So far posters have been placing critics' top ten lists individually in the Oscars section but I thought it would be better to have a single thread to contain them rather than keep starting new ones. So place any film critics' top ten lists you come across here.
I will start with...
Thelma Adams- US
1) Milk 2) Slumdog Millionaire 3) Tropic Thunder 4) Happy-Go-Lucky 5) Frozen River 6) Rachel Getting Married 7) Burn After Reading 8) A Christmas Tale 9) The Duchess 10) Revolutionary Road
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1. Milk 2. Slumdog Millionaire 3. The Dark Knight 4. Frost/Nixon 5. WALL-E 6. Revolutionary Road 7. The Visitor 8. Doubt 9. Rachel Getting Married 10. Man on Wire
Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Here is Roger Ebert's list of his top 20 films of 2008:
Ballast The Band’s Visit Che Chop Shop The Dark Knight Doubt The Fall Frost/Nixon Frozen Friver Happy-Go-Lucky Iron Man Milk Rachel Getting Married The Reader Revolutionary Road Shotgun Stories Slumdog Millionaire Synecdoche, New York W. Wall-E
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1. The Wrestler 2. The Dark Knight 3. Rachel Getting Married 4. WALL-E 5. Momma's Man 6. The Edge of Heaven 7. Burn After Reading 8. The Class 9. Milk 10. Tell No One
WORST: 1. Speed Racer 2. Star Wars: The Clone Wars 3. Patti Smith: Dream of Life 4. Australia 5. Hounddog
Lisa Schwarzbaum, EW
1. WALL-E 2. Milk 3. The Dark Knight 4. Waltz with Bashir 5. Gomorra 6. Wendy and Lucy 7. Trouble the Water 8. Happy-Go-Lucky 9. Man on Wire 10. Tropic Thunder
WORST: 1. The Women 2. Seven Pounds 3. 88 Minutes 4. Speed Racer 5. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
"A movie is not good because it arrives at conclusions you share, or bad because it does not. A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it: about the way it considers its subject matter, and about how its real subject may be quite different from the one it seems to provide." - Roger Ebert, from the introduction to "Awake in the Dark" (2006)
1. The Wrestler 2. The Dark Knight 3. Rachel Getting Married 4. WALL-E 5. Momma's Man 6. The Edge of Heaven 7. Burn After Reading 8. The Class 9. Milk 10. Tell No One
WORST: 1. Speed Racer 2. Star Wars: The Clone Wars 3. Patti Smith: Dream of Life 4. Australia 5. Hounddog
Lisa Schwarzbaum, EW
1. WALL-E 2. Milk 3. The Dark Knight 4. Waltz with Bashir 5. Gomorra 6. Wendy and Lucy 7. Trouble the Water 8. Happy-Go-Lucky 9. Man on Wire 10. Tropic Thunder
WORST: 1. The Women 2. Seven Pounds 3. 88 Minutes 4. Speed Racer 5. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Owen Gleiberman has been fairly critical of the Coen Bros. in the past and yet "Burn After Reading" makes his top ten list? Cuckoo!
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It’s the end of the year as we know it, which can only mean one thing: top 10 lists! Now, we can’t lie—we haven’t seen absolutely everything. (We’re still waiting on Gran Torino, Seven Pounds, and a few others. Also, we will never watch Wall-E. Never!) But we did see an awful (awful) lot in 2008. And here, in no particular order, are our very favorites.
The Visitor: We’ve had the weirdest crush on character actor Richard Jenkins for ages, and it was pure pleasure seeing him take on a leading role at last. In The Visitor, written and directed by Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent), Mr. Jenkins plays Walter, a quietly repressed professor who arrives at his New York pied-à-terre only to discover that a Syrian musician and a Senegalese street vendor have taken up residence. Instead of kicking them out, he befriends them. In fact, The Visitor is full of nice surprises, including a determined avoidance of pieties and lots of sneak-up-on-you emotion.
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired: We started off 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival (a.k.a. Bananastown) and caught this fascinating documentary at 8:30 a.m. after trudging through heavy snow (and we still loved it!). Directed by Marina Zenovich, the film concentrates on Mr. Polanski’s totally bat****-insane trial for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, his subsequent exile to Europe and the paparazzi circus that kept up every step of the way. There’s a ton of archival footage of the charismatic and enigmatic Mr. Polanski, plus tons of interviews with all the key players, including Mr. Polanski’s lawyer, the prosecutor and the young lady in question (now grown up with children).
The Dark Knight: Sure, this film got swirled up in a ton of hype even as it fell in the long shadow of Heath Ledger’s tragically early demise … and no, we don’t know what the deal is with Christian Bale’s lispy growl. But, leaving all that aside, this movie simply kicked ass. Dark, moody, twisting, turning, soaring, it was the most exciting moviegoing experience to be had in 2008. Yes, Heath Ledger made quite the terrifyingly awesome Joker, but not to be overlooked are Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine and—our personal favorite—Gary Oldman, taking subtle acting to new heights.
Revolutionary Road: When we first heard there was going to be a film adaptation of this, one of our very favorite books, written by the great Richard Yates in 1961, we were a little worried. Turned out there was no need. Sam Mendes, working from a faithfully adapted script by Justin Haythe, manages to capture all the angst, loneliness and longing from the original. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio turn in astonishing performances, and as bleak as the story of a marriage falling apart may be, Revolutionary Road is simply exhilarating.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Hands down, this is our favorite of Woody Allen’s latest works. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Allen muse Scarlet Johansson) are two American la-de-da friends of very different temperaments on holiday in Spain when they both fall for the same hot Spanish painter (Javier Bardem). Spain has never looked more sunny and appealing, and all these women (which include Patricia Clarkson, yay!) have never looked more attractive. Just brace yourself for when Penélope Cruz shows up and blows everyone way.
Burn After Reading: No matter what the other critics say, we’ll stand by this Coen brothers film. Sure, it’s a little on the zany side, but hey, we like that! This cast—which includes a hilarious Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich—looks like they had the time of their life filming this one, a caper involving a missing C.I.A. file.
Rachel Getting Married: When we first got to know Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries, we had no idea she’d one day turn in such a sniping-to-perfection performance like this one. Ms. Hathaway plays Kym, a young woman on leave from rehab, returning to the family fold for the wedding of her older sister (Rosemarie DeWitt). Directed by Jonathan Demme from a script written by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney!), this small film takes a very close look at the madness that happens whenever any kind of family gets together.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Strangely enough, this film made us even more depressed than Revolutionary Road. Brad Pitt stars as Benjamin Button, a man who ages backward. It’s a beautifully lit, gorgeously shot movie (based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story), and director David Fincher keeps a slow and an almost-old-fashioned-like steady pace. Supporting players Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson and Jason Flemyng are all very fine, and perhaps after this one, we can all forget about “Brangelina” for a while and remember that Brad Pitt is, in fact, a good actor.
Milk: Just when you think Sean Penn can’t surprise you with his “acting” anymore, a movie like Milk comes along and does just that. Mr. Penn disappears completely into his role of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office, who was later assassinated. James Franco, Emile Hirsch and Josh Brolin all turn in memorable performances, and director Gus Van Sant departs from the dreaminess of his past few films to tell this real-life and poignant story effectively straightforwardly.
Slumdog Millionaire: This year’s little-best-picture-that-could doesn’t have a big marquee name in it, but audiences have rightly flipped for it. Using the structure of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) teaches us all about the tragic childhood of our hero, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a “slumdog” from the streets of Mumbai. Watch for the always-great Irfan Khan as the interrogator who doesn’t believe this orphan kid could win a trivia show, and the ridiculously fun song-and-dance final number.
Honorable Mention: Definitely, Maybe: We can’t lie, we love ourselves a good romantic comedy. But the trouble with this genre is that, when not handled properly, things can get pretty ugly (cough, Made of Honor). Definitely, Maybe, written and directed by Adam Brooks, was our very favorite rom-com of the year. Not only are the performances from Ryan Reynolds (who knew?), Isla Fisher, Elizabeth Banks, Rachel Weisz, and Kevin Kline good, it absolutely nails the je ne sais quoi of living in New York in the mid-’90s. Cue the nostalgia!
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1) Slumdog Millionaire (His #1 film of the year but the rest of the list is in alphabetical order) 2) A Chistmas Tale/ The Class 3) Frost/Nixon 4) Frozen River/ Ballast 5) Gomorrah/ Happy-Go-Lucky 6) Rachel Getting Married 7) Man on Wire/ Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired/ Stranded/ Trouble the Water 8) Tell No One 9) WALL-E 10) Waltz with Bashir
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COMMENTARY By Alonso Duralde Film critic msnbc.com contributor updated 2 hours, 37 minutes ago
Blame it on the writers strike or the economy or the national mood. Or maybe biorhythms, who knows? In any event, 2008 was an exceedingly odd year for movies.
For one thing, the films that critics often ignore as mere summer entertainments wound up being, for the most part, quite extraordinary. While not perfect movies, both “Iron Man” and “The Dark Knight” were provocative and intelligent, blessed with smart scripts and bolstered by strong performances. And while I thought “WALL-E” fell apart once the title character left Earth, the funny and moving first 50 minutes or so ranked with the works of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd as an example of precisely crafted silent cinema.
It was also a good year for the manchild-comes-of-age movie, with slacker comedies both within the Judd Apatow stable (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Pineapple Express”)and without (Kevin Smith’s “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” and David Wain’s “Role Models”) putting witty new spins on what seemed like a tapped-out genre. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here
While all these pop titles were charming viewers, however, it was the obligatory year-end parade of middlebrow Serious Cinema that lobbed one dud after another: “Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Revolutionary Road,” “The Reader” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” will all no doubt be vying for Oscars come early 2009, but all of these movies lacked a pulse.
It’s no wonder that my colleagues in the Los Angeles Film Critics Association leaned toward “The Dark Knight” and “WALL-E” as the best films of the year. Don’t be surprised if “Slumdog Millionaire” winds up copping the top prizes; it may be “merely” entertaining, but it connects with an audience in a way that none of this Hollywood Oscar-bait seems capable of doing.
But let’s put those films aside and revisit the best films that 2008 had to offer:
10. (tie) “Cloverfield” and “Afterschool”: One’s a monster movie and the other is a creepy exploration of disaffected adolescents, but both films powerfully captured how the YouTube generation uses hand-held video and instantly-available images to process the world around them. New technologies have long changed the face of cinema, but these two films seem to have a real paradigm-shifting power.
9. “In Bruges”: Playwright Martin McDonagh made a dynamite screen debut as a writer-director with this hilarious and occasionally harrowing comedy about two British hit men (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) hiding out in Belgium after a botched job. Farrell’s never been better, and McDonagh’s staccato prose made for a film with an exhilarating sense of rhythm.
8. “The Class”: Writer François Bégaudeau (adapting his book) and director Laurent Cantet (“Time Out,” “Human Resources”) strip away the usual clichés to tell a pared-down yet riveting story about a schoolteacher (Bégaudeau) and his students over the course of a school year, with all its day-to-day irritations and revelations (and occasional tiny triumphs).
7. “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”: Critics are always quick to trumpet each new Woody Allen comedy as a long-awaited return to form, but this sensuous romantic farce about two American girls (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson) and their encounters with a lusty Spanish artist (Javier Bardem) and his volatile ex-wife (Penélope Cruz) more than earned that distinction.
6. “Elegy”: It was a terrific year for Penélope Cruz, who did extraordinary work both for Woody Allen and for director Isabel Coixet in this haunting romance. Cruz’s co-star Ben Kingsley had a good 2008 as well, between his role as an academic entranced by Cruz in this loose adaptation of Philip Roth’s “The Dying Animal” and his amusing turn as a pothead psychiatrist in “The Wackness.” Let’s just agree not to talk about his cameo in “The Love Guru.”
5. “A Christmas Tale”: Catherine Deneuve seems to grow more fascinating with each passing year, and her on-screen charisma was put to good use in writer-director Arnaud Desplechin’s study of a corrosively dysfunctional family. Seeing Deneuve — as one of the screen’s more toxic parents in recent memory — facing off with bitter son Mathieu Amalric (who also played the “Quantum of Solace” villain) was one of the year’s most deliciously tart experiences.
4. “Wendy and Lucy”: Forget “Marley & Me” and “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” — this was the dog movie that mattered in 2008. Michelle Williams is heartbreaking as a woman at the end of her means, trying to make her way to Alaska to find work but stymied by a number of pitfalls, principally her quest to rescue her dog Lucy from the pound. It’s an unforgettable and brutally powerful tale for these economically depressed times.
3. “Waltz with Bashir”: Who says animation and documentary filmmaking can’t mix? Certainly not director Ari Folman, who combines both genres brilliantly to tell the story of a generation of Israelis trying to put the haunting memories of fighting in Beirut behind them. Rather than merely combine talking heads with stock footage, Folman takes us deeply into his subjects’ troubled memories and vividly brings the horror of combat to life in a unique way.
2. “Ballast”: A brilliant feature directorial debut from Lance Hammer, “Ballast” movingly yet sparingly chronicles the way that one man’s death affects his twin brother (Micheal J. Smith Sr.), his son (JimMyron Ross) and the boy’s mother (Tarra Riggs). Working in a style that the Italian neo-realists would have admired — and summoning three extraordinary performances — Hammer demonstrates he’s a filmmaker to watch.
1. “Synecdoche, New York”: Every so often, a movie gets under your skin and delights both the head and the heart. That’s how I felt about veteran screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s first foray into directing. It’s a movie about art and artists, yes, but it’s also a mind-blowing exploration of how life can slip away from you, how we can try to map our own destiny despite the universe having other plans and how sometimes we aren’t even the stars of our own autobiography. Kaufman and his amazing cast — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Dianne Weist, Catherine Keener, Tom Noonan, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis and Emily Watson, plus scores of superior character actors — assembled to create a work of, and this is a word I use exceedingly sparingly, genius. And 2008 was the better for it.
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1) Synecdoche, New York 2) Milk 3) The Dark Knight 4) Frost/Nixon 5) WALL-E 6) Forgetting Sarah Marshall 7) Iron Man 8) Son of Rambow 9) Slumdog Millionaire 10) Rachel Getting Married
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Manohla Darghis' NY Times year-end recap (lists her best films, but not really orderly):
December 21, 2008 Film In the Big Picture, Big-Screen Hopes By MANOHLA DARGIS “YOU can’t make everyone happy,” a woman says in “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh’s film about an irrepressible young teacher named Poppy, played with infectious good will and gurgling laughter by Sally Hawkins. “There’s no harm in trying, is there?” Poppy replies, with a smile as bright and warming as the sun. It is hard to argue with the sun when it beats down on you as relentlessly as Poppy.
And so, dear (and hostile) reader, it is in the admittedly alien spirit of optimism that I offer you my 10 favorite films, and some thoughts about the year in film. Optimism, I should add, perhaps needlessly, does not come naturally to me. Hope is for suckers (or so I believed!) and those who think Carrie really will find her happily-ever-after by marrying Mr. Big. I tend to embrace my inner Caden Cotard, the theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” a grievously underloved film about life and death and every agonized and beautiful thing in between, including art and the scratch-scratch of those who are trying to leave their marks on the world.
Like Caden, I generally don’t see the proverbial glass half empty; I tend to see it drained to the last drop, chewed up and swallowed, jagged shard by shard. For a lot of people both in the movie world and in journalism, this has been the year of eating glass, which is even worse when you know those who have lost their jobs. Not long ago I went to a press screening expecting to be greeted by the publicist handling the film. She never showed because she had been told to stick around the office to wait for the official confirmation that her company had gone belly up. That news, by the way, was delivered by e-mail.
The next day she and I exchanged goodbye e-mail messages, and she thanked me for a review of another movie that she had been representing. “I just wish,” she added, “a good review meant something these days.” I understand what she means, but she was talking as a publicist, as someone for whom the value of a review comes down to whether it can help sell a movie in a fearsomely overcrowded market. But selling movies isn’t the job of the reviewer, which is something I wish some of my colleagues would remember whenever they start moaning about how critics don’t have power anymore. As if making (or breaking) movies were part of the gig. It isn’t, and never should have been.
That doesn’t mean critics don’t advocate and try to nudge (or push) you into theaters. And I do wish more of you had checked out the likes of “Alexandra,” a spooky, ethereally beautiful meditation on war and national identity from the Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, which ushers you into an extraordinary, vivid world unlike any that materialized at the local multiplex. Or “Flight of the Red Balloon,” a tenderly expressive film about childhood and its end from the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, an artist whose camera soars even as his worldview remains grounded in real life. Or “Silent Light,” a rapturous love story set in a northern Mexican Mennonite community from Carlos Reygadas. Or “Paranoid Park,” the one great film from Gus Van Sant to come out this year.
Mr. Van Sant’s other film, of course, is “Milk,” a touching if aesthetically unremarkable biography of Harvey Milk, the assassinated gay rights pioneer. I like “Milk,” which has a strong, showy, often moving performance from Sean Penn as Milk and one gorgeously directed and choreographed sequence — shot by the great cinematographer Harris Savides — in which Josh Brolin, oiled in flop sweat and hair grease as Milk’s killer, Dan White, walks alone through a series of grim institutional corridors that put the killer’s existential isolation and desperate journey into bold visual terms. “Milk” is undeniably moving, but it earns most of its power from its historical resonance and because it holds up a mirror to another charismatic community organizer who rose from the streets on a message of hope.
I wish “Milk” well, because I want Mr. Van Sant, usually one of the most aesthetically venturesome American directors working today, to keep making movies. I’m also rooting for “Milk,” which was made by Focus Features, a specialty division of Universal Studios, because it represents the kind of serious, midsize production that seems most in peril these days. The big studios like being in the big movie business, but it’s rare that art enters the equation as forcefully as it does in “The Dark Knight,” the Christopher Nolan film that earned critical love on its release but is now being shunned by critics’ groups that seem to think complexity, self-conscious contradictions and beauty are exclusive to the art house.
“The Dark Knight” was one of the few good things to come out of Warner Brothers this year. In the spring the studio shut down two of its specialty divisions, Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse, and gutted another of its companies, New Line Cinema. This is bad news for those who lost their jobs and for mainstream American movies of a certain size and provenance. Warner Independent and Picturehouse released some unfortunate titles, but sometimes they were also responsible for the only decent movies to come off the Warner lot, including George Clooney’s intelligent gloss on the showdown between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy, “Good Night, and Good Luck”; Guillermo del Toro’s eerie wartime fairy tale, “Pan’s Labyrinth”; and Fernando Eimbcke’s low-key, low-budget charmer “Duck Season.”
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that more specialty divisions keep afloat. Without them it’s hard to see how a modern masterwork like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” which was released last year by Paramount Vantage — whose ranks were radically thinned this year — will be made. Over the past few decades the studios siphoned talent from the independent sector, including filmmakers like Mr. Anderson and Mr. Nolan, and went into the art-house business. I have deeply ambivalent feelings about how this incursion affected the independent world (it turned the Sundance Film Festival into a frenzied meat market, among other unfortunate developments), but there’s no question that American mainstream movies have been better for it.
The tough times have been even tougher on nonstudio companies, including the British outfit Tartan Films, which shut down entirely, and ThinkFilm, which teetered on the edge this year and saw the departure of one of its founders, Mark Urman, who headed to a new venture. Despite its woes, ThinkFilm released some solid films this year, including another of my favorites, “Encounters at the End of the World,” in which Werner Herzog goes deep and way down south to the Antarctic only to surface with an elegiac meditation on life and death among creatures great and microscopic. Mr. Herzog dedicated this digitally shot wonderment to his longtime friend, the critic Roger Ebert, who, despite losing his voice to illness, has continued to express his movie love with admirable vigor.
There are glimmers. While independent distributors have taken plenty of hits, veteran outfits like New Yorker Films, which released another of my favorites, Jia Zhang-ke’s “Still Life,” and newcomers like Oscilloscope Pictures, which put out my last (though not least) favorite of the year, Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy,” are keeping the faith. When I was in college, I once helped program an entire semester’s worth of attractions just by cherry-picking titles from the New Yorker Films back catalog. The company’s longevity seems something of a miracle, as does the consistent quality of its releases. If nothing else, companies like these offer stubborn proof that there remains a serious audience for the kinds of serious movies that Ms. Reichardt, Mr. Herzog and others keep making against often daunting odds.
At the risk of sounding stoned on hope, I offer the following heresy: The movies are fine. Sometimes they’re great; occasionally they’re magnificent. The movie and news businesses are hurting, true, but any year that brings films like “Still Life” into American theaters — along with “Momma’s Man,” “Reprise,” “Ballast,” “The Class,” “Boarding Gate,” “A Christmas Tale,” “The Duchess of Langeais,” “Gran Torino,” “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29,” “My Winnipeg,” “The Last Mistress,” “The Order of Myths,” “Trouble the Water,” “Frownland,” “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” “Mad Detective,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” “Che” and “Wall-E,” or rather its first superb 15 minutes (which bear remarkable resemblance to the first 15 minutes of “There Will Be Blood,” though that’s another story) — cannot be deemed a washout.
There is, of course, perverse pleasure in ending the year with an angry rant, as I have proven in the past, if only to myself. But given the clanging of so much bad news, I thought I would try a change of pace. I’m not sure if optimism becomes me, but it sure feels nice. Every year filmmakers from around the world offer us stories filled with grief and tragedy that either feed our souls or rip out another little piece. I tend to fall for movies like these, but I also swoon for those filled with grace and generous sentiments, like “Happy-Go-Lucky,” that suggest that one way to face hard times (and raging driving instructors) is with an open heart and smile. Quickly now: give it a try!
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December 21, 2008 Film In the Face of Loss, Celebrating Ties That Bind By A. O. SCOTT A year ago the big crisis in the film world — which always has to be in some crisis or another — was a glut of movies. Last December my colleagues and I feared we would crack under the strain of winnowing more than 600 releases into lists of 10. Filmmakers and studio executives, meanwhile, worried that so many pictures crowding into theaters would overwhelm the audience and cripple the business.
Now, at the end of 2008, all signs point to a future of scarcity, a bleak and blighted landscape that has already begun to materialize around us. There are fewer companies putting out movies and fewer salaried critics writing about those movies than there were a year ago, and the attrition is sure to continue. But there are not, or not yet, fewer movies demanding attention. This year new films arrived on New York screens at the rate of more than 50 per month. By Dec. 31 the annual tally of film reviews published in The New York Times will once again exceed 600.
The problem, though, is not a surfeit of movies. Honestly, how could there be too many movies? The problem is that too many of them are the wrong movies. The box office may have remained robust, but all year the enterprise of moviemaking and the practice of movie watching have been shadowed by fatigue and irrelevance. This was not entirely the fault of the Hollywood studios and their somewhat beleaguered specialty divisions, which continue to exert a near-monopolistic hold on what is shown in American multiplexes and art houses. It was awfully hard for any scripted spectacle to compete with an election that was at once a hugely consequential political event and a nonstop media bonanza. And no blockbuster could match the slow-motion, real-life disaster epic of a collapsing economy, a horror show that has kept most of us queasy, riveted and in a perpetual state of anxious suspense.
Such unexpected competition from real life, however, serves only to emphasize the shortcomings of mainstream moviemaking, which runs more and more on caution, complacency and the willingness to turn any fresh idea into a marketing formula. I’m not thinking only, or primarily, of the puerile comedies and comic book spectaculars of summer, but rather of the somber and polished dramas that arrive in the waning weeks of the year as a stimulus package for Oscar-campaign publicists.
“Doubt,” “The Reader,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Revolutionary Road” — all of these transplants from stage or page are impeccably acted, exquisitely production-designed excursions into the recent past. And each one is a hermetically sealed melodrama of received thinking, feverishly advancing a set of themes that are the very opposite of provocative. The suburbs are hell on earth. Richard Nixon was a monster. Literature is good for you. Religious authority is bad. The Nazis too. Kate Winslet is hot.
Why argue? And, for all the shouting and finger pointing that goes on in these films, they exist to be admired, not argued about or with. The interesting movie debates of 2008 were incited by the populist entertainments of summertime, “Wall-E” and “The Dark Knight,” contrasting allegories pitched at the anxieties of the moment. Curiously enough, the makers of “Wall-E” took it upon themselves to deny that the film was a parable of environmental devastation as well as a disarmingly sweet love story, while some who commented on “The Dark Knight” pushed the allegorical interpretation as far as it would go, reading the film as a cloaked apologia for — unless it was a veiled critique of — President Bush and his policies.
That was perhaps a bit much, but “The Dark Knight” did bring some of the central preoccupations of Bush-era filmmaking to a grim, lustrous apotheosis. For most of the past seven years the actual, political contours of the post-9/11 world have been left mainly to documentarians, while the realm of pop-culture fantasy has bloomed with poisonous flowers of grief, vengeance and dread. Christopher Nolan’s second exploration of the Batman mythos was a cartoon opera of good and evil, solemn enough to seem important, but vague enough to avoid the risk of overt topicality.
Its glum, masochistic exploration of terror and vigilantism was artful, but also seemed strategically incoherent, its central moral question — what kind of hero do we need? — posed with more grandiosity than insight. And by year’s end the central standoff between a mournful, angry avenger and a figure of pure anarchic malice has taken on the fusty air of cliché. In due course Max Payne and the Punisher came to collect their brutal payback, joining a vigilante army that even managed to conscript poor James Bond, once the avatar of puckish, British political heroism.
But at least he survived, and may recover his sense of humor in time for Bond 23. That makes him one of the lucky few, since the only theme more pervasive than vengeance this year was martyrdom. I would spoil the whole month of December if I listed the movies that end with the main character’s embrace of death, frequently in an uncompromising, implicitly self-aggrandizing act of sacrifice.
But somehow all this messianism and overblown superheroism rings false, both within individual films and out here in the rumpled, stressed-out, hopeful, uneasy world where movies live. Who will save us? Whom should we kill? These don’t strike me as the most useful questions right now, and they are generally not the kind posed by the films I found most challenging and interesting this year, which in general were less concerned with moral abstractions than with ethical predicaments.
Consider Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” and Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy,” each one about a woman making her way in an indifferent and sometimes hostile world. Poppy and Wendy are mirror images (Wendy being decidedly unhappy and unlucky), difficult people who challenge the people around them, and the audience, to care. And while neither film has an overtly political message, each implicitly challenges us to think about what how the world as presently organized constrains and limits our impulses toward compassion, generosity and fellow feeling.
These impulses are easily sentimentalized of course. And while I am suspicious of easy affirmation or forced happy endings, I am nonetheless grateful for movies that, in spite of everything, investigate the possibility of hope. The 10 movies listed below are not all expressions of optimism, but they are all about the obligations, responsibilities and accidents that bind people together, within and across formally constituted families and communities. And they are also about the refusal to give up, to give in to darkness or despair. These are movies, as Harvey Milk might put it, about various kinds of “us-es” — about how fragile such connections can be and about how necessary they are. In the year to come we will need more movies like them.
WALL-E The visual sublimity of Andrew Stanton’s latest Pixar masterpiece is matched by a depth and sweetness of feeling not seen since the heyday of Charlie Chaplin. I don’t know why it seems so fitting that the year’s most humane hero should be a robot, or that its most tender love story should involve a romance between two soulful machines.
SILENT LIGHT Another otherwordly love story, this one set in a Mennonite settlement in Mexico. The director, Carlos Reygadas, photographs people and landscapes with a devotion as deep as the spiritual conviction that is his subject. Rarely has a film depicted religious experience with such power and clarity, bringing the audience uncannily, exaltingly close to a state of holiness.
THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN Abdellatif Kechiche’s long, warm, bustling couscous epic, set among mainly second-generation North African immigrants in a sagging French port city, is both the best family drama in a year filled with them and the best of a dazzling and diverse crop of French movies released in America in 2008.
MAN ON WIRE Part true-crime story, part elegy, James Marsh’s documentary about Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope dance between the towers of the World Trade Center is like found poetry: beautiful, charming and hauntingly strange.
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN Fatih Akin, a German director of Turkish descent, explores the complicated links between his two homelands in this knotty, moving drama of converging destinies and chance encounters.
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY As Poppy, Sally Hawkins is like a flesh-and-blood, female Wall-E: hard-working, steadfast, compulsive, perhaps slightly annoying and capable, by dint of sheer decency and determination, of saving humanity from its worst impulses.
WENDY AND LUCY This tiny sliver of a story — a girl, traveling to Alaska with her dog, runs into trouble somewhere in Oregon — is heartbreaking and resonant, an intimation of hard times coming and a sad, sober assessment of just how alone each of us may be in facing them.
MILK In Gus Van Sant’s accessible, intelligent biography, Harvey Milk, the San Francisco gay rights activist and city supervisor assassinated along with the city’s mayor in 1978, is not a martyr or a saint, but rather an excitable, passionate champion of dignity and freedom. Let “Che” fight it out with “W” for a distant second place. This is the best political film of the year.
RACHEL GETTING MARRIED The addiction story may feel a little familiar, but Jonathan Demme’s sprawling family-therapy wedding blowout is bracing for the window it offers into a mixed-up, multi-everything America that has existed, up to now, just about everywhere except in our movies and our politics.
CADILLAC RECORDS Joy and pain; rhythm and blues; blacks and Jews. Darnell Martin’s group portrait of the Chess Record label is a smart and insightful history lesson, and you can dance to it too.
Here's Manohla Dargis' list of ten favorite films to go along w/ her article:
Happy-Go-Lucky Synecdoche, New York Alexandra Flight of the Red Balloon Silent Light Paranoid Park The Dark Knight Encounters at the End of the World Still Life Wendy and Lucy
Originally posted by seanflynn: Neither NYTimes list, nor the LA Times, mentioned Benj Button. This is NOT a good sign for its Oscar chances.
Besides Milk, Wall-E, and The Dark Knight, the major best picture contenders were all left off the NY Times lists. No Benj Button, no Frost/Nixon, no Doubt, no The Reader, no Rev. Road, no Slumdog.
LA Times at least gave Slumdog and Frost/Nixon some support but snubbed Milk and The Dark Knight.
Not really sure how any of these lists will influence the Oscar race considering that they're mostly filled up w/ films that have practically zero chance of Oscar glory (sad but true, especially considering films like Wendy and Lucy or Synecdoche, New York).
But it does indicate lack of great reviews from those 2 influential papers, and Button is a film - like There Will Be Blood last year - that depends on strong reviews to overcome its more "arty" cerebral appeal. The film could be in trouble.
(And so there is no confusion, I think the film deserves a best picture nomination).
THIS is the season for critics to turn out lists of the best mov ies of the year. Un fortunately, many consist of highly publicized, big-budget movies that opened between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, while ignoring earlier films.
In other words, critics let studio publicists tell them which movies deserve to be on their lists. As usual, I try to avoid this end-of-year syndrome. Here it goes:
1. "IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA" (Jose Luis Guerin, France/Spain): Follow that woman! Minimalist romancer riffs on "Last Year at Marienbad."
2. "WENDY AND LUCY" (Kelly Reichardt, USA): A girl and her dog and a friendly security guard.
3. "MOMMA'S MAN" (Azazel Jacobs, USA): The Family Jacobs proves you can go home again.
4. "PARANOID PARK" (Gus Van Sant, France/USA): Forget "Milk"; this is the Van Sant movie that matters.
5. "LET THE RIGHT ONE IN" (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden). Forget "Twilight"; this is the teen vampire movie that matters.
6. "FROZEN RIVER" (Courtney Hunt, USA): Melissa Leo has meltdown on ice.
7. "THE WRESTLER" (Darren Aronofsky, USA): A Ram slam.
Top Ten List of Various Critics (?) at THE ONION...
The Onion AV Club (Noel Murray) 1 WALL-E 2 Burn After Reading 3 Synecdoche, New York 4 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 5 The Dark Knight 6 Surfwise 7 Rachel Getting Married 8 Paranoid Park 9 Milk 10 My Winnipeg
The Onion AV Club (Keith Phipps) 1 Rachel Getting Married 2 WALL-E 3 Wendy and Lucy 4 Che 5 The Dark Knight 6 Milk 7 Vicky Cristina Barcelona 8 Reprise 9 Let The Right One In 10 Happy-Go-Lucky
The Onion AV Club (Nathan Rabin) 1 Rachel Getting Married 2 The Dark Knight 3 Synecdoche, New York 4 WALL-E 5 Operation Filmmaker 6 Reprise 7 Stuck 8 The Wrestler 9 Happy-Go-Lucky 10 Milk
The Onion AV Club (Tasha Robinson) 1 The Fall 2 WALL-E 3 Man on Wire 4 Redbelt 5 Synecdoche, New York 6 Cloverfield 7 Surfwise 8 The Reader 9 The Edge of Heaven 10 The Pool
The Onion AV Club (Scott Tobias) 1 Rachel Getting Married 2 WALL-E 3 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 4 Standard Operating Procedure 5 Paranoid Park 6 Man on Wire 7 Funny Games 8 Wendy and Lucy 9 The Dark Knight 10 Stuck
Posts: 27141 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
The Dark Knight was so fulfilling and such a success on every level — writing, directing, acting, box office dollars — that it's hard to believe another comic book film will ever stack up. The Dark Knight isn't just a great film. It is an important film, with the power to change perceptions about the source material and get people to look at comics and sequential art in a different light.
2. WALL-E
Never doubt Pixar. Just when you think they can't do it again, they up the ante.
WALL-E is a brilliant film and Pixar's best yet. Robots, slapstick, a dystopian world ... there's something in it for everyone. I love the beginning of the movie, with its bleeps, boops and lack of human dialogue. The film gives you time to breathe and take in WALL-E's world on your own before the plot accelerates.
It becomes clear early on that this is magical filmmaking. I was sold by the time the blue-collar WALL-E flipped on Hello, Dolly!
3. Bigger, Stronger, Faster
One of the best documentaries I've ever seen, Bigger, Stronger, Faster hits the steroid debate from all angles.
Filmmaker Chris Bell used steroids at one point, but gave them up. His brothers still use them. And so he begins his quest to debunk steroid myths and make viewers re-examine their own perceptions on steroids.
The best thing about the film is how much ground Bell covers in 105 minutes and how he gets all sides of the story. There are plenty of facts and useful information, but no judgments. You'll have to make those on your own.
4. Pineapple Express
It's a stoner movie, but you don't have to be high to laugh at Pineapple Express. This film is completely absurd, but it's also one of the funniest movies I've seen in years. Seth Rogen is great as always, but James Franco is the real star of the show.
The Judd Apatow bromances might get old at some point, but not yet. Not while they've still got heart and dozens of laughs.
5. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Nearly as funny as Pineapple Express, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is another great Apatow-produced comedy. Jason Segel is the star here, as he both starred in and wrote the film, which isn't afraid to bare its soul (or Segel's body, full-frontal).
The film's honesty can best be seen in A Taste for Love, a Dracula-based musical created by Segel's character, Peter. As seen on a bonus feature of the DVD, Segel was actually creating the puppet musical for years, with no sense of irony. He just decided to throw it into the film, which adds another delicious layer to the proceedings.
6. Iron Man
It was somewhat overshadowed by The Dark Knight, but there was at least one more great comic book film in 2008.
Unlike other superhero films that rely on ensemble casts, this film counts on Robert Downey Jr. to carry it and, of course, he's more than up to the task. A fun ride.
7. Tropic Thunder
A pretty good year for comedy. This star-studded, inside-Hollywood film was funnier than the commercials led on, but it didn't garner as many laughs from me as Pineapple Express or Forgetting Sarah Marshall did. It was, perhaps, a little too big and star-studded.
And the funniest part of Tropic Thunder comes before the film itself, with the movie's fake trailers.
8. Young@Heart
A documentary about Young@Heart, which is a senior citizens' chorus who sings modern songs. And they rock.
There are some missteps along the way, and the direction isn't stellar. But the story lifts the proceedings above all, as this is a moving and uplifting film. You'll fight the tears during the rendition of Coldplay's Fix You, a song I never really liked ... until I saw this film.
9. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Hellboy is a great character. Played to perfection by Ron Perlman, the big red guy is worth seeing in any film, especially when Guillermo del Toro is directing.
Though not a great film, Hellboy II is worth watching for the cast and imaginative creatures alone.
10. Kung Fu Panda
Kung Fu Panda is the Iron Man to WALL-E's The Dark Knight.
Kung Fu Panda is a very good computer animated film that was overshadowed by a deeper, better film in WALL-E. Like Iron Man, Panda was also carried by its star, Jack Black. And both films are a lot of fun.
Posts: 4233 | Location: SE Pennsylvania | Registered: May 27, 2005
