Top Ten 2008, Final Answer (for now)

I'm sorry, Brandon, but from where I'm standing 2008 knocked the snot out of 2007.

Here goes:

1. Mister Lonely
2. Still Life
3. The Romance of Astrea and Celadon
4. Ashes of Time Redux
5. Wall-E
6. Funny Games
7. Appaloosa
8. La France
9. In Bruges
10. Iron Man

1 made me break down and love the world anew. 2, 3, and 4 reminded me how precious Love is. 5 is unarguably delightful. I insist on 6. I may be too gracious toward 7, overreacting against a largely lukewarm critical response, but my enjoyment of the film as one of the best Westerns of the past couple decades or so still stands. The music of 8 still haunts me to the point that I should just look up the lyrics and learn them already and start singing in French all day. 9 and 10 are just so watchable that I can't not include them.

Now I'm going to cheat. 2008 was so good that I'm going to include two honorable mention spots, #11 and #12, both including 10 movies each, all of which I thought were good to great, listed in alphabetical order. Any of the movies in the #11 slot could easily slip in and out of the Top Ten (and many of them were already there earlier in the year before other favorites came along). #12 contains movies that I enjoyed a great deal, but had some glaring flaw or two that kept me from outright gushing over the films. Besides my 11 and 12 categories, there are still several films from 2008 that were critical darlings that other people liked and I either didn't like them as much or I just haven't seen them yet. What's amazing is that there's very little overlap between mine and Brandon's lists (we only share 2 entries), but we both thought that we saw some great movies. I respect each one of his choices (I haven't seen 2 of them: Reprise or Benjamin Button) and most of them are somewhere here on my honorables lists. I still need to watch The Dark Knight again. I know I've been unfair toward it.

#11 Che, A Christmas Tale, Encounters at the End of the World, The Fall, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Gran Torino, Happy-Go-Lucky, JCVD, Synechdoche, NY, W.

#12 Burn After Reading, Cassandra's Dream, Hellboy II, My Blueberry Nights, Redbelt, Shotgun Stories, Speed Racer, Tell No One, Waltz With Bashier, Wendy and Lucy

As a word of warning, I'll echo Brandon: "Of course this is all bullshit, I’ll want to change my mind immediately after I post this."