1) Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller)
No other 2008 movie summarized our culture with more knowing wit.
Ben Stiller’s directorial effort (a big step up from Zoolander and The Cable Guy) focuses on the insecurities of actors who
think they’re participating in the filming of a war epic. Any real
parody has to take the step of becoming an amplification of what it’s
making fun of, and Stiller hits the pretentious phoniness of
Hollywood’s event and issue movies. A series of fake trailers that open
Tropic Thunder satirize the star-martyrdom of three ridiculous
(but believably real) films. It’s a great touch that the serious
award-calibre war movie-within-a-movie is fetishly violent and
emotionally exploitative. Tropic Thunder is a messy, ambitious
movie that works for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are that
it’s messy and ambitious. It’s the landmark comedy in a year that had a
lot of verygood ones.
2) My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)
Maddin’s take on his hometown is part fact, part fantasia, but as
his droll narration explains, “everything in Winnipeg is a euphemism.”
The side lanes that only locals know about provide a metaphor for
Maddin’s alternate history. He hires actors to recreate his childhood
family life, and presents the snow-filled nighttime streets as a city
of the living dead. The scene of horse heads frozen on the surface of
the Red River is a fabrication, but it has lingered with me more than
any other film image this year. My Winnipeg‘s comic
black-and-white dream-reality is hallucinatory.
3) Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)
More than a celebration of family life through the ritual
formalities of a wedding, Rachel Getting Married realistically
and non-judgementally looks at support and oppression through the
juxtaposition of two sisters. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is starting her
dream life. Sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) is fresh out of rehab for the
weekend. She faces the (largely imagined) scrutiny that she hasn’t
grown up “the right way.” Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet leave it
up to individual taste to decide whom to side with. The family dynamic
is dramatic and profound because it doesn’t believe in easy scrutiny or
caricature.
4) CJ7 (Stephen Chow)
After Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle got big
notice, why was the studio so quick to bury Stephen Chow’s CJ7?
Evidently Western audiences are confused by an Asian genre movie that
isn’t about martial arts. Too bad, because the children’s film
CJ7 is more exhilarating and deep than the bulk of 2008’s
grown-up fare. From the opening where a young boy is scolded by his
teacher when he follows up on his classmates’ careerist dreams by
stating that he wants to grow up to be a poor person, CJ7 announces itself as a left-field treat. Though his construction worker
father can’t afford the new toy that could give the kid social
acceptance, he’s granted something better. When he’s visited by an
alien, Chow turns CJ7 into a rare, sharp variation of
E.T.. The boy’s friendship with the creature becomes a lesson in
humility and outsider acceptance. This is no Mac and Me.
5) Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen)
Characters repeatedly state, “What the fuck?!”—the Coen Brothers’
latest is cohesive in its confusion. Burn After Reading is
commonly dismissed as a minor work—another of those comedies the
Coens make between serious Oscar films. Repeat viewings (most Coen
films need at least two) reveal that its pieces are as carefully placed
as No Country For Old Men‘s. Brad Pitt, George Clooney, John
Malkovich and Frances McDormand parody their real-life personas, all
involved in a spy game spiralled far out of their control or
understanding. They’re dangerously eccentric egos, but the Coens have
so much fun with these characters that every false move is a comic
moment.
6) W. (Oliver Stone)
W. faded from discussion when it was discovered it wasn’t
full of sophomoric political jabs. Instead, Oliver Stone was more
courageous, taking an artist’s understanding that our biggest enemies
are human. In one of the year’s most remarkable performances, Josh
Brolin turns George W. into a being of Shakespearian torment.
7) Hamlet 2 (Andrew Fleming)
“Sometimes an idea can be so bad it starts to turn good again,” the
high school theatre critic informs the school’s drama teacher Dana
(Steve Coogan). Dana has been panned for his school plays of movies
like Erin Brockovich, but takes his lack of success as an excuse
to stage an original work: a musical sequel to Hamlet. Sure, the
portrait of the Latin thugs in Dana’s drama class will raise some
eyebrows at first. But director Fleming makes Hamlet 2 a comedy
about push-button liberal and conservative moral outrage that winds up
a fresh, feel-good look at the impulse of art and unexpectancy of life.
Like the process of putting on a school musical, the movie builds from
nothing into a complete, surprising experience. It’s why the whole of
Hamlet 2 is better than any individual scene in it.
8) Wall-E (Andrew Stanton)
I find Wall-E‘s social satire too familiar—the movie
becomes too message-driven and focuses too heavily on uninteresting
humans after establishing the surprising humanity in the robots. The
inconsistency is frustrating. But the first 40 minutes of Wall-E are better than any movie released in 2008. In that stretch, director
Andrew Stanton and Pixar craft a moving, purely cinematic silent film
that stands with the best of them.
9) Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
Whenever someone tells me Mike Leigh is boring, I’m tempted to ask
if they consider their life is boring as well. In
Happy-Go-Lucky, the daily familiarity of life is engaged through
the type of person most movies ignore: an optimistic, spacey, good
girl. Poppy (Sally Hawkins) isn’t judged derisively, and
Happy-Go-Lucky is not, as some weird conspiracy of marketing and
reviews want you to believe, a comedy. Leigh views the intersection of
different social types, making the everyday world familiar. That’s
something most movies never do.
10) Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog)
A documentary ostensibly on the people who choose to live in
Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World‘s fragmented
style takes its time to get going. Once it does, it develops into
something more fascinating—a thesis on how humans try to maintain a
deity complex within a world largely ruled by chaos. Herzog shows
bizarre underwater sites and creatures, and points out that a lot of it
is beyond understanding. The planet was here before us, and won’t die
until long after we’re wiped out. There’s beauty in chaos and the
universe beyond our control, so why fear that rather than be humbled by
its majesty?
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2009.