The Best of '08

Copyright 2008, Warner Bros. Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures

There's still a large part of me that can't shake the fact that, as much as I feel and know that The Dark Knight and WALL-E are the best films so far of 2008, they really shouldn't be.

Why shouldn't movies about a man dressed as a bat and a lonely robot in love be the best of the year? Well, no specific reason, but the way that Hollywood works, it's been a long time since the blockbuster was able to also be something more than a way to spend a couple hours on a sun-drenched day in June. That these two movies are still so resonant with enough people to be seriously considered as Best Picture contenders says much for their quality and even more about the lack of quality coming from the arthouse circuit this year.

Of course, after a year that produced such great small films like Once, There Will Be Blood, and No Country for Old Men, it's hard for current indies to top this kind of work. Still, most of the year's arthouse films, especially the most recent ones, aren't succeeding on as similar a level. Thus, Christian Bale and WALL-E sneak in.

Aside from these two films, the year has been disturbingly sparse in films that are actually great, ones worth remembering ten or twenty years down the line. The next best films for me were earlier entries: In Bruges and The Visitor, both propelled by stunning lead performances. That Richard Jenkins, the lead of the latter film, is brilliant as Walter Vale is not, in itself, stunning. That he, one of the prototypical character actors, was the lead of his own film is the stunner. Colin Farrell's hilarious and poignant performance in the former movie...that was a discovery.

2008's offerings have been relatively dry otherwise, with movies like Doubt and Milk featuring strong performances but lacking a strong core to stick with this viewer. Then there's Slumdog Millionaire, this year's Cinderella story, which has an abundance of flashy directing from Danny Boyle, and a heap of contrivances that have lead me to join the small camp of people who just don't get where the love for this movie is coming from. Have there been worse movies? Oh yes. Have there been better? Double yes. Now I know what those who didn't get Juno or Little Miss Sunshine were coming from.

The year's not over, film-wise. With Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Gran Torino, Revolutionary Road, and Valkyrie just being released, I'm not giving up on movies this year; being in Phoenix and Flagstaff has also prevented me from seeing a few other indie films, which I'll end up remedying in the new year. My list of ten will hopefully include movies I genuinely loved or liked a lot, instead of just movies that have to go on the list because they are among the ten best I've seen, even if they're not more than good. Until then, I'll wait and wonder which, if any, movie will end up dethroning The Dark Knight as the best film of 2008.