The Best of 2009
by Adam Hirsch
Now, on this snowy New Year’s Eve, it’s a better time than ever to reflect back on the year and select our choices for the best cinematic efforts in 2009.
Myself, Peter Warren, Brian Barth, Giampaolo Bianconi, Jake Teresi and Matt Paley all wrote down our Top-10 lists (although Matt, in an uncharacteristically cynical move, declined to offer a full 10). There were ten films overlapping our choices, and, ranked by frequency, comprise the final top-10 list.
Best Films.
Up (Dir. Pete Doctor) — 5 Votes
The Hurt Locker (Dir. Kathryn Bigelow) — 5 Votes
A Serious Man (Dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen) — 4 Votes
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Dir. Wes Anderson) — 3 Votes
Up In The Air (Dir. Jason Reitman) — 3 Votes
Inglorious Basterds (Dir. Quentin Tarantino) — 2 Votes
Lorna’s Silence (Dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne) — 2 Votes
Where The Wild Things Are (Dir. Spike Jonze) — 2 Votes
The Road (Dir. John Hillcoat) — 2 Votes
Sugar (Dir. Anna Boden) — 2 Votes (more…)
On Watching Hitler Die
by Giampaolo Bianconi
“Facts can be so misleading,” says the S.S. colonel Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz as a truly devilish take on Claude Rains, towards the beginning of Quentin Tarantino’s new film. He prefers to stick to rumors, in a sense, to dreams: the collective dreams and whispers that form rumor, eventually codified into some kind of historical record, to be proven or proved apocryphal. By the end of the film, as the colonel discusses the terms of his heroic surrender over the radio, he makes sure to emphasize that when the history of Operation Kino is written, he will be recorded to have been a crucial member from the beginning (Operation Kino is the name given to a successful plot to kill the German high command). Before Tarantino, Ronald Reagan was the last person to exhibit such a preference for the Hollywood version of history.
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