With the caveats that I have not yet seen The Wrestler, and that some of these movies were released on DVD in 2008, but in theaters in 2007, here (in alphabetical order) are the movies I most enjoyed in 2008:
The Dark Knight
Hellboy 2
I’m not there
Into the wild
Iron Man
Milk
Paranoid Park
Quantum of Solace
Sukiyaki Western Django
War, Inc.
In Gran Torino Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean war veteran and retired Detroit autoworker who, as the movie opens, is mourning the death of his wife. There are three acts. In the first, Eastwood plays a crotchety, deeply racist and unhappy man whose ire is raised by everything, but especially the Hmong family next door. Act II sees his character mellow, become friendly and attached to this family, or at least the teenage son and daughter, and try to help the son gain skills, a job and some sort of confidence in himself. The Hmong family substitutes for his own family and children, from whom he has become estranged, and he becomes the de facto protector of the largely Hmong neighborhood. In Act III Eastwood contemplates vengeance in response to the brutality of a local Hmong gang. Continue reading Gran Torino
somehow we have managed to not have any discussion of this list published last month in conjunction with some fancy book. lots of fine movies, but also some head-scratchers in both inclusions and omissions. let me say first of all that, for all its blind-spots and excessive emphases, it is nice to see a list that doesn’t have casablanca anywhere on it, let alone in the top 5. on the other hand, they manage to leave out everything by scorsese while finding room for blake edwards’ the party. yes, “birdie num-num” the party. poor jerry lewis must really be upset. other major notables who’re left out completely include herzog, fassbinder, ghatak and malick. chaplin gets five nods (the most for any director, i believe) while most of the screwball classics (plus the marx bros.) get shafted. this is not entirely unexpected, given issues of language–the english language films selected are largely either silent or visual-atmospheric (this also explains manhattan over annie hall as the sole allen), and as you’d expect the heroes of the new wave are represented in spades. hitchcock has three (though i’m not convinced notorious should be in there over shadow of a doubt or psycho) and familiar names from the western and noir canons crop up.
some other surprises are in the rankings. i love the night of the hunter and was pleasantly surprised to see it included, but at #2? we have actually begun to slowly make our way through viewings of films on the list that we’ve either never seen or saw so long ago that we’ve completely forgotten. i’ll post more about these later, but let me note my surprise that vigo’s l’atalante is ranked #5. it’s a nice film, but what am i missing?
more later.
Full of heart and bile, whiskey drenched and reeking of cigarettes, A Christmas Tale hurls the viewer headfirst into a sprawling, gloriously messy, bourgeois comedy populated by a likeable, charming though often irascible, family full of sad-sacks, philosophers and self-obsessed neurotics. There’s the matriarch, Junon (Catherine Deneuve), a dragon lady who exudes maternal warmth when necessary; her husband Abel, who works diligently to keep the peace; their oldest daughter, Elizabeth, a successful playwright who banished her irredeemable younger brother, Henri (Mathieu Amalric), six years earlier; and the baby of the family, Ivan, whose puppyish contentment belies his own fading youth. Hovering above all is the ghost of young Joseph, the first-born son who died from leukemia at age six (Henri was conceived in hopes that his placenta would heal his dying, older brother). These folks, their spouses and children, gather together for a Christmas celebration tinged with dry-eyed melancholy. Junon has recently been diagnosed with leukemia and needs a donor match for a bone-marrow transplant. Thus, much to Elizabeth’s chagrin, Henri returns to the fold. Continue reading Un film de Arnaud Desplechin: Un conte de Noël
After voting for Obama, I drove over to Minneapolis to see Happy-Go-Lucky (so as to avoid the internet and CNN). Mike Leigh’s latest functions as a kind of yin to Naked’s yang, centering on a truly happy woman who carefully and successfully negotiates the angry, xenophobic, violent, unfair world that streams around her. Sally Hawkins delivers a lovely, quirky yet believable performance. Her Poppy may be happy but she’s no flake. An elementary school teacher who has traveled the world with her best friend and flatmate Zoe (fine, grounded work by newcomer Alexis Zegerman), Poppy likes to party about as much as she enjoys taking the piss out of life’s rude awakenings. The film opens on one such event when her bike is stolen and Poppy is forced, for the first time, to learn how to drive. It is her driving lessons with Scott (Eddie Marsan channeling David Thewlis) that provides the main thrust of the dramatic action. Continue reading Short Takes: Three Films
I mostly started this thread in the hope of goading Arnab and Gio into discussions of Italian soccer. But a couple of movie-related soccer topics have recently come to mind.
First, I just re-watched the central scene of the original Fever Pitch (the re-make was beyond horrible) with Colin Firth as a fanatical, obsessed Arsenal fan. It is a fine portrait of how sports obsession can make you miserable. I loathe Arsenal, and I’m concerned about the decency of the short shorts being worn by soccer players in 1989, but it is still worth seeing: here.
Just kidding. It’s albums. Two sets: First the newer artists, then the old ones. There’s a lot of great music out there. I have no idea if it’s popular or on a big label, or if it sells, or if the band is even still going, but here it is in no particular order:
Starling Electric – Clouded Staircase (very Robert Pollard-y, but without the stuff that makes most people not like Robert Pollard)
J. Tillman – Vacilando Territory Blues / Cancer and Delirium (Rec. if you like Iron & Wine)
Ray LaMontagne – Gossip In The Grain
Frontier Ruckus – The Orion Songbook
Flying Lotus – Los Angeles / LAEP1 / LAEP2 / LAEP3
The Grand Archives
The Middle East – The Recordings Of The Middle East
Vampire Weekend (Hyped, but still so good)
Santogold – maybe my favorite of the year
Continue reading Best Movies of 2008
I just got a copy of 2666 from the library, and should be starting in on it, but I wanted to at least throw a few words down about Charlie Kaufman’s latest.
First off, the cast. Philip Seymour Hoffman has to have the best homerun average in the game right now. Though I wish he’d get roles a little closer to Talented Mr. Ripley than the usual depressed shlub, this shlub is every bit as great as this guy or the guy from Happiness. Hoffman’s the center, but there’s a huge number of first-rate female performances here: Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis – and then showing up late and re-igniting the whole movie again – Dianne Wiest and Emily Watson. This can be a frustrating movie I guess. Time is screwy, sores ooze, injuries mental, physical, psychological and self-inflicted are heaped on to a man who is so predestined for failure that his award of a MacArthur Genius Grant is almost summarily ignored by everyone.
But I’ll let Manohla and Roger say a little:
NY Times’ first line:
To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York†is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.
I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely.
Having only seen it once, I can’t claim to get it all (I’ve actually learned quite a bit I missed by reading some of the better reviews after seeing it), but I can at least tell you some of the reasons I loved it.
Continue reading Synecdoche, New York
Has anyone heard of these discs? 2 discs, 16 short films from a pretty impressive range of European directors–not new stuff, but culled from bignames’ prior efforts. Just finished disc 1, which had a bleak and funny bit of corrosive stoic fury very much like the the director’s longer Songs from the Second Floor (Sweden’s Roy Andersson), the excellent Wasp by Andrea Arnold and equally fantastic Gasman by Lynne Ramsay, a very entertaining New-Wave parody by Toby Macdonald (who?), an old Svankmajer short, and then some stuff veering from forgettable whimsy to utter crap (Christopher Nolan’s ridiculous little Doodlebug). Disc 2 has films by Ridley Scott and Anders Thomas Jensen that I want to see, as well as the previously-discussed and excellent Six Shooter.
Danny Boyle’s much ballyhooed film is a crowd pleasing tale of star crossed lovers searching for connection on the busy streets of Mumbai. Simplistic and sentimental, the dramatic action, which jumps back and forth in time throughout, cribs generously from a variety of sources: Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the musical Annie, Bollywood, Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, and Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (with an odd nod to August Strindberg’s Miss Julie). The story centers on Jamal, a young Muslim boy, and his older brother, Salim, both orphaned after a violent attack by ravaging Hindus (or so I’m left to assume). A third youngster, the lovely and beautiful Latika, joins the brothers and soon the melodramatics kick into high gear. As a young man some fifteen to twenty years down the road, Jamal works his way onto “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire†(or “Kaun Banega Crorepati,†which appears to be a cultural phenomenon throughout southeast Asia), and the film is structured around how this young, uneducated “chai wallah†utilizes his “hard knock life†as a tatterdemalion to answer enough questions to potentially win 20 million rupees on national television. Each question triggers a flashback and so forth and so on. I’m doing my best not to give too much away except my mild disappointment in this thick slab of populist entertainment.
One could argue that Slumdog Millionaire chronicles India’s economic ascent during the age of globalization, but the film’s lurid portrait of India is painted in oversaturated hues. The film itself is visually busy—unnecessarily so. Everyone is corrupt, filth and degradation cover all most surfaces, and idealistic young love is a crap shoot at best. One thing that intrigued me is that Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy seem to extol western virtues throughout, celebrating a “pick yourself up by the bootstraps†mentality that privileges individual will over the community. Perhaps such notions are also celebrated in India. I’ll be curious to hear what others have to say.