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A few of my favorite films of the year

Posted August 14th, 2008 by Aaron Johnson in Movies

Here are some brief film reviews I wrote as part of a discussion on the Integral Naked forums.  I thought I'd post them seperately here.

Hancock- This film really adds something substantial to the whole superhero narrative, which I see as the culmination of the great American myth.  Will Smith is excellent in this film, and his gritty persona and devil-may-care attitude is a bit of a departure for him, as he generally seems to play more of a "nice guy".  The essential joke of the film is that even a superhero needs a public relations manager, and Jason Batemen fills this role with lightness and sincerity.  It says a lot about social responsibility, as well, and I walked out of the film particularly aware of my karmic footprint, and loving every minute of it.  It's a comedy that's not afraid of sincerity; a great opportunity to laugh and cry and be inspired, and I feel like it would have been very hard to accomplish this without Will Smith, who takes on the role with a kind of haphazard yet somehow lovingly calculated charisma that is vital to the message of the film. Oh, and Charlize Theron performs perfectly the role of the skeptical-but-loving motherly protector, a perfect antithesis to Smith's rough-around-the-edges superhero charm and Batemen's save-the-world optimistic spirit.

WALL-E- This film is way undersold in the trailers.  It is absolutely a space epic in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey (several references to this film are made, as well).  I've always loved Pixar films, and this is probably their best.
 
Cloverfield- It's been a little while since I saw this in theaters, but I can still feel the adrenaline pumping in my veins after seeing this for the first time.  It uses contemporary consumer technology (the personal video camera that is vital to the Youtube age of our collective social construct) as a way to show how our cultural lens filters our understanding of the vastness of our world, all the immense, awful, catastrophic powers so far beyond our understanding and control, and all this is perfectly embodied in the Cloverfield monster, expertly constructed, its intricacies slowly and suspensfully revealed, with a mastery that gives us a momentous sense of event.  Ultimately, we look into the monster's face and see only ourselves, searching desperately for love and understanding, but the films characters, and most of its audience, tragically miss that fact, and that is precisely the point.
 
Speed Racer- This film was written and directed by the Wachowski Brothers, who did the Matrix Trilogy, and if one looks just beyond its candy-coated exterior, one finds a work just as amazing as their previous films, and, I believe, an important piece of the future of filmmaking.  The film, in its visual language, shows us infinite layers of depth, flattened before our eyes into a brilliant surface of incomprehensible luminosity (all this arrives to us in the form of a dream-like racecar, racing onward into infinity).  This, to me, is metaphor for the film's overall goal.  Due to its multiple layers of depth, it brings people together from multiple stations of life along the spiral of evolving consciousness, all in communion through the appreciation of a single work of art for a few fleeting hours.  Speed Racer is the Wachowski Brothers' first attempt at a family film, and in content it seems to reflect on the nature of family, and what ties family and friends together if not the mythic-traditional roles and associations forwarded by most "family-friendly" films.  It seems to conclude that a family congregate around each other in service of art, one's karma, one's work in the world, or "what I am here to do".  A family, in Speed Racer's vision, provides the warm embrace and the room to grow required for one to embody the infinite love and light inherent in this and every moment, and expand out into it ever more each day.  And sometimes that creative, artistic embodiment finds expression through a machine.  And sometimes that machine is a racecar.  There are plenty more subtle philosophical reflections in the film that I'd love, such as comments on the relationship between man and machine, the fluidity of time and chronology at subtler levels of reality, and the nature of "enemy" and if he ever existed in the first place.  I cried multiple times out of sheer awe and overwhelming emotion during each of my two viewings of this film in theaters.  Leaving the theater, I felt reacquainted with an immense well of energy I had lost since my childhood, and I knew it could now all be used in service of a brand new day.  It was a shame to see that the film didn't do so well in theaters, but I think the world just wasn't ready quite yet.
 
The Dark Knight- This is a newer film, so I haven't had quite as much time to reflect on it, but my immediate read on it has to do with a persistent mask-beneath-a-mask theme.  In the opening sequence, the Joker wears a clown mask, which only hides another clown beneath, painted onto his face.  Ironically, the Joker's obsession is to unmask the false reality he sees before him of plans and visions and ideals and reveal the truly depraved nature of all humanity.  And he's right, within all of us is the capacity to take food from a starving baby's mouth.  All one has to do is push and push and push.  But Batman sees another side of the story.  He sees that there is also, within human beings, great potential, the capacity for greatness, and he embodies that greatness for us, as the mythic figure of the superhero, to inspire us to see it within ourselves.  It doesn't matter that this greatness lies in a mask, because all thoughts and images and concepts are masks, because if one focuses solely on "unmasking" the sinister "truth," the way it "really is," there will always be a mask beneath a mask beneath a mask.  But the Joker cannot see beneath the mask he wears himself, as he has made himself nothing but a mask, an archetypal foil who requires a larger-than-life figure like Batman to engage with in epic struggle order to find any sense of completion.  The Joker cannot see that a mask can be real, if the mask is made with love.  He cannot see that we can "make our own luck" as Harvey Dent suggests.  Of course, the Joker's role as an unmasking agent of chaos is vital to this message.  One cannot know whether one's mask truly embodies the force of light and love if it cannot withstand the forces of chaos.  A great mask must be able to withstand unmasking.  I have a hard time thinking of anyone who could embody the dark, murky, and viscuous nature of this process better than Heath Ledger, and he is an artist who will be sorely missed in this world.  I think this is one of the most important films in several years, and I don't think early suggestions I've heard that it may rank with epics like Citizen Kane and The Godfather, in the big scheme of things, were any exaggeration.  It may even get several Academy Award nominations, which would put superhero films on the map in a brand new way.