Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) (2009)

I think it was the laugh-out-loud melodrama I enjoyed most watching Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, an overwrought carry-on about a blind film writer's affair with an actress, but everything else left me a little cold, including the rush to tie all the nonsense up sensibly in the end.

★★★☆☆

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しんぼる ('Symbol') (2009)

This very funny oddity jumps back and forth between two disparate situations - an aged Mexican wrestler gears up for a bout as his family races to attend and, in a completely separate absurdist fantasy, a man-child wakes inside a white cube and finds he has no means of escape but there are a large number of cherubs' penis buttons dotted around the room that, when pushed, dispense food and other random objects.....really.

★★★☆☆ for the wrestler story

★★★★☆ for the absurd comedy

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Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009)

When its master dies, leaving it to run free, a Japanese Akita called Hachi takes up residence at a train station, where everyone assumes it is showing extreme loyalty to its deceased master, but it's easy to cynically flip this otherwise pleasant story - based on the 1920s real-life dog, Hachiko - into a tale of animal neglect, seeing the dog's choice to squat at the station as the result of its having been turfed out by uncaring family, made to sit through rain, hail, or shine in the only place anybody will feed and pet him...sorry.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween II (2009)

I thought director Rob Zombie got away with his first Halloween remake, taking viewers inside the head of masked crazy Michael Myers and giving the killer a sympathetic backstory and rationale for his killing in his adult life, but this 2009 sequel confirms the director is trying too hard with his vision for the slasher series - in every scene, Zombie distracts with his communications direct to viewer that what he is doing is arthouse: messages are graffitied on every wall and unlikely posters appear in every room pronouncing cultural subversiveness (a victim of a serial killer has a poster celebrating Charles Manson on her bedroom wall, really?), and even Weird Al Yankovich turns up as Zombie attempts to culturally contextualise what is better suited as a cartoony slasher for teens...and the results are a ridiculous mess: viewers share in the killer's delusory thoughts and are privy to manifestations of his madness in the form of mother, dressed like Legolas, leading a white horse on their journey back to Haddonfield, all the while as a separate movie, a misguided comedy, is spliced in here and there featuring Malcolm McDowell's Doctor Loomis as a whiny fame-whore, suddenly not the Doctor Loomis of previous iterations, in a storyline unrelated to the whole nor relevant to the greater series.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) (2009)

I came very late to these adaptations of the Stieg Larsson books - was I on another planet? - but have, in 2021,  finally watched the Swedish movie series and can say they are gripping, often brutal action mysteries, this first one introducing Noomi Rapace as the kickass title heroine who investigates a 40-year-old murder mystery, one of those plots that require a fair suspension of your disbelief as details from all those decades ago present themselves to the hacker-slash-investigator impossibly conveniently, untouched and intact in the modern day.

★★★★☆

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The Blind Side (2009)

In this adaptation of Michael (Moneyball, The Big Short) Lewis' based-on-fact book, a woman (Sandra Bullock) takes in a homeless student, real-life Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), and helps him carve out an education and a future in sport, but while the first half pulls at heartstrings with its Christian saviour story and the second half occasionally amuses with its cameo-laden comedic look at the NFL college draft, what you realise by the end is that Oher himself is missing - a physical presence in the film but little more than a mere shape, a centrepiece for a whole lot of other people's busy-ness and noise around the table.

★★☆☆☆

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Bruno (2009)

Someone needs to audit this documentary-style comedy from Sacha Baron Cohen to determine how many of its players — its US police officers and focus group participants and army sergeants and gay conversion therapists and hotel concierges and aspiring baby model moms — are plants in on the joke and how many are actually American citizens caught up in Cohen's audacious web, because surely Cohen would have been killed were everyone here exactly who they are purported to be — Americans having both their greatest quality — their polite and gracious accommodation of others — and their worst quality - their ugly extreme right-wing conservatism — thrust back in their faces by Cohen's  outrageous persona, the wrong-on-so-many-levels but hilarious follow-up to Borat, Bruno the fame-hungry homosexual Austrian!

★★★★☆

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The Final Destination (2009)

The inventive Final Destination series continues with this fourth movie, a especially breezy 84-minutes that feels hastily cobbled together, in which a group, this time a particularly wooden bunch of teens, cheat Death by foreseeing and escaping a freak accident, this time involving racecars at a speedway, only for Death to turn up again - and again - determined to settle the score; like always, Death takes the form of grisly Rube Goldberg machines ending in eye trauma, decapitation and the like and a few of these machines are so effective they could be used in a government campaign for workplace safety, but there is also a good number of other scenes in this particular FD instalment that are just lazily conceived moments of bloodsplatter.

★★☆☆☆

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Triangle (2009)

Six pretty young things aboard a capsized yacht believe themselves rescued when a cruise ship passes by, but on board the ship, in the faded opulence of echoey, abandoned hotel-like interiors, the group discovers creepy things like, impossibly, signs they've been on the ship before and, creepily, messages scrawled in blood, and, optimistically (for the writers), some allusions to another more memorable horror movie - things that don't really make sense, but to the movie's credit, it powers unashamedly on and on no matter how ridiculous things become, and you will keep watching if only to see how far it is willing to go with its Lost island premise.

★★☆☆☆

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It's Complicated (2009)

Some of Nancy Meyer's movies are so clean, so sanitised, with sets so "interior-designed" they feel like laundry detergeant commercials, but she keeps things more down-to-earth and more relatable in this romantic comedy, another movie in which she squarely targets a more mature generation of female movie-goer, this time telling the story about a woman (Meryl Streep) who embarks upon an affair with her married ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) while keeping up appearances with her adult children and with the architect (Steve Martin) renovating her house.

★★★★☆

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Friday the 13th (2009)

The first twenty-three minutes, a lead-up to the titlecard and effectively a mini-movie that shows just how short and efficient these Friday the 13th episodes could actually be, may be too much for some viewers - it is a nasty, distressing sequence - but for the gluttons for (torture porn) punishment who resist the urge to switch off, the next 70 minutes prove to be the same old 80s business enlivened by naughties' production values, with better actors and a Jason Voorhees who is more gigantic than ever but also more nimble - we never see, but scene-to-scene this lumbering hockey-mask-wearing mute exhibits a wuxia lightness-on-his-feet that sees him cutting effortlessly and silently across vast expanses of woods, moving from underground tunnels to Camp Crystal Lake jetties to rooftops and toolsheds in split seconds-flat to dispatch more bong-smoking, copulating teenage prey.

★★☆☆☆

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Harry Brown (2009)

When housing estate thugs murder his friend, former marine Harry Brown (played by Michael Caine), an elderly gent grown weary of the gangbangers' reign of terror and frustrated by the ineffectual response of police, takes the law into his own hands and his campaign of retribution makes this a captivating revenge thriller, like Get Carter on a pension, with harrowing scenes of drug den depravity and wanton youth violence helping to keep audiences angry and sympathetic to Harry Brown's vigilantism.

★★★☆☆

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Whiteout (2009)

In an Antarctic research station beset by a killer, one character says of the Aurora Australis, "It's a helluva show," and the line comes right at the point viewers' can unequivocally agree the same cannot be said of this thriller full of performances icier and more remote than its polar setting. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Buffy was interesting because her demon-slaying was analogous to the trials and tribulations of high school - and she lost more sleep over the latter than the former - but this horror comedy, obviously geared at Buffy audiences with its combination of demon-slaying, indie rock soundtrack, and high school drama, is a less sensible, less compelling concoction about two female students: one who has meaningful, consensual sex with her boyfriend, and one who honeytraps horny males and feeds on their dead bodies; the fact the latter, played by Megan Fox, was kidnapped and slaughtered by a four-strong gang of males is treated as a trivial detail - the important thing, apparently, is there is a right way to use your body, and Jennifer is an evil slut who deserves death, ok?

★☆☆☆☆

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Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

The horribly wronged Count of Monte Cristo has you on side all the way through his revenge plot in Dumas' thousand-odd pages, but after his wife and child are brutally killed by home invaders in this film's opening scenes, Gerard Butler's horribly wronged Law Abiding Citizen only momentarily has your sympathy when suddenly the movie pulls the revenge-thriller rug out from under you and makes him the Batman technology-enhanced, street-smart Jason Bournish villain of the film and it is up to Jamie Foxx's prosecutor Nick Rice to stop him enacting his cold dish of extremely gruesome revenge on everyone that failed him.

★★☆☆☆

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The Secret In Their Eyes (El Secreto De Sus Ojos) (2009)

In this engrossing romantic mystery thriller from Argentina, a criminal investigator in retirement played by the captivating Ricardo Darin looks back upon a murder case for inspiration for a novel and as the movie switches backwards and forwards between the brutal events of the past and his and his colleagues' memories of them, questions are raised about seizing life, living with grief, and seeking justice and revenge.

★★★★☆

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Case 39 (2009)

A bit like The Bad Seed crossed with The Omen only incredibly stupid, Case 39 stars Renee Zellweger as a child welfare worker who comes very quickly to the conclusion that the child murderers and abusers she encounters over the course of her job have good reason for wanting to stuff their devil's spawn into their gas ovens, and so she starts wanting to do the same.

★☆☆☆☆

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Terminator Salvation (2009)

Unwisely, the Terminator series takes us for the first time to a time after the apocalyptic Judgement Day (until now, just an occasionally glimpsed bleak potential future our heroes have been working hard to avoid) and suddenly we are learning more than we ever cared to know about John Connor's dreary war against the machines - it is more Transformers with Mad Max stylings than Terminator - and muddying the Terminator formula even more than this is a lead Wolverine character whose uninteresting journey into the future delays the movie we actually wanted to watch which starts twenty minutes before the end.

★★☆☆☆

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The Ugly Truth (2009)

Katherine Heigl is a morning news show producer with integrity but low ratings and Gerard Butler is a crude, politically incorrect sharer of 'hard truths' who attracts huge numbers of viewers (basically he says that women are to blame for their own lovelessness; that they need to try harder to appeal to men), and of course these two opposites butt heads but pretty soon he's got her trying harder to appeal to men, having public orgasms, becoming willing to be scrutinized and groped and dressed in lingerie that men want to put in their mouths and swearing like a trooper, so a romance becomes possible between the two.

★☆☆☆☆

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