2009 Movie Releases

Now that the nation is steeped in the post-Oscar, pre-Fourth of July movie-release lull, it’s the perfect time to look to the future and prepare ourselves for another year of excellent movies. In no particular order, here is a selection of films that are likely to amaze in 2009:

Tree of Life:
Tree of Life will be Terrence Malick’s follow-up to the totally underrated Pocahantas tale, The New World, and it seems he is touching on long-abandoned ground with the uncharacteristic scope of his new project. What began as a traditional drama about a man examining his life has evolved into a computer animated three-part release to be exhibited in both 35mm and IMAX. Malick’s exercise in CGI is a big change of pace for a man who has shot entire features using only natural light, but it is his love of nature that apparently inspired the CGI—he is attempting to make a film that chronicles the history of life on earth. It begins with the Big Bang, and moves through dinosaurs, minotaurs, volcanoes, the ice age, and eventually finds Brad Pitt (who replaced Heath Ledger in the lead role). But don’t be thrown by Malick’s new jones for technology: the script is said to be poetic for pages on end with the prose-filled voice over we love so much from him. The film is a throwback to Q, a project about a minotaur that Malick began work on in 1978 that ballooned into a financial and metaphysical mess so big that not only was it never made, but he didn’t release another movie for twenty years with 1998’s Thin Red Line. BananaWho’s fingers are crossed for this one.

Director: Terrence Malick
Writer: Terrence Malick
Release Date: Hopefully

Inglourious Basterds:
This is not a remake of Erizo G. Castellari’s 1978 movie Inglorious Bastards as is rumored, rather, Tarantino just borrowed the title for his new release and spelled it wrong to bring us the story of a troupe of Nazi-killing American soldiers and an escaped Jewish girl whose plans converge to take the war into their own hands. The trailers for the movie are cleverly skewed to attract a bloodthirsty male audience, when in reality, Tarantino is bringing us another feminist revenge tale that is joyously juvenile and extremely quotable. Inglourious Basterds comes in Tarantino’s signature structure of “chapters” which are essentially short films that work individually, but they merge into one awesome feature film that rewrites history in the most satisfying way. This is Tarantino’s homage to German Cinema in the guise of a Spaghetti Western with WWII iconography.

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Release Date: August 21, 2009

Where the Wild Things Are:
The first thing we should discuss is how long we’ve been waiting for this movie: forever. Director Spike Jonze has been through years of battles with this project already, but Warner Brothers has finally committed to an October, 2009 release. Where the Wild Things Are is Jonze’s second adaptation since Adaptation, and only his 3rd feature film despite his notoriety for short format work. Here is a long format feature that is rife with big name creatives: Dave Eggers penned the script with a little help from veteran Charlie Kaufman, and Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is scoring it. Yeah! But it is the reaction of freaked-out children who pre-screened the movie in focus groups compounded by the over-long editing process that halted its release for so long. For such a highly-technical animated feature, Jonze took every advantage of the inflated budget to make his process his own: rather than shooting the actors separately from the Wild Things (which will ultimately wind up as CGI creations), he shot live action footage of actors in enormous Wild Thing suits that had to be tediously rotoscoped in post-production. But not only that, most movies that rely heavily on CGI are shot in controlled camera moves that are easily manipulated in post, but Jonze’s cinematographer shot the majority of Where the Wild Things Are handheld, and they never called cut. They rolled out on forty-minute takes, and had a second camera pre-loaded, standing by to take the place of the empty one. In addition, the nine-year-old boy they found to play Max wore a microphone in his ear through which Jonze would whisper actions to him or play music as he frolicked in front of the lens. Sounds more like an art film that a studio blockbuster. Jonze himself admits that it is not a traditional kids movie, or even a film for kids, but the product is unique, and the adaptation is unexpected but true to the original.

Director: Spike Jonze
Writer: Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers, Charlie Kaufman, Maurice Sendak (book)
Release Date: October 16, 2009
Watch the trailer!

The Lovely Bones:
This widely-read Oprah extravaganza is a book most people thought would be too difficult to bring to the screen because of the logistical puzzle of how to depict its murdered main character watching her family grapple with the horror of their loss from Heaven. The project was originally developed by writer-director Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar) before Peter Jackson moved in to take the reins, and it seems that with his success at directing young women in a fantasy land with 1994’s Heavenly Creatures and his vast experience working with CGI in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he might be just the man for the job. The Lovely Bones will probably be the only coming-of-age/family-drama/horror film you’ll ever see, and Jackson needed to draw on all of his skills to meld a CGI depiction of Heaven with the character-intensive drama of the grieving family on earth. The gristly rape and murder are bound to be chilling (if it’s even shown), but it might surprise audiences that it’s central conflict ends up being the dead girl’s internal struggle between dwelling on the living and moving on with her death.

Director: Peter Jackson
Writer: Peter Jackson, Alice Seabold (book)
Release Date: December 11, 2009

The Road:
Try to ignore the fact that this is another Oprah book. If you have seen The Proposition, then you know that director John Hillcoat feels at home with brutality, a quality he shares with the author of The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Based on his fears for the son he fathered late in life, The Road follows a man and his child who struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic America a few years after an unnamed cataclysmic event that scorched all life from the earth. In a land where nothing grows, there are only two types of survivors: the scavengers who hunt for leftover canned goods, and the cannibals who eat them. It’s a bitterly bleak story, and there were fears from fans of the book that a screen adaptation would Hollywoodize the story, tone down the despair, the brutality, the horror of the whole thing, make the boy too cute, give the barely-there mother too big of a role, but those who have pre-screened the movie assure BananaWho that Hillcoat preserved all the darkness McCarthy intended. This is not going to be a feel good movie, but if it lives up to its Pulitzer Prize-winning book, it will be well worth it to experience this story of finding hope in the hopeless.

Director: John Hillcoat
Writer: Joe Penhall, Cormac McCarthy (book)
Release Date: 2009

Public Enemies:
Michael Mann’s latest action blockbuster follows the pursuit of J. Edgar Hoover’s #1 Public Enemy, John Dillinger, the famed bank robber who became a national hero in the 1930s for robbing the banks that sank America into the Great Depression. Our own financial crisis is the perfect backdrop for this movie to be released against, even though they wrapped production in Chicago before the economic nosedive in late 2008. This movie stars Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard for good measure, and a million other great actors you’ll recognize. Public Enemies is going to be the period gangster movie Road to Perdition only wishes it was, and the story seems more apropos to our time than ever.

Director: Michael Mann
Writer: Ronan Bennett, Ann Biderman (book)
Release Date: July 1, 2009

Sugar:
Sugar is Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s follow-up release to Half Nelson, the uber low-budget indie that was the Oscars’ zero-to-hero pic of 2006. With their second feature, Boden and Fleck continue with their subversive style, using non-actors in lead roles and exploring common material through an uncommon perspective. Algenis Perez Soto plays Miguel “Sugar” Santos, one of the many Dominican baseball players who go through training camps that prepare them to play baseball in the American minor leagues. Sugar leaves everything he knows in the Domincan Republic and finds himself in Iowa where he is culture shocked and caught behind a rigid language barrier. Sugar quickly wanders off the traditional sports film track to focus on issues of displacement and isolation in America. Even though Sugar sold out in every screening at Sundance 2008, it still struggled for distribution for lack of star power, but the industry shouldn’t punish the film for being authentic, and neither should you. See it!

Director: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Writer: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Release Date: April 3, 2009 (limited)

-CH.