The movie business began 2009 on the same troubled note as every other industry on this crumbling planet we call home. Yet the year concluded on a very different one. The closing moments having been defined (from a commercial perspective, at least) not by a whimper or a bang but by a wannabe fang-banger: the stratospheric success of The Twilight Saga: New Moon pushed North American box office tallies to a record high. In fact, the numbers are already so good that it doesn’t matter if no other holiday release reaches New Moon’s heights. That’s just as well, given the slim chance that teen girls will go as mad for Avatar’s star-crossed giant Smurfs as they did for Bella and Edward.
The latest batch of longing glances between Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson must surely count among the most iconic screen images of the year in cinema, even if I found myself more enthralled by the unblinking gaze of Jackson Rathbone as the blond vampire Jasper — if he keeps up that level of intensity, he’ll be shooting lasers out of his eyes in next summer’s Twilight franchise instalment, Eclipse.
Other looks and gestures may prove to have an equal degree of resonance in the long run. Perhaps you’ll most treasure the sly smile that crawls across Christoph Waltz’s lips whenever Hans Landa unveils another weapon in his linguistic arsenal in Inglourious Basterds. Or maybe it’ll be the rapidly alternating expressions of rage, malice and shock as Charlotte Gainsbourg gives Willem Dafoe a very unhappy ending in Antichrist. Or the frustration and bewilderment in Michael Stuhlbarg’s face as he tries to explain to the Columbia Record House guy that he doesn’t want a “Santanasabraxas!” in A Serious Man.
Let’s not forget other body parts, like the emaciated torso of Michael Fassbender’s Bobby Sands in Hunger. I also appreciated the nimble fingers of Jeremy Renner’s he-man bomb defuser in The Hurt Locker and guitarist Fred Frith in the extraordinary final sequence of Act of God.
Nor did a character have to be flesh and blood to be memorably expressive. The charming leads of the twin stop-motion wonders Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox proved that, as did the loquacious canines in Up and the furry manic-depressives in Where the Wild Things Are. Likewise, the near-flawless integration of digitized and physical actors in District 9 and Avatar illustrated just how far we’ve come since Liam Neeson bantered with Jar Jar Binks.
Such images are also a poignant portent of what we’re losing as the scale of movies is miniaturized in order to fit onto the screens of our evermore portable devices. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, the medium’s best moments are still big — it’s the pictures that are getting smaller.
And while theatres make plenty of room for behemoths like New Moon and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009’s box-office champ, despite offering no noteworthy image besides that of Megan Fox in a burqa), the smaller fish seem locked in a battle that no one is winning. Such is the dearth of mainstream dramatic fare that it’s no surprise that the thoroughly middlebrow likes of Up in the Air and An Education get Oscar buzz and ecstatic raves. (More tender-hearted readers might spare a tear for the world’s shrinking cadre of movie critics, ever more compelled to play ball with publicists and publishers as their kind are cut in favour of user- and wire-generated content.)
Maybe it takes a bludgeoning like the kind delivered by Precious for a smaller-budgeted release to dent the marketplace. Among the more depressing tidbits about 2009 was the fact that the only specialty title in the first half of the year to have any traction was the instantly forgettable Sunshine Cleaning.
Beyond the crowds at Hot Docs, the news wasn’t much better for non-fiction filmmaking. Audiences largely spurned any more showboating from Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock and such seemingly surefire hits as The Cove and Food, Inc. came and went too quickly. Canadian docs like Act of God and Inside Hana’s Suitcase deserved wider exposure, too. So did the continuing bounty of French-Canadian cinema, whether the examples were festival favourites such as C’est pas moi, je le jure! and Lost Song or populist-minded crowd-pleasers like De père en flic, Sticky Fingers or 1981, none of which got English Canadian releases. (The one movie to bridge both camps, Xavier Dolan’s Cannes sensation I Killed My Mother, gets a local run in February.)
As for devotees of world cinema, well, we’re used to subsisting on survival rations in between the big fests. The newly retitled TIFF Cinematheque delivered another strong slate (including the long-awaited local premiere of The Headless Woman) while Tokyo Sonata, Summer Hours, 24 City, Gomorrah, Of Time and the City and Tulpan all benefited from the elbow grease that distributors put into their releases. Alas, the closing of the Carlton means that the occasional good-news story from that sliver of the marketplace — like the months-long stand there by the Japanese drama Departures or the healthy numbers for Ruba Nadda’s delicate Cairo Time — will become even scarcer.
But really, what good did thinking about the future ever do us? The only sensible thing to do in the here and now is stop worrying and relish the pleasures that are still available to us. Bella and Edward have surely taught us that. Well… that, and to never have sex.