Why so serious?

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight will go down movie history as one of the most haunting masterpieces ever made (complete with unforgettable characters), but having to live through 2008 with other fine but intense films like Joe Wright’s heartbreaking Atonement and Paul Thomas Anderson’s powerful There Will Be Blood? One’s a story of guilt and redemption, the other’s a chronicle of greed and power, but both feature excellent award winning performances – you don’t know what you are missing out if you haven’t seen these films.

Thankfully, the troubled 2008 (think global recession) is lightened up by the likes of a wacky movie duo in Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, a gang of motley crew in the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, a lonely robot in Andrew Stanton’s Wall·E and a talking American White Shepherd in Chris Williams and Byron Howard’s Bolt. While inducing laughs, these charming folks (thanks to clever scripting and movie making, of course) made us reflect and to (cue the familiar tune) always look on the bright side of life.

Over in Asia closer to home, Johnnie To’s cinematic experience Sparrow (Hong Kong), Wei Te-sheng’s phenomenal love story Cape No. 7 (Taiwan) and Aditya Chopra’s Bollywood extravaganza Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (India) gave us a few important lessons on how to take things easy (even if pickpockets lurk around every corner in the beautiful city of Hong Kong), how to achieve the triumphant human spirit (even if life seems to be going against you in every way in a small Taiwan town), and how to remember what it is like to experience love again (in the midst of dancing and singing in a crowded India state).

With so much to see, hear and experience in 2008, you’d think to yourself – why so serious?

2008 started with a choice so harrowing in its moral clauses and so heinous in its ramifications that it shone new light on a featherweight actor through his frighteningly assured feature debut— Gone Baby Gone is director Ben Affleck’s noir vision of Dennis Lehane’s novel that in its palpitating bleakness, cry out the film’s grim declarations. Cormac McCarthy and Upton Sinclair form the deliriously eccentric narrative tracts on American greed through the great auteurs, the Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson in their immaculately conceived magnum opuses of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood—both films complemented by equally extraordinary performances: Javier Bardem’s eerie Death incarnate serial killer and Daniel Day-Lewis’s mesmerising, inspired oilman ranks among the most memorable performances of the decade.

The futuristic exodus of mankind is indelibly perceived through the expressive eyes of a pantomime trash compactor, Wall·E—a brilliantly evocative step up for the genre into noble, soulful animation—another great American classic is realised through that great bastion of family friendly fare, Pixar. A tragedy, a personal odyssey, a thriller and a cautionary tale all wrapped in the enigma of existence on earth—Sharkwater speaks more to the soul through a single, haunting blink of a de-finned shark just before it’s thrown back into the ocean than anything else.

All hail Asia Argento; her furious passion is the nexus of Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, a film so captivatingly sensual and so damningly deviant that its intensity turns gender roles on its head. Horror is next on the agenda and they could not be any more diverse: [Rec] approximates the best of Romero’s legacy with the understanding of its genre’s limitations and serves up one of the most visceral experiences of the year in its pitch-perfect shocks, while Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, from Tim Burton, delivers a glorious marriage of style and execution into a Grand Guignol finale of mutual ruin and deranged despair.

If Burton proved that an A-list production can churn out artistry alongside pure entertainment, then Christopher Nolan plain nails it in The Dark Knight, by making the most definitive ideological treatise about the nature of terrorism ever put into a mainstream film and also creating the year’s greatest action extravaganza. But what of the personal, understated aspects of cinema? Lee Chang-dong has that covered in an uncompromising dissertation on human suffering, and the year’s best film— Secret Sunshine, remains an instantly sobering, brutally honest character piece on the reverberations of loss and a graceful memento mori that resonates with a striking density of thought.

It seems that my love for comics had subconsciously affected my choice of top ten favorite movies this year. I loved them for stretching the limits of imagination once again while still relatable and reflect in certain realistic manner. Evangelion for the magic of re-editing, Le Grand Chef for the various sob subplots, Hellboy 2 for the camaraderie among characters, 20th Century Boys for the uncertainly in life, The Day The Earth Stood Still (was adapted for Marvel Comics once) for ignorance and arrogance of mankind and The Dark Knight for the kickass portrayal of and interaction between Batman, Joker, Harvey Dent and Commission Gordon.

The non comics based entries are Sparrow, Yes Man, 2 Faces of My Girlfriend and The Mist. Each of them had charmed me for the whole duration of the film and beyond. Sparrow for it’s mesmerizing soundtracks and lovely cinematography, Yes Man for it’s motivational positivity stance, 2 Faces of My Girlfriend for it’s depiction of the different phase of love and The Mist for kicking the balls of Christian fanatics! (just kidding, I loved The Mist for the portrayal of mass hysterical and having the balls to end it the way it did)

Other notable films that couldn’t get squeezed into my Top Ten are:

3:10 to Yuma, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le papillon), Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon 三国之见龙卸甲, Semi-Pro, Juno, If I were Superman 슈퍼맨이었던 사나이 , Kallang Roar , Ip Man 葉問 , Iron Man, Shattered ( Butterfly on a Wheel), Muallaf, Run Fat Boy Run, Breath