look forward to something, and it always disappoints you?
 
Your birthday comes and goes, and even if you do something fun, you realize that the only difference is that you’ve added a year to your age and gotten precisely three books richer. Every sports season begins this way for me – Opening Day nears, and I get outrageously excited. And then, as I sit through the first blowout loss, I suddenly remember “oh, yeah, sometimes these games suck.” Halfway through the first game, I’m poking through emails on my laptop.
 
The start of summer blockbusters is exactly the same for me – all throughout the spring, I see the trailers. Terrible horror movie after terrible horror movie comes out - I skip them all. As a result, I’m never at the movies, and I miss it – no sneaking from theater to theater, no smuggling in of food, no yelling out sarcastic things at yet another terrible Dwayne Johnson trailer. Instead, I wait for the summer blockbusters.
 
Naturally, watching the trailers, they all look amazing – dizzying fight scenes and pervasive explosions, and at the end of it you’re making note of the day it comes out so you can go to the midnight showing. And so when early May rolls around and you go to the first one, it’s not just a movie you’re going to see, it’s Opening Day for you. It’s the beginning of a whole summer of escapist fun.
 
And then, you see X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and you remember “oh, yeah, sometimes these movies suck.” And it sucks the fun out of your whole summer.
 
With Wolverine, there were just so many things that went wrong. It wasn’t just that you could predict what was going to happen – it’s that you could predict it with such accuracy. There’s a moment where one of the characters – it’s not a spoiler, because you’ll see it immediately if you see the movie – takes a small step to her right, placing a window with a long, clear shot of the fields behind it directly behind her head. And before you can shout “quick, move, you easily replaceable one-dimensional character; before a sniper with superhuman accuracy shoots you through the head,” she’s dead.
 
It’s a shame, because the film begins with such promise – the Avengers-like fighting force that Wolverine joins at the beginning of the movie is oodles of fun – but quickly devolves into one man’s slow, explosion-filled quest to seek revenge on the men who took his love from him. Hugh Jackman’s quest to be the world’s Most-Ripped Actor ends up being the only effort in this movie that’s in any way successful.
 
Some things require a back story. How Wolverine got that bitchin’ leather coat is not one of them.

The 23rd Best Movie I’ve Seen This Year

#23. Taken
 
I’ve been trying to figure out how to spell the word “yech.” Or maybe it’s “yelch.” “Yealch.” “Yealk.” It’s onomatopoeia, so it’s a little tricky, but it’s that word you say when you’re trying to say “yuck,” but your tongue gets involved, and so it kind of adds a lllllll sound at the back of your throat.
 
“Yulck.”  Sure. Let’s do that.
 
I bring this up because that’s the word that sprang unbidden to my lips when I decided that I should review all of the 23 movies I’ve seen this year,  starting with the bottom – and I saw that on the bottom was Taken.
 
Now, understand, this is a clear case of misplaced enthusiasm. There were certainly worse movies released this year (I fortunately avoided almost all of them), but Taken had a lot going for it. It starred a classic man’s man, Liam Neeson, a man with educated tone and ever-haunted eyes – the man who taught Bruce Wayne to fight in Batman Begins, appeared in one of the greatest duels in cinema history in Rob Roy, and made us weep like little children in Love Actually (maybe that was just me). This is a man who appeared in The Phantom Menace and yet somehow became more awesome. This is an actor of terrific power. And this is an actor wasted.

I was so certain I would like this movie that I almost didn’t realize that I didn’t. In the middle of yet another disjointed, poorly shot car chase, Claire whispered to me “hey, are you really bored?” And it suddenly hit me – I was really bored.  I was terribly bored. I was nearly asleep. I just hadn’t realized it until just that moment, because my brain just kept telling me “any second now – it’s gonna get good.”
 
All you need to understand about the movie is this: there’s a great exchange during the trailer where Neeson is on the phone with the people who took his daughter – it played in every single one of their 30-second TV spots, and it's on that poster over there on the top left. In it, Neeson promises to find and kill every one of the kidnappers. A dark voice on the other end of the line growls knowingly, “good luck,” then hangs up with a click. At this point, everyone in the theater watching the trailer is practically fist-pumping with anticipation. “Oh, it is on! Liam Neeson’s gonna kill that mother!” It looks like a classic cat-and-mouse as Neeson hunts down the thieves while the mastermind behind it all sends him down darkened alleys and into traps.
 
Instead, the guy on the other end of the phone turns out to be a fairly dumb, run-of-the-mill thug who Neeson stumbles upon midway through the film. When he dies, you’ll know you’re about two-thirds of the way through the movie.

A slight differential, yes.

The 23 Best Movies I’ve Seen in Theaters This Year (In Terms Of Box Office)

1. Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
3. Up
4. The Hangover
5. Star Trek
6. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
7. Taken
8. Inglorious Basterds
9. District 9
10. Watchmen
11. I Love You, Man
12. Zombieland
13. Funny People
14. State of Play
15. Where The Wild Things Are
16. (500)Days of Summer
17. The Informant!
18. Adventureland
19. The Invention of Lying
20. The Hurt Locker
21. Whip It
22. Away We Go
23. Taking Woodstock

The 23 Best Movies I’ve Seen In Theaters This Year (In Terms of Excellence)

1. Up
2. The Hurt Locker
3. (500) Days Of Summer
4. Inglorious Basterds
5. Away We Go
6. Star Trek
7. Zombieland
8. Where The Wild Things Are
9. Adventureland
10. District 9
11. The Hangover
12. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
13. I Love You, Man
14. State Of Play
15. The Invention Of Lying
16. Whip It
17. Watchmen
18. Taking Woodstock
19. Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen
20. The Informant!
21. Funny People
22. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
23. Taken

Best Movie of the Aughts.

Bill Simmons recently did a gigantic piece on the year in sports, mostly having to do with a defense of Almost Famous as the decade's defining movie. While some people apparently freaked out over the selection, I couldn't really find anything wrong with it. His three criteria were quality, originality, and re-watchability, and Almost Famous has all three in spades. It's one of the few movies from this decade that you can point to and say that.

I decided to dig through the vault and try to find the 10 most likely candidates for "Movie Of The Aughts," a title we won't really be able to figure out until 10 years down the line. Keep in mind, often the decade's defining movies don't come out until the end of the decade, so there's still hope for 2009 that something like The Hangover, (500) Days Of Summer, or The Hurt Locker might grab the title.

10. Donnie Darko (2001) - Sort of an underground choice, but people still endlessly debate this movie and what, exactly, it's about. There's about to be a sequel that doesn't involve any of the major characters or the writer-director, just because the original keeps sticking with people. That's impressive.
9. Juno (2007) - It's really too soon to know, but this seems most likely to be the indie movie that forever could.
8. Milk (2008) - In 10 years, people will completely incorrectly give this movie credit for changing American opinion on gay marriage. Working in it's favor will be the fact that it will still be a really good movie.
7. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004) - Because - ironically - it sticks in your mind, and ultimately we'll consider it Kate Winslet's greatest movie.
6. Memento (2001) - The Aughts will be remembered for this sort of movie, and this and Sunshine are the two best examples of them. I'm betting on one of them sticking around in the national consciousness.
5. High Fidelity (2000) - Really more of a 90's movie than an 00's movie, it's still one of the strongest romantic comedies of all time.
4. Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy (2004) - Every generation has a turning-point comedy, and this was ours.
3. Dark Knight (2008) - The best superhero movie of all time, of the biggest grossing movies of all time, and the special effects are so solid it should age extremely well.
2. Lord Of The Rings (2001-2003) - Decades are remembered for their franchises more than anything.
1. Almost Famous (2000) - Hey, I didn't say I disagreed with him. I just wanted to open up the discussion.

What did I miss? Should movies like Little Miss Sunshine or Brokeback Mountain have made the list? Or has their time already come and gone?

Also, now that enough time has passed, I have to ask: what is the quintessential 90's movie? I vote for either Saving Private Ryan or American Beauty.