Recently in David Fincher Category

So, David Fincher's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a well-made and suitably unpleasant experience, I suppose, and I expect it will send the very impressive Rooney Mara right to the top of the A-list. (Not to beat a dead horse, but the difference between her and Knightley on Monday was striking.) But I have to question why it was even necessary to make this movie in the first place.

For starters, with the exception of a Nine Inch Nails-y music video credit sequence (set to that ultra-catchy cover of "Immigrant Song" from the teaser), this film is no different in tone or content than, nor does it improve on, the Swedish version that came out all of two years ago. (Ironically, that film's two stars, Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist, are also on-screen this weekend in Sherlock and MI: Ghost Protocol respectively.) To be honest, I don't even know why Fincher bothered to make this film, except for the paycheck: He already covered this sort of ground in Se7en, and went well beyond it with Zodiac. And even Matt Reeves' Let Me In was further afield from Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In than this is to Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 film.

If anything, Oplev's 2009 version was more elegant in many ways. You definitely don't need to see them both. There, the clues snapped together better as the story progressed -- Here, it's occasionally unclear how our two intrepid investigators, Lizabeth Salander (Mara) and Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) have made the intuitive leaps they have. There, the post-case coda was briskly covered -- Here, the extended ending approaches Return of the King-levels. And, perhaps most importantly, in the 2009 film, there was more than one bleedin' suspect in the movie. Here, even without the obvious casting tell, the eventual murderer is pretty much the only person we meet over the course of the investigation. (Fincher should've paid Willem DaFoe and Christopher Walken just to show up and skulk around.)

Now, in my Let Me In review, I was rather tolerant of that film being a note-for-note remake of the Swedish version, while here, not so much. What's the difference? Well, for me, it's mainly because Let the Right One In was a novel take on the teenage vampire story, i.e. a story worth telling. But both versions of Dragon Tattoo are, in my humble opinion, puerile, sadistic trash. Honestly, what does it say about us that this brutal, rapey, not-particularly-interesting revenge-pr0n thriller was the #1 best-selling book in America for many moons? The only interesting subtext here is of buried secrets festering rot, which registers in both the national history of Sweden (who, as a neutral nation, had its share of Nazi sympathizers during the war) and the personal history of the author (who apparently wrote these books as penance for ignoring a horrible crime.) Otherwise, I find these films to be ultra-violent, serial-killer crapola.

And speaking of indications of how screwed up we are as a country, why was Steve McQueen's Shame rated NC-17 if this movie got an R? Shame had a lot of consensual (if pained), not-very-appetizingly-filmed sex, and, ok, full-frontal nudity from Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan. (Yes, Virginia, adults have mommy and daddy parts). Meanwhile, this movie has beatings, murder, rapes, torture, eviscerations, disembowelments, Stellan Skarsgard...oh, heck, let's just give it an R. Honestly, the MPAA's priorities are nothing short of bizarre. (I'm not advocating censorship of this film -- Bring the kids if you're so inclined. It's the ridiculously messed-up priorities that rankle.)

I'll concede that, in general, I find serial-killer movies to be abominably stupid. (They're not even frightening. In that regard, I much prefer supernatural horror. Other than Silence of the Lambs, American Psycho, Zodiac, the original Vanishing, and, if you want to count it, A Clockwork Orange, I can't even think of any films in the serial killer genre I like.) So if the Dragon Tattoo books were your cup of tea, but not so much so that you didn't bother to catch the Swedish movie, then perhaps you'll find The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo worthwhile. The movie is definitely competently directed and made -- Fincher isn't going to put out bad product. But I found this an unnecessary remake of a grotesque and ludicrous story in the first place, and I'm kinda annoyed with myself for spending money on it.

As the post-Inception zeitgeist film of the fall, David Fincher's moody, ambitious, and entertaining The Social Network, a.k.a. the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, has already been pretty well dissected by now -- I wish I'd had time to get to this flick earlier.

Suffice to say, this movie is a lot like its protagonist -- fast-talking, occasionally irritating, oftentimes more clever than it is smart, and ultimately endearing despite itself. In all honesty, The Social Network irked me quite a bit in the early going, but it also managed to win me back by the closing credits. The highest praise I can give Fincher's film in the end is that I enjoyed it, would recommend it, and look forward to seeing it again, even despite the fact that, when it came to any aspect of the story I actually knew anything about, the movie was often aggravatingly, woefully wrong.

First, the story. The Social Network begins with a very Aaron Sorkin-y dispute at a bar between Erica, an attractive young BU co-ed (Rooney Mara, soon to be Fincher's Lisabeth Salander), and Mark, her geeky-arrogant Harvard boyfriend (Jesse Eisenberg, here making a bold move to outflank his actorly nemesis, Michael Cera). For some reason, Mark is seriously sweating what Finals Club -- a.k.a. the old-school, Harvard version of the fraternity scene -- he might end up in, so much so that he eventually lets his disdain for his girlfriend slip out. ("Why do you keep saying I don't need to study?" "You go to BU!") And so Erica wisely walks out of the picture, leaving Mark stewing in the cauldron of feminine slight, status anxiety, and nerd-rage from which, presumably, world-conquering social websites are eventually born.

Having introduced Mr. Zuckerberg and his general unpleasantness, The Social Network proceeds to tell his story. How, after bad-mouthing Erica on his blog (First rule of blogging: Don't drink and blog), he embarks on a plan of revenge against all of womanhood by coding up a Harvard "Hot or Not" knockoff called Facemash. How this stunt gains him both notoriety on campus and the attention of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (both Armie Hammer), a pair of Old Money, Olympian-class rowing twins -- and members of the Porcellian! -- who need a coder for their website idea, "The Harvard Connection." And how Mark, along with his kind-hearted (and wealthier) best friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield, the heart of the film), may or may not steal their idea to create his own social portal, "The Facebook"-- which, as we all know, eventually leads to mo' money, mo' problems, as a wise man once put it.

This origin story is smoothly told throughout -- remarkably so, in fact. The action cuts back and forth between the shenanigans taking place at Harvard and, eventually, Silicon Valley (Enter Justin Timberlake, playing an outsized, Faustian version of Napster's Sean Parker) and, after the millions have been made, two grim depositions: Mark is being sued separately by Eduardo and the Winklevoss twins, who he memorably dubs the "Winklevi." And throughout, it's hard not to appreciate how relentlessly smart the movie is. In the early going, to establish Mark's coding prowess, there's even an admirable attempt to explain the basics of how he puts together Facesmash: "First up is Kirkland. They keep everything open and allow indexes in their Apache configuration, so a little WGET magic is all that's necessary to download the entire Kirkland facebook. Kids' stuff."

So what's the problem? Well, I'm not a coder by any means, and I definitely wasn't present at the birth of Facebook. But I did go to Harvard, spent more than a few hours in the crew tanks, own and have rocked the Henley jacket, and have cooled my heels in the Porc's bike room before. And when it comes to the alma mater, the film is severely off by at least three or four decades. The Harvard of The Social Network is pre-meritocratic -- It looks right but feels totally wrong. Really, who cares about Finals Clubs anymore? Slate's Nathan Heller already eviscerated the movie on his front, and he's absolutely right: "I recognized their Harvard, but only from Love Story and The Paper Chase, not my experience. To get the university this wrong in this movie is no small matter."

And so a lot of the The Social Network just felt ludicrous to me. Early on, they try to portray a party at the Phoenix, one of the Finals Clubs (in my day, probably the most ethnically diverse and least douchey of them, to boot), as the very pinnacle of exclusivity, where the beautiful people party. In the film, attractive, revealingly-dressed women bus in from all over Boston to see if they can get past the rope line. In reality, parties at the Phoenix were...well, college frat parties. The very fact that I got drunk at them occasionally doesn't speak highly of either their exclusivity or their beautifulness. In other words, Finals Clubs are kinda sad and desiccated these days. They were glorified frats, and nobody took them at all seriously -- not even the private school kids who might have a vested interest in keeping up the old appearances.

That is just one example, but it happens over and over again in The Social Network. That aforementioned sinister-seeming bus of farmed-in party girls -- well, Cambridge folk know that's the "F**k Truck", and it was just a bus route, no more, no less. I was a regular on it for months when dating a gal out in Wellesley. But it seems like Sorkin heard the nickname and went wild with it. There's another scene where Eduardo and others are hazed about "the Statue of the Three Lies, and some frosh flubs it wildly. But the three lies are Firstyear 101. Everyone knows 'em, and there's no way a kid, however wasted, would blank out like that. The whole scene just seems inserted in to show off Sorkin's Harvard research.

And don't get me started on the crew stuff. On one hand, it's a real kick to see the sport get some props here -- One scene, set to a Reznorized version of "Hall of the Mountain King", even shows the Winklevi competing at Henley. (Not much love for coxswains, alas.) But then the Wonder Twins meet "His Royal Highness," the Prince of Monaco (as a friend pointed out, it's His Serene Highness.") And, when said prince says it's the closest race he's seen in 30 years, Tyler replies: "[M]ile and a half races are more commonly won by a boat length or two." Uh, no, races come to within a few seats, or even a few bowballs, all the time. And Henley is actually a 1.3 mile race, and one that rowers would normally talk about in meters -- here, 2112 -- in any case.

FWIW, this inattention to detail is a recurring problem I have with Aaron Sorkin's output -- The West Wing, a show which I know is much-beloved, also had more than its fair share of aggravating errors. (To take just one example, I remember President Martin Sheen complaining in the last episode about the Founders picking the cold month of January for inauguration day. They didn't.) And in both The West Wing and here in The Social Network, every single character speaks in exactly the same hyper-clever, overwritten voice, and that over-writing, to my mind, generally tends to be fast and sloppy (Or, to be uncharitable about it, coked out.)

Are these quibbles? Well, maybe, but they add up, and I eventually thought the minor-but-accumulating errors of truth hamstrung the overall truthiness of the project. If Harvard isn't actually a citadel reigned over by bluebloods and subdivided into all-important Finals Club fiefdoms (and it isn't), then the Match Point-esque status anxiety driving Zuckerberg here isn't at all convincing.

Or, to take another problem: At the time this story begins, in the fall of 2003, I was in New York and dating someone I'd met on Friendster. But you don't get any sense from this story that Friendster, or MySpace, or even the Columbia Campus Network were already well-established by the time Facebook was concocted.

The point being, the entire movie is constructed as if Zuckerberg et al are fighting over this ground-breaking and wonderful new idea. But, as Larry Lessig pointed out in TNR: By 2003, the idea of a social network was really nothing new at all. The origin of Facebook is really a story about execution: As Lessig writes, "In interviews given after making the film, Sorkin boasts about his ignorance of the Internet. That ignorance shows."

In an effort to make the Facebook idea seem unique, Sorkin & Fincher argue here that it's the site's exclusivity that makes it something altogether new. Really? I don't buy that, particularly when the worries about exclusivity theoretically driving Zuckerberg here ring so false. Don't get me wrong -- I liked The Social Network, and I had a lot of fun watching it. But, while Fincher's film may be a very entertaining whirlwind tour through the stately pleasure domes of Harvard and the Bay, it's also aggravatingly lacking in veritas in ways both great and small. I'd friend The Social Network, sure, but unfortunately it's not the all-time classic that the online hype suggested.

Casting for Kenneth Branagh's take on Thor fills out, with Jaimie Alexander and Colm Feore joining the cast. Alexander plays Sif, while "Feore's character is shrouded in mystery, though it is known to be a villain." (That spells trouble to me -- Be it stage or screen, Feore can be super-hammy.)

Whoever Feore is playing (Mephisto?), it's not Loki -- That would be Tom Hiddleston, appearing alongside "Papa Kirk" Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Natalie Portman as Jane Foster.

Meanwhile, the strange Aaron Sorkin-penned, David Fincher-directed Facebook movie, The Social Network, gets a cast in Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, and Doctor Who alum Andrew Garfield (also soon to appear in Gilliam's Imaginarium.) "Eisenberg will play Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Timberlake will play Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who became Facebook's founding president; and Andrew Garfield will play Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who fell out with Zuckerberg over money."

Move over, dogs-playing-poker. A New Zealand ad company promotes the airing of the weaksauce AvP movies on SkyTV with some classic-yet-forgotten Alien v. Predator duels of yore. (See also the tetherball and chess matches -- Hopefully table tennis, foosball, and poker will get their day as well.)

Well, now that we're in the second month of 2009, and since I'm *mostly* caught up on last year's prestige crop, it seems arguably the last, best time to write up the belated Best of 2008 Movie list. (I did see one more indy film of 2008 Sunday morning, but as it was after my arbitrarily-chosen 1/31 cutoff, it'll go in next year's list.) Compiling the reviews this year, it seems my October hunch was correct: For a combination of reasons, I went to the movies a lot less than usual in 2008. (The review count usually clocks in around 45. Last year, I only saw 30 films on the big screen.) And, looking over the release schedule, I see lots of movies I had every intention of viewing -- Appaloosa, Be Kind, Rewind, Blindness, Choke, Leatherheads -- and never got around to.

At any rate, given what I did see, here're the best of 'em. And here's hoping the 2009 list will be more comprehensive. As always, all of the reviews can be found here. (And if a movie title doesn't link to a full review, it means I caught it on DVD.)

Top 20 Films of 2008

[2000/2001/2002/2003/2004/2005/2006/2007]

1. The Dark Knight: Yes, it's the obvious fanboy pick. And, admittedly, TDK had pacing problems -- it was herky-jerky at times and the third act felt rushed. Still, in a not-particularly-good year for cinema, Christopher Nolan's operatic reimagining of the Caped Crusader and his arch-nemesis was far and away the most enjoyable experience i had at the movies in 2008. And if Candidate Obama was America's own white knight (metaphorically speaking) this past year, Heath Ledger's Joker was its mischievous, amoral, and misanthropic id. If and when the economic wheels continue to come off in 2009, will stoic selflessness or gleeful anarchy be the order of the day? The battle for Gotham continues, and everybody's nervously eyeing those detonators. Let's hope the clown doesn't get the last laugh.


2. Milk: What with a former community organizer turned "hopemonger" being elected president -- while evangelicals, conservatives and sundry Mormons inflicted Proposition 8 on the people of California -- Gus Van Sant's vibrant recounting of the tragedy of Harvey Milk was obviously the timeliest political movie of 2008. But, in a year that saw entirely too much inert Oscar-bait on-screen in its final months, Milk -- romantic, passionate, and full of conviction -- was also one of the most alive. While it extends some measure of compassion even to its erstwhile villain (Josh Brolin), Milk is a civil-rights saga that harbors no illusions about the forces of intolerance still amongst us, and how far we all still have to go.


3. The Wrestler: Have you ever seen a one-trick pony in the fields so happy and free? Me neither, to be honest, but Aronofsky's naturalistic slice-of-life about the twilight days of Randy "the Ram" Ramzinski was likely the next best thing. I don't know if Mickey Rourke will experience a career resurrection after this performance or not. But he won this match fair and square, and nobody can take it from him.


4. Let the Right One In: As if living in public housing in the dead of a Swedish winter wasn't depressing enough, now there's a nosferatu to contend with... My Bodyguard by way of Ingmar Bergman and Stephen King, this creepy and unsettling tale of a very unsparkly pre-teen vampyrer will leave bitemarks long after you step out into the light.


5. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days: A 2007 release that made it stateside in 2008, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days is a movie that I probably wouldn't ever want to watch again. Still, this grim, unrelenting journey through the seedy hotels and sordid back-alleys of Ceaucescu's Romania is another hard one to shake off. And, tho' I caught it early on, it remained one of the very best films of the year.


6. WALL-E: If you saw one movie last year about a boy(bot) from the slums meeting -- and then improbably wooing -- the girl(bot) of his dreams, I really hope it was WALL-E. Hearkening back to quality seventies sci-fi like Silent Running, Andrew Stanton's robot love story and timely eco-parable is a definite winner, and certainly another jewel in the gem-studded Pixar crown. I just wish it'd stayed in the melancholy, bittersweet key of its first hour, rather than venturing off to the hijinx-filled, interstellar fat farm. Ah well, bring on Up.


7. Iron Man: Much better than I ever anticipated, Jon Favreau's (and Robert Downey Jr.'s) Iron Man kicked a summer of superheroes off in grand fashion. In the end, I preferred the gloomy stylings of Gotham in 2008, but there's definitely something to be said for this rousing, upbeat entrant in the comic movie canon. It delivered on its own terms, and it was a much better tech-fetishizing, boys-and-their-toys type-film than, say, 2007's Transformers or (I suspect) 2009's GI Joe. Bonus points for the Dude going all Big Jeff Lebowski on us here...now quit being cheap about the sequel.


8. Man on Wire: 4:40pm: Two foreign nationals and their American abettors successfully navigate past the guard checkpoint of the World Trade Center's South Tower. Their fanatical mission: To use the WTC as a symbol to transform the world...through an act of illegal, death-defying performance art. Although it never explicitly mentions 9/11 (of course, it doesn't need to -- the towers themselves do most of the work, and reconstructing its story as a heist does the rest), the stirring documentary Man on Wire, about Phillipe Petit's 1974 tightrope-walk between the towers, gains most of its resonance from the events of that dark day in 2001.

After seventy minutes or so, just as it seems this unspoken analogy is starting to wear thin, Petit finally steps out onto that ridiculous wire, and Man on Wire takes your breath away. Nothing is permanent, the movie suggests. Not youth, not life, not love, not even those majestic, formidable towers. But some moments -- yes, the beautiful ones too -- can never be forgotten. (Note: Man on Wire is currently available as a direct download on Netflix.)


9. U2 3D: One of two 2008 films (along with #16) which seemed to suggest the future of the movie-going experience, U2 3D was both a decently rousing concert performance by Dublin's fab four, and -- more importantly -- an experimental film which played with an entirely new cinema syntax. Just as students look back on D.W. Griffith films of a century ago as the beginnings of 2D-movie expression, so too might future generations look at this lowly U2 concert and see, in its layering of unrelated images onto one field of vision, when the language of 3D really began to take off. At which point someone might also say, "Man, I wish they'd played 'So Cruel' instead of some of these tired old dogs."


10. The Visitor: I wrote about Tom McCarthy's The Visitor (which I saw on DVD) some in my Gran Torino review, and my criticism there stands: As with Torino, the central thrust of this story is too Bagger Vance-ish by half. Still, it's fun to see a likable character actor like Richard Jenkins get his due in a starring role, and he's really great here. And, if the "magical immigrant" portions of this tale defy reality to some extent, McCarthy and Jenkins' vision of a life desiccated by years of wallowing in academic purgatory -- the humdrum lectures, the recycled syllabi, the mind-numbingly banal conferences, all divorced from any real-world interaction with the issues at hand -- is frighteningly plausible.


11. Synecdoche, New York: Long on ambition and short on narrative coherence, Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut is the There Will Be Blood of last year's crop, in that it's a film that I think will inspire a phalanx of ardent defenders among movie buffs, who will argue its virtues passionately against all comers. For my own part, I admired this often-bewildering movie more than I actually enjoyed it, and ultimately found it much less engaging than Kaufman's real magnum opus, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Still, I'm glad I made the attempt, and it's definitely worth seeing.


12. Frost/Nixon: Two man enter, one man leave! More a sports movie than a political one, Ron Howard and Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon is a decently entertaining depiction of two hungry down-and-outers locked in the debater's version of mortal kombat. That being said, I kinda wish the stakes had seemed higher, or that the substance of the issues at hand -- Vietnam, Cambodia, Watergate -- had been as foregrounded as the mano-a-mano mechanics of the interview. Plus, that scene where Tricky Dick sweeps the leg? That's not kosher.


13. Snow Angels: David Gordon Green's quiet, novelistic Snow Angels is an early-2008 film I caught on DVD only a few weeks ago, and it's been slowly sneaking up the list ever since. Based on a 1994 book by Stewart O'Nan, the movie depicts the intertwined lives of a small New England community, and recounts the tragic circumstances that lead to two gunshots being fired therein one winter afternoon. (If it sounds like Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, it's very close in form, content, and melancholy impact.)

In a movie brimming over with quality performances -- including (an ever-so-slightly-implausible) Kate Beckinsale, Nicky Katt, Amy Sedaris, and the long-forgotten Griffin Dunne -- three actors stand out: Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby fall into one of the most honest, believable, and affectation-free high school romances I've seen in a movie in ages. And the always-watchable Sam Rockwell sneaks up on you as a perennial loser who tries to be a good guy and just keeps failing at life despite himself. At first not much more than an amiable buffoon as per his usual m.o., Rockwell's gradual surrender to his demons -- note his scenes with his daughter, or in the truck with his dog, or at the bar -- gives Snow Angels a haunting resonance that sticks with you.


14. Burn After Reading: As I said in the original review, it's not one of the all-time Coen classics or anything. But even medium-grade Coen tends to offer more delights than most films do in a given year, and the same holds true of their espionage-and-paranoia farce Burn After Reading in 2008. From John Malkovich's foul-mouthed, (barely-)functioning alcoholic to George Clooney as a (thoroughly goofy) lactose-intolerant bondage enthusiast to, of course, Brad Pitt's poor, dim-witted Chet, Burn introduced plenty of ridiculous new characters to the brothers' already-stacked rogues' gallery. This is one (unlike The Ladykillers) that I'm looking forward to seeing again.


15. Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Another catch-up DVD rental, this was Woody Allen's good movie last year (as opposed to the woeful Cassandra's Dream), and a smarter-than-average relationship film (as one might expect from the man behind Husbands and Wives and Annie Hall.) There're some definitive Allen tics here that take some getting used to in the new environment of Barcelona -- a very Woody-ish omniscient voiceover, some Allenesque quips emanating from Scarlett Johannson and the striking Rebecca Hall (late of Frost/Nixon and The Prestige), and, as per Match Point and Scoop, some rather outdated depictions of the class system. (Hall's fiance, played by Chris Messina of Six Feet Under, is basically a caricature of the boring, born-entitled Ivy League grad, circa 1965.)

Still, if you can get past all that, Vicky Cristina is quite worthwhile. (And, as far as the Oscar buzz goes, I'd say Javier Bardem makes more of an impression here than does Penelope Cruz.) Whether you're as old as Woody or as young as Vicky and Cristina, the story remains the same: love is a weird, untameable thing, and the heart wants what it wants.


16. Speed Racer: Easily the most unfairly maligned movie of 2008 (and I'm not a Wachowski apologist -- I thought Matrix: Revolutions was atrocious), Speed Racer is an amped-up, hypercolorful extravaganza of the senses, and, this side of the original Matrix, one of the more interesting attempts I've seen at bringing anime to life. Critics derided it pretty much across the board as loud, gaudy nonsense, but, then as now, I'm not sure what they went in expecting from the film adaptation of a lousy sixties cartoon involving race cars and silly monkeys. This is where some readers might ask: "Um, are you really saying Speed Racer is a better movie than Revolutionary Road?" And I'm saying, yes, it's much more successful at what it aimed to accomplish, and probably more entertaining to boot. Sure, Racer is a kid's movie, but so was WALL-E. And, given most of the drek put before the youths today, it's a darned innovative one. Plus, I've seen a lot of filmed laments about quiet-desperation-in-the-suburbs in my day, but for better or worse, in my 34 years of existence, I had never seen anything quite like this.


17. Gran Torino: Alas, Speed Racer, it seems, grew old, got ornery, and began fetishizing his car in the garage instead. Good thing there're some kindly Hmong next door to pry open that rusty heart with a crowbar! Like The Visitor, Torino suffers from an excess of sentiment when it comes to its depiction of 21st-century immigrants and their salutary impact on old white folks. But, as a cautionary coda to a lifelong career glorifying vigilantism, Eastwood's Gran Torino has that rusty heart in the right place, at least. And while Eastwood's Walt Kowalski may be a mean old cuss, Eastwood's performance here suggests that the old man's got some tricks in him yet.


18. A Christmas Tale: I wrote about this movie very recently, so my thoughts on it haven't changed all that much. A bit pretentious at times, Arnaud Desplechin's anti-sentimental holiday film has its virtues, most notably Chiara Mastroianni eerily (and probably inadvertently) channeling her father and the elfin Mathieu Almaric wreaking havoc on his long-suffering family whenever possible. It's a Not-So-Wonderful Life, I guess, but -- however aggravating your relatives 'round christmastime -- it's still probably better than the alternative.


19. Tropic Thunder: Its pleasures were fleeting -- I can't remember very many funny lines at this point -- and even somewhat scattershot. (Tom Cruise as Harvey Weinstein by way of a gigantic member was funny for the first ten minutes. Less so after half an hour.) Still, give Tropic Thunder credit. Unlike all too many comedies in recent years, it didn't try to make us better people -- it just went for the laugh, and power to it. And when the most controversial aspect of your movie turns out not to be the white guy in blackface (or, as we all euphemistically tend to put it now, "the dude disguised as another dude"), but the obvious Forrest Gump/Rain Man spoof, I guess you've done something right.


20. W: Nowhere near as potent as Stone's early political forays, JFK and Nixon, W still came close to accomplishing the impossible in 2008: making the out-going president seem a sympathetic figure. I suppose several other films could've sat with distinction in this 20-spot -- In Bruges or Benjamin Button, perhaps -- but none of them would've afforded me the opportunity to write these lovely words once more: So long, Dubya.

Honorable Mention: It wasn't a movie, of course. But 2008 was also the year we bid farewell to The Wire. Be sure to raise a glass, or tip a 40, in respect. (And let's pray that -- this year, despite all that's come before -- a "New Day" really is dawning.)

Most Disappointing: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Worth a Rental: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, In Bruges, Revolutionary Road, Valkyrie

Don't Bother: Cassandra's Dream, Cloverfield, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Doubt, Hellboy II: The Golden Age, The Incredible Hulk, Quantum of Solace, Slumdog Millionaire, Wanted

Best Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler, Sean Penn, Milk, Richard Jenkins, The Visitor
Best Actress: Anamaria Marinca, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Lina Leandersson, Let the Right One In, Rebecca Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight, Josh Brolin, Milk, Jeff Bridges, Iron Man, Sam Rockwell, Snow Angels
Best Supporting Actress: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler, Tilda Swinton, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Unseen: Appaloosa, Australia, The Bank Job, Be Kind, Rewind, Blindness, Body of Lies, Cadillac Records, Changeling, Choke, The Class, Defiance, Eagle Eye, The Fall, Funny Games, Hancock, Happy Go Lucky, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo, Leatherheads, I Loved You So Long, The Lucky Ones, Miracle at St. Anna, Pineapple Express, Rambo, The Reader, Redbelt, RockNRolla, The Spirit, Traitor, Waltz with Bashir

A Good Year For:
• Billionaire Do-Gooders (The Dark Knight, Iron Man)
  
• Lonely Old White Guys (Gran Torino, The Visitor, The Wrestler)
  
• Magical Immigrants (Gran Torino, The Visitor)
  
• Rebecca Hall (Vicky Christina Barcelona, Frost/Nixon)
  
• Richard Jenkins (The Visitor, Burn after Reading)
  
• Robert Downey, Jr. (Iron Man, Tropic Thunder)
  
• Romance at the Junkyard (WALL-E, Slumdog Millionaire)
  
• Sam Rockwell (Choke, Frost/Nixon, Snow Angels)
  
• Teenage Vampirism (Let the Right One In, Twilight)
  
• Tosca (Quantum of Solace, Milk)
  

A Bad Year For:
• GOP Ex-Presidents (Frost/Nixon, W)
  
• Political Do-Gooders (The Dark Knight, Milk)
  
• Pulp Heroes (The Spirit)
  
• Vigilantism without Remorse (Gran Torino, The Dark Knight)
  
• Would-Be Assassins (Valkyrie, Wanted)
  

2009: Avatar, The Box, Bruno, Coraline, Duplicity, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Knowing, The Lovely Bones, New York, I Love You, Observe and Report, Push, Sherlock Holmes, The Soloist, State of Play, Star Trek, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Terminator: Salvation, Up, Where the Wild Things Are, The Wolfman, Wolverine and, of course,



Hrm.

The powers-that-be announce the nominees for the 81st Academy Awards, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button garnering 13 nominations (it helps when your Oscar Bait is FX-heavy), Slumdog Millionaire grabbing ten, and Milk and The Dark Knight notching eight apiece. (That being said, TDK was frozen out of the main awards, Ledger's inevitable Supporting Actor bid notwithtanding.)

Also in the running for major stuff: The Reader (picture, actress, director), The Wrestler (actor, supporting actress), Doubt (actor, screenplay, actress, supporting actress), Frost/Nixon (director, actor, screenplay), and WALL-E (screenplay, animated film). And the happy semi-surprises: Richard Jenkins for The Visitor and Robert Downey, Jr. for Tropic Thunder.

I'll make my picks with the GitM 2008 list, which should be coming up within the next week or two. (The movies I've been waiting for -- Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, and The Wrestler -- all open here tomorrow.) And, don't worry, 2009 isn't being slighted all that much: I highly doubt Paul Blart: Mall Cop was going to make the cut anyway.

Everyone is evanescent, and everything in this world, no matter how beautiful or important, fades. Alas, David Fincher's striking but flawed The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not exempt from this grim calculus. A lovely movie to gaze upon while it's actually playing out, Button begins to wither and deteriorate the minute you're once again exposed to the sunlight.

To switch up metaphors, Button is a dazzling contraption at times, to be sure...but a contraption it remains. Unlike Milk, which felt alive in every moment of its run, the stately, strangely inert Button -- despite trying to wring emotion from more death scenes than your average season of Six Feet Under -- moves to a tidy, mechanical, and clockwork pulse that ultimately feels pretty far removed from the messy emotions and drawing-outside-the-lines sensations of real life. Fincher, the actors (particularly Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and Taraji P. Henson), and the special effects team put forth an undeniably impressive effort, but as the movie progresses, it starts to feel more and more like what it in fact is: well-made but sloppily written Oscar bait. And the more you think about Button, the less it holds together.

Trade out feathers for hummingbirds, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is, for all intent and purposes, Forrest Gump. (Indeed, while Button began as a Fitzgerald short story, the two films share a screenwriter in Eric Roth. It shows.) After a Katrina-era framing device is established, involving an old, terminally ill woman sharing her last few moments with her daughter (Julia Ormond) in a New Orleans hospital, we head back to 1918 and the end of World War I, as Benjamin Button begins to recount his tale...with a Gumpish southern drawl, no less. Born "under unusual circumstances" and left at the doorstep of the local old folks' home, Button (Pitt, good but something of a cipher), as you probably know by now, ages backwards -- He begins life as a very old baby and grows younger over time, like Dick Clark or the Bob Dylan song. (I've skipped over a short story involving Teddy Roosevelt and a distraught clockmaker (Elias Koteas) which, with the final visual payoff of the Katrina angle, may actually be the most beautiful and affecting part of the film.)

The central conceit established, Button's life then proceeds to follow a surprisingly Gumpian course. Raised by his take-no-guff, God-fearin' mama (Taraji P. Henson, a much-needed breath of life throughout) and considered a "special child" by all around him, Button eventually embarks on a series of grand adventures. He hooks up with a gruff but lovable sea captain (Jared Harris, nothing at all like Lt. Dan) who teaches him the ways of the world. He eventually finds himself in the midst of war, and spends several years traveling by himself all around the globe. And throughout his days, he finds himself continually drawn to his childhood friend turned free spirit, Jenny...uh, Daisy (Blanchett, graceful, alluring and thoroughly unDylanesque). But Daisy, like the rest of us, is aging along the usual lines. (Indeed, given that Daisy is a prima ballerina, her window of time seems that much shorter and more precious.) How can Benjamin and Daisy forge anything lasting when they're at best two ships passing in the night? However happy they are at any given moment, time is against them and they know it. And time, whether one ages backwards or forwards, has a way of inexorably marching on.

There are scenes (such as Daisy trying to seduce Benjamin through dance one midsummer night) and vignettes (such as Benjamin and Tilda Swinton in their own version of Lost in Translation) that are eminently engaging throughout, and yet The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ultimately seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. (This is particularly true of the last hour, where it begins to devolve into an interminably long Abercrombie & Fitch ad.) Part of the problem is that the script starts beating its central thesis -- "time keeps slipping, slipping, slipping into the future" -- into the ground after awhile. But, even allowing for that, there are clumsy plot holes throughout. Ben and Daisy (well, Ben) reach a decision near the end of the film that makes zero sense from any perspective, other than to add further poignancy to their romance. Characters are created (Benjamin's sister, Julia Ormond's dad) that seem to have no other purpose than to drive the story along, and disappear as soon as it's convenient.

Taking a step back from the basic plot mechanics, Button often seems confused about what it really wants to say. At times, it veers in the direction of "No fate but what we make"...ok, I'm all for free will. Later, in the middle going, it digresses in Paris for a visually arresting but totally-out-of-left-field Amelie-style reverie on the cruel vagaries of luck. (Which seems clever, until you realize that the entire sequence makes no sense given that we're meant to have been reading from Button's diary the whole time.) But if free will and/or randomness is the order of the day, then why do Ben and Daisy seem to keep circling each other all their lives (and why do so many second-tier characters seem to hold down the same jobs their parents did?) Is it...fate? I wasn't expecting Button to come up with a unified theory of the universe or anything -- Life sure doesn't have one that I'm yet aware of. (Ok, other than "life is a box of chocolates," etc. etc.) But the movie is so emphatic and precise about the short term points it's making that, taken as whole, it all seems a bit poorly thought through.

Now, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button isn't a disaster by any means. In fact, it's one of the most sumptuously filmed movies I've seen this year. Still, as I walked out of the theater -- and even more in the days since -- I found the film wanting. At first, I assumed the problem was Fincher, who's a quality director (Zodiac, Fight Club) but whose style might've been too cool, clinical, and remote for this particular project. But, the more I think about it, it was probably Fincher's distance and reserve that prevented Button from becoming an unwatchable schmaltzfest. (Roth seems the real culprit.) In any case, Benjamin Button is a likable lad who shows occasional flashes of real potential. But, other than that whole aging-young thing, he unfortunately doesn't end up seeming all that special.

The nominees for the 2008 Golden Globes are announced, with David Fincher's Benjamin Button, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, and Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon leading the pack with five nods each. I've been feeling way behind on my moviegoing all year, so I'm glad to see that all of the best drama nominees (Button, Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, The Reader), as well as some of the closer also-rans (Milk, Doubt, The Wrestler) are films that aren't out yet here. So, since i can't as yet speak knowledgably about any of the contenders, i'll hold off on my picks until closer to the big night.

Going into the awards stretch, my favorite film of the year is probably still The Dark Knight (with WALL-E running at 2nd), so I was also glad to see Heath Ledger get his due today. Would that he were around to see it.

"A man only gets a couple of chances in life. It won't be long before he's sitting around wondering how he got to be second-rate." Lots of choice stuff in today's trailer bin: First up, President Josh Brolin braves pretzels, Poppa Bush, and enough JD to kill a small horse in this fun extended trailer for Oliver Stone's W. (I can't wait.) Elsewhere, Frank Miller borrows from Robert Rodriguez, who, of course, borrowed from him, to mine Will Eisner's back-catalog in this short new teaser for The Spirit. (I'm still not sold.)

Also up recently, Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio forsake the Titanic to suffocate in the suburbs in the first trailer for Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road. (Ok, altho' it looks Little Children-ish.) Tom Cruise leads an all-star team of character actors in a plot to kill Hitler in the second trailer for Bryan Singer's Valkyrie. And Brad Pitt moves from age to wisdom in the second trailer for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (Not as haunting as the teaser, but close.) I gotta say, it's good to finally hit the Oscar stretch for 2008 -- I haven't seen nearly enough movies this year.

Update: One more, via LMG: Philip Seymour Hoffman puts on a play -- and gets stuck waiting in the wings -- in the trailer for Charlie Kaufman's much-anticipated Synecdoche, New York, also starring Hope Davis, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson, and Michelle Williams.

Update 2: Ok, what with Marky Mark, Ludacris, Bridges the Lesser, the lousy whiteboy angst-metal, and the highly Matrix-derivative gun-fu and explosions throughout, the recent trailer for John Moore's Max Payne looks Skinemax bad. But, then again, it does have The Wire's Jamie Hector (Marlo) briefly playing Exposition Guy with an island accent, so that's enough for a link. Hey, I'm easily amused.

"I was born under unusual circumstances." The moody and mesmerizing teaser for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, from the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and youtubed in Spanish a few weeks ago, is now officially online, and in hi-def.

Happy New Year, everyone. So unlike last year, when I took an extra month on account of my travels in New Zealand, the Best of 2007 Movie list seems ready to go out on schedule, and it's below. (If you've been reading all the reviews around here, I'm betting the top few choices won't be a surprise. Still, organizing the 5-15 section was more tough than usual this year.) At any rate, 2008 should be a big orbit around the sun in any event, what with grad school winding down and it being time -- at last! -- to pick a new president. So a very happy new year to you and yours, and let's hope the movies of the coming year will contain to sustain, amuse, baffle, and delight.

Top 20 Films of 2007

[2000/2001/2002/2003/2004/2005/2006]


1. I'm Not There: "There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice." Admittedly, it was a wonderful confluence of my interests. Nevertheless, Todd Haynes' postmodern celebration of Bob Dylan, brimming over with wit and vitality and as stirring, resonant, and universal as a well-picked G-C-D-Em progression, was far and away my favorite film experience of the year. It seems to have slipped in a lot of critics' end-of-year lists (although Salon's Stephanie Zacharek also put it up top, and the Sun-Times' Jim Emerson has been championing it too), but so be it -- You shouldn't let other people get their kicks for you anyway. A heartfelt, multi-layered, six-sided puzzle about the many faces and voices of Dylan, l found I'm Not There both pleasingly cerebral and emotionally direct, and it's a film I look forward to returning to in the years to come. Everybody knows he's not a folk-singer.



2. No Country for Old Men: It probably won't do wonders for West Texas tourism. Still, the Coens' expertly-crafted No Country works as both a visceral exercise in dread and a sobering philosophical rumination on mortality and the nature of evil. (And in his chilling portrayal of Anton Chigurh, Javier Bardem has crafted a movie villain for the ages.) People sometimes refer to Coen movies as "well-made" as a dig, as if the brothers were just soulless clinically-minded technicians. I couldn't disagree with that assessment more. Still, No Country for Old Men seems so seamless and fully formed, so judicious and economical in its storytelling, that it reminds me of Salieri's line in Amadeus: "Displace one note and there would be diminishment, displace one phrase and the structure would fall." A dark journey that throbs with a jagged pulse, No Country for Old Men is very close to the best film of the year, and -- along with Miller's Crossing, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski -- yet another masterpiece sprung from the Coens' elegant and twisted hive-mind. Bring on Burn After Reading.



3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Through the wonders of cinematic alchemy, Julian Schnabel took the sad real-life account of Vogue editor Jean-Do Bauby's horrific imprisonment within his own body and made it soar. No other film this year put the "locked-in" experience of taking in a movie as inventively in service of its story (although I kinda wish Atonement had tried.) Special kudos to Mathieu Almaric for conveying so much with so little to work with, and to Max von Sydow for his haunting turn as Bauby's invalid father. And, lest someone holds "arthouse foreign film" against it, Diving Bell is both much funnier and more uplifting than anyone might expect of a tale about hospital paralysis. Salut.



[3.] The Lives of Others: The one hold-over from 2006 on the list this year (I was pretty thorough about catching up before posting last January, although I still never did see Inland Empire), The Lives of Others is a timely and compelling parable of art, politics, surveillance, and moral awakening in the final days of the Stasi. In a way, Lives is an East German counterpart to Charlie Wilson's War, a story about how even small political acts of individual conscience can change the world, even (or perhaps especially) in a decaying Orwellian state. With a memorable central performance by Ulrich Mühe and a languid conclusion that ends on exactly the right note, the resoundingly humanist Lives of Others is a Sonata for a Good Man in Bad Times. We could use more of its ilk.



4. Knocked Up: Judd Apatow's sweet, good-natured take on modern love and unwanted pregnancy was probably the most purely satisfying film of the summer. As funny in its pop-culture jawing as it was well-observed in its understanding of relationship politics, Knocked Up also felt -- unlike the well-meaning but overstylized Juno, the film it'll most likely be paired with from now herein -- refreshingly real. As I said in my recent review of Walk Hard, an eventual Apatow backlash seems almost inevitable given how many comedies he has on the 2008 slate. Nevertheless, we'll always have Freaks & Geeks, and we'll always have Knocked Up.



5. The Bourne Ultimatum: The third installment of the Bourne franchise was the best blockbuster of the year, and proved that director Paul Greengrass can churn out excellent, heart-pounding fare even when he's basically repeating himself. Really, given how much of Ultimatum plays exactly like its two predecessors on the page -- the car chase, the Company Men, the Eurotrash assassin, Julia Stiles, exotic locales and cellphone hijinx -- it's hard to fathom how good it turned out to be. But Bourne was riveting through and through...You just couldn't take your eyes off it. I know I've said this several times now, but if Zack Snyder screws up Watchmen (and I'd say the odds are 50-50 at this point), the lost opportunity for a Greengrass version will rankle for years.



6. Zodiac: The best film of the spring. What at first looked to be another stylish David Fincher serial killer flick is instead a moody and haunting police procedural about the search for a seemingly unknowable truth, and the toll it exacts on the men -- cops, journalists, citizens -- who undertake it for years and even decades. Reveling in the daily investigatory minutiae that also comprise much of The Wire and Law and Order, and arguably boasting the best ensemble cast of the year, Zodiac is a troubling and open-ended inquiry that, until perhaps the final few moments, offers little in the way of satisfying closure for its characters or its audience. Whatever Dirty Harry may suggest to the contrary, the Zodiac remains elusive.



7. 28 Weeks Later: Sir, we appear to have lost control of the Green Zone...Shall I send in the air support? Zombie flicks have been a choice staple for political allegory since the early days of Romero, but one of the strengths of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's merciless 28 Weeks Later -- perhaps the best horror sequel since James Cameron's Aliens -- is that it foregoes the 1:1 sermonizing about failed reconstructions and American hubris whenever it gets in the way of the nightmare scenario at hand. (Besides, if you wanted to see explicit muckraking about current events this year, there were options aplenty, from In the Valley of Elah to No End in Sight, although plenty of this year's politically-minded forays -- Rendition, Lions for Lambs -- looked rather inert from a distance.) There's little time for moralizing in the dark, wretched heart of 28 Weeks Later: In fact, the right thing to do is often suicide, or worse. You pretty much have only one viable option: run like hell.



8. In the Valley of Elah: Paul Haggis' surprisingly unsentimentalized depiction of the hidden costs of war for the homefront, Elah benefits greatly from Tommy Lee Jones' slow burn as a military father who's lost his last son to a horrific murder. In fact, it's hard not to think of Jones' inspired performances here and in No Country of a piece. There was something quintessentially America-in-2007 about Jones this year. In every crease and furrow of this grizzled Texan's visage, we can see the wounds and weariness of recent times, the mask of dignity and good humor beginning to slip in the face of tragic events and colossal stupidity. Jones is masterful in Elah, and while Daniel Day-Lewis seems to be garnering most of the accolades for There Will Be Blood and Philip Seymour Hoffman stunned in three pics this fall (all on the list below), I'd put Jones' work here as the best of the year.



9. There Will Be Blood: Ah, the maddening There Will Be Blood. I just reviewed this one yesterday, so it's doubtful my opinion on it has changed much. But what Anderson's film reminds me of most at the moment (and not only for the Daniel Day-Lewis connection) is Scorsese's Gangs of New York, a movie I reviewed at the end of 2002 and then bumped up a few spots a week later when writing the 2002 list, thinking that its flaws would diminish over time. They haven't -- if anything, they're just as noticeable as ever. So it may well be with TWBB. Even despite its somewhat unseemly pretensions to greatness, the first hour or so of There Will Be Blood, from the Kubrickian opening to the Days in Heaven-ish burning oil rig, is as powerful and memorable as you could ever want in a film. But TWBB loses its way, and the second half is a significantly less interesting enterprise, ultimately culminating in that goofy, illogical bowling alley ending. I'd characterize Blood as a significant step forward for PTA, and there's something to be said for getting even this close to a masterpiece. But he hasn't struck black gold yet.



10. Hot Fuzz: While I personally still prefer Shaun of the Dead, this fish-out-of-water, buddy-cop action spectacle proved the droll British team of Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, and Edgar Wright can't be considered one-hit-wonders (and that they're as savvy about certain pop culture tropes as their American colleagues in the Apatow camp.) And, while I didn't see Elizabeth II: The Golden Age, Hot Fuzz may well include the second-best Cate Blanchett performance of the year.



11. Gone Baby Gone: First-time director Ben Affleck acquits himself well with this chronicle of missing children and seedy n'er-do-wells in working-class Boston, wisely choosing to stick with a town and a leading man he knows like the back of his hand. His brother Casey holds his own, and crime author Dennis Lehane's original source material provides some compelling twists-and-turns throughout. And, as the drug-addled, quick-to-dis Townie mom who's lost her baby, The Wire's Amy Ryan gives arguably the Best Supporting Actress performance of the year (although she'll likely get some run from Blanchett's Jude Quinn.)



12. Michael Clayton: Clooney's impeccable taste in projects continues with this, Tony Gilroy's meditation on corporate malfeasance and lawyerly ethics (or lack thereof.) The bit with the horses still seems a convenient (and corny) happenstance on which to hang such a major plot point, and I found Tilda Swinton to be overly mannered and distracting for much of the film's run. But most else about Michael Clayton, from Sidney Pollack's Master of the Universe to Michael O'Keefe's snide, unctuous #2 to Tom Wilkinson's last scene to Clooney not rebounding as well to events as, say, Danny Ocean, rang true. A small film, in its way, but a worthwhile one.



13. Charlie Wilson's War: Another one I wrote on in the past 24 hours, so I don't have much to add. Perhaps the best thing about Mike Nichols and Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of Crile's book is that it "gets" politics like few recent Washington thrillers I can think of. Philip Seymour Hoffman shows impeccable comic timing as the gruff Gust Avrakotos, and he works very well with Hanks here, who's gone from being overexposed a few years ago back to a guy I wouldn't mind seeing more of, particularly if he continues along the Alec Baldwinish character actor path Wilson sometimes suggests could be his future.



14. The Savages: I actually thought about putting Tamara Jenkins' The Savages higher on this list, and few other movie endings this year hit me in the gut quite like this one. But, there are definite problems here, such as the wheezy Gbenga Akinnagbe subplot, which compel me to keep it here in the mid-teens. Still, this comedy about an ornery lion in winter, and the battling cubs who have to come to his aid, is a worthwhile one, and particularly if you're in the mood for some rather black humor. As Lenny the senescent and slipping paterfamilias, Philip Bosco gives a standout performance, as does Hoffman as the miserable Bertholdt Brecht scholar trapped in deepest, darkest Buffalo.



15. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead: Now, Before the Devil is a movie I did end up seeing twice, on account of Brooklyn friends who were looking to catch it, and the film didn't bring much new to the table on that second viewing. Still, Sidney Lumet and Kelly Masterson's lean family tragedy benefits from several excellent performances -- most notably by Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, and Albert Finney, but also in supporting work by Amy Ryan, Michael Shannon, Brian O'Byrne, and Rosemary Harris -- as well as a memorable Carter Burwell score. (Also, it's just a coincidence that the three Hoffman movies ended up in a row like this -- Still, it's a testament to the man's ability that he seemed unique and fully formed in each. Then again, the only time I can think of that Hoffman was actually bad in a film was Cold Mountain, which was pretty glitched up regardless.)



16. Sunshine: Along with There Will Be Blood, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's exasperating Sunshine is the other film this year that saw an amazing first hour become undone by breathtakingly poor choices on the back end. Unlike the halting, confused slide of TWBB, though, the moment where Sunshine slips the rails is clear-cut and irrefutable: It's when what had been a heady science fiction tale about a near-impossible mission to the heart of the sun became instead an unwieldy space-slasher flick, i.e. basically an Armageddon variation on Jason X. The wreckage this subplot makes of what had been a superior hard-sci-fi film is more than a little depressing...Still, for that first hour, Sunshine is really something, perhaps the best realistically-portrayed outer space voyage we've seen on-screen in years.



17. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Andrew Dominik's sprawling psychological western about the end of the West and the early days of American celebrity-worship is every bit as ambitious and flawed as PTA's There Will Be Blood. Still, maybe it's the often stunning Roger Deakins cinematography, or the lively character actors (Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Garret Dillahunt) in the margins of the film, or maybe it's even the terrible omniscient voiceover, which is every bit as distracting as the similarly ham-handed one in Little Children, and so goofy at times it verges on endearing. Whatever it is, I warmed to Jesse James more than I probably should, and for whatever reason I feel more willing to forgive it its considerable problems. If you blinked, you probably missed its theatrical run...but maybe it'll find new life on DVD, when the 160-min running time won't seem so off-putting.



18. I am Legend: When the film focused on Will Smith and his dog fighting blood-sucking and badly rendered CGI Infecteds (whose level of social deevolution changed back and forth solely to accommodate turns in the plot), Francis Lawrence's I am Legend could seem pedestrian and forgettable. But, when the movie focused on Will Smith and his dog fighting interminable loneliness in an eerily abandoned New York City, which was most of the first two-thirds of the film, I am Legend was a surprisingly melancholy and resonant blockbuster. What can I say? This one hit me where, and how, I live.



19. Ratatouille: There's no review of this one up -- I actually only saw it on DVD last week. And yet, while Ratatouille is a visual marvel (and Brad Bird and the PIXAR gurus don't seem to make bad films), I found this nowhere near as inventive or entertaining as their last collaboration, 2004's The Incredibles. (I'd put this one at about the level of Cars.) Now, this may in part be due to the fact that I have much more interest in comic book conceits than the culinary arts. (I'd even go so far as to say that I find many foodies -- particularly those who blather on endlessly about Parisian cuisine -- kind of insufferable.) Still, even given my relative lack of interest in the subject matter, Ratatouille bugged me. If "anyone can cook," as Chef Gustave proclaims, why is no one's input ever important but the rat? If it's bad to make money selling pre-cooked (and affordable) food to the teeming masses, as Ian Holm's character tries to do, why is it any better to do what Remy does? (And why should we care then when he and Gustave Jr. move into a deluxe apartment in the sky? I thought this enterprise wasn't about making money.) In short, I thought Ratatouille wanted to have it both ways, cloaking a rather elitist, even snobbish story in the trappings of democratic tolerance. And the closing monologue by Peter O'Toole's Anton Ego, which I thought ostensibly tried to make the movie critic-proof, irked me too. But, all that aside, it does look real purty.



20. Atonement: There were several contenders for this last spot on this list, including Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Simpsons Movie, and Jason Reitman's Juno. But in the end I went with Joe Wright's take on Ian McEwan's novel, partly because people I trust who haven't read the book beforehand haven't shared my issues with the film. If nothing else, Atonement looks ravishing, and it features breakout performances by James McAvoy, Romola Garai, and Saiorse Ronan. Still, in a year that saw No Country and Diving Bell, I wish Wright had been less conventional in its approach to the story, and found a way to do the gloomy, misanthropic ending of McEwan's novel justice.


Most Disappointing: The Golden Compass, Grindhouse, Spiderman 3, Southland Tales

Worth a Rental: 3:10 to Yuma, Beowulf, Eastern Promises, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Juno, Live Free or Die Hard, Lust, Caution, Ocean's 13, The Simpsons Movie, Stardust, Superbad, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Don't Bother: 300, Across the Universe, American Gangster, The Darjeeling Limited, Interview, The Invasion, Margot at the Wedding, The Mist, Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End, Transformers, You Kill Me

Best Actor: Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah; Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Best Actress: Ellen Page, Juno
Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Best Supporting Actress: Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone; Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There

A Good Year For:
• Casey Affleck (Assassination of Jesse James, Gone Baby Gone)
  
• Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard)
  
• Josh Brolin (American Gangster, Grindhouse, In the Valley of Elah, No Country)
  
• Michael Cera (Superbad, Juno)
  
• Garret Dillahunt (No Country for Old Men, Assassination of Jesse James)
  
• Full-Frontal Parity (Diving Bell, Eastern Promises, I'm Not There, Walk Hard)
  
• Philip Seymour Hoffman (Before the Devil, Charlie Wilson's War, The Savages)
  
• Tommy Lee Jones (In the Valley of Elah, No Country for Old Men)
  
• Man's Best Friend (I am Legend, The Savages)
  
• Pregnant Hipsters (Knocked Up, Juno)
  
• Seth Rogen (Knocked Up, Superbad)
  
• Amy Ryan (Before the Devil, Gone Baby Gone)
  
• Texans (No Country for Old Men, Charlie Wilson's War)
  
• The Western (3:10 to Yuma, Assassination of Jesse James, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood)

A Bad Year For:
• The Beatles (Across the Universe, Walk Hard)
  
• Josh Brolin's PETA standing (American Gangster, No Country for Old Men)
  
• Great Cities (28 Weeks Later, I am Legend)
  
• Kidman/Craig Pairings (The Invasion, The Golden Compass)
  
• The Male Derriere (Charlie Wilson's War, Margot at the Wedding)
  
• Standard-Issue Music Biopics(I'm Not There, Walk Hard)

Unseen: Away from Her, Black Book, Black Snake Moan, The Brave One, Breach, Control, Elizabeth II: The Golden Age, Enchanted, Grace is Gone, The Great Debaters, Goya's Ghosts, The Host, Into the Wild, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, The Kingdom, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, The Kite Runner, Lars and the Real Girl, La Vie En Rose, Lions for Lambs, Love in the Time of Cholera, A Mighty Heart, The Namesake, No End in Sight, Once, The Orphanage, Persepolis, Redacted, Rendition, Rescue Dawn, Reservation Road, Romance and Cigarettes, Shoot 'Em Up, Sicko, Sweeney Todd, Talk to Me, This is England, We Own the Night, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Wristcutters: A Love Story, Year of the Dog, Youth Without Youth

2008: Be Kind, Rewind, Cassandra's Dream, Cloverfield, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Funny Games, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, In Bruges, The Incredible Hulk, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man, James Bond 22, Jumper, Leatherheads, My Blueberry Nights, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Revolutionary Road, Run, Fat Boy Run, Speed Racer, Star Trek, Valkyrie, Wall-E, Wanted, The X-Files 2...let's see, am I missing anything...?



Welcome, 2008. I'll see y'all on the other side.

More trailers: Sly tries to go fifteen more rounds in the surprisingly effective second trailer for Rocky Balboa (It's the music, for sure), and Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey, Jr., Chloe Sevigny, Donal Logue, Elias Koteas, and Brian Cox venture into Se7en territory in the preview for David Fincher's Zodiac. (Panic Room was sorta dull and by-the-numbers, but Fincher still has a lot of goodwill in this corner for Fight Club.)

Another director update: Steven Soderbergh, late of The Good German, talks Che and Ocean's 13, and David Fincher, currently completing Zodiac, has picked up, yes, still another serial killer flick, Torso, about the latter days of Elliot Ness as a crimefighter in Cleveland.