(This is the list I submitted to CInematical, to MSN Movies, to Movie City News and, in this form, actually wrote up for my work with Redbox. It’s worth noting that I did not see a few things — Secret of the Grain, Let the Right One In, and more — that many of my peers have adored; still, that’s the nature of this gig.)
As 2008 draws to a close, movie writers everywhere scratch and puzzle over their lists — to a degree that you can find collected lists of lists out on the internet, as everyone from your local paper’s film critic to your friendly neighborhood web writer chimes in. I keep a Top Ten, contributing the same list to all the people who ask me, with some perspective — I don’t think I’m walking down from the top of any mountain with this list carved on two tablets, and these are the films that I really enjoyed — but, then again, if it inspires you to check out one of the films on this list you haven’t heard of (some of which are on DVD and some of which aren’t even in theaters yet), then I’m doing my job. I tend to use the same rule for consideration as the Academy does for the Oscars and make my lists for any given year out of films that have played theatrically in L.A. and New York for at least a week in 2008; with that said, and in no particular order leading up to #1, here’s my Top Ten Movies of 2008. …
10) Waltz with Bashir
An animated documentary — with artists creating visions and visuals based on interviews with real people — about war, youth, memory and loss, with brilliant, bizarre images and human, heartfelt emotions.
9) Funny Games
Full of cruel tricks and grim treats, this horror-thriller is almost a kind of magic trick — director Michael Haneke warns you that he’s going to trick you and then does it anyway, leaving you not just scared by a movie but thinking about all scary movies.
Man on Wire
The year’s best documentary showing how Phillip Petit, a French tightrope walker, managed to break into the World Trade Center in 1974, string a wire between the two buildings and step out between them with the city — and the world — looking up in awe. Exhilarating, exciting, and more than a little sad — 9/11’s never mentioned, but it hangs over the film’s wonder and joy — Man on Wire’s a great story of inspiration, celebration and gutsy glory.
7) The Dark Knight
Yes, it’s a comic-book movie; it’s also the year’s best meditation on right, wrong and the struggle to figure out the difference between the two. It also has some amazingly pure action moviemaking — and it’s ultimately a great example to big-studio Hollywood that you can make a great movie that still makes plenty of money.
6) Ballast
One of the standouts of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Ballast is hard to sum up, as three people connect and clash in the gray flatness of a Mississippi winter — and even harder to forget, with incredible performances and a haunting realism that the movies too rarely have.
5) Reprise
A lesser-seen foreign film that speaks in the universal language of youth and young manhood, as two friends and novelists in their ’20s kinda know they’re clichés and don’t quite know how to change that. Reprise tackles some real stuff, but it’s also fun — brilliantly cut and shot and edited, with energy and ambition leaping off-screen in every frame.
4) Milk
One of the best performances in the year, as Sean Penn plays the murdered San Francisco politician and gay rights leader with smart, sly acting that, as I noted when the film came out, shows us that while Harvey Milk may have been a martyr, he was no saint. Milk’s not a one-issue film, either; it’s one of the best movies about modern American politics we’ve had in a long, long time.
3) Slumdog Millionaire
A big, old-fashioned movie set in 21st-Century fast-forward India, as a brave, smart street-born kid (Dev Patel, in a winning performance) gets a chance to win it all on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — and more importantly, just maybe, reunite with his lost love. Tough and exciting and hopeful and honest, and immensely rousing.
2) The Wrestler
Mickey Rourke makes his comeback as a broken-down ‘8os pro wrestling superstar making do and getting by in low-rent matches and with what remains of his faded glory — until a heart attack forces him to face the idea of life after the ring. A brilliant script, smart direction and a great cast (Rourke’s amazing, but Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood also put unexpected moments in what could have been cliché parts) make The Wrestler a thrilling, funny, scary and very American story.
1) Che
For this two-part epic about the life of, yes, revolutionary Che Guevara, Steven Soderbergh combines his indie roots (sex, lies and videotape, The Limey) with the big-screen scale of his studio films (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven) to make a historical epic that doesn’t try to tell you everything about its subject’s life, and one that shows us a vision of the most important political figures of the 20th century without making our minds up for us. Part one is thrilling, exciting action; part two is a sad slide into the darkness, and the two compliment each other perfectly. Benicio Del Toro is great as Che, but it’s Soderbergh — shooting on location, on digital video, with fully independent financing - who’s the star here, making the most ambitious, flawed, exciting and fascinating movie of the year.
(Almost, but not quite: WALL-E, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, A Christmas Tale, Encounters at the End of the World, Gomorra, Rachel Getting Married, Synecdoche, New York, The Class.)
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“I spent some of the holiday week catching up with books I had missed, in part because the barrage of end-of-year-screenings had left me a little movie-d out — or, rather, end-of-year-screenings plus Adam Sandler’s Bedtime Stories, about which less said, the better. One of the books I’ve been idly leafing through is A Third Face, Samuel Fuller’s memoir — “My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking,” as the subtitle elaborates. You may have never seen a Sam Fuller movie, but plenty of people who you respect as moviemakers did — Martin Scorsese provides the introduction for A Third Face, and the just-released DVD of White Dog, shelved for decades due to controversy, is one of the hottest discs of the year. Fuller’s not exactly a name that springs to mind when we think of the great directors of the past, and at the same time, he’s got a real style — whether you’re watching one of his Westerns (I Shot Jesse James), or his war films (The Big Red One) or his dramas (Shock Corridor) or his two-fisted crime films — like this week’s Retro Rental, a movie I went back to after reading Fuller’s book, Pickup on South Street.”
“The action is not only roughly historically accurate but also actually exciting; as a bomb-maker explains that ” … Any problem on Earth can be solved with the application of enough plastic explosive ….” we get a little education in bomb-making. Later, as von Stauffenberg tries to do the delicate work of bomb-setting with war-wounded hands, we enjoy the suspense even more because we’ve been told what we need to know early and well and we understand what’s going wrong. The supporting cast is great — including Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Izzard and Terence Stamp as co-conspirators — but the story is the star in Valkyrie, with Singer showing us all the things we didn’t know, so that the twists and turns of a story where we know the final act somehow still pushes us to the edge of our seats. Valkyrie was notoriously moved from the end of this year to early next year and then moved back again; the fact is, Valkyrie plays a lot better as a diverting summertime action thriller than it does as an earnest end-of-year Oscar-contender drama. At the same time, there are flashes of beauty and dark wonder in Valkyrie, like von Stauffenberg’s first meeting with a conspirator in a gorgeous cathedral, the next wide shot pulling back to reveal how the roof over the altar’s been destroyed by bombs; there’s no safe place, and everything good will be destroyed if the war goes on much longer. It’s a simple moment, but an effective and unexpected one, a moment of grace and spooky beauty hidden in-between the shouting and shooting. Valkyrie’s brawny and big and bold, but it’s also stronger, slicker and smarter than you’d think.”
“Trying to pull our heart strings and tickle our funny bones, Sandler (who, as star and producer, had his longtime crony Tim Herily re-write Matt Lopez’s original script) and Bedtime Stories don’t manage to do either terribly well. Kids won’t understand Pearce’s big musical number; the parents accompanying them to the theater will come to hate the comedy-relief animated hamster with every fiber of their being. Bedtime Stories tries to be charming and whimsical, but while charm and whimsy, like love, can be helped by great sums of money, charm and whimsy, like love, cannot be created by great sums of money. That sense of hollow spectacle makes Bedtime Stories feel forced and fake and flabby, and Sandler’s need to play the best guy ever is a little obvious. The creepy finale involves us not only seeing Skeeter succeed, but also witnessing his enemies fail, so Sandler gets to both win and rub it in. With a needlessly complicated story that’ll bore kids and shallow, silly jokes that’ll exhaust adults, Bedtime Stories runs a real danger of living up to its name not with sweet storytelling, infinite imagination and childlike wonder but instead by putting audiences to sleep.”
“They don’t make movies like A Bridge Too Far anymore, which is simultaneously a good and bad thing; I have a hard time wrapping my conscience around any war film that looks like too much fun, but at the same time, good heavens, A Bridge Too Far is great to watch — big, sprawling, messy, full of tricks and nonchalant moments of heroism and bravery. Goldman, who also wrote All The President’s Men and The Princess Bride notes in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade that he had to cut so many amazing true stories from Ryan’s book that it broke his heart, just because there were too many moments of dumb luck, brilliant decision making and impossible bravery at Arnheim to get into a three-hour movie. A Bridge Too Far, like Valkyrie, is a movie that turns a known historical fact into a great suspenseful game of coulda, shoulda, woulda, where anything — a shift in the wind, a single shot fired at the right time — could have changed everything, and didn’t.”.jpg)
