I haven’t exactly rushed out my 2008 Top Ten list. Really, I just didn’t much feel like it. There are plenty of movies I truly admire, but somehow, my passion is just not inflamed as it should be at the end of the year.
Here are 21 runners up: Battle For Haditha, Beaufort, Beauty in Trouble, Blindness, Boy A, Cadillac Records, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Frozen River, Hancock, In Bruges, Let The Right One In, My Winnipeg, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, Paranoid Park, Seven Pounds, Speed Racer, Surfwise, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Visitor, and W.
How I feel about the films is one thing, but I want to pull out a couple of films for special mention, as they are more than just good films. The Wachowski’s Speed Racer is going to be one of the most influential films of its generation. Of course, we are already seeing other filmmakers on some of the same paths, like Gus Van Sant’s seam-unworried mixture of documentary and produced footage in Milk or Danny Boyle’s mélange of Slumdog Millionaire. But The Wachowskis are stunningly fearless and gifted… and too easily misunderstood or underthought.
Also, Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha kicks most other films based on this war’s ass. There are finally a few, like the thriller-as-near-doc The Hurt Locker (from Kathryn Bigalow, due in 2009), that are egoless enough to turn the complicated trick of creating drama out of a war that is still going on.
Gus van Sant’s Paranoid Park and Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In, and even, albeit more heavily handed fashion, Gabriele Muccino’s Seven Pounds offer a slow, gentle, ambitious, and demanding form of drama that somehow resonates well beyond a viewing in remarkably unexpected ways.
And now…
THE TOP TEN OF 2008
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/01/top_ten_2008.html