As I remember, last year was really Man World heavy in film (No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton) with lots of tales involving competitiveness and ego. Since, I didn't write about my favorite movies of last year, here they are in no particular order.

12:08 East of Bucharest - I love love loved this film about parochial folks in a small town of Romania. The first 2/3 of the film is an overview of various residents, a teacher, an old citizen, and a television personality, their lives not demonstrably better since the fall of Communism 16 years ago. On the eve of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu's ousting, a debate is broadcast at the slipshod local tv studio. The three begrudging "witnesses" cannot agree on the exact moment when the great revolution occurred or what even happened during it, but the callers are skeptical that revolution ever happened at all. Poker face funny.


There Will Be Blood is based on Upton Sinclair's novel indicting the crushing machine of capitalism. The drama is writ large and breathtakingly beautiful by director Paul Thomas Anderson whose treatment of the film is structurally thematic and absolutely true to the nature of the subject. Like the "if you're not with me you're against me attitude" of Daniel Plainview, each image gets a payback through another later one, each perceived misdeed answered with a slap. A fresh struck oil well siphons high into the sky, and later, that same oil rig burns to the ground with a rigorous vengeance. Plainview is a man trapped inside the ambition of manifest destiny, his adopted "son", a symbol of his allegorical soul, tossed to the wayside. In Blood there is nothing but pure American drive. Plainview sees through the two bit players like so much chaff, and he's going to suck them all dry.

For any person drowning in the morass of stifling office politics and material culture, despressed by your plight in life, The Bothersome Man is right up your Brazil watching alley. A man commits suicide and ends up traveling by bus to a blandly surreal place with ubiquitously sleek interiors and a blue-grey company culture. The food has the no flavor and sex is equally bland. This Norwegian satire by director Jens Lien is grotesquely, dreadfully fatalist. If a dose of darkly absurd, understatedly soul crunching humor is just what the doctor seemed to have ordered, then beware, because the movie is surreally unkind to the sensitive psyche.

Some people have the olympics and others have the presidency, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe have Donkey Kong. I hate to sound so cliche but King of Kong really is a story about human nature. OK, human nature and a bunch of nerdy classic nintendo freaks who happen to be really, really competitive. But, the film is also a portrayal of underdogs making a space in the world for themselves, trying to hold onto that space for dear life, and fighting to be recognized for their achievements, no matter how inconsequential that may seem.