Voice-LA Weekly. "Film Poll 2008."

"All hail Andrew Stanton's WALL•E - even us!" J Hoberman: "Sometimes, the movies really are universal. And so a major studio's mainstream, multiplex, mega-million-dollar-grossing, Oscar-friendly 'summer movie' resoundingly won the ninth annual Village Voice-LA Weekly poll of (mainly) alt-press critics, named on 35 of 81 ballots.... Not just the winner on points, WALL•E was also the movie about which critics felt most strongly.... That can only be quantified by the Passiondex^TM - a form of data-crunching developed with a nerdiness worthy of WALL•E."

Topping J Hoberman's own list is The Flight of the Red Balloon: "In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental performances, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius."

"2008 was that rare year in which critics and audiences saw eye to eye on at least two of the year's best films, with The Dark Knight and WALL•E sitting pretty on many '10 best' lists while also ranking among the year's five highest-grossing releases," notes Scott Foundas:

Does that mean Hollywood is getting better, or Indiewood merely worse? I'd propose that the verdict is out on the former and all but in on the latter, with the majors and mini-majors (those that are still in business) having effectively laid claim to the most promising indie talent (such as Christopher Nolan) and given them surprising creative freedom, while the one-time fertile terrain of true American independent cinema has turned depressingly fallow. If anything, all that the flash-in-the-pan hipster "movement" disaffectionately known (by those who knew it at all) as Mumblecore seems to have left in its wake is an unexpected nostalgia for those would-be Andersons (Wes or PT), Soderberghs and Tarantinos whose somewhat livelier brand of navel-gazing set the tone for the previous decade of Sundance follies.

And his #1's a tie between Jia Zhangke's Still Life and Wang Bing's Fengming: A Chinese Memoir.

Ella Taylor names Waltz with Bashir as her #1: "If ever there was proof that psychic agonies are not always best represented by realism, it's Ari Folman's soulful animated documentary about the deferred torment of former Israeli soldiers, himself included, who witnessed the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian Phalangists in the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps in 1982."

2008 finds independent filmmakers "stranded, as distributors cinch their wallets, exhibitors look vainly for indie success stories, and marketing costs continue to skyrocket in a flatlining economy," writes Jim Ridley. "Even so, a few models suggest ways to reboot or reroute a system that filmmakers and programmers agree needs fixing. In a year that has seen a few narrative features opt for self-distribution - director Randall Miller's Bottle Shock (which earned a respectable $4 million); the indie comedy Last Stop for Paul; Ronald Bronstein's way-underground whatsit Frownland - perhaps the most illustrative example of current conditions is Lance Hammer's Ballast."

Will 3D save the movies? Jeffrey Katzenberg thinks so. Robert Wilonsky reports.

Posted by dwhudson at December 31, 2008 8:55 AM