Top 10 Films of 2009
This is my list for last year. Even if you have only a faint interest in cinema you should watch all of them.
5. Moon
10. The Wrestler
Honorable mention get Avatar (beautiful effects but terrible script), District 9, The Messenger, Up in the Air, Tyson and Star Treck. I have not seen Fantastic Mr. Fox yet but from what I gather it is great. Let me know about my terrible omissions. Then let me shoot them down.
World Cinema by Joel and Ethan Coen
Another Coen brothers film. I am not sorry.
Six Small Things
that make me happy.
Petya kindly invited me to join a chain of posts. I put down my list in google docs about a month ago and then forgot about it. So, here they are.
1. Coffee. Does not matter if the source is an espresso machine, french press or filter coffee maker. I crave the substance and I drink at least a few cups every day.
2. The return of Fake Steve Jobs. The funniest blogger on my side of the internet is back with the familiar tagline “Dude, I invented the friggin iPhone. Have you heard of it?”
3. House MD. I count the days (42) to the premiere of season 6. I used to wake up at 4 in the morning to grab the latest episode from the torrent sites.
4. Stumbling upon a film I should have seen a long time ago but did not. The freshest one in this category is Martin Scorsese’s American Boy. The movie was actually never released to the broad public but this did not stop movie buffs to seek, watch and directly lift ideas from it. Certainly everyone reading this can recall Uma Turman snorting heroin and OD-ing in Pulp Fiction. The scene below has almost a one to one correspondence with a story told in American Boy.
I have no problem with the good directors borrow, great directors steal approach.
On another note, if you, for some freakish reason, have not seen Pulp Fiction - Get out of here right now! I will quote Marsellus Wallace about the situation your lack of curiosity for quality cinema entertainment has created.
Yeah, we cool. Two things. Don’t tell nobody about this. This shit is between me, you, and Mr. Soon-To-Be-Living-The-Rest-of-His-Short-Ass-Life-In-Agonizing-Pain Rapist here. It ain’t nobody else’s business. Two: you leave town tonight, right now. And when you’re gone, you stay gone, or you be gone. You lost all your L.A. privileges. Deal?
5. Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself. I find it extremely useful in making sense of web content. Check it out.
6. Not playing WoW any more. It is nothing less than triumph of my will power. Let’s see how long it will last…
A Serious Man
This is the trailer for the new Coen brothers film. A Serious Man seems to be a darker and deeper trip in paranoia than the excellent Burn After Reading. It will be great. The brothers can do no wrong on screen.
Rendez-vous
On an 1976 August morning, French New Wave film maker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro stabilized camera on his own Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 and raced through the streets of central Paris. Lelouch dubbed over the sound of a Ferrari 275GTB to create the impression for an even higher speed. He did not have permits to stop traffic and film. The director was arrested for endangering public safety shortly after the first screening. C’était un rendez-vous (It was a date) was done in one take without stuntman or special effects. It is nine minutes long.
In Space No One Can Hear You Scream
I am a movie junkie. Take away watching films and I will do anything, no matter how horrible it might be, to get it back. So when I came across The 50 [allegedly] Greatest Trailers of All Time, I had to spend the next 2 hours going through the list. Some of the films that made it there are good, some of them are truly great. Enjoy.
Movie Buffs Rejoice
The Criterion Collection is finally getting online. Although there are only 20 films available now, more will be added soon. Each costs $5 to view multiple times online for 1 week. If you choose to purchase the film later, the rental fee will be deducted from the price.
A knowledgeable friend recently told me that some people download films via a protocol called bittorrent. Unfortunately, even the biggest torrent sites (such as this and this) often fail queries for certain classics or art films. Those are precisely the bread and butter of the Criterion Collection.
But this gets even better. The Auteurs in partnership with Criterion provide some features for free. The former shapes up to become a great location to watch, discover and discuss films. I will be checking it out alongside my old-time favourites Empire and Sight & Sound.
