My year in film: 2008

I think it’s only natural for our horizons to become broader as we get older, partly down to familiarity I guess and partly down to a greater understanding and willingness to try something new. Musically this has been something I’ve witnessed before and I think 2008 was the year it really happened for me with film. Now I’ve always been a big fan of films and watched as much and as many films as I could, but last year I really felt like I stepped out of what I had always watched and liked to catch up on some history, seek out more esoteric and lesser known works and to get to grips with film more as a medium as well as entertainment. Not that I’ve suddenly come over all avant-garde where I won’t even consider a film unless it’s 3 hours long with subtitles and set in 1936 Paris with extended shots of clouds and trees, but I think the range of what I have seen and enjoyed has greatly improved. A large contributor to this change has been the existence of a certain film-rental company from whom I receive regular films through the post. The ease of adding films to my list and the random nature of what I get sent I have really enjoyed, and the depth of the library has helped me start to plug the great gaps on film knowledge that I have regarding films dated earlier than 1980. In fact my previous aversion to older films, born I presume of a relish of the new and an unfamiliarity with cinema history, along with a stubbornly held belief that such films were old fashioned or boring, is slowly dissipating. One of the advantages however to being averse to older films for so long means that I now have a wealth of significant films to dive into and discover. In the last few months alone I have seen for the first time films such as Apocalypse Now, Duck Soup, The Apartment, and Vertigo which is just the start. However I’m not completely recanting my modernistic leanings, and have of course watched and enjoyed many more up to date films as well, though from a slightly wider spectrum than in the past. So if I talk about the year in film to me it is not just about the films released in 2008 but those I have seen and experienced for the first time in the last 12 months. A year in which I was floored by the manic genius of the Marx Brothers, in which the greatest love story I witnessed was between two machines hundreds of years in the future, where for once the highest grossing film of the year was also one of the best, where I finally understood at least some of why the Coen brothers are so highly regarded and where I still had time to enjoy the low-brow but puppet filled hilarity of Forgetting Sarah Marshall (well OK not puppet filled, per-se but certainly more puppet filled than any other film I saw this year.) Oh and lastly an honourable mention to the worst film I saw this year which was undoubtedly The Happening, as a fan of M Night it is a shame to see how far he has fallen, it really was a painful experience. And whilst it would be unfair not be mention the horrible performances in the film as well I will simply attribute them to a director who rather lost the plot, thus exonerating the lovely Zooey Deschanel from any criticism, as it should be. So there will be no top [insert number here] list from me this year, but I will leave with a list of the films I appreciated, enjoyed and that affected me the most in the last 12 months and the hope that this voyage of discovery I find myself on (one filled with awful cliché’s apparently…) continues throughout 2009 and that I am able to at least share some of what I find in this very space. So I hope you’re having a fantastic new year and I’ll be back real soon. Not a best of list for 2008 but a list of films I liked a lot in no particular order: (catchy title, huh?) The Assassination of Jesse James Wall-E Cloverfield There Will be Blood Brazil Duck Soup Gone Baby Gone The Dark Knight Apocalypse Now The Apartment Rushmore Crimes and Misdemeanours Before Sunrise Lars and the Real Girl Into the Wild