Articles - Best of 2008 - andyconway.net

The Best of 2008

In Bruges

FILMS OF THE YEAR

I loved Be Kind Rewind so much that I fully expected it to be my movie of the year back in March. Many people found it silly, but I guess I just go for ironic deconstructions of Capraesque feelgood with a side order of Fats Waller. So sue me.

In Bruges ran it close with a tragicomic script that had me sniggering for the entire two hours as a couple of mismatched hitmen wandered round the quaint medieval town trying to avoid talking about the disastrous job they're hiding from.

Man on Wire, of all things a documentary, transported me to a very magical place. One of the most entertaining movies of the year, and possibly the greatest heist movie ever made?

Wall-E knocked me for six. A children's film with a stunning dialogue-free opening act following the daily routine of a lone robot cleaning up a post-apocalyptic Earth. If it were French it would be hailed as the film of the decade for that alone. But it also developed into a brilliant romantic saving humanity caper that was fresh, funny, fast and finespun*.

Obscure Indie gem of the year was Orgies and the Meaning of Life, Brad T Gottfred's brilliant account of trying to find the woman who can liberate him from his addiction to orgy fantasies, while trying to find an ending for his book about an orgy-obsessed stick figure searching for a portal to the three dimensional world. My kinda movie.

Alex Holdridge ran it close with his Mumblecore flick, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, about a group of LA slackers looking for love on New Year's Eve.

I'm an afficionado of romcoms, probably due to my abiding love of 1930s screwball, and I've watched some truly awful ones just for research, but it's a genre that has been looking jaded for many years now, so it was nice to see a fresh take on it provided by the much underrated Definitely, Maybe. Hopefully it's the sign that things are on the up for romcom and they'll be worth watching again.

TV SERIES OF THE YEAR

UK telly didn't offer much for me this year except for Georgian police procedural City of Vice. What a fantastic premise: famous author Henry Fielding and his blind brother set up London's first police force. The series hit the ground running with a superb example of a midcut pilot, only for us to realise that someone at Channel 4 mislabelled the tapes and the much more conservative, slow, spoon-feeding pilot was being shown at the end. A lesson for us all (not only Channel 4) that audiences don't need laborious set up. If you hit the ground running they will run with you.

Schoolboy sitcom The Inbetweeners was funnier, sharper, wittier than any of its adult rivals. I wanted to be annoyed by that, but I just laughed my balls off instead.

But, like many of you, I spent most of my year hopelessly hooked on US drama series.

I've raved about Battlestar Galactica many times before so I'll spare you a panegyric on its soon to be concluded brilliant fourth season (but fuck me, what a mid-season climax that was: they've reached Earth - and it's shit).

I'll drool over the second season of Mad Men instead. This provided acting, production values and writing so wonderful that each episode felt like it was giving you sexual favours. For free! Friends have told me they can't watch this series because they don't see the point; can't see what it's trying to say or where it's trying to get to. They have missed the point. Mad Men telegraphs its points via the smallest of gestures; through epiphanies, not catastrophes.

Other dramas to die for were Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was always more poignant and philosophical than any drama about killer robots from the future has a right to be (see review), and Breaking Bad, the harrowing story of a terminally ill chemistry teacher becoming a drug lord. There was no 2008 TV moment more powerful than Bryan Cranstone's death mask of horror at seeing the violent extremity of the new drug he had put on the streets, while Gnarls Barkley moaned Who's Gonna Save My Soul Now? The second season cannot come quickly enough.

All of which were intensely deep and serious. But when I wanted to sit back and have some fun, I reached for the delights of espionage comedies Burn Notice and Chuck (see review), the second season of Californication, which just got better and better, and the Entourage guys, now in their fifth season, who show no signs whatsoever of getting tired.

Taking that half-hour dramedy format and giving it a UK spin was the second season of Lucy Prebble's Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, ITV2's late night secret delight, which still deserves a much wider audience (see my interview with Lucy). We can do it as well as the Americans here - we just don't always realise it when we have.

* I know, I know, but it's the only word for subtle in the thesaurus that starts with an F.

Content :

FILMS OF THE YEAR

TV SERIES OF THE YEAR