Bleary-eyed 2008 Best-Of, Blurst-Of…

This list has no arbitrary number, and no real parameters other than I’m trying (dimly) to recall all that resonated with me the most, for better or worse, in the bygone year. Plot-related SPOILERS will be discussed, because it’s hard to be specific in praise/critique without acknowledging details. Here’s my not-so-thin-line between love and hate.

LOVED:

• All-Star Superman was perfect in almost every way. Grant Morrison embraced everything Superman inspired, assembling cluttered continuity and archetypical resonances into a heroic ideal distilled to its essence. Frank Quitely continues to be my favorite of Morrison’s recurring collaborators. While there are other artists whom I might prefer in general, Quitely’s unique style and sense of pacing just seems to fit ineffably better.

• The Death of Captain America managed to turn what could’ve been a cheap stunt, into one of the most compelling espionage stories I’ve ever read. As a lefty and contrarian, I’ve never been a fan of the unabashed patriotism and jingoism Captain America’s represented, but Ed Brubaker helped carve out a character I cared about– before shooting him dead and replacing him with his long-lost sidekick. And of course he made me like the resurrected sidekick too, taking the new Captain America into murkier and doubt-ridden places that a stalwart, Hitler-punching Steve Rogers may not have been able to go. Brubaker’s Criminal has consistently been one of the best reads in any given month and his new series Incognito is off to a great start for the best of 2009.
• Fallout 3 destroyed my social life by being 2008’s most absorbing video game experience. GTA IV was good, and even great at times,  and Fable 2 was fun in its own right– but nothing beat the bombed-out post-apocalyptic wastes of Fallout’s immense world. Fallout’s mix of humor, nostalgia, cold-war paranoia, and engaging game-play has kept me glued to my 360 for the last third of the year.
• The Dark Knight was among the best movies I saw in 2008, regardless of genre and my own geekiness. Heath Ledger’s electric performance, the epic cinematography, overarching themes of dodgy morality, and complex plotting made TDK one of the year’s best (especially in IMAX intensity).  Iron Man was fun too, because hanging out with Robert Downey Jr. would be fun, but it just didn’t put all the pieces together the way TDK did.
• Let The Right One In was my favorite movie of the year, its frosty Swedish setting sealing the tension within its story of nascent desire and adolescent violence. The fact that it was a teen vampire movie of sorts, puts it into immediate comparison with Twilight and Anne Rice’s libidinous stories, but LTROI distinguishes itself by its emotional naturalism and the fact that in many ways it was a purer and more loyal exploration of the vampire myth.

HATED:

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was dumber than even I expected it to be. Steven Spielberg managed to crowbar in all his pet obsessions (daddy issues, alien life, and the irrepressibility of youth!) into one of the densest disappointments of the year. Even if the story wasn’t totally inane, the performances were uniformly horrible. Harrison Ford may as well have phoned it in from Spielberg’s favorite alien planet, Cate Blanchett’s horrendous Soviet accent and phallus-envy sword play were a constant irritation, and Karen Allen seemed to be reprising a role as a heretofore unknown and unhinged cat-lady. And of course, one can’t ignore that the story itself was inane. Indy 4 suffered from constant credulity-straining suspensions of disbelief (even the jungle monkeys hate Socialists!) to forehead-slapping thematic platitudes (“knowledge was their treasure!!”), resulting in a multi-million dollar turd that only Spielberg could’ve directed.
• Detective Comics: Heart of Hush by Paul Dini was a story I can’t believe I even bothered to read. I’d generally been enjoying Dini’s run on Detective, but this storyline was a pathetic attempt to bring some gravitas to the character of Hush. Riddled with cliche’s and cheap flashbacks that attempted to give Hush some depth, this absolutely airless ugh-fest compared all the more unfavorably to Grant Morrison’s convoluted but inspired BATMAN R.I.P.
• Mark Millar used to be a writer I enjoyed (The Ultimates, Ultimate Fantastic Four, etc.), but thanks to its big-screen adaptation, I finally read Wanted, and I truly wish I could unread the ugly, hateful, and ultimately pathetic power-fantasy in its pages. Everything of Millar’s I’ve read (or re-read) since has been colored by that story’s shallow characterizations, puerile attempts at humor, and general bigotry.
• Guy Fieri’s frosted douche-itude and ubiquity is quickly making the often unbearable Food Network, completely unwatchable. I can stomach Bobby Flay’s overwhelming smarminess, deal with Iron Chef America’s tepid imitation of the Japanese original, and Alton Brown’s cornball moments in return for glimpses of culinary inspiration and opinion rendered smartly and pointedly by folks like Brown, Mario Batali, Masahiro Morimoto, and Jeffrey Steingarten. But Fieri and his chicken-fried personality represent what’s wrong with how our culture relates to food. I’m not saying we need to populate the TV with granola-fed back-to-the-landers, but I’d take anything over his constant shilling of fried mediocrity and quarter-pound diabetes burgers available at TGIFridays.
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was yet another example of overblown cinematic stupidity. Probably the worst film I saw all year (even after I saw a stop-motion bat try to rape his college sweetheart). Worse because of its attempts to appear profound, shoe-horning Forrest Gump’s treacly sentimentality onto a creepy, ultimately hollow love story. For something so incredibly overwrought The Curious Case… is amazingly careless. The film doesn’t even follow its own internal logic relating to Brad Pitt’s de-aging (starts normal sized baby that’s old, so it should end with man-sized geezer that’s a baby?), and Cate Blanchett gives another overwhelmingly obnoxious performance in a high-profile movie. Adding to its insipidness, the film fails to do anything meaningful with Hurricane Katrina in its backdrop, insulting the hurricane’s victims and its audience.

Late Pass Movie Review Revue

I’m not sure what it says about me that my biggest problem with Quantum Of Solace, the latest in the famously chauvanist (if not outright misogynist) Bond franchise, was the lack of a compelling female character. I know, I know, Bond movies are about super stylized machismo, over the top chase scenes, and liberal use of bikini babes. So what sort of dolt am I to expect a serious female presence in the film? The jury’s still out on that one, but from Dame Judi Dench’s ineffectual nanny to the attempted heroine slash perpetual victim Camille (Olga Kurylenko) to the four minute cameo of Agent Fields as a token sexual conquest slash plot device (although the meta-reference to Goldfinger is sharp); never is a lady given anything meaninful to do but wring her hands as Bond methodically grinds everything in the world (friends, foes, lovers) to a bitter dust. There are plenty of other things to criticize like the incoherent action sequences and the weightless villains, but to me the most unforgiveable sin of this latest 007 outing was the lack of a sufficiently interesting and alluring Bond girl.

The Incredible Hulk suffered from an all-around lack of charisma, a deficit seemingly highlighted by commercials saying that it’s “Just as good as Iron Man!” That’s some great ad-copy there, I mean selling the movie as, “JUST AS GOOD,” is basically equivocating your product with the sort of cut-rate bargains found at outlet malls. Designer looks at half the budget! Quality film-making if you don’t like quality! The casting of this movie just failed in every aspect. While I’ve liked her in other flicks, I’ve seen tissue paper with more presence than Liv Tyler in this movie and for something he wrote a draft of, Ed Norton really doesn’t seem all that sold on his role. Everyone is phoning it in, from William Hurt to Tim Roth (possibly the most impossibly miscast individual in this entire sorry affair). There’s just something so half-hearted about the entire enterprise, it’s almost hard to criticize because it feels too easy. Instead of “JUST AS GOOD” they meant, “SORRY, WE DID OUR BEST.”

And carrying on the movie bummers was, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army which happened to put me to sleep, make me happy that I fell asleep rather than catch the stupid end of a stupid movie, then make me angry that I wasn’t sleeping the whole time. It’s some sort of paradox that Guillermo Del Toro can make movies like The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth using supernatural elemants poignantly and artistically to deal with themes of war, regret, aging, love and revenge– while simultaneously being responsible for the all around horrible Hellboy movies. Del Toro doesn’t seem to understand or care about what makes Hellboy and his stories unique. Everything about his film appearances have turned the impossible to encapsulate story of Hellboy (well seeee he’s the devil or a devil conjured by Rasputin to bring about to end the world but he didn’t and was adopted by the Army….), into a terrible romantic comedy where the wrong people are trying to make their romance work. I’m not against adaptations taking liberties with source material, as long as those changes make the story better– but changing the basic tone of Hellboy’s relationship to every single character in the source story (not to mention cudgeling the idiosyncratic supporting cast into hackneyed stereotypes) has not made the film any better. Hellboy deals with all of Del Toro’s pet themes and subjects, but his lack of regard for the characters undermines the story to a degree that his otherwise inventive visual imagination, can’t hope to compensate for.

While I sat through a lot of stinkers, I did manage to see one really great movie in the past few weeks, the eery and tense Swedish vampire movie, Let The Right One In. Following the relationship between an ostracized boy and his budding attraction to a seemingly young vampire, all the anxiety of adolescent desire is laid bare without ignoring traditional vampire lore. Abandoning the velvet boudoir seduction of other vampire films, Let the Right One In is about  affection borne of friendship and shared alienation. Genuininely creepy and squirm-inducing at times, the film avoids the cheap jump-scares remembering that there is often enough horror and fear to be found in simply being an isolated and lonely kid.