The Best Films of the 00s: 2008

by Tony Dayoub

This is a somewhat reworked repost of my 2008 end-of-year wrap-up, originally published on 1/23/09. The main difference is my inclusion of Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys) on the list instead of as an honorable mention. It replaces a television show (In Treatment) I included on the original list; not because I regret the original decision to include it, but because this series is really dedicated to discussing the decade's cinematic offerings.

I started blogging in 2008 so you should see a marked difference in my selection of films. This isn't by design, necessarily. 2008 just afforded me the opportunity to watch more movies through press screenings, screeners, and invitations to film festivals, now giving me additional access I wouldn't normally get in Atlanta. Some reminders: I cannot judge movies I haven't seen, so if you feel a film you like was unjustly left out, it might be that I haven't seen it; also, if I already wrote a review for it, I'll include a link back to the original review.

And now, in alphabetical order, the best films of 2008...

Best of 2008: The 10 Best Films of the Year

Wrapping up this week's Best of 2008 series, I present my top 10 films of the year. While the first half of 2008 was somewhat weak, I managed to find some underrated gems released during that period. And I think that the year in general was not as bad as some other recent ones. It was hard enough to narrow the list down to 10, so I didn't try to rank them in anything but alphabetical order. I also list 10 additional films I feel deserve an honorable mention. You might be surprised at how wide I cast my net in deeming some of these entries as films, but I prefer to be as inclusive as possible. Of course, my list's only requirement is that the film be released in the U.S. (in a festival, at the very least) sometime in 2008. If the title is hyperlinked, you'll also be able to see what I wrote when I first reviewed it which should be interesting as I've only been blogging for about a year. Feel free to post your own list, and agree - or even better - disagree with any of my selections. Che (Roadshow Edition), director Steven Soderbergh - A gutsy attempt to shed light on a polarizing figure, Che is actually two movies that must be seen together. The first part, The Argentine, is surprisingly the more marketable, despite being the one with potential for controversy. Shot like a traditional war movie it depicts Guevara as the hero of Cuba's revolution. The second part, Guerilla, is the more damning and difficult movie. Here, Guevara is a remote and weak character, stubbornly pursuing his lost cause. Together, they give us an understanding of why he is seen as both hero and monster by so many. Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale), dir. Arnaud Desplechin - Desplechin's look at family dynamics is the best film I saw this year. And even though this family shares some disdain for each other, one gets the feeling that they love each other in a way that one can understand only when one is part of such a group. Bitter and warm. Elegy, dir. Isabel Coixet - This is the first time I think I ever saw a sign of the real Ben Kingsley in a performance. And it was truly fascinating to watch. The story of a womanizer and his greatest character flaws - insecurity and possessiveness - was also illuminating. The Fall, dir. Tarsem Singh - Simply the most visually stunning film I've seen since Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Gran Torino, dir. Clint Eastwood - From a response I wrote to a reader's criticism at Some Came Running:

Allow me to reference "The Searchers" in order to make another point, and I preface this by asserting that I am in no way elevating "Gran Torino" to the same class as that classic film. In Ford's film, John Wayne's Ethan Edwards is the protagonist, is a racist, frequently uses epithets against the Native Americans in the film, yet still musters the tolerance to work with Jeff Hunter's Martin - a half-Native American - to pursue his quarry. For about 115 minutes of its running time (and years, in the film), Edwards is committed to killing his own niece (Natalie Wood) simply for being presumably defiled by the Native Americans who kidnapped her. And then in the last few minutes, Martin convinces Edwards to let her live. Happy ending, save for Edwards extricating himself from the life he can't be a part of due to his inherent and unresolved feelings for the Native Americans. The plot remarkably tracks similarly with "Gran Torino". So why can we give Ford a pass for the "bait-and-switch" at the end of "The Searchers"? Or the comic relief that Hank Worden's Mose so jarringly injects into every scene he's in? And why can we be so cavalier towards Ethan Edwards' own racism yet admire his heroism? Is it because the fact that Ford's film is a Western it adds another layer of distance or archetypal reduction to the events in "The Searchers"? Had "Gran Torino" been a Western with Native Americans replacing the Hmong would we even be having this conversation? I found Eastwood to be unusually direct and economical in his storytelling, a relative rarity in his recent films. And I applaud the fact that he trusts us to do the heavy lifting, rather than get anymore on-the-nose than the movie is already accused of being.

In Treatment, producer and developer, Rodrigo Garcia - Yeah, I know... it's a TV series. But its curious format is what made it compelling enough to list along with these fine films. Gabriel Byrne plays a psychologist with marital problems. Each weeknight, the show would follow him with a different patient, except for Friday when he would see his own psychologist (Dianne Wiest) to discuss his relationship issues. If you only cared to follow his sessions with Patient A, you'd only have to tune in on Monday nights; Patient B on Tuesday nights, etc. But for the complete picture, and to really get to know the psychologist, you would watch all week, as one session often impacted others during the week. A series that truly demonstrates what the long form is capable of exploring. Shotgun Stories, dir. Jeff Nichols - Nothing much happens in it... externally. But the internal is what's interesting in this one, and Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) acutely conveys so much of the devastation that one man can cause by leaving one family to start another. The Strangers, dir. Bryan Bertino - It is a truly terrifying film in which the camera forces you to be an unwilling accomplice. Not innovative per se, but that perspective has been sorely missed in this age of "torture porn". I'm gratified to see such a style make a comeback. Synecdoche, New York, dir. Charlie Kaufman - This mindbending indie pushes the limits of how far imagination can take you on a limited budget when a writer like Kaufman is given the keys to the car. Wall·E, dir. Andrew Stanton - So many of us were touched by this film, an even more amazing feat once one remembers that the characters are computer generated robots. Honorable Mention: Burn After Reading, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Happy-Go-Lucky, Iron Man, Rambo, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, L'Heure d'été (The Summer Hours), Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys), Waltz with Bashir, The Wrestler For more on the Best of 2008: Best of 2008: Animated Features Best of 2008: Performances and Creative Achievements Best of 2008: Oscar Nominations Open Thread

Movie Review: Gran Torino - Eastwood's Elegiac Rebirth

There is something sublime about Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino. Maybe it's seeing Eastwood return in front of the camera for a role that goes beyond our meager expectations into more nuanced territory. Or it might be how the film recalls much of his career in some surprising ways that perfectly sum up Eastwood's outlook on life and his career. Either way, Gran Torino is a beautiful Christmas gift from a prolific filmmaker (it's his second film in 3 months) that will prove to be one of the more important benchmarks in his filmography as both an actor and director. Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, retired, a recent widower, veteran of the Korean War. All indications at the start of the movie are that only his late wife understood him. He is alienated from his two sons and their families. A young priest, Father Janovich (Christopher Carley) is the only one reaching out to him, and that only because of a deathbed promise to Kowalski's wife. Kowalski, an apparently stereotypical "cranky old man", rebuffs him, preferring to rail against the decline of our country, wallowing in his racism, seething at his neighborhood's ghettoization by the influx of Hmong "barbarians". The one thing that seems to inspire pride in Kowalski is a 1972 mint-condition Ford Gran Torino. When Thao (Bee Vang), the Hmong boy next door, attempts to steal it as part of a gang initiation, this sets off a series of events that lead Kowalski to reexamine his hardened attitudes. Eastwood smartly dances around his tough-guy image to lure us into Torino's story. When he finds Thao breaking in, he corners the boy with his shotgun aimed squarely at him. Confronting the hopeless gang, who are so determined to prove to Thao that he has little chance of escaping his neighborhood that they'll kill to have him join the gang, Kowalski tells them that in Korea he used to stack up bodies of guys like them; use them as sandbags. You can be forgiven for expecting some Dirty Harry-type heroics at this point, except that Eastwood is smarter than that. Kowalski is lonely, seeking human contact, which he finds from Thao's sister, Sue (Ahney Her), a precocious teen who sees through his gruffness. In fact, an unspoken reason he connects with Sue is a repeated tendency to be more demanding of males than females, so you could add a bit of reverse-sexism to his list of faults. In a sense, Kowalski sees himself in many of the young males in this movie, and either finds them weak and wanting, as he does Thao and Father Janovich, or he punishes them when he sees his own failings magnified and manifested in them, as he does in the Hmong gang members. After the gang strikes out against his neighbors, Kowalski is unexpectedly cautious for an Eastwood character, waiting for his anger to subside in order to think clearly in calculating the correct degree of retaliation. Like in some of his earlier films, Eastwood explores the pitfalls of using violence to resolve conflicts. He again approaches it through the conduit of a violent man who stands in sharp relief to the weaker folks he must defend. Like Unforgiven's William Munny, Walt Kowalski is haunted by his killing in the past. Like Butch (Kevin Costner) in A Perfect World (1993), Kowalski is conscious of protecting the innocent from harm. And like Jimmy (Sean Penn) in Mystic River (2003), Harry Callahan, and any number of protagonists in Eastwood's films, Kowalski is not above taking matters into his own hands to avenge those in his care. The difference is that Kowalski and Eastwood are older, wiser, nearer to the end of their lives. They realize the consequences both moral and societal of committing murder. Eastwood plays on our expectations surrounding his vigilante persona, and inverts the outcome of the film to great effect. Gran Torino is an elegy to the gun-toting avenger of Eastwood's past, an exorcism of a persona that, at nearly 80 years of age, marks a rebirth for the actor-director. Gran Torino is in limited release, and opens across the country on January 9th.