About.com’s Jurgen Fauth has put together a list of the ten films he was most disappointed by in 2008. Among them: box office champion The Dark Knight (”turgid”), preordained indie “surprise” awards darling Slumdog Millionaire (”completely falls apart by the light of day”) and the year’s token “but it’s good for grown ups too!” animated hit, Wall-E (”predictably schematic kid’s fare”). Three cheers for contrarianism!
It should be noted that many of Jurgen’s disappointments are amongst my favorite films of the year. If I made a top ten of 2008 today, spots for Burn After Reading and Synecdoche, NY would be assured, and I’m a fan of Ballast and Vicky Cristina Barcelona as well. “Many of the movies that disappointed me most in 2008 were grossly over-hyped, flagrantly overpraised — and zealously defended by people with wide-ranging vocabularies,” he writes. I’m one of those zealots!
Since the Chicago Reader’s Pat Graham extended the meme on his own blog, I thought I might as well. My own picks for the biggest disappointments of 2008 are after the jump. Chime in with yours in the comments, or write your own blog post and paste a link there.
The hands-down winner is, as you’ve probably guessed, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Though I’ve been accused by commenters of deliberately hating it, I should point out that I was much kinder to the footage shown at Telluride than some of my peers. This was a film I wanted to love. In the end, I could not.
So, the five movies that I’d put in the “missed opportunity” file, with excerpts from my original reviews:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: “Increasingly as the film wears on, it seems as though the crux of each scene is the juxtaposition of a slightly younger Brad Pitt with a slightly older Cate Blanchett, and Fincher seems to move from one juxtaposition to next as quickly as possible as if he’s convinced that if he just hits every point on his predetermined timeline, the relationship itself will happen organically. It doesn’t.”
W.: “17 years ago, Oliver Stone made a movie that made such bizarro claims about the fate of an American president that the government actually had to pass a law to dispute it. Now, he’s content to create a live-action version of DC Follies. If history remembers W. at all, it’ll be as a monument to the erosion of Oliver Stone’s balls.”
Che: “One would think the life story of Che Guevara would have more inherently going on under the surface than, say, a Rat Pack remake, but if so that’s not the target of Soderbergh’s concern.”
American Teen: “American Teen propagates the same, modern-day martyr, constant victim-as-star bullshit that L.C. plays out season after season on The Hills. And even that, it gets wrong.”
Religulous: “It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with.”
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