Author name: Blake Williams

For some reason, I was starting to think that I overrated this. I was getting annoyed with people who compared every new, good science fiction film as being the greatest one since 2001. I was annoyed that it was topping so many Greatest Ever lists, and that certain parts of it kept showing up as homages in so many movies, like Wall-E and Magnolia, among hundreds of others. Now, while I think everyone does need to leave it alone already, seeing it with my mother of all people (she had never seen it before), I am reconvinced of its brilliance.

Watching my mother, reclined in a loveseat for the entire film, close the recliner and sit up to the edge of her seat when Dave enters the white bedroom at the end, made me notice that no matter how much one favors Hollywood blockbusters, and no matter how many science fictions films that one has seen, this film is still new and captivating to anyone seeing it for the first time, because it is so inimitable. Granted, when the star shild faded away into the credits, she looked at me and said “Thanks for showing me…that…honey” and then “Now explain the whole thing.” She didn’t get any of it, and asked me after I explained what I think happens how I ever got that from it, but I didn’t get it either after I saw it for the first time, either.

There were shots that I never questioned before and now finally noticed as being almost impossible, and the pacing felt as brisk as it ever has. I even used to sympathize with people who thought it was boring. I was reading a review by critic Armond White of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in which he compares the ending of that film to the appearance of the star child. I read the review before seeing the film, and when I saw it I thought ok, I can see it maybe. It’s an interesting comparison because it made me think about the idea of the universe aging backwards. I don’t know, but either way, this film makes me feel tiny.

Going 2 for 2, with this film I think that Kelly Reichardt joins Claire Denis, Lucrecia Martel, and Chantal Akerman as the most important working female directors on the planet, though their work all holds up against any male director. With Old Joy and now Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt creates impossibly moving films out of some of the simplest, sparsest plots in cinema. These two films affect me in ways that I had always hoped and expected Robert Bresson’s oeuvre would, but didn’t. Especially Au Hasard Balthazar, which I think has many things in common with Reichardt’s latest, drawing deep and complex pathos toward a female’s relationship with an animal that she loves; there are tons of subtle parallels between Wendy and Lucy’s respective states. Based on the films plot there is nothing all that impressive about it, but, like in Old Joy, the acting and direction elevates the film so much that you feel like you’ve witnessed some sort of dense study on human suffering that cannot do anything but move you.

The film also captures small town mediocrity perfectly, reminding me of Alexander Payne, but more authentic and less plasticky. I’ve seen a lot of reviews that call this a really great indie film, and I think that putting this in the ‘indie’ genre is misleading and irresponsible. Yes, it has a low budget and seemingly modest aspirations, but this is no more an indie film than a Bela Tarr film is. When i think of seeing an indie film, I think of pseudo indie films like those made by Steven Soderberg or Wes Anderson. This film was simply made in the exact way that it should have been, regardless of the budget that Reichardt was given or the stars or no-names it could cast.

Michelles Williams is spectacular and I cannot believe that the girl from Dawson’s Creek pulled this role off so well. All of the supporting cast is great two, especially the punks around the camp fire and the sleazy, bastard car mechanic. I cannot wait for whatever Reichardt makes next.

A pretty disappointing film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had every right to be one of the best American films of the year, but instead settled for throwaway dreamy, inspirational life story, lost love trash. The only impressive thing in this film is the digital transformation of Brad Pitt into a lifetime’s range of ages, which is really impressive. I knew beforehand that the screenwriter for this film was the same as the one for Forest Gump. This doesn’t mean much to me, because I’ve never seen that film all the way through, but of what I’ve seen, it’s not the best association.

Some Spoilers

A big problem with this film for me isn’t that it didn’t address things that it should have with such an interesting premise, but that it does address these things in such an insignificant way. The idea that Benjamin Button would fall in love with someone who looks the same age as himself for a brief period of time before they diverge into complimentary stages of life is great, but they the tension in that idea off the hook when Button simply gives up and says, paraphrasing, ‘I can’t live with the idea that you (Blanchett) would have to raise me and our child’ and then leaves her pregnant. This is the confrontation that I had been waiting for for the entire film! I wanted to see an old woman going on dates with a teenage boy and then has to defend why this is okay. I also wanted to see Benjamin Button as a young boy get questioned about why he isn’t going to school, or if he goes to school, why he is more mature than the other kids in school. I wanted to see a young boy playing with other young boys, yet while his friends are excited and carefree, Button knows, precisely, the amount of time that he has left.

And I’m not just upset about a bunch of things that I hoped would be in the film but weren’t there, I’m also upset about the things that I did want to see, were shown, but were poorly done. Like Benjamin’s early life. It is basically defined by his infatuation with a young, pretty red-headed girl. The relationship between the importance of learning and swallowing knowledge as an adolescent versus his dementia ridden, mushy brain should have been an essential part of this story. Instead, the film shows him getting a job, liking a girl, loving his mom, having some friends, with consequence and without anyone questioning his condition after becoming aware of it. They would just nonchalantly say something like, ‘oh, you’re aging backwards, how unusual.’

Not only this, but it is trying very hard to be a movie about everything and ends up as an overpolished Oscar-push. It has tons of great themes: lost love, death, birth, war, battles, time: but all of these appear in such cliched forms. I loved Fincher’s Zodiac and it probably has a lot of the blame for my harsh reaction to this one.

Doubt caught me off guard and was almost terrific. I don’t know why I had such low expectations given the amazing cast. Hoffman obviously steals the show, as Streep, while still very very good, felt to me like she was retreading her role in The Devil Wears Prada. This movie is a great demonstration of an argument. The whole thing is basically about an argument, and how gossip and absence of proof can magnify tiny things. A priest holds a few private meetings with the lone black boy at a Catholic school, one of which ends with the boy’s breath smelling like alcohol, which sets in motion a chain of events that make a great example of how to not seek the truth. The central sermon in the film about gossip is spectacular, equating the act to scattered feathers with a beautiful, if unnecessary, visualization of what he is speaking about.

There are a couple of scenes, though, that almost pushed the film off the rails. The first was the scene involving the boy’s mother, played by Viola Davis. I’ve been hearing rumors that Davis steals the show, that her one scene shames everyone else in the film, and this just isn’t true. I think that she completely overacts in this, just like she does in Soderberg’s Solaris. Her dialogue was poorly written, too, jumbling up what might have been an interesting development into a convoluted, ‘what the hell is she getting at’ rant that sounded ridiculous coming from a mother who has just been informed that a priest may be seducing her son. Most people in my theatre, including myself, were laughing at this.

And the other scene that doesn’t work is, unfortunately, the final scene, which left me with a worse taste in my mouth than this film deserved. This scene involves Streep, in which her character makes a couple of confessions of her own, one of which clearly tries to sum up the film with a bright beautiful bow, how all of the characters experience Doubt in the film. I would have been fine with the film ending with Hoffman’s third and final sermon of the film, which was better acted and written than Streep’s scene. All in all though, a nice, ambiguous portrait of three religious people trying to prove things that they have no means of proving. This is a very frustrating situation to be in, and that frustration that I felt very much while watching it.

A surprisingly good superhero movie is, so far, still just a superhero movie. Iron Man is mostly good because of the acting. Robert Downey Jr. is on a hot streak right now by playing different permutations of the same sarcastic and witty character. It kind of felt like I was watching Harry from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang as a geeky, suave superhero. Gwyneth Paltrow is remarkably inoffensive as the love interest that, intelligently, is never completely won over in this film. The relationship is just kind of put on hold in the background, which will most likely and unfortunately be further explored in the unnecessary sequels.

One of the things I do like about Iron Man is that, other than Unbreakable, it is the most camouflaged superhero movie that I have seen. One could watch the first hour of this film and not get the impression that it is in the superhero genre. It is played out as a the story of a smart man who develops something that is useful for his situation. The film is more interested in being a well-made action movie than anything else, and it succeeds at that.

My main problem with it is one of the main problems that I have with all superhero films, which is that the film tries to spread a pacifist message of ‘I’m fighting to end all wars and violence and to protect the people’ but is filmed in a manner that portrays the fight scenes as graceful, well-choreographed spectacles that the audience is clearly intended to admire. I’m still waiting for the mainstream, anti-violence movie with fight scenes that really make the fighting look unappealing. But other than that, there is nothing really wrong with this film, nothing I have to see again, but certainly the best superhero movie released in 2008.

This might have made a decent short film, about 20 minutes long. I’d recommend anyone watching this, actually, to stop it after 20 minutes and take it as a short, because after that point it becomes completely repetitious, so much so that I cannot right now remember any specific scenes as being near the the beginning or near the end. It was like the same thing playing over and over again, only with Malkovich becoming more and more annoying as time wears on. Speaking of John Malkovich, I think that I don’t like him as an actor after this film. I haven’t seen too many things with him, maybe four or five, but he is the same character in everything. He reminds a little bit of Samuel L. Jackson actually. There was an homage to the one good film that I have seen him in, Being John Malkovich, that came off just as lazy as the rest of the film.

Basically, this film was trying to honor Stanley Kubrick in an interesting way and failed. A man took advantage of Kubrick’s reclusion from the press and pretended to be him to benefit from the perks of fame, like free entrance to clubs, extra trust from people expecting money, and a general kindness from strangers. This could have been pulled off very well, but there is no development at all for this man, why he feels the need to do this, why he’s chosen Mr. Kubrick (he’s clearly not a fan as he couldn’t even remember his somewhat sparse filmography), or the relationship between this stunt and his blatant homosexuality. Instead, it is scene after scene of him conning people until they discover that he is not Kubrick. It was fun the first time, boring the second, and annoying the rest. And John Malkovich acts like John Malkovich, again.

This was significantly less annoying than I was expecting, and I would go as far to say that I really, really liked it. Poppy, the protagonist pictured in the poster to the right, is excessively cheerful and optimistic. I keep hearing that she’s a girl that is just happy all of the time, which is also implied in the title, but I don’t know that I would describe her as always happy. She says ‘hello’ to just about anyone and tries to start up conversations with strangers, talks quickly and has a really funny sense of humor, and she calmly shrugs it off when her bike is stolen, but I think that she is just very good at avoiding annoyances and wants people to feel better after spending time with her. The great thing about this film is that it shows how her ‘happiness’ isn’t actually working in the way she’d like it to, and often does the opposite for people.

One criticism I do have is that the film feels a little black and white. The happy people are really happy, and the unhappy people are flat out miserable, misanthropic, and, in one case, satanic. Obviously, it’s a little more grey than that, but it’s Sally Hawkins acting and Mike Leigh’s writing that makes it so it all remains feeling natural. There is a strange scene between Poppy and a homeless man that is one of the most beautiful scenes I saw this year. The ending is really intense, and the final scene is perfect in an ‘everything is back to normal, but what is normal?’ kind of way.

This is one of the only films that I have seen that is about criticism, and it is massively impressive that it not only portrays it so well, but that it is disguised as a family animation film. Another big theme in the movie, that genius can come from anywhere, is nice but somewhat trite, and I’m glad that the film’s climax involved the food critic Anton Ego to steer the film more toward that direction. Ego is perfect; he reminds me of one of my high school art teachers, who manages to be both snobby and charming. This just edges out Finding Nemo as my favorite Pixar film, and it is exponentially more interesting than Wall-E.

It is good to see Brad Bird back, after The Incredibles disappointed me as just a plain action superhero movie after his Iron Giant, which is just about perfect. I see he is making a live-action film next, here’s hoping it goes over as well as his animated films do, and I can’t wait to see how he directs people (as opposed to just their voices).

After I saw Sunshine, I convinced myself that Danny Boyle would one day make something truly great. Sunshine was brilliant for the first two acts (as good as a film can be that has a crew of astronauts flying into a sun to reignite it) before it became terrible, and his 28 Days Later and Trainspotting were more consistently good without ever being great. With Slumdog Millionaire, be goes completely in the opposite direction, embracing a sort of audience-friendly Oscar sure-thing that immediately falls in the same category as Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, and possibly even Haggis’ Crash. Half feel-good indie film and half pseudo culturally significant, ‘pat myself on the back because I was able to make it through, and even enjoy (!), a film that is mostly subtitled” schmaltz field. The subtitles even jump around the frame, locating themselves next to the speaker in crazy colors like blue, green, and orange.

The premise is okay. A teenager named Jamal is on the India version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and he isn’t actually intelligent enough to know the sort of questions that are commonly on the show. But, all of the questions are remarkably familiar to him. The film is structured in a way that you see the question asked on the show, and then the film has a flashback to an early part of Jamal’s traumatic childhood to reveal the event that shows us why he knows the answer to the question. Not a bad set up. Except that every flashback makes Jamal’s life seem more and more miserable. Oh, you thought it was bad that he had to escape from a latrine by jumping in a pool of shit? Just wait until you see the fucked up sway his mother dies! Oh, you think that’s terrible? How about how his childhood dream girl is sold into prostitution! Man, Jamal got a raw deal.

But it’s ok. He gets the girl, and the money, as you can predict 5 minutes in. This is the favorite for the Best Picture Oscar. Okay, then.

This is a dynamic list, so it’ll be updated each time I see a film which had its world premiere in 2007 that is better than at least one of the films already on the list.