Hollywood movies in 2008 involved a yearning for the past that suggests either deep nostalgia or piggy-wiggy laziness. Who wants to keep revisiting the 1950s and 1960s? Ewwww. Any year that brings you Get Smart, Journey to the Centre of the Earth 3D or The Day the Earth Stood Still is a year that makes subtitles look attractive.
And so they are. This was a particularly good year for movies from faraway places, such as France and Italy. (And Sweden, if you ask Slotek. He liked the Swedish horror movie Let The Right One In. But what does he know?)
France was good enough to export the films Tell No One -- an intelligent thriller about a man whose murdered wife may be somewhat less dead than he thought -- and I've Loved You So Long, the heart-rending drama that has refurbished Kristin Scott Thomas' career. She stars as a woman who must rejoin the human race, having been released from prison after 15 years. Cry? Try to see it at a theatre with special absorbent seats. Also from France and worth seeing are The Class (Entre les murs) and Un conte de Noel.
The Italians sent us The Unknown Woman, a gripping thriller/love story about a housekeeper with a hidden agenda. From Germany comes The Counterfeiters, a tough little film about the inmates at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp who were forced to create fake currency for the Nazis. Also hitting our personal Top 10 is the German/Turkish movie Edge Of Heaven, a film about people caught between two cultures.
In this sort of economic climate, it's probably not politic to talk about bad movies, but what the hell. We really want to remind you that The Women is a movie that asks you, the audience, to believe a man would choose Meg Ryan over Eva Mendes. As if. Furthermore, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is almost three hours of self-indulgent drivel about love and aging -- and this from Tinseltown, centre of the universe for all things scraped, tucked, lifted and Botoxed. Pretty weird.
Finally, for 2008, we'd like to give some kind of energizer bunny award to Angelina Jolie. She starred in Wanted and Changeling and was a featured voice in Kung Fu Panda. And had twins. And adopted 123 other children. And raised millions for charity. Can't think of another actor who did all that in a single year.
In 2009, we're really hoping to see Jolie versus Jennifer Aniston in a pay-per-view cage match, and preferably a fight-to-the-death. You could give the proceeds to the Save The Children fund.
And then, with any luck, that would be the end of that.
Liz Braun's movies of the year
I've Loved You So Long
The Unknown Woman
Happy Go Lucky
Revolutionary Road
The Wrestler
The Counterfeiters
Edge of Heaven
Tell No One
Wendy and Lucy
The Dark Knight
