Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Top 10 Movies of 2008

It’s funny how things come full circle sometimes. 2007 was a year proclaimed by many critics to be a landmark period in cinema, and I can’t really disagree. The art-house films released were indisputably great, but as a connoisseur of summer blockbusters, I can’t deny a little feeling of disappointment last year. Well 2008 took things in the complete opposite direction with a ho-hum awards season and a fantastic lineup of summer spectacle including 2 films I already consider all-time classics that I expect to be watching regularly with my kids and grandkids.

10 The Wackness
This Sundance sensation, turned little-seen gem proved to be a fairly standard coming-of-age indie flick, but it won me over by dripping with two things I can’t get enough of: early 90’s hip hop and New York City. I also thought they did a great job selling the love story, which is something many many movies attempt and fail miserably at. Add to that a great performance by Sir Ben Kingsley as an aging pothead, and you get a movie that easily squeezes into my top 10 for the year.

9 Mongol
The first of a planned trilogy of films chronicling the rise and fall of Genghis Kahn, Mongol is a great example of how to properly do a historical epic. I wish I’d gotten to see this film on the big screen, because my 20 inch Polaroid did not do the kick-ass battle scenes justice, but I will be getting this on blu-ray soon enough. Now let’s just hope they get around to making the other two parts of this story.

8 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
At this point, I think it’s pretty well settled that David Fincher is one of the great filmmakers of this generation. Benjamin Button is certainly a departure for him, but his style lends itself just as well to a sentimental love story as it does for the dark and cynical movies he’s made. The story does bear a heavy resemblance to Forrest Gump, which admittedly dropped it a few slots for me, but I know which one of those is going to be getting more re-plays in my house.

7 JCVD
Oddly enough, I went to see this one as a bit of a novelty, when the Angelika promised a post-screening Q&A with Van Damme himself, but alas, the Muscles from Brussels did not show. To my pleasant surprise however, the movie turned out to be great. The film, which stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as washed up direct-to-video action hero, Jean-Claude Van Damme is funny, suspenseful, and surprisingly touching (i.e. everything you don’t expect out of a Van Damme movie). While I don’t expect this to resurrect any careers, it’s nice to see that great movies can sometimes come from unexpected places.

6-5 Iron Man & The Incredible Hulk (tie)
I know that Iron Man is the one that gets all the acclaim, but I thought Incredible Hulk did just as good a job bringing the Marvel Universe to the big screen. Both pictures give you exactly what you want from a movie starring their respective heroes and both were perfectly cast. I absolutely can’t wait to see what Marvel Studios does next and how they continue to build on this universe they’ve created.

4 Milk
Gus Van Sant’s biopic for the first gay man elected to a major public office in America is certainly conventional, but it does conventional very very well. The issues brought up by the film are both timely and (for some reason) divisive, but the central message of standing up for what you believe in and not crumbling to “the way things are” is one that Hollywood will never tire of making, and I’ll never tire of watching.

3 Let the Right One In
I find myself going back and forth on the genre of horror a lot. The overwhelming majority of the time I find myself somewhere between disinterested and completely bored by horror movies, but when I find one I like, I really tend to flip for it. Such was the case with this Swedish vampire flick. I love it when a director really nails the atmosphere in a horror movie, and Let the Right One In oozes atmosphere like a freshly gnawed open neck. Then there’s that finale that simultaneously made me want to recoil and jump up and cheer.

2 Wall E
I have to admit, in most years this would be my #1. The level of craft on display here is so far beyond just about anything I’ve seen in an animated picture (or any picture for that matter), and there are scenes and moments in the film that are absolutely breathtaking to behold. The movie is without a doubt the best love story and the best sci-fi film I’ve seen in years, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I found myself favorably comparing the film to classics like Star Wars and 2001 more than once as I watched it that first time. Am I gushing a little? Well brace yourself….

1 The Dark Knight
Ok, so this was pretty much the least suspenseful list I’ve ever written. If you’ve known me at least an hour, you know that I am hopelessly in love with comics, and The Dark Knight served as the genre’s magnum opus. I could go on and on about Heath Ledger’s singular performance, the choreography and staging of the highway chase, the note-perfect ending, and a million other things, but what really floors me about the film is the way that super-hero movies represented one thing before it was released, and now they represent something else. I have little doubt that the film does not have an Oscar prayer, but I am equally confident that years from now The Dark Knight will be remembered as THE movie that 2008 produced and one of the essential films of the decade.

Top 10 Most Anticipated Movies of 2009

So will 2009 produce anything that I go as nuts for as The Dark Knight and Wall-E? Probably not, but it’s always fun to speculate. Here’s what I’m looking forward to next year.

10 Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Hmmm, this is familiar. I seem to remember writing something about this one last year. You know the drill. Harry Potter, most consistent film series currently running, love the books, awesome cast, and so on and so forth.

9 Green Zone
This year, Generation Kill proved that it’s not impossible to make a great film about the still-in-progress Iraq War (just very unlikely). That said, I’m very interested to see what Paul Greengrass, the man behind United 93 and the Bourne series, has cooked up. Considering what he did with 9/11, I’m confident that he’s more than equipped to handle material just as tough.

8 Public Enemies
Michael Mann’s new film about the hunt for John Dillinger, starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Uh, yes please.

7 Shutter Island
Is there any need to explain why I’d be excited for a new Scorsese film? How about mentioning that it marks his fourth collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, a partnership that brought us The Aviator and The Departed. Yeah, I think that’ll do it.

6 Star Trek
I have a lot of respect for the original 1960’s Star Trek series as a groundbreaking and tremendously influential work of science fiction, but I’m at best lukewarm on the franchise in general, and I’m not a fan of the director, J.J. Abrams by any stretch of the imagination. So why am I excited for Star Trek? Well that trailer was pretty fantastic, and with Hollywood all franchise-crazy right now, my hope is that these movies can do what the Star Wars prequels failed with, and we’ll have a new series to look forward to every few summers.

5 The Lovely Bones
I’m a sucker for popcorn movies, and Peter Jackson is arguably the reigning king of popcorn cinema. His next film, The Lovely Bones, isn’t popcorn at all (it’s an adaptation of a novel about a young girl who is murdered and watches her family from heaven), but I’m still looking forward to seeing what the man who brought us Lord of the Rings and King Kong has up his sleeve.

4 Up
Pixar’s next film, Up seems like it has an almost Miyazaki-like vibe to it, and if that awesome trailer is any indication, the movie should be another homerun for the makers of the best animated movies in… well, pretty much ever.

3 Inglorious Basterds
2009 promises many movies that we thought would never be released, including Inglorious Basterds (no, that’s not a typo), Quentin Tarantino’s WW2 epic that I believe we first heard about sometime around the release of Pulp Fiction. Tarantino’s movies have gotten increasingly fetishistic, but if he can do for the war movie what he did for the samurai flick, then we are in for a treat.

2 Watchmen
A year ago I would’ve given a brief (yeah, probably not) primer of Watchmen for people who weren’t familiar, but things have changed in the past 12 months. I’ll just reiterate what everyone already knows. A film adaptation of the greatest comic book story of all time is finally being released in theaters (we hope), and as New York’s self-proclaimed #1 comic geek, you can be sure I will have my opening night tickets a month in advance and request that day off from work.

1 Avatar
Avatar marks the first major motion picture from director James Cameron since directing the biggest movie of all time over 10 years ago. I’m not the biggest fan of that boat movie, but Aliens? Terminator? The man is a geek-movie god. So all this alone would be enough to entice me, but the fact that the film is being made with technology that he has been developing in that decade span that’s even got guys like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas excited gives this one just enough of a push to top the greatest comic book ever written.