You know the drill: these are the movies that worked their way into my brain the most over the past
12 6 months - emotionally, aesthetically, theoretically, and entertainingly, all rolled into one. We'll see how they stack up come December, when dozens more (hopefully) illustrious titles have been dumped on us in the name of Oscar splendor. I often find these early months somewhat more enticing because there's a greater sense of risk in the air, of films and creators worried less about pleasing highbrows and voters than about committing their own visions to the screen without superficial checklists in hand. These five cover a wide range of genres, styles, moods and levels of popularity, and I can only hope that the rest of this year is as brilliantly eclectic as it has so far established itself.
1.
Wall•E - I hesitate slightly in choosing this film for the top spot, coming off of but a single viewing and already manipulated (an unavoidable problem in my position) by the altogether tremendous response the film has garnered (as we speak, it rises from #9 to #6 on the
IMDb Top 250, proving that even Daniel Plainview's draaaaiiiiiiinage can't compete with the peepers of an anthropomorphic robot). That hesitation, though, is but my brutally perfectionist mind at work, the ramblings of which I will ignore and simply go with the fact that no film so far this year has invoked as pure or immediate a response. Despite a few narrative hiccups that I hope to get into after a second viewing (and third, and fourth, and fifth), the non-human portions of the film are nothing short of masterful, a divine union between the likes of Kubrick's
2001 and Chaplin's
City Lights, at once wistful and profound, humble and existential. Great films are rarely perfect films, and I sense that we're standing in the presence of an as-of-yet unrecognized giant. It's popular, for sure, but that's largely hype speaking. What when it truly settles in? Only time will tell, and I'll be there to help nudge it into the limelight of earned greatness that I'm sure it will accrue in time.
2.
Speed Racer - Woe are the Wachowskis, whose bold pop experiment and raw cinematic invention has suffered the ire of many a Rex Reed curmudgeon (and then some) for little more than - to these eyes - going so far out on a limb in rendering a film this unique, rich, and personal. My suspicion is that retrospectively-formulated expectations are the only thing preventing works such as this and Michael Mann's
Miami Vice from getting the credit they truly deserve, obscuring their use of narrative and re-calibrated designations of space and time with a hollow, shallow set of expectations that shuns cinematic craft in the name of familiarity and nostalgia. With
Speed Racer, Larry and Andy have given us a world even more complete and thought-out as anything in their
Matrix trilogy, and perhaps the most visually and artistically commanding "kids" film since George Miller broke the mold with
Babe: Pig in the City. Hijacking digital in the name of childhood euphoria, it's an ode to imagination, and one hell of a mental high. Starbucks, you got served.
3.
Married Life - I'd hoped to write something about Ira Sachs' delightful follow-up to his exquisite
Forty Shades of Blue sooner, but the inability to immediately revisit such a complex and singular film restrained me from doing so. Until the DVD is available for a second go at this morbid, funny, provocative and strangely optimistic tale of spousal priorities and moral codes between the genders, at least know that it as nearly as reflexive and metamorphic as a David Lynch film, utilizing John Bingham novel "Five Roundabouts to Heaven" with an innate knowledge of cinema's empathetic qualities, taking us along with his characters' conflicted feelings of love, longing and greed with a profound humanism. For more complete and distinct thoughts, Keith Uhlich has written was it probably the penultimate review of the film
here; it's so good that even
Roger Ebert couldn't help but mention it.
4.
Iron Man - If a director's skill can be assessed by his ability to place the emphasis of their film on the qualities they know work best, then Jon Favreau can be praised for more or less stepping out of the way of his actors, who elevate this otherwise formulaic and obviously scripted character study/morality tale into something infinitely more emotive and engaging than it had any chance of being. Downey, Jr. - whose last stroke of brilliance, in
Zodiac, went largely unnoticed (probably because everyone thought he was but playing himself) - practically drives the film, while Jeff Bridges holds his own as an evil character with a face and a heart, twisted and black though it may be (honestly, he'd have been my first choice to star in the title role of Oliver Stone's
W., but I also sense we have yet to see his career-defining performance). Props to Gwyneth Paltrow, too, who takes the kind of role typically reserved for washed-up Oscar winners and transforms it into something of blazing feminine empowerment, perhaps no more so than in an altogether icky scene that suggests Cronenberg by way of "America's Funniest Home Videos".
5.
The Unforeseen - Already, 2008 has hosted a slew of very good to almost great documentaries, and none has stuck with me more than this rapturous look at public empowerment in the face of environmental destruction a la corporate greed, an important lesson to remember given our own environmentally conscious yet politically disenfranchised times. Though it doesn't hurt to have Terrence Malick and Robert Redford on board among your executive producers, director Laura Dunn is a talent I'll be keeping a close eye on.
And some honorable mentions, many of which I will need to see again before putting together anything in the way of a respectable year-end list:
Diary of the Dead,
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,
My Blueberry Nights,
Nana,
Be Kind Rewind
