CINE-FILE / Blog

Our friends at the Chicago-based Stop Smiling magazine put together this review of their excellent film coverage from 2008. Check it out here: http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/columns.php?id=20

MIKE KING:

A caveat:
Despite being only a few hours away, moving to Madison in June severely curtailed my ability to keep up-to-date, even by flyover standards. As evidence, here are the top ten new films I read about on Cine-File but haven’t had the chance to see:

BALLAST (2008, Lance Hammer)
FULL BATTLE RATTLE (2008, Tony Gerber & Jesse Moss)
HUNGER (2008, Steve McQueen)
JCVD (2008, Mabrouk El Mechri)
OF TIME AND THE CITY (2008, Terence Davies)

SERBIS (2008, Brilliante Mendoza)
SPARROW (2008, Johnny To)
TOKYO SONATA (2008, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
24 CITY (2008, Zhang ke Jia)
WENDY AND LUCY (2008, Kelly Reichardt)

Chicagoans don’t know how good they have it. That said, here are the best American features to first cross my path in 2008 (nearly half of which still haven’t hit Madison):

WALL-E (2008, Andrew Stanton)
Best film of the millennium.

GRAN TORINO (2008, Clint Eastwood)
In a year when actioner also-rans Bruce Campbell and Jean Claude Van-Damme sought to cash in on their negligible iconographies with winks and smirks, Dirty Harry’s bizarre deathbed penance is all the more astounding for its gravity. More than just a misfit sibling to UNFORGIVEN, GRAN TORINO is a rare descendent of Sam Fuller: literal, introspective, and socially engaged, tonally strange and pitch perfect.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson)

BE KIND REWIND (2008, Michel Gondry)
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008, Charlie Kaufman)
The beloved duo behind ETERNAL SUNSHINE splits up and actually makes movies worth rewatching - one a misanthropic curlicue and the other a beatific paean to movie love. A friend (who disliked it) termed SYNECDOCHE “the death of meta.” Yes, but not only that, it’s a viking funeral. Situated on the other end of the indulgence spectrum, REWIND is a homespun “take back the media” advocacy campaign. And a surprisingly persuasive one at that.

BILLY THE KID (2007, Jennifer Venditti)

AFTERSCHOOL (2008, Antonio Campos)

CLOVERFIELD (2008, Matt Reeves)
The most aesthetically rigorous blockbuster ever made?

CHOP SHOP (2007, Ramin Bahrani)
THE WRESTLER (2008, Darren Aronofsky)
Two quicksilver downers that bask in the entrancing dilapidation of their subjects: the iron triangle and Mickey Rourke.

Honorable Mention:
Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job! (Adult Swim)
Tim and Eric Nite Live (superdeluxe)
Abso-lutely the best editing anywhere, and a reinvention of that ineffable quality known as comic timing. Rather than cutting to the punchline, Tim and Eric are demonstrating that the cut is the punchline.

JOSH MABE:

A mix of new and old seen for the first time in 2008:

1:
Jim Trainor: The Animals and Their Limitations (1998 – 2004)

2-7:
Julie Murray: DELIQUIUM (2003) & SF horses
Phil Solomon: The Exquistite Hour (1989/1994) & Remains to Be Seen (1989/1994) & The Secret Garden (1988)
Joyce Wieland: Reason Above Passion (1968)
Madison Brookshire: Opening (2007)
Abraham Ravett: Tziporah (2007)
Ben Russell and Brigid McCaffrey: The Wet Season [Tjúba Tén] (2008)

8-10:
Rosalind Nashashibi: Bachelor Machines: Part 2 (2007)
Jason Halprin: Monongahela Ghost Train (2007)
Jake Barningham: Primitive I (2008) & reSHOOTING (2008)

ROB CHRISTOPHER:

A film begins when you see it, not when it’s released. So my list of the Best Films of 2008 includes some movies that are decades old. Sure, they weren’t made this year. But one day when I think back to 2008 these are the ones I’ll probably remember most.

Sarah Polley: AWAY FROM HER (2006)
Nick Broomfield: BATTLE FOR HADITHA (2007)
Zoe Cassavetes: BROKEN ENGLISH (2006)
Julian Schnabel: THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (2007)
Steve McQueen: HUNGER (2008)
John Frankenheimer: THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973)
Jean Eustache: THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973)
David Gordon Green: PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008)
Jay Roach: RECOUNT (2008)
Tamara Jenkins: THE SAVAGES (2007)
Charlie Kaufman: SYNEDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)
Paul Thomas Anderson: THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007)
Carl Deal and Tia Lessin: TROUBLE THE WATER (2008)
Thomas McCarthy: THE VISITOR (2007)
Kelly Reichardt: WENDY AND LUCY (2008)

In a year where I felt mostly disconnected from the moving pictures I took in (though I admittedly missed a significant amount of the Crucial stuff), the ones that stick with me the most were composed by the ever eloquent (and, in this case, extremely concise) Jean-Luc Godard. I emphatically second Nathan Lee’s assertion that UNE CATASTROPHE, a minute-long trailer JLG produced for this year’s Viennale, is the movie of the year:

Other movies that struck me as exceptionally beautiful this year (in no particular order): FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON (2007, Hou Hsiao-hsien), ASHES OF TIME REDUX (1994/2008, Wong Kar Wai), and THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS (2007, Jacques Rivette). HORIZONTAL BOUNDARIES (2008, Pat O’Neill) and HOLD ME NOW (2008, Michael Robinson) were my favorite experimental shorts.