The best movie of the year just ended was the one about the improbable hero who came from humble circumstances in a far-off land and was transported to Middle America, where he rose to challenge the empire of war and deception with a message of hope and tolerance. Super-President, or Barack to the Future (as a Second City production dubbed it), ran a bit long – almost 11 months – but there's no question it was the feel-good picture of 2008.
In a year when Americans decided to reboot the presidential franchise, it was impossible not to notice how the culture wars played out on the big screen. Two of the biggest films of the year The Dark Knight and Wall·E were overly allegorical films, which dealt, respectively, with the ethics of fighting terrorism and environmental disaster. By year's end, critics were already hailing the beginning of the new Obama-era films, including the multicultural sprawl of Rachel Getting Married and the inspirational life story of gay activist Harvey Milk in Milk.
The worst marketing plan of the year was releasing W., Oliver Stone's biography of George W. Bush, less than a month before the U.S. election. Not only were the results predictable, so was the headline: “W. Bombs at Box Office.”
Action: Complicated Shadows
According to an Associated Press survey of American editors, the No. 1 entertainment story of 2008 was the death of actor Heath Ledger. To market its dark, complex comic-book movie The Dark Knight, the Warner Bros. marketing campaign used ghoulish images of Ledger and the “Why So Serious?” tagline with great success. The film topped the domestic (Canadian and American) box office in excess of a half-billion dollars. As it dramatized the moral dilemmas of violence and torture, The Dark Knight stirred intense passions. When New York magazine critic David Edelstein wrote the first negative review of the film, some Dark Knight fans set on him like a blogosphere mob.
Love, hate or just tolerate them, the cartoonish, exaggerated world of comic books is now the mainstream source for Hollywood profits. The Dark Knight's success overshadowed another big hit, Iron Man (No. 2 at the box office), which provided solid, cynical entertainment, starring Robert Downey Jr. in a role so arch he should have been called Irony Man. Finally, Wanted, a vertiginous, absurd fantasy starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie, directed by Russian-Kazakh filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov, proved again that the Hollywood action flick is the modern version of Esperanto.
Animation: Computerized angst
A kissing cousin to the comic-book movie, the animated feature has once again shown Hollywood at its artistic best. Wall·E, the ninth film produced by the remarkable Pixar company, was a children's movie about an orphan robot that borrows the delicacy of Chaplin and the grandeur of Kubrick to build a visionary fable of repairing a ruined planet.
Somewhat less sensitively, Kung Fu Panda is centred on a fight to the death between endangered species. Other movies such as Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who and Bolt were among the most successful commercial releases of the year.
One animated film was definitely not aimed at children: Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, an “animated documentary” about the 1982 Lebanon war. Like Art Spiegelman's Holocaust graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale, it uses the distance of illustration to bring us closer to what we don't want to face.
Canadians: Making Love and War
While Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg earned international accolades, a lot of media attention was focused on an old-fashioned war romance, Passchendaele, written by, directed by and starring Paul Gross. The film cost $20-million, the most expensive movie ever made in Canada, and though it met with mixed reviews, the film has done well enough at the box office (approaching $5-million) to prove there's a homegrown audience for Canadian films, if you can afford it.
