Revitalizing Roundup Reveille

January 6th, 2009 by Bruce Edwards

Hey all you Sleeping Pseudobook Reviewers. Wake up! It’s 2009 and you have not published your “best lists” of any sort. I am going to put my movie top ten here and will provide a one sentence justification and challenge you to do the same. I will state only for the record that I did not make a distinction between in-theatre and video viewings, because if we had to rely on what comes to zip code 43612 or 43402, we’d hardly ever see anything but Judd Apatow knockoffs and the real thing is worse enough. Read mine, argue with mine, post yours.

  1. Slumdog Millionaire — honor, truth, loyalty, justice, AND love. Amazing storytelling from a never-disappoints director (Danny Boyle); this same movie made by an American would be Zoolander.

  2. Redbelt — honor, truth, loyalty, justice; is there anything else? Well, love; if the ending is abrupt, it’s because actions speak louder than words for Mamet. (This was my #1 until Slumdog came along at the end of 08.)

  3. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – another period piece that incites you to turn back the clock and dream–of a day when movies could be frivolous with style and no creepy prurience. Just regular prurience.
  4. The Fall — powerfully combines imagination with a recognition of the power of desiring to believe (again).
  5. Dark Knight — chaos, evil, impotent power, paranoia, sadness.
  6. Iron Man — crisp dialogue as much or more fun as the pyrotechnics.
  7. Australia — epic vistas and unapologetic movie making for movie’s (& country’s) sake.
  8. Indiana Jones — just to see Indy in that diner and hat again.
  9. Transsiberian — creepy, scary embodiment of being in too deep with no recourse but lies.
  10. Speed Racer — best for the small screen and a better plane ride movie there cannot be: genuine family tears and dazzling technology;

BONUS PICKS

  • Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog: before this existed, could you have identified its genre or predicted its impact? Joss Whedon’s Musical Comic Book Evil Scientist Adventure Romance. Thing. “I hate the homeless. Ness problem.”
  • In Bruges — brazenly tender-hearted, heartfully profane, surprising & surprisingly spiritual

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    2 Comments »

    2 Responses to “Revitalizing Roundup Reveille”

    1. on 10 Jan 2009 at 8:10 pm   Lynn

      Wow! I wouldn’t have guessed there was such strong overlap between us! I have not *yet* seen ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ or ‘Australia’ (although I’m a serious Baz Luhrmann fan) or ‘Transsiberian’ but I found all the rest amazing films; I just saw ‘In Bruges’ and the other surprise I’ve been recommending to others is ‘The Fall’ – I figure everyone already knows about ‘Miss Pettigrew’…

      Did you see ‘Married Life’ or ‘Across the Universe’?

    2. on 14 Jan 2009 at 7:04 pm   Joel

      I have yet to see ‘Miss Pettigrew’ and ‘In Bruges’ and ‘The Fall’ but I’m glad I managed to see everything else on that list.

      My very own Year Roundup of movies (theatrical releases) follows in brief form:

      10. Tropic Thunder ~ filled with so many movie in-jokes, I didn’t even know what was coming at me (sometimes). All in all, though, I found this Ben Stiller-directed comedy to be a lot more fun than Zoolander ever was.

      9. Changeling ~ a chilling period piece set in Los Angeles. Clint Eastwood is a bona fide auteur.

      8. Australia ~ Baz Luhrmann made the Gone With The Wind of Down Under. At times, it plays a bit too much like an epic fantasy and then tries to go back to being a period piece… but overall, it was a magical, uplifting piece of cinema that one rarely sees anymore.

      7. Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ~ I, for one, thoroughly loved this revisitation of the classic character.

      6. Burn After Reading ~ The Coen brothers made another great movie about idiocy and how it isn’t confined to any place on this planet. Least of all, Washington, D.C.

      5. Valkyrie ~ a much more impressive movie than I had been led to believe it would be. Tom Cruise is, to put it mildly, excellent in his role of a German colonel who becomes caught up in a scheme to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Also, I think that Bryan Singer must’ve LOVED Paul Verhoeven’s ‘Blackbook’, because he cast three main actors from that movie in Valkyrie.

      4. The Dark Knight ~ An almost phantasmagorical new level for comic-inspired films.

      3. Transsiberian ~ Brad Anderson is going to be a director I will follow, from now on. Gripping, suspenseful, full of distressing moral dilemmas, and painfully well-acted by its principals (Woody Harrelson, Ben Kingsly, Thomas Kretschmann, Emily Mortimer, Eduardo Noriega, and Kate Mara).

      2. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army ~ Good fun and a worthy follow-up to the first feature, again with all of the principle actors in place and Guillermo del Toro (God bless him) firmly in the director’s chair.

      1. Wall-E ~ what can I say? I’ve been an even bigger sucker for Pixar movies as I have grown older. They’re so much better at what they do than any other American animation firm.

      (I would’ve picked Slumdog for my #1, no question, if I had seen it in ’08… but I just finally caught it in the first week of ’09)