The Best and Worst Films of 2009

New Zealand's Sam Neill in Dean Spanley. Photo supplied.
New Zealand's Sam Neill in Dean Spanley. Photo supplied.
Film reviewer Christine Powley offers her highs and lows of 2009.

The Good

Dean Spanley
Sam Neill is deliciously drool as a man who remembers his past life as a dog after imbibing Hungarian wine.

The delights are evenly spaced out between the other actors including Peter O'Toole and Bryan Brown.

Although set in Edwardian England, this, through the magic of film financing, qualifies as a Kiwi film.

The Topp Twins
They started as radicals and ended up as fun for the entire family.

Twenty years of Topp Twin history is a bloody good laugh and a strangely moving tribute to how much we have all changed in the last 20-odd years.

Star Trek
Mucking around with a beloved television icon is just asking for trouble.

This pulled it off through the combination of being bold yet showing a love of the old ways.

Best of all it was fun; something that more would-be blockbusters should remember.

Public Enemies
This passes in a blur of prison breaks, bank raids and shoot-outs which is fitting for the story of John Dilliger, the original live-fast-die-young-and-leave-a-pretty-corpse guy.

No matter how confusing director Michael Mann makes it, Johnny Depp's star power keeps this movie on track.

Julie & Julia
Julia Childs makes an unlikely romantic icon but here, with a very on-form Meryl Streep playing the loved-up Childs, we get to see that middle-aged romance can be dead sexy.

As a bonus there is some stuff about food and Paris thrown into the mix.

Ponyo
The stylish children's animation movie that was not made by Pixar.

It might be minus the fast pace and funny bits of Up, but this fairytale of the chaos caused when a magical goldfish decides to become human lingers through its very simplicity.

The Bad

The Boat that Rocked
1960s pirate radio seemed a fab subject and this movie had talent to burn.

Why did it all go so wrong?

A combination of too many story lines and the sad realisation that someone stuck on a boat playing records is not really that interesting.

Duplicity
Julia Roberts has been in plenty of bad movies before but this one did not even attempt to use her famous charisma to paper over the cracks.

No-one wants to see a grumpy Julia bickering with Clive Owen.

We do not care if their characters are pulling a con on each other.

We want to see her smile and toss her hair, just like Pretty Woman.

Terminator Salvation
When the first Terminator movie came out it was an easy 10 years ahead of its time.

Now we are up to No 4, it feels like a rehash of last year's scary robot movie.

Christian Bale tries but John Connor was never that interesting an character.

The Terminator series has hit the wall of diminishing returns, coupled with the burden of realising the future predicted in the time-travelling story line.

The Ugly

My Sister's Keeper
Taking a beloved novel and changing the ending that made it so memorable for readers is bad enough.

Pretending that you are going to give us a raw and honest account of the toll that cancer can have on a family and then not delivering is criminal.

This is all the director's fault.

If you are going to give us emotion, stop cutting to middle-distance shots whenever anything emotional is happening.

This cancer porn is ugly not because of the subject, but because of its inability to man up to a tough topic.

 

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