A look at film in 2008Nov 09 '09 Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Blu-ray and DVD Players
The Bottom Line 2008, a list of some of the best films, and some of the lesser ones.
2008 was an interesting year for film. It wasn’t the greatest year but it wasn’t exactly bad. Like most years, it had its ups and its downs. It had some terrific movies seen by few and some bad movies seen by everyone. It had the second highest grossing movie of all time, and some box office bombs. There were some excellent comic book movies and some good sequels. To start off this essay, here are some of the best films of 2008. Now, I have not seen every film or even all of the Oscar winners, I have not seen Benjamin Button, and I have only seen about half of Slumdog Millionaire, so until I see the rest, it is not on my list. The Dark Knight is great no doubt about it but I don’t feel a need to put it on my list, besides, just about everyone saw it. Iron Man was also a good comic book movie. Hancock had a great first half but completely fell apart in the second half; Kung Fu Panda proved that Dreamworks could compete with Pixar with pretty solid animated features. Here’s a quick list of several of my favorite films of 2008. WALL-E Pixar is easily the most impressive film company, animated or not, they release amazing films consistently, year after year. WALL-E is quit an impressive feat, to take a story revolving solely on the last robot on earth is downright impressive, to do this with no human dialogue for about 40 minutes is just incredible. Whatever Pixar is doing I hope they keep doing it. Tropic Thunder One of the best comedies of 2008 is Tropic Thunder. The satire was effective, and perhaps the best use of it was seen before the movie even started, with the fake trailers. The action was pretty good for a comedy, and Robert Downy Jr. basically made the movie with his great performance. 2008 did have several solid comedies, Pineapple Express, Sex Drive, and Role Models were also enjoyable comedies, but I feel Tropic Thunder was just a notch above the rest. Synecdoche New York Creative and celebrated screenwriter Charlie Kauffman got his directorial debut with Synecdoche New York. It is a challenging film, the level of emotion involved is intense and throughout its surrealistic style and look is a film with simple emotions. The first half is oddly comedic with many weird moments of humor; it takes a different turn in the second half as the film delves into almost dream like sequences that are pure Kauffman. This film is not for everyone, but I doubt you will have a film watching experience quite like this. Gran Torino Clint Eastwood has been around for quite some time, both as an actor and director. Gran Torino marks his final film performance, and it’s a nice way to go out. Gran Torino is a simple story of friendship in unlikely places. It veers off into a revenge flick, but it is very emotionally satisfying. Clint Eastwood acts among unknown actors in his great performance as an extremely racist old man, but it is not mean and resolves nicely. RocknRolla Perhaps my most anticipated film of the year. Guy Ritchie is one of my favorite film makers, and it was nice to see him back on the top of his game. RocknRolla has a slick plot in a very stylish manner, it has all the crackling Guy Ritchie wit and has many great lines. I loved the look and feel to this film, I thought it felt different than his previous films and was about on the same level as them. Some say Ritchie keeps repeating himself, I think he just does what he’s best at, and besides why break what isn’t broken? In Bruges Probably my favorite film of the year was In Bruges. I love this film because it is different on each viewing. I love the dark comedy aspect to it, and all of its odd quirks. It is a smartly written and beautifully shot film. The whole allegory of heaven and hell with Bruges being purgatory was nicely touched on and not overdone. The themes were solid and the two main characters were strong protagonist. Ralph fines had a great role and the final irony touch to his demise was darkly hilarious. Really, just a gem of a film, shame it was ignored at the Oscars. Those were a few of my favorite films of 2008, I suppose there’s more but those are the ones I feel like mentioning. Now I’ll go on to a few of the lesser films of the year. Worst Movie With A Number In The Title- 21 Talk about bland, 21 was a movie with no personality and no excitement. It had a predictable script, cardboard characters, and a cliché story. I really don’t get it, it should not be too hard to make Las Vegas look cool, but 21 gives boring shots and has nothing cool about it. Go see The Hangover if you want a good movie taking place in Las Vegas. Biggest Waste of A Cool Concept – Outlander I don’t know how many people saw this, but judging from its plot outline, I thought there would be no way for this to be a bad film. I was wrong. This film boasts an awesome concept but does nothing with it. Outlander is about a Space Marine from the future who comes back in time to the time of the Vikings where he must fight an alien. Awesome right? It’s like Predator and Beowulf rolled into one. Too bad this film is bland and boring with no excitement and lame special effects. Biggest Disappointment – Burn After Reading I love the Coen Brothers, to me they are the most original film makers of our time. I love their first film Blood Simple all the way up to No Country for Old Men. Now, I have not seen Intolerable Cruelty or the Lady Killers so I have never really been disappointed by them. I thought Burn after Reading was going to be great, I was wrong; it was nothing but a disappointment. The characters were bland, the story was uninspired, the jokes and satire was lazily done. Nothing worked. I still love Coens, and am excited for A Serious Man; unfortunately they really dropped the ball here. Worst Sequel – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull There was a time when the new Indiana Jones movie could have been great. It was 1995 and George Lucas was planning on making an Indiana Jones movie, it would have had the same screenwriter from the third one. And then Independence Day came out and Lucas decided to go with Star Wars. So over ten years later Lucas decided to finally make an Indiana Jones movie. It had problems from the beginning with production and when the script finally came out, it took about twenty drafts before they decided on one. The finished product was not good, the story was boring, special effects were completely overblown, and not even Karen Allen could save this train wreck. Too bad since this could have been great, maybe Indiana Jones 5 will be better, I honestly don’t see how it can get much worse. So that’s 2008 in a nutshell. It had some great films, like the ones I’ve mentioned, it had some worse films. I think for the most part it was a fairly solid year for film, although I think this year might be a little better.  |
| Read all comments (8)|Write your own comment |
