Movies of 2008: The Show So Far...

I'm kind of a movie buff, so I'd like to think I have a relatively well-informed opinion on the subject. That's not to say I'd ever want to be a critic; my interest in movies has thrived mainly on my luxury of being allowed to only see movies that actually interest me, and even then a stinker slips by every so often. (My Netflix account is overrun with 4-star ratings, which I guess is a good sign that I've been picking the right ones all these years)

But like everybody else my taste is subjective, and I try to keep that in mind when I give my opinions. Nothing pisses me off more than a critic who talks about a movie in absolute terms, like saying that a director “deliberately made a movie that no one but him could possibly want to see” (in reference to Mister Lonely – a film that I thought was flawed, but infinitely more interesting for being so). Of course, I get pissed off a great deal more when I disagree with the person, but a bad argument for the right cause offends my sense of justice in a way that probably isn't entirely appropriate in the grand scheme of things. Bad writing is bad writing (again, subjectively), regardless of its intent.

Let's focus on the positive for now. The list of my favorite movies from 2008 isn't complete yet, since there are still plenty that I haven't gotten around to yet (although being here in New York certainly gives me more of an opportunity than most folks across the country). I have, however, seen enough to at least get started on the subject.

Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr. has finally found the perfect outlet for his oily charms here, and it's about damned time. Who knew that it'd turn out to be worth over $300 million? After all, it's not like Iron Man is everybody's favorite when it comes to Marvel comics superheroes. Heck, I never even touched the title back when I was a collector, and the good folks at Marvel would routinely end up with a good portion of my weekly allowance during my junior high and high school years. (They'd also end up taking a great deal more of my money later thanks to Ron “The Billionaire Asshole not the Awesome Character Actor” Perelman driving them into bankruptcy after I'd bought some of their stock – the first stock purchase I ever made, for that matter) Jeff Bridges also brought a fair amount of awesome by playing against type, and Gwyneth Paltrow actually surprised me with the amount of personality and vulnerability she brought to a role that some other actresses might have seen as an easy fat paycheck.

Wall-E: Pixar can do no wrong. I'm convinced of this now. Even their second-tier stuff is wildly ambitious, and the chances they take never cease to pay off. But even in such rarified company, I think Wall-E stands out. To take a situation where your cast consists mostly of robots with extremely limited vocabularies in a post-apocalyptic environment and transform it into a heartwarming family film should be impossible, but sure enough I was practically moved to tears at the end. That's honestly something not many movies can do for me, regardless of who made them. There's so much emotion in these characters and they're expressions, though, that you'd pretty much have to be dead-set on hating the thing going in if you end up not feeling SOMETHING in the way of empathy (and even then, I don't think there are any guarantees).

The Dark Knight: Okay, so these choices are starting to look obvious. There's nothing I can say about this movie that hasn't already been said: it takes superheroes to dark new territory, poses devastating ethical questions, and is a hell of a thrill ride to boot. What's amazing though is that you'd expect a movie that goes through so many different emotional tones in such a short period of time to feel jarring or false, but this one just plows right through and comes out feeling like a pretty satisfying whole when all's said and done.

Doubt: From the man who brought you Joe vs. the Volcano! Actually that's not at all a slight, but I can't think of two more drastically different movies that have come from the same writer-director (especially when the man, John Patrick Shanley, only directed two films in his entire career). Where Joe was lush, colorful, expansive and exotic, Doubt is bleak, grey, confined and reserved. That's by design though, and as a result the focus ends up squarely on the performances, and folks like Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams aren't in the business of disappointing people. There are certain Christian-themed movies, like The Passion of the Christ, that I have a powerful reaction to but can't easily recommend to people who haven't spent a fair amount of time hanging out in churches. This isn't one of those movies. I think Hoffman could've afforded to add a little more ambiguity to his performance in the early going, but Streep showed both sides of her character (the stern, terrifying bully and the exhausted older woman with a dark sense of humor) very effectively; I was surprised that others considered it to be over the top.

Slumdog Millionaire: I just saw this one tonight so it's still swirling around in my head, but I think it deserves a place here (in fact, it's a big part of why I ended up talking about movies for today's blog). It's a difficult movie for me to place: on one hand it's a story about improbable luck conquering all; on the other, it's a bleak depiction of the desperation that fuels an overwhelming number of Indian lives. (No matter what this film's merits as art are, no one will ever mistake it for an enticing travelogue; I'm pretty sure that India's tourism industry isn't happy about that) But I can easily overlook the clash simply because it's a story about the kind of people most of us never think about, wrapped up in a package that's easier for mass audiences to digest. It's characters aren't simple, and while it may not make any profound statements it at least leaves the viewer with plenty to think about.

Okay, so that's five off the top of my head. I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but I've got plenty of space to discuss them another time. I still need to see Milk, Revolutionary Road, The Wrestler, The Reader, Frost/Nixon and others that haven't made their way to Staten Island yet. In fact, I'm planning on heading into the city to catch Steven Soderbergh's Che as soon as possible, since I've got a feeling it might not get down here at all.

There were others, like Synecdoche, New York and the afore-mentioned Mister Lonely, that were fascinating but not completely satisfying, and there were some interesting barely-released finds like Expired (or maybe this is all just the Samantha Morton fanboy in me talking). In documentaries, Man on Wire was compelling but maybe a little too cute, and Standard Operating Procedure went pretty deep into the minds of the torturers at Abu Ghraib, but still not quite far enough.

Overall I think it's been a real step up from '07, and I'm interested to see what happens with the Academy Awards (the only televised awards show that I can still bring myself to care about). Hear that, 2009? Don't let me down!