SDG here. I wish I had time to post something substantial, but I no sooner recover from the usual January year-end movie crunch — I vote in three critics’ awards as well as putting together my own top 10 list — than February brings something very exciting (and time-consuming!).
I’ll be posting more on that later, but for now, some movie lists worth checking out:
The Christianity Today Movies 2008 Critics Choice Awards have just been posted. Not a bad list at all, though of course I don’t necessarily agree with every film. Don’t miss the “ones that got away,” selected by individual voters including yours truly.
Last week, CTMovies posted the Christianity Today Movies Most Redeeming Films of 2008, also with “ones that got away.”
For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s my own round-up of the best films of last year. (Movies I hope to review sooner rather than later: Doubt, Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Coming this week: Coraline.
Any chance for Valkyrie and Gran Torino?
Cloverfield and Milk are very hard to swallow, indeed…
And I forgot to add Defiance to my previous comment. I really miss more Decent Films reviews for thriller and war flicks.
Probably not for the foreseeable future.
Milk hard to swallow? But it does a body good! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Bear in mind, FWIW, that the films you mentioned are individual critics’ picks, not consensus picks or vote-getters.
Hey, I just reviewed a thriller this week! Defiance is probably off the radar, though.
Good pun. Barbara Nicolosi also came up with a great one about the same movie (“Got Nausea?”
I remember laughing a lot reading reviews for the movie Stay on Rotten Tomatoes. Pretty much everyone there played with its title (“Stay…away from this movie“).
Of CT’s 2008 Critics Choice Awards, Gran Torino, Slumdog Millionaire, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button were not anywhere on your own list.
You’ve promised to review two of these films, but the fact that they are not on your list (while the presently un-reviewed Doubt is) suggests that you’ve seen them, and not liked them. Is my deduction wrong?
Just to be clear, I have not seen those films I mentioned. 🙂
I don’t envy the editors for the angry mail they’re sure to get in the next few weeks. These lists always inspire a tidal wave of rage, with the writers roaring about how all of us are going to hell for the recommendations we’ve made.
I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to say which of the Critics’ Choice “winners” I actually *voted* for, but it’s probably pretty obvious to anybody who compares the CT lists with my own list of 2008 favorites, which I posted several weeks ago:
http://lookingcloser.org/2009/01/jeffrey-overstreets-favorite-film-lists-by-year-up-through-2008/
Personally, I don’t differentiate much between the films I choose as the “best” and the films I choose as “redeeming” since, well, I tend to think that beauty and excellence *are* redeeming, and that’s what I’m thinking about when I make my “critics’ choice.”
Jeff, I’m sorry I forgot you! I was blogging in haste.
(nod) Most years my “Critics Choice” and “Most Redeeming” ballots for CT are either identical or nearly so. Yes, beauty and excellence *are* redeeming — and, correspondingly, unredemptiveness tends not to be beautiful, so I tend not to vote for morally problematic films on either list.
I would nominate “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” as the best film of 2008. FWIW, it received a rare 100% rating on rottentomatoes.com which IIRC you occasionally reference on your amazon affiliate movie review website. Out of all the movies released in 2008, apparently only 6 had a 100% rating.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pray_the_devil_back_to_hell/
While on the subject of movies, FWIW, Jimmy Akin has expressed on the air before his opinion that the only fictional world which it would be improper to depict in film is a world in which God does not exist (I am fairly certain that is an accurate reportage, but the exact context as regards the question he was responding to escapes my recollection) You seem to be more liberal on that count yet more strict when it comes to presenting a fictional world in which Jesus is not God (but yet God still exists). I find this to be an internal tension in your world view as applied to your movie reviewing enterprise. I invite you to do some more thought on the matter as you might have occasion to do.
If I may I was very disheartened by your review of The Golden Compass. On one hand you seem to realize and even express that were you to review the movie on its own merits prescinding from what implications that reviewing might have on the world, you would have evaluated or rated it differently in certain ways, i.e. more positively. Then you say that b/c giving such an if you will nakedly honest review might be a detriment to the world given the connection the movie has to certain literature and future iterations which might pose more moral problems, that you cannot divorce these elements from your review. That was the first time I had seen you do such a thing and I was shocked. I was hoping that like the USCCB reviewer you would have had the courage to judge the movie as a work as it stands in that medium. I couldn’t help but thinking at the time that rather than a principled review you were caving in since you would not want a firestorm similar to that which had come to face the USCCB reviewer. But whether it be for this or that reason, even if it be for some principle alien to me that you subscribe to, I was and remain deeply disappointed.
FWIW, I find your reviews very helpful and informative and I give this complement knowing full well that you might desire to have me disinvited from this blog and that I may end up being disinvited. With all humility, such is the nature of charity, to love freely without expectation of receiving anything in return and love freely even when faced with hostility or animosity or opposition. Keep up the good work on your reviews. Let me just mention though that I think you are overly concerned with seeing toxic messages in movies like Madagascar (1 and 2). FWIW.
P.S. when discussing beauty and excellence and the like, one might be well served to think of the Catholic philosophy of the transcendentals. The Catholic philosophy does not specially or directly address “redeeming” as such, but it does speak of beauty as a transcendental (BTW, here “a transcentental” doesn’t mean merely that it transcends other things; “a transcendental” is referring to a whole philosophical doctrine traced to ancient times and imported to Catholicism). The aspect of this philosophy and other philosophy related to it that I want to highlight is the notion that the transcendentals are not really distinct but are merely notionally distinct. So for example beauty is not in reality distinct from goodness; they are one and the same thing. The distinction is notional (basically, at least in my understanding, this would mean distinguished by the human mind as a necessary consequence of this reality being accomodated to the human mind). Keep in mind that the transcendentals were not in reference only to God; but are called “transcendentals” because actually all things of all categories are said to have these transcendentals inhere in them.
Anyway, in the discussion of something being “beautiful” versus “excellent”, I would say that that would be a case of mere notional distinction, not real distinction. In the case of “redeeming”, that is a little different it seems to me as that refers not to primarily or solely to what might inhere in the object (film) under question, but ISTM to a certain relation between that object and the appropriator of that object (either the artist or the audience). So while one might say that to the extent that a film is beautiful it is excellent and vice versa; I don’t think pace what some may or may not think above, that the same can be quite said of beautiful versus redeeming or excellent versus redeeming.
I appreciate how SDG uses various scales in his reviews and his quirky bispectral moral axis also is something while confusing to novices, precise, which precision I admire as from in that respect perhaps a sort of kindred spirit.