This year was a roller coaster of a year. A lot of things happened both good and bad and the end of it would find me single and facing a new landscape for my future. The events of this year really moved.
First and foremost, Katie and I were offered two more book deals, one specifically for ghost stories in Tucson and one specifically for Pheonix. Because of that, the move which was intended to be temporary became permanent and it was decided that my ex and step-son would move to Tucson. Before that happened, the first book, Scare-izona: A Travel Guild to Arizona’s Spookiest Spots (available on Amazon!), was released in stores. I remember the first time I saw it on the shelves and rather than feeling elated, I was being screamed at on the phone by my ex-wife. Tough.
The book came out in March and Katie and I started getting things going for the two new books. We also started booking ghost talks and book signings to promote the first book. These were a lot of fun but generally speaking, in Tucson at least, I was often treated as an also-ran presumably because my name came second on the cover because of the alphabet. I know it sounds like sour grapes, but the level of disrespect I got was kind of astounding. There wouldn’t be chairs for me, my name would be left off promotional material and name tags…it happened all the time and it was a real bummer while trying to feel proud of something I had been trying to accomplish my whole life.
Probably the worst was not this year but the next year at Tucson Festival of Books in which we were trying to find our booth/table at the area designated for authors to find their booth/table and a supervisor came over to yell at us that this was for authors only to find their booth/table and we needed to leave. After Katie explained that is what we were and what we were doing, we were escorted to a table with a name plate for her and nothing for me including a chair. This is why I have never gone back to the Tucson Festival of Books despite years of telling me how awesome it is. The Festival can fuck themselves.
Now again I know this sounds like privileged whining or something but I upended my life and worked enormously hard to co-write that book and it is a really bad feeling to be ignored an disrespected as it you drove by your co-author’s house once while they were writing the book. It is worth mentioning that this treatment has been exclusive to Tucson. I have never had anything like this every happen at events in Phoenix. For all the talk about how great and inclusive the art scene is in Tucson, I have had entirely the opposite experience as an author.
Now, it is important to be clear that the book being published was amazing and while there have been some bumps in the road, it has opened a lot of doors that would have been otherwise closed to me. It was not wasted effort and I am very proud of the accomplishment. It put me next to some amazing people and delivered some amazing experiences. Those experiences far outnumber the negative ones. But when writing about this particular year and this particular experience, it was rough.
Katie, who is a fantastic writer and one of the funniest people I have ever met, applied for and got a job writing for a blog called Up My Own Ass, which specialized in slice of life and humorous lifestyle pieces. I was very happy for her and a little bummed I hadn’t known about it to apply as well. Her pieces for Up My Own Ass were absolutely awesome.
Not long after that, Katie and I were asked to do a charity ghost tour of downtown Tucson in cooperation with the Tucson Train Museum. We had never done anything like that and we were sort of stepping in for some people who were supposed to do it but dropped out. In those days, the division of labor between us when it came to talks and appearances was that Katie was really good at making arrangements and setting things up (which terrified me) and I was much more comfortable doing to public speaking (it kind of terrified her at the time). So I did most of the talking on the ghost tour, which was our way. It was kind of impromptu and I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare outside of what I already knew about the ghostly goings on of the downtown area. Because of this, I leaned pretty heavily into comedy. I had not anticipated how much telling everyone that El Charro invented the chimichanga would figure into the tour or how funny everyone would think it was for me to mention whenever I ran out of other things to say, but it was a hit.
Katie had invited Riyad, the owner of Up My Own Ass, and some of the other writers to come to see the tour. After the tour was over, she introduced me and he said that he thought I was really funny. She said ‘I think he would be a great addition to the site’ and he said ‘I agree.’ So, he offered me a spot writing on Up My Own Ass and the more tech/gaming sister site The Break It Down Blog. I took it and it started out with me writing culture commentary and editorials about gaming. This eventually changed into writing film and video game reviews when Riyad consolidated the Break It Down Blog and Up My Own Ass into the Buzz Media. Many years later, he would get a job with Paypal and close down the Buzz Media but he gave me all of my work and helped me start my own site, the Gentlemen Media which as it happens is where you are reading this right now. But that is really getting ahead of myself. It all started here on that ghost tour, and all thanks to Katie.
I did some more acting this year. The movie that Peter Leon had asked me if I was interested in, Night on Fire, happened this year and it put me around more movie making people. I developed more friendships here and ended up hanging out with Peter quite a bit during filming because he and I actually showed up on time. There were a lot of nights of us talking about movies and just generally becoming friends. This would, obviously, lead to a lot more in the future.
Because of the open marriage my ex and I had agreed upon, I met some different people that I dated and one of those in particular stood out. We had a really great first date, a really weird second date in which we saw Teeth at the Loft, a film about a girl with vagina dentata, and saw Hard Candy on a third date, a film about a girl who traps and tortures a pedophile. It was an interesting succession of dates. When my ex and I separated and she went back to Arkansas, this person, who I am not naming any more than I have named any exes here, and I decided we wanted to be exclusive together.
I am not sure why we decided to do that as she was poly and so was I at that point, but we did. She will figure more prominently into the story in the next couple of years but this is when we met and started seeing each other.
The marriage ended fairly shortly after my ex moved her. There are a lot of reasons for that and I am not going to get into details here. It was very, very bad though and there was a lot of this year that was even more painful than things had been in Arkansas, but I had more support here and that made a lot of difference in how I felt and how I handled it. I did not feel as trapped anymore and my resources were more stable than they had been. The divorce was bitter and contentious, and didn’t fully progress to the end until after my first royalty check came and it was $30. I bought a bluray of the Fall with it but I had to kick in for tax. This convinced her to stop pushing for ‘future earnings’ and thus we were divorced.
I was both excited and crushed. Excited to be out of it and crushed that I was now twice divorced in my early 30s. I tried my best to roll with it though and the next year and most of the one after turned out pretty amazing. As ever, darkness loomed but this was the embryonic stages of a much better part of my life that continues to this day. There are some pretty big tragedies to come, however, so don’t get too comfortable.
On the movie front, this year was punctuated by a lot of movie going and movie watching. The last movie my ex and I watched together before separating was Pineapple Express, which I remember mostly because we accidentally went into the wrong theater (they are right next to each other at Park Place and confuse the hell out of most people even now) and we didn’t realize our mistake until Jet Li’s name appeared in the credits and we realized it was the Mummy. This is a hard list this week because there are a ton of movies this year that I love and have become comfort movies for me. Alas, I have locked myself into this format so this format I will continue. The runners up are deeper and often more personal to me than usual so pay attention to them. They are below.
Runners up: Cloverfield, Teeth, Semi-Pro, Run Fatboy Run, Street Kings, Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay, Redbelt, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (fuck you, I like it), War Inc, The Incredible Hulk, Get Smart, Wanted, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Step Brothers, X-Files: I Want to Believe, Midnight Meat Train, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Pineapple Express, The Rocker, Hamlet 2, Burn After Reading, Changeling, RocknRolla, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Role Models, Quantum of Solace (if you watch Casino Royale right before hand), Four Christmases, The Wrestler, and Revolutionary Road.
If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 2008 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 18-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!
1.Dark Knight-Christopher Nolan
The second in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the Dark Knight is widely considered one of the best superhero movies ever made.
Introducing both the Joker (Heath Ledger) and Two-Face (Aaron Eckheart) to this Batman series, the Dark Knight leaned heavily into crime films like Heat for inspiration while keeping Batman largely grounded in the more realistic world established in Batman Begins, the Dark Knight overcame negative casting reactions to canonize it as the definitive Batman film. That position is debatable, and people certainly do, but the Dark Knight erased the silly Joel Shumaker bullshit once and for all and made Batman feel prestige and legitimate in a away even the previous film hadn’t managed.
The Dark Knight was also the real major announcement of Christopher Nolan as an important filmmaker. He had done great work before this with Memento, Insomnia, and, the Prestige but the Dark Knight made him a household name. Inception would follow and it would be off to the races.
The Dark Knight was a cultural phenomenon, so much that it is hard to know what to write that hasn’t been covered a million times over. The making of it is a saga unto itself with the devastating death of Heath Ledger during post-production, the destruction of one of only four IMAX cameras in the world, calls to the police about the car chases in Chicago, and panic over promotional stunts including a phone in a cake that people thought was a bomb being just a few.
The pre-release controversy over Heath Ledger being cast as the Joker was loud and widespread quieted only by an early teaser in which his voice and laugh were heard for the first time. It was put to rest entirely when the movie released and Ledger’s incredible, character defining performance spoke for him from beyond the grave. He won a post-humous best supporting actor Oscar for this and it was so good and so deep of a performance, it led to speculation that being so deep in the disturbing mindset of the character led to his death. His family has refuted this definitively as they say that he was in good spirits after the filming was completed and very happy with it. His death was the result of a drug interaction between sleep meds and prescription meds that his sister had warned him not to mix the night before he died. It is as tragic of a loss of an actor as we have ever had and it is hard not to imagine the things he could have done had he lived. His body of work speaks to much more to come and the world is poorer for not having him in it.
The Dark Knight is largely considered to be the reason that the Best Picture category expanded from five to 10 slots as most people held that this and Wall-E would have had there been room. I haven’t seen any of the best picture nominees for this year so I can’t speak to their worthiness as nominees, but I do think that it is a travesty that the Dark Knight was not included.
The performances here were all top notch across the board, including Magee Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes as Rachel. The change felt like a seamless glow up which is important because a lot of the emotional throughline of this movie would not have worked if she didn’t. Aaron Eckhart does incredible work as Harvey Dent and Two-Face. Christian Bale kills it as Bruce Wayne both in public and out of it, and continues to rule as Batman, although his gravely Batman voice is hilariously over the top. Michael Caine and Gary Oldman continue to kill as Alfred and Commissioner Gordon respectively. Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox continues to be fantastic and he really shines here.
Even the smaller parts in this movie are filled with amazing actors including William Fichtner, Anthony Michael Hall, Eric Roberts, Michael Jai White, Nestor Carbonell, Nicky Katt, Chin Han, and Cillian Murphy. This was also the theatrical debut of David Dastmalchian as one of Joker’s thugs and he leaves a real impression. The casting of this movie is fantastic top to bottom.
The Dark Knight represents an interesting intersection in superhero movies. The other fork in the road appears in the number two slot in this list but the Dark Knight represents that ‘dark and gritty’ fork. For many years, and sometimes even still, whenever a comic book property didn’t pan out they took the lesson that it should have been more like the Dark Knight. Sometimes the lesson was ‘we need to make this character dark and gritty to be like the Dark Knight regardless of whether that character would fit in that kind of ton at all. This is the earth from which the Man of Steel and the Synderverse grew and we are still feeling the effects of this today.
For my part, I saw the Dark Knight at the theater and loved it immediately. I saw it several times and bought it immediately when it came out on Bluray. It became an almost instant touchpoint with my friends and I and a shorthand while making movies. It was not the definitive Batman movie for me but at the time it was my favorite.
I wasn’t an enormous fan of Batman Begins. I liked it but it seemed to be missing something for me. I saw that after a shift at Gamestop while in Arkansas with co-workers and it left me kind of cold. Part of that might have been my state of mind and wellbeing at the time but subsequent viewings have not raised it much in my esteem. So, when I went into the Dark Kight, I was hopeful but nervous. That nervousness was erased immediately and even relationship stress couldn’t dampen how much I loved this movie.
My feelings remain the same now as they have ever been although I think Batman as a character has been done better since. Batman as a player in a crime saga has not been done better and it is kind of doubtful that it will. It has just enough of the Long Halloween to make it feel lore accurate in the crime aspects and it has enough realism to ground it and make it feel less fantastical than typical superhero movies. Some of the logistical details in the movie are preposterous, and I have always found the writing clunky around explaining RICO and how they come to it (as if any DA trying to prosecute organized crime hadn’t been thinking RICO to begin with) but it doesn’t really matter. The movie just works and it rocks.
2.Iron Man-Jon Favreau
The first movie in Marvel’s last ditch effort to stay in the game, Iron Man was made, along with the Incredible Hulk, in a gamble to bet it all on two movies and then continue from there if they made money. It worked very, very well.
This is a fairly typical super hero origin story that introduces Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr), the billionaire heir to a global weapons manufacturer who gets a reality check when he is taken hostage by terrorists and forced to work on a weapons system that he was in the middle east trying to sell. He is aided by Yensin (Shaun Toub) who is a fellow prisoner, and who saved Tony’s life by hooking him up to a car battery and a magnet to keep pieces of shrapnel from getting to his heart. With Yensin’s help, Tony builds himself a metal suit in order to escape by making a miniature version of the Arc Reactor, a sustainable power source that run a city for decades.
Upon breaking out, Tony renounces making weapons much to the chagrin of his business partner Obediah Stane( Jeff Bridges) and his Air Force buddy Rhodey (Terrance Howard). Tony becomes obsessed with refining his armor design and perfecting the arc reactor and ultimately uses the armor to stop terrorists who are using Stark Tech weapons. Things become dicey when it is revealed that Stane was behind the terrorists who kidnapped Tony and tries to beat Tony with his own Iron Monger armor.
Iron Man was not a character that non-comics fans were particularly familiar with so putting half of their chips on him while betting on their future was a tricky proposition. Marvel had licensed out its top tier properties like Spider-man, X-men, and Fantastic Four to other studios in order to save themselves from bankruptcy years earlier so they had to use the characters they still had rights to and what sounded most accessible for audiences. So Iron Man was up first and it was risky. The Incredible Hulk seemed like a safer bet. He was much more well known thanks to the TV show and previous Ang Lee movie. Iron Man was a harder sell and there was a lot of skepticism about it in the run up to release.
An early rumor claiming that Iron Man wouldn’t fly caused a lot of fear. Robert Downey Jr’s casting was considered a risk given his legal troubles just a few years earlier. Fans of the comics largely recognized that he would be a good choice but a lot of them also thought that someone like Tom Cruise would be the better move. Such a risk was Downey Jr’s casting that Terrance Howard was paid more money to play Rhodey (4 million to Downey Jr’s 2.5).
Jon Favreau was largely untested as a director when he signed on to do this. He had boxing comedy Made, Christmas comedy Elf, and space themed Jumanji clone Zathura under his belt but there was some anxiety amongst fans about whether or not he would be up to a superhero movie of this scale. That the movie started filming without a completed script with almost no written dialogue did not help fan anxiety going into the movie.
It worked. The dialogue in the movie was mostly improvised or written on the spot, which was a bit of a difficulty for Jeff Bridges and Gwenyth Paltrow who were not used to working that way, but the approach led to dialogue that felt more natural and added some humor in it that would otherwise be missing in most superhero movies. A lot of that comes down to Downey Jr and his take on Tony Stark. He made him a bit more eccentric and snarky than the Tony of the comics and it really set the tone not just for this movie but the MCU moving forward.
It is kind of rough to try to launch a new movie studio on the back of an untested hero and creative team in the same year as rival DC puts out a superhero masterpiece, but Marvel did just that and succeeded with huge critical approval and box office. It sat at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and earned $585 million worldwide off an estimated budget of $140 million. It performed better than the Incredible Hulk in the same year despite that movie featuring a more well-known character. It rightfully takes its place next to the Dark Knight, despite the Dark Knight performing much better at the box office, and represents a fresh take on how to do this: just make the comic without being ashamed of it.
Superhero movies before this point had always maintained some amount of embarrassment for being superhero movies. The X-Men threw them in black leather jumpsuits, Spider-man excised some aspects of the character to make him more ‘realistic.’ Even the Donner Superman changed things around to make it more palatable for non-comic fan audiences. Iron Man didn’t really do any of that.
Now, sure, there are some story changes here from the comics like Obediah Stane being a Stark Enterprises employee rather than heading a rival company, but for the most part the Iron Man in the movie is the Iron Man of the comics. The movie has its own flavor in the performances but none of that was because anyone was embarrassed to be telling a superhero movie. As a comic fan, I can say definitively that this made me very happy.
The reverberations felt from this movie cannot be overstated. In the modern filmmaking era, this is a real dividing point: before the MCU and after and this movie is the start of all that. The fact that we are seeing Robert Downey Jr return as Dr Doom in Avengers Doomsday in just over a month and it is the 39th(!!!) movie in the franchise is testament to how important Iron Man is. If this movie didn’t work, the last 18 years would have been a lot different for film.
I saw this in the theater, obviously, and was so excited. I have been reading Iron Man comics since I was a kid and while he and the Avengers were never as big of a deal to me as Spider-man and the X-Men, I still dug him as a character. I was very much in the Robert Downey Jr is perfect for Tony Stark and thought it was the most perfect superhero casting since Patrick Stewart (RIP) was cast as Professor X. I was so excited when the post credit scene (which Marvel did not invent but definitely popularized) included Nick Fury and an Avengers reference. Not just Nick Fury but Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury. This was fairly monumental to me.
These sorts of details and comics references absolutely lit up my dopamine and got me so invested. Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson being an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. excited me and referenced a larger world that existed and that maybe we could get. Changing Jarvis from Tony’s butler to his AI J.A.R.V.I.S. that was based on his dad’s butler was a brilliant way to modernize and distance from Batman without letting the comics go. Hinting that Rhodey would be come War Machine with just showing a silver suit and having him say ‘Next time Baby!’ was a reward for the comics faithful without alienating non-comics viewers. Having a half made Captain America shield signaled more to come without overpowering things. The casting of Samuel L Jackson was really the final treat for me. In the Ultimate comics line, the Nick Fury in that universe looks like Samuel L Jackson and when they asked for permission for his likeness rights, he granted them on the condition that he get to play him if there was ever a movie. Seeing him show up at the end of Iron Man was the perfect bit of easter egg and bait for comics fans. How could they not support these movies after this?
I have always been more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like DC. I love Batman and I read Green Arrow and Green Lantern comics on the regular when I was a kid. But Marvel is more my jam. This Iron Man movie gave me a good Iron Man story but it also did it with a respect and care that I was not ready for. It hinted at the larger world without feeling like it was pandering or promoting. It was exactly what I would have hoped for in a movie like this. And it started a fire that still burns today. I fucking love the MCU and I love where it began. Iron Man rocks and is still super watchable today. And for the most part, the movies moving forward just keep getting better. You are going to read a lot about them on this list moving forward so get ready.
3.Forgetting Sarah Marshall-Nicholas Stoller
A comedy about a guy who gets broken up with and flees to Hawaii to recover only to find that she and her mega famous boyfriend are staying at the same hotel, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a hilarious and rewatchable movie that can also be emotionally devastating if you happen to see it while going through a divorce.
Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) is composer for TV show music who is dating Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), an actress on the popular crime show Peter makes music for. Things are going great until she comes back from shooting a movie and breaks up with him, while he is naked. This sends Peter into a tailspin, especially when he learns that she is dating mega famous rock start Aldous Snow (human garbage Russell Brand). After several disastrous attempts to move on in the dating scene, Peter’s step-brother Brian (Bill Hader) convinces him to get away to Hawaii. Upon arriving and attempting to check in at a hotel that is full aside from the Caputo Suite, a very expensive room for celebrities like Oprah, Peter discovers that Sarah and Aldous are staying at the same hotel. The desk clerk, Rachel (Mila Kunis), takes pity on him and puts him in the Caputo Suite for a regular rate.
What follows is a series of misadventures as Peter tries to heal while his ex is around and he starts a romance with Rachel. Paul Rudd, Jack McBrayer, Jonah Hill, and Taylor Wily make up the supporting cast of quirky characters who help Peter (or hinder him depending on point of view) and they are all delightful. Peter’s dream of a puppet based Dracula musical further solidifies this movie as a comedy classic for me.
I have to address that Russell Brand was just convicted two days ago of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. It is absolutely stomach churning to have to constantly write these sorts of caveats in entries about movies I love. Brand is funny in this movie but he is a piece of shit and my love for this film is in no way an endorsement of him. I want to make that clear. Fuck Russell Brand.
I saw this movie in the theater before the separation and divorce started but, obviously, there were already big problems. This was both a rough watch and a bit of catharsis all rolled in one. It became somewhat totemic for me after the divorce and has served me well in that context in the years since. More than that, it is just really funny and I absolutely love Jason Segel’s writing and performance and I love Nick Stoller as a director. He continues to do great work to this day but my love for him started here.
This is one of those movies that I can put in when I am upset, and it will cheer me up. Role Models, which also came out this year, is another. The soundtrack is also pretty awesome with a bunch of comedy songs used in the movie including tracks from the Dracula musical which are absolutely next-level. I want a puppet Dracula musical so bad I can taste it. I really need that to happen at some point. One time that is not appropriate to pop this on is on an airplane flying back to Hawaii because you think it might be fun to watch a movie set in the place that you just left. This is especially true if you forget about the naked break up with Peter’s dick in full view doing a bit of helicoptering. Likewise if you forget about the copious amounts of sex scenes. Moana is a much better choice, just saying.
4.Tropic Thunder-Ben Stiller
A somewhat controversial comedy about actors attempting to make a Vietnam war movie who find themselves in a real conflict with a Vietnamese drug army, Tropic Thunder is a searing indictment of the Hollywood movie making machine from directors to agents to producers and everyone in between.
The movie starts en media res as the production on an adaptation of a war memoire by ‘Four Leaf’ Taback (Nick Nolte) is way over budget and producer Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) puts the screws to director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan). In an effort to reign in the egos of his actors Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr), Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), and Alpa Chino (Brandon T Jackson), Cockburn takes Tayback’s advice and decides to shoot the movie guerilla style by taking them out into the jungle with cameras in the trees and no contact with anyone else on the production. When Cockburn steps on a landmine and blows up, the actors are left out alone without survival skills or any idea what is going on. Things are complicated when they run into the Golden Dragon gang and are split into factions as some are captured.
Tropic Thunder is a hilarious mixture of parody and meta comedy that works because of how outlandish and ridiculous it is rather than in spite of it. The satire here is very sharp and it hits its targets with deadly efficiency. Each of the actor characters are archetypical Hollywood actors: Tugg is very much the action star trying to prove his legitimacy as a serious actor, Lazarus is a method actor to the extreme such that he underwent a controversial procedure to darken his skin pigmentation to play a black character, Portnoy is a comedy actor hopelessly addicted to cocaine, Alpa Chino is a rapper trying to act while hocking his energy drink, and Sandusky is an everyman newcomer who actually did the bootcamp and cares about the actual movie.
Everyone is great in this movie but Robert Downey Jr is phenomenal giving a multilayered performance that pokes fun at himself as much as it does anyone else. His self-awareness amplifies the effect as opposed to making it feel awkward and his commitment to the bit is incredible.
That bit, while less controversial than one would imagine, is a bit of magic trick that has not aged as well out of its original context but still works because of how it is handled. Obviously, black face is not good. It is part of a shameful tradition in filmmaking that is sadly burned indelibly on the history of the industry given that the first movie with sound, the Jazz Singer, features Al Jolson in full on real blackface. This is not really that.
The other controversy shares an explanation with the Lazarus bit, which is that Tugg is coming off the failure of his movie Simple Jack which is an attempt by him to grab an Oscar and gain legitimacy by playing a comically exaggerated mentally challenged man. This did not sit well with some audiences at the time but both of these things are good examples of punching down vs punching up in comedy.
Both of the jokes here are not aimed at expense of people of color or people with developmental disability. The jokes are squarely aimed at the shallowness and hubris of some actors in chasing awards and legitimacy. Simple Jack is an overexaggerated example of actors playing people with developmental disabilities in order to win awards. It names names and gives examples. Likewise, the black face here is an extreme example of the ridiculousness of how far some actors go for method acting and how pretentious and ridiculous it is. This is also called out in the movie, particularly by Alpa Chino who takes major exception to a white Australian actor playing a black character. Obviously, I will never try to tell anyone what they can be offended by and that they shouldn’t feel that way but the movie is going for pretty damning satire and is kind of making the same point that people who are offended are. The movie is not on Tugg or Kirk’s side on this and they are being ridiculed and condemned.
I loved this movie a lot and continue to do so. The writing is sharp and hilarious with quotable lines and ridiculous situations abound. The satire here is its real strength and the fact that it can pull it off while dealing in abject absurdity makes it even better. It is definitely not for everyone. Hell, when I tried to show it to my mom, she didn’t get through the fake trailers at the beginning before turning it off. But if you can hang, there is a lot to love here. Also, Tom Cruise is fucking amazing in it.
5.The Fall-Tarsem Singh
Shot in 28 countries across four years and using only existing locations, the Fall is an epic tale that is both heart warming and heart breaking to equal measure.
Taking place in 1920, The Fall tells the story of Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a girl who broke her arm falling from a ladder while picking apples, who befriends Roy Walker (Lee Pace) a silent film actor whose legs are paralyzed after he falls off a bridge doing a movie shoot. At Alexandria’s request, Roy tells her a story of a team of heroes from different backgrounds on a quest to kill a Governor who wronged them. In between storytelling sessions Roy sends Alexandria on missions around the hospital, the purpose of which holds a deadly secret.
The Fall is a magnificent movie. It is beautiful, epic in scope, and absolutely engaging. The performances are incredible, especially from Pace and Untaru. This has made me a lifelong Lee Pace fan and I will watch anything he is involved in with little other provocation.
I saw this with the girl I was dating in the theater. Movie dates with her were pretty interesting in those days. Sometimes the movies would involve genital mutilation and sometimes they would be beautiful, sweeping epics. This movie made me cry so hard the first time I saw it and I was deeply moved by it.
When it came out on Bluray I bought it with my meager royalties from Scare-izona (I am glad I did too because it was out of print and impossible to find for years after) and I showed it to my mom. She loved it as much as I did and it destroyed her as much as it did me. She watched it a lot to the point where I would come in from working outside to find her crying and watching it. I would have to stay and watch the rest. Now it occupies that space in my heart where movies I love that connect me to mom lives. When I watch it now I not only relieve how amazing it is but I get to be with mom for awhile and we get to cry together like we used to on those days 18 years ago.