The year big ideas met big box office

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A half-dozen films released in 2009 entered the list of the Top 50 box-office movies of all time. Those were Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; Ice-Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs; Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen; 2012; Up; and Twilight Saga: New Moon. That doesn't include Avatar, which was released last week and appears already on its way to setting new box-office records.

That would seem to be good news for movies as a business, as Hollywood studios work to perfect the blockbuster formula. A majority of those films were sequels. One of those films, Up, is almost universally regarded as an artistic triumph. And all of them speak to the viability of movies as a cultural force and industry.

On the other hand, this past year made it clear that what used to be called "cinema," as a collective artistic experience of filmgoing, is either an anachronism or a specialized interest along the lines of poetry readings or philately. This is the first year in memory that two films that ended up on several critics' Top 10 lists - Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman and Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum - weren't even released in commercial theatres in English Canada.

Cinephilia is flourishing, though, thanks to DVDs and especially the Internet. The opportunities for experiencing the history of film have never been better. And yet, while much has been gained, something has been lost. Once, a reasonably culturally literate person would know Federico Fellini, whose challenging, subtitled movies were hits in the early sixties. Now, we get our Fellini predigested and dumbed-down as a tarted-up Christmas movie, Nine.

The result is that we have two different scales for measuring the importance of any movie: artistic quality, which has become something of a private literary pleasure; and the real cultural impact, which is inevitably tied to box-office success. The latter is the measurement generally used by critics, who parse the plots of films to find the post-Obama themes of collective responsibility and the psychic cost of war and economic crisis.

Here are my Top 5 "important" films of the year - those that had both a good-sized topicality and a sizable commercial impact.

1. Avatar. Though it has been in theatres less than a week, James Cameron's Avatar is the most important movie of the year, because it's a mass entertainment that makes sometimes abstract social issues - the war in Iraq, the environment, the destruction of aboriginal peoples - immediate and compelling. With its breakthrough 3-D technology, it also will change the way we watch movies, and emphasize the immersive experience of public cinema.

2. Up in the Air. One of the year's few successful grown-up films, Jason Reitman's corporate satire addresses the grief and anger over lives damaged by the worst economic recession in decades. It's a repudiation of the me-first attitude of the George W. Bush years, created by a card-carrying political libertarian, writer and director.

3. Up. Topically, it became the template for Balloon Boy, the media hoax of the year, and is emblematic of the disease of fame. It's also a nostalgia-filled celebration of film culture, quoting silent movies, The Wizard of Oz, even Werner Herzog. It's a remarkable corporate model for how the popular and intelligent can co-exist, a phenomenon for which Pixar even has a word: "simplexity."

4. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. An up-from-the-bottom cultural phenomenon, this small movie about an obese, illiterate black teenager abused by her mother and twice impregnated by her father is a study in misery so thorough that it's hard to imagine an audience for it. Yet the push by producers Oprah and Tyler Perry to bring it into the mainstream, and its audience awards at the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, indicate a desire for an empathetic reaching out that was missing from American culture during the Bush years. The character of Precious, by every measure, is a loser; and the movie, in its raw, ungainly way, asks what that social category means.

5. Inglourious Basterds. This was the headline in The Village Voice: Makes Holocaust Revisionism Fun. Quentin Tarantino's skillful, amoral movie has Jews terrorizing Nazis; a brutal SS officer (Christoph Waltz) is its most appealing character. A liberal film without liberal pieties, Inglourious Basterds is a juvenile, intellectual shocker, and an action film that's one big, long talking point.