I felt that 2008 was a relatively lackluster year for movies. There wasn't that one film that blew me away as had happened with Children of Men in 2006. Amusingly, I made this same complaint about 2007, but all three of my favorite films that year (Michael Clayton, Charlie Wilson's War and The Bourne Ultimatum) are better than anything I saw in 2008. In the end, I never wound up liking anything better than the movie that was on top of my Big Board (http://www.boxofficeprophets.com/bigboard/index.cfm?bigboardID=10&size=2&bigboardyear=2008) most of the year. Many of you know by now that my first few months of 2008 were medically unpleasant and after I got out of the hospital in mid-April, my diet was not fun. I had just gotten back to solid food when I saw Iron Man, making me really (really really) relate to the line, "Cheeseburger first." While the movie critic in me cringes at the idea of choosing a comic book adaptation as the best of the year, the honest evaluation is that nothing ever seriously challenged Iron Man.

For similar reasons, I picked Jon Favreau as the best director of the year. Not only did he return my favorite film of 2008, he also somehow managed to make one of the dumbest sounding comic book characters (a guy in armor only matters in medieval history or Dungeons and Dragons) remarkably fully formed. I felt like I immediately knew all about Tony Stark's world and what he was about. The news clippings at the start of the film were a great idea but the line that really sold me on the movie was when a scientist noted toward the end, "I'm not Tony Stark." The idea that a man's genius could be so profound that he could build something in a cave that some of the finest minds in the world could not recreate in perfect lab settings is exactly the sort of storytelling I seek in a film.





Of course, I still didn't name Robert Downey Jr. as the best actor of the year, which kind of hurts me a bit. I had thought him likely to win the category right up until I finally caught Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon. At that moment, I realized nothing was going to beat his performance as Richard Nixon. I consider it to be the best lead acting work since Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, which is pretty high praise from me given the fact that I've said here that I thought Murray's work there is the best acting I have ever seen. For Langella to approach that speaks volumes about what a tour de force performance he offers, somehow managing to make Richard Nixon monstrous, sympathetic and socially awkward, that last one being stunning for a man publically elected to our country's highest office.

I thought that the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories this year were brutal. You may not have even heard of two of the films whose actresses I lauded. So, I am damning Anne Hathaway with faint praise when I say that she was the best I saw for the year. If it helps, she would have won either of the last two years as well. Her role as a Lindsay Lohan type was relatable in a warts and all, root-for-her-still sort of way. Similarly, I cannot believe that nothing ever beat Kristen Bell in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but all of the vaunted end-of-year awards contenders left me cold save for Cruz's Academy Award winning work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. What separated Bell was the fact that her character was supposed to be one note comedy relief. Bell somehow managed to make the titular Sarah Marshall engaging, tortured, funny and more than a little bit justified. Her willingness to poke fun at herself over the atrocity that was Pulse was a serendipitous bonus. I thought Forgetting Sarah Marshall was much better than it had any reason to be, and the key to it was the presence of Bell and co-star Mila Kunis, who also makes the top three. I feel rather confident that my Best Supporting Actress top ten is unlike any other ballot you saw this past year.

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