2008:The Fucking Catalina Wine Mixer!

The retrospective won't be finished until I post the 2009 list, but there are still way too many flicks to catch up with on DVD for me to make one yet, so this will be the last one for a while.

1. The Dark Knight

What can be said has been said. Best comic book movie ever and a revolutionary blockbuster.

2. Wall-E

Will always be connected in my mind with The Dark Knight. They're two movies that came out during the same summer popcorn season that redefined what movies aiming for a mass audience are capable of.

3. In Bruges

This movie is the ultimate corrective to all the post-Pulp Fiction movies about super cool assassins and their quippy, murdery ways. Also the rare example of Colin Farrell not being insufferable.

4. Rachel Getting Married

One of the few family melodramas of the decade to contain the emotional multitudes of family life, the drama and resentment, but also the joy and sense of security.

5. Hunger

British artist Steve McQueen set out to make a movie about IRA martyr Bobby Sands and his fatal 1981 hunger strike. He had plenty of film models to work from when it comes to historical docudrama. A good example could have been 2008's other movie about imprisoned terrorists, The Baader-Meinhof Complex. It's a solid film that mixes a assiduous compilation of the exploits of West Germany's Red Army Faction with enough intimate moments with the members to give them shading and depth, but the main focus is documenting the motivations and actions of the group. McQueen goes in a completely different, and vastly more satisfying, direction by ignoring big picture questions and a blow-by-blow documentation of the "troubles." Instead, McQueen sets his film entirely inside the Maze prison in Northern Ireland and focuses entirely on the politics of the human body. The IRA prisoners in the Maze had nothing at their disposal to protest their imprisonment than their own bodies. So they refused to bath, smeared shit on their cell walls, and, in a last ditch effort to gain the attention of Margaret Thatcher's government, stopped eating. The ideology and the strategy of the IRA take a backseat to the day-to-day struggle between the prisoners and the guards over control of the prisoners bodies, and in the process McQueen generates some brilliant imagery in banal and grotesque situations: snow melting on the skinned knuckles of a punch-happy prison guard, intricate designs made from human feces being blasted from walls with a high pressure hose, a prison trustee methodically sweeping pooled urine from a hallway. McQueen has time to investigate the struggle of the flesh in all its poignant dignity because he doesn't have a list of historical incidents to dramatize. If you want to find out what happened with the Bobby Sands hunger strike, you can read his wikipedia page. McQueen offers something much more valuable and interesting than the gloomy details of the IRA hunger strike: perspective, insight and poetry.

So-bad-it's-good doubleheader: Twilight and The Happening

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: The Wrestler. This is kind of misleading, because I actually really enjoy The Wrestler, but I've been seeing it on some best of the decade lists and that seems to be a bit much. Yes, the funny script and Aranofsky's direction and Rourke's performance help elevate the sports-movie cliches, but that doesn't change the fact that much of the film is overly programmatic. And there's something sort of queasy about the way that Mickey Rourke and Randy "The Ram" sort of meld into the same person. Are you watching a great performance or are you just voyueristically grooving on the wasted wreckage of Mickey Rourke? Still, this is the only one of these "modern classic" debunkings that I actually think could qualify as a great movie (especially that fantastic ending), and it's really only here because there aren't any other plausible 2008 candidates for the position. Oh, wait! I forgot about Slumdog Millionaire! And Milk! Nevermind! The Wrestler is great.

Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that actually sucks out loud: Slumdog Millionaire. How long is it going to be before we can all admit that this movie isn't good? There isn't a single element of this film that isn't contrived or cliched or frankly insulting to the audience. If it weren't for the alluring "foreign-ness" of the setting, this could be any mechanical exercise in romantic audience manipulation. I mean, the supposed lovers whose relationship forms the spine of the whole movie have barely a dozen lines of dialogue together! There are like a million ridiculous plot coincidences that wouldn't make it into a Kate Hudson movie without the handy "destiny" excuse. Also, Milk.

Guillermo Del Toro achieves apotheosis: the death of the tree monster in Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. All of Del Toro's films to date have revolved around the intersection of the mundane and the fantastical, and no single scene has encapsulated that dramatic contrast better than the scene in Hellboy 2 when Hellboy blows the head off of a giant tree god and it's corpse slowly melds with the crumbling tenements of the Lower East Side.

Best comedy performance: Danny McBride in The Foot-Fist Way. With this movie, McBride and collaborators Ben Best and Jody Hill took the Will Ferrell model of the comedic protagonist: oblivious idiots with unearned confidence, and took it to a new level of pathos and aggressive stupidity.

Best horror scene: the swimming pool sequence in Let the Right One In. After two hours of exquisitely slow-burning tension, this brilliant take on the vampire genre breaks out the ultraviolence in such a way that it delivers all the gory payoff a horror fan would want without betraying the film's tone.

Pornography of Violence Award: a tie between John Rambo blowing a dude up with point blank heavy machine-gun fire in Rambo and the Punisher blowing a dude's face off with a shotgun WHILE HOLDING A CHILD IN HIS ARMS in Punisher: War Zone

Line of the Year: "I'm a lead farmer, motherfucker!" --Tropic Thunder