Favorite movie 2008

December is drawing to a close and with it the year. I don't think I'll be seeing another movie in the theaters for the rest of the year, so I think it's safe to pick my favorite among the movies that I have seen in theaters this year. I've seen most big movies for free courtesy of The Company's "movie night" before the budget for community activities were cut: I Am Legend, Vantage Point, Iron Man, Indiana Jones IV, Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Twilight. It's easy to see how it's been cut, of course. Notice that all of these movies came out in the first half of 2008 with the exception of the last one, which came out in November. In the second half of 2008 the economic crisis in the US began to loom upon us like the heavy dark clouds before a storm. If the budget wasn't cut I would have seen 12 movies (one for each month) for free by now and I would have seen my favorite movie of 2008 for free. As it was, I had to pay for it to see it and seen it with only two co-workers instead of 99.

WALL-E. I have no doubt that this would have been picked had there been a "movie night" for August. I like "nice" sci-fi movies. By nice I mean something that isn't highly stylized (e.g. making the whole thing grayscale, or the opposite making it burst with too bright colors) and something that doesn't strive to be something more than what it can actually deliver. WALL-E was the "nicest" scifi movie that I've seen this year. It's a Pixar animated flick and, like its predecessors, it's worth the ticket price to see it in theaters. If WALL-E wasn't shown this year, The Dark Knight would have been my top favorite movie. And there's also no doubt in my mind that it would have been picked for July if the movie night budget wasn't cut.

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I have seen only 3 Filipino movies in theaters this year: Ploning, For the First Time, and I.T.A.L.Y.. And among them, only Ploning was worth the ticket price. Even the co-workers that "forced" me to watch FTFT and ITALY with them weren't happy with these movies.

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Tropic Thunder was the funniest movie that I've seen in theaters this year. It was funny in a silly kind of way. And we paid only 90 pesos for each ticket because we saw this in SM instead of the usual Ayala Center.

The funniest one in the most-fun kind of way had got to be Bolt from Disney. We had plenty of laughter and the story wasn't bad either.

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Next year, I'm looking forward to watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.