2008 movie ratings (ranked)
Submitted by lukeprog on Fri, 01/02/2009 - 13:39
Tags:
- (2008 premieres only)
- to watch: A Christmas Tale, Liverpool, Elegy
- 7.2 Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman
- 6.5 Hunger, Steve McQueen
- 6.4 Gomorra, Matteo Garrone
- 6.2 The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky
- 6.1 Wall-E, Andrew Stanton
- 6.1 Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman
- 6.0 Milk, Gus van Sant
- 6.0 Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh
- 6.0 Doubt, John Patrick Shanley
- 6.0 Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme
- Meh
- Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard
- Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt
- The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan
- Kung Fu Panda, Mark Osborne
- Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry
- Burn After Reading, Joel Coen
- Vicki Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen
- Frozen River, Courtney Hunt
- No
- Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle
- The Reader, Stephen Daldry
- Australia, Baz Luhrmann
- W., Oliver Stone
- Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher
- God on Trial, Andy DeEmmony
- Yes Man, Peyton Reed
- Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Nicholas Stoller
- Leatherheads, George Clooney
- Ata Whenua, Fiordland
- In Bruges, Martin McDonagh
- Three Monkeys, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Steven Spielberg
- Iron Man, Jon Favreau
- Religulous, Bill Maher
- Pineapple Express, David Gordon Green
- Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood
Cloned From:
Just wondering, what about The Wrestler made it rank as the second-best film of the year on your scale? I thought it was great and very affecting, but it didn't feel as incredibly original as your picks tend to be.
Not that 6.4 is a particularly high score, but you usually hold even your 6's to a high standard of groundbreakingness.
By the way, you need to see Synecdoche.
I think you've got my opinion nailed already. It's a very solid movie, and is pretty rare movie just in virtue of avoiding the mistakes so common in nearly all movies ever made. "6.4" tells you more about the movie than "2nd best of the year," since so far as I can tell this year has been spectacularly shitty for movies. 6.4 put it on par with, for example, Gangs of New York and Memories of Murder.
But actually, I think you're right; it's not even as good as those. I'll probably drop its rating on the next update. Maybe I was just desperate for something to hit the mid-6 range, and overestimated its value on my scale. (I saw The Wrestler before I saw Gomorra, which is genuinely solid hyperlink film that manages to be affecting and unpretentious.)
Anyway, I'm flattered you would notice such a thing.
I can't wait for Synecdoche!
BTW, I'm awaiting your Marienbad review. You have a knack for saying something interesting about even such difficult films as that.
I feel like a lot of people think this has been a terrible year for movies, but I think it's been okay. It does seem like there's much less of a crop of brilliant small independent films than usual, and the standard Oscar fare (which IMHO has been pretty strong the past couple years) has been weaker, methinks. But the year did offer a couple of amazing summer blockbusters as well as some great movies that sort of defy characterization (indeed, like Synecdoche).
You should also give Frozen River a shot if you get a chance. I'm not quite sure what you'll think of it, but I think it's one of the better movies of the year. Certainly I think it is at least on par with The Wrestler in terms of its sparse, gritty filmmaking and avoidance of those common mistakes.
Ooh, pressure's on for the Marienbad review... :-)
Not "pressure," encouragement!
Cool, I hadn't heard of Frozen River.
Dark Knight was pretty good for a blockbuster. But I never got the hype around Iron Man, which for me was on par with Fantastic Four.
Sorry, I thought I had responded to this post.
I liked Iron Man and defended my praise of it here, but I agree with you that the film was pretty overhyped. I think critics were just eager to climb on board Robert Downey Jr.'s triumphant resurrection and may have gotten a little carried away with their praise. Still, I think Iron Man had more than enough interesting elements to push it above Fantastic Four. Not that I've seen Fantastic Four, I'm just guessing.
Still, it's a movie that succeeds on pretty standard terms, not one that tries something totally original, and I agree that this year has been lacking for films like that. Maybe Waltz with Bashir will change my mind...
I wouldn't have imagined you'd have liked Slumdog - I personally hated it. What did you like about it?
Funny you should say that - in my next update, which I haven't uploaded - the movie has dropped to No.
I keep wobbling on that one. On one hand it is a technically marvelous movie, and has no major plot problems. That alone makes it better than nearly all movies made each year. On the other hand it is cliche as heck and has nothing to say about anything. At first I gave it the benefit of the doubt but more and more these days I'm just going with my gut (not a method I recommend for truth or ethics, but for artistic opinion it's all we've got), and my gut told me that movie sucked.
So thanks for posting - now I'm motivated to upload my updates before anyone else thinks I liked Slumdog. :)
I'm honestly really baffled by the number of intelligent film viewers who think that Slumdog was just shallow escapism. Nothing to say about anything? I personal thought the movie was really insightful in its analysis of Indian culture. I've always wondered why the Indian film industry developed the way that it did; with Hollywood getting such a reputation for pure escapism, why did this very different country take it a step further and create a film industry based on the most overblown, song-and-dancey eye candy ever to grace celluloid? What about Indian culture makes that appealing, what role does it play in their lives? Slumdog expounds on these questions and more. I honestly didn't know enough about Mumbai to know how bad things are there for such a huge percentage of the population, and why so many of the county's lower classes need this form of entertainment, because otherwise they'll go insane thinking about how shitty their lives are. To a certain extent it examines these things from the perspective of a Western audience, including some fairly gruesomely violent scenes that actually made many filmgoers in India find the movie too unpleasant to watch. The basic story itself has been done before, sure, but the movie is the ultimate melding of East and West: an explosion of Western filmmaking, Bollywood filmmaking, and Bollywood viewed through a Western lens, in a way I've never seen before. If you think that's cliche and shallow, we'll have to agree to disagree.
My friends in India tell me profound, shocking, and insightful things about India all the time - things that could easily be put into a movie - but nothing like that is found in Slumdog. Instead, the movie is an archetypal fairy tale with irrelevant and interchangeable hero hurdles (orphan abuse, friend lost to the mob, beatings by corrupt cops), context (Mumbai), romance, and everything else. The "insightful" analysis of Indian culture was basically just that it was poor and dirty.
Even in its fairy-tale structure it had hundreds of opportunities to say something thoughtful, but took almost none of them. It could have taken a moment to say something about the neo-colonialism of call centers, the way India invests in the space program while its cities have no sanitation, the extent of religious pluralism and syncretism in India, the perverse family values that result from too many babies and not enough food - all of these and a hundred more were basically set up for Boyle by his own story, but instead he was too busy showing his hero getting beaten up or chased or DUN DUN DUHN! answering questions on a game show.
True, it's more focused on commenting on Indian culture from a cinematic/artistic perspective (making good use of the tropes that you mention, which I don't think are meant to be taken purely at face value) than from a perspective of actual social commentary on something that most of its Western viewers wouldn't understand. To me Jamal represented that spirit that many Indians seem to inhabit, of being plucky and hopeful (with a sense of optimism perhaps inspired by escapist entertainment) amidst desperate times, where one's surroundings are, yes, poor and dirty, but also where one must deal with witnessing gruesome scenes of abuse before one has even hit puberty and must develop enough street-smarts to be able to get away when things get particularly bad. I will admit that perhaps if I had friends who lived in India or knew more about Indian life, the film may have been less eye-opening for me personally, but I think a film that presents (1) a well made, entertaining story; (2) a dark underbelly that is rarely seen in such stories; (3) a commentary on the role that these stories play in the lives of its characters; and (4) a visual style featuring dazzling, exciting cinematography and editing that manages to feel both Eastern- and Western-influenced, cannot be simply dismissed as shallow.
Perhaps in our self-referential age, it disappoints to hear me talk about Slumdog as basically another film about films, but that doesn't mean it's about nothing. It sort of seems to me like an Indian Pulp Fiction in the way that it trots out character types that are sort of in a rut and adds new layers to them. Okay, we've seen hit men kill, and we've seen Bollywood heroes dance, but what else do they do? Sure, they spend some time killing and dancing in their respective movies, but each movie adds new layers to these familiar tropes.
You did not just call Slumdog Millionaire an Indian Pulp Fiction.
:)
I think I did. I think I went there.
Yes, there is a KrishnaTube.
I am so there.