So, Watchmen didn’t exactly bomb, nor was it exactly a hit. With a 65% critical Tomato-Meter rating, it was neither a fiasco nor a critic’s darling, and for all its sex and violence, the onscreen content was far less controversial than all the legal maneuvering involved with getting it to screens in the first place.

In other words, the first big film of the year was a lot like the rest of 2009’s films to date: nothing to really get all het up about one way or the other...

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5. WALL*E (Andrew Stanton, dir.)



Pixar has been on such a roll of late that if they were a single director, they’d be getting mention in the same breath as the golden age greats.  But they’re not; they’re an aggregate of many clever, talented folks who make computer-generated cartoons that are at least partly intended for children.  I’m not going to argue that this isn’t sometimes a weakness; in WALL*E, the environmental message only seems fitting and appropriate because I happen to agree with it, and the crypto-Objectivism in The Incredibles only bothered me because I don’t.  But regardless of the heavy-handedness of the moral, it can’t be denied that WALL*E is flat out the most wonderful film of the year, hopeful and funny and romantic and bittersweet all at the same time, and wrapped up in a package so beautiful to look at you wonder why anyone ever questions the potential of CGI.   And if this astounding motion picture spawned an obnoxious marketing empire, one can only shake one’s head and say “Damn kids don’t know how good they’ve got it.”

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6. THE WACKNESS



Thoughtful, well-made coming-of-age stories are usually popular, and weed has been making a cinematic comeback lately, so I’m not exactly sure why The Wackness in general and Josh Peck’s charming turn as wistful pot dealer Luke Shapiro didn’t make more of a splash in 2008. Writer/director Jonathan Levine’s evocation of Manhattan circa 1994 feels as specific and lived-in as Ben Braddock’s Pasadena or Lloyd Dobler’s Washington suburb, and it’s hard to think of a better first-love interest than Olivia Thirlby. I posted a full review of the movie back in June when it first charmed me at the Provincetown Film Festival, so rather than repeat all that praise, I’ll just paraphrase Thirlby’s character and say the film wound up on my Top Ten because, in a difficult year, it reminded me to look at the dopeness and not just the wackness.

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So, by the end of First Quarter 2008, I'd seen a lot of mediocrity and just one truly memorable movie (Full Battle Rattle), but I'm happy to report there's been a sharp uptick in the bottom line of my filmgoing enjoyment in the Second Quarter of the year, with an additional five flicks now vying for year-end Top Ten consideration.

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It’s not that I didn’t see this coming. 

By my reckoning, 2007 was a pretty solid year for movies, so I suspected 2008 would bring a cyclical downturn in cinematic quality (accompanied by a distinctly fishy, low-tide smell wafting from our nation’s multiplexes). And, yes, I know we’re in the Horse Latitudes of the movie-going year, before the summer blockbusters and the fall Oscar contenders...but, seriously, has anyone seen anything really good yet?

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Second Skin, reviewed here last week, is a documentary about MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Full Battle Rattle is also about a kind of MMORPG: let’s call it a Massively Multiplayer Outdoor Role Playing Game. The film documents the U.S. Army’s Iraq Simulation in the Mojave Desert of California, a gigantic make-believe war designed to prepare soldiers for the real one.

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The SXSW Film Festival Awards were handed out last night. I’d love to tell you how worthy all of the winners are, but as fate would have it, I have yet to see any of them. While I try to rectify that situation, here are the big winners:

The Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature went to Wellness, Jake Mahaffy’s independent feature “about a man trying to succeed in a business that doesn't exist.” (There’s a lot of that going around Austin this week.)

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