(The video below is apparently someone’s visualizer and at least three songs. Weird.)

Which leads me to one of my favorite recordings of the year (so far) is A.C. “aka Carl from the New Pornographers” Newman’s “Get Guilty.” Like most pop tunesmiths, Newman is frequently compared to Wilson, though he doesn’t seem to be quite as crippled by his melodic gifts. (A lot of these pop guys seem to go nuts trying to replicate that perfect hook that only they can hear and that’s always bouncing around their brains.)

Newman writes most of the Pornographers’ tunes, and while he shares Wilson’s gift for melody and for layering instrument on top of instrument, his lyrics have a tendency to be, at best, obtusely tuneful. Which is to say, the words make you go “what?” while you’re tapping your toes. (In fact, I’m convinced he comes up with crazy titles and choruses as a challenge. I mean, “Submarines of Stockholm?” “Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer?” “Drink To Me, Babe, Then?” “The Slow Descent into Alcoholism?”)

At first blush, this entry in the continuing series I have oh-so-cleverly dubbed “I Love This Song”—the majestic closing song “All of My Days and All of My Days Off”—sounds like one of those tongue twisters. While it’s easy to imagine a song called “All of My Days” being a toe-tapper, there’s nothing inherently melodic about it when combined with “All of My Days Off.” And to the song’s credit, it never combines the two into a single verse; instead, they come back-to-back, as if Newman is getting more (or less) specific.

What makes the song so amazing is that Newman finally abandons all of the lyrical weirdness and just goes straight for the heart. He isn’t much of a singer, but the slight wavering in his vocal performance here feels right for something this direct and nakedly emotional. Compared to past songs, it’s practically an open book. Lines like “go trip down the lane/take my name” makes its meaning pretty overt. (It just might be about getting married.)

But it’s the simple beauty of the repeating chorus—“and now I give you my days, all of my days,” which eventually transitions to “all of my days off”—that kills me. (And it’s definitely a Newman trademark to repeat a chorus more times than you think he should, and then he repeats it four more times and somehow it makes perfect sense.) The chorus reaches even greater highs when matched with the beautiful female harmonies, some lovely piano, and some whistling (!). Particularly at the end, when the background music fades out while the slightly rough-hewn voices repeat “all my days…” it’s glorious, a fully grown-up symphony to God that only an adult could possibly write. In under four minutes. Genius.

And if I ever get married—and that’s an industrial-sized if—this will be the song I dedicate to my wife.

“ALL OF MY DAYS AND ALL OF MY DAYS OFF” by A.C. Newman

Watchmen is a curious beast, a big budget move that’s either the talkiest, most action-free action movie ever or the most absurdly pumped-up character-based drama ever. If you’re a firm believer in “adaptations must look exactly like their source,” it should be a revelation; if you’re of the mind they should reflect the concepts and ideas as much (or more) as the literal look, it might leave you a wee-bit wanting.

[Many spoilers after the break.]

“Visionary” director Zack Snyder sure thinks the Watchmen are superduper awesome and violent and badass, and maybe that’s what it took to get the movie made after many aborted starts. This is Watchmen for 14-year olds. Snyder makes what little action there is superduper awesome and violent and badass. It has bodies exploding in slow motion, superheroes snapping arms in half, arms being sawed off… America, fuck yeah!

Much of the violence is made to look cool and is played for comedy, with a particularly cheap gag involving an oil executive—yeah, stick it to those bastards! Is the Comedian shooting his pregnant Vietnamese squeeze really all that bad when Silk Spectre stabs gang members in the neck? Her gang member rampage with Nite Owl makes Rorschach’s acts later almost quaint in comparison.

It’s all very R-rated, but Watchmen the movie strikes me as “adult” in the same way M-rated videogames are frequently “adult.” The comic shows its characters as frail and vulnerable and ultimately impotent adults; the movie shows them as badass ass-kickers who have slow-motion, soft-focus sex, but also have occasional breakdowns between beatdowns.

Snyder mimics the look of the comic down to the individual frame. It probably saved a fortune in storyboarding and made fans of the comic cry tears of joy during its two-year marketing campaign. Those still images! Right from the page! Simultaneous, spontaneous nerdgasm! But this hardly makes him a visionary. The dude’s made a stylish remake and two slavish photocopies; wouldn’t a true visionary put their own stamp on them in some way, or at least they would put their own imprint—their own vision—to or on them.

(Which ironically, would probably make them lesser works in the eyes of those who hold the originals sacrosanct, but would possibly make for more interesting movies. Imagine Darren Aronofsky or Joel and Ethan Coen or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Watchmen. All would be weirder, or maybe not. Who knows? But who wouldn’t want to see them?)

Snyder’s ability to perfectly mimic the look of the book doesn’t extend much to meaning, because his stylish action and fetishism of violence shows that while he may have read the comic, he didn’t really get it… or at least he got it on the level that a 14-year old would get it.

Or maybe he did get it properly. The comic walked a fine line between its adult human themes and the kind of cheap nihilism that is very 14-years old, where all problems are black and white and only solvable by violent acts committed by people in costumes. It’s this adolescent misanthropy that generally gets in the way of my enjoyment of comics. (That and a general inability to present reasonable interpersonal relationships.)

Along these lines, the character of Rorschach is the comic’s most interesting and challenging one. I’m not sure Alan Moore was able to keep the audience from loving him, and I’m assuming that wasn’t his intent. (At least I hope not.) Rorschach is a bit like Hannibal Lecter, in that he’s so interesting that we’re willing to overlook the fact he’s a sociopath and end up cheering him on even when he’s doing horrific things.

On paper, he’s a cool dude, but also a misanthropic sociopath. In the movie, Jackie Earle Haley does a terrific job making him as horrific as possible, but we still end up cheering him on because he gets the best lines. The, “they’re not protecting me from you, they’re protecting you from me” line is terrific, but it comes across as a joke. (And his eventual death is cheapened significantly by an obvious and pointless sight gag.)

Another performance of note is Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Comedian, who comes across more in the movie of not giving a shit about anything. But poor, poor Malin Ackerman. She’s terrible, with wooden line readings and empty, empty expressions. She has many of the movie’s most important and emotionally weighty scenes and is able to do nothing with them.

Most of those scenes also involve Billy Crudup, and I think he did a terrific job with Dr. Manhattan. I’ve always liked him as an actor, and his slightly feminine, or at least soft and slightly affectless, voice was a perfect match for a character with that much power. It’s too bad they used CGI for his face, because it was firmly in uncanny valley-ville and robbed the performance of some of its natural sadness.

My favorite portion of the comic was the story of his relationship with Janey Slater, which is the only portion of the comic that I connected with on a deep-down personal level. (This is largely due to being a big girl when it comes to stories about relationships.) Unfortunately, the movie sequencing—I can’t remember if it perfectly mirrored that of the comic—puts it at the end of a series of reminisces, and by that point I was suffering from serious past fatigue. Still, it remained the only personal moment that rang true.

The soundtrack didn’t help most of these moments, being both bombastic and ham-handed, frequently at the same time. For such a big movie, it has to set some sort of record for total “what?” moments. The choices range from painfully obvious (“The Times They Are a Changin’“… really, you’re that lazy?) to baffling (“99 Luftballons”) to “you aren’t serious?” (“Hallelujah”). I suppose this was expected, when you had a trailer that featured Muse’s incredibly not-subtle “Take a Bow” with a lyric saying “You will burn” right as fire exploded behind Silk Spectre. I was waiting for “Cold as Ice” to pop up when Nite Owl and Rorschach head off to Ozymandias’s lair. Too bad “Ice Ice Baby” was too late in the decade8.

While the ending controversial in geek circles, I think it’s a conceptual improvement even if it doesn’t hold up 100% to the kind of scrutiny we geeks are famous for. As with other parts of the movie, its power is undermined by choices made elsewhere. The movie wallows in the despair of the 1980s, or at least the most paranoid alternate version of the ‘80s that never really played out (and seems patently absurd with the perspective of history). Humanity is so fucked up that it gives us no reason to care about the millions that die so that there can be peace. What did anyone do to deserve it? According to the movie, the world is just full of crooks, gang members, hookers, murderers, and crazy people in tights. As Rorschach may say, it deserved to burn.

Oh Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, why do you make me hate you when I really want to love you.

Maybe hate it too strong. But your hacking minigame… why do you penalize me for success?

See, here’s the thing. You tell me all the time how much you love me to get those chains, those wonderful times when you match up multiple colors in multiple directions… tiles slide around, novas go off… it’s all so wonderful and exciting and a key to winning any combat encounter.

But when hacking, it’s a bad thing. See, I have no problem with you timing me while hacking. It adds a bit of extra thrill, a little spice. But you keep the timer going while those chains are going off, which penalizes me for actually being good. And if you need to get, say, a purple match and the next is blue, you toss out the blue one if it happens simultaneously with the purple one.

Lord knows I can’t quit you. But that little bit of impatience, that inability to occasionally stop time for me… you’re really starting to piss me off.

Great CD cover, or greatest CD cover?

Oh Neko, why did you move to Vermont after I left? And didn’t you once live in Seattle? I’m starting to think you’re avoiding me.

I’ve been using my PS3 a lot lately, and not just as a very nice DVD player.

Like everyone else, I like Flower quite a bit. I suppose I should wax poetically about its agency, or its silent narrative, or whatever pseudo-academic buzzwords people are trying to impose on “the way we talk about games” so we can all feel smarter about our favorite button-mashing wish-fulfillment fantasies. Instead, I’ll just say it’s a game that fills me with much joy.

And that’s largely due to the sense of flight. Playing it, I was instantly reminded of how enjoyable the pure act of flying around pretty environments is, and how that’s been lost over the years as we all became bald space marines fighting for humanity and legal steroids on terra brown. Flight simulators became so complex that the mere act of taking off was a chore; getting to a point where you could just enjoy the virtual sensation of swooping around was nearly impossible.

I was also reminded of how many hardcore gamers missed out on Myst, because it was much cooler to hate it than to play it. Flower is a lot like Myst, at least in terms of presenting a sadly beautiful world with machinery. It has puzzles, in the sense of “Do X to trigger Y, then advance.”

And of course the final level of mind-blowingly wonderful, and a perfect example of something I really dig about games: visibly changing the world through your actions. Fable II has this, on a slightly smaller level, and so does Flower. (Da Blob is an even better example; I’ve not played the Wii version, but I played the student demo a lot on the PC.)

So I guess Flower is Myst meets Flight Unlimited, only with extra hot plant-on-plant action. The only negative: I wish it didn’t have a score, or at least it was used more sparingly and just gave you the sounds of the wind and the grass. Instead, the entire game sounds like a Yoga video. Maybe John Tesh can score the sequel.

Now Noby Noby Boy, or is it Nobi Nobi Boy? I have no clue what the fuck that is. I played it for a couple of hours, at least I think I played it. I walked around, pooped out a few sheep, grew to impossibly large sizes, ate my own ass, and made some futile attempt to read menus that were scrolling off the top of the screen.

Music, movies, TV, whatever. It’s all pop culture to me. If I throw everything from 2008 into a pot, it seems like various TV shows keep bubbling to the top.

“The Wire” wrapped up its final season, and while I never watched the show while it was in its run, I plowed through the entire series in a one month run and yeah, it’s probably the best show ever made… even if its final season was perhaps its weakest. (Give me season 2 for drama and plotting and 4 for the devastating inevitability of failure for all of the kids trying to make it on the street.)

“Mad Men” is the most unique show on TV, and continues to dazzle.

For comedy, you have “30 Rock” and “The Office” being the two funniest shows on TV.

But the very best thing of 2008, regardless of media? That was easy. It was 90 minutes of pure awesome.

“The Shield,” Season Finale: “Family Meeting”
The season finale of “The Shield” towered over everything produced in 2008. It was a serious punch to the gut, wrapping up the show in a mind-bogglingly amazing way. If I was arguing “Best Show Ever,” I’d still put its overall run behind “The Wire,” but man… it quickly closed that gap with this episode.

(Warning: There be spoilers beyond.)

If “The Shield” can be summed up in one pithy phrase, it’s “one bad deed leads to another, even worse one.” Each season had the Strike Team dealing with shit overflowing from one cup to the next, and it all started in the very first episode, when Vic Mackey killed Terry Crowley. That murder, that first bad choice of many, hovered over the series’ entire run. It set Vic and the Strike Team up to keep trying to top that particular dodge, emboldening them to rob Armenian money trains and take on everyone from Glen Close and Forrest Whitaker (whose perfectly modulated performance of quietly controlled menace was a highlight).

Vic finally came clean about everything in the second to last episode, and it was one of Michael Chiklis’s greatest moments, though he had plenty throughout the show’s run. But he still couldn’t escape his fate, and that fate was the show’s most brilliant stroke, turning the biggest and baddest detective on the force, the one with the most swagger, the biggest gun, the biggest… everything, into an office drone in a cubicle. It’s the coldest ending imaginable, and one of the funniest scenes of the year was Mackey showing up in his ill-fitting—both literally and figuratively—suit for the first day of the rest of his life. His scene with the HR person, where she tells him about lunch protocol, was sublime. Vic Mackey ultimately won—he got full immunity for his illegal activities from the feds—but he lost everything: his family, his job, his friends, and his dignity. Kudos to Shawn Ryan for daring to end it this way.

That Shane’s ending was more inevitable didn’t make it any less devastating. If Walton Goggins doesn’t win all sorts of awards for his portrait of desperation this season, they’ve lost whatever credibility they had. Shane was my least favorite character, in that I just hated the dude. The look on his face for the last handful of episodes was so haunted. He’s a bad guy, yeah. He’s done terrible things, but he was following the “king,” as they called Vic in the last episode. Unlike Vic, however, he had no way out. The way the show handled his end, with his family, was unexpected and devastating. “Family Meeting” indeed.

That Ronnie ended up the last Strike Team member standing, the only one who’ll end up in prison for what they did, is a wonderful irony since he was the least developed of all of the characters. His big moment, when he’s being arrested and finds out that Mackey didn’t get him the same deal he received, was amazing: “You told them all of it?” It’s his realization that he’s a chump, yet another pawn in Vic’s game of self-preservation.

And who better than to deliver all of this to Vic, and to shame him in front of every other cop on the force, than Claudette. She lost most of her dignity when she realized she couldn’t get Vic, but the final scene—another amazing performance from both Chiklis and CCH Pounder—when she reads Shane’s suicide letter to Vic… whoa. “They were innocent and they are in heaven now, and we’ll always be a family,” she read to Vic.
Though she’s dying of Lupus—quick, call Dr. House!—the moral center of the show stayed that way until the end.

Every character got their own little bit of resolution, even if most of it was bleak. Dutch got his serial killer and possibly some romantic action with a lawyer, though it cost another woman her life; Aceveda will be mayor, but he’s become the empty suit everyone assumed he’d become; Julian remains in denial over his sexuality; and as with the actual Rampart division of the LAPD, and its scandal, that served as the basis for this show, things will eventually go back to normal in The Barn. And in the end, everyone will lose something.

We lost a great show.

There were plenty of terrific games in 2008, and since I no longer get them for free, I was only able to sample a tiny sliver of them. Bah.

But first, some notes: I didn’t play that many shooters this year. For some inexplicable reason, I picked up “Quantum of Solace” (yikes), but never bothered with “Call of Duty: World at War.”

For the most part, I’ve stopped playing MMOs. “Age of Conan” was a dud for the month I bashed my way through it. I bought “Warhammer,” plus a three-month pass, but haven’t even opened the box (if anyone wants to buy it, let me know), and I totally skipped “Wrath of the Lich King.”

Finally, there were some other games that fell into the “close, but no cigar” category: Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution (360); Age of Booty (360); Tomb Raider: Underworld (PC); and Lego Indiana Jones (360)

So, without further ado:

10. Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS)
I like adventure games and puzzle games, so this combination of the two is right up my alley. The story is twee, but the puzzles are an interesting mix of logic and math that don’t require a degree in adventure game logic.

9. World of Goo (PC, Wii)
The best indie games, at leas the budget-priced ones, take on interesting mechanic and polish the hell out of it. Were “World of Goo” a $50 game, it would be criticized for being overly simplistic. As a $15 game, it’s perfect. I already knew I’d enjoy the final game, having played “Tower of Goo” from its developer as an “Experimental Gameplay” prototype.

8. Boom Blox (Wii)
I’ve said this for years, but there’s a very simple rule about games: Breaking stuff is fun. “Boom Blox” is most enjoyable when played with someone else, and because its mechanics are so simple—throw stuff at blox, knock them over—it’s a terrific game for non-gamers or girls you manage to get to come to your apartment. You know, so you can break blox together. No, that’s not a euphemism.

7. Trials 2: Second Edition (PC)
Loved the free Flash version on Kongregate, loved the full version. This game is all about repetition in order to master a level, or a track in this case, which is something I normally avoid in a game. But it provides proof that I can deal with this kind of punishing design when I can immediately pick myself up after my horrible failure and try again. And again. And again.

6. MLB 2008 (PS3)
This is the 2008 version of, “I knew I ended up with a PS3 for some reason other than watching Blu-ray movies.” The first “MLB” game I played was 2006 for the PSP, and even that version was better than any other console title at the time. It’s best played as a baseball RPG, as you take your lowly minor leaguer to the pros. You can focus on the “big moments;” those games where you pinch hit or pitch the ninth. Or you can play entire seasons. Whatever you do, the on-field action is the best of any baseball game ever, though they’ve never really figured out how to let the player hit doubles with any regularity. Weird, that.

5. Braid (360)
Though it was overpraised largely because it hinted at being vaguely meaningful—the idea it was some giant artistic statement was due, in large part I suspect, to Jonathan Blow being a genuinely interesting guy in interviews, with a lot of great ideas that he put right into the game itself—it remains a very, very clever puzzle game. I loved the story, and particularly how it twisted itself around on the final level, but didn’t find it profound or amazing. However, like “World of Goo” and “Trials 2,” it showcases one simple mechanic that’s used brilliantly throughout.

4. Far Cry 2 (PC)
This is the game I wished “Crysis” had been last year, an open-ended shooter that rewards, or at least encourages, the player to try different things to progress past its obstacles. The narrative is daft, oratleasthteveryfasttalkingpeopleare, but it looks fantastic, runs fantastic, and delivers a lot of organic-feeling, non-linear gameplay. Yeah, it’s all faked, but when it’s faked this well, you have to give it some credit for trying.

3. King’s Bounty: The Legend (PC)
This game is gloriously retarded. I’ve done any number of nutty things in a game, but until playing this one I couldn’t say I’d married a zombie and gotten buffs thanks to my zombie children or fought a battle on (or possibly against) my belt. The original “King’s Bounty” was the predecessor to “Heroes of Might and Magic,” and this feels like that series’ cousin. Which is a good thing, because it’s a grand game of small tactical battles, over-the-top art direction, and a brilliantly simple interface.

2. Fallout 3 (PC)
Since I’ve completed the game twice, one as a goody-two-shoes and one as the ultimate evil (but who still couldn’t bring herself to blow up Megaton; wimp), I have a pretty good grasp on what makes it good or bad. Like “Oblivion,” the faults of “Fallout 3” stand out largely because it falls just short of total greatness. (Bethesda will have to be satisfied with the zillions of money they’ve made.) There are times when it’s clunky and arbitrary and game-y and poorly written, followed quickly by times when it’s creepy and bleak and funny and wonderful. But yeesh, when with Bethesda get modelers and environmental artists of the same skill level. People still look ghastly, while most of the environments look amazing. And the ending was dreadful. I had Fawkes with me in the final room; uh, why couldn’t he enter the code? The dude could survive the radiation.

1. Fable II (360)
There are a few things in a game, particularly an RPG, which I never get tired of: visibly affecting the world (something I wish you could do more of in “Fallout 3”), having people react to things I’ve done or am doing, and having some semblance of the passage of time. “Fable II” gives you all of these, in spades. It takes you away from the world, and depending on what you did previously, changes the world while you’re gone. People are happy when you run around laughing; they get a little weirded out when you strip naked and run through town using the “Vulgar Thrust” expression.

It’s also an easy game, the “LEGO Star Wars” of RPGs, a world without failure. Much like the original, I never died once while playing “Fable II.” Yet I never felt like I wanted more challenge, because there was so much to do. If I wasn’t doing quests, I was working, buying properties, wooing people, farting, sleeping with hookers, and doing all of those things I do oh-so-much in real life. Its moral system is more sophisticated than the blunt binary system in “Fallout 3,” or at least it fakes it better. (I’m less enamored of the “big choice” ending, which was delivered with all of the subtlety of a Bon Jovi power ballad. Instead of letting that choice play out with some actual action on the part of the player, it was literally a menu item: “Pick A, B, or C. Here’s your reward, and the downside. Har.” Fortunately, the rest of the game wasn’t that blunt.)

There’s so much fakery in “Fable II,” but it just doesn’t matter. Like its puppy dog companion, it just wants to be loved. It gives you love, and you give it right back. It leads you around by the nose, but you’re free to run off somewhere else; it won’t mind. It’ll knock you down during combat, but it won’t kill you. It’ll let you dust off your outfit and re-join the fight, no worse for wear. And it’s so damn charming, from the art direction to the music to the voice acting to the superb writing to the caricatures of all of the staff members during the closing credits. It’s a world worth spending days or weeks in.

Now, I’ll need to get back to my family. Those damn kids are always passive-aggressively suggesting I spend too much time away from home. (That would be family #1; family #2 seems fine. Yay for bigamy.)

There were a normal number of good movies released in 2008, but very few great ones. In fact, I’d only argue for my number one pick being a movie I’ll keep revisiting in future years.

OK, more ground rules: I didn’t see (yet, if ever): Milk; Synecdoche, New York; Rachel Getting Married, and god knows what others I might have liked.

So, here’s the list:

10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
This is a small movie in big movie clothes, one that’s easy to admire and hard to love. It overreaches for relevance to justify its “big picture”-ness by awkwardly bookending its story with Hurricane Katrina, but it has nothing going on between its ears to justify that wrapper. (At least something like “The English Patient” could reasonably wrap its romance around WWII.) Still, despite its slightness it’s beautiful to look at—could a David Fincher movie be anything other than an amazing technical accomplishment?—and touching in its final hour. It’s a bit of a slog to get to that point, though.

9. Hancock
This movie tends to polarize people, though it seems like some just have an issue with Will Smith, which I’ll never quite understand since he’s just so damn… likable. His playing against type makes the first hour of “Hancock” a blast; the second half, well… the twist was unexpected, but it didn’t make a lick of sense. Sure, it’s a little bit like “The Incredibles,” in that it deals with a public that would take its heroes for granted. But the idea of a superhero needing a PR makeover is still pretty good.

8. Wanted
Not having any interest in comic books make it easy for me to ignore “fidelity to source material” when considering the movie version of something like “Wanted.” Talk about pandering to your audience: meek guy turns out to be an assassin; the lesson here is that you can only be a man if you kick ass and hang out with Angelina Jolie. Uh huh. It’s borderline offensive and misogynistic in so many ways, but at the same time is so gloriously stupid and immature—James McAvoy smacks a dude with a keyboard, and the flying keys spell “F U C K U,” with the “U” being a tooth?—that it crosses over into something not entirely unlike genius. Think of it as “Fight Club’s” retarded cousin.

7. Tropic Thunder
I was disappointed in “Pineapple Express”—maybe I need to smoke more dope?—but this one worked for me. Though it teeters on the edge of “too big Hollywood movie,” it’s redeemed by Robert Downey Jr.’s method actor and Tom Cruise’s movie executive that’s reportedly based on Viacom head Sumner Redstone. (Who knew he could be this funny? It’s one of the only times you don’t feel like he’s trying too hard.) Highlights include Steve Coogan’s death, the opening trailers, and the addition of “never go full retard” into the pop-culture lexicon.

6. The Wrestler
Darren Aronofsky is as skilled a filmmaker as David Fincher, and he keeps “The Wrestler” from being the predictable and thinly plotted little melodrama it is. It helps that Mickey Rourke is so able to inhabit the main character. The real-life Rourke looks horrible, his face all bloated and fucked up from his plastic surgeries and detour into boxing. Which makes him perfect as the fallen wrestler who sells his body for entertainment—oh my, he meets a stripper who does the same thing!—and the fallout that happens when people stop watching and caring.

5. Wendy and Lucy
This is the kind of indie move that is almost better seen on the small screen. It’s an intimate, quiet story of a young woman whose car breaks down on the way to a better life/job, runs out of cash, gets caught shoplifting, and saddest of all, loses her dog and, once out of jail, goes looking for her. It’s just a beautifully detailed look at life on the fringes, when you have no safety net. It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t for its low-keyness, and for the look in Michelle Williams’ eyes throughout. I’m not sure if this was shot before or after Heath Ledger’s death, but she looks profoundly broken in all of the amazing close-up shots of her face in the movie. And it’s heartbreaking, that’s for sure.

4. The Dark Knight
Is this “just a comic book movie” or not? It certainly has pretensions to be something else, with its entire plot being an obvious parable on the war on terror and whether or not you’re willing to throw away personal freedoms for safety, but then you criticize it for anything and suddenly “it’s just a comic book movie!” Even if the fandom is annoying, the movie itself is pretty great. It’s not as “oh my god” great on subsequent viewings, but Heath Ledger’s Joker keeps it watchable. Loved the buzzing sound that plays in the background when the Joker is on screen. And his changing stories about his scars. And Senator Patrick Leahy’s performance as “old man who gets in Joker’s face at a party.”

3. Iron Man
Though the last third is total crap—really, Jeff Bridges gets in the suit? Why not the dude from Afghanistan?—this is cotton candy worth consuming. Of course it’s all about Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, an oversized role that’s perfect for an oversized personality. It’s also a weird action movie that features fairly lousy action; it’s really all about people talking, and Tony Stark being the cool, suave bastard we all wish we could be, at times.

2. Slumdog Millionaire
Rarely does contrived artifice work so well. You either buy into the fairy tale conceit—poor Indian “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” player goes over his entire life story while being interrogated over why he’s doing so well on the show, with each question/answer tying in to some memory—or you don’t. It wallows in the squalor of Mumbai while celebrating love and its rags-to-riches protagonist. It’s Danny Boyle making the Bollywood version of “Charles Dickens’ Trainspotting,” complete with a musical number at the end. It’s the most commercially weird movie of the year, and I totally went along for the ride.

1. WALL-E
AKA, “Young Robots in Love.” With movies like “No Country For Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” leading the charge, the best movies of 2007 were characterized by horrific acts of violence. In a nice contrast, the best movie of 2008 was all about hope. Hey, is this the Barack Obama story, or what? “WALL-E” satirized technology while deploying the best that Pixar has to offer. It’s a marketing juggernaut that criticizes our consumption of WALL-E toys from Wal-Mart. It features a musical no one other than director Andrew Stanton apparently liked—“Hello, Dolly!”—and is the first Pixar movie to feature real-life humans. (Though Fred Willard can be brilliantly cartoon-y.) The first 45 minutes or so is the most profoundly sad bit of filmmaking to ever emerge from the House of Mouse. Certainly, “Bambi” has the saddest individual moment, but a nearly wordless half-hour of desolation? In a kids movie? That’s the kind of juice Pixar has earned.