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.
Chris, I keep waiting for others to pipe up. I have not seen a film made for adults at the theater in …. a couple months? So, basically, a big batch of the big-hitters has come and I’ve yet to see ’em. How to make the list without any sense of Milk, Benjamin Button, Synecdoche, and so on…
But having returned from the aggravating sloppy bullshit that was Adam Sandler’s Bedtime Stories, which happily the kid enjoyed even as I gritted my teeth at how aggressively disinterested in effort the whole movie seemed to be, I did think back over the year, and here goes:
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Adam’s Apples
The Dark Knight
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
In Bruges
Noise (the Australian one)
Smiley Face
Wall-E
And a special nod for European horrors (Ils/Them and L’Interieur/Inside and A Xmas Tale) which put the American shit-remake machine to shame.
Gotta say, this is a record of enjoyment, not a particularly grand record of the year’s output. (A few of these are imports I only just saw on dvd; others came out last year. And overall there are but a couple I’d say knocked my socks off. There were a reasonable number of good films this year, but great films seemed to be in short supply.)
Oh–and I saw some critic had Johnny To’s Sparrow on his list, so I’ve ordered a batch of as-yet-unreleased To films (the aforementioned, plus Mad Detective and Triangle–the last co-directed with Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam, ‘though it’s received lukewarm reviews. I’m happy to pass ’em on to the other To fans as they wish, after I’ve watched.)
Hmm. I didn’t see a lot of movies in theaters. Maybe even less than last year. My favorite is almost certainly Synecdoche, New York.
Everyone is raving about that Anne Hathaway wedding movie (which I’ll eventually rent b/c Robyn Hitchcock is in it), but I greatly enjoyed Margot at the Wedding, esp. after not caring at all for The Squid and the Whale.
Frost/Nixon is quite good. Two terrific lead performances, and interesting subject matter, but of course what Nixon did was peanuts compared to Bush, and he was smart. What we have 30+ years later is willful ignorance and disregard of laws to such a great extent that I just found it depressing more than anything else. (And I disliked the idea that Frost could basically pull an all-nighter at the end to make up for his earlier problems in the interviews. In any case, it’s not what I consider to be a classic.)
Wall-E I could take or leave, 4 Months was way too depressing for me, Dark Knight and Iron Man both made me feel like I was living in a country I no longer have much in common with. And I disliked Slumdog Millionaire a great deal.
I liked In Bruges and War Inc. but wouldn’t put it on any best of list. For both they just exceeded my low expectations. Ils/Them – Yeah, I liked that one a lot.
I saw a lot of older movies this year: I loved both Days of Heaven and Heaven’s Gate. Also Bertolucci’s 1900, Once Upon a Time in America, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, John Huston’s Beat the Devil and others possibly mentioned here.
I’m interested in Revolutionary Road and The Wrestler, but I don’t want to watch anymore movies about the Holocaust (Not that I’ve been seeing a lot of ’em, but I know there’s a zillion out there.)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Happy-Go-Lucky have good shots of making my best of list, if I had seen them.
My favorite discovery of the year was William Klein’s three feature films, which I’ve meant to write and recommend here for months. They’re on Criterion’s Eclipse series, and together they are a fascinating, prescient view of celebrity, entertainment and – weirdly – US foreign policy.
At least rent Mr. Freedom, and be amazed by this American/French painter/ photographer/ journalist/ filmmaker’s vision and humor.
Synecdoche, New York
A Christmas Tale
Milk
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Wall-E
Let the Right One In
Burn After Reading
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
The Orphanage
Performances: Sean Penn, Samantha Morton, Dianne Wiest, Marisa Tomei, Mickey Rourke, Heath Ledger, Sally Hawkins, Emile Berling, Emile Hirsch, Colin Farrell.
Song: “Little Person” Synecdoche, New York
Films I did not see: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Revolutionary Road, The Reader, Frost/Nixon, and others I probably should have.
Films I’m glad I saw: Dear Zachary, Happy Go Lucky, Flight of the Red Balloon, The Wrestler, The Dark Knight, and Beverly Hills Chihauhau.
DVD find: Noise.
Oh yeah, worst film of the year: Sex and the City.
Jeff,
worse than, say, Speed Racer or The X Files?
what were the circumstances of you seeing this film? The twenty-minute dose of that claptrap late at night on TNT or whatever doesn’t fulfill? And, tell me, are there really many women out there who find this show an appealing and/or accurate view of women? oh boy, any one of those four makes me run from the room.
http://www.sarahjessicaparkerlookslikeahorse.com/
Speed Racer is bad, but it didn’t do over 150 million in America . . . nor did it become something of a cultural touchstone in 2008. I didn’t see the “X-Files” film.
I liked the show and watched it on HBO when it was on. I had thought I might see SATC in the theatres until I read it had a 140 minute run time (and then there were the less than glowing reviews). So, I waited for the DVD and enjoyed the first thirty minutes or so, but then the entire narrative just derails and becomes a mushy, laborious train-wreck. And, more so than ever on tv, the film was little more than consumer porn. It made me angry just watching the damn thing and strikes me as an insult to women. Of course, my wife and her friends loved it!
A couple of movies I meant to add to my list of the year’s best. The chief one is Speed Racer, which was far and away the most enjoyable popcorn film I saw this year – and probably for as far back as the previous three years.
I am confounded by the bad reviews this got. It looked absolutely stunning, and captured almost every bit of hyperactive fun of the cartoon. Race, long talking scene, race, long talking scene, one more race, one more talking scene. It wears it’s values out in the open: Family is important, don’t trade in your morals for power, do good and be good. A great good/evil movie that kids can watch that I loved too. And the villain really does look and sound like Christopher Hitchens, which made it that much more fun.
The other was Tarsem’s movie The Fall, which I mentioned previously.
Frost/Nixon was workmanlike and handsome on the surface, but, for the most part, stale and flacid. Frank Langella was quite good though. Mauer, why did you enjoy it as much as you did? Like you, I was constantly reminded of Bush Jr.’s malfeasance. I was also struck by how much the screenplay and direction worked to provide a very flattering, sympathetic portrait of Nixon. Will W. get his day on the big screen in thirty years. The horror . . .
I didn’t love it… “quite good” is what I said, which is also what you said, Jeff. But I did like the two lead performances a lot, and it reminded me how much I liked Michael Sheen in The Queen. Both movies also make great use of the viewer’s knowledge of the preceding events of the films and their strong feelings of the characters involved. And after having basically given up on Ron Howard, I was glad to see a movie of his that didn’t make me want to barf.
Speed Racer is better. And of course Roger Allam, who was in the Queen is also in that one, tying this all together nicely.
In other Oscar news, since I couldn’t make myself go see the Reader, I decided to see a different holocaust movie with sexy breasts and swastikas: The Night Porter!
Slow moving, and only one cabaret number by Charlotte Rampling wearing an SS uniform sans blouse. I was hoping for two or three. Still, I liked this a lot. In fact, Dirk Bogarde reminded me a good deal of a Ralph Fiennes-type character.
Ah, they don’t make sexy holocaust movies like they used to. (Reynolds, please make sure that line appears on my tombstone).
the night porter: up there with touch of evil on the “great movies that make you feel dirty” list.
if you want to see michael sheen at his best you should watch the underworld movies. he’s a werewolf in them, you see. who would win in a fight? a werewolf or nixon? what about if it took place in a saltwater tank? on the moon?
Would the werewolf order cheeseburgers from Trader Vic’s? If so, clearly Nixon loses.
Tony Blair: Rise of the Lycans. Arnab, have you seen the third ‘Underworld’? The absence of Kate Beckinsale is holding me back.
not yet, chris. truthfully, as long as nighy is camping it up i don’t really care who else is in it, but i do consider rhona mitra an upgrade over beckinsale.
only just got to it, but nick and norah’s infinite playlist is very cute indeed.
oh, and not even rhona mitra and bill nighy could save underworld: rise of the lycans.
frost/nixon is good! what are guys talking about? it’s a really good film! okay, it gets a bit predictable when david has the brainwave that he can actually beat nixon and starts, you know, working — third act crescendo and all that — but it’s a good political film about the vacuousness of the american presidential office. and if you saw it when bush was president, or before obama proved himself to be another bush (i wish i could say lite), watch it now.* it makes you despair that things will ever get better in this country. because they won’t. i mean, nixon wiretapped what, 37 people? those were the good old times.
*sorry, jeff.
I suspect the Frost/Nixon imbroglio has less to do with its predictability (not to mention is sympathetic portrait of Nixon) than it does the banal, bourgeois stylings of one Ron Howard. Has Opie ever make a film that us cineastes can actually rally around and still hold on to our street-cred (or should I say our campus sidewalk-cred). It’s not a bad film, but it struck me as middle-brow revisionism at best.
jeff, you probably have seen this a long time ago so engaging with you on this now may not work, but i didn’t find the portrayal of nixon sympathetic at all. to the contrary. and i think ron howard did well. it was fun to watch. and the colors seemed pretty beautiful to me — faded and passè. mostly, though, i really liked the way in which american politics and its endemic problems are tackled. nixon is represented as entirely immoral, and i find it comforting that filmmakers (especially american filmmakers) are tackling in one way or the other the breakdown of even the facade of decency that happened during the jwb administration by making films that expose america’s lifelong, brutal love story with imperialism.
Night Shift is a Ron Howard film I can proudly say I like.