Best of the Decade: 2000-2009

These lists are not easy to create. Something is always left out, or forgotten. No one will ever agree completely. But that’s the beauty of the list — it’s open for discussion or interpretation. After careful review of 10 years of movies, here is my list of favorite films from the last decade, the Oughts (2000-2009).

— Michael Clawson

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25. Primer
Two garage scientists accidentally invent time travel and they do what most of us would do: they play the stock market. But as the time loops grow more complex, the movie unfolds into one of the most difficult, but rewarding, science experiments of the cinema. Made on the fly and on the cheap by Shane Carruth, Primer is one of the gutsier sci-fi movies.

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24. High Fidelity
John Cusack … gotta love him. He plays the most manic, depressing version of himself in High Fidelity, a wonderful comedy about love, relationships and, because of its record-store setting, music. Cusack plays Rob, a recently single eccentric who reflects back on his many loves during a movie-long “top 5 list.” He’s joined by Jack Black, Tim Robbins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Bruce Springsteen and the lovely Iben Hjejle in one of the most quotable movies of the decade.

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23. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
How do you make a movie about sex with no sex? The powerhouse that is Judd Apatow figured a way in this crude but lovable comedy that introduced us to the Apatow Comedy Machine and the genius of Steve Carell, who plays the title character with a pitch-perfect howl. Many other Apatow comedies would follow (Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Funny People), but The 40-Year-Old Virgin was the best and brightest.

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22. The Dark Knight
All of Christopher Nolan’s films could appear on this list (especially Memento or Insomnia), but Dark Knight is something very special. Yes, it broke most of the box-office records. And yes, it was Heath Ledger’s last film. But more than anything the Batman Begins sequel examined the roles of superheroes, especially their roles in relation to villains. Batman growled: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Dark Knight was not afraid to look into the recesses of a man’s soul for salvation or damnation, and for that it will always be remembered.

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21. The Hurt Locker
The lone representative from 2009 on this list, Hurt Locker was a juggernaut this summer. Compared to the abysmal Transformers 2, not many people saw Hurt Locker, but those that did knew it was something special. Directed by renowned action direction Kathryn Bigelow and starring a very talented Jeremy Renner, the film follows a three-member bomb disposal team as it navigates the violent streets of Iraq. Gripping and almost surreal, the film was the first of only several films to tell an honest story from our country’s new warzones.

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20. Japanese Story
One of the most thoughtful and unappreciated movies of the decade, Japanese Story might be also one of the most forgotten. About an Australian geologist (Toni Collette) who escorts a Japanese businessman on a tour of the Outback, Japanese Story cruises along at an easy-going pace until a dramatic twist changes the entire fabric of the delicate composition. The ending is heartbreaking and poignant, but it reveals the true nature of what we as a people are capable of becoming.

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19. Punch-Drunk Love
Paul Thomas Anderson is an artist with his characters. In Punch-Drunk Love, which is something about pudding and frequent flyer miles, he gives us Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), an awkward and desperately lonely plumber salesman who has found love, or maybe love has found him. With Sandler’s best performance and a peculiar collection of new and old music, PTA crafts this wonderfully amusing and heartfelt tribute to the awkwardness in all of us.

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18. No Country for Old Men
The Coen Brothers are the most gifted of directors, and No Country For Old Men is one of their finest works. With basically no music, no fancy camera work, very little dialogue and a number of terrifically restrained performances, the Coens created their darkest, most haunting tale, this one about a bag of money and its suitors — a grizzled sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), a hired killer (Javier Bardem) and welding rancher (Josh Brolin). And if you can decipher the dreams at the end and relate them to the film you’re a cinema expert.

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17. Juno
Most films bark at teens. Juno just wants to talk. The 2007 comedy, about a pregnant teen who decides to give her baby up for adoption, understood teens on a philosophical level. Juno also gave us a proper introduction to star Ellen Page, whose quirky dialogue was instantly quotable. Directed by Jason Reitman — whose new movie, Up In the Air, could have been on this list — Juno, and all its heartwarming goofiness, is a treasure.

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16. A History of Violence
Director David Cronenberg is no stranger to the violent and perverse, but here he outdoes himself … and in small-town America no less. Starring Viggo Mortensen as a diner owner, History invokes in us the outrage of violence and also the act of betrayal, which may be what Mortensen’s character has done to his family by hiding his dark past. In the end, though, the film, as disturbing as it is, wants what we all want — a safe place to raise our families.

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15. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Striking and majestic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the first major martial arts movie of its kind (wuxia) to hit American soil. And now they’re quite common. The Ang Lee-directed picture centers on a mystical sword, its owner (Chow Yun-Fat) and a young girl (Zhang Ziyi) who wishes to wield its power. There’s lots of complex kung fu sequences, and also flying wire-fu, but the film is also an epic romance and a tragedy. Add into that stunning cinematography and a terrific Chinese score and Crouching Tiger is one of the most beautiful films of the decade.

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14. Lost in Translation
People who say nothing happens in Lost in Translation aren’t watching close enough. Life happens. About two disconnected souls (Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson) as they wander Tokyo’s culture-pulsing landscapes, Translation reflects on the loneliness of society and the way it alienates us from the mainstream’s centerline. It’s also a mesmerizing romance that ends at the most appropriate moment with a hushed whisper that’s never meant to be heard.

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13. Lord of the Rings
Peter Jackson pulled it off, and in spades no less. After filming for a full year on three consecutive movies, then releasing them a year apart — Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, The Two Towers in 2002 and Return of the King in 2003 — Jackson was not only able to create a convincing Middle Earth with Hobbits, dwarves, elves and a creepy Gollum, but he added real depth to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy books.

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12. The Departed

Martin Scorsese is one of the most gifted directors of any decade. But here, with The Departed, all his skills have been boiled into one red-hot crime thriller, about the Boston mob infiltrating the state police and the state police infiltrating the Boston mob. All the Scorsese staples are here — rock soundtrack, violence, Thelma Schoonmaker’s perfect editing, obscenely rich dialogue — as well as three of the most electric performances of the decade by Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo Dicaprio.

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11. Slumdog Millionaire
Hope is hard to convey convincingly on camera, but Danny Boyle never falters as he shows it in the face of young Jamal, a Mumbai teen who gets on a TV game show with all the right answers. Shot in some of the poorest locations on the planet and with many non-actors, Slumdog Millionaire nearly swept the Academy Awards the year it was released. More importantly, though, it showed audiences the importance of foreign film.

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10. Children of Men
Dystopian science fiction — from 1982’s Blade Runner all the way back to 1927’s Metropolis — is the oldest, and bleakest, variety of science fiction. Yet 2006’s Children of Men is something entirely new, and considerably bleaker. Set in a future London 18 years after women stopped giving birth, Alfonso Cuarón’s action-drama is ugly and cruel, but also beautiful and hopeful as it attempts to save the world’s last pregnant woman. The film is also a marvelous technical achievement as Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki craft exceptionally long takes around star Clive Owen as he plods through the nightmarish future.

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9. The Prestige

Christopher Nolan is no stranger to this list. All of his films examine the balance between good and evil, and also explore the duality of flawed men, from his existential Batman to Memento’s memory-suffering Leonard. In The Prestige, a deeply layered and fully realized dramatic thriller, he takes these themes to the absolute breaking point. About two dueling magicians, Prestige is also about obsession as Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman one-up each other in 19th Century London. The film, which is told mostly out of order, is made so exact that every single scene is essential to understanding the plot’s complex riddles.

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8. Kill Bill
Quentin Tarantino freely admits that he steals styles and filming methods from other filmmakers. Strangely, though, his films are entirely unique, even as they borrow from Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa and all his other favorite directors. In Kill Bill — both Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 — Tarantino turns his manic attention once again to Uma Thurman, who plays The Bride (or B****** K****), a betrayed former assassin who is sent on a “roaring rampage of revenge” after she’s put in a coma on her wedding day. Most people like Vol. 1’s chop-socky and kung-fu swordplay to Vol. 2’s wordier, and grittier, resolution. I think of them as a singular unit and feel required to watch both as opposed to one or the other. Every film Tarantino has made is amazing, but his Kill Bill shows off all his skills and powers as a filmmaker.

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7. There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson’s devastatingly raw There Will Be Blood was set at the turn of the last century, but its themes (greed, family, business) seem very appropriate in our world right now. Are not the CEOs of Citigroup, Enron, Goldman Sachs and Countrywide secretly versions of Daniel Day-Lewis’ devastating Daniel Plainview? Plainview, the vile oilman and father, abuses the public’s trust to attain money, and in the process abandons his son, his morals and all hope of his ultimate salvation. By the end of the movie, as he hollers to his butler, “I’m finished,” you can’t help but be thankful his reign is over. Or is it?

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6. Requiem For a Dream
Drug movies can be dark, and usually are, but not like Darren Arenofsky’s brutal, almost sadistic version of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel Requiem For a Dream. He casts Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans as addicts in one form or another as they move from score to score in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Told using a hypnotically frightening score, split-second edits of the drug peripherals and a number of clever camera tricks (bodycams, time lapse, cameras hooked to vibrating gantries), Requiem is the scariest of outcomes when it comes to addictions.

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5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Here’s a movie that’s almost science fiction, but instead veers into the psychological catacombs of a man’s despairing mind. Jim Carrey plays a man so depressed by a recent breakup with an extrovert played by Kate Winslet that he pays a company to erase his memories of her while he sleeps. Slowly, across the course of an evening, the process begins to yield results, but then the sleeping man changes his mind mid-dream. Michel Gondry’s surreal dream movie (from a script by Charlie Kaufman) is about the pain of love’s sting, but also about why that pain is a mandatory feeling — it proves why we loved to begin with.

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4. The Royal Tenenbaums
Wes Anderson is a genius. In 50 years he will be studied in film class, cable channels will run marathons of his works, and boxed sets of his films will be a mandatory purchase for movie buffs. His Royal Tenenbaums is his most complete quirky-dark comedy. Starring an all-star cast (Gene Hackman, Danny Glover, Owen and Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston), Tenenbaums, about a dying father reuniting with his imploding family, has all of the Anderson trademarks: static displays of props, hilarious montages set to rock music, highly detailed set designs, his stationary camera setups and that classic Anderson dialogue full of non-humor humor.

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3. Once
I completely believed the romance in Once. Of course, though, the stars were actually dating when the film was being made, adding a real element to the story. Real-life singers Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová play small-time musicians who meet on a Dublin street and agree to make some music over the course of a weekend. Once is a musical and the music is heartbreaking and wonderful, especially “Falling Slowly.” But Once is also a fairy tale, so much so that it spilled over into the Oscar telecast, when Irglová was cut off from her Best Song acceptance speech and after a commercial break host Jon Stewart brought her back out so she could say this: “Fair play to those who dare to dream and don’t give up. This song was written from a perspective of hope and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are.”

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2. Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe directs his own life story in Almost Famous, about a teen who hits the road with a rock band in the 1970s as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. Everything works in the film: it works as a comedy, a road movie, a rock movie, a coming-of-age story, and in some ways it works as a documentary of rock itself with an awesome soundtrack to boot. More than anything, though, it’s a touching story told with wonderful zeal by Crowe, who captures the spirit of the ’70s with the exuberance of being young and apart of something important and magical. The film also gave us the electric Kate Hudson, although she’d never do another film as good or as important.

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1. Wall-E

No other movie from the last decade, or last several decades, has been as pure as Wall-E, a film constructed, down to every last nut and bolt, with goodness. No surprise here — Wall-E is a Pixar movie. The company has made a number of films that could have made this list, including Up, Monster’s Inc., Ratatouille, The Incredibles or Finding Nemo. But Wall-E is something very special. It’s about hope — hope that something better is out there for all of us, hope that change is possible, hope that love finds a way. The computer-animated film stars Wall-E, a little trash collector who blurts and bleats out his tinny electric language. It’s funny: he never actually says anything but we understand him more than we do most human film characters. His adventure takes him from a trash-filled Earth to the deep depths of space as he follows the only love he’s ever known. No film this decade has captivated the imagination, touched hearts, caused such great sadness, or been as moving as Wall-E.

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Honorable Mentions
The list isn’t big enough for everything, but I must commend these brilliant films: Korean revenge thriller Old Boy, M. Night Shyamalan’s realist superhero thriller Unbreakable, the Ray Liotta-starring cop drama Narc, the Robert McNamara documentary Fog of War, scary-real epic City of God, dark divorce comedy The Squid and the Whale, vampire romance Let the Right One In, gritty western The Proposition, Sam Mendes’ crime drama Road to Perdition, Clint Eastwood’s beautiful Million Dollar Baby and Brian De Palma’s erotic crime thriller Femme Fatale.

A special Jury Prize should go to Steven Spielberg, who has made some stellar movies from the last decade, none of which are quite good enough for this list, though all of them are close. His works in the Oughts: AI: Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, Munich and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for which I have forgiven him.

2009: We survived, and so did the cinema

What a glorious year for movies! The good ones found audiences (Hurt Locker) and the bad ones were panned, even by their hardcore fans (Transformers 2). I feel like that’s justice. To finish off 2009, here are the best films of the last year. See you in 2010.

— Michael Clawson

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10. The Blind Side
Sandra Bullock is a talented actress. She so rarely gets to show that off, though. In The Blind Side, John Lee Hancock’s captivating human drama, Bullock presents the beautiful skills she’s been squandering in rom-com garbage. She plays a wealthy and white Tennessee socialite who plucks a poor and black teen off the street and adopts him. Race is a minor theme, as is football, but the movie has more important messages: it’s about the lengths people are willing to go to help those in need. Blind Side is also exceptionally cast with great performances by country singer Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron and child actors Jae Head and Lily Collins. It should also be noted that Blind Side is one of two movies this year — the other being Invictus — that did something I've been asking from sports movies for years: it showed the action on the football field without using omnipresent sports commentators. Audiences don't need voices to narrate sports, yet it's a Hollywood staple that is rarely ever absent from sports movies.

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9. Knowing
Instantly perplexing and feverishly debated earlier this year, Knowing was either loved or hated with no room in between. It stars Nicolas Cage as a college professor who uncovers the fate of the universe in a string of numbers pulled from a time capsule. Besides being a convincing thriller, with some horror-type scares thrown in — not to mention a plane and a subway crash that are so realistic they’re scary — the film has actual dogma woven into its philosophical themes. Are events random, or are they part of a grander, more dreadful scheme? Knowing knows, but director Alex Proyas (Dark City) doesn’t bonk you on the head with the answer.

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8. Coraline/Fantastic Mr. Fox
Stop-motion animation is not going away. In fact, with these two films, it did better in 2009 than hand-drawn animation, which only had one release (The Princess and the Frog). Coraline, about a little girl getting sucked into a fake version of her own world, was creepy and a visual delight. And Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s quirky tale about a thieving squab-eating fox, was hilarious and intoxicatingly brilliant. Both films are based on children’s books, but both work because they don’t speak down to children. They speak up to them.

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7. The Hangover
No comedy from this year can even get close to The Hangover, a rip-roaring comedy powerhouse that sunk its teeth into our funny bone and never let go. Starring a bunch of underrated funnymen — Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper — the Vegas-set movie told a familiar story: men go to bachelor party, party too hard and then wake up with blurry visions of the previous night. As they retrace their steps the next day they come across Mike Tyson, a tiger, taser demonstrations and overacting goofball Ken Jeong. Classic comedies are few and far between, but this one made it look easy.

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6. Avatar
I wrote off director James Cameron for more than a decade. Who didn’t, really? But he proved me wrong with Avatar, his long-awaited, super-expensive sci-fi fantasy. Told using massive amounts of computer animation, as well as motion capture suits, Avatar is about a man who uploads his brain activity into the body of an alien being. And as that alien, called a Na’vi, he falls in love (with the sexiest of alien women), becomes a member of the tribe, rides a dragon and redeems his sins when man tries to mine the beautiful planet all this takes place on. The animation is incredible and awe-inspiring, the world is gorgeous, the characters are fully realized and complete, and the action is everything you’d expect from the guy that gave us Aliens and two Terminator films. James Cameron, you’ve proved me wrong.

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5. (500) Days of Summer
Relationships can get messy. It’s not pessimistic; it’s reality. (500) Days of Summer is the most realistic of romantic comedies, or maybe it’s a romantic drama. Featuring star players Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, Summer is an exploration on how fragile the human heart is, but also how resilient it is. It begins on Day 1 — or is it Day 500 — and jumps around from there to points through the 500 days our stars are in love. But a word of caution: “This is not a love story.” No, it’s so much more.

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4. Up
Pixar films make the world smile. And Up gives one of the biggest smiles. Carefully animated and expertly orchestrated — from characters and plot to music and laugh-out-loud gags — Up will make you look at the world with warmth and a little bit of adventure. Poor Mr. Ferguson, a widower facing an eminent domain fight, just wants to go to Paradise Falls. So he straps balloons to his house and flies it to South America. A little Boy Scout tags along, along with talking dogs and a female bird named Kevin, and the adventure soars. Up is a pure movie, as are all of Pixar’s movies.

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3. Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s wordy and violent World War II film is a hilarious catharsis for everything that happened between us and the Nazis. Yes, Hitler is killed at the end, as is most of the German high command, but Inglourious Basterds is not meant to be historically accurate. It’s Tarantino’s version of events. Brad Pitt plays Aldo the Apache, a renegade soldier stomping through France butchering Nazis. There are other characters, too: Hans Landa, the sadistic Jew Hunter; Donny Donowitz, the Bear Jew; and Shosanna Dreyfuss, a theater owner who plans to use film stock to decapitate the head of the Nazi party. Over-the-top and ridiculous, Basterds is Tarantino having a blast.

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2. Up in the Air
Jason Reitman is the next great director. After Juno no one was quite sure what to make of him: one hit wonder or bona fide filmmaker? Here we learn he’s legit, the real deal all the way. In the superbly written Up In the Air, he gives us George Clooney, a man who lives his entire life in airports, rental cars and from his suitcase. He’s hired to fire people for employers who don’t like firing people; and in this economy business is booming. The movie is so much more than that, though: he gets an energetic young apprentice, he falls in love with a female version of himself and he finds his shaky morals thrown off balance by the world that’s changing around him. A movie for our time, Up In the Air is also a terrific portrait of a lonely man.

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1. The Hurt Locker
I knew Kathryn Bigelow’s realistic and emotionally challenging war movie The Hurt Locker was my favorite movie of the year about 10 minutes into it. And that was in June, before so many other great movies would even be seen. Ignoring all the typical Hollywood action-film rules and choosing actors capable of realistic fear and anger, Hurt Locker stormed out of the gate with raw physical power. It knew what it was about, and it understood its characters in every way characters could be understood. It was about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, but it’s also about why men and women fight, how they cope, and why they second guess everything when they’re out there exposed to enemy machine gun nests, roadside bombs and sniper fire. This is an important film, a film we’ll be talking about many years after 2009.

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Honorable Mentions
Here are some films that almost made the list: Steven Soderbergh’s intoxicating sex drama The Girlfriend Experience, the brutally honest Precious, John Hillcoat’s faithful version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the awesome Star Trek reinvention, the timely and appropriate military drama The Messenger, and Spike Jonze’s delightfully strange Where the Wild Things Are.

A father and son at the end of time

Few movies are as relentlessly disturbing as John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road. Cannibalism, barbarism, suicide, mass extinction of the human race, rape, infanticide … this is not material you usually leave your Thanksgiving dinner to go see.

But amid all the grisly nihilism and stomach-turning hopelessness is one of the most heart-warming, tender and significant relationships of the movies of 2009. We have a father and a son, and the love they share brightens a screen that starts (and ends) in a pitch-black turmoil so thick it seems to drip from the screen like sludgy ink.

The Road, an exquisitely accurate adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel of the same name, stars Viggo Mortensen as a man with no name. He wanders the burning plains of a destroyed world with his young son, also nameless. The movie makes no attempt to explain the disaster, although nuclear war, famine and disease are likely culprits. Calamity is everywhere: Fires are sweeping through the countryside, all vegetation has stopped growing, electricity is long gone, cars are parked where they ran out of gas, most houses are tombs for their last owners, and roving bands of cannibals terrorize the few survivors.

In an early scene in the film the father and son look for food in a barn. Hanging from the rafters are the corpses of a family that could no longer bear the world. Notice the young boy: he doesn’t flinch at their decomposing bodies. The Boy, young and innocent, has grown up in this chaos and it does not shake him easily.

Man and Boy are instinctively traveling south to the ocean from what might be the Carolinas or Virginias. They scrounge for food where they can. A can of soda makes an unexpected treat. The road they’re traveling on is worn and overgrown, and occasionally they meet other travelers, who they regard with caution.

Because the only real plot point in The Road is getting to the ocean, the movie is very episodic in nature. It skips from event to event, like a highlight reel of Man and Boy’s travelogue. They wander the road from hamlet to hamlet, passing under collapsing overpasses and through burning forests dislodged from the topsoil by unnerving earthquakes. They meet Ely (Robert Duvall), an old man who blindly shuffles along the crumbling road. They are robbed by a harmless thief (Michael K. Williams). They find a bunker with stockpiled food. They bathe in a beautiful waterfall spitting grey water.

They cross paths with cannibals fairly often and the movie does not shy away from the reality of the horrific device — disemboweled torsos, amputated victims, discarded heads and bones — although it stops short of the book, which had a glimpse of a baby roasting on a spit. Was the film exaggerating the cannibalism? I’m not so sure. People will do most anything to stop the hunger pangs.

But not the Man and his son, who live by principle even if the world does not. And that is the point of The Road: In a world with no humanity, love and compassion can still exist. This movie teaches that goodness is inherited from good people. “Papa, we carry the fire, don’t we?” the Boy asks. “Yes, we carry the fire,” the Man responds warmly. The Boy was born into this madness and he was taught right and wrong by a father who was not obligated to teach such things. The Road is also about the goodness of children. The sparkle in their eyes. The innocence of their questions.

McCarthy, the reclusive author, has said in interviews recently that the dialogue in his book — dialogue that’s been brought over into the movie — was based on actual conversations he had with his own son, whom he dedicated the book to. Put into the context of his post-apocalyptic vision and it becomes heartbreaking. “Are we the good guys?” the Boy wonders. The film knows where our heartstrings are, but doesn’t strum them unnecessarily. It doesn’t pander to our sentimentality. It simply speaks, and we listen.

McCarthy should be proud of what Hillcoat (The Proposition) has accomplished with his version of The Road. The film understands the source material, even as it changes it (with the addition of a mother, Charlize Theron) and condenses it. And the producers must be applauded for keeping the film as dark and hopeless as the book, which is a brave declaration of the sanctity of McCarthy’s original work.

Really, though, what is this movie? It’s a movie for fathers and their sons. Very few movies speak so loudly and proudly about the powers of fathers. The day I saw The Road I had been helping my own father rewire electricity in his home, the home I grew up in. We had been working on it for more than a week, and we had bonded tremendously during those days of hard work. That time is priceless to me. I knew that before seeing The Road, but the film magnified it further.

Someone once said that parents raise children to replace them. It’s the truth. A good father only wants his child to grow up to be wiser and kinder than he is. And this father is no different with his son, be it the end of the world or no.

Stare into my eyes, Vampire

As if the world needed more skulking, brooding teens, here is an entire film of them doing nothing but staring into the abyss of each other’s eyes contemplating being together for the most miserable of eternities. Why they want to brave immortality together is beyond me, especially when they can’t muster a smile for more than about 5 minutes.

Even in the film’s opening moments — usually the parts of a movie full of happy pre-conflict characters — our hero is reciting Romeo & Juliet, and not the romantic verses either, but the suicide parts. Apparently, his soul is tortured, which is why he tortures the screen (and us) with his overplayed teen angst.

I’m going to just unload on New Moon starting right from the top since the core audience of the Twilight franchise doesn’t read this blog because it isn’t delivered as an iPhone app or a Twitter update. And because if they know better they’ll stay away from reviews, most of which are going to devour this petty, minuscule movie and its unnecessarily loud hype.

New Moon is a teen vampire movie set in the Pacific Northwest. It made me yearn for better teen movies, better vampire movies and a different story in the Pacific Northwest, a setting far too pretty for these gloomy teens. If you haven’t seen Twilight then there’s no real point in seeing New Moon, which assumes you know every scene from the first film and every word, comma and veiled nuance in Stephenie Meyer’s novels, including the endings to sequels that haven’t been filmed yet.

Apparently even the most average Twilight fans read the books multiple times so they can nod in agreement when the films ace the material, and then shake their fists when they get it all wrong. It’s as if the film isn’t a film, but an appendix to the book. Those same fans will say you have to read the books to enjoy the movies, but let me add this: you can skip the books and the movies so you can free up time in your schedule for charity work, organized sports or treehouses. (To be fair, the same can be said about Star Wars, Harry Potter or any other overhyped franchise.)

Bella (Kristen Stewart) is back and this time she wants to be a vampire. The pros are fashionable clothes, overpriced cars and eternal life with Edward (Robert Pattinson). The cons are twinkling ice-cold skin, pale complexion, chronic boredom and eternal life with Edward. Most women at the screening I attended would love to spend just half an hour with Edward (if it even takes that long for the little imp) even if there’s clearly not a single thought in that vampire brain of his. Honestly now, how long could you really talk about how much you loved each other? This is why Romeo and Juliet are both dead at the end of their story — they really had nothing better to talk about anyway.

Sensing Bella’s sudden vampire urge (a blatant sexual metaphor perhaps), Edward ditches her “for her own safety.” Taking advantage of Bella’s new single status is Jacob (pudgy faced Taylor Lautner), the local werewolf who reveals himself to be a werewolf about 90 minutes after the Twilight idiots (like myself) have figured it out for ourselves. The fact that he walked around in cut-off shorts and no shirt in Washington’s winter had something to do with it, though. And then after he’s revealed, cue a stream of horrific wolf/dog puns.

The acting is atrocious on nearly every level. Stewart, who I feel has some talent, is required to have bad dreams and stare into empty spaces like Edward's face, which barely counts as acting in a movie not made for girls with Hello Kitty! backpacks. Edward looks clueless in every scene, and Pattinson doesn't help him with the hazed-over wonderment in his moonface. All the best characters are given only brief parts, like Charley, Bella's dad, who says stupid fatherly things, but is generally a sane character if also a little clueless about his free-wheeling daughter. Vampire matriarch Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) is the most interesting of the vampires, if only because he's not 17 years old, yet all he does is stitch an arm then fade into the background. Bella's friend Jessica has a terrific little monologue about zombies and clichés that's so poignant it could be a commentary on the film itself. Jessica's played by Anna Kendrick, the star of one of my favorite movies about teens, Rocket Science. She also keeps up with George Clooney in December's superb Up in the Air. See either of those movies and you'll be better using your time.

I’ve explained some of the plot, but I’m not doing the film justice. What is it about? It’s about Bella waiting for Edward to return. That’s it. She toys with Jacob’s feelings, but he clearly never has a shot, the poor wolf-guy, because Edward is destined to return or Bella will just whither from his absence. The film states all this again and again in tortured sequences of dialogue that will test your patience and the strength of your armrest as you claw at it mercilessly. In terms of content, the vacuum of space feels like a conga line compared to the chilly and unpleasant conversations these characters share during many of New Moon’s 130 minutes.

All this weepy drama can’t be good for women, especially young girls, who are brainwashed by opera this soapy. I hate it when a movie makes me feel like a feminist, but this is one of them. Consider: Bella is defined by the men she’s dating. She’s worthless when Edward’s not around. When he disappears she acts suicidal in hopes that he’ll return and pity her. She’s always in need of rescuing. Watch this movie and you’re being told that women are stupid and meaningless until a man completes them. I expect this from a misogynist like Tucker Max, not a woman. And why does a man have to draw attention to this?

If it hates women or loves them, all I ask is that something happens. New Moon just pretends to have things happening: vampires lunge at open wounds, shirtless boys transform into overgrown wolves, stand-offs and chases in the woods, and Italian castles with a vampire tribunal (in which Dakota Fanning has one line, “Pain”). Break all that down, though, and you still only have a frozen tundra of uncomfortable silences, impassioned gazes and lifted eyebrows all directed at Bella, who’s so self-centered that maybe immortality as a narcissist vampire is an appropriate career path.

Obviously, I hated this movie, but — and this has to be said — Twilight fans will love it. They’ll see Bella and Edward’s bland conversations as modern-day Shakespeare, and all the weepy, detached romance as eternal true love. They’ll eat it up in multiple viewings and then write me to say I’m a cranky old man who doesn’t understand anything. Well, here’s one thing I do understand: skulking, brooding teens are no fun to watch. In real life, or in a movie.

Smile already.