notes on best of 08 list

1 Wall-E: The melancholic charm of I Am Legend becomes fully realised.
I don't know if its my inner cinephile or inner loner, but whatever the reason, Wall-E spoke to me.
Identification and empathy followed the film's awesome 1st 45 mins. The pretense of daily labor revealed as meaninglessness -- psychic boredom kept busy. Filling his spiritually emptied life with an apartment overflowing with junk and purposeless tasks that double as rituals. The diamonds are in the detritus. Wall-E's life belongs to things; objects of (Commodity) fetish, such as in his fixation on a scene re-watched on a VHS of Hello, Dolly. Being able to witness the transformation of that fetish onto a real figure with romantic potentiality (Eva) was brilliant.

4 Gran Torino : A great American film.
Clint Eastwood is like Fuller's White Dog. A B movie that turns itself into an A movie.

5 4 months, 3 wks, 2 days: abortion: how the fear of time (in its exactness; the constant awareness of it bearing down on us and the loss of minute after minute..) becomes related to the process of fundamental healthcare needs and freedom for Women.
Like the less successful Revolutionary Road, this film is marked by one quietly iconic , straightforward image that is simply unforgettable. (Rev Road has Winslet's character standing by the window with the huge blood stain covering her panties and skirt. ) 4 months has the bathroom floor scene, with the aborted fetus.
Both films, although fully grounded in reality, have elements of the horrific. It is important to note that the horror in these films is built around time constraints that connect to a lack of narrative options for each respective character, and that both films take place where and when abortion is, quite unfortunately, illegal and thus unsafe...

12 watching the last mistress is sort of like watching an episode of The Bad Girls' Club, or Vh1's Charm School. Argento's character is all externalisation. All she does and thinks seems reactionary and desperate. Cunning and plotting and loving, yes, but a victim to men. She seems to fool herself into thinking that reacting like a crazy person will make them give a shit about her. Her veil of power and strength is eventually revealed after her miscarriage pushes her further out of the narrative frame of reality. She makes a choice to live inside her pain; the world of the film delegates her to hide in an isolated cottage.
The film studies her, reveals her lack of agency and transmits her emotional wounds with a smart visual composition.
A masterfully simple feminist film.