Having had more than a week to think about the “must-see” movie of this year, I still like it quite a bit. The science is ridiculous, of course, and not always consistent. But as an entertaining thriller, it’s yet another feather in Christopher Nolan’s cap. He has yet to make a bad movie.
What’s really interesting to me is that, over the last year, we’ve had no less than five very good science fiction movies hit the screen. This after a long long wasteland in which no good science fiction movies were being made (roughly between The Matrix and WALL-E). But Avatar, Moon, District 9, Star Trek and Inception were all good, even great. They featured novel ideas, good writing and great plotting. And you can even see the fore-runners of this surge in movies from the past few years like the aforementioned WALL-E and the vivid Children of Men.
I’m sure TIme Magazine will come up with some reason why this micro-trend is happening. Back when Potter and LOTR were dominating the box office, TIme ran a front-page article claiming that the stampede to fantasy movies was a cultural attempt to escape from the stress of the War on Terror. I’m not making this up. Apparently, when both series were being green-lighted, the makers knew terrorism was going to be a big deal and we’d need something to escape to. It never occurred to Time, Inc. that people will go to good films no matter what the genre and it just so happened that the two best franchises were in the fantasy genre.
So I’m sure the recent spate of sci-fi success will stimulate someone to claim its escapism from the economy or something. Maybe. But I think it’s just that people like good movies. And the recent sci-fi films have been very good.
Post Scriptum: On the planes to and from Oz, I caught the movies Kick-Ass and Iron Man 2. The former was much better than I expected. I know there was a lot of controversy over the depiction of a 12-year-old girl hurling profanity and slaughtering rooms full of bad guys (Roger Ebert hated the movie because of this). But the depiction was so ridiculously over the top, I couldn’t take it seriously and just enjoyed the ride. The latter also exceeded my low expectations, although I wasn’t that enamored of it. I’m getting a little tired of bigger badder CGI smash-em-ups. The best things about Iron Man 2 were the interactions of the characters. More of that and less explosions for movie 3 would do nicely, thank you.
Joe Posnanski lists his picks as the 100 best movies he’s seen. Since that post went up a week ago, I’ve been mulling over a post of my own on this subject. I’m still deciding whether to go with my 100 favorite or the 100 best. The difference is subtle but important. By “100 favorite movies” I mean 100 I’d want with me on a desert island (I mean, besides “How to build a raft out of a palm trees and fingernail clippings”). By “100 best movies”, I mean the 100 I’d give to aliens if they said they were going to destroy our civilization and that would be all the remained.
I’ll mull this over and maybe put up a post once week on the subject. I have a deep love of movies, I like lists and I like talking about myself — hence the blog. So this sounds like it’s right up my alley.
Another great TED talk on the little things. This sort of logic is a key reason that I’m a libertarian — I think small policy change can be more effective than big massive expensive endeavors, but small changes don’t get slavering media coverage or the approval of historians. But I put it here in non-political links because it applies to everything. Another example I can think of is companies that invest zillions in revamping their website when a few small fixes would be better (I’m looking at you, Facebook).
Turns out those Russian agents were a lot prettier than smart. It’s hilarious how much ink this story has gotten now that Anna Chapman’s face has been plastered all over the TV.
Political links:
Just when you think Oliver Stone can’t get any dumber.
Are the Tea Parties just a bunch of angry white men? Not so fast.
Heh. The lawyers are mad about the BP settlement because they won’t get their contingency fees.
More good climate skepticism from Ron Bailey. Be sure to read his postscript on page 2.
You know, if the Bush Administration were keeping the press away from embarrassing video and photos of an oil spill made by a huge campaign donor, I have a feeling it would be a bigger story.
Rant warning. Charles Bolden gave a speech this weekend claiming NASA’s new mission is international outreach and claiming no single nation can reach beyond low earth orbit. This is categorical bullshit. We lack not the ability, but the will. It’s becoming clearer that NASA spending — both science and exploration — is one of the few items the Democrats may cut. I wonder if this will stop science bloggers from blushing and fainting over everything Obama does.
More on the horrific torture and murder of children in Nigeria on witchcraft charges. Worse: the lead witch-smeller pursuivant is being feted by people in this country.
I actually think the discovery of vast mineral reserves in Afghanistan could be bad for that country. Natural resources are frequently more of a curse than a blessing. Think of war-ravaged Africa on the one hand and the British Empire on the other.
Another study looks at why there are fewer women in science. I expect this will be an unpopular study — note what happened to Larry Summers. But hopefully it will stimulate some discussion. While I think the study makes some points, I’m not convinced we are in the interest-limited regime for women in physics.
Bill Kristol, the delusional hack who denounced predictions of sectarian violence in post-war Iraq as liberal hysteria, is advocating for bombing Iran. I should really fisk the shit out of this one. Well, somebody already did.
Why I Don’t Like Big Government, Part 135: Apple is getting castigated and threatened for not genuflecting to Washington. We’ve seen similar things happen to Microsoft, Paypal and Google. If you become powerful, you have to give Washington their pound of flesh. There is no opting out of the lobbying game.
I remember Margaret Thatcher. I admired Margaret Thatcher. You, Sarah Palin, are no Margaret Thatcher.
You can add Denmark to Spain and Germany as countries that have lost jobs as a result of “investment” in green industries. Broad tax incentives, not subsidies, are the way to go here. Subsidized industries are almost always an economic drag.
As I feared, Republicans want to fix healthcare by removing the insurance mandate but leaving everything intact. This would be the only thing worse than the current bill — it would destroy the insurance industry.
Let me get this straight. We pay $3 billion a year to subsidize cotton growers. Brazil takes us to the WTO. Instead of ending the subsidies (remember the budget crisis?), we will now paythem $150 million per year to make up or it, a bounty that will presumably extend until we are paying billions in subsidies to cotton growers around the world. OK.
Government is different. If you blow the whistle on a corporation, you get rewarded. If you blow the whistle on the government, you go to jail. It’s not just supposedly classified info either. Obama has ramped up prosecution of government whistleblowers throughout the system.
More form the Right Wing Fantasyworld. That’s twice I’ve linked to thinkprogress in one blog post. Damn you, Sarah Palin! It used to be the Left that just made shit up (3 million homeless, murder being the leading cause of death in women, no history of gun ownership, etc.)
I have to agree with Morrissey and Bainbridge. The Zogby poll being touted by people as proof of liberal ignorance about economics seems more designed to get a certain result than to show anything. While I agree with some of the points stated as “enlightened”, those point are not beyond dispute. Besides. I shudder to think what a poll of conservatives on scientific issues would show.
Once again, we don’t need more regulation. We need to enforce the ones we have.
A Tale of Two Counties that perfectly illustrates how we’ve gotten into such a deep fiscal hole.
I love the graph at this site about Cash for Clunkers. It perfectly illustrates the point the critics were trying to make. The program just changed when people bought cars, not whether they bought them.
Nope. No such thing as defensive medicine. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Jesus. Why do politicians have to stick their noses into everything.
There is no place in America more dangerous than between Chuck Schumer and a microphone. Now he’s on about call centers. Because the Future of America is in answering phones? Or because people bitch about their calls being handled in India?
It’s depressing to read stories like this. The Obama Administration is no friend of liberty. Oh, and Jim Bunning is an asshole. But you already knew that.
However, one of the things I like about Obama is his calm demeanor. Apparently, this isn’t sitting well in some quarters that think he should blow his stack more often. I’m sorry. The last thing we need in this country is another president who promotes a perpetual sense of crisis.
This is one of those things that is so fucking obvious that you spend a few minutes slapping yourself in the head for not thinking of it first.
It’s difficult to assess how films do on this test off the top of my head. But after thinking about it for a while, I’m somewhat stunned at just how many films fail it. For example, of the 25 top-rated films on IMDB, going by memory:
Three of the movies — Shawshank Redemption, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and 12 Angry Men have no significant female characters at all.
Eight films — Stars Wars, Empire Strikes Back, the Dark Night, Casablanca, Fight Club, Once Upon a Time in the West, the Usual Suspects and Seven Samurai — have only one significant female character. Same goes, incidentally, for the Star Wars prequels. To be fair, the female characters in several of those films are strong. But they fail the test. My recollection is that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and City of God also fall into this category.
The LOTR movies and Pulp Fiction have several women, but they do not interact.
Goodfellas and both The Godfather films have several female character who interact. But my recall is that they only discuss the men in their lives. Raiders of the Lost Ark has a brief exchange between Marion and Sala’s wife about monkey, but I don’t think that counts. I’m not sure about The Matrix but I don’t recall a female conversation. There’s a reference to an offscreen conversation between Trinity and the Oracle. But that was about Neo.
Only four of the top 25 films meet this test:
Schindler’s List, despite being dominated by its male characters, has numerous scenes of Jewish women discussing the situation.
Rear Window passes the test. Despite Hitch’s icy blonde reputation, he always had interesting female characters. Psycho fails the test, but mostly because of the way the film is structured.
Silence of the Lambs has some interaction between Clarice and one of her friends at the academy.
But even those four are marginal passes.
So is this indicative of extensive sexism in Hollywood? Yes and no. One problem is that a number of those films deal with subjects — war, crime, prison — which have historically been male-dominated. Others take place in circumstances where there few women — 12 Angry Men, for example, was written when juries were usually all-male.
In addition, IMDB’s top 25 movies among women is little different. Most of the women-favored movies are identical to the male-favored list and the new ones aren’t exactly breaking the mold. Amelie and Forest Gump I don’t recall well enough but think they fail. Gone With the Wind passes (more on that in a second). I’ve not seen American History X but doubt that it passes. To Kill a Mockingbird and Beauty and the Beast pass, I think. Up fails, as does WALL-E. So one could argue that women aren’t exactly demanding movies that pass the Bechtel test. Even the conventional “chick flick”, if I can use the term, is mostly about romance.
However, that misses the point, in my opinion. The problem is that our movies have, for the most part, been heavily divided between “chick flicks” about romance and “guy movies” about everything else. This doesn’t have to be the case; it simply represents a blind spot in the mostly male writers, producers and directors of movies and TV. Almost all of the top 25 movies could have passed the Bechtel test if writers gave two shits about creating more than one interesting woman character. The movies that do pass the test didn’t exactly go out their way to do it. They just rounded the movies out a bit, made them fuller and more realistic.
In the end, this trend may be less of symptom of sexism than sexism convolved with writers attempting to economize on character development. One thing I’ve noticed in movies and TV is the startling number of characters who are single children, have deceased parents or have no children of their own. This is mainly because it gets so complicated to write about real people with real families and real circles of friends. Writers also tend to write exclusively male characters since it’s so easy to write your own gender and “Gary Stu” the damned thing. (As an unpublished writer myself, I used to be that way. But I eventually started writing female characters and found them far more interesting.)
As an example of how things could be different, you can contrast Star Trek: The Next Generation against Babylon 5. The latter had interesting female characters who frequently talked about something other than men. The former, however, danced on the blade quite a bit, never seeming to know what to do with its female characters (although it still usually passed the test). This was a principle reason why, in my opinion, B5 was the better show.
As another example — the most successful movie of all time — Gone With the Wind — is a vast war epic that has numerous interactions with women that are not just about men (just mostly about men … Oh, Ashley!) Titanic and Avatar dominated the box office and, I think, both pass the test or at least dance on the blade.
I’m not saying that people should rewrite movies to make sure they pass this test. If nothing else, I don’t want to watch a movie and hear my brain shriek “Bechtel scene” when some pointless all-women conversation is shoe-horned in. The Bechtel test is a thought experiment, not a recipe. Some movies and genres are simply unsuited to having multiple dynamic women characters — Lawrence of Arabia or Master and Commander, for example. “Bechtelling up” books like LOTR would be misguided and smack of tokenism.
No, I think the lesson here is that Hollywood still has a blind spot. Not about women, but about life.
I finally saw the Best Picture of 2009. It’s good, maybe even great. It has some inaccuracies that I’m sure drive genuine Iraqi vets up the wall (one particular sequence, in which the soldiers run around in the dark without using their night vision, was particularly egregious). But as an action-thriller, it works very well, held together mainly by the lead performance and exquisite directing.
I note the IMDB rating is rather low (7.9) for such an acclaimed film and Amazon’s review are a bit mixed. It ranks around Iron Man and Frost/Nixon for 2008, the year it was technically released. That seems about right to me, actually. Right now, I rate it an 8. Good, but not Great.
What puzzles me is why this won Best Picture. It’s a good movie, but it’s in the same category as District 9 and Avatar, two fellow nominees whose presence also puzzles me. It’s an action movie; a “guy movie”, really. It doesn’t have a great deal of artistic merit and it’s unlikely to be remembered as an all-time classic. I liked it better than Up or Inglorious Basterds and haven’t seen the other films. But some strike me as being more in traditional Oscar territory.
So why did it win? Was it really that great a picture? I don’t think so. I think Hurt Locker’s victory can be attributed to two factors.
1) Many people didn’t want Avatar to win and stampeded to the alternative. And if they gave the middle finger to Cameron by decorating his ex-wife, all the better. (I don’t think it bothered Cameron at all, though. I’m sure he’s crying all the way to the bank.)
2) I think many Academy members didn’t watch the movie and figured that it must make a statement against the Iraq War (which it doesn’t).
In short, it strikes me as a victory of Hollywood politics.
The politicization of award season has really stopped bothering me anymore. I was furious when the mediocre Shakespeare in Love triumphed over the amazing Saving Private Ryan. But ever since Lord of the Rings won the Oscar, my interest has waned.
And I really don’t think that’s a bad thing. What point do the Oscars serve anymore, other than for Hollywood to worship itself? Critic’s top ten lists are online. Places like metacritic will merge them into a big list for you. Rotten Tomatoes compiles reviews. IMDB compiles user ratings. Hurt Locker is one of the rare films that got a boost from winning the award. But it’s not like no one would have heard of it otherwise. Maybe I only have 50% of the X chromosomes needed to appreciate the “elegance” and “spectacle” of the awards show, but even those who have a full complement seem to be getting bored with it.
(And as an aside, I had to turn off the Oscars during the actor’s award presentations. It’s intolerable to watch each actor get some worshipful paragraph read to them by another actor. Give me a fucking break. These are actors, not miracle workers. No matter how good Meryl Streep is, it’s not like she cured cancer.)
Anyway, the movie is good. I may be even buy it. And in the end, that’s all that matters: whether people watch it and keep watching it in the future. Awards come and go. Art remains.
This Christmas, I heard a lot of people express skepticism about buying new DVDs and blu-rays. The reason was because was are supposedly going to go to digital streaming and storage of movies. What do you need a blu-ray for when you can have all the movie you want on a hard disk?
I remain skeptical of this.
I’ll ignore for the moment any arguments about technology. I’ve been streaming netflix movies to my TV for some time and they look fine. I’m sure that will only improve. I have no doubt that a lot of movies will be watched that way. And while there are concerns that the internet infrastructure can keep up, I’m sure enough money will make the problem go away.
But I remain skeptical that an iTunes like device will completely replace the video library, at least for a long long time. My skepticism is based on three recent events.
First, I recently bought both The Dark Knight and Star Trek on blu-ray with the so-called digital copy. If this is the future of home video, you can leave me out. The digital copies are only authorized on a certain number of machines (and the bad code caused it to register on my laptop twice). Hollywood has been immensely stupid on DRM and I have no intention of putting my movie pleasure at their mercy. I suspect I am not alone in this.
Second the recent incident in which Amazon yanked copies of 1984 off of Kindle was alarming. Bezos apologized but the reasoning behind it sounded ominous — a copyright violation. What might happen if we have, say, a “Coming to America” style copyright dispute? Will the movies vanish from our hard drives? Or what happens if some government agent decides that, for example, “The Tin Drum” constitute kiddie porn and then unilaterally yanks it from every video library in America?
Finally, there is the very real danger that certain directors (*cough* Lucas *cough*) might decide to put out new and improved versions of their movies, replacing original copies while you sleep. Do we want to give them that power?
The fundamental problem here is that Hollywood’s (and Washington’s) attitude is that you do not own digital copies of movies, music or books — you merely license them. I see this as the pin that may eventually burst the digital ballon. Until we move to a fairer system of copyright law — on in which you permanently own copies and fair use is protected — there will be curmudgeons like me who will resist. And with good reason.
It’s simply a fact that the technical hurdles of the digital movie era may be nothing compared to the pinhead politician problems. I’m not sure that has a solution.
My daughter is really into the Disney Princesses right now. Princess shoes, Princess play castle, Princess diapers, Princess dolls. When we got the play castle, she ran upstairs, grabbed a diaper and gleefully found which princess matched it. I — nerd that I am — was very proud that she could do image matching. But was when the Princess thing really began.
She’s also starting to get into TV now, which is a little scary. I know she likes it but I’m trying hard to limit it. This is difficult on weekends when neither of us has the energy to play with her all day and the temptation to use the Electronic Babysitter is strong. But we’ve mostly limited it to stuff like Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer (which she was exposed to through friends, not us). Lately, she’s also gotten into Bugs Bunny. So the natural extension is the Disney movies.
Unfortunately, Disney’s oddball DVD policy prevents us from buying Cinderella, Abby’s favorite. But we did pick up Sleeping Beauty, her second favorite. Thanks to the Stomach Flu from Hell, we’ve watched it a dozen times in the last few days.
The movie is actually very good. In fact, I worry it’s a little intense for a 2.5 year old. It has decent characters, especially the delightfully evil villainess. The scene in which Sleeping Beauty is drawn to the spindle is also very well done (it always provokes Abby, who has watched it raptly every time, to say, ‘No, Sleepy Huey! Stop!’)
But I watching a scene of Maleficent’s demons. It is very similar to the “Night on Bald Mountain” scene from Fantasia — probably one of the most incredible pieces of animation in film history. That remind me of this video, which accuses Disney of ripping itself off.
A multi-billion dollar corporation that gets zillions from kids and is brutal in defending its copyrights needs no defense from me. But artistically, I will defend:
1) No one imagined that future generations would break these movies down from home videos.
2) This sort of thing is overlooked when it’s not a company that evokes hatred in certain quarters. George Lucas, in particular, loves to homage other movies, including his own. The Star Trek films and series have repeatedly reused F/X footage — notably the Klingon Bird-of-Prey explosion from ST6.
3) The original animations were based on filming live actors, an expensive process to recreate for a medium that was not terribly profitable. If you got it right the first time, why screw it up the second time?
Anyway, I’m looking forward to recovering more of my childhood through Abby. Although I think I might hold off on Watership Down until she’s old enough to handle it. 38 should be good.
Update: In other weird Disney criticism, I just remember this paragraph from Roger Ebert’s review of Snow White (which is the first movie I remember seeing in a theater):
Richard Schickel’s 1968 book The Disney Version points out Disney’s inspiration in providing his heroes and supporting characters with different centers of gravity. A heroine like Snow White will stand upright and tall. But all of the comic characters will make movements centered on and emanating from their posteriors. Rump-butting is commonplace in Disney films, and characters often fall on their behinds and spin around. Schickel; attributed this to some kind of Disney anal fixation, but I think Disney did it because it works: It makes the comic characters rounder, lower, softer, bouncier and funnier, and the personalities of all seven Dwarfs are built from the seat up.
Ebert has kids so I’m sure he can also appreciate that kids find butts and butt-related actions to be really really funny.
There’s a video out there — a long annoying video — that is a full bore attack on the Star Wars prequels. Even having slogged through most of it, I stand by what I previously said (and Robert’s insightful comment). I think the movies are decent to almost great. That they are not as good as the original trilogy doesn’t bother me; I didn’t expect them to be. A lot more works than doesn’t. And much of the anger is generational — i.e., most intense among those who grew up on the first trilogy.
I was actually mulling over making my own video response to the critique. But I can’t imagine where I’d get the time.
I will add one thing to my previous post: the prequel trilogy was a losing proposition from the start. Prequels, in general, do not do well. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single on that really worked except for the prequel half of The Godfather. Reboots sometimes work, but prequels rarely do.
The reason is not because prequel makers are idiots but because they are faced with not one but two impossible tacks. First, they have to match the quality of a film that was so good it merited a prequel. Even a small regression to the mean is inevitable. It’s just not easy to make two magnum opi.
Second, prequels are, by definition, narratively confined. We know where it’s going to end, so drama and surprise are out. More importantly, the plot ceases to flow from the characters. The characters become slaves to the plot. This is one of the biggest problems with the Star Wars prequels — characters like Padme have to serve more as walking plot devices than actual characters.
As a writer myself, I have often envisioned the end of the story only to find the characters marching it off in a different direction. With prequels, that freedom is lost.
Still, I enjoy Episode I-III for what they are. They do a reasonable job, although not as a good a job as they could. And I’ve never really understood how someone could be so enraged by them as to do things like make an annoying and deliberately obtuse 70-minute video.
Every year, I like to run an article looking ahead and behind, making fearless predictions for the year to come. I’ve written a long piece for the other site on the last year in politics called a Year in Fantasyland. 2009 was the year everyone in politics was delusional — from Democrats who though the nation turned liberal to Republicans who think they’ll ride the tea parties back into power.
I didn’t comment on it there, but my predictions from last year held up pretty well:
I was right that Obama’s popularity would fade as the economy continued to stagnate. And I was right that his foreign policy would be a competent version of Bush’s. I was also right that the economy would be slow to recover.
I was right about the Gators, the Steelers and the Yankees, which kind of scares me.
I was wrong on the international picture. Pakistan has stayed stable while Iran has reeled from protests. However, at least I was right on Iraq — last month saw zero combat deaths for the US, a stunning achievement that got no press at all.
I was wrong on entertainment. There were a solid number of good movies this year and four science fictions films — Star Trek, Avatar, Moon and District 9 — did well critically and financially. That’s the best year in Sci-Fi that I can recall, ever. I still am not watching TV, so I assume it hasn’t improved since it drove me away.
Anyway, 2010 is already two weeks old, so I’d better make my predictions so I can be as wrong as ever.
The economy will show signs of life, but unemployment will remain stubborn. By the end of the year, debt will be the single issue dominating the discussion. This will lead to…
The Republicans, as as result of the above, will gain seats in the Senate and House but fell short of taking back the majority.
This, along with the general mood of the nation, will shift Obama’s agenda slightly to the Right. My hope is that this will mean fiscal conservatism. My fear is that it will mean tougher stances on the War on Terror and crime.
Sarah Palin peaked in 2009 and 2010 will see her slowly revealed as an ignorant and somewhat deluded ideologue. She’s now got a commenting bit on Fox News, which is the first step in exposing who she really is. By the end of the year, the idea of her running for President will be laughable.
Colts over Vikings. Cardinals over Rangers. And parity continues to be the case in the College Football, with Boise State coming very close to cracking the championship game.
The Iranian regime will continue to totter, but will come just short of falling. Reform may be the only way the mullahs stay in power. Iraq will continue to wind down and Afghanistan will improve. Our attention will slowly turn toward Yemen and the disaster that is Africa.
Television will continue its spell in the doldrums, but late night shows will improve as the comedians get better and more comfortable with mocking Obama. The year at the movies does not look terribly impressive to me. Looking at the most anticipated films does not exactly fill me with enthusiasm. Clash of the Titans, in particular, looks sure to disappoint.
It will be a banner year for science. Again.
As much as 2009 was the year of fantasy, 2010 will be, I think and hope, the year of reality. And about time too.
It just occurred to me that I never went back over the 2007 or 2008 movies, like I did with 2006. Part of this is that between daughter, move and work, Sue and I are watching far fewer movies than we used to.
But part of it, I think, is that I deliberately spaced on 2007, since it wasn’t exactly a horrid year for movies, but it wasn’t a good year and it was a depressing year. The top ten movies with 25,000 votes on IMDB were No Country For Old Men, Sicko, the Bourne Ultimatum, Ratatouille, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, the Man From Earth, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Hot Fuzz and American Gangster. No Country for Old Men was well made but I find Comac McCarthy’s ugly view of humanity off-putting. Sicko, as fiction, was probably OK. As a “documentary”, it was a sick joke, as I frequently blogged. Into the Wild was quite good as was There Will Be Blood and Diving Bell. But again, all three were downer movies.
There are still a couple of films I want to see from 2007. But it’s significant than I look back at 2007, the only movies I have on DVD are The Simpsons and Potter 5 (both of which were “fan” purchases). If I had unlimited funds, I might buy several other films. But there were no films, none, that made me say You Must Buy This. If I had to list my favorite movies of 2007, they would probably be, in no particular order, with my IMDB rating listed:
No Country For Old Men: 8 There Will Be Blood: 8 Hot Fuzz: 7 Atonement: 8 Lust, Caution: 8 The Great Debaters: 7 Knocked Up: 7 Harry Potter 5: 8 Charlie Wilson’s War: 8 The Diving Bell and the Butterfly : 8 Into the Wild: 8
with the caveat that I have yet to see 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Sweeney Todd. Lots of depressing titles in that list. None of them rated the 9 or 10 that usually indicated greatness. And I don’t see that I would raise any of them after further reflection.
Anyway, the main reason I’m writing this is that I recently had a burst of movie watching to catch up on 2008 (yes, I know, it’s almost 2010 — you try watching movies with a 2-year-old). But looking back, I now think that 2008 was an exceptional year for movies
The top ten IMDB movies of 2008 were The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Slumdog Millionaire, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, In Bruges, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Let the Right One In, Iron Man and Changeling. I have seen all except Torino and Right One. I have the top three on blu-ray. All eight of the ones I have seen are very good and better than almost anything I saw in 2007.
Going further down the list reveals things like Frost/Nixon, Doubt and Pineapple Express — all good movies. Hell even fluff like Definitely, Maybe and Vicky Christian Barcelona wasn’t too bad. When a Ryan Reynolds movie doesn’t completely suck, it must be a good year.
In fact, what stimulated this post was a recent buying/renting spree that reminded me of just how good 2008 was.
Here are my top movies of 2008. All are rated at least an 8, except Dark Knight, which I rated a 9.
WALL-E – Pixar has yet to make a bad movie. Spectacular on blu-ray.
Slumdog Millionaire – Wonderfully directed and acted. Even my uncle liked it. Also spectacular on blu-ray. IMDB rating: 8.
The Wrestler – A downer movie, but one worth watching just for Mickey Rourke’s exceptional performance.
Frost/Nixon – I was on the edge of my seat for this one. A movie carried by its actors. I would have rated it higher except that Ron Howard performed his usual historical revisionism.
Doubt – Another acting tour de force. Watching Hoffman and Streep go at it is like watching two prize-fighters go into the 15th round.
Still need to see: Gran Torino, The Reader, Burn After Reading, Defiance, Valkyrie, Milk.
Hopefully, my 2009 review will be up before 2011. Now that I’m settled into State College, I’m getting a little more movie-watching done.