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The Year In Movies 2008: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

By Prairie Miller

While directors will always tell you when asked which of their own movies are their favorites, that they love them all equally like their children, movie critics as a species are notoriously far less easy to please. With that in mind, I offer my Best and Worst picks of 2008, with a few boutique categories whimsically tossed in. And if you're wondering what my yearly category 'Ugly' is all about, let's just say it's a little like opening a dazzling, magnificently wrapped Christmas present, and finding something really obnoxious inside. Which basically means that beauty can be only skin deep in movie too. So here goes.

THE GOOD...

1. THE WRESTLER: Mickey's Rourke's unflinching, warts and all portrait in the raw of an over the hill, but still fiercely driven wrestler is excruciating to watch but also impossible not to. At the same time, the movie exposes the troublesome psychological, let alone physical damage of often unrealistic, destructive notions of masculinity and masculine identity in this culture.

2. CHANGELING: Clint Eastwood gets in touch with his surprising feminist side, while exposing the corrupt, Dirty Harryish roots of notorious LAPD excess, and immersing his docudrama in poetically charged Roaring Twenties period nostalgia. And while ostensibly about a child kidnapping, the movie uncovers the buried history of the routine forced mental hospitalization of women back then, during their bid for equality following their right to vote victory.

3. FROZEN RIVER: A gut-wrenching, contemporary economic hard times thriller, as two ballsy Canadian border single moms - white and Mohawk - are pressured into lives as smugglers of abused immigrants into the US, across the dangerous icy waters of the St. Lawrence River. Alternately heartbreaking and terrifying.

4. WALTZ WITH BASHIR: The Israeli Apocalypse Now blasts into movie theaters - in animation! And pulls it off to vividly surreal effect. Director Ari Folman, a soldier and eyewitness to the horrific 1982 Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camp massacres, dredges up his own personal demons through fictionalized recurrent personal nightmares and agonizing collective memory shared with fellow Israeli vets.

5. THE DUCHESS: Not just another royal goddess in a gilded cage period costume drama, The Duchess palpitates with a compelling personal story that rarely strays from the incendiary but contradictory politics of the era. Keira Knightley is radiant as Georgiana Spencer, similarly tragic but spunky 18th century ancestor of the late Princess Diana Spencer, whose fateful misstep was to take the newly unveiled Declaration of the Rights of Man - not women - figuratively and not literally.

6. BLINDNESS: A frightening and also profoundly moving social allegory, this thinking man's horror movie delves with both stern disapproval and tremendous tenderness into the disheartening depths and admirable heights within humankind's grasp. Julianne Moore as a normal woman on a planet suddenly afflicted with mass blindness, conveys with startling assurance, the pain of human awareness and consciousness among an also symbolically blinded world, that sight can ironically bring.

7. BALLAST: Tarra Riggs shines in a Best Actress caliber performance, in this hardscrabble tale unfolding in the Mississippi delta among African Americans just barely surviving but prevailing, against the odds of an array of cruel emotional and financial ordeals at the heart of this somber masterpiece. That the local nonactors are allowed to just be themselves and speak their own words rather than imposing an outsider perspective, makes for a bracing and astonishing cinematic experience.

8. KIT KITTREDGE: The best children's movie this year, this delightfully outlandish, possibly economically prophetic Great Depression era adventure for grownups too, is filled humor, history, imagination, and plenty of quality kid wisdom to impart to the less enlightened adults around them. Abigail Breslin, who tends to show up at least once a year on screen to amaze with her vivacious talents, is the gabby diminutive idealist Kit, a ten year old aspiring newspaper reporter with an aversion to glass ceilings, as well as the word 'no.'

9. TOWELHEAD: In no way shy about pointing out just what may be unhealthy in America today, from sexual exploitation and racism to foreign aggression, Towelhead is that rare story making a bold leap into the nearly alternate universe known as the female point of view. Summer Bishil astonishes in this coming of age social satire about an abused Lebanese American teen, that kicks open the suburban bedroom door and exposes often silent personal terrors that are both rudely shocking and uncomfortably familiar.

10. THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS: In no way a fashion statement about sleepwear, but rather a solemnly imaginative political statement touching on a German population asleep when it came to exactly what genocidal horrors were going down during the Nazi regime, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas brings an entirely novel perspective through an Aryan child's eyes, to the already exhaustive ongoing annals of Holocaust cinema. The Final Solution meets The Pied Piper.

THE BAD...

1. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON: More than curious and bordering on just plain silly, this time reversal, looking literally younger every day without benefit of cosmetic surgery Brad Pitt vehicle, could be positioning the new eighty in Hollywood as a one year old. Clocking in at a punishing 167 minutes and no, not in reverse time, this fantasy is a wearing ordeal, at the conclusion of which you're likely to feel a whole lot older than 167 minutes, and really drained. And by the time Ben's lover (Cate Blanchett) is clutching her longtime object of erotic desire as he squirms around in her arms in diapers and all of one foot long, let's just say that it's more than a little on the kinky side.

2. SEVEN POUNDS: Scrooge is Will Smith's 21st century workaholic with text messaging addiction issues. Suicide by jellyfish, don't ask. Paging Dr. Kevorkian.

3. MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL: A rancid Knocked Up knockoff in giddy romantic comedy clothing, with a tone that is sheer stomach-churning in reaction to just how low a director (Howard Deutch) will go to lavish leading man (Dane Cook) finesse on a scuzzy, womanizing boorish male. What was Kate Hudson thinking, while so utterly demeaning herself as the designated lovestruck loon and lascivious sex object in a movie.

THE UGLY...

1. ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED: A premeditated act of promotional propaganda masquerading as a balanced documentary. And in the service of exonerating - with a creative genius defense - the noted fugitive from justice filmmaker's rape of a drugged child.

2. THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES: Orthodox family values in fake free spirit female coed Columbine comeuppance clothing. Or in other words, a woman's place is in the delivery room. Not exactly a road movie, but certainly an anti-abortion mandatory teen motherhood guilt trip. All that's missing are the pamphlet tables in the theater lobbies.

3. HOUSE OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES: A movie that might have been more aptly titled, Sexually Desirable When Drugged, the film allows lewd elderly director Vadim Glowna to star himself as molester and rapist of a series of nude adolescent slumbering sex slaves, in what may or may not be a fantasy brothel for necrophiliacs. Nothing less than a romanticized and lusty aesthetic portrayal of date rape.

WORST MOVIE MOMMIES OF THE YEAR:

DOUBT: Mom confesses that she doesn't mind if her son is being molested by a pedophile priest, as long as he gets to graduate. Will all the mothers in the audience who have ever heard such an idea even hinted at from the lips of a fellow female parent, please raise your hands.

SAVAGE GRACE: Julianne Moore's too much information bored sexaholic socialite hits on her teen soon. A depressing and meaningless tabloid cinema smutty glimpse into the depraved family lives of stuffy rich and infamous designer couch potatoes.

THE KNOCK IT OFF ALREADY AWARD, for all those black mammies on screen, even when they're men: Hounddog, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Nights In Rodanthe, The Secret Life Of Bees, Miracle At St. Anna.

Ending On A Positive Note....

BEST MOVIE LINE: Heath Ledger's Joker in Dark Knight: 'Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stranger.'

BEST MOVIE LINE, Runner-up: 'If you're going to have an affair, at least do the housework.' - Kim Ki-duk 's Soom

Prairie Miller is a multimedia journalist online, in print and on radio. Contact her through NewsBlaze.