Documentaries of 2008

05.) Surfwise
04.) Operation Filmmaker
03.) Encounters at the End of the World
02.) Man On Wire
01.) Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

#1

A Christmas Tale
Arnaud Desplechin

Arnaud Desplechin's film is a beautiful mess. Rootless and toneless, the near two and a half hour film bounces along, playing with story lines like an attention deficit child. Despite the film's ramblings, there is a core, though one that's not easy to pinpoint. It's a movie where a lot happens but then again nothing happens. A family film (a Christmas film) that's unsentimental, character expose their issues but return to their individuals lives much in the same way they arrived. It's an emotionally dense film yet charming and funny and even a bit whimsical. It's an intellectual movie but one that doesn't force you to overthink. It's a lot of things working in perfect harmony together.

#2

Wall-E
Andrew Stanton

Blanket statements are tossed around when people talk about the movies. You'll hear stuff like "I don't like to watch movies in black & white" or "I'm not gonna watch that, it has subtitles. If I wanted to read I would have picked up a book." Seldom, however, is the component being railed upon the actual reason behind why someone might not like a movie. In the case of Wall-E, that nearly silent first act was cause for concern for some: "My kid ain't gonna be able to sit through that!" Starting a movie with thirty minutes of silence interspersed with songs from Hello Dolly was Pixar's way of raising the degree of difficulty and ignoring parents that are worried that their restless kids couldn't handle it: "Sit down and relax, Pixar wouldn't release an arthouse film."

Well they kind of did. Pixar could rest on their laurels and release just about anything and still make money. Instead they released their most ambitious film yet. A thought piece of a movie intended to also sell plush toys. A movie for children that skewered our country's over-consumption and ambivalence towards the environment more so than any "serious" work.

Admitting to liking Pixar movies is so in right now. It's like a way to say that you're comfortable in your own skin by admitting you like cartoons. Admitting to liking Wall-E is a little more than that. This thing is a masterpiece and no "animated feature" qualification is needed.

#3

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days
Cristian Mungiu

Romania has become fertile ground for international arthouse cinema and nowhere else in the world is there such stylistic unity as to suggest a national film movement. Like 12:08 East of Bucharest and Death of Mr. Lazerescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is stripped down to nothing, leaving interpretive wiggle room for the birds.

Mungiu's film is one tragic and dreadful day in the life of pregnant student planning an abortion and her roommate who agrees to help. Since having an abortion in Communist Romania was against the law, the girls are forced to get one on the black market, turning a difficult situation into an unbearable one. This is a document of life in an oppressed society, where laws are still broken but must go to hell and back to do so.

Mungiu pulls no punches to the point of being unsympathetic to his viewer. If it wasn't executed this well it would have been exploitative. Just utterly devastating.

#4

Let the Right One In
Tomas Alfredson

What people keep talking about when discussing this Alfredson's precise Let the Right One In is how many genres it covers. You'll hear how it's a vampire flick and a coming of age tale, and some will even discuss it's Swedish origin as if that were a genre onto itself as well.

Treating it as if it were a minor work that succeeds almost entirely because of the way Alfredson mixes doesn't give the film the credit it deserves. Like Paranoid Park, Let the Right One In is story on the tribulations of growing up the outcast and the desire to be something different. While yes, there is a vampire involved, Alfredson never betrays the film's emotional core by dwelling on this horror subplot. It's more like, "yea Eli is a vampire, she needs to suck blood from time to time. Can we talk about something else now?"

#5

The Dark Knight
Christopher Nolan

Forgetting the obvious for a second - Heath Ledger's one for the ages performance and two "WEEEE!!!!" action sequences, what I found most impressive was how Christopher Nolan has, from scratch, created a world both completely realistic and original. It's of course a superhero movie and Gotham is basically a toontown. The possibilities were endless, as Joel Schumacher would regrettably point out. The Gotham Christian Bale's Batman lives in has a history, diverse neighborhoods, a working government. I guess, Gotham and its citizens are the main characters here and Nolan has just chosen to follow Batman around.

I would guess my interest in the creation of cities would be of minor concern to most. The Dark Knight was the event movie of the year; the type that you'd go see at 2 am on a Wednesday before work. It was a billion dollar earner that met almost everyone's (including my way up in the sky) expectations that, for some, was a little bit more.

i.e. "Enthralling...An ambitious, full-bodied crime epic of gratifying scope and moral complexity, this is seriously brainy pop entertainment that satisfies every expectation raised by its hit predecessor and then some."

While I would agree that The Dark Knight was more thought provoking than your average Summer Blockbuster, the execution was a bit off. I think the Nolans had a tough time weaving all of these ideas about terror, evil, heroism and vigilantism into a movie that has to have an action beat every twenty minutes. Which is why, despite being awesome, it sits at number 5.

#6

The Edge of Heaven
Fatih Akin

Akin's multi-narrative film about misunderstanding and loss is a subtle look at the collisions that take place as our world gets smaller. In the film, there are Turks living in Germany and Germans living in Turkey, there's an argument about the EU and revolutionaries in Turkey, there's a Turk killed in Germany and a German killed in Turkey and of course all of this, in the end, becomes one story.

Edge of Heaven has plenty in common with Babel, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film about an interconnected world still hampered by many barriers. While Inarritu's film stumbles over itself trying to connect the stories, Akin's movie isn't dependent on a gimmicky reveal intertwining the threads. It's two stories, telling two side of the same coin and it's inconsequential whether those sides come together at all.

#7

Chop Shop
Ramin Bahrani

After watching Chop Shop, you'd think director Ramin Bahrani was recycling stories from his youth, cribbing dialogue from his days spent at the Iron Triangle – the Queens neighborhood of industry, expressways, and auto-repair junkyards the film takes place. But Bahrani was raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and although he went to Columbia, I'm gonna presume that he didn't spend a lot of time in this neighborhood. Where then, did the ingredients for his slice of life come from, and how does it taste so true?

#8

Slumdog Millionaire
Danny Boyle

After coming out of nowhere (ok, it was the Toronto Film Festival) to position itself as the frontrunner in the best picture horserace, Slumdog was in the backlash stage of its existence when I went to see it. "The premise was flimsy and my god isn't it cheesy."

While many might have choked up the sickly sweet mixture of destined love and game show theatrics, I didn't mind it. The story is compelling, in the same way that City of God is – the life in a third-world slum is rife with violence, crime and corruption. And I don't mind the business about a predestined tale, as a number of films are setup on a similar structure. It's not the best picture of the year (although it'll win that prize at the academy awards) but it's far better than Gladiator. Danny Boyle is a good director, he deserves this.

#9

Paranoid Park
Gus Van Sant

Like Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant has adopted a one for me one for you strategy. But while Soderbergh's for you films have been the uber-successful Ocean's # films, Gus Van Sant sells out to studios in the form of biopics of gay activists (he also directed Milk this year). What's frustrating about GVS is that you'd wish he add more experiment into straight narratives.

Conversely, what I've always wanted was a little more narrative in his experiments. Paranoid Park is Van Sant's most accessible of experimental projects. Van Sant's avant garde tendencies have always manifested themselves in a sort of filmmaking by slacker style, which suits Paranoid Park's skateboarder coming of age tale nicely. Alex, our protagonist, accidentally finds himself in more trouble than anyone could handle. How he deals with it, largely through internal turmoil veiled by slacker indifference is poignant - more so than most films in this genre. Like I wrote when the movie was first released, this is a movie that simultaneously bores you to death while gripping you with a clenched fist, and I meant that as a compliment.

Bonus points for the GVS entourage cameo, where at a backyard bbq in Queens, everyone knew what "a new Gus Van Sant movie" is and was really excited by it.

#10

Boy A
John Crowley

George Lucas once famously (infamously?) quipped "any idiot can get sympathy from an audience, just grab a kitten and wring its neck." There are a number of these movies released a year – those that wish to trade you over-the-top melancholy for your empathy. Seldom do you actually care about anybody on the screen.

As the story of a young man reentering society from his prison stay resulting from a tragic crime he committed as a child, I imagine Boy A could have been one of those movies. But because of Andrew Hatfield's head-turning performance, you have a character that you actually care about, like you were watching a documentary of one of your buddies.

Maybe this is supposed to be some sort of a comment on the prison rehabilitation system but who cares?

2008: The Pictures

In cinema, 2007 was a druggy high and 2008 was the come down. There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly were insta-classics and their place on any decade top 10 list should be ensured. But nearly any year, particularly in recent memory, when compared with 2007 will look pretty lackluster. All in all, 2008 was a pretty decent year at the Cineplex. The foreign cinemas in particular were responsible for some wonderful and challenging films. With that said, I found most of the prominent movies vying for the title Best Movie of the Year to be disappointing (The Wrestler), formulaic ho-hum (Frost/Nixon) or just plain bad (Rachel Getting Married). You'd find more risk-taking from of two big budget Summer blockbusters than you would in any of the movies to find themselves on the end of the year roll-call of awards contenders.

Like last year, I've compiled an impressive list (in it's own right) of movies I haven't had a chance to see. These movies are ranked by hunch:

10.) The Reader Che
09.) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
08.) Ballast
07.) Waltz with Bashir
06.) Wendy and Lucy
05.) I've Loved You So Long
04.) Happy Go Lucky
03.) Gomorrah
02.) Tell No One
01.) JCVD