ShaunHuston filmblog

Last week, figuring that we had seen all of the films we were going to see in 2008, Anne-Marie and I held our annual review of our year in movie watching. We each come up with a list of the five best. Our ground rules are pretty simple. We only consider films seen in the theater during the calendar year. We only list five because we don't see enough films to merit a top ten, or, at least, given the number of movies we do see, coming up with five is more of a challenge than would be ten or more. This year we saw a paltry twenty-seven, barely more than one every two weeks. The fewer films we see, the more personal and basically arbitrary our lists are (they are always so to be sure, but the more movies we have to compare, the more informed our selections). Here is my personal best five for 2008, in order seen, from least to most recent:

• There Will be Blood
• Girls Rock!
• Redbelt
• Man on Wire
• Rachel Getting Married

This is very different from last year's list, which had uniformly wonderful, even transcendent, films, not to mention the cachet of our having attended the Toronto International Film Festival. This year's list is composed of flawed, but interesting movies.

My favorite here is probably Rachel Getting Married, although it has the advantage of being the last I saw. I love Demme's use of long takes, the persistent irritating music, the way it feels like a wedding weekend, and how the filmmakers take the complexity of family relationships seriously. For me, it is a film that shows one direction for cinema, even as TV and other visual storytelling media exceed it as a form of expression for certain purposes. The necessarily finite nature of the story makes it ideal for film. Further, as I argued in my DVD review of My Blueberry Nights, there's a kind of visual intimacy that is best experienced in a theater, on a big screen, and Rachel is that kind of film.

There Will be Blood is also natively cinematic, but because of its bigness, rather than its smallness, and because its character arcs are complete and perfect. The same could be written of Man on Wire, although I'm not sure how different my viewing experience would have been if I had seen that film first on OPB or HBO rather than at the Darkside. I have no question that I could have seen Girls Rock! on TV or online and still been affected by the kids the filmmakers chose to focus on. That Redbelt is on this list comes as a surprise. I would not have thought that when we saw it. It is kind of a silly movie, but Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance has stuck with me like no other this year.

There are, as always, movies that I saw for the first time on DVD and at Western Oregon's French Film Festival that would have been contenders for the list had I seen them in the theater. On DVD, I saw the strange and wonderful Last Night, the amazingly compelling King of Kong, the beautiful and provocative About a Son, and the Canadian classic, Goin' Down the Road. I'm fairly certain that the first two listed here would have been on my list. From the Tournées Festival, I certainly would have thought about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

You can see all of the films I saw in the theater last year here and those I saw on DVD here. Anne-Marie's list is here.