GMD Social Poll: Top Ten Films of 2008

some pretty lazy reviews for this one, and some very old ones, sry in advance

15) Redbelt
(Dir. David Mamet)
The best weapon in the world is a flashlight. So you can look deep into the other guy's eyes.

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my list begins with two films that would each serve as perfect double bills with aronofsky's the wrestler, albeit in very different ways. in mamet's surprisingly restrained and poignant redbelt, an honourable, self-sacrificing jujitsu instructor has his strict moral code assailed by circling sharks, and has to find a way to survive and perhaps even prosper without surrendering his soul.

14) The Hurt Locker (Dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

As you get older... some of the things that you love might not seem so special anymore, you know?

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in the hurt locker, war is even more of a health risk than wrestling, and just as much of a rush. i'm no fan of boal's writing here or elsewhere and i'm not too interested in how it functions as allegory, but it's hard to overstate how refreshing it was at the time to see a war film which eschewed guilt-tripping sanctimony in favour of one masterfully tense ground-level set piece after another.

13) Night & Day (Dir. Hong Sang-Soo)

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we learn from an opening title card that our painter 'hero' has fled to paris after getting caught smoking pot with his students, and we'll spend the next 2+ hours watching him woo, annoy and berate various women in between whiny, horny phone calls to his wife back in seoul. it's long by hong's standards but otherwise of a piece with the rest of his filmog, a simultaneously funny and scathing rohmerian character study full of the usual doubles, coincidences, repetitions, foot fetishes, alcoholic beverages, madonna/whore complexes, narcissistic moral posturing, mediocre art, lowkey-dream sequences, and so on.


12) Sparrow (Dir. Johnnie To)

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a ramshackle crime caper about a gang of pickpockets on bicycles who decide to fight to save a trapped woman, sparrow's charm lies in its elegance and spontaneity, its graceful padding from one genre to the next. it moves like a jazzy demy musical or city symphony, covering everything from melancholy melodrama to slapstick pratfalls to stealth set pieces without an ounce of pretension or cynicism. it was known to have been a passion project for to, shooting scenes here and there in between doing other things, and his love and warmth for every person (even the millionaire villain) and place therein is extremely evident. if ya don't like this ya don't like movies.

11) Burn After Reading (Dir. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)
I thought you might be worried... about the security... of your shit.

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i watch this every couple of years, every performance is killer.

10) The Dark Knight (Dir. Christopher Nolan)
You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these... these civilized people, they'll eat each other.

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it's a love/hate relationship, but it has to be here. without ledger, it wouldn't be.

9) Julia (Dir. Erick Zonca)
Well, I'm not really down with the good neighbor shit.

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still the definitive tilda performance.


8) Speed Racer (Dir. Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski)
A car's a living, breathing thing, and she's alive. Feel it talking to you. Telling you what she wants, what she needs. All you gotta do is listen. Close your eyes and listen.

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fuck you, this is cinema.

7) The Wrestler (Dir. Darren Aronofsky)
Then that Cobain pussy had to come around and ruin it all.

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what could provide better accompaniment for his metaphysical hotchpotch the fountain than an exhilarating spray of half-real half-fake blood plastering the battered steroid-pumped body of a washed up ex-star, a man only in his element when being nailed to his proverbial cross, played with career-resurrecting physicality and pathos by blatant acting analogue mickey rourke (with tomei every bit his equal)? this is where aronofsky began ripping off the dardennes instead of satoshi kon or whoever, but he makes that style his own here and i consider this his best work.

6) A Christmas Tale (Dir. Arnaud Desplechin)
Scumbag! You're part of the game! By choosing for me, you played.

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every bit as great of a chaotic family reunion drama as the royal tenenbaums, with a disgustingly great cast and such control over its many formal excesses that it never becomes self-indulgent.

5) Tokyo Sonata (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Use that pen as a microphone, and sing.

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for a while it's the most depressing movie imaginable, and then it becomes something else, something a lot more difficult to describe. maybe the greatest film in a great filmography.

4) Happy-Go-Lucky (Dir. Mike Leigh)
And the education system, it works like this... "I will give you a world view. And if you repeat my world view, if you reconfirm my world view, you will pass your exams and you will go higher and higher and higher, and you will become a policeman, a magistrate, a lawyer, a general, a politician. And you will be happy and you will succeed. But if you think for yourself, if you think outside of the box, then you will be unhappy and you will fail. That's how the education system works."

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top tier leigh in my book; it only seems slight until those moments when fuck it really isn't. maybe the best performed film of the entire decade, littered with singular characters.


3) Two Lovers (Dir. James Gray)
Are you a fuck up?

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ed gonzalez perfectly describes it as follows: 'has the feel of something bygone, an ambered tone poem of unusually striking eroticism and ambiguity that derives its beauty from its hypnotic feeling for location, and accumulation of seemingly off-the-cuff details that speak wondrous profundities about its main character’s eccentricities and defense mechanisms'. i can only add that it’s one of those rare films where an archetypal screenplay is made to seem like the freshest thing in the world by the romance of the direction and the intensity of the performances. in what is still his best performance in my eyes, phoenix fires out clichés like ‘i love you so much’ or ‘you’re so beautiful’ and there’s this tone of fumbling desperation in his voice that gives the impression that he’s desperate to say something more profound but his feelings are beyond the scope of language.

2) Love Exposure (Dir. Sion Sono)
I love Yoko more than God!

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the most unfiltered movie i know, with every emotion ramped up into religious hysteria, and a seething disdain for any institution or value system which would lead one to feel ashamed and repress one's true self. it posits that society is a patchwork of false cults which cause everybody irreparable damage, and it ends up feeling like a collective exorcism, tearing down every norm it encounters (be it regarding love, gender, family, sex, or those of narrative cinema itself) in an attempt to strike on something honest and true, even if that means trying to get upskirt photos for a full half hour. there's much more to it and i'll write 20 paragraphs about it sometime as it's easily one of my top 5 movies ever, but for now: love sono forever, love sakura ando forever.

1) Synecdoche New York (Dir. Charlie Kaufman)
I didn't jump!

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big surprise, i know. again i can hardly capture this in a paragraph, but i will say that no film better captures the horror of time slipping by, and all the many different ways we try and fail to grasp and preserve it before it's gone.

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1. synecdoche new york
2. love exposure
3. two lovers
4. happy go lucky
5. tokyo sonata
6. a christmas tale
7. the wrestler
8. speed racer
9. julia
10. the dark knight
 
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