2008: A Superficial Year In Review by Matt Payton
Most people resolve to quit smoking or quit eating the equivalent of cigarettes in their diet on New Year’s Day. I usually tell myself I’m going to stop making top ten lists about music and movies, but then like a reformed smoker I can smell it in the air and before I know it I’m three cartons deep into bullshit. So let’s all enjoy a little puff, shall we?
TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 2008
1. Titus Andronicus The Airing Of Grievances
In a year where our collective journey down the toilet as a society has been accelerated with a lead foot, this album to me just felt right. And that’s really the only criteria I can use for these silly little lists. 2008 is the year that I wanted to listen to drunken 20-year-olds screaming “Your life is over” and “Fuck everything and fuck me!” while contemplating how we’re going to make it to 2009.
2. Vivian Girls Vivian Girls
The album sounds like it was recorded in some attic outside of Pittsburgh and the songs sound like they could’ve been written in 1965. I’m always a sucker for a short, straightforward album that consists of perfectly crafted pop songs all 3 minutes long or less. Upon re-reading that idiotic last sentence I might as well have said, “I’m always a sucker for cars that last 25 years and get 70 mpg with little-to-no maintenance required throughout it’s very satisfying life.”
3. Bob Dylan The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs - Rare And Unreleased 1989-2006
Not only are there a lot of unheard gems on this, there are some great alternate and live versions of some latter-day Bobby D greats like “Ain’t Talkin’” and “Ring Them Bells.” This guy has more A material in his leftovers than a lot of artists have on their “masterpiece” album. Probably because he’s still making quality original music, he has kept up his aversion to fake nostalgia and running on the fumes of his hits unlike other pop musicians his age (I’m looking at you, The Police and well, most people from the 80s who are touring stadiums).
4. Deerhunter Microcastle
At first I didn’t think much of this one, but then it crept back up on me like a Chipotle meal. It’s just kind of awkwardly pretty. I’m not entirely sure what that means but let’s assume it’s some sort of statement of genius and the great thinkers in hundreds of years from now will find this and put me on their currency.
5. No Age Nouns
There are only two people in this band and when I listen to this album I hear an almost “Wall of Sound” aspect to the noise of guitar and drums. So this is either one of those great bands that can make a lot with a little or the sound in my head is a result of that voluntary lobotomy I signed up for in exchange for a treat from the ice cream man when I was 5. But hey, I had to sit through church somehow!
6. GZA The Genius Pro Tools
What a great flow this one has - each song compliments the next one quite nicely. A very fun listen and the beats feel fresh. Unlike last year’s all-over-the-place Wu-Tang release, this album is very focused without too much filler. All the hip hop albums getting critical praise at the end of the year like Lil’ Wayne, Q-Tip and Lupe Fiasco didn’t do much for me while the GZA seemed to slip under a lot of people’s radar and I’m not sure why.
7. Beck Modern Guilt
I usually don’t get too excited about Beck although I have always liked his music, but this one really did it for me. Maybe because of the Danger Mouse-produced psuedo-psychedelic sound, maybe because of the ten, relatively short songs or maybe it’s because all year-end music lists are legally obligated to include any new Beck album that came out that year and claim it’s his best album since Odelay then passive-aggressively shit on it when the next one comes out.
8. Lightspeed Champion Falling Off The Lavender Bridge
What made this album interesting to me was this mopy British guy singing all these midwestern twangy songs about all of his friends listening to crunk. This sound seemed to be fashionable about 6 years ago, but I never get tired of it. I don’t even know what the new “indie rock” sound is anymore, but to make it in that world it seems like all you really need to do is name your band after some sort of animal native to Colorado and/or Wyoming.
9. Tokyo Police Club Elephant Shell
Just a fun collection of catchy and peppy pop songs that I’ve continually enjoyed listening to throughout the year. The genre that this would most likely be in, pop-punk, is as hard to make enjoyable these days as a romantic comedy is and I think they pulled it off well. Since these guys are from Toronto, I may be willing to forgive that city for all the years of Rush. No, not quite yet.
10. Kanye West 808s And Heartbreak
The first time I listened to this album I hated it with the exception of one song and was ready to throw it away. Then I kept going back and thought, “Maybe I don’t hate this at all, in fact, maybe I think it’s great in a some way.” That pendulum has swung back and forth for me a number of times now and I’m still not sure how I feel about this one. Sometimes I think it could be Kanye’s Kid A and other times I think the whole album is just a self-indulgent robot voice whining about girl problems. Of course, accusing Mr. West of being self-indulgent is like saying reality TV is insulting your intelligence - isn’t that the point of it? But it’s interesting nonetheless and I can’t quite get it out of my head.
Honorable Mention:
Ra Ra Riot The Rhumb Line
MGMT Oracular Spectacular
Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue
Jay Reatard Matador Singles ‘08
R.E.M. Accelerate
TOP TEN SONGS OF 2008
1. Ben Folds with Regina Spektor “You Don’t Know Me”
Good break-up song.
2. Lightspeed Champion “Galaxy Of The Lost”
Good reluctant-one-night-stand song.
3. Eddie Vedder and Corin Tucker “The Golden State”
Good love song about a person and/or California.
4. Black Kids “I’m Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance”
Good dance song.
5. Kanye West “Robocop”
Good “trust issues” song.
6. Tokyo Police Club “Tessellate”
Good pop song.
7. Animal Collective “Water Curses”
Good weird song.
8. Vampire Weekend “M79”
Good grandiose song.
9. Deerhoof “Chandelier Searchlight”
Good happy song.
10. Riskay “Smell Yo Dick”
Good practical advice song.
TOP TEN FILMS OF 2008
1. WALL•E (Andrew Stanton)
The two robots who fall in love are the most human and emotionally rich characters I’ve seen in a modern film in the last few years. But then again, we as a nation don’t really watch movies about humans anymore. Instead we watch morally black and white superhero movies, vampires who will indulge our puritan attitudes about teen virginity and 58-year-old women who drink cosmos and sleep with 23-year-old sexual stallions who don’t seem to notice the AARP magazines on the night stand the next morning. A lot of attention went to the post-apocalyptic depiction of earth and the human race that turned into lazy, fat slobs who sit in front of TV screens all day in the future (didn’t that already happen about ten years ago anyway?) and I really enjoyed that myself, but the love story here was the key to the film. When WALL•E finally grabs Eve’s hand and holds it, I almost lost it. And the last time I cried at a movie was when Fivel got separated from his family.
2. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
This was a very hard movie to watch the first time because it’s just so sad. But it’s also very funny, sweet and strange at the same time. When people asked me what I thought of it after I saw it I had no answer for them because it took approximately 3 weeks to process and let my emotions simmer back down. Then I realized if a movie has such an effect on me that it’s what I was still thinking about after arriving in Australia and had to drive around by myself for 20 minutes after seeing it before I could face people again because I was so emotional from it, then it has to be worthy of recognition. Even though it had some flaws, at least it made me feel something strongly for better and worse, which I can’t say for most of the movies I saw this year. And with these first 3 movies especially, they all stuck with me long after I left the theater and went back to my rather inconsequential daily activities.
3. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
I know a lot of people were annoyed by this movie, specifically Sally Hawkins’ uber-perky performance in the lead role, and you could argue that she drifted into manic pixie dream girl territory at times, but it didn’t bother me in the least. Quentin Tarantino talks about a specific genre of films that he calls “hang out movies” where you hang out with the characters so much they become your friends in films like Rio Bravo and Dazed And Confused. This film fits right into that category - the plot isn’t all that substantial but it’s such a fun time in this beautiful and interesting world you get to sit in on for two hours it doesn’t bother you that not that much is happening.
4. Burn After Reading (Joel & Ethan Coen)
Just funny the whole way through and it never gets boring. Pretty much anytime John Malkovich was on the screen I was laughing, not to mention David Rasche and J.K. Simmons. The film has a great way of not taking itself very seriously but with very competent filmmaking and storytelling. Critics seemed to poo-poo it because it was very light-hearted compared to the Cohen’s ultra-serious No Country For Old Men last year, but this was carried out just as well as that one was and had just as many goofy haircuts so what was the problem?
5. Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris)
The content of this documentary is more sad than the Charlie Kaufman movie and yet makes you more angry than depressed. Errol Morris gets some great interviews in this, including Lynndie England. I guess not a lot of people want to watch a complex and detailed analysis of how we torture our POWs and then shift the blame away from people higher up who let it all happen, but maybe if we paid more attention to this we’d make more of a fuss about it. And that’s about as much self-righteousness as I can take on New Year’s Day, so I’ll just go back to eating my cinnamon rolls right now and mindlessly consume as usual while bitching about things that I could take the time to invest in if I wasn’t one of those lazy slobs in WALL•E. Damn.
6. A Girl Cut In Two (Claude Chabrol)
Of all the older-man-haves-an-affair-with-woman-young-enough-to-be-his-daughter movies that came out this year, this one was my favorite. Maybe because of the high-caliber actors involved or that is also includes a murder or because of how attractive Ludivine Sagnier is in the film. Or maybe just because it’s French and perhaps that’s why it addresses complex sexual issues and actually acknowledges something besides vanilla sex between two people in a room with candles while Enya plays in the background and there’s some sort of creepy breeze without judging it.
7. The Foot Fist Way (Jody Hill)
I thought this was going to be another generic, overly-crass, Will Ferell-inspired movie about dumbasses who hide behind fake cockiness and thankfully, it was. That’s not a criticism, this was a very funny movie with a very funny actor in the lead role by the name of Danny McBride and without him I don’t know if I would’ve liked this as much. Well, him and the little kid who plays Julio. It was nice to see a fresh comedy this year that was from a scene not attached to Judd Apatow’s, kind of like when the Yankees would lose a game 10 years ago.
8. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)
A weird little semi-autobiographical movie from Guy Maddin set in his winter wonderland hometown of Winnipeg, he pretty much narrates stories about his childhood and there are beautiful pictures to go along with it. It’s a movie that could easily put you to sleep since the narrator is fighting sleep the entire time and the town is buried under 6 tons of snow the whole time. I’m shamed to say this was my first Guy Maddin experience and much like when I tried guacamole for the first time this year, I thought to myself, “What took you so long, you idiot!?”
9. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh)
This film felt like a good Pixies album to me - small, well-executed, to the point and without any excess fat with the exception of the guy who played Ken. It’s a very funny movie with great use of excess cursing and violence juxtaposed with the backdrop of a charming old town in Belgium. Wait, I just realized my subconscious connection of this movie with the Pixies - one of my favorite songs of theirs is in the trailer to this movie. And I always thought I was smarter than the trailers. Well, I’m off to see W. because a retarded man just walked by my window, damn sublimiminal tricks.
10. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)
High school movies are always tough for me to watch because 1) they’re usually dumbed down to the point where only Hummer-owners can enjoy them and 2) they have 90210 syndrome of 35-year-olds playing 16-year-olds. This high school movie though has actual teenagers playing teenagers and talking like real teenagers do which means not a lot of dialogue and the word “like” is heard frequently. It’s really a great murder mystery that you get to find out the details of while the story is told non-sequentially. And it’s not really about skateboarding just like Raging Bull isn’t really about boxing. It’s about steak, right?
Honorable Mention:
Elegy (Isabel Coixet)
Married Life (Ira Sachs)
Role Models (David Wain)
WORST TEN FILMS OF 2008
1. W. (Oliver Stone)
Interesting observations, so you’re telling me George W. Bush likes to act on instinct more than thinking things through? Gee, it’s not like I’m painfully reminded of that everyday and will be for years to come, thank you! You couldn’t even parody this movie if you tried and Lord knows Oliver Stone did. I love me some Josh Brolin, but watch him in Milk instead of this bio-pic seemingly written by an 8th grader. If I wanted to see a one-dimensional politician depicted this cartoonish and simplistic I’d watch CNN.
2. Miracle At St. Anna (Spike Lee)
Usually I can still enjoy Spike Lee’s lesser works like She Hate Me and even on some level Bamboozled, but this was hard to sit through. There are 10 different themes trying to work at the same time and I could never figure out what any of them were outside some obvious ones I knew would be in there before seeing it. The most frustrating thing about this is that we need a good WWII movie about black soldiers because I can’t really think of any within my narrow world of cinema knowledge. I would’ve enjoyed a montage of Spike yelling at people while at Knick games on YouTube more than this film. Hey, that gives me an idea…
3. Smart People (Noam Murro)
One of the most eye-roll worthy movies I saw this year. It’s yet another in a long line of scripts purposely written to corner the quirk market but forgetting to be charming, interesting or funny. Your annoying co-worker who talked about Sex And The City all summer will call this her favorite “weird, art-house” movie of the year. Try to ignore her and show something shiny to her so she’ll get distracted and move on to something else.
4. The Spirit (Frank Miller)
I know nothing of comic books so I shouldn’t really weigh in on these types of movies, but my 2 year old niece could weigh in on this and sound more smart than anything in the film. I could stare at Scarlett Johansson for about 6 days in a row with pools of drool flooding me at my feet, but I really think she’s a horrible actress that has brought down most of the movies I’ve seen her in the last few years, especially Vicky Christina Barcelona. Of course the next thing she’s in I’ll be first in line for while fantasizing that she’ll be at the showing, sit by me, become charmed by my witty comments during the film and then introduce me to Woody Allen after making violent love to me. And scoff at people for being too into fantasy and superhero movies!
5. Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? (Morgan Spurlock)
A junior high video project disguised as a cross-cultural, in-depth religious discussion. The message of the movie seems to be that Muslims are kind of weird but they’re not all terrorist-lovin’ extremists then wants points for being nuanced or something. We’re so ignorant about other cultures that you can get a movie financed that basically just recognizes other people’s existence. Morgan Spurlock here doesn’t try to dig beyond the surface, connect any dots or look at any cause-and-effect reasons for anything. Did I already use the “I’d watch CNN” joke? Son of a bitch!
6. Zack And Miri Make A Porno (Kevin Smith)
The big conflict of this movie hinges on a misunderstanding that even the president of the Three’s Company Fan Club would scoff at. I thought the idea of making a porno because you were broke was a good idea and very appropriate given our economic climate, but it never goes anywhere beyond “porn is funny.” The only reason to sit through this is to watch Craig Robinson from The Office be really funny, as he is in everything he’s in. So if he’s not on screen either fast forward through it, or go to the movie theater bathroom and try to illicit sex from your Republican senator or local youth pastor.
7. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (David Fincher)
The problem with this one is not that the movie is over two and half hours long. It’s that it feels about 2 and half weeks long, and that’s just in the first 30 minutes. I don’t need movies like this to make total sense, I just need the strange world they create to be interesting enough to make me not think about the logistics of a white man born in 1918 in the south with a black mother not ever encountering racism or just the chronology not quite lining up right between Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. And why is it old people in movies never think to tell their fascinating life stories until they’re on their death bed even though the story has been written out perfectly for the last 20 years? You see, I don’t want to be thinking about these questions during a movie and I was. This might be one of the most boring films I’ve seen in a long time which is a shame considering David Fincher made a really long and fascinating character study last year with Zodiac. But I guess Let It Be and Abbey Road were made in the same year too.
8. War, Inc. (Joshua Seftel)
Again, a great idea and subject to tackle - war profiteering, but the execution goes nowhere. I really liked Grosse Point Blank the first time I saw it, but I don’t need it remade and shoehorned into a story about Popeye’s in Baghdad. That was a funny place to have secret government meetings in though. Perhaps God is punishing Jon Cusack for those horrible chick flicks he keeps doing, but I don’t understand why he has to punish the rest of us in the process. Maybe because we still let Mel Gibson make movies?
9. Hamlet 2 (Andy Fleming)
This had some good ingredients like Steve Coogan and just the proposal of making a Hamlet 2, but that’s about it. The movie feels like a bad Comedy Central pilot that has a decent premise, but no one actually showed up to work on it until the day before it was supposed to be done. Hey, I just described this list. Anyway, the “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus” song is kind of funny, so just watch that on the internet and forget about the rest.
10. Tie: 27 Dresses/The Rocker/Fireproof (Anne Fletcher/Peter Cattaneo/Alex Kendrick)
I grouped these movies together here because I saw one in a wisdom tooth pulling aftermath while coming in and out of conciousness, I saw half of one on a plane and it was so disgustingly bad I didn’t need to see the rest and the last one I watched about 5 minutes of when I was killing time at the movie theater waiting for something to start and it was maybe the funniest movie scene I saw all year, although unintentionally. So 27 Dresses - the usual stupid and condescending to women movie that people like and will always be around, nothing particularly worse about it than any other movie like that. The Rocker - a great movie that’s funny and sweet if you’re 12 years old and think that Green Day is punk music. But Fireproof makes the list because of the scene I walked into which was Kirk Cameron’s character on his computer reading and he starts to get tempted to click on a pornography pop up ad and has to pace around the room to psyche himself out of not looking at porn. He then finds his Christian marriage book on the table open to the chapter about conquering addictions and the next scene is him taking a baseball bat to his circa 2000-era Gateway tower. And since that computer is the only source of porn in the world and I’m guessing he doesn’t own a television all of his problems are solved! Is it wrong I want to rent the movie to see the rest of it? Of course, it will just give Cameron more money to put out more end-of-days video games.
Dishonorable Mention:
Choke (Clark Gregg)
Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen)
Baby Mama (Michael McCullers)
DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE
- movies that were on everyone’s lists and received lots of praise that I didn’t think was deserved, even though I enjoyed most of these movies on some level:
Vicky Christina Barcelona (Woody Allen)
The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)
Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)
Frost/Nixon (Ron Howard)
Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle & Loveleen Tandan)
Iron Man (Jon Favreau)
Milk (Gus Van Sant) I enjoyed this one, not as much as the documentary.
Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller)
