Gateway Cinephiles

The Best Films of 2008

Last year I waited until mid-January to post my Year-in-Review feature. Inevitably, there were a few 2007 films that I caught later that month–particularly There Will Be Blood and Michael Clayton–that probably should have been ranked among the best of the year. Nevertheless, this year you’re getting my assessment of 2008’s films on the final day of December. The risks of shutting out features that won’t arrive in St. Louis theaters until next year have to be weighed against the faded relevance of a 2008 Year-in-Review feature published in January of February. In the end, the decision was somewhat arbitrary, just as the marking of a “Year in Film” from January 1 to December 31 is fairly arbitrary. Ultimately, I relied on my sense that I have a fairly full quiver to draw from this year. Simply put, I saw a lot more films in their theatrical release in 2008 than I did in 2007, which has significantly enhanced my ability to assemble a respectable Year-in-Review feature.

So let’s get to it. I still have mixed feelings about last year’s self-imposed constraint of just five films, so this year I’m veering in the other direction. I’ve assembled a list of the best films of 2008 without any regard for a final number. I ended up with thirteen luminaries and thirteen honorable mentions. The top thirteen were those works that truly jumped out at me when I combed back over this year’s films. These features didn’t just stand out from the pack as cinematic achievements; they also possessed some elusive element that touched me personally. The films are listed alphabetically, because A) this method seemed to work well last year, B) I hate agonizing over rankings, and C) rankings are fairly ridiculous anyway.

To be considered, a film must have opened in America between January 1 and December 31, 2008 in wide, limited, or select city release. Film festival premieres don’t count, but even a one-week run in New York City does. Got it? My wife also offers up a capsule second opinion, including some contrarian tweaking of the Coens and Claude Chabrol. Let the nitpicking begin!

Go to the Best Films of 2008…

The Girl Next Door

Let the Right One In (Låt Den Rätte Komma In)
2008 (Sweden)
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Viewed: December 28, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Tomas Alfredson’s chilly, provocative vampire tale, Let the Right One In, is not for the faint of heart. It spatters blood and gore with the ugly abandon of a child’s vengeful dream. It dabbles at the edges of sexual norms, and dares to do so with characters on the cusp of adolescence. It plunges into the icy waters of schoolyard memories that cut to the quick: bullying, humiliation, loneliness, and that first crush, so unbelievably sweet and painful. Although it snuffles in the countless musty corners of the vampire myth and revels in camp horror silliness at times, Let the Right One In is no mere horror paint-by-numbers exercise. Rather, director Alfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide Linqvist–who adapted his own novel–take up the genre for its purest purpose, engaging a host of personal and social anxieties with a quiet, distinctly Scandinavian cunning. Serving as a parable, allegory, and hideously gleeful dose of wish fulfillment all rolled into one, this is an astonishingly powerful vampire film, in that leaves a thousand whirling thoughts in its wake, none of them about vampires.

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Quick Review: Frost/Nixon

Frost/Nixon
2008 (USA)
Director: Ron Howard
Viewed: December 28, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

It’s never been clear to me why the 1977 interviews between talk-show host David Frost and disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon necessitate a dramatic narrative. I haven’t seen Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon, but Ron Howard’s thoroughly unspectacular adaptation does little with the premise. Howard’s Frost/Nixon is a determinedly momentous dollop of prestige film confection, surprisingly witty and wistful in the moments when it stops earnestly clenching to its historical crib sheet. Unfortunately, it rarely coalesces into anything more profound than the immediate drama of the dueling journalist and politician. Frank Langella is grandly watchable, as always, as Dick Nixon, although it takes a minute to settle into his deliberately off-center stripe of mimicry. The film is most compelling when it plumbs the shared class resentments in Frost and Nixon, and its finest scene involves a drunken late-night phonecall where all the bad dreams of a decade boil out in one monologue. More often, however, it just plods along, a curious mix of reliable plotting and obscure context. Blessedly, I recently read Rick Perlstein’s epic political history, Nixonland. How might another thirtystomething fare with Frost/Nixon’s breezy treatment of Watergate’s minutia?

Quick Review: Doubt

Doubt
2008 (USA)
Director: John Patrick Shanley
Viewed: December 27, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

The appeal of Doubt is that of a slick, addictive puzzle. Shrugging off the more undemanding prospects within a tale of (maybe) Catholic pedophilia, John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his play creates something perplexing and remarkably vast within the fine grains of gestures and dialog, self-consciously provoking water-cooler mulling of the film’s legion of possibilities. Shanley’s disciplined and occasionally too-clever-by-half commitment to narrative ambiguity is Doubt’s selling point and its most irksome flaw. Ultimately, the film is a knickknack engineered to spark conversation, or at best a Rorschach test that will coax the viewer’s prejudices to the surface like so much greasy film. It’s ingenious in its way, but not really a film achievement, especially given Shanley’s preference for a decidedly flat theatrical presentation with the odd bit of visual punctuation. (Count the Dutch angle shots!) However, even a miscast Philip Seymour Hoffman rarely distracts from Doubt’s main attraction: a fierce, invigorating Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, whose withering glares and surprising vulnerability lend the film both a vividness and a dose of needed thematic depth. The veteran’s actress’s casual ease with such a contradictory protagonist bestows on Doubt its most fascinating tensions, particularly between vigilance and bigotry.

Fake But Accurate

2008 (USA)
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Viewed: November 23, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

[As the year draws to a close, I’ll be offering full reviews of some of the films that were featured at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival and which have now opened in wide or limited release.]

On the surface, The Wrestler is as dissimilar to Darren Aronofsky’s prior films as one could imagine. Assembled with an unflashy aesthetic and a mood of agonizing immediacy, Aronofsky’s camera hovers over the shoulder of waning (waned, really) professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, absorbing the sad details of his life with a quietly pitying gaze. Can this really be the same film-maker that gave us the grainy paranoia of Pi, the diabolic carnival of Requieum for a Dream, or the ecstatic mourning of the underrated The Fountain? Never mind the stylistic chasm that lies between those films and The Wrestler. Aronofsky’s pet themes are all present and accounted for: obsession, disintegration, and the sour mingling of bliss and misery, nostalgia and hope. Unquestionably, this is the director’s most emotionally intricate work to date. It’s hard to say whether this is in spite of, or due to, The Wrestler’s near absence of Aronofsky’s academic doodling, grandiose gestures, or relentless cinematic punctuation (which, I should add, aren’t unpleasant features in and of themselves). What is undeniable is that The Wrestler’s sorrowful heft rests on the director’s emergent sensitivity and particularly on a breathtaking performance from Mickey Rourke, for whom the phrase “perfectly cast” seems an understatement. It may be the performance of the year, and given that this year also gave us stunning turns from Juliette Binoche, Anamaria Marinca, Heath Ledger, and Sally Hawkins, that’s saying something.

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Another (Gay) Biopic

Milk
2008 (USA)
Director: Gus Van Sant
Viewed: December 15, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

There’s a frustrating ordinariness at work in Gus Van Sant’s Milk. Hewing to the narrative conventions and rhythms of a thousand undemanding, “uplifting” biographical films that have gone before, it invites a viewer sympathetic to the struggle for gay rights to mutter in outrage and nod appreciatively at the right moments. Excepting Sean Penn’s riveting performance as activist, politician, and martyr Harvey Milk, as well as Van Sant’s modest but invigorating visual daubings, Milk rarely strays from pedestrian biopic territory. The faux-shocks of male-on-male kissing and tastefully lit intimacies aside, this is easily Van Sant’s most determinedly accessible film in years, surpassing even Good Will Hunting. It’s a touch disappointing that Van Sant–one of the boldest and most sensitive living American auteurs, and an openly gay one at that–has created a work mostly indistinguishable from any other biopic. Forgoing thematic richness for simplistic, feel-good messaging, Milk asks merely that we follow along and shed a tear or two.

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Film Diary: Dear Zachary

2008 (USA)
Director: Kurt Kuenne
Viewed: December 9, 2008
Format: Television - MSNBC

Film Diary: Casino Royale

2006 (USA)
Director: Martin Campbell
Viewed: December 14, 2008
Format: Blu-ray - Sony (2007)

Questing for a Quota of Quality

Quantum of Solace
2008 (UK / USA)
Director: Marc Forster
Viewed: December 3, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Quantum of Solace is not the sequel that the refreshing, gripping Casino Royale deserved. Director Marc Forster has created a routine whoosh-boom contraption that reflects the bruised dazzle of CR, but unfortunately doesn’t generate much glint of its own. As a action film generically and a Bond film specifically, it’s serviceable. There are elaborate action sequences, a couple of beautiful women, a little bleeding-edge gadgetry, and a global conspiracy. However, Forster is merely spattering the Bond signifiers onto the screen without much grace or consideration for the quality of the components. The script–mangled by a committee of writers–is just wretched, so it’s a blessing that Daniel Craig carries on the pitch-perfect, smoldering portrayal he delivered in Casino Royale. His Bond is just as watchable in Quantum, despite the ludicrous lines he and his fellow performers are saddled with. It’s revealing that while the action in this twenty-second Bond film is mindless and colorless, Craig’s almost rebellious need for both evocative nuance and ferocity seduces us once again.

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