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
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.
My apologies if someone has already posted on this movie. War, Inc. is a blast, the most fun I’ve had watching a movie all year. It is an absurdist take (clearly indebted to Dr. Strangelove) on the corporatization of war and nation-building. A fictional Halliburton (the Tamerlane Corporation) has an exclusive contract to rebuild, privatize and generally rape the central asian country of Turaqistan, and every aspect that we have seen in recent years in Iraq is ramped up to 11 to comic effect. The politics of the movie are crude and brutally funny, with moments of real power and poingancy. In particular, a scene in a bombed out town at night, as assorted military contractors and local militias fire blindly at each other, explosions rake the landscape and refugees flee, bring to mind the bridge-building scene in Apocalypse Now.
John Cusak is the corporation’s hit man with a heart of gold, and the movie elicits hysterical performances from Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei and a host of minor characters. The story of redemption for John Cusack is hardly original, but the movie still pulls very few punches, and occasionally hits you right in the gut. The choice of eschewing ernest characters offering their critiques of American imperial power and instead relying upon images and humor makes this even stronger. I suspect that there will be less of this kind of movie in the next couple of years as the afterglow of Obama’s victory lingers. This one is well worth watching, if only as a reminder of the world Obama has inherited.
This is the latest little gem from Gus Van Sant, consistently my favorite American director. It follows a few days in the life of Alex (Gabe Nevins), suburban teenager in Portland and part of what a cop refers to as “the skateboarding community.†There is a murder mystery that forms the spine of this short (84 minute) movie, but it is neither important nor terribly interesting. As always, Van Sant wants to explore the peculiar, affectless, forms of alienation (which in this case are pretty mild) in American teenagers, and to do so while giving us a series of breathtakingly beautiful images. Continue reading Paranoid Park
The story of Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), a man of Sudanese and American parentage, as he navigates the jihadi world. The audience is meant to be in suspense as to whether Samir is a traitor to the jihadis who befriend him, or the American handlers who believe he is inflitrating a terrorist cell. And Cheadle tries, only somewhat successfully, to convey how conflicted he is. This movie does a lot of things right, the most important being to give a co-starring role Said Taghmaoui, who was so superb in a minor role in Three Kings, and is far and away the most intersting thing about this movie. It paints a fairly gritty picture of the environment that produces suicide bombers, and the underground networks that recruit and nurture them. The movie also deserves some credit for trying to explain Samir’s motivation in terms of his commitment to, and interpretation of, the Koran. Thus it presents an alternative view of Islam, one that empahsizes non-violence. That said, the movie is dull and efforts to ramp up the tension are limited to making the soundtrack more instrusive. Cheadle is also diappointing, wearing a single dour expression the entire time. He can be so much fun when he flashes a smile and avoids the cockney accent he is weighted down with in the Ocean movies, but here he is largely a cipher, forced to utter a series of earnest but silly lines.
Apologies if this has been discussed before, but I can’t find it using the search feature. Following is Christopher Nolan’s first film, two years before Memento, produced for only $60K and lasting 70 minutes. The initial conceit is that unemployed writer Jeremy Theobald (simply called “the young man”) likes to follow random people. He breaks his own rules and repeatedly follows a man named Cobb, who turns out to be a thief. The premise serves only to set up the rest of the movie, which is pure and enjoyable noir as Theobald gets sucked into a a series of underworld crimes and a relationship with a woman (Lucy Russell) who is credited only as “the blonde”. What makes this worth watching, beyond the simple craft, the gritty black and white photography, and the fine performance from Theobald (who seems to have never acted again except for a bit part in Batman Begins), is Nolan’s trademark shattering of time. Scenes are played out of order so that we see elements of the story in fragments; Theobald appears with a different haircut and suit, then returns to his goatee and leather jacket; we see bruises on his face, then they disappear. It is all tied together at the end in far too neat a package, but you admire it nonetheless.
First, the good news: according to the previews, Transporter 3 is coming soon.
The bad news is that this remake is not a very good movie. The Pang brothers have remade their 1999 story of lone assassin (is there any other type?), this time with Nicolas Cage in the lead role. In the original, the assassin was deaf-mute; in the remake the love interest is deaf-mute, and how the directors expect to make a love story between an American man and a Thai woman believable when they cannot communicate in any way, is anyone’s guess. In truth, the love story is irrelevant. We are meant to believe that Cage inexplicably grows a heart and a conscience on his final mission, setting aside every rule he has made for himself. In fairness, this is a theme we have seen many times before, but Nicolas Cage is no Chow Yun-Fat.
The action sequences are decent, there are a couple of momments of poetry (particularly a scene where two men try to mug Cage), and the movie even manages to summon up a Hong Kong sensibility at the very end as Cage sits in a car and contemplates his own death. But Cage is not given enough to do. He alternates between cold hitman and goofy tourist, with nothing in between. A waste.
It is a very simple idea. Train 17 high def cameras on a single player, in real time, for the duration of a soccer game. The player is Zinedine Zidane, and the game was one he played for Real Madrid in 2004 as his career was coming to an end (but before the 2006 World Cup final that formally ended that career). What you get is the portrait of a single player, largely isolated from his team and the events around him. Even the crowd noise is turned way down and an ethereal Mogwai soundtrack plays over the murmur of the crowd. The cameras never leave Zidane. You don’t see a goal being scored, or a foul committed, unless Zidane is involved, just his face. Occasionally his teammate David Beckham wanders across the frame sporting his flock of seagulls haircut. Roberto Carlos exchanges a smile and a look of relief with Zidane. There are endless shots of his cleats and socks, of the sweat pouring off his face. Only occasionally is a piece of the TV footage of the game inserted to give some context. What you get is a portrait of a craftsman, of all the stuff you never see when you watch a soccer game on TV. It is far more mundane because you are not following the ball; you are watching Zidane following the ball. His economy of movement, at the end of his career, is remarkable. Never a wasted movement, but the ability to spring into action and return to a state of rest the instant the potential of a play is over. There is some pretentious and self-important nonsense (French soccer players seem to be regarded as philosophers, ever since the banalities of Eric Cantona — wonderfully skewered in the “Philosophy Football” t-shirts one can buy), and a strange sequence of world news events that were occurring the same day as the game. But the point is made when you see footage of a car bomb in Najaf, and as you watch a bloody stretcher in the distance, a boy passes the edge of the frame wearing a #5 Zidane jersey.
This is probably only for aficionados, but there is a quiet beauty to watching a craftsman at work. And perhaps fittingly, it ends with Zidane’s volcanic temper leading to a red card near the end of the game. He walks off the field, disbelief on his face, alone.
Death Race is a thoroughly satisfying little action movie, all the better for being entirely predictable: the good cons win and the bad cons and prison governors lose. There is a not a stray storyline, a hint of complexity, or an emotion that outlasts the time it takes to downshift a Mustang V8 Fastback. Even the wincingly bad dialogue is kept to a minimum. It is exactly what the previews and the title suggest. Good guy, ex-steelworker and one time race driver, Jason Statham, is framed for the murder of his adored wife in order to participate in a top-rated prison death race by evil prison governor, Joan Allen. Statham is befriended by cuddly, loveable cons like Ian McShane and a tough but cute navigator from the women’s prison, Natalie Martinez. Mayhem ensues. Roger Corman is credited as a producer, but despite the claim in the credits, this remake is nothing like the original. It is hard to fault, unless, of course, you expect more from your movies than simple setup, fine driving, and explosions galore. And Joan Allen emerges with, if not her dignity intact, at least a couple of sly scenes.