THE BACKGROUND : 2008 was not a banner year in movies. As a matter of fact, looking back, it was pretty poor. Up until about a week ago, my top ten list had six movies on it. And I didn’t feel particularly great about a few of them.
Everybody has a different method for compiling a top ten list. My top ten list is not simply a number or another list, it’s the highest praise I can offer for a given project. My top ten list is a way of recognizing the best of the best. If 500 films are released in a given year, my top ten list highlights the movies that stood out, head-and-shoulders, above the rest. Sometimes there are more than ten films that fit this billing; rather than pull an Ebert and list the 69 best films of the year, I simply list the ten best of the year and cap it at that, leaving several deserving titles off the chart.
2008 gives me a different type of scenario: I am not entirely sure that there are five, let alone ten, movies out there that deserve the honor and privilege of making my top ten list. I couldn’t stand The Dark Knight, Iron Man was good, but not great, I wasn't a huge fan of Slumdog Millionaire, Gran Torino or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and biopics (like Milk, especially like Milk) drive me nuts.
I’m sure someone will read this list and e-mail me a profanity-laced diatribe to the effect of, “Wait a minute, you think The Lucky Ones is one of the year’s ten best films?” To which I will inevitably respond, “I acknowledge that it might be a weak top ten, but I couldn’t come up with any movies I liked better than it that weren’t already on the list.” Congratulations, The Lucky Ones and Neil Burger, I don’t think I have ever damned a project with fainter praise than that.* I’ll stop here before I write that The Lucky Ones might be similar in this regard to the Arizona Cardinals. Not only do I not want to link Burger's film with one of the most historically bad franchises in the NFL, but it would be a crime against nature and God to compare Rachel McAdams and Kurt Warner.
* In truth, I really did like The Lucky Ones. I thought it was a very well made film and I enjoyed watching it thoroughly. If I were to give it a letter grade, I’d teeter between a B+ and an A-. This is, however, not the type of film that normally makes a top ten list. 'Good but not great' films are the type of film that make the 'honorable mention' lists.
And if you need any further proof that 2008 was an unusual year in film, consider this: my top ten list features not one, but two films starring Colin Farrell, one film featuring a faceless blue creature, another with a robot who can't talk and my film of the year was written by and stars a morning dee-jay.
THE LIST :
10) THE LUCKY ONES director: Neil Burger Writer/director Neil Burger’s The Lucky Ones is a pleasant movie that reminded me, in the most positive sense, of a late-90s indie film. The entire movie feels as if it were shot stolen; there were numerous scenes in The Lucky Ones where I wondered whether there was anyone else on set besides the actors and the operator holding the camera. One such scene was shot by the side of a highway with dozens upon dozens of cars zooming by in the background. Knowing how small the budget was for The Lucky Ones, there wasn’t a chance in hell that they were picture cars. That level of reality is present throughout the film and gives the plot material a boost that a glossy investigation would never have. This is an interesting concept: benefitting from a small budget. Most interesting is that The Lucky Ones isn't the only film on this top ten list to have done so. (So did The Bank Job).
Tim Robbins, Michael Pena and Rachel McAdams star in The Lucky Ones as three Iraqi War veterans who end up taking a road trip across the United States when their flights are all cancelled at JFK because of huge blackout. Robbins and Pena’s performances are solid, but McAdams’ was the best of the year. Upbeat and relentlessly optimistic, in spite of whether circumstances dictate that level of positive thinking or not, McAdams made what could have been a very average role hers her. No actor/actress did more this year with less than McAdams did here.*
* I acknowledge that I am again damning this project with faint praise. I really did like this movie and McAdams' work in it. Really!
9) IN BRUGES director: Martin McDonagh While there might not have been 15-20 truly great movies released in 2008, there were an inordinate number of warm, soft, sweet films that came out. (The four warmest, softest and sweetest made this list: Kabluey, Leatherheads, Wall•E and The Hammer). In Bruges is most assuredly not one of these films.
On paper, writer/director Martin McDonagh’s story of two hitmen (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) hiding out in Bruges after a job gone bad is one hell of a dark comedy. One of the hitmen is fascinated by dwarves and impresses girls on first dates by confessing that he kills people for money. The other is a willing tourist who is hell bent on making the most of their unfortunate situation. The two advise fat people not to walk up to the top of a tower, get angry at people for not waving at them and have no problem delivering severe beatings to other people for having the temerity to ask them not to blow cigarette smoke in their faces.
In reality though, the movie is just dark. Farrell’s character is argumentative, severely depressed and suicidal; the combination of these three things is what propels the film’s emotional plot forward. Throw in a dead child and the year’s most animated sociopath (Ralph Fiennes) and In Bruges’ shadowy core is set. What makes McDonagh’s film so good is its contemplative nature and some of the year’s best dialogue. Sparkling with wit, intelligence and laugh out loud lines delivered in the most unexpected of places, In Bruges was a film that stayed with me for several days after I first screened it. High praise indeed.
8) KABLUEY director: Scott Prendergast Kabluey is an unusual movie in a very similar vein to P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (which I also thoroughly enjoyed). About halfway through Kabluey, I realized that I had no idea where it was going. I mean, I wasn’t quite sure what problem the lead was trying to resolve, nor did I understand why writer/director/star Scott Prendergast had created a movie about a thirty-something slacker who passes out fliers by the side of the highway… and I didn’t care. I was simply enraptured by the film. From the quick cutaway jokes, to the kids from hell, to one of the year’s most underrated performances courtesy of Lisa Kudrow, to Prendergast’s unusual plot material, I could not have been more entertained while watching Kabluey. I never knew what was coming next and the result was one of the most off-beat viewing experiences of the year.
7) PRIDE AND GLORY director: Gavin O'Connor The rule of thumb in literary circles is that there are only seven types of plots. The details may differ, the characters may change, but in broad strokes, there are only seven different stories that an author/director can tell. What truly separates one project from another isn’t its plot material, but how the plot material is handled and (in the medium of cinema) how expertly the interactions are shot.
The overarching plot of director Gavin O’Connor’s Pride and Glory is one that has most likely been seen before. It is a movie about corrupt cops. Corrupt New York City cops. I mean, it’s almost a genre to itself. What makes Pride and Glory stand out from amongst this crowd is that O’Connor seems well aware of the other movies in this realm and takes great pains to get his camera inside the lives of those involved in the corruption. Most surprisingly, the corrupt officers themselves are likable and genuinely worried about how their actions are going to impact themselves and their families.
Pride and Glory also benefits from one of the best combinations of plot material and directorial style in the last year. It’s possible there was a score to the film, but I don’t remember it. O’Connor ratcheted up the tension in the appropriate scenes by using different camera types, ably used long tracking shots to first draw the audience in and created one of the most tumultuous and sinister crowd sequences this side of Hotel Rwanda at the film's climax. The end result? One of the most professional and well-made movies of the year. Funny what happens when you put talented people on a project and then stay out of their way.
6) THE BANK JOB director: Roger Donaldson The Bank Job is an extreme rarity in today’s Hollywood. It is a very simple movie with one very simple goal: to tell the story of London’s most famous and profitable bank heist. With studios investing more and more money into their films and their subsequent P&A campaigns, movies are not often allowed to unfold organically and settle into their own unique comfort zone. One of the biggest gaps in logic in the studio system is that most studio executives feel that a project can’t succeed unless everyone in the audience is pleased.
This makes perfect sense on paper—you’re spending $200 million on a film, it had better satisfy everyone in order to maximize its earning potential—but the problem comes in the execution of this ideal... because you can’t satisfy everyone. It's an impossible goal. And when you try to satisfy everyone, all you get is a watered down version of a film that might have otherwise entertained a large swatch of people.
The Bank Job doesn’t aim to please all; it simply aims to tell its story. When you think about it, this is the perfect way to approach a project. It’s completely backwards to suggest, but The Bank Job’s small $20 million budget was probably its greatest asset. If it had cost double that amount, focus groups would have been brought it, people would have complained that there was no sex and there weren't enough high speed car chases. Then the movie would have been changed for the worse. Thank God this was allowed to fly under the radar to the degree that it was.
