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2009 Kaedrin Movie Awards: Arbitrary Awards
So we're finished with the formal awards, but there are always some other awards that I don't really bother to come up with other nominees for... and there are some movies that have something so uncommon that it's worth bringing up. Interestingly, some of these awards have actually become a yearly thing, despite never really being conceived as such. In any case, here they are:

• The "You know what happens when a toad gets struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else" Award for Worst Dialogue: Avatar. This is quite an accomplishment, though Cameron is certainly no Shyamalan (last year's "winner" of this award). I wish I had a copy of the shooting script so that I could pick out the exact lines, but a big part of bad dialogue is also bad delivery, which isn't especially in short supply here either.
• The Proximity to Jason Vorhees Award for Heroic Stupidity: Friday the 13th. This seems like a no brainer, but this probably could have been a real category if I really wanted to do that. But in the end, it's hard not to give the award its own namesake, right?
• The Divorced Man's Fantasy Award: Taken. There has to be thousands of divorced guys who list this as their favorite movie, right?
• The Blatant Disregard to History Award: Inglourious Basterds. But in a good way (which is actually a pretty impressive feat all by itself)!
• The Blatant Disregard to Physics Award: Star Trek. Red matter? Really? It's not so much that this was the worst movie in this category as that I'm most disappointed by Trek (a movie I still love and which will make my top 10).
• Best Incongruous Action Sequence: The sniper battle in The Hurt Locker. This is the best sequence in the movie, which is weird because it's ostensibly a movie about a bomb disposal squad (those sequences are good too, but they're not as good as this one).
• The "I Can't Believe They Went There" Award for Dumbest Plot Twist: Knowing. This is one of those movies where you guess the ending long before hand but dismiss it because it's so stupid, only to find that it actually was the ending. Touché.
• The Rod Serling Memorial Award: The Box. The movie plays like a feature length episode of The Twilight Zone. It attempts to explain too much towards the end, but is otherwise a lot better than the abysmal reviews its garnered...
• Best Return To Their Roots: Sam Raimi and Drag Me to Hell. I'm not as in love with this movie as a lot of old-time Raimi fans, but it is very nice to see him back in the genre (and he did produce one of the best horror movies of the year).

As with last year, no real runaway movies taking a lot of awards. Indeed, Inglourious Basterds is the only movie to get more than 1 award (Avatar got 3, but two of those were negative awards... similarly, Star Trek got 1 positive and 1 negative)... guess what's going to be near the top of the top 10? Speaking of which, it might be a couple weeks before that list gets posted. Still want to check out a couple of movies before nailing it down.

This post is part of the Kaedrin Weblog. It's been categorized under 2009 Movie Awards , Movies and was originally published in January 2010.

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I've managed to make a clean sweep. I haven't seen any of the movies that you've given awards to for 2009.

Well, several of them are pretty obscure (which is kinda the point of the awards - to shed some light on some underrated stuff), but, well, some are very much not obscure:p Also, I expect that a lot of people don't see as many movies in the theater as me, and some of this stuff ain't available yet, so there's that.

Out of curiosity, what were your favorite movies of the year?

One of the problems I run into is that I don't see things in theaters that much, and when I watch DVDs, they're from all over the place in terms of time periods.

Definitely agree with you about Avatar. Pretty crap, but still crap. What else did I see?
I saw the original version (I think it's French, maybe?) of "The Strangers". I hated it. At the end, I was just like "Wait... what? Are you fucking kidding me? *That's* the ending? Wow. What bullshit."
Saw District 9 a couple of times. I know it's not perfect, but I loved it. I still think it's a real treat. Despite my feelings about QT, "Basterds" was a real treat. Very very well done. Saw "Rec", and loved it, too. The "explanation" that pops up near the end is ridiculous, but I just ignored it as being the ravings of some twisted crazy person, and not the actual canon explanation. Saw "9" (the animated one), and was very underwhelmed. It wasn't as stupid as "Avatar", but that's a very low bar. Oh, I remember--"The Invention of Lying" was fun. I saw that, and liked it. I wish I could remember now what else I'd seen.

Mark, I didn't mean to imply your movies are obscure at all. Like Roy, I get most everything on DVD. I did want to see Drag Me to Hell, Julie and Julia and Star Trek in the theater this year. I just never made it.

My favorite movies that I saw this year were Let the Right One In (which is at least only a bout a year old) and MirrorMask, which is at least 10-15 years old.

I haven't seen the French version of The Strangers, but it's on my netflix queue somewhere. Ditto for [rec] (and I haven't seen the American version of that one either. I kinda dismissed The Invention of Lying when it came out, but I keep hearing good things about it... it seems like an underrated film...

I try to mix it up when I'm Netflixing stuff, but yeah, I guess I do see a lot of stuff in theaters too. The three movies I have at my house now are The Haunting (60s version), Nightmare on Elm Street 4 (80s), and Away We Go (2009 film that I'm not expecting to love but which has an off chance). And my queue is filled with entirely too much stuff (well over 250 movies in there)

Let the Right One In was one of my top movies of 2008. I've never seen MirrorMask, but that's another one that just recently came on my radar. I'd never heard of it until a few months ago, but it sounds interesting...

Let me know what you think of Rec when/if you see it. I think you might enjoy it, but I suspect that you'll also find that the ending "explanation" ridiculous. Still, it builds up well, and keeps ratcheting the tension up. The Strangers actively pissed me off. It's like... there's some potential there, but it asked for too much suspension of disbelief from me, and the pay-off is just so very stupid.

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