Year in Review 2009 – Part 1 – Jan to June

Right so, its another one of them year in review things. I’m not sure 2009 was one of the better year for movies. Plenty of hype, but it was far and few between that actually delivered. Incidentally, there are links to the reviews where applicable.

January
The year started promising enough with Mickey Rourke being resurrected from the depths of Hollywood hell by Darren Aronofsky in The Wrestler. Not promising enough for Rourke to pick up an Oscar, but at least he got a golden globe out of the whole thing. Rourke played an old time Wrestler who didn’t know when to hang up his spandex. It certainly warmed the heart which was well required after the holiday season of too much of everything !On the old scoring system I gave it 8/10. 
From here I had the misfortune of losing a valuable amount of life time to Valkyrie. I am and always will be a Tom Cruise fan, but for him to come out of where ever he was hiding for a few years with this! I’ll never know what was going through his mind. A load of Germans with American accents and a slow and sporadic story line, this was the first FAIL of 2009. I gave it 5/10.
Moving from Nazi’s to Nixon. One of the better movies of 2009 blew its load all over January with Michael Sheen and Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon. Set predominately around Nixon and his fall from “grace” It done exactly what it said on the tin and had an immense feel good factor at the end. If there was ever a time to root for the small guy, this was it! For its trouble, it got 8/10.
And that was the bulk of January, release wise. An overall promising start for 2009, with 2 of the above movies having their fair share of awards. Looking back, January    should have been the beginning of greatness for Mickey Rourke, but within minutes of him being jolted back to life, he was off attempting to go to the WWE and said a few bits that more or less put him back on hold for a bit. But as we know, he’s back now and looks promising in Iron Man 2, to say the least. Everyone went out and bought WWE figures!

February
A month that’s surrounded in love, cards and cheap chocolate. The second month of the year was a relatively slow one movie wise. But what the month of tack brought was plenty of viral sites. The 2 big ones namely being for Terminator Salvation and 2012. Check out http://www.skynetresearch.com/ and http://www.instituteforhumancontinuity.org/ Oh and lets not forget Uwe Boll wanted your money…to make a film or something. And then the month that has one night in it, that you are almost guaranteed    to get laid on, had Christian Bale being less than romantic on the set of Salvation. Downright fuckin mad he was. His performance of him losing his mind was actually better than his performance in Salvation. Then the TV spots for Wolverine started and everybody got hard and wet. Not that it’d last long though. And from here we again got nailed with promising looking trailers.
The International and Lesbian Vampire Killers all looked great back in this month, but failed to deliver. The Watchmen machine was in full effect by now as people waited with baited breath for Alan Moores graphic novel to hit the big screen. And for a million reasons or another, the Oscars turned up at the end of the month surrounded with the usual heavy set of politics. Besides Hugh Jackman telling us all he is Wolverine in a fantastic song and dance number, Pixar brought home yet another gold man with Wall E. Heath Ledger got the inveitable (but deserved) Oscar for best supporting actor. Sean Penn picked up Best Actor and Kate Winslet got to blabber on stage for winning Best Actress for the Reader. And then the world went Bollywood mad as Slumdog Millionaire took home the best picture award. For me, February ended on a positive note with the news the Eddie Murphy was set to play Richard Pryor in his biopic, Is it something I said. Everyone went out and bought replica, cheap ass Oscar statues.

March
Traditionally a month where the Irish get drunk and fall around the place ( I know, it doesn’t really make it different to any other month) and those that aren’t Irish will swear that their granddads donkey was Mexican but they knew an Irish badger. No doubt many were drunk when the thundered off to see Watchmen, as plenty hated it. Alan Moore’s “unfilmable” graphic novel turned up in March and I loved it. Every second of it! Where it went wrong is quite obvious. It wasn’t your standard run of the mill movie adaptation. With very few exceptions, many comic book movies are diluted for the brain dead and as a result are not entirely loyal to the original product. Watchmen on the other hand was a different story. It was so loyal, the only thing it didn’t have was page numbers.

Trailers for what would be 2 of the years better flicks, The Hangover and Star Trek turned up and everybody took off their pants as Mike Tyson done some air drumming in the Hangover trailer. The madness surrounding Joaquin Phoenix kept surrounding him and everyone else as he dove off the stage in Axl Rose style and got into a little fisty cuffs at a “gig”. And speaking of madness the first stills from Tim Burtons, Alice in Wonderland turned up, and nobody took off their pants. And then for me, the worst movie of the year turned up. Paul fuckin Blart!

I haven’t despised a movie like this in a long time. I got so pissed off that the review was made up of pictures including inflatable shit and a horse gone through a windscreen. I felt the pictures done the movie more justice than any words ever could.

And speaking of disasters, Nic Cage and Knowing turned up toward the end of the month and it was actually quite enjoyable.Maybe it was to do with all the doom and gloom but it got 8/10.  From an Irish perspective, one of the best movies of the year turned up called Waveriders directed by Joel Conroy. All about surfing and its founding auld f  ella it got a lot of people excited and we all went and bought surfboards.

April
The month of fools! Well your going to get caught out at least once, particuarly at the start of the month. You know the deal, people tell you stuff that isn’t real. Actually the month was full of deceptions. One thing that didn’t deceive was Monsters Vs Aliens. It managed a respectable 7/10 in my review and proved to be somewhat entertaining. Then the Boat that rocked sailed into port and that too was an entertaining romp about pirates, although none of them looked like Jack Sparrow. It too received a nice 7/10. Then the trailers started and with them, they brought plenty of April fools! First off was Fame. I know, I know. Another piece of unoriginal shite. A remake, reboot or a reshit. Whatever. After Fame the trailer for Bruno turned up and deceived us all. Sasha Baron Cohen promised us all he could do it again. Hah!!!
The world came to a grinding halt as more un Jack Sparrow like pirates spread copies of X-Men Origins: Wolverine around the world. This was a version of the movie that featured little or no special effects and the studio promised it was not the final version of the movie. The world waited with baited breath, or at least until it downloaded!
Fast and Furious also turned up and managed to entertain us for 20 minutes at least as Vin Diesel and Paul Walker teamed up again. Obviously mortgages had to be paid, but they pulled off a no brainer, at times entertaining romp. Jim Sturgess turned up in 50 Dead Men Walking which I enjoyed, and that for its trouble, regardless of its inaccuracies got 9/10. More trailers arrived deceiving us all like a bloke that sells ashtrays for motorbikes. Harry Potter and Angels and Demons all promised much more than they would eventually deliver. A glimmer of hope emerged with trailers for Inglorious Basterds. Everyone and their dog took off their pants for the latest offering from Mr.Tarantino.  
Crank 2 turned up and the Stat eat up electricty and I gave it 8/10. Even though it was only April, Crank 2 set the bar incredibly high for the no brainer of the year. Then things went backwards as Paul Rudd and co unleashed I Love You, Man. It got 6/10. To be honest if you’ve seen the trailer you’ve actually seen a better movie than the drivel that turned up on the big screen!  
April was also the month that we got to see Russell Crowe dress up as Robin Hood for Ridley Scott and Seth Rogen dressed up as a Mall security guard in Observe and Report. It did manage to excite me to some degree and it got 7/10. It might have get a lesser rating but there was more obese male full frontal nudity than your average porn site. Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck got it on in State of Play and bored us all into oblivion, but for those of us that managed to stay awake, it warranted a 7.5/10. If there was one major highlight of April, its this one. Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right one in arrived in cinemas to huge critical acclaim. Another vampire movie with a young teen playing a particularly hungry vampire. Thankfully this didn’t feature werewolves or Team Edward. What it did feature was a fantastic story, which beautifully shot and  proved world cinema and in particular Swedish cinema is well and truly kicking.  It got 10/10. To celebrate, We all went to IKEA and bought shit we don’t need.

May
The month of my birthday and the month the summer officially kicks off. Although in Ireland that usual means more fuckin rain! Of course the start of summer always brings in the big blockbuster season and the first one left out of the cage was X-Men Origins:Wolverine Hugh Jackman delievered an OK performance but the movie didn’t exactly set the screen alight with intensity. We didn’t exactly a get a real Wolverine movie, but none the less it entertained to some degree and it got 6.5/10. More trailers for Terminator Salvation and Transformers 2 turned up and loads of us get hard ons, but as you know by know they didn’t last long! Then, one of the few movies to actually deliver in 2009 arrived. Star Trek. The dude that brought us Lost decided to reboot the aging franchise and as a devout follower of the church of Lucas, even I loved it and gave it 9/10.
Then things took a turn for the worse as Tom Hanks got a hair cut and went thundering around the Vatican in Angels and Demons And what thundering went on. It was like Chariots of Fire. You’d actually be hard pushed to see more running around in the Olympics. Either way it got 6.5/10. Things kept on the downward spiral as Ben Stiller decided we all needed to see him in a sequel, so in comes Night at the Museum 2. It turned out that the kids would love it and the couples on a date movie would just go “Meh!”. It got 6/10. The first trailer for Sherlock Holmes arrived and I was left feeling quite tepid, and still am. The rollercoaster of a month hit a high note with Sam Raimi, who went back to his horror roots with Drag me to Hell. All about gypsy curses and the like. The trailer promised an absolutely terrifying experience, but in true Raimi style it delivered the terror and oodles of laughs at the same time. It got 8/10. We all went out and bought gypsy curses! 

JUNE

So, bang in the middle of Summer and of course bang in the middle of non-stop rain in Ireland. Although we got off to a bright start with a teaser trailer for Toy Story 3, McG and Terminator Salvation took away a little bit of the aforementioned brightness with Terminator Salvation. Besides some superb action sequences, not a great deal else happened. Catering toward a younger audience may have been its downfall and Christian Bale doing impressions of Batman throughout, didn’t do much to help it on its way.Not even a superb digital Arnie could save the 4th Terminator movie. It got 6/10. In more bad news, David Carradine died in Michael Hutchinson style circumstances. 
  From there, I was left bemused by the Hangover. A story about a stag night that goes wrong, except we don’t see the actual night. Only the morning after. As enjoyable as it was including Mike Tyson air drumming and an awesome Tiger, I only lashed out 6.5/10. Michael Bay turned up to the Summer with LeBeouf, more transforming robots and Megan Fox’s ass! Besides the brilliantly shot slow motion of Fox’s boobies, Transformers 2 failed to deliver. It was too long and hadn’t a great deal going for it, besides the usual Bay explosions and giant robots. At this point, I had stopped giving marks out of ten, but recommended you leave your brain on at the door! But going back to the middle of June, one of the better movies of the year, let alone the Summer turned up.An unlikely pairing of Eric Cantona and Ken Loach brought us Looking for Eric which while quite dark, brought plenty of laughs and feel good moments as a Postman gets guidance from an imaginary Cantona. It got 9/10 and we all went out and started re-quoting the best movie quote of the year, “I’m not a man, I’m Cantona!”