Welcome to the eighth instalment of the Noughts Report. Each entry revisits a year in film from the 2000s, highlighting movies big and small and the careers and genres and trends that ignited or flamed out along the way. This attempted kaleidoscope is 100% subjective and AI-free, so if I bag or barely mention a film you love, or orate at length or heap praise upon a film you loathe, I apologise.
Read Part 1: 2001, Part 2: 2002, Part 3: 2003, Part 4: 2004, Part 5: 2005, Part 6: 2006, and Part 7: 2007.
Christopher Nolan followed up Batman Begins—his hard reset of Batman on film—with The Dark Knight. This sequel was likewise a reset, eschewing the former film’s classical Bildungsroman/Hero’s Journey for something equally epic yet more contemporary in resonance. Of all the films grappling with Bush 2.0/911/Iraq this year—and there are many, including homefront drama Stop Loss, thriller Traitor, Oliver Stone’s entertaining but punch-pulling Bush biopic W, and Ridley Scott’s consummately-made but flavourless Body of Lies, in which Leonardo DiCaprio suffers for his art while Russell Crowe wears comfy clothes—this feels the most pointed in its depiction of an encroaching nihilistic mood (personified in Heath Ledger’s brilliant performance as the Joker), burgeoning surveillance state, distrust of government, and hope and heroism amidst it all.
Lest that sound like an unsatisfying night at the movies, Nolan still threads the needle expertly, as he did on Batman Begins, combining his fetishes and preoccupations with the requisite commercial aesthetics of popcorn cinema, even landing some groaner gags amidst all the seriousness. And while this is arguably the most chronicled film of the year and one of the most written-about blockbusters of the 21st century, I’d be remiss if I didn’t briefly sketch its reverberations: it elevated Nolan into the rarefied air of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron; changed the Oscar race for both good and ill by sparking the change from five to ten Best Picture nominees following its contested omission; ushered in a post-Joker strain of villainy in films ranging from Skyfall—which wholesale borrows beats from The Dark Knight—to Fast X; elevated said Joker role into a Hamlet/Vito Corleone-esque tier that wins Oscars or demands Oscar-minted casting; and popularised a gridmark, utilitarian aesthetic in popular cinema—admittedly seeping in earlier in the decade in films like King Arthur—to be later seen in Robin Hood (via Ridley Scott), the Nolan-produced Man of Steel, and indeed much of the Snyderverse and DCEU that followed in The Dark Knight Rises’ wake.
One of the things I love about Nolan is his tendency to throw a meaty support role, in his already stacked casts, to an accomplished name actor with some faded star wattage, e.g. Martin Donovan in Insomnia and Tenet, Rutger Hauer in Batman Begins, Tom Skerrit in Inception, Matthew Modine in The Dark Knight Rises etc. As an Eric Roberts fan, I’m especially fond of his appearance as gangster Salvatore Maroni in The Dark Knight. I’ve loved Eric Roberts since his turn as villainous timelord The Master—completely attuned to the assignment—in 1996 telemovie Doctor Who, and love all incarnations of Eric Roberts: the ravenously hungry young star of Star 80 and The Pope of Greenwich Village and Runaway Train in the 1980s; the B-movie hero of Best of the Best, The Ambulance, By the Sword (spotlighted in 90s All Over), and Freefall and A-movie icky villain of Final Analysis, The Specialist, and Heaven’s Prisoners in the 1990s; the Roberts who’ll occasionally land and own in small roles for high-profile projects ala The Dark Knight, The Expendables, and Inherent Vice; and the workaholic actor of the 21st century who’ll appear in literally any film, in any role, chalking up—at the time of writing—over 950 credits on IMDb.
As big a fan of Eric Roberts as I am, I don’t have the wherewithal or resourcefulness to attempt to master this bountiful, ballooning, and largely schlocky body of work, but I love that it exists and I love that Roberts loves to work and comes to play. Whether playing dogged cop, family man, man of influence, psycho killer, or sleazy criminal ala The Dark Knight, the actor never really transforms nowadays, always recognisably essaying a variation on Eric Roberts, but then if Daniel Day-Lewis made a movie a week he’d also by necessity opt for economy of performance.
Anyway, to pivot back from Eric Roberts to the comic-book films of 2008—and this is why GenAI will never usurp the human authorial voice, with all its peculiarities and preoccupations—the year was also noteworthy for the humble beginnings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. The former is objectively the better film and Robert Downey Jnr’s work is undeniable—not “let’s-pay-the-man-$100-million” levels of undeniable, which really is the height of obscenity, but undeniable nonetheless—however I enjoy the latter much more. Admittedly that’s in part due to my general preference for that character, and because Louis Leterrier’s movie is the biggest outlier to what would become the Marvel house style—very much a counter-aesthetic to Nolan’s Dark Knight work—as a chase actioner riffing on the Fugitive-riffing television incarnation of Hulk.
Side bar: I think of this Simpsons clip often when ruminating on comic-book movie casting, and this year feels like a particular pivot point. Where Hugh Jackman, Tobey Maguire, Eric Bana, Ben Affleck, and Christian Bale were all promising young actors (albeit intermittently lambasted in Affleck’s case), Downey Jnr in Iron Man and Edward Norton in Incredible Hulk were veteran Oscar-nominated stars: both admittedly troubled guys with professional baggage that undoubtedly docked their wage, but nonetheless established and respected players. While good for the genre, I’m not sure it’s been as good for the profession, and one can imagine an alternate, less appealing history of acting where the likes of the wonderful, beautiful, haunted Montgomery Clift had to don a one-piece and play Nightwing.
Alongside Iron Man and Incredible Hulk, Marvel properties continued to be adapted off-brand, and would for some time to come, seen in 2008 with Punisher: War Zone. With its excessive quota of OTT slapstick violence and OTT ham acting, it’s safe to say the word “Subtler!” was never uttered on-set by director Lexi Alexandar.
I consider Batman Begins and Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy, as articulated earlier in this series, companion pieces in deftly threading that aforementioned needle between popcorn cinema and directorial fetish. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, equally deft, did not enjoy the same multipliers of acclaim and commerce as The Dark Knight, in large part due to the differing mainstream cachets of these properties, but Del Toro’s heart is very much on his sleeve and his movie is handsome and lovingly crafted. Wanted, in contrast, is not the work of a gentle soul. I found the movie obnoxious then and have not revisited it since, and director Timur Bekbambetov’s subsequent career downturn has spared me having to ever reconsider that stance.
Side bar: Angelina Jolie is good in Wanted—as is her voicework in the likeable Kung Fu Panda—and she’s compelling in Clint Eastwood’s excellent period drama Changeling. But is Jolie the biggest female movie star to never star in a classic movie? Girl Interrupted is wonderful, and I like Alexander and others, but where is her Bonnie & Clyde or Chinatown or Network? Her Annie Hall? Her 9 to 5? Her Aliens or Ghostbusters? Her When Harry Met Sally? Her Silence of the Lambs? Her Thelma & Louise? Her Basic Instinct? Her Pretty Woman? Her Mean Girls or The Notebook? It certainly isn’t among her 2000s titles: Gone in 60 Seconds, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and its sequel, Original Sin, Taking Lives, Life or Something Like It, Beyond Borders, Shark Tale, Sky Captain, Mr & Mrs Smith, The Good Shepherd, A Mighty Heart, or Beowulf. Is Maleficent default-headlining her In Memoriam Oscar reel one day?
Batman, Hulk, the Punisher, and Hellboy weren’t the only returning heroes or anti-heroes of 2008. I had a tremendous time watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull theatrically, but it hasn’t aged like fine wine and the realisation it was corked set in fairly quickly. It’s certainly not the disaster or legacy affront its loudest critics decry, but there’s too much CGI, too many groaner moments, and overestimation of audiences’ affections for burgeoning star Shia LaBeouf. But Harrison Ford’s in the pocket and the recent underwhelm of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny certainly bolsters appreciation of Spielberg’s craft here, making this perhaps the most superbly directed bad movie of the year. Timur Bekbambetov wishes he could make a bad movie this skilfully.
Rambo also unloaded in 2008, and I’m happy to get to talk Sylvester Stallone again—though not everyone shares my Stallonean preoccupations—as pickings have been thin over this series. Following his Rocky revival with Rocky Balboa, Stallone similarly revisits his other signature, less benevolent character, reluctantly roped into freedom fighting in Burma, with Sly on directorial duty for the first and only time on this franchise (though of course his overriding authorship on any production is well-documented). The film adapts to the limitations of its lower budget and older star, focusing on gratuitous CGI-augmented gore—taking a leaf from Saw and its thriving sequels—over the spectacular set pieces of its predecessors.
Both Rocky Balboa and Rambo are intriguing character studies calibrated to their star’s strengths and savvy re-contextualisations of 1980s icons in the 2000s. Stallone was ahead of the curve of nostalgia-driven legacy sequels, remakes, and reboots, anticipating the likes of TRON: Legacy, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Blade Runner 2049, Spider Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, The Flash, and Karate Kid: Legends.
Finally, James Bond returned in Quantum of Solace, an artfully made thumbnail sketch of a James Bond movie. Watching the film is a bit like sitting down for a Sunday roast and there’s an empty space on the plate where potatoes should sit. Industrial action handicapped the screenwriting and production, making the film feel slight and underdeveloped. If one thinks of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace combined as a Hollywood epic ala Gone with the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, Quantum kind of works as the slightly less effective post-Intermission second half. But as a movie on its own, it’s a strike against the Daniel Craig era, and one of the reasons I’m confounded this almost two-decade stretch of 007 as a grumpy Tom Ford-wearing sourpuss is so universally revered.
As noted above, The Dark Knight’s perceived Oscar snub—a misnomer presupposing that a body comprising thousands of disparate voters made a joint town hall decision to snub the movie from Best Picture consideration—sparked an expansion of the Best Picture shortlist from 5 to 10 nominees, taking effect with the films of 2009, with the hope that more populist titles would net nominations. In the meantime, the films nominated over The Dark Knight were victor Slumdog Millionaire, Frost Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, and The Reader. Of that list, The Reader is the only title I find pedestrian and unimpressive; indeed, of the two pedigree Kate Winslet releases of 2008, I prefer Sam Mendes’ lacerating marriage drama Revolutionary Road, reuniting Winslet with Titanic flame Leonardo DiCaprio as discontent 1950s suburbanites, though I wouldn’t nominate that for Best Picture either. As par the course, DiCaprio suffers his tits off.
Of the other competitors, all four share in common very accomplished scripts—by Peter Morgan, Simon Beaufoy, Eric Roth, and Dustin Lance Black—all nailed by their directors, the sort of quality control that would be relinquished a little in the 10-picture race, where excellently directed films might not have the same sturdy screenwriting foundations and vice versa. Morgan’s keen dramatist’s eye for recent history—as seen in The Queen, Last King of Scotland, and later Rush—is evident in Frost Nixon, and that work is bolstered by tremendous lead performances from Frank Langella and Michael Sheen and director Ron Howard executing said dramatization with his consummate populist craft. In contrast, Danny Boyle’s approach on Slumdog Millionaire feels like capturing lightning in a bottle, as do many other Boyle movies. It’s got tension and danger and heart and joy, buoyed by Anthony Dod Mantle’s immersive cinematography and A.R. Rahman’s banger soundtrack, grounded by Dev Patel’s sympathetic lead performance.
Like Eric Roth’s most famous script, Forrest Gump, Benjamin Button is a decades-spanning oddball saga, but very differently handled by David Fincher: it’s textured and finely burnished and emotional whilst keeping sentimentality at a remove. Finally, Milk—inarguably the most rote in its biopic trappings—sees Gus Van Sant down his experimental tools of recent years, delivering the assignment with warmth and simplicity. Oliver Stone also shepherded a Harvey Milk biopic for many years, and I can imagine that being a busier, heavier-handed version of the project. In some curious synergy, Stone’s George W, Josh Brolin, played Harvey Milk’s killer Dan White for Van Sant.
Sean Penn won his second Best Actor award as the slain activist, for a nice performance that eschewed much (but not all) of his bag of tricks and tics. It also marked the second time Penn triumphed over revelatory work from a similarly prickly star who probably deserved it more: previously Bill Murray for Lost in Translation, and here Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler. Rourke’s empathetic work is the centre and, to some degree, circus geek show in this stylistic pivot by Darren Aronofsky from the formalism of his previous films towards something more fluid and intimate; he would marry the approaches in subsequent work.
Penn also pops up playing himself—as does an impressively bearded Bruce Willis—in What Just Happened? Directed by Barry Levinson, the film boasts a script from powerhouse producer and very occasional director (Where the Buffalo Roam) and screenwriter Art Linson, and stars Robert De Niro as a Linson-esque producer putting out fires and navigating creative egos. As a producer, Linson has some very fine credits to his name—among them Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Scrooged, The Edge, Fight Club, and a mediocre personal favourite of mine, Point of No Return—but this industry satire doesn’t particularly bite the hand that feeds it, while Levinson’s direction—gently aping the verité aesthetic of prestige sitcoms of the decade—sits oddly with the material.
For a director who’d previously astutely mined celebrity, hubris, and Hollywood in Wag the Dog and Bugsy, What Just Happened feels rather toothless and half-baked. And like The Player’s satirical film within the film, the movie within a movie here—featuring Penn’s antihero seemingly wearing Tom Cruise’s garb from Collateral—looks like it was shot in half a day by second unit on a Kevin Smith film, further sucking the venom from Linson’s satire. At least De Niro is alert and engaged here, unlike other 2000s gigs for hire, perhaps because he’s reteaming with his Wag the Dog and Sleepers director and impersonating Linson, his peer and frequent producer (on Heat, The Untouchables, This Boy’s Life, Great Expectations, and We’re No Angels: a true trash and treasure trove).
While I don’t subscribe to the concept of Oscar bait, several films from 2008—largely ignored by the Academy—fulfil the stereotypical commercial aesthetics of Oscar bait films: period dramas with plum actorly roles and opportunities for impeccable decor and coterie like The Other Boleyn Girl—also scripted by Peter Morgan—and Brideshead Revisited, the latter featuring lovely forlorn work from Ben Whishaw; on top of Milk and Frost Nixon and W, a bevy of other biopics including Cadillac Records, Che Parts I and II from Steven Soderbergh, and Richard Linklater’s Me & Orson Welles, the latter featuring a barnstorming Welles impression from Christian McKay; and World War II dramas including the solid Defiance from Edward Zwick, punishing The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and Valkyrie.
Valkyrie, directed by Bryan Singer and starring Tom Cruise as a German military man conspiring to assassinate the Fuhrer, is surprisingly low-energy for its terrific premise. It’s perhaps most notable in retrospect as the first collaboration between Cruise and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, who would become a Cruise Whisperer of sorts as director of Jack Reacher and multiple Mission: Impossible films and screenwriter on Edge of Tomorrow and Top Gun: Maverick, among other collaborations.
In addition to Slumdog Millionaire, two other notable works from British directors were Rocknrolla and In Bruges. The former is a serious contender for Guy Ritchie’s best film, a return to the UK criminal milieu of his earlier work, but straddling criminal class tiers and executed with (some) maturity and polish rather than razzle dazzle for shits & giggles. The latter was the feature debut of playwright Martin McDonagh, a dark comedy about two hitmen dispatched to Bruges, one to kill the other. Like the deeply laddish humour of Rocknrolla, the jet-black gallows humour and impeccably-honed, politically incorrect, sweary turns of phrase peppering In Bruges aren’t to all tastes, but I find it hilarious and unexpectedly touching and exciting in that way movies are when all the ingredients are clicking and zinging. Shout-outs to Toby Kebbel and Mark Strong in the former film and Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes in the latter, all on point.
While superhero movies like The Dark Knight were skewing darker and more adult—something that sits uncomfortably with me about this and subsequent Batman films, whatever my admiration for them—there were family films squarely tailored for families in 2008. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian was the second of three Narnia films and a solid adaptation of its source; I can’t speak to how well City of Ember adapted its source material, but it’s a decent subterranean-set, post-apocalyptic family film with some nice work from Saoirse Ronan and effectively harnesses some of the latent menace inherent in Bill Murray’s persona (see also Mad Dog & Glory). Speed Racer has many vocal fans, but I’m not one; I get what the Wachowskis are going for and appreciate the swing, but find the film annoying. I do, however, vibe with the similarly affected tone of Stephen Chow’s CJ7, a comedy about a father, son, and gelatinous alien. It marked a pivot from the martial arts comedy of Chow’s previous work and was also, regrettably, his final acting role.
Brendan Fraser had not one but two adventure movies in release. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor pitted Fraser’s relic hunter and his recast wife (Mario Bello) against another Hong Kong alum in Jet Li’s titular reanimated villain; Michelle Yeoh also appears. Journey to the Centre of the Earth updated Jules Verne’s classic sci-fi novel with cheesy effects becoming of 2008. Both films are unmemorable, though the latter is at least likeable; the third Mummy suffers from the absence of former series star Rachel Weisz and director Stephen Sommers, who despite Van Helsing’s sins was still a better fit for the series than Rob Cohen, striking the right balance between horror and action and comedy and, importantly, state of the art and schlock on the effects front.
Side bar: The casting of Li and Yeoh, appropriation of Chinese lore including terra cotta warriors, and shooting in Shanghai were part of Hollywood courting the lucrative Chinese audience base; see also The Dark Knight’s Hong Kong-set action sequences, the aforementioned Kung Fu Panda, and Disney’s Forbidden Kingdom, a martial arts Neverending Story featuring genre alum in Li and Jackie Chan, hampered by a lead kid who’s hard to watch.
Animated family films of 2008 included said Panda (likeable) and Disney’s Bolt (benign). I continue to feel mugged at gunpoint by Star Wars: The Clone Wars, three computer-animated television episodes strung together for theatrical release, but another sci-fi animation, Pixar’s Wall-E, is absolutely delightful: its titular robot is a magical piece of design, its robot romance is exquisitely handled, and its imagined future somewhat prescient, even if some of the details—e.g. human affluence yielded by AI automation—don’t all track in 2026.
The film, released by Disney, was produced independently—with Steve Jobs in a benefactory role—during the stretch where Pixar’s relationship with the studio was uncertain, and that’s certainly reflected in its integrity of vision and lack of piety to formula and commerce. That this environmentally-minded film would unleash a mass of plastic merchandise under Disney’s distribution and bemoan the evils of screens under Steve Jobs’s benefaction highlights the miracle of its existence and the intriguing contradictions that emerge from creating art within the industrial complex. With his recent Toy Story sequel, director Andrew Stanton reiterated concerns about human absorption in screens and machines, there localised around a single child rather than the bloated remnants of humanity.
While superheroes and IP-derived blockbusters continued sucking the oxygen from traditional actioners, the novelty of Liam Neeson’s casting in the Luc Besson-produced, Pierre Morel-helmed Taken launched a cottage industry of sequels and imitators. Producer Besson—himself a cottage industry—and another directing acolyte, Olivier Megaton—gigging between defending the Earth from Decepticons—also presided over The Transporter 3, one of the cottage industry of Jason Statham-starring actioners alongside The Bank Job. Meanwhile, the fleeting clout of Shia LaBeouf after headlining Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull afforded the star and his Disturbia director D.J. Caruso a chance to make Eagle Eye, this time switching from Rear Window homage to Hitchcockian chase film in a modern surveillance state.
I don’t really remember the three abovementioned movies at all—despite my general affection for the work of The Bank Job’s journeyman director Roger Donaldson—nor the Pang Bros’ Nicolas Cage-headlined remake of their Thai original Bangkok Dangerous, though I remember its physiologically suspect poster art. This is one of those movies where Cage was serving neither his mainstream fandom nor his cult admirers, and I don’t believe the Cage reclamation project of the past decade has rubbed off on this title.
While I’ve sung the praises of Stallone—and to a lesser extent the politicking Schwarzenegger—repeatedly throughout 90s All Over Me and the Noughts Report, action stars of their vintage like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren I like more in theory than practice, enjoying them in a handful of titles but struggling with big stretches of their filmographies. Van Damme, however, is indisputably excellent in JCVD, playing himself as a weary ageing action star who gets caught up in a bank robbery. There’s a high camp, glossy version of that premise, but JCVD is admirably low-fi in execution and taps unexpected pathos from its bumpy-foreheaded subject. Other 2007 titles with meta inclinations include comedy Be Kind Rewind and South Korean Western The Good, the Bad, and the Weird. Continuing a refrain from above, I don’t remember either title very well, but nostalgia for videotape and appreciation of Song Kang-Ho make me predisposed toward revisits.
A bi-product of the splintering of action cinema into high-end superhero & IP product at one end and lower-fi actioners on the other was a bubbling up, quite evident in 2008, of nerdy action vehicles trying to serve both geeks and fans of gnarlier action: see Babylon AD, Death Race, Outlander, and Doomsday, all neither fish nor fowl. Babylon AD was a particular disappointment, wasting the considerable talent of La Haine and The Crimson Rivers director Matthieu Kassovitz, while Doomsday was the strongest of this bunch, a solid if unremarkable stab at Mad Max/Escape from New York-style post-apocalyptic action from Dog Soldiers and The Descent director Neil Marshall.
Roland Emmerich’s prehistoric actioner 10 000 BC and Matt Reeves’ sci-fi disaster film Cloverfield also feel like cousins to this trend, the latter one of the best movies to tackle the found-footage aesthetic whilst also, like all of its ilk, contorting to accommodate the baked-in demands of the sub-genre. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening is a dopier disaster movie, in retrospect a precursor to his turn of the past decade as a purveyor of high-concept mischief of questionable taste, but botching its intriguing Twilight Zone-esque premise with bad acting. Star Mark Wahlberg was especially cursed in the 2000s starring in some of the least-liked movies from great directors: see also Burton’s Planet of the Apes and Demme’s The Truth About Charlie.
Chillers of 2008 included Let the Right One In, Martyrs, Mirrors, The Midnight Meat Train, Donkey Punch, Quarantine, The Strangers, and sequels The X-Files: I Want to Believe—very much doing a ‘monster of the week’ thing—and Saw V. A satellite to the genre was paranormal romance Twilight. I’ve only seen this entry and the fourth instalment directed by Bill Condon—bowing out of the fifth because I want to continue liking Bill Condon—so I’m not the guy to praise nor bury this franchise, but I’ll shout-out leads Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson for carving very interesting filmographies in the wake of this phenomenon. A curious genre adjunct was mumblecore horror comedy Baghead, the sophomore film from the Duplass Brothers and third film featuring the remarkable Greta Gerwig.
In the wake of Wolf Creek and Saw, Australian horror was having a moment, seen in 2008 across Dying Breed, Lake Mungo, and Acolytes. A previous era of Ozploitation, largely investor- rather than government-funded, was celebrated in Mark Hartley’s tremendous documentary Not Quite Hollywood, an energetic rollercoaster ride through the saucy comedies, stunt-heavy action movies, and bloody genre fare that shadowed the more distinguished Australian New Wave of the 1970s and 80s. Hartley’s documentary alternates entertainingly between clips from these movies and talking head interviews ranging from Quentin Tarantino to Phillip Adams and Bob Ellis. I embarked on a multi-year Ozploitation bender following Not Quite Hollywood and am appreciative that it led me into the back catalogues of the likes of Brian Trenchard-Smith and Richard Franklin.
The Square, not to be confused with the arch Ruben Ostlund art scene satire of 2017, is a tense, well-crafted Australian noir from Nash Edgerton that squeezes maximum juice from its nifty setup. Another local thriller, Cactus—not to be confused with the Paul Cox-directed, Isabelle Huppert-starring drama of 1986—also unspooled in 2008. Dramedy The Black Balloon was the victor at that year’s AACTA awards, while Baz Luhrmann’s Australia—big and broad and preening and star-studded and occasionally brilliant and thrilling, bending national myth to its director’s patented storytelling rhythms—was the year’s commercial victor. Also released was the amiable, eccentric Dean Spanley—read all out it here—while Australian director Gregor Jordan helmed a seedy, forgettable Brett Easton Ellis adaptation, The Informers.
With the viability of theatrical comedy a recurring topic of discourse, forcing unreasonable weight and expectation upon scarce emissaries like the recent Naked Gun and Scary Movie revivals, it’s sobering to look back at 2008 and see so much comedy: some excellent (Pineapple Express, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers, Marley & Me, and Tropic Thunder, a vastly superior Hollywood satire to What Just Happened), some enjoyable but disposable (The House Bunny, Yes Man, Get Smart, Meet Dave, Bedtime Stories, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan), some mediocre (Drillbit Taylor, Ghost Town, Semi-Pro, Baby Mama), and one particularly noxious miss in The Love Guru.
Several generations of comedy stars and schools of comedy are accounted for across this list—Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Steve Carrell, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Adam Sandler, Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Aniston, Anna Farris, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler—though James Franco in Pineapple Express, Robert Downey Jnr (in fairness an SNL alum) in Tropic Thunder, and canine Marley might be the MVPs.
Burn after Reading and Swing Vote mine bureaucracy for comedy, the former a zany swing for the Coen Brothers after No Country for Old Men—not unlike their swing from Fargo with The Big Lebowski a decade earlier—and the latter a shaggy but very formulaic programmer riding on the charms of Kevin Costner (not a comedy star, but very capable in comedic mode) as a redneck who holds the future of the US Presidency in his hands. I don’t remember much about Bottle Shock, but Alan Rickman’s posturing on the poster implies comedic hijinks involving viniculture.
While 2007 saw a surfeit of musicals, pickings were slimmer in 2008, with just Repo: The Genetic Opera and Mama Mia, perhaps the horniest and most-desperate-to-entertain musical ever committed to stage and screen. The fun isn’t as infectious for this viewer, but as far as jukebox musical songbooks go this one’s all bangers, even when bludgeoned by Pierce Brosnan. Similar good vibrations, albeit in more mundane working-class surrounds, underpin Sally Hawkins’ lovely performance in Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky.
Rom-coms represented in lightweight romp Fool’s Gold, teaming Matthew McCoughnehay and Kate Hudson a second time, and Kevin Smith’s saucy-minded but sweet and goofball Zack & Miri Make a Porno. More introspective, melancholic terrain was charted in Elegy, drawn from a Phillip Roth source and featuring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz, and Two Lovers, a James Gray film where Joaquin Phoenix is torn between two women, one a match made within his family’s inner circle (Vinessa Shaw) and one very much outside (Gwyneth Paltrow). Like much of Gray’s body of work, this chews on themes of family and cultural baggage and individualism vs. collectivism, and affords three great, meaty roles to Phoenix, Paltrow, and Shaw, the latter in particular shining and luminous after briefly impressing in Eyes Wide Shut and holding her own opposite Chris Kattan in Corky Romano. Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married also pits individual against collective and chews over family baggage, with Anne Hathaway delivering a striking, exposed nerve performance
Two Lovers and 2008 more broadly would prove an inflection point in Paltrow and Phoenix’s careers: the former thereafter becoming an entrepreneur and purveyor of suspect wares, mostly only popping up in Iron Man and MCU movies thereafter until last year’s Marty Supreme; the latter releasing his fascinating if testing performance art mockumentary I’m Still Here in Two Lovers’ wake and already in character on the film’s publicity tour, to Gray’s chagrin, then rebirthing—phoenix-like, dare I say—with The Master a few years later and steadfastly never doing normie s**t like Ladder 49 again.
Speaking of veteran filmmakers, this is the part in every instalment where I marvel at the prodigious outputs of Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood, both in their 70s, this decade: the former keeping pace with a new film annually, here Vicky Christina Barcelona, and the latter issuing two new releases this calendar year—the aforementioned Changeling and Gran Torino—while layabouts Andrew Stanton and Baz Luhrmann can only muster two for the decade.
To be clear, I jest; there are very different scales of production at work across Australia and Wall-E on the one hand and Vicky Christina Barcelona, Changeling, and Gran Torino on the other. Of the two Eastwood titles, Gran Torino has the stronger whiff of twilight Eastwood, cranked out a bit too efficiently, perhaps before all the spot-checks have been performed along the assembly line, with minimal takes and fuss and some actors—here many non-professional—faring less well than others without the preparation other directors would favour. But where Changeling is objectively the formally sturdier work—its subject matter and emotional lead performance likely necessitating more TLC in its production—the imperfections and weird grace notes of Gran Torino also make it soar when it soars, which is mostly around Eastwood’s enjoyable performance as a cantankerous widowed racist who gradually warms to and then defends his Hmong neighbours.
Vicky Christina Barcelona, meanwhile, sees Allen uprooting from London—the setting of his last three films—to Spain and casting Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz in a menage a trois, with Rebecca Hall on the sidelines. Lest it sound like Wild Orchid, the film is still very much a Woody Allen movie and hence rather tame, but the milieu feels fresh and the four leads are wonderful. In Allen’s absence, New York neuroticism was tackled by Charlie Kaufman in Synecdoche New York, a striking film I cannot profess to like or understand.
I’m always intrigued by actor-directors, both those like Eastwood and Allen who build formidable bodies of work and those who occasionally dabble in filmmaking and, consequently, what stories they’re drawn to on those rare excursions. Ed Harris’s debut, Pollock, felt like a film with lots to say and depths to express and profundity to plumb, that couldn’t quite articulate it beyond saying art hurts, the artistic process is tortured, Jackson Pollock was tortured, and hurting people hurt others. Appaloosa—no relation to the Marlon Brando Western of the same name—cannot help but look like a bit of a lark in contrast, a piece of fun boy's adventure dress-up; however, like its director, it’s sturdy, muscular, economical, with virtues in its smart incremental characterization and nuanced handling of Old West gender dynamics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30mbAu1k6hk
Costner’s Open Range, released a few years earlier, is an obvious point of comparison for Appaloosa: both Westerns by actor-directors featuring bro-mantic duos (here Harris and Viggo Mortensen) standing up against an abusive land baron of British descent (here Jeremy Irons), with a well-cast romantic interest (here Renee Zellweger) thrown in. Whilst I prefer Costner’s elegant bloat to Harris’s leaner storytelling, said storytelling is nothing to sniff at. Dean Semler, on DP duty, subs the romantic glow of his previous Westerns (Dances with Wolves, Young Guns, City Slickers, The Alamo) with a more bleached aesthetic, with a touch of Chiaroscuro in the lightning.
Zellweger also co-stars with another actor-director, George Clooney, on his third film Leatherheads: an old-fashioned comedy that signalled the middlebrow turn in Clooney’s directorial CV after the initially intriguing Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night and Good Luck.
A pair of prison films, Hunger and Bronson, marked the film debut of Steve McQueen and English-language film debut of Nicolas Winding Refn respectively, as well as breakthrough roles for stars Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy. Both are based on true stories, the former tackled with realist aspirations, the latter with dark mirth. Meanwhile, a pair of French films, The Class and Female Agents, highlight European cinema’s different reactions to Hollywood formula: the former eschews it, thoughtfully depicting the mundanity and percolating tension & trolling & needling of the classroom sans the inspirational hijinks of Dead Poets Society or Dangerous Minds, while the latter emulates formula in its tale of wartime espionage games, buoyed by its gifted cast.
There were also Hollywood thrillers, mid-budget and star-led and not yet entirely muscled out of the ecosystem, but based on this line-up getting there: Vantage Point, which feels very generic despite its Rashomon-like story structure; Lakeview Terrace, which starts provocatively but slips into generic mode, with cop bogeyman Samuel L. Jackson menacing new neighbours Kerry Washington and honky husband Patrick Wilson; the solid Pride and Glory, with Edward Norton and Colin Farrell as brothers on the police force, which would kill to be We Own the Night; the sloppy Righteous Kill, pairing De Niro and Pacino, which would kill to be Michael Mann’s Heat but isn’t even as good as Burt Reynolds’ Heat; and Deception and Passengers, both fine but a little academic in their execution.
I’ve not touched on Christian faith films in this series, aside from the Left Behind sequels, mostly because I haven’t seen many from this decade. The success of Fireproof, which shares a star with Left Behind in Kirk Cameron, helped nudge this cottage industry closer to mainstream legitimacy, as well as solidifying its director team, the Kendrick Brothers, as reliable creators of contemporary Christian drama. The movie, with Cameron playing an exceptional firefighter but wayward, porn-addicted husband who reforms to save his marriage, is earnestly intended and capably executed, betraying fewer of the limitations of its genre than others of its ilk. It does not aspire to art, unlike secular releases Doubt and Seven Pounds: movies with better actors and better craft and the affordances bequeathed to major studio productions, which are nonetheless muddy and troubled in their messaging—the former about organised religion in the guise of 60s Catholicism, the latter in its overtures to secular mysticism—compared to Fireproof’s crystal clarity and conviction.
For the record, I’ve not seen remakes The Day the Earth Stood Still, Long Weekend, or The Women, nor The Brothers Bloom, Gomorrah, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo, Man on Wire, Mesrine, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Red Cliff, Redbelt, Waltz with Bashir, War Inc, or Wendy & Lucy.
Thanks for reading. One final year, 2009, left to tackle; til then...