The Oscars were pretty cool this year; I really liked the bit with using former winners as presenters. I was going to make my standard snide remark about the Academy having no taste in movies, but after making the list below, I found to my horror that many of them had, in face, received an Oscar or two. Here, in no particular order is a list of my favorite movies of 2008. Not necessarily the best, just my visceral favorites. What’s yours?
Hellboy II — Beautiful production design, great makeup, interesting characters, good one-liners. Sure, moral ambiguity with a darkly admirable villain and petty, petulant heroes has been done to death, but what hasn’t?
Vicky Cristina Barcelona — Sure, sure, you think I just put this movie here because it has Scarlet Johansson making out with Penelope Cruz, but that’s only half the story. The other half is that it’s a stunningly beautiful movie with colors and textures that make my eyes happy.
Baghead — Mumblecore slacker horror moviemaking satire relationship flick. The unspeakable truth of low-budget indie flicks is that the acting mostly sucks ass. Not here, man, not here. Of course, it’s an Austin flick, so I may be partial.
WALL-E — Top-notch animation and a great story are par for the Pixar course, but I like this movie because it is so intensely visual–most of the interesting stuff in the movie happen without any dialogue at all. That’s a rare thing in movies, and it works here as it does in a couple of my other favorites, I am Legend or The Scent of Green Papaya.
Batman: The Dark Knight — This is really a so-so movie. “What we’ll do is, we’ll move the shenanigans of the past eight years into a fictional setting, and construct all these situations that show the moral conundrums the current global environment poses, and it’ll be all allegorical and stuff”. Meh. Been done before, whatever, blah blah blah. At least they blew up a major character, so that was unexpected, for Hollywood at least. Really, the reason this movie is on the list is Ledger’s Joker. It’s not because he’s dead–it was just one hell of a performance. Lip-smacking creepy scary crazy louche fantastic is what it was. Heath ledger made Jack Nicholson look like a chump, and that’s no mean feat.
Smart People – Dennis Quaid does a very believable turn as a socially challenged professor, Ellen Page proves she’s can play more than one note as his daughter, and Thomas Haden Church is hilarious as his slacker brother. Sarah Jessica Parker puts in a solid performance too. The movie itself is like Little Miss Sunshine without the sap, the talke of a semi-functional family that works, except when it doesn’t. What I found really interesting about it was the really geeky, intellectual voice that motivates all the dialog.
Rambo — This is the bloodiest, most brutal movie I’ve ever seen. That’s why it’s on my list of favorites: because I spent the whole movie going “Whoa, FUCK! Did you just see that? I can’t even believe I just saw that.” It’s like Stallone was worried people thought he’d gone soft in his old age, so instead he just decided to sit down with a nice Chianti, throw a baby or two on the fire, and write a movie so over-the-top violent that it would set a new benchmark for deaths per minute.
In Bruges — A sort of thinking man’s action flick. A bit heartless, perhaps, but not everything has to be about heart. The performances are all smooth, the dialog pitch-perfect, and the plot seamless. It is in many parts laugh-out-loud funny, and never seems to take itself too seriously.
Body of Lies — I’m a sucker for spy flicks, and I’m a sucker for Ridley Scott flicks, and I’ve never seen a bad movie with Leonardo di Caprio in it. This movie is all three. ’nuff said.
W — I fucking hate George Bush, and this film managed to make him in some ways sympathetic without making him a total moron, which is a good trick. It does make him look pretty bad, though, and I like that; it uses his own quotes and footage to do it, too, which is genius of Tina-Fey-as-Sarah-Palin caliber.
