2009 in Film.

Merry Christmas, everyone. As we’re at the halfway point of the big decade list — Pt. 1, Pt. 2 — now seems like a good time to uncork the usual end-of-year movie list. Think of it as a new-stuff sorbet before we move to the final fifty.

I should say before we start that there are a few movies I’ll very likely see from 2009 — most notably The Lovely Bones, A Single Man, and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus — that aren’t included due to their limited release schedule — most don’t arrive around these parts until 2010. The better-than-expected Sherlock Holmes, which I saw yesterday and have not yet reviewed in full, is also not here, although I did think of slotting it in at #20 before the Victorian-era tazer and remote-controlled cyanide bomb showed up. And there are still a few other stragglers I wouldn’t mind catching at some point, most notably Invictus and The Messenger. But if any of these are really, really great, they’ll either get backdated in or show up in next year’s list, as per usual. So don’t worry — credit will get paid where due.

In the meantime, as has been the standard — and although the decade list has been working differently — we start at #1 and proceed from there. And without further ado, the…

Top 20 Films of 2009
[2000/2001/2002/2003/2004/2005/2006/2007/2008]

1. In the Loop: “Tobes, I don’t want to have to read you the Riot Act, but I am going to have to read you some extracts from the Riot Act, like: Section 1, Paragraph 1: Don’t leave your boss twisting in the wind and then burst in late, smelling like a pissed seaside donkey.” Even if I hadn’t moved back to DC this year for a ringside seat to the clusterfrak, Armando Ianucci’s In the Loop would’ve been at the top of my list. I’m not normally a huge laugher at movies, but this flick had me rolling.

Basically, In the Loop is Office Space for people in politics, and it’s a smart, wickedly funny entertainment. And like Judge’s film and The Big Lebowski, I expect it will enjoy a long, happy, and very quotable renaissance on DVD. If you find The Daily Show or Colbert Report at all enjoyable, this is a must-see. And, even if you don’t, well the choice Scottish swearing should get you through.

2. Moon: While Michael Bay, McG and their ilk tried to top each other with gimongous explosions this summer, Duncan Jones’ moody, low-key Moon just aimed to blow our minds. A throwback to the seventies big-think sci-fi that has fallen out of favor in the post-Star Wars-era, Moon‘s big special effect, other than Sam Rockwell, of course, was its clever ideas. And in a year of hit-or-miss (mostly miss) blockbusters, Rockwell’s quiet two-man show turned out to be the sci-fi extravaganza of 2009.

3. A Serious Man: Oy vey. This existential disquisition into wandering dybbuks, sixties Judaica, quantum mechanics, and Old Testament justice was yet another triumph for those devilishly talented brothers from Minnesota. The Job-like travails of Larry Gopnik introduced us to several colorful, Coenesque personages (Sy Ableman, Rabbi Nachtner) and offered vignettes (the Goy’s Teeth) and quotable philosophy (“Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you“) that cinephiles will ponder for awhile to come. The Coens abide.

4. The Hurt Locker: Bombs away, and we’re not ok. Other than Modern Warfare 2 and Generation Kill, this immersive, nail-biting account of an IED team’s travails in the midst of the suck was the best pop culture simulator out there for feeling embedded in Iraq…and stuck at the wrong Baghdad street corner at just the wrong time. And with the tension ratcheting to uncomfortable levels in each of the ordnance disposal scenes, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker — sorry, King of the World — was the action movie of the year.

5. Coraline: In an auspicious year for both regular (see #10) and stop-motion (see #13) animation, Henry Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline was the pick of the litter. It sorta got lost in the early-year shuffle, but Selick & Gaiman’s dark, twisted fairy tale delivered the goods, and hopefully it’ll find more life on DVD.

6. District 9: For those who find Moon a little too talky and slow, I direct you to Neil Blomkamp’s little (ok, $30 million) South African indie that could. Alien Nation meets Cry Freedom with healthy dollops of Cronenberg body horror and old-school Peter Jackson viscera-splatter, District 9 came out as more than the sum of its parts, and (with #8) was one of the most purely enjoyable films of the summer.

7. (500) Days of Summer: “This is a story of boy meets girl. The boy, Tom Hansen of Margate, New Jersey, grew up believing that he’d never truly be happy until the day he met The One. This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total mis-reading of the movie ‘The Graduate’.” Speaking of said music, here’s a movie the early Elvis Costello would love. Sure, (500) Days is unabashedly for folks who’ve been on the wrong end of a break-up. But, even if it is ultimately Annie Hall-lite in a lot of ways, it had more truths to tell than most of the rom-coms out in any given year…combined.

8. Drag Me to Hell: Shaking off the Spidey 3 doldrums, Sam Raimi went back to his gross-out Evil Dead roots for this carnival concoction. Besides being easily the most explicitly anti-gypsy film since Borat, Drag Me to Hell was also, in its own way, as much of a Great Recession cautionary tale as Up in the Air. One hopes that when the Senate takes up financial services reform next year, our erstwhile reformers in that esteemed body will note what happened to Alison Lohman when she, against all better judgment, decided to do the bidding of the Banks.

9. Star Trek: There was admittedly a whole lotta stupid in J.J. Abrams’ Star Warsy revamp of the Star Trek franchise — Once exposed to the light, the movie’s basic premises completely fall apart. But, like the stomachache that accompanies eating too much candy, those regrets come later. In the moment, Star Trek was more fun than you can shake a stick at, and as solid and entertaining a franchise reboot as 2006’s Casino Royale. Let’s hope The Revenge of Khan or whatever it’s called turns out better than Quantum of Solace.

10. Up: If the movie were just the first ten-fifteen minutes, this might’ve been in the top five. But even more than WALL-E, the good stuff in Up is front-loaded. And, after the story of a lifetime ended a quarter hour in, I wasn’t much in the mood for talking dogs and big, funny birds (even birds named Kevin) anymore. Still, Pixar is Pixar, and Up carried their usual mark of quality.

11. The Damned United: Frost/Nixon for the futbol set, Tom Hooper’s ballad of Clough and Revie was a low-key character study that made up for an awkwardly-frontloaded bromance with another great performance by Michael Sheen and plenty of “Life in a Northern Town” local color to spare. You can practically smell the mud off the cleats in this one.

12. Duplicity: Perhaps I’m giving too many props to well-made breezy entertainments this year (see also Nos. 8 & 9). Nonetheless, Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity was a sleek espionage caper and a decently sexy love story that was all the more amusing because the stakes were so small. As it turns out, Clive Owen had just taken on evil corporations with a global reach a few weeks earlier in The International (a movie I caught on DVD, and which was most memorable for its Gunfight in the Guggenheim) — He’s more fun when he’s on the payroll.

13. The Fantastic Mr. Fox: If you see one clever stop-motion adaptation of a sardonic children’s novel this year…well, see Coraline. Nonetheless, The Fantastic Mr. Fox was also one of the better entrants in the 2009 line-up. It was ultimately a little too Wes Anderson saccharine for my tastes, but, of course, your mileage may vary. And at least Fox didn’t wallow in the emo like, you know.

14. Inglourious Basterds: After a decade of languishing in the shallows, Quentin Tarantino found a bit of his old magic in this sprawling alternate history of WWII. Yes, it needed a good and ruthless editor, and some rather longish scenes don’t really work at all (I’m thinking mainly of Shoshanna’s lunch with Goebbels and Linda.) But at certain times — the basement cafe snafu, for example, or the memorable finale — Basterds is the best thing QT has done since Jackie Brown. Let’s hope he stays in form.

15. Public Enemies: Michael Mann’s high-def retelling of The Last Days of Dillinger was a strange one, alright. Like Basterds, it was long and languid and sometimes seemed to move without purpose. But, like Mann’s last grainy-digital foray into tales of manly men and the women they love, Miami Vice, Public Enemies has stuck with me ever since. Say what you will about the hi-def video aesthetic, it somehow seems to match Mann’s haunted, Hemingwayesque sense of poetry.

16. The Informant!: The tragedy of The Insider retold as farce, The Informant!, like many of Steven Soderbergh’s films, was experimental in a lot of ways. Some things worked (the ADM-buttery sheen); Others didn’t (the distractingly peppy Hamlisch score); Others still were hit-or-miss (the in-head bipolar voiceover). Nonetheless, The Informant! is mostly a success, and it’s good to see Soderbergh out there trying new things — I wish I’d gotten around to catching The Girlfriend Experience. (Ahem, the movie, that is. Sheesh, some people.)

17. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: I had definite doubts going in, but Werner Herzog’s Grand Theft Auto: New Orleans turned out to be a surprisingly fun gonzo trip. After years of hanging with the Kinski, good ole Werner sure knows his way around the crazy, and by pairing Nicholas Cage on a savage burn with hyperreal iguanas, voodoo breakdancers, and the like, he’s done Abel Ferrara’s Gloomy Gus version of this tale one better. There’s no Catholic angst for this Lieutenant — just reveling in sordidness…but then again, isn’t that the whole point of Carnival?

18. Watchmen: “At midnight, all the agents and the superhuman crews go and round up everyone who knows more than they do.” True, Zack Snyder’s attempt to recreate the Alan Moore graphic novel on film is flawed in a lot of ways. (The longer DVD version smooths out some of these issues while introducing others.) And I still wish the project had stayed in Paul Greengrass’ hands. But, give credit where it’s due — For all its many problems (most notably the fratboy-indulgences into “cool” violence), Snyder’s Watchmen got a lot of things right, from Dr. Manhattan sulking on Mars to Jackie Earle Haley’s turn as Rorschach. Snyder couldn’t match the degree of difficulty involved in the end, but Watchmen was still a worthy attempt.

19. The Road: In the Future, There Will Be Cannibals: John Hillcoat’s film version of Cormac McCarthy’s dabbling in the apocalyptic form definitely captured the resonances of the book. And this is a quality production through and through, with solid performances by Viggo, the kid, Charlize Theron, and all of the HBO All-Stars (with particularly big ups to Robert Duvall.) Unfortunately, I didn’t think much of the book either, and in its monochromatic grimness, The Road never seems as memorable as Hillcoat’s earlier film, The Proposition. All work and no play makes Hobo Viggo somethin’ somethin’.

20. The Men Who Stare at Goats: I’m sure a lot of lists would’ve found room for Avatar or Up in the Air in their top twenty, and both have their merits (even if Avatar‘s are almost completely technical.) But if Avatar was too flat and Air too glib, The Men Who Stare at Goats was a frothy excursion that delivered on basically the terms it promised at the onset. Ok, there’s not much there there, but sometimes a couple of likable actors having an extended goof will go farther than Big, Oscar-Worthy Messages and World-Beating Tech. Hmmm, if you think about it, the “sparkly eye” technique probably would’ve gone over better with the Na’vi than all those Aliens-loaned cargo-loaders anyway. Score one for the First Earth Battalion.

Most Disappointing: Where the Wild Things Are, Terminator: Salvation

Worth a Rental: An Education, Avatar, Cold Souls, Eden (2006), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The International, Paranormal Activity, Sherlock Holmes, A Single Man, Taken, Up in the Air, Zombieland

Don’t Bother: 2012, The Box, The Brothers Bloom, Extract, A Girl Cut in Two (2006), The Hangover, Invictus, Jennifer’s Body, State of Play, The Tiger’s Tail (2006), Whip It, World’s Greatest Dad

Best Actor: Sam Rockwell, Moon; Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Best Actress: Carey Mulligan, An Education
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds; Robert Duvall, The Road
Best Supporting Actress: Marion Cotillard, Public Enemies; Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds

Unseen: 9, Nine, Adventureland, Angels & Demons, Amelia, Antichrist, Armored, Astro Boy, Black Dynamite, Blood: The Last Vampire, Bright Star, Brothers, Bruno, Capitalism: A Love Story, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, Crank: High Voltage, Crossing Over, Everybody’s Fine, Funny People, Gentlemen Broncos, GI Joe, The Girlfriend Experience, Good Hair, The Education of Charlie Banks, The Great Buck Howard, Hunger, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Invention of Lying, It’s Complicated, Julie & Julia, Land of the Lost, The Limits of Control, , The Lovely Bones, I Love You Man, Me and Orson Welles, The Messenger, New York I Love You, Notorious, Observe & Report, Orphan, Pandorum, Pirate Radio, Ponyo, Precious, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, The Proposal, Push, The Soloist, Surrogates, The Taking of Pelham1-2-3, Taking Woodstock, Thirst, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Two Lovers, The Ugly Truth, Whatever Works, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Year One

A Good Year For

The Apocalypse (2012, Zombieland, The Road)
Demons (A Serious Man, Drag Me to Hell, Jennifer’s Body, Paranormal Activity)
George Clooney (The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up in the Air)
Going Undercover to Play Both Sides (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Duplicity, The Informant!)
Guy Pearce Cameos (The Road, The Hurt Locker)
Hipsters with Unresolved Childhood Issues (The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Where the Wild Things Are)
“The Jews” (Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man)
Matthew Goode (Watchmen, A Single Man)
Melanie Lynskey (Up in the Air, The Informant!)
Stop-Motion (Coraline, The Fantastic Mr. Fox)

A Bad Year For

Goats (Drag Me to Hell, The Men Who Stare at Goats)
Robots from the Future (Transformers 2, Terminator: Salvation)
Pithy Movie Titles: (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Summer blockbusters: (GI Joe, Terminator: Salvation, Transformers 2, Wolverine)

2010: Alice in Wonderland, All Good Things, The American, The A-Team, The Book of Eli, Brooklyn’s Finest, Clash of the Titans, A Couple of Dicks, Daybreakers, The Expendables, Greenberg, The Green Hornet, Green Zone, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 1, I Love You Phillip Morris, Inception, Iron Man 2, Jonah Hex, Kick-Ass, Knight & Day, The Last Airbender, Legion, The Losers, Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Morning Glory, Predators, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Red, Robin Hood, Salt, Season of the Witch, Shanghai, Shutter Island, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Toy Story 3, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, The Wolf Man, Youth in Revolt, more needless ’80s remakes than you can shake a stick at. (Footloose, The Karate Kid, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Red Dawn), and…

TRON 2. 2010, y’all. It’s the future, and no mistake.

Where the Plastic Things Are.

After a decade in the toy chest, Woody, Buzz, and the gang finally get out of mothballs in the trailer for Pixar and Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3. It’s been 15 years since the first and ten since the second, so unclear to me why Pixar would endanger its winning streak by going back to this well now. Still, they haven’t let us down yet.

Down, Up, and Over.

Since I’m behind on my movie reviews, as ever, I’m hitting up the past few summer flicks I’ve witnessed in bulk. So, in brief:

A loving throwback to the director’s Evil Dead days, and an audience film if there ever was one, Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell delivers a solidly entertaining two hours of low-budge comic mayhem, if you’re in the mood for it. It doesn’t really aspire to be anything more than what it is — a B-movie carnival funhouse. But taken as such, Drag Me to Hell offers thrills, chills, and (gross-out) spills with plenty of Raimi’s old-school tongue-in-cheek. I enjoyed myself quite a bit at a virtually empty screening, and would think this movie would kill with a packed Saturday night crowd. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

If you haven’t seen the previews, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman, quite appealing) is an ex-farm-girl trying to shake off her country roots and jump ahead a few social strata in the City of Angels, and she’s doing everything she can to be (or at least seem) upwardly mobile — she’s listening to pronunciation tapes to lose her accent, she’s foregoing sweets to keep her (newly thin) figure, she’s eyeing a promotion to assistant manager at the bank she works at, she has wildly overpaid for a trendy Mac laptop, etc. Then again, the last decision was probably forced on her, as Christine is currently dating Mac Guy (Justin Long), here Clay, a new psychology professor whose wealthy, elitist parents radiate condescension towards poor Christine. (By the way, fellow gradual students: if the kid being dragged to Hell before the opening credits didn’t tip you off that this is fantasy, the sight of Long starting a new academic job, complete with spiffy office, should do the trick. Riiiiight.)

At any rate, in her halfhearted attempts to seem ruthless enough for her bank promotion, Christine one day refuses the pleas of a sickly (re: gross) old woman (Lorna Raver) and signs off on the foreclosure of her home. Huge mistake, as this grotesque crone is actually of the gypsy persuasion — Yes, this movie is gonna make massive bank in Kazakhstan. Soon enough, after a comic brawl that involves stapled eyes and a lot of gummings, said gypsy dooms Christine to Hell. Hades. The Bad Place. And so, poor Ms. Brown only has three days — days which she will spend tormented by the lamia, a shadowy goat demon from the nefarious netherrealms — to save her soul. And, if you factor in LA ‘s infernal traffic, that’s really only two days…

One of the running jokes in Drag Me to Hell is that pretty much everybody around Christine — her boss (David Paymer), her co-worker (Reggie Lee), her gypsy nemesis, Clay’s parents, even Clay, whose warmth and sincere fondness for Christine is infused with noblesse oblige — is probably more deserving of her dire straits than she. Raimi’s film is positively Victorian in its punishing of Christine for trying to transgress class boundaries — apparently, there is no sin worse in LA than social striving. Still, pondering Drag Me to Hell‘s socioeconomic implications for any length of time is missing the point. Best to just sit back and let the blood, maggots, and embalming fluid flow. And if the elderly woman a few seats over won’t stop hacking, coughing, or chattering during the film — trust me, you’ll want to just let her do her thing.

Soon after bounding out of Drag Me to Hell, I caught Pixar’s Up in 3D. And, yes, like every other Pixar movie you can name (with the possible exception of Cars), it’s an impressive, eye-popping, first-rate entertainment, with both colorful craziness for the kids and a haunting resonance for adults. My go-to-Pixar films remain Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles, but I’m sure this’ll make a few people’s favorites list as well, even if most of the film actually comes off as somewhat anti-climactic.

Up begins with a meet-cute between nerdy Carl (eventually, Ed Asner) and adventurous Elie (Elizabeth Docter), two youngsters who share an inordinate fondness for explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer) and his Spirit of Adventure, the zeppelin he piloted to faraway Paradise Falls, never to return. These two kids enter a pact that they will one day follow in the footsteps of their hero…but, after love, puberty, marriage, and a life well-lived, they never quite make it. By ten minutes in, Elie has passed on, Carl is now an old and curmudgeonly retiree, and their longtime house is about to be torn down by ne’er-do-well corporate developers. Knowing no gypsies, Carl takes drastic action of a different kind — he attaches several hundred helium balloons to the premises and simply floats away. And, with an inadvertent stowaway in tow — That would be Russell (Jordan Nagai), the would-be Wilderness Scout who just wants to “assist the elderly” and procure his final badge — Carl finally has that long-awaited Paradise Falls adventure, which includes but is not limited to an ill-fated reunion with Muntz, a giant bird named Kevin, and a gaggle of roaming, Bowlingual-enhanced dogs…Squirrel!

Much hilarity and occasional melancholy ensues, of course, as per the norm. But for all the film’s many strengths, I thought Up suffered from a grievous structural flaw that knocks it out of the top tier of Pixar offerings. Remember how the first forty minutes of WALL-E just overpowered the broader and more whimsical “starship fatties” half of the movie? Well, Up feels even more frontloaded. The first ten minutes or so of the film, encompassing Carl and Elie’s many decades together, is so concise and elegantly told that it just put me out of the mood for the colorful birds and talking dog hijinx that follows. Ever see the ST:TNG episode where, due to that particular week’s encounter with a cosmic energy force, Picard ends up living out an entire lifetime — marriage, kids, grandkids, and all — while only forty-five minutes passes on the Enterprise? How was he supposed to go back to the usual random shuttling back-and-forth across the Alpha Quadrant after an experience like that? Well, Up felt for me much the same. It basically peaks in the first ten minutes, as it tells the story of a lifetime, and everything thereafter — tho’ kids will probably feel different — is just a slow leaking of air.

I’ve noticed in my conversations with movie people that there seems to be a distinct generation of men — say, five to ten years younger than me — who think of Todd Phillips’ Old School as a certifiable comedy classic, the Stripes or Revenge of the Nerds of its era. (FWIW, I thought Old School was terrible, and remember very little about it except Will Ferrell honing his naked-guy schtick.) Well, I’m guessing a lot of those folks thought more of Todd Phillips’ The Hangover than I did. It’s not a bad movie or anything — in fact, I would call it intermittently funny. But i didn’t find it anywhere near as uproarious as some reviews would suggest, and I feel I could’ve just as easily caught this flick on cable in a few months and not lost anything. If this is really the comedy event of the summer, then just keep drinking — we’re in for another year to forget.

The premise of The Hangover may be the funniest thing about it. Four friends — ok, three friends and Alan, a weird deadbeat soon-to-be brother-in-law (Zack Galifianakis) — descend upon Vegas to paint the town red for a blowout bachelor party. Cut to the next day, and things have clearly gotten out of hand. Doug the groom (Justin Bartha) is nowhere to be found. Phil the lothario schoolteacher (Bradley Cooper) has a monster headache and a hospital band around his wrist. Stu the henpecked, cuckolded dentist (Ed Helms) has lost a tooth and gained a wife. And Alan can’t find his pants or his man-satchel…but has found a tiger in the bathroom and a toddler in the closet. So what the eff happened? The remaining three musketeers try to piece together clues of their Big Night and find their lost friend before zero hour in California, when Bridezilla awakens. Can they save the day in time?

The Hangover works best if you think that absolutely anything could’ve happened the night before. As it turns out, tho, most of what happened is constrained by what you’ve seen in the previews (or, barring that, the promotional materials all over the theater I was in — Heather Graham, check. Mike Tyson, check. Mike Epps, check.) And so what you’re mostly left with is a few hours of waiting for these haggard guys to tick off the next few boxes and get up to speed with the trailer. In the meantime, their company is, well, mildly entertaining, I guess, although (as in Old School) these dudes — and the sense of humor — are all a bit too mook for my taste. (If you find bare asses funny on their own terms, tho’, have at it.) A lot of the jokes revolves around Zack Galifianakis’s Alan, who’s…not quite right in the head. But, frankly, he just seems like a collection of comedy writing tics than a full-fledged character like, say, Walter Sobchak in Lebowski. What can I say? Humor is a delicate thing, and it differs for different people. But, aside from a line here or there (like the “Holocaust ring” one in the trailer), I just didn’t find The Hangover all that funny. Your mileage may vary.

Besides, on my first wild weekend in Vegas, Dubya started an unnecessary, multibillion-dollar war. Beat that for crazy.

The Summer Contenders.

“I’ve been waiting for this day my whole life, this day of reckoning.” Some choice offerings from the rest of the Watchmen trailer bin, which are now online: Harry digs deep into the memory hole to Anakin up He-Who Must-Not-Be-Named in the second preview for David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (To be honest, I think I might’ve missed the first trailer from last November (at the same link) — that one’s not bad either.) Iowan ne’er-do-well James Tiberius Kirk straightens up and flies right in a preview for J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek of epic scope. Hugh Jackman dons the claws once more in another look at Gavin Hood’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. (Meh, bub.) And an animated Ed Asner braves floating houses, boy scouts, and talking dogs in the newest trailer for Pixar’s UP. Pixar will go wrong someday — this doesn’t look to be it.

2008 in Film.

Well, now that we’re in the second month of 2009, and since I’m *mostly* caught up on last year’s prestige crop, it seems arguably the last, best time to write up the belated Best of 2008 Movie list. (I did see one more indy film of 2008 Sunday morning, but as it was after my arbitrarily-chosen 1/31 cutoff, it’ll go in next year’s list.) Compiling the reviews this year, it seems my October hunch was correct: For a combination of reasons, I went to the movies a lot less than usual in 2008. (The review count usually clocks in around 45. Last year, I only saw 30 films on the big screen.) And, looking over the release schedule, I see lots of movies I had every intention of viewing — Appaloosa, Be Kind, Rewind, Blindness, Choke, Leatherheads — and never got around to.

At any rate, given what I did see, here’re the best of ’em. And here’s hoping the 2009 list will be more comprehensive. As always, all of the reviews can be found here. (And if a movie title doesn’t link to a full review, it means I caught it on DVD.)

Top 20 Films of 2008

[2000/2001/2002/2003/2004/2005/2006/2007]

1. The Dark Knight: Yes, it’s the obvious fanboy pick. And, admittedly, TDK had pacing problems — it was herky-jerky at times and the third act felt rushed. Still, in a not-particularly-good year for cinema, Christopher Nolan’s operatic reimagining of the Caped Crusader and his arch-nemesis was far and away the most enjoyable experience i had at the movies in 2008. And if Candidate Obama was America’s own white knight (metaphorically speaking) this past year, Heath Ledger’s Joker was its mischievous, amoral, and misanthropic id. If and when the economic wheels continue to come off in 2009, will stoic selflessness or gleeful anarchy be the order of the day? The battle for Gotham continues, and everybody’s nervously eyeing those detonators. Let’s hope the clown doesn’t get the last laugh.

2. Milk: What with a former community organizer turned “hopemonger” being elected president — while evangelicals, conservatives and sundry Mormons inflicted Proposition 8 on the people of California — Gus Van Sant’s vibrant recounting of the tragedy of Harvey Milk was obviously the timeliest political movie of 2008. But, in a year that saw entirely too much inert Oscar-bait on-screen in its final months, Milk — romantic, passionate, and full of conviction — was also one of the most alive. While it extends some measure of compassion even to its erstwhile villain (Josh Brolin), Milk is a civil-rights saga that harbors no illusions about the forces of intolerance still amongst us, and how far we all still have to go.

3. The Wrestler: Have you ever seen a one-trick pony in the fields so happy and free? Me neither, to be honest, but Aronofsky’s naturalistic slice-of-life about the twilight days of Randy “the Ram” Ramzinski was likely the next best thing. I don’t know if Mickey Rourke will experience a career resurrection after this performance or not. But he won this match fair and square, and nobody can take it from him.

4. Let the Right One In: As if living in public housing in the dead of a Swedish winter wasn’t depressing enough, now there’s a nosferatu to contend with… My Bodyguard by way of Ingmar Bergman and Stephen King, this creepy and unsettling tale of a very unsparkly pre-teen vampyrer will leave bitemarks long after you step out into the light.

5. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days: A 2007 release that made it stateside in 2008, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days is a movie that I probably wouldn’t ever want to watch again. Still, this grim, unrelenting journey through the seedy hotels and sordid back-alleys of Ceaucescu’s Romania is another hard one to shake off. And, tho’ I caught it early on, it remained one of the very best films of the year.

6. WALL-E: If you saw one movie last year about a boy(bot) from the slums meeting — and then improbably wooing — the girl(bot) of his dreams, I really hope it was WALL-E. Hearkening back to quality seventies sci-fi like Silent Running, Andrew Stanton’s robot love story and timely eco-parable is a definite winner, and certainly another jewel in the gem-studded Pixar crown. I just wish it’d stayed in the melancholy, bittersweet key of its first hour, rather than venturing off to the hijinx-filled, interstellar fat farm. Ah well, bring on Up.

7. Iron Man: Much better than I ever anticipated, Jon Favreau’s (and Robert Downey Jr.’s) Iron Man kicked a summer of superheroes off in grand fashion. In the end, I preferred the gloomy stylings of Gotham in 2008, but there’s definitely something to be said for this rousing, upbeat entrant in the comic movie canon. It delivered on its own terms, and it was a much better tech-fetishizing, boys-and-their-toys type-film than, say, 2007’s Transformers or (I suspect) 2009’s GI Joe. Bonus points for the Dude going all Big Jeff Lebowski on us here…now quit being cheap about the sequel.

8. Man on Wire: 4:40pm: Two foreign nationals and their American abettors successfully navigate past the guard checkpoint of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Their fanatical mission: To use the WTC as a symbol to transform the world…through an act of illegal, death-defying performance art. Although it never explicitly mentions 9/11 (of course, it doesn’t need to — the towers themselves do most of the work, and reconstructing its story as a heist does the rest), the stirring documentary Man on Wire, about Phillipe Petit’s 1974 tightrope-walk between the towers, gains most of its resonance from the events of that dark day in 2001.

After seventy minutes or so, just as it seems this unspoken analogy is starting to wear thin, Petit finally steps out onto that ridiculous wire, and Man on Wire takes your breath away. Nothing is permanent, the movie suggests. Not youth, not life, not love, not even those majestic, formidable towers. But some moments — yes, the beautiful ones too — can never be forgotten. (Note: Man on Wire is currently available as a direct download on Netflix.)

9. U2 3D: One of two 2008 films (along with #16) which seemed to suggest the future of the movie-going experience, U2 3D was both a decently rousing concert performance by Dublin’s fab four, and — more importantly — an experimental film which played with an entirely new cinema syntax. Just as students look back on D.W. Griffith films of a century ago as the beginnings of 2D-movie expression, so too might future generations look at this lowly U2 concert and see, in its layering of unrelated images onto one field of vision, when the language of 3D really began to take off. At which point someone might also say, “Man, I wish they’d played ‘So Cruel’ instead of some of these tired old dogs.”

10. The Visitor: I wrote about Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor (which I saw on DVD) some in my Gran Torino review, and my criticism there stands: As with Torino, the central thrust of this story is too Bagger Vance-ish by half. Still, it’s fun to see a likable character actor like Richard Jenkins get his due in a starring role, and he’s really great here. And, if the “magical immigrant” portions of this tale defy reality to some extent, McCarthy and Jenkins’ vision of a life desiccated by years of wallowing in academic purgatory — the humdrum lectures, the recycled syllabi, the mind-numbingly banal conferences, all divorced from any real-world interaction with the issues at hand — is frighteningly plausible.

11. Synecdoche, New York: Long on ambition and short on narrative coherence, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut is the There Will Be Blood of last year’s crop, in that it’s a film that I think will inspire a phalanx of ardent defenders among movie buffs, who will argue its virtues passionately against all comers. For my own part, I admired this often-bewildering movie more than I actually enjoyed it, and ultimately found it much less engaging than Kaufman’s real magnum opus, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Still, I’m glad I made the attempt, and it’s definitely worth seeing.

12. Frost/Nixon: Two man enter, one man leave! More a sports movie than a political one, Ron Howard and Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon is a decently entertaining depiction of two hungry down-and-outers locked in the debater’s version of mortal kombat. That being said, I kinda wish the stakes had seemed higher, or that the substance of the issues at hand — Vietnam, Cambodia, Watergate — had been as foregrounded as the mano-a-mano mechanics of the interview. Plus, that scene where Tricky Dick sweeps the leg? That’s not kosher.

13. Snow Angels: David Gordon Green’s quiet, novelistic Snow Angels is an early-2008 film I caught on DVD only a few weeks ago, and it’s been slowly sneaking up the list ever since. Based on a 1994 book by Stewart O’Nan, the movie depicts the intertwined lives of a small New England community, and recounts the tragic circumstances that lead to two gunshots being fired therein one winter afternoon. (If it sounds like Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, it’s very close in form, content, and melancholy impact.)

In a movie brimming over with quality performances — including (an ever-so-slightly-implausible) Kate Beckinsale, Nicky Katt, Amy Sedaris, and the long-forgotten Griffin Dunne — three actors stand out: Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby fall into one of the most honest, believable, and affectation-free high school romances I’ve seen in a movie in ages. And the always-watchable Sam Rockwell sneaks up on you as a perennial loser who tries to be a good guy and just keeps failing at life despite himself. At first not much more than an amiable buffoon as per his usual m.o., Rockwell’s gradual surrender to his demons — note his scenes with his daughter, or in the truck with his dog, or at the bar — gives Snow Angels a haunting resonance that sticks with you.

14. Burn After Reading: As I said in the original review, it’s not one of the all-time Coen classics or anything. But even medium-grade Coen tends to offer more delights than most films do in a given year, and the same holds true of their espionage-and-paranoia farce Burn After Reading in 2008. From John Malkovich’s foul-mouthed, (barely-)functioning alcoholic to George Clooney as a (thoroughly goofy) lactose-intolerant bondage enthusiast to, of course, Brad Pitt’s poor, dim-witted Chet, Burn introduced plenty of ridiculous new characters to the brothers’ already-stacked rogues’ gallery. This is one (unlike The Ladykillers) that I’m looking forward to seeing again.

15. Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Another catch-up DVD rental, this was Woody Allen’s good movie last year (as opposed to the woeful Cassandra’s Dream), and a smarter-than-average relationship film (as one might expect from the man behind Husbands and Wives and Annie Hall.) There’re some definitive Allen tics here that take some getting used to in the new environment of Barcelona — a very Woody-ish omniscient voiceover, some Allenesque quips emanating from Scarlett Johannson and the striking Rebecca Hall (late of Frost/Nixon and The Prestige), and, as per Match Point and Scoop, some rather outdated depictions of the class system. (Hall’s fiance, played by Chris Messina of Six Feet Under, is basically a caricature of the boring, born-entitled Ivy League grad, circa 1965.)

Still, if you can get past all that, Vicky Cristina is quite worthwhile. (And, as far as the Oscar buzz goes, I’d say Javier Bardem makes more of an impression here than does Penelope Cruz.) Whether you’re as old as Woody or as young as Vicky and Cristina, the story remains the same: love is a weird, untameable thing, and the heart wants what it wants.

16. Speed Racer: Easily the most unfairly maligned movie of 2008 (and I’m not a Wachowski apologist — I thought Matrix: Revolutions was atrocious), Speed Racer is an amped-up, hypercolorful extravaganza of the senses, and, this side of the original Matrix, one of the more interesting attempts I’ve seen at bringing anime to life. Critics derided it pretty much across the board as loud, gaudy nonsense, but, then as now, I’m not sure what they went in expecting from the film adaptation of a lousy sixties cartoon involving race cars and silly monkeys. This is where some readers might ask: “Um, are you really saying Speed Racer is a better movie than Revolutionary Road?” And I’m saying, yes, it’s much more successful at what it aimed to accomplish, and probably more entertaining to boot. Sure, Racer is a kid’s movie, but so was WALL-E. And, given most of the drek put before the youths today, it’s a darned innovative one. Plus, I’ve seen a lot of filmed laments about quiet-desperation-in-the-suburbs in my day, but for better or worse, in my 34 years of existence, I had never seen anything quite like this.

17. Gran Torino: Alas, Speed Racer, it seems, grew old, got ornery, and began fetishizing his car in the garage instead. Good thing there’re some kindly Hmong next door to pry open that rusty heart with a crowbar! Like The Visitor, Torino suffers from an excess of sentiment when it comes to its depiction of 21st-century immigrants and their salutary impact on old white folks. But, as a cautionary coda to a lifelong career glorifying vigilantism, Eastwood’s Gran Torino has that rusty heart in the right place, at least. And while Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski may be a mean old cuss, Eastwood’s performance here suggests that the old man’s got some tricks in him yet.

18. A Christmas Tale: I wrote about this movie very recently, so my thoughts on it haven’t changed all that much. A bit pretentious at times, Arnaud Desplechin’s anti-sentimental holiday film has its virtues, most notably Chiara Mastroianni eerily (and probably inadvertently) channeling her father and the elfin Mathieu Amalric wreaking havoc on his long-suffering family whenever possible. It’s a Not-So-Wonderful Life, I guess, but — however aggravating your relatives ’round christmastime — it’s still probably better than the alternative.

19. Tropic Thunder: Its pleasures were fleeting — I can’t remember very many funny lines at this point — and even somewhat scattershot. (Tom Cruise as Harvey Weinstein by way of a gigantic member was funny for the first ten minutes. Less so after half an hour.) Still, give Tropic Thunder credit. Unlike all too many comedies in recent years, it didn’t try to make us better people — it just went for the laugh, and power to it. And when the most controversial aspect of your movie turns out not to be the white guy in blackface (or, as we all euphemistically tend to put it now, “the dude disguised as another dude“), but the obvious Forrest Gump/Rain Man spoof, I guess you’ve done something right.

20. W: Nowhere near as potent as Stone’s early political forays, JFK and Nixon, W still came close to accomplishing the impossible in 2008: making the out-going president seem a sympathetic figure. I suppose several other films could’ve sat with distinction in this 20-spot — In Bruges or Benjamin Button, perhaps — but none of them would’ve afforded me the opportunity to write these lovely words once more: So long, Dubya.

Honorable Mention: It wasn’t a movie, of course. But 2008 was also the year we bid farewell to The Wire. Be sure to raise a glass, or tip a 40, in respect. (And let’s pray that — this year, despite all that’s come before — a “New Day” really is dawning.)

Most Disappointing: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Worth a Rental: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, In Bruges, Revolutionary Road, Valkyrie

Don’t Bother: Cassandra’s Dream, Cloverfield, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Doubt, Hellboy II: The Golden Age, The Incredible Hulk, Quantum of Solace, Slumdog Millionaire, Wanted

Best Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler, Sean Penn, Milk, Richard Jenkins, The Visitor
Best Actress: Anamaria Marinca, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Lina Leandersson, Let the Right One In, Rebecca Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight, Josh Brolin, Milk, Jeff Bridges, Iron Man, Sam Rockwell, Snow Angels
Best Supporting Actress: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler, Tilda Swinton, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Unseen: Appaloosa, Australia, The Bank Job, Be Kind, Rewind, Blindness, Body of Lies, Cadillac Records, Changeling, Choke, The Class, Defiance, Eagle Eye, The Fall, Funny Games, Hancock, Happy Go Lucky, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo, Leatherheads, I Loved You So Long, The Lucky Ones, Miracle at St. Anna, Pineapple Express, Rambo, The Reader, Redbelt, RockNRolla, The Spirit, Traitor, Waltz with Bashir

A Good Year For

Billionaire Do-Gooders (The Dark Knight, Iron Man)
Lonely Old White Guys (Gran Torino, The Visitor, The Wrestler)
Magical Immigrants (Gran Torino, The Visitor)
Rebecca Hall (Vicky Christina Barcelona, Frost/Nixon)
Richard Jenkins (The Visitor, Burn after Reading)
Robert Downey, Jr. (Iron Man, Tropic Thunder)
Romance at the Junkyard (WALL-E, Slumdog Millionaire)
Sam Rockwell (Choke, Frost/Nixon, Snow Angels)
Teenage Vampirism (Let the Right One In, Twilight)
Tosca (Quantum of Solace, Milk)

A Bad Year For

GOP Ex-Presidents (Frost/Nixon, W)
Political Do-Gooders (The Dark Knight, Milk)
Pulp Heroes (The Spirit)
Vigilantism without Remorse (Gran Torino, The Dark Knight)
Would-Be Assassins (Valkyrie, Wanted)

2009: Avatar, The Box, Bruno, Coraline, Duplicity, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Knowing, The Lovely Bones, New York, I Love You, Observe and Report, Push, Sherlock Holmes, The Soloist, State of Play, Star Trek, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Terminator: Salvation, Up, Where the Wild Things Are, The Wolfman, Wolverine and, of course,

Hrm.

The Curious Case of Benjamin’s Oscar Love.

The powers-that-be announce the nominees for the 81st Academy Awards, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button garnering 13 nominations (it helps when your Oscar Bait is FX-heavy), Slumdog Millionaire grabbing ten, and Milk and The Dark Knight notching eight apiece. (That being said, TDK was frozen out of the main awards, Ledger’s inevitable Supporting Actor bid notwithtanding.)

Also in the running for major stuff: The Reader (picture, actress, director), The Wrestler (actor, supporting actress), Doubt (actor, screenplay, actress, supporting actress), Frost/Nixon (director, actor, screenplay), and WALL-E (screenplay, animated film). And the happy semi-surprises: Richard Jenkins for The Visitor and Robert Downey, Jr. for Tropic Thunder.

I’ll make my picks with the GitM 2008 list, which should be coming up within the next week or two. (The movies I’ve been waiting for — Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, and The Wrestler — all open here tomorrow.) And, don’t worry, 2009 isn’t being slighted all that much: I highly doubt Paul Blart: Mall Cop was going to make the cut anyway.

Twelve for ’09.

On the occasion of the new year, EW previews some of the more-anticipated films of 2009, including Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Terminator: Salvation, Spike Jonze’s’ long-awaited Where the Wild Things Are, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Pixar’s Up, Harold Ramis’ Year One, The Taking of the Pelham 1-2-3 (again), Wolverine, and Watchmen.

Computer Love.

WwwaaaLLLLLL-Eeee! In the end, I can’t say I enjoyed it quite as much as Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, and I really, really wish it’d stayed in the melancholy I am Legend/Lars and the Real Girl groove of its first hour, rather than devolving into an Idiocracy-type satire aboard Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic. That being said, Andrew Stanton’s ambitious, impressive WALL-E is definitely in keeping with the high standard we’ve come to expect from the Pixar gang, and in scope and theme alone I’d rate it above recent forays Ratatouille, Cars and Finding Nemo. Part Silent Running-ish environmental parable, part whimsical robot romance (think Bjork, but you know, for kids!), and part trenchant political slapstick (note the Dubyaesque Fred Willard), WALL-E fires on significantly more cylinders throughout than, say, your average Dreamworks animation would even attempt. That the reach of WALL-E‘s ambition ultimately exceeds its grasp in the second hour, when the movie becomes a much more conventional family flick, can’t be held too harshly against the film, I think. I wish WALL-E had stayed Earthbound, in a way, but at least the little guy was reaching for the stars. (In any case, I expect WALL-E has a metal, mortal lock on next year’s Best Animation Oscar.)

Bringing a literal meaning to the term “space opera”, WALL-E begins with — of all things — Michael Crawford of Phantom fame crooning a musical number from Hello, Dolly! (“Put on Your Sunday Clothes“), which we hear while traversing the more scenic localities in our corner of the cosmos. Eventually, the swooping camera keys in on our home planet, except it’s clearly surrounded by more satellite debris than seems atmospherically sanitary. As we come down to Earth, matters are worse: Our beloved Terra has become an arid, dusty wasteland, cluttered with decaying buildings, vacuous advertising, and skyscrapers made of garbage. Enter WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class), a goggle-eyed robot (of the No. 5, Huey, and Vincent persuasion more than Artoo) whose job it is to construct these towers of refuse and who happens to be — along with one solitary cockroach — the lone survivor of our-now abandoned civilization.

Loneliness does funny things to a droid. Over the centuries of isolation, it seems, WALL-E has developed something of a personality — he collects intriguing knick-knacks he finds amidst the trash, repairs himself with pieces of his defunct brethren, and endlessly watches what’s left of a deteriorating VHS copy of Hello Dolly!, honing his song-and-dance routine and his understanding of human rituals of affection in the process. Alas, his skills of courtship go wasted…until, one day, EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) literally drops out of the sky, with a gimongous rocket ship in tow. A sleek, ovate, blue-eyed ingenue with massive destructive capability, EVE is pretty much everything WALL-E might want in a female* companion, and so, naturally, our lonely hero sets about to woo her. But, just when everything seems to be going well, WALL-E offers her a gift from his collection that initiates a higher directive…

This gets us to about forty-five minutes into the film, so we have a ways to go yet. That being said, everything that takes place here on Earth, before WALL-E chases his apparently malfunctioning muse off-world, is far and away the strongest and most affecting parts of the picture. I won’t give away the jag the picture takes in the second half, as it’s kinda funny and worth discovering on one’s own. But as WALL-E becomes more of a traditional Pixar pic in the second hour — idiosyncratic allies are made, for example, and the readily identifiable voices of Jeff Garlin and John Ratzenberger come into play — the movie also loses much of its early magic. I like goofy robot chases as much as the next guy — probably more, in fact (“MmmmmmmMo.“) — but I nonetheless found WALL-E‘s otherwise admirable back-end a bit of a disappointment.

The second half is still entertaining, no doubt, but it misses the simplicity, melancholy, and romance that characterized life for WALL-E up ’till then. I dunno…perhaps the kids were getting restless. Still, after centuries of wandering around by himself, gazing at the stars, the Last Robot on Earth has fallen in love. Did we really need to contrive a second act to top that?

E, Racer head-to-head.

I missed these the other day, but via Bitten Tongue, two new international trailers for the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer are now online. You might want to stay away if you have any propensity for epileptic seizures. Also out today, the final trailer for Pixar’s WALL-E: Lonely boy-robot meets egg-shaped girl-robot, gets lost amid the stars. Pretty standard, really. Update: The full domestic trailer for Speed Racer is up, now with 95% more Susan Sarandon. (And, I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but Matthew Fox as Racer-X is a stroke of genius.)

Middle of the Road.

First, a disclaimer: While I’m always up for a road trip, for whatever reason — and despite growing up next to the Darlington 500 — I never really acquired an appreciation for NASCAR, or for car culture in general. Still, I’d say the review consensus on Cars, Disney and Pixar’s recent foray into CGI entertainment for the red states, is basically on the money: While not nearly a classic on the order of the Toy Stories or The Incredibles, this visual marvel does make for an enjoyable summer jaunt, even if it feels more than a bit by-the-numbers for most of its run. The movie hits all its beats (albeit somewhat languidly) and kids, particularly those of the Hot Wheels persuasion, are sure to love it — John Lassiter & co. don’t drop the ball here by any means. Still, one can’t help but get the lingering sense from Cars that the tank on Pixar’s incredible creative ride may be in need of a fill-up.

In terms of story, Cars is basically Days of Thunder meets Doc Hollywood: On his way cross-country to the most important race of the year, Lightning McQueen, a hotshot young rookie racer on the Piston Cup circuit (Owen Wilson, whose trademark whine starts to grate after awhile), makes an inadvertent pit-stop in Radiator Springs, a sleepy little town languishing on a forgotten stretch of the Mother Road, Route 66. Impounded for reckless driving and forced into community service by the gruff town elder, a Hudson Hornet (Paul Newman), McQueen finds himself having to spend crucial race-prep days repaving the village thoroughfare. But, fret not — as it turns out, the self-absorbed, vainglorious McQueen may just learn a thing or two about life and the true spirit of racing from the locals, which include, among others, a redneck tow truck (Larry the Cable Guy), a Ferrari-loving Fiat (Tony Shalhoub), a hippie VW bus (George Carlin) and, if you’re into that sort of thing, an alluring Porsche lawyer (Bonnie Hunt). All well and good, but can McQueen still make the big race in time, defeat his mustachi-grilled nemesis (Michael Keaton), and win the glory and sponsorship he’s been so desperately seeking?

Take a guess. Still, one shouldn’t fault Cars for being somewhat pat — it is, after all, a kid’s movie, and, as the film points out, the journey should matter more than the destination anyway. That being said, despite its hyperkinetic opening and for all its many breathtaking visual flourishes (note particularly both the wide-angle western landscapes and the eye-popping neon of Radiator Springs at night), Cars definitely bogs down for most of the middle laps, amid several interminably long stretches of rote character development. (By the way, as the mind wanders while these animated cars talk to each other in been-there, done-that platitudes, it occasionally becomes hard not to see them instead as weird immersion tanks for floating eyeballs — you’ll see what I mean.) To be fair, by the standards of most animated films, Cars is still in a class above the rest. But, given that this is Pixar we’re talking about, it’s hard not to expect a little more ingenuity throughout. (Also, while it may be ludicrous to discuss issues of political economy here, Cars wants it both ways: Apparently small-town folk are more wise and virtuous than their city-car contemporaries, but Radiator Springs’ major beef is that they’re no longer a big city. Ah well…I guess The Incredibles had similar problems.)