NYT. "The Year in Culture."

"At the risk of sounding stoned on hope, I offer the following heresy: The movies are fine. Sometimes they're great; occasionally they're magnificent." Opening with an exchange from Happy-Go-Lucky, which appears on both her and AO Scott's list of the "Top Movies of 2008," and then listing many of the reasons to be concerned about the state of the art, Manohla Dargis tries on something new: "There is, of course, perverse pleasure in ending the year with an angry rant, as I have proven in the past, if only to myself. But given the clanging of so much bad news, I thought I would try a change of pace. I'm not sure if optimism becomes me, but it sure feels nice."

Particularly within the context of her piece and the two critics' conversation (podcast) that accompanies the New York Times' big "Year in Culture" package - in which they spontaneously decide that "hope" is the word of the year - this position really isn't as pollyannaish at it might at first seem.

AO Scott whittles his list of ten down to movies that "are not all expressions of optimism, but they are all about the obligations, responsibilities and accidents that bind people together, within and across formally constituted families and communities. And they are also about the refusal to give up, to give in to darkness or despair." And earlier, discussing some of the box office superheroes and awards season hopefuls, he notes that "somehow all this messianism and overblown superheroism rings false, both within individual films and out here in the rumpled, stressed-out, hopeful, uneasy world where movies live. Who will save us? Whom should we kill? These don't strike me as the most useful questions right now, and they are generally not the kind posed by the films I found most challenging and interesting this year, which in general were less concerned with moral abstractions than with ethical predicaments."

"In a disappointing year for serious American movies, two television series, AMC's Mad Men and Showtime's Brotherhood, far outshone in truthfulness and complexity most of what American filmmakers created for the big screen," begins Stephen Holden, who tops his list with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

Posted by dwhudson at December 20, 2008 3:48 AM