2008: Top 10

These end of the year lists are both a blessing and a curse. It's fun to reflect back on the year in cinema and remember the best the year had to offer. Sometimes you get a year like 2007 where you have an abundance of riches to choose from. And then there are years like 2008. 2008 was not a great year for movies. I know last year I said I should refrain from making that kind of sweeping generalization as it will come back to bite me. That said, it's undeniable that my top 10 this year did not excite me the way my top 10 did last year. That is not meant to be an insult to the films listed below - far from it. I've been spoiled the last two years by having a number one film that I was in love with. That didn't happen this year. I love my number one, but that's not quite the same thing. I think having the kind of anchor in my top 10 list that both Once and Children of Men provided in the past would help me to feel more comfortable with the rest of my list.

A few notes before we get things started. I tried to see everything I could, but a few films got past me. Timecrimes, Dear Zachary, Che, The Reader, Valkyrie, and City of Ember are films I hope to catch in the near future. The first two in particular are unfortunate in that they really sound like my kind of films. I also want to point out how frustrating the release system was this year. I felt like I was scrambling to see far too many movies at the very end of the year. It's really disappointing that studios feel the need to hold so much back until December. Not only does this mean some films won't make my list because I didn't see them, but others don't have the proper time to sit with me. I saw Benjamin Button only this morning, and while it probably wouldn't make my top 10, I feel like it's too big to digest this quickly. Some films in my top 10 are likely to fluctuate big time in the coming month as I get time to think about them, namely The Wrestler, which could rise even higher if given the time. In short, this is a top 10 in flux. Not as complete as last year's, but with about 60 films screened it's a pretty good approximation of what I liked about 2008.

10. The Visitor

As film after film fell by the wayside in the last month, I began to look back on some of the smaller films of 2008 to fill out this list. The Visitor, from writer/director Thomas McCarthy, proved to be the true keeper. I loved his last film, The Station Agent, and here he touches on many of the same themes - namely loneliness and how people discover themselves through their relationships with others. It's delightful to see Richard Jenkins get such a great lead role for once, and he does a perfect job with the part. Really, the whole cast is a delight, working well off of each other to give you a warm feeling, even as things don't go so well for the characters. You know that in spite of what happens to them, everyone will be better off for having known each other.

9. Pineapple Express

I'll admit, I wasn't expecting much from this film after the opening scene. Stoner comedies are among the least funny films out there. They always go for the easiest jokes, and this starts off doing just that. Thankfully, this rose above that to deliver both a very funny film and a great examination of friendships. That last scene where the three heroes are reminiscing about what they'd just been through is perhaps the highlight of the whole thing. These guys are like kids who just had a fun adventure, and they even get a ride home with one character's grandmother. Brilliant. Special notice should go to James Franco, who gives such a fully realized performance that goes beyond just being funny. Oscars, please take note.

8. Frost/Nixon

I'm surprised Ron Howard had such a strong film in him. Usually he's content to go the bland, easy route (The Da Vinci Code), but here he takes two great actors and a strong script and lets that carry the film. Both Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost give career best performances, which should be no surprise given that they've had time to perfect them on stage. Perhaps the most unexpected delight of this film is how funny it is. It could easily have been a quiet drama, but the writing allows for some very funny moments. Nixon's reaction to having to film a segment called Nixon: The Man is hilarious. This is the kind of movie that I could see myself watching any time it pops on TV, which goes a long way when you really think about it.

7. Rachel Getting Married

This is, to me, the biggest surprise of the year. Everything else in my top 10 had something going for it prior to watching it. This was a film I was dragged to against my will, and indeed, resisted for half the run time. But slowly I allowed it to wash over me, and I found such a warm, wondrous delight of a film inhabited by so many great characters. The key to this film is that it's presented as simply a fly on the wall look at this wedding. No pretense, no narrative, just a family getting together to celebrate one daughter's wedding. The performances are great across the board, but the one person who has been overlooked this year is Bill Irwin. His performance really made me think hard about whether or not Heath Ledger is the best supporting actor of 2008. He felt so real to me, so honest, that I felt his every emotion. His reaction to learning he is going to be a grandparent is a moment to cherish in 2008.

6. The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky is really proving to be a versatile director. Who'd have guessed he could turn out a film like this just two years after The Fountain? Mickey Rourke is the heart of this story, and you you come to feel for him in ways you wouldn't expect. I wouldn't have thought a film about wrestling could ever provide such depth, but these are people with a fascinating and largely untold story. Seeing the way they plan out their fights before hand, the genuine camaraderie between fighters, and the way they turn out washed up and alone at the end of their careers is unexpectedly riveting stuff.

5. Slumdog Millionaire

The great achievement of this film is how is really takes us right into the world of Indian slums. It opened my eyes to a people I knew little about. It's also a fun, inventive, and charming film. It's going to be interesting to see if this really can take Best Picture this year, and right now I suspect it will. Kudos to Danny Boyle for taking what could have been a schmaltzy story and injecting it with real emotion, jubilation, struggles, and hardships. And that final dance number really hits home how uplifting the story ultimately is.

4. In Bruges

Martin McDonagh made his first feature length film here, and it is an unexpected emotional roller coaster. In Bruges is both darkly hilarious and quietly sobering. I won't give away its secrets, but the film takes some dark and surprising turns as it tells its story. I love films that can make you laugh out loud at one moment, then have you get a bit teary eyed the next. Colin Farrell gives easily his best performance as a hitman who made one horrible mistake. Watching him cope with his grief is unexpectedly moving. The film's real secret, though, is Brendan Gleeson as Farrell's partner. Faced with a moral crisis of his own, he drives this great film home.

3. WALL·E

I knew this was going to be something special when I first heard about it, and sure enough, it stands high atop a mountain of Pixar films to be their best yet. I love that Pixar is willing to take such risks with their films, not going for the easy sell. Who else would have the guts to make an animated kids' film that has no real dialogue to speak of for most of the run time? The animation is truly stunning, leaps and bounds beyond what anyone else is doing these days. It's going to be hard for Pixar to top this one, but if anyone can do it, it's these guys.

2. Let The Right One In

This came so close to number one that I may still switch it. Time will tell. I mentioned earlier that there are films I am in love with and films I love. My number one film is not an easy one to be in love with, but this one is. Which is kind of weird considering this is a Swedish film about a child vampire forging a relationship with a school recluse. But it's so damn moving. The child performances are spot on, especially Lina Leandersson as the vampire. I know not many people have seen this one yet, nor will they considering what it is. But if you ever come across this one, please give it a shot. You've never seen something quite like this, and it has the most unexpectedly satisfying, thrilling, and deeply moving ending for any film this year.

1. The Dark Knight

After 4 viewings, I simply can't deny this is the strongest film of the year. The Dark Knight was my most anticipated film of the year, and miraculously it lived up to and exceeded those expectations. Batman has long been my favorite comic book character, and it has been a delight to see him get such a fine treatment in cinema. I never in my life would have dreamed that people would be talking about a Batman film being a serious contender for a Best Picture Oscar, but here we are. Obviously, at the center of this epic masterpiece is Heath Ledger. That final line of his, "I think we're destined to do this forever," just hits so painfully hard knowing that we'll never see him do this again. Far too long we've seen comic book characters treated in a jokey manor (Sam Raimi, I'm looking at you). It feels validating to see someone treat these kinds of stories seriously for a change and reap such huge rewards as a result.

The Wrestler

The Wrestler is not the film I wanted from Darren Aronofsky. A film about a professional wrestler staring Mickey Rourke of all people did not sound like my cup of tea. While I felt let down by The Fountain, Aronofsky's last film, I felt it was an ambitious film that felt like a logical followup to his masterpiece Requiem for a Dream. He was clearly creating a distinctive style for himself that, had he continued with it, would have made the word "Aronofsky-esque" a buzz word for cinema in future generations. Instead we got The Wrestler, a major departure from his last two films, and it may very well have solidified Aronofsky as one of the most versatile filmmaker of his generation.

Aronofsky is very much a part of a new 00's generation of young filmmakers, whose other players include Christopher Nolan and Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame. With the decade winding down, it feels very much like these new visionaries have helped shape this decade's cinema in much the same way Quentin Tarrantino did for the 90's. Unfortunately, when you help shape an era of film, you become in danger of being trapped in that decade. Tarantino may still be a big name, but he is certainly not the reliable filmmaker we all once hoped he'd be. And Richard Kelly perhaps demonstrated best of all how a filmmaker can capture the zeitgeist so perfectly, only to become irrelevant as the years pass. I honestly believe Aronofsky must have examined the career path Kelly has taken and realized he was in danger of following right behind. As a result, we have The Wrestler, a stripped down, achingly real portrait of a man with no certain future.

The film certainly starts off at its own deliberate pace. For much of the opening scenes we follow right behind Randy "The Ram" Robinson, never seeing his face. This is a shot that repeats throughout the film, at first alienating, but eventually giving you an over the shoulder view of the man's life. Randy is played by Mickey Rourke, a man whose own career seems to have inevitably led to this film, a perfect meeting of actor and writing. Rourke gives an incredibly lived in performance, you feel the years of turmoil this guy has been through. He is supported by Marisa Tomei as a stripper friend named Cassidy, and Evan Rachel Wood as his estranged daughter Stephanie. Tomei does a good job playing off of Rourke, but Wood feels out of place. The estranged daughter storyline fits the film well, but the way it is handled makes the film stop in place in one major moment. A stronger actress perhaps could have made us feel a bit more empathy for the situation Randy had put his daughter in.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some of the wrestling scenes, which are among the most uncomfortable and excruciating scenes I've seen all year. Aronofsky adds a level of tension to these scenes, especially after Ram has a heart attack and knows he should no longer be submitting himself to these acts. The scene that everyone will be talking about, however, is a fight early on that involves broken glass, a staple gun, and barbed wire. It is unbearable. It's also the breaking point. We see to what lengths Randy is willing to go to in order to hold on to his former glory days, and it is here that he also finally is given a chance to reexamine the path his life has taken. This scene is so visceral, you would be forgiven for looking away. But it is an inevitable step in this man's path, a crossroads. Randy has seen what becomes of men like him - wheelchair bound, dependant on colostomy bags, lost hearing. It isn't pretty and he knows a change is needed.

Aronofsky has been able to change up his style early in his career without abandoning the themes and characters that made his past films work. In many ways, the story of Randy mirrors that of Harry Goldfarb in Requiem. Both are men who are traveling down an inevitable path from which there appear to be no exits. But where Harry's life is eternally doomed, there is a ray of hope for Randy. The film ends ambiguously, and the more cynical could see it as the final curtain for Randy. But there is certainly enough there to let you assume that he will finally embrace a change in his life.

Gran Torino

How does one judge a bad film that entertains immensely? Is it still a bad film or does the fact that it was so entertaining raise to another level? Is a guilty pleasure a good movie or simply a bad one you still like? These are the kinds of questions Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino raises, a film with some glaringly obvious flaws that should have destroyed it, yet instead made the film all the more endearing.

I make no bones about it, I really enjoy Clint Eastwood films, both when he's doing the acting and when he's doing the directing. Changeling, from earlier this year, was a major misstep in my opinion, and Flags of Our Fathers was hit or miss, but everything else he's done for a long while has really pleased me. Each of those films had their flaws, however, and there's no denying it. Here Eastwood presents us with what is purported to be his acting swan song, and it feels like an ode to his classic Dirty Harry character if the guy had grown old and alienated everyone he knew. We've been getting a lot of these deconstructionist reimaginings of classic characters lately, notably with a double whammy from Sylvester Stallone, but that streak really started with Eastwood's Unforgiven back in 1992. It worked perfectly there, not so much here.

I think the two biggest flaws here are the horrible acting and the simplified story. Aside from Eastwood, everyone is a newcomer. Eastwood went out and found regular Hmong folks to be in his movie, and while it makes it feel a bit more authentic, it is at times unbearable listening to the constant forced line deliveries. Granted, there isn't exactly a huge repository of young seasoned Asian actors out there, so it's nice that Eastwood was trying to expand the selection, so to speak. On top of that, Eastwood himself gives an occasionally groan worthy performance, literally growling half his lines. As much as I enjoy Eastwood, it's clear that if he's nominated for an Oscar for this it's only because the Academy loves him as a person so much.

The story is the other problem. Eastwood plays Walt, a retied widower living in a neighborhood increasingly filled with minorities. This doesn't please him one bit. Yet after an altercation on his front lawn, he gets to know his neighbors and realizes he has more in common with them than with his own family. It builds to a showdown between Eastwood and a local gang that have been harassing his neighbors. If you go in expecting a Dirty Harry movie, you'll be surprised by the outcome. If you go in expecting a deconstruction of a Dirty Harry movie, you won't be. Either way, the ending is fairly satisfying, though a bit unlikely. The problem is how simplified everything is. In Eastwood's world things are either black or white, never gray. His family is unrepentantly unlikable, his neighbors are all saints, the gang members are purely evil. Unforgiven seemed to find a nice middle ground for its characters, but that has been abandoned here.

And yet... I can't help but admit that I was entertained throughout. It's a lot of goofy fun. On some level I think Eastwood intended it that way, but on another I think he took a lot of this very seriously, which makes it all the more amusing. At the heart of it all is Walt, such a strange and verbally abusive character that you laugh both at and with. What, for example, are we to make of his repeated threats using his hand to mimic a gun? If an 80 year old man walked up to a corner boy and did that, they'd laugh him off. Hell, even Dirty Harry would have trouble making that gesture genuinely frightening. Is Walt aware of that? Does he even care?

This is not the highbrow Eastwood of recent years, whether it is aspiring to be that or not. What it is, though, is a genuinely amusing, if sometimes gratingly silly film. It's always a welcome pleasure to see Eastwood back on the screen, and while this isn't quite the fitting swan song I'd like it to be, it is an amusing deconstructive coda to a string of tough guy roles.

Frost/Nixon

Richard Nixon is one of those rare Presidents, not unlike Lincoln, Washington, and Roosevelt, that has transcended the Presidency to become a mythic figure in our culture. But unlike those others, he has attained that position through his wrong doings, not through his greatest achievements. I only have one memory of the man: his death. I was too young to be aware of him before then, and I was simply not around when he was President. Interestingly enough, much of what I've gleaned from cinema about him is that he was a tragic man who almost deserves our sympathies. Such was the case with Oliver Stone's Nixon, and such is the case here with Frost/Nixon. Here is a portrait of a man that is seen as both cunning, sly, and cruel, yet at the same time tragically lost and lonely. How many other Presidents get such a multifaceted examination so consistently in films?

Based on the stage play of the same name, and staring the same stars, Frost/Nixon centers around the four day interviews between British talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) and former President Nixon (Frank Langella). In an interesting take on the two men, both see this as an opportunity to reclaim some of their past glories. Nixon wants to use it as a way to show the public he's a misunderstood good guy after all, while Frost longs for the chance to be relevant again after a slew of failed TV shows. Clearly both men won't get what they want.

This is a prefect example of how if you have a great screenplay and terrific performances across the board, you've almost certainly got yourself a good movie. I've long been a naysayer of Ron Howard, and here he does nothing to change that. He lacks any sort of real style, and he does everything as safely as possible. That worked wonderfully for him once before, with Apollo 13, and now it works again for him here. Because he has such a simple approach to the material, he allows the stronger aspects of writing and acting to shine through unobstructed. And boy do they.

The two central performances of Sheen and Langella are uniformly excellent, among the year's best. They've had a great deal of time to perfect these roles on the stage, and it really shows. Langella is clearly the showier role, yet he doesn't allow it to become a caricature. Often times he is simply delivering long monologue answers to questions, yet he does it with such wit, charm, and charisma that you can understand why one character says he wished he'd voted for Nixon when he had the chance. I don't think this is ever meant to be a damning portrayal, simply a tragic one. Nixon often comes across as a man in need of an audience, yet never knowing what to do with that audience. Take his impromptu piano performance for friends and family, or his rambling stories with no point. He loves attention but is at a loss as to how to keep that audience happy. He even muses at one point that perhaps that very quality was what made him ill prepared to be President.

Sheen has the tougher job of the two. He has to play Frost as a guy way out of his league, yet make him alternatively charming, cocky, frightened, and authoritative. His is the real character arc of the film. Frost constantly has a look on his face that indicates he is grasping to his calm demeanor with only the most tenuous of strings. He knows he is in over his head, but he refuses to let anyone else know. The other actors all do great stuff. Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt as Frost's two investigators bring a great air of levity, while at the same time grounding it all in reality by reminding us that there's more at stake here than just one man's reputation. And Toby Jones is quickly becoming one of the most entertaining character actors working today. His Swifty Lazar is only in a few brief scenes, but you can't take your eyes off of him.

The real star, however, is the screenplay. The writing is so assured that it allows two people to just talk back and forth with the knowledge that it this is in fact riveting. The interviews between these two men are the most gripping scenes in the movie. Much of it is lifted from actual transcripts, but it's all pieced together in such a way that it allows us to see inside these two men, really understand what it is that makes them tick. Fascinating stuff. What's also very surprising about the writing is how funny it is. There are some truly great laugh out loud moments I simply wasn't expecting. I know the idea of a movie about two people conducting an interview sounds like it has the potential to be boring, but the writing never allows that to be the case.

I think the unsung hero of this film - and many great films of this nature - is the editing. If the editing wasn't just right, it's entirely possible that the screenplay would have lost some of its edge. Editing is something you don't get with a stage play, and I think it is used here in such a way that this feels like more than a play. Howard picks exactly the right moments to cut to a close up of an actor, inviting us inside each man's head at crucial moments in the interviews. There is also a use of talking heads shots where people in the film comment on the events that transpired, allowing the film to have a sort of analytic feel to it while also feeling so personal. The tension constantly builds, even if we know deep down that this wasn't a major moment in history.

This is much more an Oscar contender than I ever would have given it credit for. Langella is a strong candidate for the win, and in a fair world Sheen would be in the running for a lead actor nomination as well. And perhaps most important of all, this is just a really fun movie. Not something I would have expected to say before I saw it, but I could easily sit through this one again and just enjoy it. There's a lot to be said about movies that can inform, examine, and entertain, all at once.