Delphine Seyrig in Alain Resnais' Muriel

Bay Area film writer Brian Darr polls his fellow San Francisco cinephiles at the end of every year to gather a list of favorite repertory or revival screenings, and reading the entries is always a testament to how much film is available to see outside the house. It's also fun to participate, since it means looking over all the year's screenings that weren't eligible for any sort of awards, even though they're often the highlights of the year. As Brian says, "No two eyes can witness all the splendid film presentations that occur in a year here," and "[c]ollectively, these fifteen lists might provide a reasonably accurate view of the range and depth of cinematic experiences to be had for a Frisco Bay rep-head in 2008."

Here's my entry, and from there you can find the others.

I was extra lucky to participate this year since I was only in San Francisco through May. Still, it was hard to whittle my list to ten. As J. Robert Parks has shown, the offerings in Chicago are rich as well, and one of my resolutions is to take better advantage of them this year.

Tsai cheng-tai / IFC Films

Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon

Happy new year! I've posted my list of favorite films of 2008 at Paste, along with a bunch of extras and comments. Also, although the sequence isn't quite what I had in mind, I have a few more entries for our 2008 in Negative series to post over the next few days. I'd planned to push those out sooner, but the holidays got in the way.

Watch for J. Robert Parks to post his lists here at Daily Plastic soon.

Here's hoping 2009 brings everyone a little stability and brightness.

Merrick Morton / Paramount and Warner Bros.

Taraji P. Henson and Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

As the best-of-2008 lists begin to congeal around a certain body of films, the lists that attract my eye are of course the ones that contain outliers.

For instance: Kent Jones.

He likes Leos Carax and Claire Denis and Hou Hsiao-hsien; I've always appreciated his taste. Last year Hou's latest film, Flight of the Red Balloon, seemed to be underwhelming audiences at festivals (although not all of them) and then earlier this year seemed to slip into American theaters almost unnoticed, along with Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights, as if it were not a remarkable turn of fortune for a long-revered, contemporary Asian master with historically limited success at finding distribution in the US to be screening a film at the art theater of many American downtowns. Jones was one of the film's champions, and I appreciated his efforts on the film's behalf. (How interesting that a year later, Flight of the Red Balloon has just topped the indieWIRE critics poll. Meanwhile, the dentists who vote for the Golden Globes have never heard of the guy.)

For 2008, Jones' list of favorite films is buried inside a special issue of Sight & Sound, but let me pull it out for perusal:

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Guy Ritchie, de-punctuator

From our discussion of the year in film, I must detour for a moment to examine the serious matter of titular ink.

The titles of most of the movies released this year had absolutely no punctuation, so adding even a tiny period, as Oliver Stone did, said something, don't you think? When he called his movie W. he said, hey (or perhaps look), this isn't M or Z or V or any such film. It's W., quaint as can be. In a title so short, even a period claims a good 8-10% of the title's ink, and that's not counting the serifs. The serifs matter. The period matters. This title smiles.

Looking back at the films of 2008, I can see that a punctational vision like Stone's was in short supply. Happy-Go-Lucky is sporting hyphens, sure, and Mamma Mia! is jacked up with an exclamation point, but think of how many more titles could be improved dramatically with a few well-placed marks.

Changeling!
Fireproof!
Saw V!

But we must respect the ability of such a mark to alter a film's thrust, sometimes irrevocably. An errant drip of ink can turn I've Loved You So Long into a Dear John letter (I've Loved You; So Long), create an equivalence that did not exist before (Beverly Hills: Chihuahua), change a title into a Craigslist ad for a vacation rental (Lakeview, Terrace), turn an innocuous teen romp into a Hair ripoff (High: School Musical), or transform a phrase into a sequence of events (Sex, Drive).

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At the opposite end of some sort of rainbow from Roger Ebert is James Quandt, senior programmer of the Cinematheque Ontario and tireless scourer of the globe for lost prints of important films. His work often results in retrospectives that redefine a filmmaker's career or revive interest in forgotten masters. The prints he assembles, if we're lucky, work their way through the world's (too few) cinematheques, and if we're luckier still they end up on DVD, so I've been the indirect beneficiary of his efforts through many darkened screenings at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and now a few at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago.

Plus, I've only seen three of the ten films on his list (or four of the eleven, depending on how you manage the tally), which is perfect. His list appears in Artforum and comes to us online via my friend Girish Shambu. Please click through to see Quandt's top ten films of 2008.

Unlike Ebert's list, which for this active moviegoer elicits a string of yays and nays but very little action, Quandt's list has a different impact: it goes, almost in its entirety, onto my "films to see" list.

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Roger Ebert. He's a film critic of the people and a fan of good movies. He watches a lot of them, and he writes with enviable energy. He's also firmly in touch with the mainstream even as he keeps a toe or two invested in more adventurous films. So his list seems like a fine place to begin.

This year, instead of ranking ten films sequentially he chose to identify twenty features, five documentaries, and one special jury prize, sorting each group alphabetically. Another reason his list is a good place to start is that I've seen all of these films. First, take a look at his list and read his remarks.

He chose the following features (listed alphabetically):

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Every year, the lists. Lists lists lists.

And with each one comes trouble. For example, do we include films that we saw this year or films that were released this year? And how do you define "released?" Rules rules rules.

But more interesting than legalities are the inevitable philosophical problems. For instance, if my list omits a film that many other respected film watchers and blabbermouths have included on their best-of lists, does that mean I didn't like it or didn't see it?

I could answer that question in the accompanying remarks, but even an informative didn't-see-it seems to reinforce the year-end canon, a brick in the wall that keeps out the little movies that few people saw. Bricks. Walls. Slippery slides into oblivion. Make your own metaphor.

There's no solution, of course, but let's see if we can think of a new way to examine the field. Daily Plastic wasn't around last year, but with any luck this will become our tradition: we're going to dig into a number of year-end lists that we find interesting, one by one, day by day, and we'll examine not what they've left out (which will be covered implicitly by our own year-end lists) but by what they've included.

It's "2008 in Negative," not negative as an attitude but negative as a bas-relief.

At the end of the series we'll reveal our own favorites of 2008. I like to eject mine from the movie Jeep as the ball drops on New Year's Eve; my Plastic colleague J. Robert Parks prefers to mull the options well into January. Until then, we'll look at the early birds, the canaries in the mine.

• Roger Ebert
• James Quandt
• tangent: titular ink
• Kent Jones and Benjamin Button
• more coming

And finally, our own lists:

• Rob's Favorite Films of 2008
• J. Robert's Favorite Films of 2008
• Rob's Favorite San Francisco Rep Screenings of 2008
• J. Robert's Favorite Older Films Seen in 2008

You know what would be great? To take Hitler down? And stop the gassing and the conquest and the thing and the guy? Would be an audacious hotshot with the guts to get in there and do it. A guy so good he could do it with one eye tied behind his back. A guy so good he counts his blown-off right-hand as an asset because he can "Heil Hitler" ironically and you can never really call him on it. And I know just the actor to play him.

Stauffenberg hatching his plan.

Stauffenberg selling his plan to Nazis who are starting to question this Third Reich thing, circa 1944.

Stauffenberg psyching himself up for the dangerous mission.

Stauffenberg expressing self-doubt. (deleted scene)

Stauffenberg expressing absolute confidence in the mission and himself.

Stauffenberg upon being told that his paperwork must be signed by the Führer.

Stauffenberg insisting that he blew Hitler up but only after the paperwork was signed.

Stauffenberg, God bless him, expressing outrage that Op Valk was not engaged as planned, wasting the three precious hours that he'd previously gained through ingenuity.

Stauffenberg taking even more charge than he'd taken previously. Must he do everything single-handedly? Time to school these chumps; the only problem is that he lacks a pupil.

Stauffenberg running the German government with an eye toward Berlin.

'Do you think he has a sense of humor?' 'I think his optometrist has a sense of humor.'

Stauffenberg inquiring after the safety of his wife, Frau Stauffenberg.

Stauffenberg coming to the conclusion that Hitler was not blown up and wondering if the mistake was due to faulty depth perception on the part of one of his peers.

Stauffenberg about to be executed but only after naming a name to clarify that the failure was not his but that of Shiva the God of the Wrong Person's Death.

Stauffenberg as remembered by the footnotes of history, steely.

Valkyrie is based on a true story, which I know because the screen says so at the beginning of the film in German. And I know that it says so at the beginning of the film in German because the letters morph into English before they go away. Then we hear the hotshot writing his diary in German, which eventually morphs (audibly) into the English words of Tom Cruise who seems almost frustrated by the cumbersome translation process, as if the hotshot can't be bothered to continue in German when something more serious is at stake. Also: we hear what he writes. Linguistic efficiencies could and will be made.

And the movie's off. A sequence in the middle of the film involves putting a bomb at the Führer's feet, and I quite liked the suspense, even though throughout that stretch I was thinking, "I wish Eddie Izzard were taking down the Führer instead of nervously making a phone call in the background." That's what's nice about this movie. It gives you time to think about what you're seeing. Like: Is Tom Wilkinson speaking only his dependent clauses with a British accent? Is that Peter Cushing back there? And, say, who do you think would win in a peaked-cap face-off between Grand Moff Tarkin, General Zod, and let's say Hitler? That kind of thing.

Then more morphing, this time in the face of the sometimes eye-patched, sometimes digitally walleyed Tom Cruise. It's his steely performance, his 1,000 faces that carry the film, each one revealing a facet of Hotshot Claus von Stauffenberg, each of them determined, each of them steely. If it weren't for that Germano-English text up front, I'd think this guy could probably pull it off. Ice the Führer, engage Operation Valkyrie to gain control of Berlin, gain control of Germany, gain control of Europe, and finally install Field Marshall Goose just in time to put the egg back on the mantel before the Allies arrive to say, "Yo, what the?"

Alas, he had no strafing partner, this hotshot. The rest is footnoted history and symphonic strings.

His wife lived and raised their kids without incident. Did I mention his wife? No matter.

Summit Entertainment

Bella is the new girl in town, and Twilight waits a full hour before revealing to her what the rest of us knew from the moment he strode pale-faced into the school cafeteria: the quiet, glowering boy in her grade is a vampire. It's the skin, it's the brooding look, it's the magnificently gelled hair, it's the slo-mo entrance. Dead giveaways. He doesn't talk to anybody, ever, but, alas, he locks into Bella's gaze, and she smolders for the rest of the film, usually in tight shots that alternate with close-ups of his burning unrest.

Director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown) sees the humor in the portrayal, and her whiffs of wit carry a long, slow setup. When the vampire, Edward, is seated in biology class — still brooding, ever brooding — Hardwicke positions a stuffed bird on the shelf behind him, spreading its wings so they seem to be attached to the scruff of his neck. In Magnolia, P.T. Anderson used a caduceus painted on a back wall to make the sad boy genius in the foreground even more angelic, even more Falconetti-esque, and in Twilight Hardwicke evokes genuine, giddy laughter with the shots of first one wing, then two, the pair growing in prominence as Edward senses Bella's approach through the bio-science doorway.

It's a dangerous thing to confuse children with angels.

But Edward is not, in fact, happy to see her. He holds his head low like the reluctant angel in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. This blue-lipped, aggressively plucked boy is not a reluctant angel, of course, but a reluctant vampire smitten by the girl who should be his prey.

Therein lies his conflict, and therein lies hers, and from the two a familiar story emerges: love at first sight needs no justification; opposites attract; beautiful people attract; dangerous boys attract bold girls who, in time, will benefit from the protection provided by their speed, strength, mystique, and wisdom (or, here, telepathy). Protection from what? It matters not; girls need protecting. From reckless drivers. Rival vampires. What have you.

But — here's the rub — if the boy loses control of himself in the heat of passion he could destroy her. She has an intoxicating scent. She's filled with blood-red deliciousness. Perhaps he would not retract his teeth were they ever to take hold. It's the story of a thousand romances, of two thousand movie teens who struggle against chastity, and it's a story not altogether different from that of poor Peter Parker who cannot declare his love for whatshername because certain ne'er-do-wells would then use her as Spider-Man bait. In short, nothing attracts boys like somebody else's letter jacket. But in this case, the ne'er-do-well is Edward himself. Stuff that duality into your Spidey tights, Peter.

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Colin Powell Reacts to Obama Victory:

More video clips:

• President Bush on the White House lawn
• Condoleezza Rice's comments
• McCain's gracious concession speech
• Obama's excellent acceptance speech

Update:

• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert announce the winner, trying to maintain composure