#10. AUSTRALIA - Dir Baz Lhurmann, Australia
There will always be the most misunderstood film of the year. Australia hits the panel. Groans due to its butt-numbing longueur, criticised due to its thematic unevenness, this part-Western, part-romance, part-war-film, part-aborigine walkabout - is indeed a capricious beast of a movie, but Australia boasts a breed of filmmaking that one has to be a mad fool making it nowadays. Such the ambitious folly of Lhurmann to capture a ravishingly beautiful panorama with such astonishing scope and radiant performances. This is Lhurmann’s homage to the dying breed of Westerns and the Golden Age epic filmmaking. Flawed, overwrought, but there's no denying its picture quality. The problem is not the movie, but the mainstream audience, who are mostly cynical at this day and age (or perhaps the short attention span). It may not be a classic - but it's a damn good joyride.
#9. HAPPY-GO-LUCKY - Dir Mike Leigh, UK
A simple tale of a London schoolteacher (possibly nutcase) trying to make everyone around her happy. The poignant core of this film is Poppy's philosophical reason of her behaviour; there's no dark past behind her, but her character makes us question ourselves what happiness really means. This is an offbeat, uplifting comedy from a filmmaker whose movies are about depressing human situations. Once you peer through its everyday-event plotting, you’ll see a genuine socio-realist commentary and a blast of energy in the central character that would challenge a gallon of Lucozade. We wish we could face life's tribulations with a smile, Poppy-style. A British gem with a bravura, heartwarming performance by Sally Hawkins.
#8. WALTZ WITH BASHIR - Dir Ari Folman, Israel
Perhaps no other medium but graphic animation would pay tremendous respect to such the complex, psychologically haunting material of Waltz with Bashir. Just behind Wall-E for being the best animated pic of the year, and also the first ever animated-documentary in celluloid, this tackles adult moral issues of war, trauma, memory and humanity. Beautifully poetic and immensely devastating, never has a war film taken to a deeply personal level since Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Waltz with Bashir is daringly inventive, audacious and a transcendent portrait of the fallibility of memory and the painful pangs of a traumatic past. Critically lauded, and all rightfully deserved.
#7. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON - Dir David Fincher, USA
Some people brand it 'the new Forrest Gump'. Some call it that odd old-fart's film. And for some, it's that unfair cinematic surgery of Brad Pitt growing backwards. But call it what suits your fancy, this films looks as gorgeous as its two leads, beautifully captured with visual effects that breaks new ground, see the perfectly engineered de-aging of its central character. The conceit of this dark fairy tale is about a man born as a pensioner and grows reverse to a tot. It is a profound reflection on the passing of life, and Button works like a mesmerising dream. The 'what-if' theory deconstruction, the clockwork reverse war scene, the episodes in a Russian hotel - the film is handsomely built with a tender storytelling. And the tragedy at its core is that time is love's greatest arch-enemy. Philosophically befuddling but deeply allegorical. Fincher may have done his best film since Fight Club and Se7en, with a compellingly reserved and passive Brad Pitt as Button.
#6. CHANGELING - Dir Clint Eastwood, USA
Eastwood's child-abduction period drama Changeling strikes a nerve to a mother's greatest fear: losing a child. This compound, multi-faceted tale might just stand along the likes of LA Confidential and Chinatown for being a compelling critique on the City of Angel's corrupted past. Here Eastwood tailors a classical Hollywood storytelling, the picture evolving from a high-strung investigative crime film to a chilling weird-child thriller, to a mental hospital flick, to a gripping noir and to a court drama - then finally a weepfest where a distraught Angelina Jolie sobs her way to Oscar nomination, screaming "Where is my son?" for about 50 times. But Jolie is a tour-de-force, she is the nucleus, the beating pulse of this tale and draws a convincing, compassionate portrait of grieving mother forced to fight for social justice. Eastwood, at 76, is just getting better and better. Changeling is fiercely unforgettable.
#5. THE WRESTLER - Dir Darren Aronofsky, USA
You've got to hand it to Aronofsky for crafting The Wrestler as that rare intimate, compassionate picture. He sheds pretentiousness and goes gritty and cinema verite on us, making his camera as a raw medium, a witness to the unfolding portrait of this wretched human being. For a sport that rarely requires sympathy, The Wrestler injects such a burgeoning humanity that one would be heartless not to pay respect to this fetishistic, exploitation of violence. But its sole entertainer, Mickey Rourke redeems himself as an actor, and this is his redemption film. It is a calibre of a performance, both to sheer physicality (the bruises, the hormone drugs, the buffed-up bod) and deep emotionality. His physical are nothing compared to the bruises inside him. A violent, bloody sport film overshadowed by more painful pangs of loneliness and self-destruction. It is inhuman not to award Rourke an acting prize.
#4. WALL-E - Dir Andrew Stanton, USA
This is Finding Nemo surpassed. The most ambitious animated film of all time plainly because it is not really just for kids. Pixar's Golden Age is at it pinnacle here, from Toy Story to Nemo to Ratatouille, they're serving up contemporary masterpieces, and Wall-E is nothing short but Kubrickian in status. For its sheer boldness and audacity, its first hour runs without a dialogue, working almost like a throwback to the silent era, opening in a bleak sci-fi dystopian vision with a Hello, Dolly track - it's a plunger into a terra firma where only five-year-olds with 150 intelligence quotient would get. But the most wonderful creation is the Woody-Allen-esque interplay between the loner lad of Wall-E and the sophisticated gal of Eve. Traditional romanticism ensues, and the picture blossoms in many things at once: a visual art feast, an engrossing sci-fi, an ambitious animation, an ecological forewarning, and above all – a moving, charming, timeless love story of two robots with a touch of humanity. This is cinematic bliss.
#3. THE DARK KNIGHT - Dir Christopher Nolan, USA
One of the most staggering cinematic forces of the year. Here is a contemporary film that draws the elements of a superior motion picture: the moral questions of humanity, the internal struggle of psyche, the consequence of choice, the challenge of chance, and the vital blurring of lines between what is really good and evil. The Dark Knight enters a threshold in which superhero movies have rarely ventured before - for in these dark waters lie the beast of realism, the ominous surface where neither heroes nor villains exist, but only tragic human figures. Perhaps one of the most quotable films in history, this is undoubtedly the finest superhero movie entirely because it is not a superhero movie: it is a staggering crime epic and an exceptional film noir with a complex, haunting tale of morality and human tragedies with Shakespearean resonance. Heath Ledger's The Joker is an colossal force of nature. Hail The Godfather of comic-book adaptations. It also boasts one of the most superb cinematography of the year.
#2. SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE - Dir Danny Boyle, UK
The ultimate reason why Slumdog Millionaire is such a triumphantly effective film is that it never rigorously intellectualise its central message. At its best, it delivers its blissful core by ramming home a ubiquitous tale of an underdog fighting for what he believes in, and that is rare in this greedy, lusty world. The result is a celebration to life, love and adversity and packs it all in a tightly-wrapped power of poignancy. It is Dickensian in proportions, Jamal is the Oliver Twist in the streets of Mumbai, and his childhood affection for Latika is his Great Expectations, and these are all sewn in pitch-perfect practicality. Boyle relentlessly showcases an extraordinary cinematography, roving his camera in such a vibrant, vivid rush around the poverty-stricken India, the chase through the slums, railways and sewers make for a moving childhood backdrop to life's greatest answers to questions, and that is experience. An exuberant, rapturous paean to the power of cinema – that beneath its gameshow shell is actually a magnificent homage to childhood, adversity, life and love.
#1. HUNGER - Dir Steve McQueen, UK
A controversial choice for 2008's finest film - but Hunger, judging from its one-word title, is big, bold and blustery. It is also a film of almost wordless beauty. It is a kind of filmmaking that would leave audience dumbfounded, cinephiles pulse racing, poets breathless and visual artists ignited. In short, this is too-independent, too-arty, too-psychologically and too-philosophically befuddling for Oscar taste. This is a cinematic achievement in its own right; unflinchingly brutal and disarmingly human – a rare event for the British contemporary cinema that is visually stylised yet at the same time hauntingly real. At this crossroad, where British cinema is swarmed with socialist dramas, here lies a passage of transformation that a contemporary piece such as this can be elevated as a work of art. It proves that the silence has the power that words cannot express fully, exemplified in its wordless scenes with guttural visual poetics: the excrement-smeared prison walls, the urine-washed cell corridors, and the shocking corpse-like bodies of its inmates. Then it burst forth a dramatic flood of words at the middle-half of the film, a notable aspect in which it manages to say a lot about serious issues of politics, religion, humanity, life and death by showing very little. Stunningly exemplified in a static camera shot, 24-minute talk-a-thon, showing a dialogue interplay between the hunger-striker Bobby Sands and the priest. Hunger is the year’s most harrowing, most startling, most visually astounding experience. It's also a minimalist work of art, consolidated by McQueen’s passionate direction and Fassbender’s stalwart, ferocious performance.
Catch you all again soon, next year. Rocknrolla, 2009.
The Moviejerk (c) J.S.Datinguinoo
