My Ten Best Films of 2008...

Okay, I lied…. this isn't a "10 Best" list. It's a "10 Favorite" list.

I always feel that as soon as you introduce the word "best," everyone feels compelled to pick movies with important themes, weighty subjects and serious performances.

Which isn't to say I don't think these films are top of the line: Everyone of them stuck with me in one way or another. It's just by way of explaining why some of the films that seem to be on everyone else's lists aren't here.

Oh, and they're not listed in order of preference or importance. I love them all.

Let the Right One In

Jar City

The Fall

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

The Bank Job

American Zombie

Surfwise

Diary of the Dead

Slumdog Millionaire

Azur and Asmar

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom II... This is not a joke!

I'm sure there are Phantom lovers everywhere whose hearts are already leaping at the news that Webber is well into writing the sequel, Love Never Dies to his insanely popular Broadway show, as reported in this lengthy piece from the Times of London.

I confess, I never saw the show on stage, only as the 2004 movie Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. But I don't think it would have made a difference, because my biggest complaint is that the only memerable scrap of music in the entire score is the six-note Phantom theme. And there's no blaming Joel Schumacher for that.

I do like the rumor that Torchwood's John Barrowman is in the running for the role of the Phantom, though. Let's hope his nude swim in Webber's swimming pool gives him an edge.

Goodbye, Ann Savage, noir's most fatale femme...

In a shadowy sea of seductively lethal ladies, Detour star Ann Savage, who died on December 27th, two months shy of her 88th birthday, was the most poisonous of them all. An exterminating angel hitchhiking on a desert highway, her hard-bitten, predatory Vera thumbs a ride with a failed New York jazz pianist who just wants to join his girlfriend in California; by the time she's done with him, he's passed rock bottom and gone straight to a sunwashed living hell.

Born Bernice Lyon in South Carolina, Savage changed her name when she became an actress and worked her way through a series of small parts in undistinguished movies. Poverty-row thriller Detour was shot in a breathless four days on sets so cheap they're barely there, but Savage's seething performance helped make it a film noir classic.

She made a dozen some odd films after Detour and did some television, but her career peaked with the b-movies she made in the 1940s and by the late '50s she was all but done. Married since the early '40s to agent-turned-financier Bert D'Armand, Savage devoted herself to her marriage, which ended with his death in 1969.

In 2006, Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, a lifelong fan, persuaded Savage to appear in his phantasmagoric, semi-autobiographical My Winnipeg (2007) as the fictional "Guy Maddin"'s shrewish mother. Thank you, Guy Maddin, for giving Ann Savage the gift of one last memorable part.

Shhhh, Shhhh... Bang, Bang!

Not that I would ever advocate pulling a gun on that son of a bitch who's been talking all the way through the movie you paid $11.50 to see, but this article does touch a certain nerve:

Movie Theater Shooting

I grew up loving the experience of going to the movies, but more and more I'd rather just see them at home, and a big part of the reason is that most people now treat movie theaters as an extension of their living rooms and feel free to argue, whisper, eat — and I'm not talking popcorn; I'm talking full meals, with all the noise that entails — ignore their crying babies and and chat/text on their cell lphones the entire time.

Movie theaters aren't churches, but they also aren't basement rec rooms, thank you very much.

New reviews: The Spirit and Last Chance Harvey

My reviews of The Spirit and Last Chance Harvey are now live.

Check them out if you have a chance...