A forgotten summer indie, The Wackness is super-cute and, I'm assuming, accurate to the time period. It's one of those quasi-autobiography movies, as the writer/director Jonathan Levine was also a 17-year-old Jewish boy in New York City in the summer of 1994. Of course, in the movie he sells pot out of an icee cart with his elderly psychologist to make money for college. He also has a short love affair with said psychologist's young stepdaughter. The movie got plenty of attention for the music it used -old-school rap, like A Tribe Called Quest - and the fact that Mary-Kate Olsen has a very small role in which she is not very good. But this movie has more than pot and an Olsen twin, it has great acting (mostly) and super storytelling.

Yeah, this movie fucking rocked. It got so much buzz and then you never heard about it again. It didn't even get nominated for best original song! This was bar-none the funniest movie of 2008, and possibly of the last five years. I've seen it four times now. I own the soundtrack. And even though I know that Rand comes back at the end to play Laertes as bi-curious, I still love it every single time I watch it. Which is often. Because it is awesome. And I'm a little bit obsessed with the movie. If you haven't seen it, which you probably haven't, because no one did, you should, because it is magnificent. And I'm through.

Meryl Streep! Philip Seymour Hoffman! Amy Adams! Viola Davis! Pulitzer-winning source material! John! Patrick! Shanley! How could this film be anything but awesome? It was awesome, though, with particularly vicious performances by Viola Davis and Meryl Streep. And, of course, fantastic writing and some decent directing for a playwright. My favorite is, of course, the last scene with Adams and Streep in the winter. Such great writing.

These movies are very different movies that achieve the same end. While The Dark Knight is obvi the more cinematic of the two, thanks to Heath Ledger and Christopher Nolan, Iron Man is no less accomplished as a film. Quick disclaimer: my love for Iron Man may or may not have anything to do with my intense love for Robert Downey, Jr. Just saying. These two movies ushered in the summer of the super hero, not to mention they revived the genre after years of lackluster filmmaking. I'm looking at you, X-Men 3.

Every time I hear the line, "My name is Harvey Milk and I'm here to recruit you!" on TV, I can't help but smile. This was such a good movie with such amazingly accurate casting both in the physical resemblance of the actors and the skill. With the exception of Diego Luna, who freaked me the fuck out, all the actors were great. The plot seemed to mirror the recent happenings quite eerily, with the Proposition 2 (I think) passing in the movie and then Prop 8 in real life just a few weeks before it came out. 

Why is it that no one saw this movie?!? It has Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleason, Ralph freakin' Fiennes, a little person, some random Belgian people, and a killer script. Some of the greatest lines of the year are in this movie, and yet no one saw it when it came out in March. It's about a couple of hitmen who hide out in Bruges, Belgium after a hit gone bad. It gets really good after Ralph Fiennes shows up, and not just because he's a sex god.

Cliiiiint. What can I say? He's magnificent. Also, I did not know there were that many derogatory terms for Asians before I watched this movie. Obvi Clint Eastwood did, though. What I want to know is how. 

I can't even include an image for this movie, that's how amazing it was. No picture I found could do it justice. I have been told that my personal love for this movie belies my taste for the bizarre, but I was on the verge of crying from about two minutes into the movie until after the credits rolled. I even sobbed once or twice. If you tell anyone, I will deny it wholeheartedly. Who do you think they are going to believe? 

Fuck Twilight. The best vampire movie this year was this gruesome Swedish gem. See that little twelve year old girl next to this paragraph? Yeah. That's the vampire. And she hooks a little twelve year old boy. She also eats a bunch of people amid obscenely beautiful cinematography of the Swedish snowscape. This showed up on a ton of critics' lists and for good reason, too, because it is awesome. But not awesome enough to be number one. I think if it were in English, I would have liked it even more. But it is what it is. Let the Right One In, all your dreams...are dead.

And finally...

You saw this one coming. You know how I know you saw this one coming? Because I know you. And also because it's kind of a no-brainer. Where else would you put a movie like Slumdog? It's sweet, but not too sweet, it's stylish, it's uplifting, and - fuck the haters - it doesn't matter whether it's plausible or not. It's beautiful. It's a love story that ends with a huge song-and-dance number. How could anyone not love this movie. If this doesn't win best picture, I weep for humanity.