I had to wait a bit to make my list, which is perhaps realistic for movie goers who aren't paid to see movies. Since the Oscar-consideration calendar has now crept back into, like, October, keeping up with the "prestige" releases is a little exhausting. Luckily, I disliked both The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (It's Old Man Does Forrest Gump for far too long... before it's a totally unconvincing love story. Although, the aging trick is pretty spectactular) and Revolutionary Road (just mean spirited), so, my list didn't even undergo many adjustments recently. I still, however, haven't had a chance to see some movies I'd like to - The Wrestler, Nothing But The Truth, Frozen River, The Class, Frost/Nixon, and, I think more importantly, a number of smaller, independent releases that have a chance to truly impress me. That's why I think the truest Best of the Year lists are ongoing. And that the only real #1 of any year is the movie that moved you the most, which is perhaps why my #1 pick this year has 0 Oscar buzz. It is, however, closest to my heart.
Best Movies of 2008:
1. Elegy
Perhaps 2008 is the year of getting old. As Benjamin Button's shallow ruminations on getting old soar to Awards victory, Roger Ebert pointed out that the movie about aging people will really remember is Charlie Kaufmann's Synecdoche, NY. Well, I didn't love that one either. What I did love was Elegy, a disquieting, magnificently powerful movie not simply of aging, but of the concept of aging. Following David Kapesh (Ben Kingsley), a mid-60's professor who begins in affair with Consuela, a much younger student played by Penelope Cruz, Elegy is the story of the way not just age affects their romance, but of Kapesh's own understanding of age, his own hangups about how old he looks and appears to others. It's a movie about the way constant anxiety over that appearance clouds what actually exists.
Isabel Coixet is a first time director, but she makes the sweet, soft images of Elegy combine with two magnificent performances to discuss what love, friendship, desire, and even our interactions with each other mean, past our own understanding of them. In fact, it makes a fairly convincing argument that our understanding gets in the way of actual interactions. I was left with more to think about after Elegy than any other movie I saw all year, and it's because it simply told a story of its characters that respected their humanity, their mystery, their desires, and their misconceptions. I dare you to find any moment in any of the eventual Best Picture nominees that disarms more than the truly astonishing scene in which Consuela, now desperate, with short hair, returns to David and strips for him. If you've seen the movie, you know why this scene is so wrenching and unforgettable. If you've seen Penelope Cruz's face in it, you know why she gave the performance of the year. Little did I know while seeing that scene, the movie would be impossible to top too.
2. Milk
The prestige movie that actually delivers. Gus Van Sant's Milk makes two very smart decisions in chronicling the life of slain San Francisco politician Harvey Milk - first, to focus on the nuts and bolts of the political process, on the greased hands, illogical causes, and the piecemeal way in which Milk rises to more and more prominent posts. Second, in the astonishing work of Sean Penn, whose nebbishy tics and passion make his joy and nervousness ours. Milk gets very personal towards the end, and it works and wounds because the process of believing in something is given such specific, grand weight - and because we believe right along with him.
3. Pineapple Express
Secretly the best of the "Apatow gang" comedies, Pineapple Express did something no other comedy this year made me do: make me laugh. Not just laugh, but double over laughing, with stoners, at stoners, with action movie fans, at action movie fans. Pineapple Express loves the bonds stoners and friends create and never lets you believe that bond is less than real. James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Danny McBride are great, but only because their weird love of each other and occasional hatred of themselves makes their bond in the movie surprisingly effective and totally believable. It might have taken the breezy, drama-helmed direction of David Gordon Green to make a story of friendship outshine a dopey action-buddy narrative - and still be hilarious.
4. Rachel Getting Married
Jonathan Demme's story of a recovering, self-obsessed, frazzled woman returning from rehab to attend her sister's wedding is a gritty, shaky-cam excuse for great performances. But it's also a simple, breezy, occasionally gripping-with-awkwardness story of accepting people, of how we're our own worst enemies, of blame and love and caring for the people around us. Plenty argued that they found the family of Rachel obnoxious, or couldn't deal with the jutting, rough camera work, but it all seemed to me a grand exercise of getting in the lives of the people it chronicled with great respect and sincerity. Maybe its crew is self-obsessed and crazy, but then maybe all of us are too - at least they know how to throw a loving, honest wedding, and we just got to watch.
5. Happy-Go-Lucky
Mike Leigh's most loving, human movie, Happy-Go-Lucky has the good sense to give us a woman who is happy, positive, and improves the lives of everyone around her, and not punish her for it. Sally Hawkins as Poppy, with her great boots and clangy arm of bracelets, flitters like a lawn ornament, but she also helps and cares and stands up for herself and people around her. Shot with Leigh's most gorgeous cinematic eye yet, Happy-Go-Lucky is magnificently warm, well crafted, and deserving to be told; it's the first movie of his I've seen that didn't ever have me looking at my watch, and it's one I'd watch again. I wish it didn't get a little too easy in its final minute, but Happy is a true triumph of people acting warmly towards one another.
6. Wall-E
Maybe as usual with Pixar movies, I'm gaga for it without feeling the grip I felt in better movies, like Elegy and Happy-Go-Lucky. I too gazed lovingly at the bleak but warm view of the future - fat people flying around with constant giant sodas, a world abandoned into garbage and soullessness. It's the hater in me that points out that Wall-E is better social satire than romance, but with images of the future this indelible, there's no doubt Wall-E is bound to be one of the most significant Pixar movies yet, a grand leap in ambition and scope, and, robot or no, made animation even more able to tell important human stories
7. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Even if you're sick of Michael Cera playing the most adorable teenage nerd in the world, Nick & Norah's story of streetwise privileged New York teens is a wild and wonderful story of a great night out. I wish that all of the supposed 17 and 18 year olds didn't look and act like they were in their mid-20's, but maybe New York's teenagers age faster than the rest of us. Regardless, Nick & Norah is the movie I went in grouchiest and came out most excited this year - a bit of young romance and wonder at the world illuminating the possibilities of night life in any city.
8. The Dark Knight
Ignoring the ass-busting running time and the rather unnecessary Two Face plotline, The Dark Knight is the most credible "dark" superhero story, perhaps ever, because of Heath Ledger's combination of blissful anomie and Christian Bale's stolid righteousness. Ledger takes his Joker to such horrific, lived-in dispeptic superiority, far more than any performer would ever be expected of. But it's easy to overlook that it's truly the combination of Ledger and Bale that makes the movie so gripping - its humanist message only works if you root for the Bat, too.
9. Doubt
The prestige movie I'd dismissed as stagebred fodder turned out to be far more than expected, not about doubt, certainty, religion, or Catholic church sex scandals, but about the world of suspicion and responsibility. Meryl Streep - who is, after all, Meryl Streep - gives such a harrowingly cruelty-laced performance that it overshadows the doubt and certainty of everyone else in the movie (with the possible exception of the wonderfully sensitive Viola Davis), and it allows her remaining humanity to underscore the film's brilliant sense of parochial duty.
10. The Edge of Heaven
Touching on religion, politics, nationalism, the illusion of geographical line, language, and the frail bonds of child and parent, it would be easy to paint The Edge of Heaven, from Turkish director Fatih Akin, as the grand European answer to Babel. And it is - grand in that it's quiet, intimate, unflashy, a criss-cross of love, concern, and a desire to reconnect that respects the grand, small connections of us all.
Best Movies of 2008:
1. Elegy
Perhaps 2008 is the year of getting old. As Benjamin Button's shallow ruminations on getting old soar to Awards victory, Roger Ebert pointed out that the movie about aging people will really remember is Charlie Kaufmann's Synecdoche, NY. Well, I didn't love that one either. What I did love was Elegy, a disquieting, magnificently powerful movie not simply of aging, but of the concept of aging. Following David Kapesh (Ben Kingsley), a mid-60's professor who begins in affair with Consuela, a much younger student played by Penelope Cruz, Elegy is the story of the way not just age affects their romance, but of Kapesh's own understanding of age, his own hangups about how old he looks and appears to others. It's a movie about the way constant anxiety over that appearance clouds what actually exists.
Isabel Coixet is a first time director, but she makes the sweet, soft images of Elegy combine with two magnificent performances to discuss what love, friendship, desire, and even our interactions with each other mean, past our own understanding of them. In fact, it makes a fairly convincing argument that our understanding gets in the way of actual interactions. I was left with more to think about after Elegy than any other movie I saw all year, and it's because it simply told a story of its characters that respected their humanity, their mystery, their desires, and their misconceptions. I dare you to find any moment in any of the eventual Best Picture nominees that disarms more than the truly astonishing scene in which Consuela, now desperate, with short hair, returns to David and strips for him. If you've seen the movie, you know why this scene is so wrenching and unforgettable. If you've seen Penelope Cruz's face in it, you know why she gave the performance of the year. Little did I know while seeing that scene, the movie would be impossible to top too.
2. Milk
The prestige movie that actually delivers. Gus Van Sant's Milk makes two very smart decisions in chronicling the life of slain San Francisco politician Harvey Milk - first, to focus on the nuts and bolts of the political process, on the greased hands, illogical causes, and the piecemeal way in which Milk rises to more and more prominent posts. Second, in the astonishing work of Sean Penn, whose nebbishy tics and passion make his joy and nervousness ours. Milk gets very personal towards the end, and it works and wounds because the process of believing in something is given such specific, grand weight - and because we believe right along with him.
3. Pineapple Express
Secretly the best of the "Apatow gang" comedies, Pineapple Express did something no other comedy this year made me do: make me laugh. Not just laugh, but double over laughing, with stoners, at stoners, with action movie fans, at action movie fans. Pineapple Express loves the bonds stoners and friends create and never lets you believe that bond is less than real. James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Danny McBride are great, but only because their weird love of each other and occasional hatred of themselves makes their bond in the movie surprisingly effective and totally believable. It might have taken the breezy, drama-helmed direction of David Gordon Green to make a story of friendship outshine a dopey action-buddy narrative - and still be hilarious.
4. Rachel Getting Married
Jonathan Demme's story of a recovering, self-obsessed, frazzled woman returning from rehab to attend her sister's wedding is a gritty, shaky-cam excuse for great performances. But it's also a simple, breezy, occasionally gripping-with-awkwardness story of accepting people, of how we're our own worst enemies, of blame and love and caring for the people around us. Plenty argued that they found the family of Rachel obnoxious, or couldn't deal with the jutting, rough camera work, but it all seemed to me a grand exercise of getting in the lives of the people it chronicled with great respect and sincerity. Maybe its crew is self-obsessed and crazy, but then maybe all of us are too - at least they know how to throw a loving, honest wedding, and we just got to watch.
5. Happy-Go-Lucky
Mike Leigh's most loving, human movie, Happy-Go-Lucky has the good sense to give us a woman who is happy, positive, and improves the lives of everyone around her, and not punish her for it. Sally Hawkins as Poppy, with her great boots and clangy arm of bracelets, flitters like a lawn ornament, but she also helps and cares and stands up for herself and people around her. Shot with Leigh's most gorgeous cinematic eye yet, Happy-Go-Lucky is magnificently warm, well crafted, and deserving to be told; it's the first movie of his I've seen that didn't ever have me looking at my watch, and it's one I'd watch again. I wish it didn't get a little too easy in its final minute, but Happy is a true triumph of people acting warmly towards one another.
6. Wall-E
Maybe as usual with Pixar movies, I'm gaga for it without feeling the grip I felt in better movies, like Elegy and Happy-Go-Lucky. I too gazed lovingly at the bleak but warm view of the future - fat people flying around with constant giant sodas, a world abandoned into garbage and soullessness. It's the hater in me that points out that Wall-E is better social satire than romance, but with images of the future this indelible, there's no doubt Wall-E is bound to be one of the most significant Pixar movies yet, a grand leap in ambition and scope, and, robot or no, made animation even more able to tell important human stories
7. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Even if you're sick of Michael Cera playing the most adorable teenage nerd in the world, Nick & Norah's story of streetwise privileged New York teens is a wild and wonderful story of a great night out. I wish that all of the supposed 17 and 18 year olds didn't look and act like they were in their mid-20's, but maybe New York's teenagers age faster than the rest of us. Regardless, Nick & Norah is the movie I went in grouchiest and came out most excited this year - a bit of young romance and wonder at the world illuminating the possibilities of night life in any city.
8. The Dark Knight
Ignoring the ass-busting running time and the rather unnecessary Two Face plotline, The Dark Knight is the most credible "dark" superhero story, perhaps ever, because of Heath Ledger's combination of blissful anomie and Christian Bale's stolid righteousness. Ledger takes his Joker to such horrific, lived-in dispeptic superiority, far more than any performer would ever be expected of. But it's easy to overlook that it's truly the combination of Ledger and Bale that makes the movie so gripping - its humanist message only works if you root for the Bat, too.
9. Doubt
The prestige movie I'd dismissed as stagebred fodder turned out to be far more than expected, not about doubt, certainty, religion, or Catholic church sex scandals, but about the world of suspicion and responsibility. Meryl Streep - who is, after all, Meryl Streep - gives such a harrowingly cruelty-laced performance that it overshadows the doubt and certainty of everyone else in the movie (with the possible exception of the wonderfully sensitive Viola Davis), and it allows her remaining humanity to underscore the film's brilliant sense of parochial duty.
10. The Edge of Heaven
Touching on religion, politics, nationalism, the illusion of geographical line, language, and the frail bonds of child and parent, it would be easy to paint The Edge of Heaven, from Turkish director Fatih Akin, as the grand European answer to Babel. And it is - grand in that it's quiet, intimate, unflashy, a criss-cross of love, concern, and a desire to reconnect that respects the grand, small connections of us all.
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