The ’09 movies that stood out

If you close your eyes, you can probably conjure them up even now though it’s been days or weeks or even months since you’ve seen them; images swimming out of the deep memory pool created by those whose Oscar dreams will be dashed or fulfilled tonight. For whatever else the films of 2009 tell us about the state of the union in Hollywood, this group is a brilliant reminder that at its essence, film is made powerful, made real, made unreal, by the images on screen.

We sometimes forget that the pictures tell their own story, tales of the remarkable if often fraught collaborations required to create a single frame; a delicate dance among cinematography, lighting, set decoration, production design, location, script, score, costumes, makeup, editing, effects special and otherwise, and of course those who take most of the bows -- the directors and actors.

Let us consider a few of the considered, the eclectic, ingenious, riveting, sobering, the completely fanciful and the frighteningly real that make up the look of Oscar this season. Whether their budgets were massive or minuscule, visually they pulled off the impossible -- to be not just memorable but worth remembering. These are the ones that stay with me, a part of the permanent collection.

The fox was indeed fantastic in Wes Anderson’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” a rich cast of animals infused with a Norman Rockwell sensibility that turned the film into a fur-and-feathered masterpiece of Americana. There were the button-eyed creatures of “Coraline,” with its circus upstairs and the garden out back that blooms into life only on certain occasions, an unsettling, unearthly delight.

From the wonderfully fractured mind of Quentin Tarantino came “Inglourious Basterds,” which reimagined World War II’s European theater of operations as a French burlesque. Through another glass darkly came Terry Gilliam’s “ The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” which reimagined life as an exotic, multidimensional gypsy caravan driven by the devil.

Tom Ford’s glossy “A Single Man” with its GQ snapshot of a damaged life stood in contrast to the Harlem grit and grim of “Precious,” with a damaged life of a very different sort -- while in one the fantasy emerged in black and white, color drenched the imaginary in the other; pain eloquently evoked in the pristine in one, and in the refuse and detritus of the other.

There was the haunting monastic beauty of “A Prophet,” a poetic stream of light and dark, peace and chaos, where murder’s death throes are bloody and not easy in coming. Violence moves through a different prism in “The Hurt Locker,” in the sandstorm of blasts that director Kathryn Bigelow wraps around her bomb defusing team, with desert heat and Iraqi rage rising off the screen in clouds.

There was Michael Haneke’s chilling Puritanism of “The White Ribbon” with children whose eyes were even more frightening than those in “Coraline,” the palette of black and white creating its portraiture of moral decay in exquisite detail.

We were invaded by the towering Prawn race of “District 9” with its space ship hovering like a mush- room cloud over Johannesburg and its ghetto for the discarded alien nation a masterwork constructed from scraps of cardboard, plywood and tin.

The balloons in “Up” lifted a house and hearts, and then dropped us into a South American back country paradise with birds and beasts awash in such extraordinary color we returned to a world outside pale in comparison. Meanwhile, “Up in the Air” captured the patchwork quilt of our countryside and cities from 40,000 feet above, powerfully underscoring the reality that our lives are lived more on the grid than off.

“Young Victoria” opened up the Victorian era with both beauty and restraint, while “An Education” took us to ‘60s London with beautiful precision of a different sort. Both created such a sense of time and place, it was if we were there.

And of course there was the Na’vi blue universe of “Avatar,” a visual feat that truly took us to a world we couldn’t imagine until someone else created it for us. Thank you for that, James Cameron.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com