The 2008 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 2008

VOTE THROUGH OCTOBER 31

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles

[therewillbeblus]

Can you please add

Le petit fut (Claude Chabrol)
Protect You + Me (Brady Corbet)
Yard Work is Hard Work (Jodie Mack)

[swo17]

Added

[Lowry_Sam]

Can you add

Pageant
China Blue
Murder, Spies, & Voting Lies
Joy Division
Bush's War (pts 1 & 2)
John Adams


There's only one listing for Mesrine, but there were 2 films released in 2008:
Mesrine: Killer Instinct
Mesrine: Public Enemy #1

Are you combining the 2 into one entry? I don't recall them being presented theatrically as a single film though the initially released separate blu-rays were re-released in a single package. The films are fairly comparable in quality and will probably work against each other as separate options though.

[swo17]

I've added several of those but China Blue was eligible as a 2005 film and Joy Division as a 2007 film.

Like most two-part films I've presented Mesrine as one entry, assuming people would generally want to vote for the two parts combined. If anyone wants to be able to vote for just one of them, let me know and I can add the individual entries

[Aunt Peg]

Could the following films be added (thanks in advance):

Adoration (Atom Egoyan)
Camino (Javier Fesser)
Kabei: Our Mother (Yoji Yamada)
Let's Talk About the Rain aka Let it Rain (Agnes Jaoui)
The Queen and I (Drottningen och jag) (Nahid Persson)
Seraphine (Martin Provost)
A Woman in Berlin (Max Farberbock)

[swo17]

Added but I put the Persson in 2009

[ballmouse]

Can Felon (Ric Roman Waugh) be added?

[swo17]

Done

[domino harvey]

Can you please add:

Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis
God on Trial
Louis Theroux: African Hunting Holiday
the Yellow Handkerchief

[yoshimori]

Lots of requests:

Laura Bari, Antoine - thrilling doc about a blind, genius 6-year-old Vietnamese-Canadian boy
Phillip Lachenmann, "SHU [Blue Hour Lullaby]"
Thomas Clay, Soi Cowboy
Brillante Mendoza, Serbis
Royston Tan, 12 Lotus
Valdis Oskarsdottir, Country Wedding - directorial work by the editor of Celebration, Julien-donkey boy, Eternal Sunshine, etc
Yasmin Ahmad, Muallaf
Bruce Conner, "Easter Morning"
Nathaniel Dorsey, "Winter"
Hiroki Ryuichi, Your Friends

Especially recommend folks seek out the Bari doc.

[swo17]

All added except for Winter which was already in the database as a 2007 film

[yoshimori]

Great. Thanks.

[domino harvey]

Thanks swo!

Recently saw a great little film while screening DVDs for my class, a quite recent British teleplay called God on Trial. It aired here last year as part of the modern Masterpiece Theatre-series and while it clearly had a budget slightly above that of your local news, the material is first-class all the way. A philosophical argument on the debate of God over his apparent complicity in letting the Holocaust occur, the film presents a barrack of concentration camp residents holding a Jewish court and trying God in absentia while half of the men prepare to die in the morning. The arguments are compelling and peppered with punches on either end of the debate, and Eddie Marsan, so brilliant in Happy Go Lucky, absolutely tears the place down with his small cameo halfway through-- his one line statement after the fact concerning his sons' fate is grandly terrible in its implications. And his is but the first of several great monologues that race the film to its finish in the last half-- contributions arrive from a French scientist and a phony Jew before ending with a captured rabbi's ten minute showstopper that leads the court to its ultimate decision.

Is the film flawless? Lord no, and hoary devices such as the modern-day wraparound and a handful of Holocaust cliches abound. But in the face of such compelling material and the limited budget and time, this is really something special and not likely to leave my mind for a while. It's based on an anecdote from a very similarly-titled Elie Wiesel play but shares nothing else in common. I wish the script were published, I'd love to excerpt from it in the future.

the Yellow Handkerchief (Udayan Prasad 2008) This remake of a Japanese film, unseen by me, follows William Hurt’s release from prison for manslaughter and the trek he makes through post-Katrina Louisiana with two teenagers (Kirsten Stewart and Eddie Redmayne) in tow. Hurt is good, as he often is, as the quiet central figure, and while I initially found the heavy reliance on flashbacks a distraction, they eventually start to hit their mark with surprising effectiveness. I don’t buy the road movie machinations that tether Hurt to his younger co-stars, but they mostly take the backseat to Hurt regardless, so it doesn’t matter too much. Certainly if you needed to see Eddie Redmayne in a road movie, picking this over the godawful Hick would be the right choice, but what a strange thing to need in the first place!

I know I’ve written about Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis on here but I cannot find it. This was at one time the highest grossing French film of all time (in France) and while much of its popularity derives from dialectical and cultural differences difficult to parse for foreign viewers, the commercial subs for film still do a remarkably good job of getting the jokes across for the rest of us non-French. It’s a feel good, sweet-natured fish out of water comedy that unfortunately has led to a lot of very bad comedies featuring its two stars (I knowingly watched last year’s Pope comedy with Kad Merad in it on a recent flight, and I knew it wouldn’t be good so that’s on me but holy fuck you would not believe how bad a movie can actually be)

[TMDaines]

Can you add Nordwand // North Face (2008) by Philipp Stölzl? It is a very much a modern Bergfilm harking back by to the likes of Trenker's.

[schlafen]

Would you add Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy) to the list?

[swo17]

Both added

[schlafen]

Thank you.

[John Cope]

Please add:

A Corte do Norte (João Botelho)
Vinyan (Fabrice du Welz)

[swo17]

I added Botelho. The other was already there