Top Ten films of 2009

More to choose from than with books, and pound for pound, quality is higher, along with the quantity:

1. Oldboy. D: Park Chan-wook. Sick, brutal film about revenge delayed, redeemed by the fact that it is brilliant in every way. It is important that there are still people this crazed and talented making films.
2. Darwin's Nightmare. D: Hubert Sauper. Lives of Tanzanian fishermen and the pending collapse of the lake's eco-system. Grim and objective account of human degradation and environmental destruction to sate western appetites.
3. Der Dritte. D: Egon Gunther. A woman seeks love amid the socialist realism. Stylish, nouvelle vague comedy drama from GDR. Yes, you read that correctly.
4. The Sweet Smell of Success. D: Alexander MacKendrick. Crackling script, brilliant musical score and ace performances as human louse Tony Curtis weasels his way about the screen. Brilliant.
5. Nackt Unter Wolfen. D: Frank Beyer. Concentration camp cat and mouse as prisoners conceal a child. Stark, brilliant, only slightly weakened by some clumsy pro-USSR propaganda.
6. La Chinoise. D: Jean luc Godard. Godard renounces radical leftism in charactertistically off beat tale of student terrorists. Alternates typically confrontational mis en scene with touches of casual brilliance.
7. All the Kings Men. D: Robert Rossen. 1950s take on political corruption. Swaggering performance by Broderick Crawford as sleazy politician.
8. Architekten. D: Peter Kahane. East German architects run up against institutional inertia. More interesting than it sounds, shot in a low key, realist style, with understated excellence in all areas.
9. Angelus. D: Lech Majewski. Weird fable about individuality, spirituality, shagging and the end of the world, set in communist Poland. Captivatingly strange.
10. No Country for Old Men. D: Joel & Ethan Coen. Film noir with cowboy hats. Impressive, but spoiled by a cartoon villan.

n.b. this is films I watched in 2009, not films released.

2009 - reads of the year

Not a vintage year by any means. These are my stand outs - I've had to go right down to my ** rated reads to make up a Top Ten.

1. Red Shift by Alan Garner. Brilliant novel that defies description. Three stories, where love and violence coincide, intermesh and repeat across the centuries, around the same Cheshire locations.
2. Hitler: a Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock. The first full biography of Hitler largely based on Nuremburg testimony. Extensive, detailed, enthralling, though hardly uplifting.
3. The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy. Sequel to American Tabloid, exploring the decade between the murders of Jack and Bobby kennedy. Contains all Ellroy's good and bad points in abundance.
4. The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. A convict accidentally escapes from the pennitentiary, while two lovers drift aimless to disaster. Two novellas exploring freedom and compulsion. Initially unconvincing, ultimately riveting.
5. Baghdad Burning by Riverbend. Iraq after invasion, told with wit and rage by a blogger who has been silent for almost 2 years. Prescient.
6. Germinal by Emile Zola. French miners strike against their apalling work conditions. Disaster ensues. Over-wrought and bathetic, but still powerful.
7. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. Off kilter tale of crime and punishment, set in Tsarist Russia and Geneva, as an embittered student is forced to infiltrate a revolutionary group.
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In a reversal of prior experience: first half drags, second soars. But too much of his supposedly luminous tale is just a an endless recitation of odd stuff happening.
9. Big Muddy by B.C. Hall & C.T. Wood. A modern Mississippi journey. Worthy, but lacks the detail to match the scope of the project. The book I'm most interested in re-reading, which is why it makes the list.
10. Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame. Autobiofictography. A childhood that veered between desperate poverty and imaginative nightmare is described brilliantly, but the adult present, played as a comedy of manners, is unsatisfying.

2010 had better be an improvement.