Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is one those people that you meet that you have to ask, “What are you on?”  Essentially, she would probably just tell you, simply, “Life.”  Poppy, an exuberant and charming school teacher in London, has a vivacity about everything she does that is borderline in need of medication.  But that’s just the point: she isn’t in need of medication; it’s the rest of the world that needs to hop on board the Happy-Go-Lucky train, in order to see that life is indeed chock-full of pleasure and joy, despite often being fraught with difficulty.

Poppy’s story is fundamentally unexceptional.  She lives a very quite life in London, teaching young children, learning to drive at 30, with no love life to speak of, no mortgage (much to her sister’s chagrin), and the same flatmate for a decade.  Her life is, by all accounts, not something anyone would really want to put on film.  And that’s precisely why it is put on film.  Her life, and ours by extension, may have periods of unexceptionally dry spells, where we feel that each day is much the same, without a lot of drama or excitement.  Poppy revels in this ostensibly ordinary existence; she finds that her charisma and charm is simultaneously joyously magnetic and mind-numbingly irritating.  Her approach to life, that is, to each day, and to each moment within each day, is that life is precious, intended to be enjoyed as much as possible, and her goal seems to be to nudge everyone in this direction, to seeing life as she sees it, if only momentarily.

The plot is simple and unadorned.  Poppy teaches, learns to drive, and falls in love.  She finds her way through life in a kind of meandering labyrinthine sort of fashion that is inimitably hers; she one of those people you might describe by simply saying her name.  Oh, she’s just “Poppy.”  She’s also eponymously Happy-Go-Lucky, a phrase that fits her so perfectly as to be uncanny.  The directing is similarly unfestooned, giving the movie a very simple, lighthearted feel without glossing over the very real fact that sometimes life isn’t exactly “happy.”  The music can almost only be described as gleeful, bouncing around with Poppy and her daily forays.

What makes this movie enjoyable, besides the very subtle, moving, and riotously funny performance by Hawkins, is the message.  Your life may not always be exceptional because it’s exceptional, but it will always be exceptional because it’s yours.  There is something in Poppy we all need, I think, and after you watch this film, I think you’ll agree.

Rating: 3.5/4 Stars

Nietzsche said, “Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster.”  The existentialist musings of this film are as old as Friedrich himself, which does nothing but further substantiate this film into the existentialist film canon.  Charlie Kaufman, writer of many an odd, quirky film, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directs this one for a change, revealing his incredible talent and his keen eye when looking through a lens.  The acting on the part of Phillip Seymour Hoffman is equally as talented and keen as Kaufman, and their suffixed duo here rivals the best of 2008 easily.  And Hoffman is surrounded by “strong female actresses,” which make the film better and better, with each additional actress and character.

A plot can be several things.  Among other things, it may be the following of a protagonist around as he/she attempts to overcome an obstacle.  Plot can also be the following of several different “protagonists” as they each try to overcome their own or a shared obstacle.  Here, Kaufman questions and amalgamates.  Asking the simplest of questions, he subverts the notion of plot until it is nearly unrecognizable.  The beauty of this is that it allows him to take any preconception and mold it into a new conception in your mind, probably something you did not expect.  We see Caden Cotard (Hoffman) living his life, so it seems, as the protagonist of his own story, and the protagonist of the story on the screen, but he creates another story, one on the stage and on camera, different from the life he lives, a selected part of it – verisimilitude is the name of his particular game.  And as the story unfolds, as Caden’s story unfolds, we begin to understand the title, the nature of the film itself, and the raison d’être of Cadan’s whole project becomes clearer and more lucid.

Though it is undoubtedly existentialist, Synecdoche, New York can’t keep itself too far from a form of expressionism either.  In a peculiar way, it opens with the bang of Death of a Salesman, and it closes with the same bang.  It deftly manages to handle an intense level of abstraction and and a very raw  and ironic degree of intimacy at the same time.  One might find this decidedly self-aware film extremely depressing, and for the greater part of the film, I think that that is fairly “right.”  Not in a moral sense, but in the sense of accuracy.  Just one example of the almost Derridean linguistic and communicative nature of the film, as well, on yet another richly complex layer.  But it isn’t only a self-aware, existentialist-expressionist, depressing film.

In fact, it echoes Albert Camus’s Sisyphean universe, where each person is the hero of his or her own story, the protagonist, “not an extra,” but the lead in their own beautifully fantastic and wonderful story.  It is the image of Sisyphus, forever trudging back up the eternal hill, pushing the rock to the top each time, and each time it rolls back down to the bottom.  It is here, Camus says, that we see Sisphyus for a moment, as he begins the eternal ascent yet again, smiling.

You may not be smiling the moment the curtain drops, but hopefully you will remember Sisyphus’ undying smile, or the words of Caden, anyway, that you are the hero in your own story.  Chances are, though, you will find shreds of hope that hold the film up from the abyss of despair, and you might even laugh a few times along the way.  As Nietzsche also said, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.”  Everyone needs hope.  It’s what keeps the abyss from gazing back.  This film understands that, I think, and for that reason, there is hope to find in it amidst the cacophony of uncertainty that it depicts so vividly.

Rating: 4/4 Stars

This movie doesn’t have any idea what it wants to be.  It tries to pull a Spiderman and ends up pulling all punches.  There isn’t much here to see, except what might possibly happen if Jerry Bruckheimer ever gets his greedy paws on Ghostbusters 3 (planned for 2010, by the way).  The movie plays like a George Lucas catastrophe, without a thread to hold it together or a shred of a hope of being interesting.  It falls pretty hard on its face early on, and I lost almost all interest.

There are a few good points amidst the rubble.  Jeffrey Tambor is a fine actor, and he saves every scene he can, but even he isn’t enough to save this from becoming just another bad superhero movie.  It’s bad in the way the first Hulk was bad: even the graphics don’t hold your interest.  They aren’t bad graphics…for 1994.  But this 2008 movie should have known better than to try and pull out a sequel from this relatively obscure superhero.  The public likes Bruce and Clark and Peter, because they know them.  They grew up with them, and these characters are part of their psyche.  Hellboy, for all he may be worth, isn’t.  This is really only one of the endless reasons this movie doesn’t work, though.  On a positive note, the makeup is great.  But I don’t remember ever loving a movie because “the makeup is great.”  This one’s no different.

The plot is contrived, predictable in a bad way right down to the last drop, including the role of the infamous Golden Army, and the script plays like a bad undergrad student project.  They clearly had quite a large budget for this movie, but nothing to show for it.  I didn’t really care about the characters, most of which are bad imitations of Star Wars characters, and the suspense which is supposedly built up throughout the movie is unaffectingly affecting, like stale popcorn.

I don’t think 2008 would have been much the worse if this hadn’t been made.  I think Tambor did this movie to make a few extra bucks, and in this economy no one can blame him.  But I hold someone like Guillermo del Toro to a little bit of a higher standard, coming off of his previous work such as Pan’s Labyrinth, one of the best foreign films that I’ve seen.  If nothing else, his effort level is transparent: Pan is great, Hellboy is everything but.  It’s not a good movie, and I don’t recommend it.  Stay away.  Especially if you like del Toro.  (And maybe even if you like Hellboy.)

Rating: 1.5/4 Stars

Platoon: A Comedy in 2 Acts is maybe a better title than Tropic Thunder, though it works pretty well, too.  Ben Stiller writes, directs, and produces himself, along with Jack Black, Robert Downey, Jr., Matthew McConaughey, Nick Nolte, Danny McBride, and Tom Cruise, in what turns out to be one of the funniest movies of 2008.  It’s sidesplitting humor from big names having a ton of fun.  And it spoofs a few famous war movies, too.

I will start by saying that Robert Downey Jr.’s character, Kirk Lazarus, is comic gold, with genius comic timing, and all this done in blackface.  I’m not sure that’s even legal, and it’s funnier if it isn’t.  The cast alone for this one probably cost about $100 billion, but it was entirely worth it.  Tom Cruise’s character, Les Grossman, unpublicized, is one of the best things ole Cruisie has done for his career in about a half a decade.  Valkyrie was entertaining, but Grossman is a brilliant career move.  In a day when people see Cruise as an idiot mostly and then an actor, it will only help that he let his hair down to step into Grossman’s thick skin.  Stiller’s prima donna character and Black’s coke addicted one are pretty much predictable, but still very funny, and the latter is very crass (would he be Jack Black otherwise?), which makes his character that much funnier, honestly.  Nick Nolte and Danny McBride are a tagteam in this, playing oddballs that McBride is getting very used to, it seems (see Pineapple Express).

The writing is the first Stiller has really done since Zoolander, but it doesn’t show, and his directing hand is really good here, too.  His star-status is probably one of the main things that allows him to direct such huge names as are in this one, especially since he is probably friends with nearly all of them.  The music is appropriately ridiculous, which, though used by many directors, is becoming a Stillerism, and it works well here.  There are no huge surprises in the plot, but the plot isn’t as important as the hilarious character-acting going on by Downey and the others.

I laughed so hard I thought I might asphyxiate.  This movie is about as funny as they come.  If you haven’t had the chance to see it yet, and you don’t mind F-bombs every 2.6 seconds, you’ll enjoy Tropic Thunder.  I almost can’t believe I waited as long as I did.

Rating: 3/4 Stars

Animation that uses only essential movements, like a form of anime, is used to tell the story of a man in search of his own memory of a war he fought long ago, the 1982 Lebanon war, and the massacre that followed.  Waltz with Bashir is a documentary, but because of its animated presentation, it doesn’t really seem to play like one.  It has the makings of historical fiction, and the line between the two, the history and the fiction, is sometimes so blurred that it becomes negligible and even ceases to exist.  The same can be said of dreams, of our dream life; sometimes we do not realize that an event which occurred in a dream did not actually happen in “real life,” as the saying goes.  But what is real life?  Where is the line drawn between dream and reality, between memory and history, between perception and actuality?

This film explores all of these and more, with a keen eye for discovering and unpacking the lucid and not-so-lucid memories of war.  Is post-traumatic stress disorder a one-size-fits-all, or can it express itself as what Freud might have called denial?  Ari Folman wrote, directed, and essentially stars in this documentary story of a man in search of his own memories.  He can’t seem to remember anything about the war, save for one image, near the time of the massacre.  Throughout the film/story, he interviews several people he was there with, trying to piece together his own memories from theirs.  It begins to fall into place with each successive interview, until a full picture is revealed.  It isn’t the fact of the newfound memory that is the point of the movie, but what it reveals about Ari Folman, about humanity, about memory, about war, and crimes of hatred and inhumane acts of cruely, whether political or otherwise.  The film seems to encompass all of these so easily, so deftly, ostensibly without any trouble at all.  But we know this isn’t true.  We know that the director himself peered into his own psyche and poured out his soul into this film.

The evidence is all over the screen and in the four years it took to create and produce it.  The animation is not typical, but no animation seems typical nowadays, and the type employed here is perfect.  So many chilling moments, crafted to perfection, allow this film and its story to seep into your heart until the end, when you find that you have, in your own way, become Ari as well, seeking to find your own memory of something that you did not experience, forming the story in your own mind.

Waltz with Bashir is at once both a genuinely haunting and beautiful experience, portraying vividly the horrors of war, the ravaging of a people, the intricacies of the human memory, the beauty of the mind, and the search of a man in pursuit of his own past.  If you see a foreign film, make it this one.  If you see a documentary, make it this one.  If you see an animated film, make it this one.  It may be the best of all three categories you see this year.

Rating: 4/4 Stars

In an orgy of gunfire, shootouts, explosions, car chases, and cryptic language, Wanted tells a story that has as much fun as it has loopholes.  Though it’s little more than a 90-minute montage of the aforementioned items, with a few plot pieces thrown in for good measure, this movie is about as much fun as you can have at the movies.  And it doesn’t have Paul Walker.  Which is always a plus.

James McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, a 9-5 cubicle guy who can’t care about anything – except caring about the fact that he can’t care about anything.  That’s almost verbatim.  He thinks he has panic attacks arising from an axiety disorder which accompanies a rapid heartbeat (and nearly always slow-motion).  What he really has is the ability to do things normal people can’t.  He thinks he’s a normal person.  Herein lies the meager substance this movie offers.  But man does not live on substantial plotting alone.  Man also lives on action sequences.  And this movie has action sequences the size of Angelina Jolie’s lips.  She leans out of the windows of cars shooting people.  ”I’ve seen that,” you say.  But she leans out, or rather through, the front window, like the one over the hood.  Not only is it entirely improbable, it’s also incredibly fun to watch.

The whole movie is full of these types of chases and shootouts, and it would never, ever work without the cast it has at its disposal.  If this were a bunch of no-names, or even the tag-team triumvirate of Paul Walker and Ben Affleck and Vin Diesel, it would cease to exist.  The glib lines (and storyline) would fall apart from the very beginning, and no one would care.  Instead, director Timur Bekmambetov, a Russian/Kazakh guy known for directing vampire films, has the above-mentioed McAvoy and Jolie, Terrence Stamp, and none other than Morgan “I Make Anything Sound Good” Freeman.  Without this cast of well-known, seasoned veterans, the film never makes it off the loom.

The graphics and sound are all very well done, and the actors have nearly as much fun as the audience does with this one.  The body count begins to pile up and reaches a space-bending climax near the end, but you will have been ready for it, guessed it even, and it doesn’t make any difference.  You will probably have enjoyed it enough not to care.  You may even want to watch it again.

Rating: 2.5/4 Stars

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Hopefully you’re some form of an existentialist. Preferably a pessimistic, yet mildly amused existentialist. If not, you should still give this film a shot, because it boils down to a way of seeing life: good, bad, or ugly, it is still lived. And in our living of this one life, how do we live? What is morality, and does it have any basis in a world terribly far from Eden? These questions are perennial. They have been asked for centuries, and I doubt that they will ever stop being asked. That is, so long as there are people around to ask them.  (And preferably asked in the form of a joke.)

The film follows two men and their trip to Bruges, Belgium. They are stuck together and must make the best of this Odd Couple relationship that they possess. In Bruges, they must wait, and wait they do. They anticipate a call from their boss, who will then tell them what to do next. All of this is suspicious, and I was keenly aware that it possessed a certain amount of similarity to a certain play by Harold Pinter. And indeed it does. Colin Ferrell and Brendan Gleeson, who play Ray and Ken respectively, give striking and layered performances, transforming into characters whose lives are as removed from their own as Ray is from where he wants to be: that is, anywhere but Bruges, and he’ll act like a 5-year-old until someone will let him leave.  What unfolds is a story full of ironic humor, existentialist morality, and the Camusian influence of a life that must be lived. If you don’t want all of the waxing philosophic, it’s a movie about two guys who wait to find out who they are supposed to kill next. They’re assassins, and they’re next job is in Bruges, a city Ray finds repulsive and Ken finds enigmatically beautiful in its storied history. Either way (or both), it’s a really well-made film and quite an enthralling story of suspense, relationships, and morals. Not to mention being intensely funny.

Though a very dark film, In Bruges is a hilarious movie that had me laughing hyseterically at times that probably should have had me crying or vomiting, maybe both.  Which brings up a good point.  This movie is full of oppositional situations, in which humor and gore find the same stage, in which fear and arousal both enter the mind.  There is a kind of tongue-in-cheek going on the whole time, which gives each scene an eerily similar tone of both horror and hilarity.  To those of you who have read or seen Martin McDonagh’s plays before, this will probably be no surprise, as In Bruges has a striking similarity to Pillowman.  In fact, the film seems to be the offspring of Pillowman and The Dumb Waiter by Pinter.  This may seem like a spoiler.  It isn’t.  Rest assured.

The directing of this film has a nice combination of both experienced texture and personal perspective, but not so much of either to be annyoing or distracting.  The script, for which it received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, is very, very good.  It’s a great story with equal amounts of perturbation and humor, but it may have borrowed a bit from a previous generation.  The aspect that sets this movie apart is the overt tone of morality that pervades the whole thing, the whole notion that an assassin can have a sense of right-and-wrong, that a group of people whose occupation involves the payed killing of other human beings can genuinely believe in ethics, is very real and poignant, and it gives the movie what it needs to separate itself for the aforementioned writers/writings.

If you don’t have a stomach for graphic violence (which are done extremely well), then this one should be skipped.  If you saw I <3 Huckabees and longed for something dark and violent and a penchant for anything with a hard edge, then this one surely should not be skipped.  In fact, this movie is actually quite good, with great acting performances from Ferrell, Gleeson, and Fiennes, gifted writing, a crafted narrative, and a genuinely fine-tuned balance between hilarity and insanity.  I don’t know if it will win, but it’s definitely worth watching.

Rating: 3/4 Stars

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A horror film can be anything.  It doesn’t have to include any armed weapons, serial killers, rapists, or anything supernatural.  It may not even have to have the word Saw in the title, but that’s clearly open to debate.  Another kind of  horror film is any film that truly reveals the horror  of which humanity is capable.  Horror in the genuinely intimate sense of the term can be nothing more than the relationship between two people, the lies they share, the lives they invest and invade, and the notion that each person has within them the possibility of being utterly repulsive and worthy of being feared.  Horror.

Revolutionary Road is a movie about the Wheelers, a family of four, husband, wife, son, and daughter, who live on the street of the same name.  Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) works at Knox 500, a pre-computer computer company.  Before Apple and Microsoft and even IBM had really come onto the scene, in this film, the fictional Knox was the company.  It’s the mid-1950′s, so April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) is still a stay-at-home Mom, caring for her two young children. In what turns out to be a macabre tale of a marriage gone horribly wrong, we watch Frank and April attempt to maintain their own sanity amidst the realization that marraige, having children, jobs, travelling even, and life itself is not what they thought it was.  They have no delusions about the grandeur of the American Dream; in fact, they are planning a trip to France to escape the “hopeless emptiness” of that Dream.  Plans change, though.  Plans also explode.

The brilliant acting on the part of both DiCaprio and Winslet is utterly staggering, the kind of acting you expect to see only a few times in any great actor’s lifetime.  Winslet seemes to be getting used to these performances.  Her role in The Reader (also 2008) was a spectacular character whose part in World War II cost her a lifetime of freedom and security, and the promise of beautiful literacy slips away from her with each passing day.  The roles in these movies are very different, each with its own set of difficulties and triumphs.  Winslet plays them both completely honestly and devoid of hackneyed display or melodrama.  She pours herself into these roles, and the result can only be described as a tour de force, a whirlwind of brilliant acting and great Art.  Capital A.

Another aspect of her performance is that it doesn’t seem to detract from the others, only enhances them.  DiCaprio is equally as incredible in this one, and Michael Shannon’s subtle and nuanced performance adds to the movie another layer of enigmatic spiritual soul searching.  DiCaprio hasn’t played a role so challenging in quite some time, probably since The Aviator; his role in The Departed was also no doubt a great one, but this role has him revealing a side of himself that many actors never find, a place of honesty and emotional intensity.  When we see it, we know it is real and it moves us.  It is not our capacity for being moved, but actually being moved that separates the essentialy entertaining and the truly artful.  This movie is clearly the latter.

But it also entertains.  This two hour masterpiece felt like all of ten minutes.  The end achieved something in me that few movies do: I wanted it both to keep going and knew that it ended at just the right moment.  I have had the pleasure and joy of seeing many of the best movies of 2008 in a row now, and this one easily makes the list.  You may grieve with the roll of the credits, but I doubt you will regret it.

Rating: 4/4 Stars

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Is there a point in life when we realize we’ve been wasting time?  How long does it take for someone who has spent a great portion of his or her life to realize that they were just acting busy?  And after those epiphanes strike home, what do you do?  In The Visitor, Richard Jenkins’s character Walter Vale, a professor at a school in Connecticut, discovers these things for himself, finding that a life worth living is a life spent in pursuit of meaningful relationships, with all of the baggage that may come with it.

Walter Vale is a professor who has been teaching the same course for two decades.  He has published three books, is working on the fourth one, and he has lived alone for some time now.  He is told he must present a paper at NYU that he co-authored, since the other autor can’t make it.  He relunctantly obliges and drives to New York City.  When he arrives, he finds a bit of a surprise in his apartment.  There isn’t a lot I can say, because I don’t want to spoil anything.  The surprise changes his life.  He finds himself in the middle of a new group of people, people who need him, people who see the world through different eyes.  He decides he to help, and it is that decision which changes the course of his life forever.

The film explores the reality between opposite worlds and how those worlds collide and conflate, forming something greater than the two of them on their own.  It asks big questions about morality and obligation, and it poses political questions about post-9/11 immigration laws in America.  The film is a character study of Walter Vale, an archetype of sorts, a man who represents a great number of people who walk and talk and eat and sleep and repeat the cycle, looking busy, making plans.  But are any of them living life?  What does it mean to live life?  What is a life worth living?

The Visitor is an exploration of all of these ideas.  The acting is fantastic from everyone involved, especially Richard Jenkins, whose character is subtle and nuanced, a man in whom the search for meaning and the anonymity of routine have waged war against one another.  It may have begun as a battle of wits, but it will end as a battle of the soul.  He is a quixotic man at heart, whose exterior has been ravaged by both tedium and tragedy.  The supporting cast is also superb.  The script is absolutely perfect, and the direction is vivid and insightful.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this movie is the interplay of title and story.  Who is The Visitor?  Which of the characters’ lives is closest to that of outsider, the one looking in, the individual who seeks to become part of the group?  In a way, it’s obvious.  In another way, though, it’s impossible to answer.  Each person is a visitor in his or her own way, and this film exemplifies and elucidates this theme brilliantly.  It’s a beautiful film, and one which everyone should see.  And I don’t think that’s opinion.  I think that’s a fact.

Rating: 3.5/4 Stars

Go back to the seventies in America, when the next wave of Civil Rights had just begun.  Transport yourself to the kitchen of Harvey Milk, where you will listen to his story, both haunting and revealing of a bygone epoch in American history, but one which still lingers and echoes today.  Or, you can let Gus Van Sant do all the work for you.  You will have Milk, one of the best films of 2008.