I'm a bit early, and obviously, towards the end of the year, I'll have opportunity to amend. But I wanted to get this in while the gettin' was still good:

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - every generation has "that film," and Sunshine is one of those, a movie which blows open the bounds of what movies can do and what they can mean to the people who see them. An elaborately constructed, fiendishly mischievous, and frequently unnervingly heart-accurate tale of the utter existential chasm of love. No, it never works out. So?

2. There Will Be Blood - whatever else every other movie has been, There Will Be Blood is not. It is something I almost never see: distinct. It is a work of art entirely of itself, of its own meanings and ideals, and powerfully and profoundly so for the people of this decade (and that one). Paul Thomas Anderson didn't exactly suck before this movie; yet he is speaking with an entirely new and ferocious voice here.

3. The Lord of the Rings - cast aside any griping about overexcited fanboys and a legacy of sweaty cosplay; these would be among the most influential films ever made even if they weren't also kickass pieces of cinema. The fruition of digital technology in moviemaking, the apprehension of fantasy as a foundational genre of modern storytelling, the elevation of the pulp to the dramatically mythic, the culture within a culture created by the DVDs' worm's eye view of every second of their creation, even the you-pick-the-flavour alternate versions... All wrote the book on how filmed entertainment would work in the 21st century. Oh, and the movies are kickass.

4. Brokeback Mountain - somewhat dismissed (or at least underestimated) upon its titter-inducing release, the gay cowboy movie still sets the standard for finely observed American drama for a decade that turned out to be surprisingly chock-full of such offerings (especially in the last few years). Is it the 70s again? Now given unexpected colour by Heath Ledger's death, the final five minutes of this film are among the most mournful ever lensed.

5. Lake of Fire - the most important film ever made on any topic of the complexity of abortion, Lake of Fire suffers the ignominy of having been almost completely ignored. You might be able to find it at a video store near you, but otherwise the discussion has been virtually nil. Under the circumstances, I hope I am not being too much of a paranoiac by suggesting willing (or unwitting) conspiracy: America simply isn't ready to have its hateful, patriarchal heart carved out like this. Should be required viewing for every human.

Special jury prize: The Prestige, the best fucking movie that is not on this list.

The 50 best films of the decade are still TBD, but that'll get ya started.

Posted by tederick at 6:04 PM in movies & reviews
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While we're on the subject, here's a list that's ten years belated.

1. Fight Club
2. Schindler's List
3. Pulp Fiction
4. The Matrix
5. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

Special jury prize: Heat

Posted by tederick at 7:07 PM in movies & reviews
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We are told Zack Snyder is a "visionary director," but what has he envisioned? I have no doubt that Snyder understands Watchmen-the-book, better than many people, perhaps. What he seems to lack, however, is any idea of why Watchmen would be great as a film.

Click here to read the rest of the review.

Posted by tederick at 6:05 PM in reviews
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Neo-Devastator via the Transformers 2. Well, I mean... frick lord. They're makin' a toy of that? Meaning you could Neo-Dev vs. Gen 1 in your own back yard? I used to know a person who played with Transformers in the bathtub. Imagine that mash-up. ...I mean, wow.

Sorry. Zoned out for a minute there. Anyways, I went to see Revolutionary Road yesterday, at long last (and here's my review). So very, very interesting. So really, very, unsuccesful. But interesting. Sam Mendes! Frick! What happened, man?

Posted by tederick at 2:45 PM in pirates & reviews & toys!
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It's hardly fashionable to admit this, but some little part of me went bare-ass nuts when I read the Kate and Leo quotes from the stupid godawful Golden Globes last night. This is because I am, as you already know, a 12-year-old girl. Clearly I need to get out to see Revolutionary Road, for reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that for its being a Sam Mendes flick, I would have seen it anyway.

(All right, admittedly, the prospect of a new movie completely annihilating the 90s' premier romantic couple does have its own level of malicious glee.)

And when I see it, I will have to review it. I was reading my TIFF 2006 film reviews the other day and I realized that, after a 2-year absence, it's time for me to start reviewing the films I see again. Who knows how long this will last, but in the meantime I've written up Speed Racer and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (though the latter is more of a neurotic rant) and will proceed forward from here.

And speaking of write-ups, Chris is interviewed at rather extraordinary length in Toro Magazine, about my favourite of his flicks, Tera/Tori. It's nice to know Chris can articulate the subtleties of his work with such dexterity in one breath, and then preach the gospel of Leroy Jenkins to me, Daniel, Brenda and Demetre in the next. It's like using the whole brain. Now that he has outlived 2008, is Chris this decade's Renaissance Man?

Posted by tederick at 9:00 AM in movies & reviews
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Just about to roll the year-end Mamo, so I guess there's no harm in finally publishing this:

What a weird, bad, troubling year it was for movies. Nominally, I assign a top ten list to the films I've seen in a given year - but some years just don't get there. In my head I call these "A.I. years" - because 2001 was the best recent example, a year where the overall offerings were so poor (or at least, the ones that I saw were so poor) that I ended up, not with a top ten or even a top five, but in that case with a top four - a "hopeful" top five list where I left an empty seat at the table for a guest to arrive later. (I ended up filling that fifth slot with A.I., not because the movie is good, but because Chris and I spent the better part of the next 2 years having occasional, enthusiastic discussions about just what in the hell we were supposed to make of that movie. It affected the moviegoing landscape profoundly for the year, which was more than I could say for most of the rest of the flicks out of 2001.)

This year came out about the same. For a year where I saw a handful of films that I pretty much loved as much as any others I've ever seen, 2008 was a film year without a middle class - a few greats, a number of goods, and an almost overwhelming slew of "mehs." You can tell you're in a year like this by examining the reviews of your three favourite critics: I guarantee they will not agree. Two of the critics I greatly admire put Benjamin Button on their Top Ten list; the third thinks the film is profoundly misguided and unsettling. Perhaps this is par for the course, but it felt like the waters were more troubled than usual in 2008; subjectivity ruled. Picking and choosing from among the informed masses was pointless. I returned to the basic set of tools: find out what a film's about (but not too much), who made it and who's in it, and go with your gut. The result, though, was a pretty wobbly year.

As a result, 2008 has a top five instead of a top ten, and even that just barely. I was tempted to leave an "empty seat" again, given that there are a number of films I haven't seen yet which might otherwise have proved list-worthy. Among those are Valkyrie, Man on Wire, Doubt, Rachel Getting Married, Milk and of course Revolutionary Road. In the meantime, though, the films of the year are...

1. The Dark Knight
2. Let the Right One In
3. Wall-E
4. Ché
5. It Might Get Loud

Sure, it's become unseasonably fashionable to skewer The Dark Knight since its release; American culture (and ours by inevitable association) is nothing if not bipolar in its twin barrels of a) insistence upon enormous achievement, and b) resentment of same. Now, six months later, even some of the same people who were singing in the rafters about the newfound strength of the comic book movie in July, are down in the church basement fucking alter-boys a billion dollars later. Everybody hates a winner. But a winner it was, glossy and canny, and between The Dark Knight and Let the Right One In, 2008 continued one of this decade's key filmic movements - the LOTR-inaugurated march towards fully exploiting and expurgating the mythic strengths of archetypal stories. Fantasy is a genre in glorious bloom, unlike almost any other genre in movies right now. For a comic book movie and a Swedish vampire movie, these two films were, also, among the most cunning excisions of American political, moral, and sexual mores that have graced our screens this year. Not bad for "pop."

WALL-E, of course, is pop beyond pop; it is not a film of subtlety in its razing of American consumerism, but doesn't need to be, because it is furthermore such a lovingly enraptured tale of two individuals just plain needing each other - a strength in Let the Right One In, as well - that it's difficult not to be utterly beguiled. Love seemed to return to the movie screens this year after a long absence - real love, love where each partner completes the other and thereby opens the boundaries of the possible, not the grim (and dramatically facile) tragedy of love-of-the-doomed. 2008 held a number of refreshing returns to stories that say that great love does not need to end in poisoning, sinking ships, or Alzheimer's.

Ché gains the list almost by virtue of sheer mass; in essaying a guerrilla movie about guerrilla war (using guerrilla cameras, no less), Soderbergh generates enough electricity in 5 hours of running time to more than overwhelm any 2-hour entry on the list. The distinct halves of Ché, though, are also sharp, entertaining, and thoughtful, refreshing the memory of the landscape of possibilities of a filmmaker, a camera, and a sense of artistic fun. This was true of It Might Get Loud as well, to a surprisingly strong degree; for such a humdrum premise (2 hours on the cultural importance of the electric guitar?) it's stunning how much this film makes you want to run outdoors with a camera(/the artistic tool of your choice) in your hand and just make something beautiful.

Honourable Mentions

In spite of the overall weakness of the formal list, this was the year of Honourable Mentions. The Honourable Mention slot, for me, goes to the film that was quite usefully distinct in the overall viewing, but "missed it by this much" because there's something about it that just doesn't seem inherently list-worthy. Normally, I pick one. This year, I picked four:

• Citron and Flame, the movie Valkyrie wishes it could be
• Ce'st pas moi, je le jure, another meaty and grim essay of troubled boyhood that would make a fine real-world companion piece to Let the Right One In
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, one of those rare films which was actually originally included in my top five but slowly dropped as the days since I saw the film passed. Its strengths do not linger, and its weaknesses gain scale after the fact.
• And for whatever reason, I am quite after-the-fact obsessed with Sauna, a movie which everyone (and me) didn't think very much of at the Toronto Film Festival, but which has sort of kicked around the back of my head since then. It would probably earn the "A.I. slot," if one were available. Flawed, disturbing, fearless.

I would also heartily suggest that while Cloverfield might not belong on this list, it belongs on some list, somewhere, because from a purely technical perspective, it is one of the great achievements of the year. Would have loved it if they'd come up with some miraculous solution to the clichés, but it's still film school in a can for anyone who wants to deconstruct the Bourne run-and-gun filmic style. Additionally, obviously, it is a master class in film marketing, and unlikely to be challenged in that regard for years. (Incidentally: if you watch the film with the presumption that at the instant of the attack, Hud goes completely insane and can no longer rationally assess "reality," the movie works significantly better.)

Worst film of the year

There was no clear winner this year for worst film, either, probably because I just didn't end up going to anything that really made me want to skullfuck my eyes out at the Van Helsing level of awfulness. Even Martyrs - certainly the worst filmgoing experience I had this year - is too disreputably vile to be counted against real movies; it is not so much "bad" as "horrid," and as useful to me as rotten salad.

Instead, I am going to name Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in this slot, which is unfair and whiny; it is not a terrible film nor even a terrible disappointment, but certainly ended up being the most negative relationship I had with a movie this year. For such an underwhelming and ultimately unimportant film, Indy 4 sure irritates the fuck out of me, and my empathy for the Phantom Menace haters grew tenfold this year. It's foolish to think that your "childhood" is some sovereign territory that lives for your agency only, but it's also horrible when you willingly allow some piece of it to be despoiled by fallen men. We should all be stronger.

Best technology of the year

Nonsensical made-uppy category, but shinybludisks made a major impact in my film enjoyment this year. It took a while, but I am apparently turning into the sort of loser who would rather be home with his home theatre than out at the Scotiamount with the assholes. (Well, the Scotiamount sucks regardless.)

Other and miscellany

Best original score: The Dark Knight

Best performance: Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler

Best sequence of a boat hitting another boat: At the Edge of the World

Better on Blu than at the movies: Encounters at the End of the World

Best Blu-Ray overall: The Dark Knight (picture), WALL-E (features & extras), Lost: The Complete Fourth Season (watchability), Juno (huggability)

Most overrated film of any length: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

You'll never see it, but you really should: Medicine for Melancholy

Biggest disappointment: Hellboy 2

Best karate kick... to my heart!: Jean-Claude Van Damme's soliloquy in JCVD

Best... something: Synechdoche, New York

Unexpected words to live by: "If I run, you run." (Mila Kunis to Jason Segel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall)

Posted by tederick at 12:16 PM in batman! & dr. jones & movies & reviews & shinybludisks
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If Casino Royale made it safe to be a man again - to enjoy all the things that Playboy circa 1962 told us to enjoy, nice suits and Beluga caviar and cars sexier than the women who share the chilled drinks - then Quantum of Solace displaces that pleasure for the other oldest masculine pursuit, hella killing and beating shit up. But where Royale ended with the feeling that Bond had definably gone somewhere, this outing dangles in the abyss of potentially going nowhere. The emotional dystopia of Quantum of Solace might make sense given the ongoing narrative, but it's nothing like fun.

Click here to read my review.

Posted by tederick at 5:59 PM in reviews
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When we meet Oskar, he is so coiled up in the aimless void between articulation and action that is the life of a child learning what it is to be an adult, that he is literally standing outside in the cold stabbing trees, hoping for the day when those trees might be replaced by humans. This boy needs a hobby, and badly. Why take up lacrosse, though, when you can get your vampire girlfriend to revel in showers of your enemies' blood?

Click here to read my review...

Posted by tederick at 1:28 PM in reviews
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Between me and my brother, this morning:

Me: Check it out, aliens are actually real.
Adam: Damn... here's hoping he's sane. I wiki'd him and he's 78 so he may just be senile from all the age and space travel.
Me: Or maybe he has a CRYSTAL SKULL??
Adam: More likely, yes.

It wasn't until a few days ago that I actually registered the full measure of my disappointment about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was tooling around indianajones.com, there were some video clips from the movie on there, and I just sorta gawped at it. Good lord in fuck, why on earth would anyone ever do a thing like this. It's amazing that three Star Wars prequels couldn't make me hate George Lucas, but this one did it with one computer-animated gopher poking out of a dune hill, and took down my teenboy love of Spielberg with it. They're freezing Lucas in carbonite over in Japan in officially sanctioned product now; can we get desk-sized ones on this side of the Pacific?

On a much lower scale of disappointment is the X Files sequel. For years I have been crying "The world needs Fox Mulder!" so I guess I'm getting what I paid for this weekend; in the post-Batman orgasmic high it barely mattered to me at all that this movie was even coming out, and the results bear out:

I genuinely do: I want to believe. I want to believe in aliens and psychics and fluke men. More than that, though, I desperately want to believe that if the Man is being a scary, lying sonofabitch, there's a couple of methodical, deadpan FBI agents out there with flashlights and cell phones and a drab mid-size sedan, patrolling the highways and biways of middle America / Vancouver with a dogged (Doggett?) interest in figuring out just what the hell is going on. Maybe not solving, maybe not saving, but at least seeing. I believe in The X Files.

Rest of the review is here.

Now utterly unsure of what the hell I'm supposed to go do with myself, I'm going wander around the city and try to find new gods.

Posted by tederick at 12:12 PM in ADAM & dr. jones & galaxy far & miscellaneous crap & reviews
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The Dark Knight - which arrives at a level of craft and dedication that will be a high-water mark for 2008 - is not just the film that Batman Begins inspired in all of our minds with its critical final words ("escalation," "taste of the theatrical," "calling card"). It is significantly more: the most dextrous, complicated, and absorbing "comic book movie" ever made.

Click here to read my review, with a heavy spoiler warning.

This review was murderously hard to write. Actually, I guess it isn't even a "review" at all, more of a film analysis than anything about pros/cons of a new Batman flick. Oddly enough I glimpsed at my review for Begins just now, and was struck by how oddly and unintentionally parallel the two reviews are in construction. Which I suppose bodes well for my theory on Nolan and the films, if they could spontaneously generate such similar responses without any purposeful re-examination of my previous writing. That guy is doing some fucking incredibly solid work, man, and with each successive entry I become more and more fascinated.

Posted by tederick at 3:49 PM in batman! & movies & reviews
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Last night the 3QF cinematheque hosted perhaps its final double feature of the season, Krull vs. The Machine Girl. In an odd bit of unintended synergy, both films featured the same five-bladed starfish weapon. The latter, though, also featured a schoolgirl with a machine gun arm. It's tremendous what they're doing with movies these days.

Food on hand for screening: Crullers and sushi.

Coincidentally, around the same time we were doing all that, Warner yanked Where the Wild Things Are from its release schedule altogether, after having previously shoved the release to late '09. The bulljive is in full swing in the press release, and lord knows I'm no great Spike Jonze fan anyway, but I wonder if we're now ever going to see what he conceived as the proper approach to this unmakeable film - an approach which, regardless of how it turns out, is inherently way more interesting to me than anything that "delivers for a broad-based audience." It's a feature-length adaptation of a 15-page children's story, and if the rumour mill it to be believed, it's gonna have giant walking puppets. Honestly, I don't care if it sucks; I just want to see it. There just aren't enough amazing things in the world any more.

Admonitions like that, however, lead to Hellboy II. And it is, unfortunately, time to report that I don't want any more things to lead to stuff like Hellboy II. I am declaring a moratorium on underwhelm: let's get back to kicking some ass, shall we? Review snippet follows thus:

For all his prodigous gifts with the look n' feel, Del Toro has always suffered from recurring skill gaps in his writing: an over-reliance on form; a lack of substance in his English-language dialogue; a tendency to see hererosocial relations from only the male point of view; and what's with all the clocks? Pan's seemed to herald the completion of a successful leap upward from the young director of able adventure stories like Blade II and even the first Hellboy. With Hellboy II, sadly, all of Del Toro's weaknesses as a writer have come roaring back, and have brought some friends. The thing looks fantastic, but goddamn, this is some piss-poor storytelling.

And full review is here. I can't help but notice that I'm writing a lot more bad reviews these days than good ones. I do hope this isn't because I've become an asshole, which I admit is becoming more and more possible with every film I see. I suppose it's unlikely that every single goddamn thing sucks. HB2 has many admirable qualities and means well, if "meaning well" means to plumb whatever street cred Del Toro has amassed in order to make a nice chunk of summer-movie coin. (I don't even begrudge that. Who wouldn't want to make coin? Coin buys condominiums.) I just want a flick to have appreciable achievement in all areas of filmcraft, not just one or two, y'know? Or at least, transport me so spectacularly into its own idea that I come out unable to help admitting that yeah, that thing was a movie, a thing of the world worth making and bestowing upon others. (Like Wall-E, and in a completely opposite series of ways, like The Machine Girl.) I'd like to stop rounding up.

Posted by tederick at 11:42 AM in 3QF & movie night & movies & reviews
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I haven't received a headache from a movie like that since Magnolia drilled a migraine into my brain.

I know what I'm in for when I step into an Indiana Jones movie, and it ain't common sense, or even layman archaeology. To paraphrase Dr. Jones, the danger is folklore: brilliant for its MacGuffiny, quest-inducing power, but a little thin on credibility. Still, believable or not, the Ark had rules. (Indy even spelled them out, in a brisk 2-minute scene, relying occasionally on a blackboard to help him do so.) The creators of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull have apparently observed no rules whatsoever.

Click here to read my review. Spoilers abound, but then, the word "spoilers" implies some effort on the part of the filmmakers at keeping the plot twists in some way veiled.

Posted by tederick at 11:58 AM in dr. jones & reviews
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Once again we're in a year where everyone knows what #1 is going to be and nobody's gonna be happy about it, so let's start from there and work our way down. In spite of what the critical community might be waxing, '07 wasn't the best year for movies ever ('03 and '99 still kick its ass by a landslide), nor was it the worst ('04 was pretty thin, so was '01). Comfortably of the middle ground, '07 featured a lot of variety, some real standouts, a wealth of solid base hits, and the best worst movie I've seen in a very long time.

In most cases there aren't reviews to speak of, cuz that thing where I was gonna stop reviewing movies kinda almost sorta worked out. But I've linked out to whatever I've got on the blog (or blogTO) that can provide a little context.

#1: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

The word "masterpiece" gets tossed around so much these days. I'm not even going to attempt to use it here, because at no time have I tried to deny that this thing's got flaws so fucking huge that my fondness for it is genuinely embarrassing. But then, so is my fondness for most things that I am fond of, so fuck it and fuck you (with hugs and kisses!). Really, the reason I just can't stop going on about this thing is onefold: I have seen exactly four movies in my life that have made me feel this unabashedly, ludicrously happy. And while this one may not replace one of the others at the top of the list of my favourite films for too much longer, it's been sort of enjoyable to seat it there for the time being.

I blame the wedding among fish people.

Hey, while we're here, let's hand out another award: best score of the year. Remember when I used to be a Hans Zimmer hater? Well that's over and done with. Zimmer flips the theme structure of the first two movies right on its back here, and writes a musical counter-argument to the original material that does precisely what I love most about the film itself: says "this is film three, and we are in a new place." I have burned a hole in this CD (metaphorically) this year. "Up is Down" might actually be my favourite score track of the past ten years.

#2: XXY

Hey, why not stab out with an arthouse Argentinian flick about gender identity that nobody will ever see as my second film, to redeem the sector of the audience that took off two sentences into the #1 entry above. Right, welcome to the polar opposites of my filmic inclinations. If the world was made up of nothing but overgigantic movies featuring ship-to-ship gun battles in the midst of swirling maelstroms, and tiny little character pieces about 15-year-old he-she's dealing with whether or not they want to be un-hermaphrodited (surgically), I'd be happy as a pig in fucking slop. And though it's probably declassé to say, the teen girlguy-on-guy defloration scene in XXY is definitely one of the hottest sex scenes I've ever seen. But that goes to my predilections in rather a straight line, so let's leave it off right there.

#3: Juno

The sentimental fave that got a bit too oversentimentalized in the time between seeing at TIFF and its actual release into the world, Juno is still a big walking smiley face much more kindly than Gregg Araki's actually-titled Smiley Face, and it's about teen pregnancy without being tragic about it, and it's got pretty much every actor in the world who was ever a genius in it, plus the one who's now potentially going to define the next ten years of "female star." Soooooo... good movie. Actually, let's just leave it with the title of Roger Ebert's review: "No wrong scenes, no extra scenes, and characters you want to hug." There ya go. So far "I want to make sweet sloppy love to this movie" is leading "this movie is really good" 2 to 1.

#4: There Will Be Blood

Trying to place this in the list is like trying to find a seat for a sociopath at Christmas dinner. Who cares where he sits, as long as he isn't near the knives? Actually I'm sort of nervous leaving Blood sitting next to Juno. That's an odd pairing. Technically, Blood is probably better than Juno, but it's also hard to sort out how I feel about it, given that I only saw it last night and when I was done watching it, I mostly just felt like Paul Thomas Anderson had pulled apart the lobes of my brain like he was splitting open a grapefruit, and then proceeded to take a shit in the crevasse he'd made. A good shit, mind you, and satisfying, but was anyone having fun? Hey. What?

#5: Zodiac

Zodiac's a tough little son of a bitch, too. It's perfectly made, of course; if there's a sure-thing filmmaker working in Hollywood today who's more reliable than Fincher for sheer command of craft, I don't know who it is. Unlike most of the rest of his flicks, though, Zodiac ain't enjoyable, and is dedicatedly trying to frustrate your every narrative need throughout, so the film can leave you in a decidedly muddled state when its final frames unfold in a Canadian airport. Still, for geek fetishism of both the actual 1970s and the look of 1970s American filmmaking, it's second to none, and it almost makes Mark Ruffalo not an asshole. So that's something.

#6: 3:10 to Yuma

Masterful existentialist Western. Actually, this raises a good point: 2007 was full of these things - simple genre pieces, easy base hits, that in many cases the director elevated nicely to a honed point by applying some common sense and taking the material seriously. Economical expression, classical dramatic composition, and a kickass cast make 3:10 one of the most engagingly flawless cinematic experiences of the year. I suppose the only really sad thing about any of these is that they've become so fucking rare in the last ten years that now, they're standing out as genuine masterpieces when really, they should just be one among the crowd. This flick had a lot going on under the hood, too, but let's not get too pretentious about Batman vs. Maximus, cuz that's really the whole point.

#7: Une Vieille Maîtresse

What can I say, I'm a sucker for a movie that can make sex work, and make it awesome. The ultimate flick (and whoa, so accurate) about what it's like to fall jealously, obsessively, and above all inextricably, in love with absolutely the wrong girl, Maîtresse owns balls like nothing else I saw this year, made Asia Argento appear to actually know how to act, and put a flush on me right down to my 12-year-old soul. Jeez, I'm blushing just thinking about it right now. Does anyone want to lick fresh blood off my throat?

#8: Death Proof

Sure, it's a genre exercise, but fuck howdy, it's a hell of a genre exercise. The least of Quentin Tarantino's work is still a gleefully exuberant smack out of the park compared with the best of his contemporaries (sadly including, for the purposes of this double-feature, Robert Rodriguez), and Death Proof is just so fucking fun it makes you want to get really drunk on Jack and drive around in the desert with a girl on the hood of your car. Wait, that can't be the intention, can it? Well, whatever. I want that car.

#9: Across the Universe

Well, now the "movies to hug" have tied "movies that are actually good" 4 to 4 (Maîtresse counts toward the former, by the way, for its naughty-feelings-causing-ness). So before the ratio slips too far down towards some kind of critical respectability, let's toss Across the Universe in there with a whole lot of tongue. In many ways too long and too ingratiating, this flick's every note is obvious, literally and figuratively. But it's got that demure glow about it that makes the coyness of its sixties mythologization fade away under the simple premise: this music is part of every single one of us, and apparently, we needed reminding of what that means. Yeah, it's a love-it-or-hate-it, and unsurprisingly, big cheeseball me loved it. And besides, I've just seen a face.

#10: Forever

This is kind of an odd choice for me - a documentary about a cemetery which, at various parts I admit I had difficulty determining whether it was staged or real. And it doesn't so much end as fade out. But it's still often sublime, occasionally profound, and otherwise always otherworldly and beautiful. Also the first movie that ever actually made me want to go to Paris. Take that, Bertolucci!

Honourable Mention: Naissance des pieuvres

I think I've spent every day since I saw this flick at TIFF apologizing for not liking it more at the time. It got by my radar that day, and then proceeded to ferment in my subconscious for the following five or six weeks until it popped out as one of the most important films I saw all year. Naissance is clean, simple queer cinema, but that's actually the source of its charm: seeming artlessness meets precocious emotional nakedness and leaves the soul haunted. We'll look for more work from Céline Sciamma in the future.

The Worst Movie Of The Year: Spider-Man 3

It has been a long, long time since I've enjoyed a worst-of-the-year this much, and this is also easily the most I've ever enjoyed one of Sam Raimi's Spider-flicks. I know that makes me an odd hairy freak, but there it is. This movie is just so coherent. Not in terms of plot or dialogue or performance or anything like that, but just in the bricklayer-like reliability with which, with an almost Kubrickian dedication to construction, each successive scene is in fact worse than the one that came before it, building mistake on top of mistake with such outrageous blindness to any kind of aesthetic decency that by the third act, the film has become a towering pyramid of awfulness that reaches a zenith on top of a skyscraper with a dead Harry Osborn, an almost illiterate Dumbfuck MJ, and, of course, a Spider-Man who just can't stop crying like a little girl with a skinned knee. Honestly: this was one of the best movie-watching experiences I had all year, and I recommend it (and the rum) to anyone. Bravo.

Yesteryear Award: The Prestige

It's only a year old, but the fact that I somehow left Prestige off last year's top ten list is pretty much inexcusable. This is one of those movies that, at the end of the decade (which is now precariously close), I will look back on as one of the great achievements in the medium over these mercurial ten years. My fondness for the flick has only grown in the three viewings (!) that followed the time I saw it in theatres. I just keep going back, and my esteem only grows. What a joyful little clockwork, this.

And that's yer year. And officially....

...2008's gonna make me smile.

Posted by tederick at 5:34 PM in batman! & blogTO & movies & reviews
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Honestly: I never sleep. What's sleep? Bloody pointless, is what. Even when the things that usually keep me from sleeping aren't around, there's always still one more thing between me and pillow. The wheel never stops turning, does it Badger?

How ya doin', Internet? I'll tell you one thing, the Christmas season is not lacking for things to do. Movies with Matty Price. Lunch with Langs. Defenestration with D-Coc. (If only.) Saturday night the North Toronto posse had its sort-of annual reunion; we went to the cash-grab formerly known as Marché and pretended it was a semi-formal. (Mark and I even wore suits, mostly because I wanted to wear my new suit again.) We visited the spitting man, looked for the pornography (but did not find it), and foodwise, the girl and I had waffles and sushi. Together. Take that, planet. Your rules? I spit on them.

Then me and Sarafina went to see Sweeney Todd, and it was pretty much excruciating from frame one. Well, at the least, from frame one it was clear that this thing had so completely missed the boat that the fact that frame one includes a boat was pretty fucking funny after the fact. Yesterday afternoon I opened a vein on the bastard, and wrote what is not so much a review as an utter renunciation:

"One of the things I like least about my job is the ocasional seeming need to psycho-deconstruct filmmakers who, in the paraphrased words of Sick Boy, "had it, then lost it, then it was gone forever." Doing this head job is (of course) pointless, because really, how the fuck do I know what went wrong with Tim Burton? I don't know anything about him. He might look at his recent work with the same mortified contempt that I hold for it, and spend his lunch hours crying uncontrollably in an increasingly small series of bathrooms."

Rest of the deal is here, and I am done with Tim Burton. I will never see another of his films. How sad is that? The dude was one of the three filmmakers who, when I was a teenager, made me want to spend the rest of my life in the movies. And now he's just an asshole. Fuck you Tim Burton. I'm off the ride.

I drove Sarah to Brantford yesterday in my dad's new Land Rover, which, after three years of the Smrt car, felt appreciably like stretching my legs, though I could have done with more highway drive time. Got home and nipped over to the Brown Family Christmas, which kicks off the 96-hour eat-a-thon that is the next few days of my life. Actually I did all right, eating-wise. I think my stomach has shrunk. I also kicked Trevor's ass in the annual roundtable game (it was "Things" this time), although he then gave me some payback on the lightning-round follow-up.

It was warm and rainy when I woke up yesterday, and cold and lonely when I got home. Two more things kept me up late, one very good, one not so good, and I don't remember sleep, though I have faith that it was there.

"She represents the Lollipop Guild." - Mark
"The Lollipop Guild?" - Trevor
"The Lollipop Guild." - Mark

Posted by tederick at 9:33 AM in foodin' & jedi antics & miscellaneous crap & reviews
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Well, here goes...

The only time the daemons truly impress, ironically, is when they die - each of them vanishes in a dangerously aestheticized explosion of fiery Dust particles, which positively reeks of a studio saying "we could do something really cool here!" rather than thinking that, perhaps, a human life being snuffed out ought to be played as horrific rather than wondrous. But I'm sure some spreadsheet somewhere proved that golden baths of dusty colour sell more happy meals than souls being pinched out of existence by the brutal finality of death.

...and the rest.

I'm not particularly happy with this review but I had to get it done or my brain would have slowly dissolved in this mediocre little bastard of a movie. In a lot of ways I wish it had been significantly worse if it could not have been significantly better; its utter blandness makes even writing about it a challenge, and even less fun than watching it, which is saying something.

Well, now we've had our Bakshi version.

Posted by tederick at 4:27 PM in reviews
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Well there's no other way to say it, Beowulf fascinated me blind. I don't think it was a good movie, really, but ho... interesting. I actually wrote a review of it, because once I started putting the ideas together in my head, I couldn't stop. Like Die Hard 4 this summer, it's probably just another good example of a mediocre movie that unknowingly bears huge, huge, subtextual freight. But riding on that train of thought is just... well... wheeeeeeeee!!

But neither naked warrior (whose dick outdoes Bart Simpson’s for coyness) nor Rubenesque woman is anything more than the digital manifestation of what a programmer thinks those things should look like – a sin of animation for generations, so nothing new here, but one whose potential photorealism is about to give it a hell of a demented 21st Century subtext.

Rest of the review is here.

I like trains. The other day I actually said (well, wrote) "Narnia's cool and all, but I prefer trains." It was a hell of a thematic point in context, but taken out of context I think it's just a dandy sentence in its own right.

I have found a new home!! Unfortunately there are people living there who would need to be removed, so assassination may be involved. But otherwise I am deeply, deeply in love. I mean, 3QF is awesome too. And Teen Girl Squad? So fun. But 2008 is the future for at least five more weeks, and I am all about the future.

Posted by tederick at 11:56 AM in 3QF & movies & reviews
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Other people prefer second chapters, for their inherent ambiguity and narrative darkening; I like watching a master storyteller pull all the attendant threads towards the middle like every single one of them has been heading there all along - and then blow everything up real good. Ultimatum doesn't disappoint in this regard; if it's not as gloriously sharp as Supremacy, it's about twice as skullfuckingly dense and nearly three times meaner.

Complete review be here.

Man, I love completing a trilogy. I think this is the last scheduled review that I have for quite some time - still haven't figured out what I'm going to be doing during TIFF this year (blogging at least, but I doubt I'll settle down to write actual one-pagers on anything because fuck, who has the time?) and I don't have anything else I'm keening to write about in the immediate future. But this was a fun one.

Posted by tederick at 10:08 PM in reviews
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The only nominal element curiously missing is a musical number; and the only true concession to the Friday night morality of the multiplex is a gag shot of Bart's dick. Otherwise, it's Simpsons through and through. Big glorious frame (and computer-enhanced animation and colouring) notwithstanding, it's amazing how cleanly the 88-minute movie effort fits within the emotional rhythms of the 400-strong flotilla of 22-minute episodes.

Click here to read my review.

Posted by tederick at 3:46 PM in reviews & simps
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For a series called Harry Potter, I don't think I can recall one of these movies that was so brilliantly, delightfully about its titular character. Pecs bulging and eyes steady, Daniel Radcliffe glares out from the screen with a dominance that wilfully pushes the rest of the junk clean out of the frame. Actor and character have fused at last. Radcliffe's matured chops meet Harry's Book Five angst, and the resulting potion is the film franchise's equivalent of veritaserum.

Click here to read my review.

7 days out, 700 pages to go. And FYI: it absolutely sucks to see a Harry Potter movie without Becky Jo Wood.

Posted by tederick at 4:29 PM in h-pot & reviews
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Seriously. POISON. Confusing yet miserably attractive poison. This is why you should never let infants play around under the sink: bright blue viscous fluid looks so goddamned inviting. It's the wrong impulse.

You too can write to Rorschach!:

rorschachsjournal.com

Nice to see them taking a page from the Joker's book. Hey who would win in a fight? Rorschach or the Joker? How about Rorschach and the Joker team up on Batman and John McClane? What if they had ten stormtroopers each? What if the first one to kill an opponent's stormtrooper got Jango Fett? What if General Zod were blowing on them, while ewoks threw rocks? What then?

Die Hard review was really challenging, but rewarding in the end. Taste this:

"There is no greater monument to the internal image of America's awesomeness than the '80s action hero, and the width of the gulf between that man's world (corporate skyscrapers, coke-sniffing yuppies, and disposable Eurotrash baddies) and the world we live in now (Homeland Security, near-fascist politcal correctness, and the ever-shifting sands of the war on terror) is so telling, it's almost tear-inducing. How awful it is to be a man like John McClane, in Paris Hilton's America."

Then read on if you so choose. Man, if only there was that much to play with in the other three films. I might go back and review 'em too. But sometimes a yippee ki yay is just a yippee ki yay.

So now I am going to have to go over to the coffee shop and finish Goblet of Fire, because as has proven true since the very first time I read the book, I just can't leave Harry in that graveyard. No matter what. As soon as they touch the portkey, I am overwhelmed with emotion at the thought of leaving Harry alone in that cemetery by closing the book for even a moment longer than I have to. It actually upsets me. Which, I must admit, does not happen with any other story that I have ever read, seen, or been told. I just can't do it. I have to get him home, even if it takes me all night.

I am so glad to be on vacation right now, I can't even tell you. This one was direly, direly needed.

"Jerry, it's Frank Costanza. Steinbrenner's here, George is dead, call me back."
- Frank Costanza

Posted by tederick at 7:46 PM in comix & h-pot & reviews
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Well, this is gonna be one hell of a summer.

Yesterday I covered the Women of Comics II symposium at the Paradise Comic Con for blogTO. It was pretty damned enjoyable I gotta say - way more than the convention floor itself, which, aside from meeting Georges Jeanty (and drooling on him a bit) and having a decent conversation with my new personal hero Faith Erin Hicks, wasn't exactly my air-quotes "thing." Incidentally: have I met Faith Erin Hicks before? I really feel like I have, but I can't place it. If any reader can twig me on this thing, please inform. It might just be because her name is fun to say.

Then Matty Price and I hit Ocean's Thirteen for some bank and... well sweet fucking hell I thought I didn't have anything relevant to say about that thing, but apparently I did, because I said it in review form:

The filmmakers have stripped the requirements of the Ocean's franchise to such a spare extreme that this one isn't just running on fumes, but is also turning around and convincing you that those fumes are honest, hard-won gasoline from the vast oil fields of Iraq. The flick - intentionally or no, though I'd gamble on the former - acts as an almost cruel contretemps to the risible "one for us, one for them" philosophy of indie vs. mainstream filmmaking that has plagued Hollywood for decades.

Rest of the review is here.

Got home and stumbled into a ginormous party that Teen Girl Squad was throwing for Rachel, and decided to stay (there was rum). Rachel, who shot off a fire extinguisher like she was play-acting Ghostbusters in the back yard and covered the entire neighbourhood in Spielbergian fog, Rachel who took her clothes off not once but twice, Rachel who turned me into an inadvertent drug mule. And did I mention the rum? Yeah I'm pretty much calling it the best party ever held in this house, with the exception of the Pirate Party, because nothing will ever actually defeat the Pirate Party.

Then not a lot of sleep, then a really good yoga, now peanut butter and laundry and sunshiney yesness.

Posted by tederick at 1:08 PM in 3QF & blogTO & comix & jedi antics & reviews & the rum diaries
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This is the best fucking movie I have ever seen.

Okay... let me see if I can explain that without sounding crazy...

Click here to read my review.

Posted by tederick at 11:56 AM in pirates & reviews
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It's all happening on blogTO right now.

Yesterday afternoon I went to see Off-side, the second film I've seen with that title in under nine months, and a decent if unspectacular tween drama from the Netherlands. Hella lot of cursing though, and sex talk from the kiddies, which lead to the walk-outs. Man if you can program a flick at Sprockets that's causing walk-outs, I'd say you're really getting somewhere.

After that I had some time to kill so I bought some Spider-Man comics and went to read them on the Pauper's patio in the unexpected springtime sunshine, where I promptly got Basic Instincted by a supremely drunk girl in a short black dress. She was there with her boyfriend and they were on maybe the fifth or sixth beer apiece by the time I arrived, and they were all into each other at every moment, except for when he would get on his cell phone. So at one point he gets on his phone and she looks over at me with my Spider-Man comic, and unfolds her legs revealing the entire lack of underwear going on below her waist. Holds the position till he gets off the phone and then folds up again. So I guess spring has officially sprung, being as that I'm mooning around like a 10th-grader on happy purple pills, and girls are dressing like they're on their way to a semi-formal, minus the undies.

Hey, speaking of comics: new to the blog-crawl, and best new blog title I've read lately, Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed). Now, my idea of hot in comics is Serenity Rose, not Black Widow, so I'm already predisposed to raise some of the flags that this blogger now seems to have dedicated a regular chunk of her life to, so bravo to her. And besides, girls reading comics is hot. So hot!

And speaking of girls: GIRLS ROCK!!! Oh man, I've been looking forward to this thing like crazy all week. I was phenomenally disappointed to learn that this movie is receiving a very narrow release and not until next year at that; the flick should be required viewing for... uh well I was going to say something else but let's go with "everyone." Yep this was definitely the best I've seen at Hot Docs so far, in the "saw it, loved it, got a poster to prove it" sort of way.

My review of that, plus geek-chic fetish must-see Helvetica, are up here... and I just noticed it's also linked on the Girls Rock site. Why? Because I rock. In a decidedly girly fashion.

Got one last Sprocket and two more docs tonight, then a few days off from the film viewing. I'm working from home tomorrow so that I can nip out and cover the TIFF groundbreaking in the afternoon, which won't really allow me an opportunity to bag any extra sleep, but will at least let me spend the morning in my jammies eating toast.

Posted by tederick at 1:27 PM in blogTO & blogsphere & comix & movies & reviews
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If I could do this for the rest of my life - "this" being just spending my time watching movies at film festivals and at home - I'd do it, to the exclusion of anything else. Last night I found myself gobbling down noodles after a film screening, sitting across from a chair I'd filled with the Hot Docs festival guide, the Miramax book, and the Bande à part DVD, and I thought to myself, I'm not even going out of my way to stop being so transparent on this fucking point, am I? If I stay at my job indefinitely, I will eventually crack up, and as for making films professionally, there isn't remotely enough evidence on the ground to figure out whether I would even enjoy doing that - lord knows my enthusiasm is a cold ember compared to what it used to be. But the festival-crawling, subtitle-reading, argument-inducing filmie lifestyle... that's all right. It can't be normal to spend this much of your year wishing it was September. Last night I looked up at the sky at 8:00 and said, "in September it will be roughly this dark at roughly this time." I swear, I used to have a life.

Thursday night was In the Shadow of the Moon and last night was Let's All Hate Toronto, which did nothing more than to firmly entrench me in my belief that I never want to live anywhere but here for the rest of my life. (Sorry Vancouver.) The film was pretty terrible though. The sketch comedy across the country was all right, but the damn thing just goes dead in the second half as "Mr. Toronto" - already a fucking annoying and utterly guileless comic cypher - tries to counter the ten top complaints about Toronto. Like Fuck last year, it was like once the filmmaker came up with what he presumed was an iron-clad movie concept, he decided to call it a day. Still, the screening bore the veneer of "it," so it was nice to be able to flash my badge and walk right in and feel generally meritorious. Plus, I'm fairly certain Amber Tozer was in the flick, making non-verbal noises at various points. And I find it enjoyable that I can pick three 2-second Amber Tozer shots out of a 75-minute movie, given that the only time I've "seen" her was as an animated character in the Tozer Show shorts.

I am essentially living on coffee at this point. This is not healthy nor was it by design, it's just sort of the way a rough week at work and some strange hours and commitments fell out this time. Not a lot of square meals. Going to go get some breakfast and plot out my coverage for the second half of the week, and then I've got a Sprockets screening and 2 Hot Docs before nightfall. And... well the other thing but that's not important right now.

Posted by tederick at 10:18 AM in blogTO & j-o-b & movies & reviews
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The grinding tension as this orgy of cinematic speed builds up is nearly unbearable, and the satisfaction of the eventual payoff is just as masterful. As the car chase unspools through its many reversals and reveals, it is - as has been the case with QT's career so many, many times before - like seeing a God of Cinema touch the earth with his finger.

Click here to read my review.

Posted by tederick at 9:29 PM in reviews
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I've just finished re-importing a bunch more of the lost Tederick.comments from last year; it's a service I am happy to provide for you the reader. I've also learned how to store JavaScript in a separate .js file so that I don't have to update the Tederick Films menu on every page of the site every time I think of a new movie. It's the little things.

Last night Chris and Matty Price and I went to see Zodiac, and even waiting 2 miserable days to go see this flick was too long. That movie is cake. Here's a bit of my review: When Fincher goes behind the scenes, you see a filmmaker so consummately dedicated to the meticulous expression of his art form that learning about his craft is the film fan equivalent of pornography or fine wine or both. This absorbing attention to detail, to the things that make films great, is par for the course in Zodiac, and makes the film an unabashed pleasure from start to finish. Rest of the review is here.

I scuttled my snowboarding plans for today so I am now on Skybully's good humour. I am going to work on the comic and do some reading. Due to a disastrous leaving-behind of the Sarah Vowell book at my parents' place I am now reading three books simultaneously. (Well, almost simultaneously.) Fortunately Tederick.com is flexible enough to represent this. One of the books is about Sulu! Fancy.

Aforementioned snowboarding plans now gone, I would like very much for springtime to arrive soon. I intend to shave my beard once it's clear that I no longer need it any more... but I might go Wolverine for a week or two.

"Werewoofs! COWBOY werewoofs!" - Molly Hayes

Posted by tederick at 10:25 AM in books & reviews & tederickdotcomdotcom
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I love this part of the year - the part where the Top Ten list has been in draft mode for a solid six months, but there are still a few tantalizing films being dribbled into theatres that threaten, on reputation at least, to displace at least one of the hopefuls for a slot in the not-really-very-coveted Tederick.com Top Ten.

2006 was pretty easy overall. After a moribund spring and a lacklustre summer, most of the entrants made their way through my eyeballs in the ten days of the Toronto International Film Festival, which must make it far and away the best fest I've attended in my lifetime, to have added so significantly to my annual filmgoing as a whole.

Based on this list it seems that this year, I was looking for a saviour, which isn't particularly surprising after all that shit last year. Redemption, faith, meaning, and hope... they are challenged and affirmed by every single film in this list, which in turn saved me a little bit. Maybe we'll get through after all. Maybe I will.

The Top Ten begins after the jump...

More after the jump...

Posted by tederick at 9:47 AM in movies & reviews
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I think this is what the future will actually be like: more ads, less God. Children of Men, by positioning a future world so similar to our own - where all commercial industry is laughably futile, yet rolling onwards anyway - has the uncanny effect of peeling back the lie that we live with every day. Our commercialism is equally futile, but no one has noticed it yet.

Click here to read my review.

That's it, my last regular review. I'll still be writing plenty I'm sure - just not every film, every time. And hopefully a few more important classics on DVD and a few less crappy Hollywood blockbusters and "think pieces" that I don't care about.

Back tomorrow with the best of the year!

Posted by tederick at 10:10 AM in reviews
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Though the technological improvement of filmmaking has been substantial, the lion's share of the development of film as a medium is all on this side of the camera, where we as audiences have improved by leaps and bounds in our ability to interact meaningfully with a filmed image. This is all by way of saying that The Good German is really boring.

Click here to read my review.

Posted by tederick at 10:12 AM in reviews
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Well, the cat is officially out of the bag: in addition to all the other things I will be stopping doing at the end of this year, I am also retiring from the moviesTO podcast. This was a really difficult decision for me because obviously, the podcast has a very wide reach and can be a lot of fun to do, and people speak highly of it. But looking forward to 2007, it was very clear to me by October of this year that my heart was no longer going to be into the ongoing coverage. So I figured that it was time to quit while I was ahead and divert even more of my suddenly-freed-up time to the more significant strategic imperatives on my plate for the new year. And as soon as I'd made that call, I felt a lot better about things. So I think this is a step in the right direction.

The good news is that if you want to be blogTO's fabulous new movie podcaster, they are accepting demos from any Toronto resident looking to fill the gig. So if you're one of the hundreds of Tederick.commies who sit comfortably back in your easy chairs thinking to yourself, "I could replace Matt Brown in a cold heartbeat," this is your moment! Send Tim a demo and we'll see where it goes.

OK, with that out of the way, moviesTO #57 is up and running right here, covering the suicide documentary The Bridge at some length, and also sending out the call for my replacement. (The musical pun at the tail end of the show, re: the upcoming retirement, was entirely unintentional, but as soon as I realized what had happened I left it in place out of sheer delight.)

And to Bridge it up morelikes, my review of the film has also been posted:

The filmmakers' hearts, at least, seem to be in the right place. They spent a year photographing the Golden Gate Bridge, waiting for a few of the 40-some individuals who would end their lives by leaping from the world-famous structure in 2004. They settled on 7 such people, and used the footage of their suicides as the - ahem - jumping-off point for an exploration of not only their lives, but of suicide as a whole and of the Golden Gate's unique pull on the victims. This, my friends, is what we call high-stakes poker.

Click here to read the review.

Posted by tederick at 3:17 PM in podcastery & reviews
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