The Top Ten Films of 2008

There she is! The star of my Top Ten Films of 2008 list, Catherine Deneuve, in the sweet-funny-stylish family drama from director Arnaud Desplechin, Un conte de Noël (Christmas Tale). I like Ms. Deneuve because she smokes and drinks and does not apologize for it. I loved watching her smoke, and I loved watching her speak, shop, read, and argue with her family. She speaks without pretention or silly one-upmanship; she debates and tells you flatly what she thinks. Deneuve, as the terminally ill matriarch of a large dysfunctional family, is the frazzled clan's center of gravity that behaves with the utmost cool. How refreshing to watch her simply be onscreen, a model for all, with her directness, her wisdom and calm, and must it be stated? Naturally, her beauty. Deneuve sealed 2008 with a kiss and I suppose you know, then, which film is my number one? Here are the rest, in order from top to bottom:

1. Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël, Arnaud Desplechin)
2. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
3. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke )
4. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry)
5. Girl Cut in Two (La Fille coupée en deux, Claude Chabrol)
6. Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood)
7. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)
8. Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani)
9. Step Brothers (Adam McKay)
10. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton)

Great Runners-Up: 24 City, Ballast, The Band's Visit, Elegy, Happy-Go-Lucky, Man On Wire, Medicine for Melancholy.

List Influencing, But Still Unseen: Che, Changeling, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, In The City of Sylvia, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, Sparrow, Synecdoche, New York, The Reader, Redbelt, Tokyo Sonata, Wendy and Lucy, The Wrestler.

But 2008 was funny for me because the biggest winners to my mind are the slew of retrospective screenings I caught up with. Some were formal theatrical screenings at festivals and at the Gene Siskel Film Center and The Music Box here in Chicago, but many more were DVD showings at home. One of the brightest was a movie I saw at Roger Ebert's film festival last April, Josef von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), a movie I've seen a number of times before and remains on my list of the top 5 films of all-time; but seeing it this time on a tremendous screen with musical accompaniment made it fresher, more vibrant, almost as if I were seeing it for the first time. At that same festival I experienced Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), an astonishing structuring of a book adapted to film that places its characters on surreal, color-bursting sets with a haunting Philip Glass score.

I saw the threesome of John Ford, George Marshall and Henry Hathaway's How The West Was Won (1962), albeit on a sad 19" television that does zero justice to its Cinemascope format; Hal Ashby's Being There (1979) and Coming Home (1978), Lucino Visconti's Sandra (1965) and The Damned (1969), and Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), Taste of Cherry (1997) and Ten (2002). I also caught up on a lot of Johnny To action flicks, Running Out of Time (1999), Fulltime Killer (2001) and Throwdown (2004), each one great, the latter of the three impossibly so. And upon the recommendation of Dave K. (who has a pretty damn great list over here) I saw 1983's Risky Business--a spooky stomp through the city of Chicago and the awkwardness of adolescence, ironically starring Tom Cruise sans hair product and Armani shirt. Anthony Mann naturally made an appearance with The Last Frontier (1955); and then there was Julien Duvivier's Au Bonhuer de Dames (1930), for me, the biggest retrospective spectacle of the whole year.

So that is that. It was a productive year indeed, but mama is still hungry for more movies. Feed me, 2009!