The Screengrab

2008 is already getting a rap as a bad year for filmmaking, which is entirely unfair -- it's merely a good year that has to contend with coming right after 2007, one of the greatest years in recent cinematic history.  It's also the first year where I spent the entire year as a critic living in a city that seems allergic to art films; when it came time to compile my top tens, which no doubt reflect my current cultural circumstances, I found I had seen fewer of the most highly praised films of the year than in any recent memory.  Putting this list together involved a lot of work on my part -- not the normal intellectual work of weighing the artistic merits of each movie and finding something to say about them, but the physical work of actually seeing the damn things, when a good half of them didn't play in my city.  This is especially true of the 2008 end-of-year releases.  But throught a combination of tactics, including but not limited to Netflix, filesharing, begging publicists for screeners, shuttling back and forth to Austin, and, in the case of my #1 pick, engaging in a quest that would, itself, make a pretty good movie, I managed to put together a list of my ten favorite films of the year.  I don't know how you loyal readers will take it -- I know that I'm at odds with a few of my Screengrab colleagues on at least a couple of these -- but here I stand, in a year that ain't as bad as it seemed.

10. MILK (Gus Van Sant, dir.)



Three decades too late, but this is the year of Harvey Milk:  the new album by an Athens-based band that bears the assassinated San Francisco supervisor’s name is one of the best of the year, as is Gus Van Sant’s biopic of the country’s first openly gay elected official.  Noted by Van Sant as the first movie of his return to mainstream filmmaking, Milk has been criticized for taking a straightforward approach rather than showcasing the director’s more experimental side, but, like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, it largely succeeds because it lets the flashy stylistic touches take a back seat to what is, after all, one of the most compelling political stories of the American century.  Sean Penn is rightly getting props for his terrific performance as Harvey Milk; it’s a career-redeeming showing after nearly a decade of missteps.  But no one should ignore the excellent supporting performance, especially those of James Franco as Milk’s partner Scott Smith and Josh Brolin as the tortured killer Dan White.   Elegant, appealing, timely and persuasive without being preachy, Milk is one of the best biopics of recent vintage.

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Ballast, which was made in rural Mississippi with a small cast of non-professional actors, most of them African-American, begins with Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.), who is discovered sitting in his living room in shock, with the body of his twin brother, a suicide, lying in bed in the other room. For a while, the movie cuts back and forth between Lawrence's sad story and the troubles of twelve-year-old James (JimMyron Ross) and his indulgent single mother Marlee (Tarra Riggs), without at first making it clear how their lives are connected. Bored and lonely, James hooks up with an older group of drug dealers and begins making drops for them on his bike. He also acquires a gun and begins seriously acting out, at one point barging in on Lawrence in his home and robbing him, though Lawrence is so far lost in his depressive misery that it feels a little off applying so active a verb as "robbing" to anything that could be done to him; sticking a gat in his face is like yelling at a dead dog to heel. Eventually, things go very wrong with James and his new friends, and as the increasingly desperate Marlee begins to flail out looking for a way to keep herself and her son safe, the central trio collide with a bang.

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