2007-2008 Movie List

Worst movie of the year, hands down

42.  Reno 911!Miami I don’t know why I watched the whole thing.  It was maddeningly unfunny, worse than anything I’ve seen over the last couple years.  The trailer for this was way funnier than the actual movie.  It makes me angry just thinking about it.

 

Movies I didn’t enjoy

41. Blades of Glory – I love Will Ferrell, but this was not funny at all.  I’m convinced the guy from Napoleon Dynamite was perfect for that one role, and will never be funny again.

40. Apocalypto – Pointless, violent action movie.  About as unrealistic as an action movie can get.  How many times can you get shot with an arrow and still outrun a jaguar?

 

Movies I enjoyed at least part of, but weren’t all that great or memorable

40.5 Totsi – I forgot about this one because I rented it in the store.  It won an academy award for best foreign film a couple of years ago, but I just thought it was so-so.  It says on the rental box that it’s a story of redemption, but unless you consider someone redeemed simply because they don’t kill a baby for no reason, then it isn’t.

39. The Ex – Zach Braff and Jason Bateman.  I actually laughed a decent amount at this because I had low expectations going in.

38. The Assassination of Jesse James –  Not necessarily bad, but it was slow, and I didn’t like Brad Pitt as Jesse James.

37. 3:10 to Yuma – If you like westerns, you’ll probably like this movie.  It was fun to watch, but I’ve already forgotten almost everything about it.

36. Beowulf – Weird movie.  For one, I didn’t realize until I started watching it that it was animated, and I had seen the previews.  It is a weird animation style only slightly less creepy than The Polar Express (which I hated, by the way).  It’s fascinating at times, and Angelina Jolie plays one of the most attractive tentacled monsters I’ve ever seen.

35. In the Valley of Elah – Another interesting movie that was pretty well made, but I was kind of depressed after watching it, and it seemed like it would turn out to be more interesting than it ever did.  Tommy Lee Jones is great in it.

34. The Simpsons Movie – I used to be able to quote pretty much every episode of the Simpsons, but I haven’t really watched the show much over the last few years.  This was still a funny movie, but no better than a good tv episode.

33. Walk Hard – An enjoyable, if not necessarily good parody of Ray and Walk the Line.  It was never laugh-out-loud funny, but I still enjoyed it.

32. We Own the Night – Textbook cop movie.  Not bad.

31. Spider Man 3  - I’ve always thought Venom was one of the coolest superhero bad-guys.  Nothing memorable about this, but it was fun.

30. A Scanner Darkly – Animated version of a Phillip K. Dick story.  I liked this, but I think my expectations were a little high going in.

29. The Lookout – I think this was one of Richard Roeper’s top 5 movies of last year, about a kid with a brain injury that gets talked into being a lookout for a heist.  Interesting. 

28. I’m Not There – Bob Dylan movie.  A little weird, but the soundtrack is amazing.  You kind of have to be a Dylan fan to have any idea what’s going on.

 

Enjoyable monster movies – I put all these movies together because they are all in the same genre.  For some reason I saw a ton of monster/horror movies this year, and I have to admit that I liked all of them.

27.Cloverfield – Interesting idea for a movie – using handheld footage to show a monster’s attack on New York.  The monster part is kind of cool, as is the way it’s filmed.  But it doesn’t really have much of a plot.

26. I Am Legend – Sort of a Hollywood version of 28 Days Later.  Entertaining and creepy.  Maybe it’s because I’m a biology teacher that I think movies where viruses destroy the world are cool.

25. 30 Days of Night – Vampires attack a town in Alaska during winter so there is no sun for 30 days.  A lot more violent than I thought it would be (it’s really a horror movie), but it was scary in a cool way.

24. 28 Weeks Later – Sequel to the scariest zombie movie ever, 28 Days Later.  This is just as scary.  Zombies that can run really fast are scary no matter how many times you see it.

More Movies I enjoyed and would even recommend to most people -

23. Transformers – I went in with low expectations and thoroughly enjoyed this.  Typical summer action movie, but the special effects are really cool.

22. 300 – This one I had higher expectations for and thought it was decent but not great.  I liked Gladiator better.

21.Blue Planet – this was actually a 6 disk set about ocean life from the people that made Planet Earth.  The first disk is awesome if you like nature videos.  Does it get any better than a polar bear trying to catch a whale?  I think not.

20. Rescue Dawn – Based on a true story, I guess there is a documentary about this POW story that is better, but I thought this was pretty powerful.

19.5 – Eastern Promises – another one I forgot about when I originally ranked these because I rented it in the store.  Viggio Mortenson is great in this, and for that matter, just about everything.  I can’t wait to see him in the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

19. The Kite Runner – I loved this book, and thought the movie adaptations was good, even if it did leave out some big parts.  It’s always hard to watch a movie after reading the book and separate out your thoughts about the book from the movie itself.

18. Breach – Good old fashioned (and true) spy story.  Ryan Phillipe always sucks, but Chris Cooper is always good and makes up for it.

Movies that I thought were really well made, but I didn’t particularly enjoy

17. There Will Be Blood

16. No Country For Old Men

I thought both of these were beautifully filmed, the stories were good, and both actors really deserved the academy awards they got.  I thought No Country was the more interesting of the two, but I just didn’t really like watching either of them.

Movies that were really funny, but not quite as funny as everyone said

15. Super Bad

14. Knocked Up

I saw both of these the same week last summer, and laughed pretty hard at times during both of them.  I think both were produced by Judd Apatow, who has made a million comedies in the last couple years, including some that I really liked such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But I still think that his best work was the single season of the show Freaks and Geeks that was canceled about 10 years ago.  If you have Netflix or Blockbuster online, and haven’t seen every episode, make it a goal this summer.  The characters (especially the Geeks) are great, and the show has more heart and isn’t quite as crass as Apatow’s movies.  It’s probably my favorite high school show/movie ever made, right up there with Rushmore.

More good movies

13. Chalk – Mockumentary about a first year high school teacher.  As a teacher, it is painful to watch at times, but also hilarious.

12. The Host – yet another monster movie, but this one is a Korean movie, and along with having a really cool monster, it is a commentary on the Korean government.

11. Evan Almighty – I haven’t talked to anyone else that liked this movie, but I watched it with my kids and loved it.  Steve Carrell is a modern-day Noah.

The Top 10 – I really enjoyed all of these movies.

10. Hot Fuzz – Cop movie from the people that made Shawn of the Dead.  Really funny.

9. Gone Baby Gone – Way better than I thought it would be.  Interesting detective story about a missing girl.  The whole movie raises some really great moral/ethical questions.  If you’ve seen the movie, I’d be really curious to hear what you thought the “right” thing to do would have been.

8. The Kingdom – Probably my favorite action movie of the past year.  Really intense, and smarter than the average action movie.

7. Ratatouille – The rare kids movie that I enjoyed as much as they did.  I didn’t like it quite as much as I liked The Incredibles, but it was still terrific.

6. Night Watch – No one I know has seen this movie, and I’m dying to hear someone else’s opinion about it.  It’s part 2 of a trilogy of Russian vampire movies (part 1 was called Day Watch).  Like I said before, for some reason I got into monster movies this year, but this one was really weird, and really cool.  If you’re going to watch it, see Day Watch first.  It is very different from any American-made action movie, and I think that’s what I liked about it.

5. Into the Wild – I loved the book, and thought this was a great adaptation.  Not to mention a great soundtrack by Eddie Vedder.

4. Michael Clayton – I thought Tom Wilkinson, the guy who goes crazy, was the best part of this movie, but the characters are all great.

3. Pan’s Labyrinth – technically I saw this last year, but I rented the DVD this year so I could watch the director’s commentary, and it was fascinating.  Even if you’ve already seen it, it’s worth listening to the commentary because there is so much symbolism in the movie that I didn’t catch the first time I watched it.  Plus it’s great to hear the director talk about how much he hated working with horses.

2. Juno – I enjoyed almost everything about this movie.  Jeremy Rozansky did a great job as the boyfriend too.

1. The Lives of Others – Probably my favorite movie in the last 4 or 5 years.  It sounded like a boring movie, so it took me a while to rent it.  Almost everything about it is perfect.  It’s beautiful to watch, the acting is great, the character development is great, and despite being sad it is also an uplifting story.