Who else but Stephen King would put The Ruins and Lakeview Terrace alongside Slumdog and Wall-E on a top ten list? King has earned the right to be unpretentious and his list is always a welcome break from the usual. He also likes Redbelt, a throwaway David Mamet film from earlier in the year – too bad that one didn’t go anywhere. Here is what King says about Wall-E:
One of the longest animated features of the last 25 years or so, and certainly the best; the first half an hour is an almost wordless tone poem that combines humor with an elegiac sadness for our throwaway culture. I don’t think it deserves a Best Picture Academy Award, but it certainly deserves to be nominated.
Number 2 is Slumdog Millionaire:
Combine Bollywood, Huckleberry Finn, and Oliver Twist, and you come out with this brilliant, sentimental, hilarious, and ultimately uplifting epic of survival in an urban world of cataclysmic poverty. The cinematography is beautiful, and the performances shimmer. It’s been years since the movies have produced such an affecting story about the power of friendship.
And making his number one? The Dark Knight:
The best superhero movie ever. It’s crowned by ’s performance as the Joker, but makes a great Batman, delivering a performance where dignity and despair are in perfect sync. The supporting cast (especially as Alfred) is wonderful. This is to cape-and-tights movies what Godfather II was to the gangster movie: a genre-defining event.
14 Responses for "Stephen King’s Top Ten"
Very bright list. Two films with Jason Statham (the dude is cool, “Bank Job”, amazing), “Tropic Thunder”, “The Ruins” (people, it’s actually good), even is his obvious choice (“Slumdog”, “Dark Knight”), seems interesting. More than this: you can deeply disagree withe the names (I despise “Lakeview”, even more “Funny Games”, both versions, I know how people hate Jason, hate “Ruins”), but every time I read King’s annual list, the list give me the impression that King has a generous, true and ecletic love for movies. And that is the best way to celabrate Cinema.
When I hear Wall-e called the best animated film of the last 25 years, I can’t help but scoff. Better than Spirited Away? Better than Grave of the Fireflies? And even the Recobbled, unfinished version of The Thief and the Cobbler has many attributes that Wall-e owes to (the two main characters don’t speak for almost the entire film). Wall-e was a good movie. But when I think of that little girl in Grave of the Fireflies, I get pretty damn sad.
Otherwise, I agree with him about The Dark Knight.
Wow, that’s an incredibly juvenile list!
I don’t find it juvenile…just not the one I’d put up. THE RUINS was probably one of the better horror films of the year, but that’s saying NOTHING.
Okay, I take that back, after reading them all, it’s terrible…and juvenile.
Ridiculous… it reads to me like a lazy, half-assed, cobbled together list of movies. It also appears he didn’t even care to, or hasn’t seen, most of year-end movies that I’m sure he would love (Let the Right One In, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).
Wow…I guess he’s almost as bad a film critic as a writer. Almost.
“…my forebrain was thinking, Oh, man, this [Saw V] is the year’s biggest pile of cinematic dog vomit. But the rest of my brain is thinking, I’m at the mooooovies! IS THIS GREAT OR WHAT?”
Man, I can’t tell you how much this describes me. Say what you will about his taste, I can’t condemn a man who loves movies as much as I do. And kudos to him for placing The Dark Knight at the top (that almost makes his inclusion of Funny Games forgivable), but he needs to see Let the Right One In. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why he left it off his list.
I’m in no position to say his list is terrible. I think he has some movies on their of low “objective” (cinematography, acting, screenplay, plot, etc) quality and some with higher quality. So long as he’s not saying “these are the best films made this year without qualification,” then I’m cool with the list.
Screw the fact that he has crap like ‘The Ruins’ and ‘Lakeview Terrace’ on there — how could anyone think that the steaming pile of offensively pretentious dogshit known as ‘Funny Games’ would be anywhere but at the bottom of the movies of 2008??
That is one of the worst lists I’ve ever seen.
HOWEVER, I give him props for mentioned the largely ignored but wonderful Bank Job, a movie better than any Ocean’s film with wonderful cinematography.
I can kind of understand what Stephen King sees in Funny Games. King is well-known for wanting things to be just so in the film adaptations of his books. Haneke’s refusal to relinquish any interpretive power to the viewer in Funny Games is a more extreme, obsessive form of that lust for creative control.
Didn’t like THE RUINS. Certainly it had the elements for a strong psychological thriller of people besieged like another picture Stephen King so famously praised back in the day in THE EVIL DEAD.
But instead it’s poorly executed as yet more dumbass teenagers that waste our time and energy.
I mean just look at the ending. If you think about it, those murdering Mayan villagers are the heroes, for if one of those stupid kids escaped, the whole world would have been infected and died with plants growing out of their ass.
I’m still waiting on a good American horror movie. How many more years will I have to wait to get a good one?
thanks for the spoiler alert rra.
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