(Diane Krueger in Inglourious Basterds.)

Punching Hippies

2009 was a good year for thought-provoking and invigorating movies. Who can forget the Comedian punching hippies in Watchmen, and Rorschach decrying stay-within-the-lines liberal sensibilities from a darker perspective. There was Inglourious Basterds, Avatar, A Serious Man, Public Enemies, Whip It, Extract, The Hangover and (500) Days of Summer. Star Trek captured the hopeful, confident, smart, scientific* and youthful zeitgest of the first of the Obama years, with young pundits like Jonathan Cohn, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias coming to the fore, and liberals like Obama, Emanuel, Geithner and Orszag taking over the levers of government. Remember when Bones asked Chekov "How old are you?!?"

I didn't see Invictus, Bright Star, Where the Wild Things Are, the Hurt Locker, the Messenger, Antichrist, Precious, An Education, Men Who Stare At Goats, or Up in the Air so obviously I can't judge those but undeniably 2009 was a banner year for Billy Crudup (Watchmen, Public Enemies), Giovanni Ribisi (Avatar, Public Enemies), Stephen Lang (Avatar, Public Enemies) and Kristen Wiig (Extract, Whip It).

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*Some may argue technocratic would be a better word than scientific, but I view technocratic as being more of a pejorative. (Dr. Manhattan in the Watchmen was technocratic, that is, doing Nixon's bidding in Vietnam without considering whether or not it was a just war.) Science tries to put political - more specifically, partisan - concerns aside. The glibertarians at Hit & Run wonder "why are so many sci-fi films left-wing?" The answer is that objective science is more of a priority on the left. On the rightwing science's findings and priorities are often overridden in the interests of profits and religious ideology or twisted to further rightwing goals. On the undemocratic left, like Stalinist Russia, science can be subsumed under ideology also obviously. As Wikipedia says:

Although the sciences were less rigorously censored than other fields such as art, there were several examples of suppression of ideas. In the most notorious, the Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko refused to accept the chromosome theory of heredity usually accepted by modern genetics. Claiming his theories corresponded to Marxism, he managed to talk Joseph Stalin in 1948 into banning population genetics and several other related fields of biological research; this decision was not reverted up to the 1960s.