BEFORE I FORGET: Writer-director-star's Jacques Nolot's measured, surprisingly affecting portrait of an aging gay hustler whose friends are dying off (as he himself enters his twenty-fourth year of being HIV-positive) and who lives in fear of losing the very memories that he's become mired in. A dry-eyed yet very moving experience, this French film arrived in theaters here in late summer and attracted about as much attention as most films do when they're not in English and include plenty of footage of men in their fifties and sixties with their clothes off.
CHOP SHOP Writer-director Rahmin Bahrani, who also made Man Push Cart and the forthcoming Goodbye Solo, makes movies about people different from those at the center of mainstream movie culture, hard-edged but sympathetic explorations of what it means to be economically shut out and culturally isolated. This is real Neo-Realism for our times, and it makes something like Wendy and Lucy look like the overpraised, pity-the-poor-waif hankie movie it is.
A CHRISTMAS TALE: Arnaud Desplechin's two-and-a-half-hour, bracingly grown-up domestic drama has all the things that make the holidays great: inherited terminal illness, drunken name-calling, childhood fantasies that would make Dr. Phil alert the FBI, adulterous yearnings, repressed family resentments, family resentments that couldn't be less repressed if they were spelled out on the side of the Goodyear blimp, and bitterly estranged siblings battling over which of them will get the bragging rights for the crucial donation to mom's bone marrow transplant. All that plus this classic Christmas Eve conversation between a drunken adult and a couple of kids: "Boys, you should go to bed." "We're waiting for Jesus." "But Jesus never existed." "We'll wait anyway. We want to see him"
THE CLASS: Laurent Cantet's improvisational take on the education system. See the Screengrab Q & A.
THE DARK KNIGHT: Because Heath Ledger's Joker convinced me that if I didn't include this one, he'd come back to talk to me about it. This one is also for the woman who was sitting behind me at the Empire 25 in Times Square, who, when Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon let his wife know that he hadn't really been killed by showing up on the doorstep in the middle of the night and the wife slapped him--Ka-POW!!-- across his sheepish face, said, "I know that's right!" and who, when the wife then grabbed him and kissed him while his cheek was still throbbing, whispered, "That's right, too."
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN: Fatih Akin's Head-On was one of my favorite movies of the decade. A pure charge of sadomasochistic romantic torment, it was by turns funny, angry, sexy, and heart-breaking, and it just seemed to flow as naturally as a spring brook. His newest multi-character drama isn't as ferociously inspired as that picture was; the plot is built on a string of coincidences, and Akin lets you hear the gears turning. But it's still one of the most remarkable dramas of the year, from a filmmaker who remains a man to watch.
THE ORDER OF MYTHS: Margaret Brown's jaw-dropping documentary about the parallel, racially segregated Mardi Gras cultures of Mobile, Alabama. Would make for the double feature of the year if paired with another remarkable documentary about race and Southern culture, Godfrey Cheshire's Moving Midway.
THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN: This entry is partly a mea culpa. I first saw Abdellatif Kechiche's Franco-Tunisian family drama, a sprawling film with a basically simple story about an aged immigrant trying to start up a restaurant, when it played last spring at the Tribeca Film Festival, and at the time, I wrote a review that emphasized my problems with it, especially my feeling that it sometimes left its performers stranded in needlessly meandering long takes that did not justify its running time of two and a half hours. I'm not quite ready to take all that back, but I have to admit that, in the six months since, parts of this movie have come back and played themselves over and over in my head when I was least expecting to think about them again, and that I can't say that about many other films I saw this year. It's just now opened commercially in select U.S. theaters, and damned if I don't feel like I ought to see it again now that I'm no longer suffering from festival fever. In the meantime, I sure wouldn't try to talk anyone else out of seeing it.
SYNECDOCHE, NY: The flaws of Charlie Kaufman's long, cluttered film don't look like much to me in comparison to its achievement: a comedy about all the ways that our obsessions with death and futility prevent us from getting anything done with the precious time we have here, which does full justice to this very depressing theme yet also manages to be very funny. People who fault Kaufman for excessive cleverness might as well be complaining that action movies promote antisocial behavior. Kaufman is clever; more than that, he's actually intelligent. And he's one of the few artists in movies actively grappling with what might just be one of the great concerns of the post-modern world: how do people smart enough to see all the reasons for believing that everything is hopeless stop using their intellligence to trip them themselves up?
WALL-E: The first quarter-hour or so of this Pixar haymaker constitute the most astonishing kind of triumph: a fully realized, scarily believable vision of Hell on Earth that I felt like I never wanted to leave, or at least never stop watching. If, once the plot kicks in, it settles down into a mere first-rate satirical animated love story with a kick, I'd hate for that to seem like a complaint.
HONORABLE MENTION: Dear Zachary: A Letter to His Son about His Father, Encounters at the End of the World, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Full Battle Rattle, The Go-Getter, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Iron Man, Jellyfish, Kung Fu Panda, Let the Right One In, Man on Wire, Milk, My Winnipeg, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Paranoid Park, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Slumdog Millionaire, Summer Palace, Taxi to the Dark Side, Trouble the Water, The Unforseen, Up the Yangtze, The Visitor, Water Lilies, Waltz with Bashir, The Witnesses, The Wrestler
BEST MOVIE RELEASED IN THE U.S. IN 2008 WHICH, FOR SOME REASON, EVERY CRITIC IN THE U.S. PUT ON HIS OR HER TEN-BEST LIST FOR 2007: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
BEST RESTORATION/BEST RE-ISSUE: The Exiles, Kent MacKenzie's legendary 1961 documentary-style look at the Native American subculture of Los Angeles's Bunker Hill. Not as great as the first two Godfather films, which also got a handsome and timely restoration, but that was going to happen anyway. This was more of a happy surprise.
BEST FILMED THEATER: the "avant-garde" production of Hamlet in Jellyfish; the kids' play in A Christmas Tale
BEST SCENE OF A COUPLE OF GUYS BURIED IN PROSTHETIC MAKE-UP GETTING BOOZED UP AND SINGING ALONG WITH BARRY MANILOW: Hellboy II: The Golden Army
REALLY GOOD TV: The HBO film Longford, Generation Kill, Breaking Bad, the last season of The Wire, the last episode of The Shield, Sarah Palin on the interview circuit, and The Drinky Crow Show on Adult Swim
GREAT PERFORMANCES: Jeffrey Wright, Columbus Short, and Eamonn Walker in Cadillac Records, Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Roussilllon, and Chiara Mastroianni in A Christmas Tale, Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch in Milk, Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, Danny McBride in The Foot Fist Way and Tropic Thunder, Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, Anil Kapoor and Irrfan Khan in Slumdog Millionaire, Juliette Binoche in The Flight of the Red Balloon, Viola Davis in Doubt, Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler, Melissa Leo in Frozen River, Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsen in Happy-Go-Lucky, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz in Vicki Christina Barcelona, Samantha Morton in Synecdoche, NY, Patricia Clarkson in Elegy and Married Life, Michelle Williams in Synecdoche, NY and Wendy and Lucy, Habib Boufares and Hafsia Herzi in The Secret of the Grain, James Franco in Pineapple Express, Richard Dreyfuss in W., Kristen Scott-Thomas in I've Loved You So Long, Kathryn Hahn in Step Brothers, Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, Tea Leone in Ghost Town, Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jane Lynch in Role Models, Richard Jenkins, Danai Jekesai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass in The Visitor, Ludivine Sagnier in Love Songs and A Girl Cut in Two, Andrew Garfield in Boy A, Famke Janssen in Turn the River, Greta Gerwig in Baghead, Jeanne Balibar in The Duchess of Langeais
BEST USE OF ZOOEY DESCHANEL: The unofficial muse of the Screengrab got the royal treatment in The Go-Getter, a too-little-seen road comedy that marked the writer-director feature debut of Martin Hynes, previously best known as the star of the 1999 short George Lucas in Love. The movie, which also features terrific work by Jena Malone, Maura Tierney, Bill Duke, Judy Greer, Nick Offerman, and its young star, Lou Taylor Pucci, doesn't introduce Deschanel's character unscreen until midway through, though she keeps in touch via cell phone, so the audience gets to have its collective ear tickled by the entrancing sound her voice before being premitted to gaze upon her ethereal loveliness. Slow to turn up in theaters and too quick to vacate them, The Go-Getter was actually completed in 2007, the same year that Deschanel appeared on the small screen in a guest appearance on the increasingly rotten Weeds that came to exactly nothing and as Dorothy as the stinko Wizard of Oz-as-sci-fi-fantasy miniseries Tin Man. This year, she graduated to big-studio movies that sought to exploit her freshness and talent in the name of shoring of has-been directors (in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening) and tired stars (in The Yes Man with Jim Carrey). No wonder the poor kid's looking to break into music.
SHE'S JUST A GIRL WHO CAN'T SAY NO: In Boarding Gate, Asia Argento ran drugs, escaped a hail of gunfire on a motorcycle, got drugged and raped (off-screen) by a bunch of Japanese businessmen, choked Michael Madsen with his own belt only to discover that he kind of enjoyed it, handcuffed Madsen and shot him in the head, and traveled to Hong Kong to find herself at the mercy of Kim Gordon, all nice work if you can get it. She also slipped into black underwear and matching fuck-me shoes to pose for the poster, holding a big-ass gun that she was going to have trouble concealing in that outfit. In The Last Mistress, she told dirty stories about herself and made eating ice cream look as if ought to count as a violation of the Patriot Act. In Mother of Tears, she swam through an underground sea of sewage and gore, got paralyzed, became psychic, witnessed the murders of her friends by ghouls who throttled women with their own intestines and shoved phallic pikes between their legs until the pointy ends came out their mouths, splattered a woman's head like a cantaloupe during a train ride, and hung out with Udo Kier. That last was one was directed by her father. I can't for the life of me decide what that makes it all better or even worse.
BEST INSIDE SNAPSHOT OF HOLLYWOOD: Nina Davenport's documentary Project Filmmaker began with the actor Liev Schreiber, who was planning to make his first film as a director, Everything Is Illluminated (2005), based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel. Schreiber was watching MTV when he saw a report about the effects of the Iraq War and saw a 25-year-old Iraqi, Muthana Mohmed, explaining that he wanted to be a filmmaker but the Americans just blew up the country's film school. In a fit of liberal guilt, Schrieber magnanimously sent word that this lad was to be found and hired and brought to the Czech Republic to work on the set of his major studio production. And Schreiber was so impressed with his own gesture that he further instructed that a documentary would be made to record this inspiring episode in annals of the brotherhood of man. The next thing anyone knew, there was a sullen, pissed-off young Iraqi on the set, telling Davenport's camera how freaked out he was to be "working for a Jewish director of a Jewish movie defending the Jewish theory"--that would appear to be the "theory" that the Holocaust happened--and bitterly complaining that while the most important scenes were being filmed, he was made to remain in a trailer, "mixing the snacks." Davenport seems a little overly taken with the notion that Muthana's story parallels that of Iraq itself since 2003, and way too taken with the idea that there's some larger comment to mae about the culture at large that metasized in Baghdad: at one point, she cuts from actual footage of carnage in Iraq to gruseomely made-up extras lying in heaps on the set of Doom, a movie based on a video game, whose star, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, arranged to sent Muthana to film school in London after the little fella's love affair with Liev Schreiber went the way of all flesh. By the end, Davenport herself is trying to explain to Mohmed that she can't continue to shell out money whenever he says he needs it and complaining that he's gotten his hands on her footage and is "holding it hostage." Early on, Liev Schreiber's associates say that Mohmed simply didn't understand the mechanics of how a smart operator makes himself "indispensible" to a director and so uses his time on a film set as a career stepping stone. But they can't say he didn't learn as he went along.
MOST EFFECTIVE MINDLESS SCARE MACHINE: The Strangers
SHITTIEST-LOOKING MOVIE OF THE YEAR: It used to be that back when filmmaking on almost any scale was an incredibly expensive, physically demanding enterprise, low-budget indie filmmakers and proud amateurs who either couldn't afford or achieve decent lighting or camerawork could be counted on to point to the butt-ugliness of their work as proof of their artistic integrity. But recent technological advances have made films that can't meet a certain level of visual polish harder and harder to come by. JCVD is worth pointing to as a real match of form and content, yoking its single, solitary, half-bright idea--let's get all meta with Jean-Claude Van Damme!--not just to a slack and unimaginative execution but to a visual style that makes it look as if Dario Argento had rubbed entrails all over the camera lens, or that the entire country of Belgium had neglected to pay its light bill. Here's to director Mabrouk el Mechri for kickin' it old school.
NOT ALL THAT: Baghead, Ballast, Be Kind Rewind, Che, Doubt, Frozen River, George Romero's Diary of the Dead, A Girl Cut in Two, Heartbeat Detector, I Serve the King of England, Momma's Man, The Pool, Rachel Getting Married, Shotgun Stories, Standard Operating Procedure, Stuck, Tell No One, Trannsiberian, W., Wendy and Lucy