Since my draft "Best Movies of 2009" list was so underwhelming and incomplete, I decided to focus on things I saw at home this year. With the exception of the last category (leftovers that didn't fit anywhere else), the titles on my list seemed to lump together pretty naturally into some vague genres, as follows:
Semiautobiographical Non-Fiction
Moving Midway - though the ostensible subject (moving an NC plantation house) seems better suited to a paint-drying hour of HGTV, Godfrey Cheshire's film manages to capture the contemporary South like nothing else I've seen
Of Time & The City - Ode to Liverpool (and the editing room); must be some kind of high water mark for the use of archival footage
TV on DVD - Warning: Drug-Related Content
The Mighty Boosh: Season 1 - comedy team given the means to project the contents of their heads onscreen - results are both very weird and LOL
The Wire: Season 5 - don't know how it will look in 10, 20 years, but right now all the "best show ever" talk doesn't sound like hyperbole
Rock'n'Roll Lifestyle
Over The Edge - quintessential teen rebellionsploitation from 1979; early Cheap Trick sounds more badass than ever
Heavy Metal Parking Lot - underground VHS swap classic gets deluxe DVD treatment, padded out with near-essential "special features"
Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream - you'd never guess Bogdanovich was responsible, but give the man credit: he made a four-hour-plus rock doc that flies by on Rickenbacker wings
Tough Guys and Bad Sumbitches
Payday - Nashville Babylon
The Friends of Eddie Coyle - rediscovered piece of archetypal '70s grit filmmaking; could be one of Mitchum's best, which is really saying something
The Wrestler - Aronofsky goes to polar extremes with ring gore and weepy sentimentality but Rourke holds it together
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie - some kind of a masterpiece
Euro-Grotesques
Let The Right One In - the Swedish vampire movie that everyone was talking about, for good reason
Triplets of Belleville - one of the best animated movies from a decade full of really good ones
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