2008’s Creative Dearth
As someone who fancies himself a bit of a film critic, I try to manage my own expectations despite my genuine love of cinema. (That sound pretentious, but bear with me.) Before this year, I would generally see anything that was thrown in front of me because I would rather watch a bad movie than no movie at all. Lucky for me, from 2005 to 2007, I was able to sit down in front of movies that were great beyond all expectations or at least interesting in spite of their flaws.
The three years prior to 2008 were amazing years for cinema. We saw great filmmakers working at the peak of their powers. From Spielberg with Munich to the Coens with No Country for Old Men, filmmakers were responding to the world in a way that audiences haven’t seen since the 1970s. Why then has 2008 sucked so bad?
Most people leave a comment like that for their year-in-review. And to some, every year is a bad year if it’s not a 1939 or 1999. This year, however, has been exceptionally disappointing. The Coen Brothers returned to a form we didn’t want to see from them again with Burn After Reading. Brazil’s Fernando Meirelles crashed and burned with Blindness, a film so universally panned that I didn’t even bother to see it. David Gordon Green’s working class drama Snow Angels wasn’t nearly as good as his stoner comedy Pineapple Express. Even Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light, a Rolling Stones concert film, didn’t start me up the way I wished it would have. Then there’s Spielberg, who made a summer blockbuster that shall not be named. The masters were at work, but they weren’t producing the work of masters.
It’s nearly November and the best movie I’ve seen so far this year is WALL·E. It’s a future classic to be sure, but not the movie I thought would be at the top of my list at this point in the year. I’ve had fun at movies like In Bruges, Iron Man, and Religulous. I was surprised at how good an Iraq War film could actually be when I watched Stop Loss. And of course, there was Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. The difference between these movies and the movies I saw in years past is none of them have moved me to regularly visit my local cineplex. I feel as disillusioned about the movies this year as most Republicans do watching John McCain run for president. Something is going terribly wrong.
I watched more movies this year than I have in years past. Most of the ones I caught, however, were classics or personal favorites, movies I could curl up with at home. I read more about movies than I have ever had the pleasure to do, too. I didn’t fall out of love with the cinema, but I hit a rough patch that had me searching through my memory box to reflect on better days.
Sure, 2008 is backloaded. Revolutionary Road, Milk, Doubt, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Australia, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Frost/Nixon are still to come. Rachel Getting Married just opened here in Cleveland. Plus there’s an Eastwood one-two punch coming at us with Changeling and Gran Torino. But if history has shown us anything, it’s that at least half of these pictures won’t live up to the hype.
So, fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy 65 days.
Get Email Updates
