It’s usually around this time of year that most commentators bring out their top ten of the year lists, but frankly, I find them limiting (that’s not a dig at you, Arya). I can rarely come up with ten movies that I’m excited about, and I usually find myself wanting to modify them not long after the fact. Plus, I don’t feel like heaping the typical praise on movies that were good, but still made me feel like I was settling for Skittles when I wanted M&M’s.
And so, without further commotion…
Biggest Hole Where My Fedora and Whip Shaped Heart Should Be: There may have been far worse films this year (I avoided Disaster Movie at all costs), but in terms of the disparity between what should have been and what eventually was, was there a single bigger failure this year than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? I was willing to get on board the aliens, the jump to the 50s, and maybe even the whole kid thing. But prairie dogs? Monkeys? Sucking? Did it feel like being dumped by your long-time wife for Kevin Federline to anybody else?
(This was very nearly the Biggest Hole Where My Vodka Martini-Shaped Heart Should Be, which would have gone to the equally bad but less disappointing Quantum of Solace).
Film That Produced The Most Conflicted Feelings: I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I cannot agree with the popular sentiment that 
The Dark Knight represents anything all that revolutionary. Fine, it was more nuanced and violent than any other superhero film (the title of best still belongs to X2:X-Men United as far as I’m concerned), and it had, you know, themes to it, but I’ve seen it three times now, and I really don’t see an argument that this is the best expression of those themes that it could have been. And Rachel Dawes? Come on. You make up a character, and it's her? Say whatever you want about what this has done for comic book movies. It may be ten, may be twenty years, but some day we will have the definitive Batman film, and this will look kind of silly in comparison.
The 'Wow, You Managed to Make Giant Monsters Boring' Award: Let’s face it, 
making big monsters boring is no mean feat. No matter ineptly done, any Godzilla, Gojira, or Mothra can hold nearly all of our attentions for a certain length of time, but it just wasn’t so with me for Cloverfield. I understand wanting to bring big giant things back to the masses (that’s what she said), but did it have to feel so…bland? And did it have to center around people that I really wanted to see eaten, only to have the PG-13 rating adhered to? Plus, I predicted the last shot of the movie. You're not supposed to be able to do that.
Best Biopic: You might want to wait for this one until video, because it’s a slog (and definitely eat beforehand, I made that mistake), but if you give it a chance, you might like
Che as much as I did. It’s fairly apolitical (which might be a liability for some of you), but I do buy the argument that it’s beside the point. It’s fairly naturalistic, and basically is guerilla fighting for upwards of four hours, but it is all executed with a tremendous degree of skill. And let’s face it: if anyone can carry a four-hour long film with a single performance, it’s Benicio del Toro.
Best Film Of The Year, Could Have Been Best of the Decade: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button/Wall*E (tie). I’m the first to concede that these films had their flaws. Button needed about twenty-five minutes cut from it(maybe in another article, I’ll tell you where), and you could almost feel Wall*E shift in quality the second that people showed up. That said, while musing about the potential of each, you can at least make the argument that 
for long stretches, these films in fact were the films that they were supposed to be. They were both gorgeous to look at, extremely well-paced, and understood the tempestuous nature of the relationships at the center of each. And when they weren’t as good as they were before, they still weren’t bad, per se. Not Kingdom of the Crystal Skull bad, at least.
So, by default, they’re my favorite films of the year. That sounds a little more pathetic than it’s supposed to.
Most Overlooked Performance of The Year: For those of you who saw Burn After Reading (funny, but it really didn’t feel like they were trying very hard), you probably remember one thing standing out in this movie: Brad Pitt, as the most irritating, air-headed jock that film may have yet produced. Let’s face it: this is the send-up of macho behavior that Ben Stiller seems to keep insisting that he’s capable of doing. But he’s not. And this proved it.
