It’s a bit past 2009, but not too late for a retrospective on the best movies I saw that year (most of which were foreign). Without further ado:

1. Yang Yang – 5 stars

   This Taiwanese film is the second by virtuoso director and Ang Lee protégé Cheng Yu-Chieh, and is just about perfect. It is a gorgeous and subtle film—far and away the best movie I saw in 2009.

2. Heaven’s Heart – 5 stars

   This was a Swedish movie actually made in 2008 that I saw in SFIFF 2009, and is drama at its finest. Intense and brilliant.

3. His Wedding – 5 stars

   This radiant Korean short film made the best use of split screen I’ve ever seen and was poignant without descending into the melodrama so much of Korean cinema is prone to. I would love to see a feature-length project from this director.

4. Star Trek – 5 stars

   This is the only Hollywood movie to make it onto my list. J.J. Abrams’ adaptation of the classic series is my favorite Star Trek movie of all time (yes, even better than the previous undisputed champion, The Wrath of Khan).

5. All Around Us – 4 stars

   This one is from Japan, and was the clear standout of SFIAAFF 2009. It was distinguished by its smart script and terrific acting. Highly recommended.

Honorable mentions:

• Can Go Through Skin – 4 stars

  This Dutch movie is the art film, done right. Very high production value and an experimental but superbly effective sound design are the hallmarks of this film. Very highly recommended.

• Claustrophobia – 4 stars

  This movie, hailing from Hong Kong, was made by a screenwriter-turned-director, and it shows. The script is terrific. Make sure to see this one if you can.

What were some of your favorites?

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Check out the original video page to see it in HD, which I highly recommend. Just stunning. Unbelievably, it’s almost entirely CG.

I’ve just done something most of my friends will find shocking. I’ve just cancelled my mobile phone service with AT&T and switched to another carrier. More importantly, I’ve switched away from the iPhone. Really. And I’m sleeping better for it.

This is about the point when my iPhone-owning friends look at me like I’ve been hitting the egg nog a bit too hard. Upon hearing this story, one of them followed the look up with: “You’d have to pry my iPhone out of my cold, dead hands.” Not so long ago, I might have agreed with her. So what changed my mind?

One thing I have to point out is that I have the iPhone 2G, which I ordered online the very first day they became available some 2 1/2 years ago. (Personally, I like the way they look in comparison to the 3G models.) Having a general-purpose pocket computer improved my daily life in a thousand different ways, and I soon came to rely on it to function.

Now, I live in San Francisco, which along with New York City is one of the two most iPhone-heavy cities in the country—it seems like everyone and their dog has one here in SF. What this means is that AT&T’s at-best-lackluster service is truly awful here. There are entire swathes of the city where I get little or no service. In the Mission, one of the only flat neighborhoods in SF, I could not use my phone indoors. I had to stand out on my driveway to get a signal, and even then I had a less than 50% chance of connecting a call or keeping it up on a weekend. The EDGE network, there and in the rest of the city, was nothing short of unusable. I can’t count the number of times I stood at a bus stop trying futilely to load the pure-text website that would tell me when the next notoriously slow bus would arrive, only to see the damn bus beat the iPhone. It became painfully obvious that I was paying $80 a month for a data plan I couldn’t use at all. Correction: $80 a month for nothing.

In fact, it became painfully obvious that what I had wasn’t an iPhone, but an iPod Touch with a camera. So for the past few months, during which time AT&T’s service has been growing steadily worse—you’d think that instead of spending however many millions of dollars on those ridiculous Luke Wilson commercials, they’d, I don’t know, put a few more fucking towers in SF or NYC—I’d seriously been considering divorcing AT&T and finding someone who cared about me. Or at least didn’t piss me off daily.

The last straw came last weekend, when AT&T tried to quietly stop selling iPhones in NYC. It seemed clear then, if it hadn’t before, that things will only get worse before they get better. If they ever do—it’s arguable that they’ll never get better for the 2G network. The very next day, I stopped by my local Best Buy and spent $50 for a Boost Mobile phone. 10¢ a minute to talk, 10¢ per text message, pay as you go. It’ll pay for itself within a month. Less, even.

Even though it’s a cheap piece of plastic, and I have to put numbers into the address book manually (how quaint!), I can actually make (and receive) calls on it.

Have a happy new year, everyone. I know my AT&T-free one will be.