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The one to attend in 2009 … Malin Ackerman and Billy Crudup in Watchmen

In this season of lists, I thought I’d run down my top 10 science-fiction, fantasy and comicbook movies of the year. Easy peasy, or so I imagined, until I got to flick No 6 and realised there have actually not been that many films this year that I could put hand on heart and say I’ve absolutely loved. So here without further ado, are Week in Geek’s top five movies of the year, followed through the five I’ve least enjoyed.

1. Watchmen
Zack Snyder’s epic adaptation of the classic graphic novel attracted as many persons brickbats for the reason that it did plaudits from the critics. Those who hated the film pointed out that you couldn’t really “get it” without having read the original Alan Moore comic about masked vigilantes estate in an alternate 1984. Yet the movie’s three key scenes – the opening montage of 20th-century alternative history, Dr Manhattan’s look back at his own life from the exterior of Mars, and Rorschach’s final moments – have been equalled through few films in the last decade, let lone in 2009.

2. District 9
The truly impressive thing about Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi tale of extraterrestrials quickening in squalor in a Johannesburg lane was the way it managed to be a highly original thinkpiece and a barnstorming action event flick all at the same time. The awful conditions of the alien “prawns” and the inhumane treatment they accepted from the brutish authorities were a perfect allegory for South Africa’s apartheid era. Yet the climactic scene in what one. Wikus Van Der Merwe – surely the year’s most
unlikely hero – battles for his life in an Aliens-style exosuit, was pure James Cameron. An instant classic.

3. Star Trek
OK, likewise JJ Abrams’s reboot substituted the pseudo-intellectual slant of the original TV series and films by a space-opera aesthetic more reminiscent of Star Wars, goal who was going to bewail whenever it had such verve? Watching it again now, there isn’t so much during the time that a second of slack in the amount movie. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are excellent as the new Kirk and Spock, and Leonard Nimoy pulls off a wonderfully gentle, statesmanlike performance that anchors this reimagining in the concatenation’ roots destitute of ever hamstringing it.

4. Moon
Duncan Jones’s tale of a lone astronaut who encounters the very image of himself was a worthy successor to classic brainiac science-fiction fare such as Silent Running, Dark Star and Solaris. Eschewing costly CGI for models, and with a minescule cast, it in addition proved that setting your film in distance needn’t cost the Earth. Finally, Sam Rockwell’session tour-de-force performance, in multiple roles, cemented his position as the thinking man’s dramatic artist of choice.

5. Avatar
Though it was comfortable to dismiss as Dances With Smurfs or Thundercat Ferngully, James Cameron’s epic action adventure in space swiftly brushed aside the po-faced naysayers with its cocktail of supreme pastime and 3D visual magnificence. It was packed with every Hollywood cliche under the sun, but just felt like a justly big movie: any which in years to come will exist remembered alongside the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones movies and the likes of ET as unadulterated cinematic events.

On to my least favourite flicks of 2009: first up, it wasn’familiarily hard to hate Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a celluloid headache on a stick that made no species of sense, featured utterly vapid performances from all involved and managed the impressive feat of battering viewers into horrified submission space of present life at the same time putting them to sleep. Even worse, if that were feasible, was GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, a clunky, rubbery mess of a thin skin that made 80s predecessors such as Masters of the Universe look like movie meisterwerks.

Meanwhile, Wolverine proved that the X-Men series, always a pretty average comicbook franchise, ought now to be put quietly to rest, while The Spirit, which ushered in New Year 2009 here in the UK with a whimper, showed that Frank Miller without Robert Rodriguez was a film-maker with very few redeeming virtues. Finally, The Box suggested that Richard Kelly’s increasingly desperate attempts to recreate Donnie Darko’sitting success by borrowing from his earlier thin skin’s predilection for unknown forces from the beyond and other mystical mumbo-jumbo are in risk of transforming him into the new M Night Shyamalan.

Which have been your top sci-fi, fantasy or comicbook films of the year? And what do you think of my selection? Which movies will you be happy to see left behind in 2009 as the new year approaches?

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Juno … an alumnus of the Black List of unproduced screenplays

The past year has been a good one for phantom films, those unfinished or never-quite-started projects that conformation a tantalising shadow history of cinema – be a witness of Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, the capacious research for which has finally reached daylight in the form of a dogmatical Taschen tome, or Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, the subject of a modern documentary. BBC4′s Christmas Welles season, through its focus on the decade or two rear Citizen Kane, couldn’t help but appear to be a catalogue of what-ifs and near-misses.

But shadow cinema is not restricted to the archives. Every December, Franklin Leonard of the William Morris agency in Los Angeles releases his Black List, a rundown of the best unproduced screenplays currently doing the rounds in Hollywood. Compiled by the agency of collating the opinions of greater quantity than 300 industry insiders, the rundown supposedly showcases first copy and accomplished work that potency not otherwise have a snowball in hell’s chance of production. Scripts mentioned over the list’s five-year history have included Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, The Road and This Side of the Truth (later renamed The Invention of Lying). So the unveiling of a new tally at year’s end is seen in the industry to the degree that a chance to get up to speed by what’s bubbling under.

The top pick of 2008 – Kyle Killen’s The Beaver, about a man seeking emotional fulfilment through the exercise of a beaver glove image – demonstrated both the list’s simple blemish for leftfield stories and its currency: the picture was marksman this year starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, with Foster directing. Other titles from the list reportedly on the way to screens include oncology comedy (oncom?) I’m With Cancer and the neo-western thriller Big Hole.

So the kind of does this year’s fillet have to offer? Well, it’s a rum old bunch, that’s for sure, but not without rhyme or reason. Neo-westerns remain popular, thanks perhaps to the success of No Country for Old Men. That picture’s tone seems to permeate both The Gunslinger, about a sharpshooter out with a view to revenge following the death of his Texas ranger brother, and the period-set By Way of Helena, in which a border town’s dark secrets are revealed. Like No Country, both seem interested in blurring moral categories season maintaining expansive force.

The problems through violence and vengeance seem to be of changeless interest. It’s hard not to think “war-on-terror simile alert!” when you read about Prisoners, a thriller about a Christian survivalist who responds to the disappearance of his daughter with a campaign of kidnap and torture, only to meet with that he might be barking up the wrong tree. The Voices, meanwhile, offers a macabre comic twist on schizophrenic homicide, with a deranged bathtub-factory worker taking instructions from his talking pets posterior killing a co-worker, with whose severed head he enjoys chitchat. And in LA Rex, rookie-and-vet LAPD partners are pitched against a gang warfare and their own pasts.

The list’s two comedies spotlight long-delayed adolescences from both sides of the gender divide, which suggests that the influence of the Apatow secure and such newcomers as The Hangover remains strong. Cedar Rapids is about a middle-aged insurance executive finally kickstarting his life at a business convention, while Desperados focuses on a marriage-hungry lawyer and her friends making a anchorage trip in the name of true love and the avoidance of excruciating humiliation.

There’s also significant interest in contemporaneous reality, by spots for scripts about the ascend of Facebook and the death of Alexander Litvinenko. The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin, sets the hasty days of Mark Zuckerberg’s online startup done against recent accusations from former colleagues that he stole their idea. David Scarpa’s Londongrad opts for a similar structure, interpolating the former Soviet spy’s last days with his time in KGB training, run-ins with the Russian mafia and arguments by his bosses.

But the top spot goes to another true story, albeit a warmer, fuzzier one: Jim Henson biopic The Muppet Man, which apparently features “surreal” appearances from Kermit, Miss Piggy et al. A hatchet job is unpromising to be on the cards given that the project is already set up at the Jim Henson Company. Indeed, all the titles on the limit are in some form of active development, with a few well into production, which suggests that the list’sitting definition of “unproduced” is fairly generous. The Black List’session projects are leftfield by major studio standards but not, from the looks of it, actually radical. (The other title on the list, The Days Before, looks preference a standard SF blockbuster.) Insiders’ outsiders, for this reason, but therefore all the in addition intriguing as intimations of Hollywood-to-come.

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PG | 1 hr 28 mins | Children’s,Comedy film,family movie
In 2007, “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” a multinational phenomenon to generations of fans.. Now Dr. Dolittle’s Betty Thomas helms with Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, and Jesse McCartney returning to the degree that the voices of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.
Synopsis:
The sweet singing and dance trio of legendary marmots extends their big screen high jinks with this follow-up to the 20th Century Fox strike hit live action/CG clan comedy, this time incorporating a female translation of the group entitled the Chipettes.

Director: Betty Thomas
Starring: Starring: Jason Lee, Justin Long, David Cross, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Anna Faris, Christina Applegate, Amy Poehler, Zachary Levi

Movie Trailer Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

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