2008 - The Year in Movies

2008 fell a bit short of 2007, both number- and quality-wise. I blame the numbers largely on my discovery of Hulu, and all of the Joss Whedon it has to offer (and Burn Notice! Burn Notice is fantastic!). My total number of new films watched in 2008, not including TV shows or re-watches?

109.

In that number, there was a slightly smaller proportion of American films than last year – about 64, not counting international co-productions. I branched out with the Europeans, with films from Romania, Sweden and Belgium alongside the more typical French and UK stuff. I also saw more Canadian movies, in part due to my growing love for Guy Maddin. I’m still a little burnt out on Bollywood, though the excellent Veer-Zaara may have helped turn that around. (Sorry for the lack of a formal review on that one, but in short – I loved it.) I’ve had my interest in Japanese film similarly re-awakened by Tokyo Sonata. And by this point, if you’ve made a half-decent vampire movie, I’ve probably seen it.

Overall, I was uninspired by most of what I saw in theaters, with the exception of some 2007 holdovers that I didn’t get a chance to see until the start of the new year. Here’s a shortlist of some of my favorite films watched in 2008, in alphabetical order –

4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Brief Encounter
Le Doulos
Exotica
Funny Games (original version)
Gerry
The Insect Woman
Into Great Silence
Iron Man
Last Year at Marienbad
Let the Right One In
The Lives of Others
My Brilliant Career
My Winnipeg
There Will Be Blood
Wristcutters – A Love Story

As for the stuff that I didn’t like . . . well, I watched a lot of crap this year. I’m going to let some of the direct-to-DVD stuff like The Lazarus Project slide, because no one expects anything from movies like that. And though I saw BOTH Mr. Brooks and The Number 23 this year, I can’t say that they were the worst things I watched, because, like the remake of The Wicker Man, they’re just too funny to hate. However, the latest Body Snatchers movie, The Invasion, was both dull and angry-making, due to the complete cop-out at the end. And I intensely disliked The Darjeeling Limited, production values be damned, because Anderson’s little-boy-lost oeuvre has really started to grate. But for sheer worst of the year? The movie I most likely wouldn’t watch again if you paid me to? National Treasure: Book of Secrets managed to be boring, moronic, entirely too long, and a career low for Helen Mirren. La vie en rose frustrated me so much that I still can’t quite believe I watched the whole thing. But neither of these takes last place, because this year we had the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise. Officially, hands-down, my least favorite movie of the year. Worse than Lost Boys 2!

Then we come to those films that you really, really wanted to be better than they were. Like Redbelt, which, despite the excellence of Chiwetel Ejiofor, was ultimately a letdown. I’m probably one of the only people I know who expected more from Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, but for a movie about punk Scottish cannibals fighting Medieval knights, it was surprisingly dull. Be Kind Rewind fell pretty flat, and Fido took an inspired premise but failed to push it far enough. Then there was Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which took my Marienbad-inspired interest in Alain Resnais and slowly suffocated it under endless montage sequences.

Surprises? Probably the biggest one was the aforementioned Wristcutters, which charmed me enough to land on my bests list. I also quite liked In Bruges, despite my general aversion to Colin Farrell. Year of the Dog also took an actor I don’t care for – Molly Shannon – and created a character for her that was both sweet and quite melancholy. The Signal and JCVD both turned genre on its head, and though neither was entirely successful, they were two of the more memorable films of the year.

Looking through my list of 109 films, I probably have a lot more to say about the year that was, but more than anything I’m looking towards 2009, hoping that at the very least, its offerings will be more interesting than what American theaters had for us this year. I mean – not one, but TWO mall-cop comedies? How can 2009 not be awesome?

As luck would have it, this is my 200th post. I don't think I ever expected filmsnack to enjoy this long a life. Thanks, everyone for reading and commenting.