There’s good news and there’s bad news.
The good news is that Hollywood made money hand over-fist-this year.
The bad news is that while moviegoers indeed came out in droves to fork over their money, plenty of what they saw was dreadful. Miss March. I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. I Love You Beth Cooper. Obsessed. Last House On The Left. If you sat through any of those, you know what we’re talking about.
The North American box-office gross for 2009 will probably end up somewhere around $10.5 billion — or a billion more than last year. That’s enough to surpass the box-office figures for 2007, a record earnings year.
But the movies all this money comes from? Leading the pack is Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, which is a sequel, and right after that is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Which, we point out, is a sequel. And there’s more where those came from.
For people who aren’t males aged 15-25, some of the best movies of 2009 were documentaries. Big River Man, John Maringouin’s film about endurance swimmer Martin Strel and his journey down the Amazon, is completely weird and wonderful.
You could see Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal’s haunting film about lightning, Act Of God, or Collapse, a superb film about oil and the end of the world as we know it.
Then there’s The Cove, a thriller about dolphin killings, and several more worth seeing — Saving Luna, Soul Power, The Queen and I, The Art Star and The Sudanese Twins, Earth, Inside Hana’s Suitcase, Prom Night In Mississippi and It Might Get Loud.
For this year, your choices at the movies were limited to small storytelling and supersized special effects. What happens next probably depends a lot upon what Avatar does at the box office. We’ll keep you posted.
LIZ’S TOP 10 MOVIES
1. A Single Man
2. The Hurt Locker
3. Hunger
4. Crazy Heart
5. Food, Inc.
6. Gomorrah
7. The Hangover
8. Precious
9. The White Ribbon
10. Sin Nombre
