I'm done with 2008

I guess I’m done with “the Best of 2008” posts. Actually I’m not sure which other categories I could write about, I’m not a big music fan, so I didn’t really hear many new discs this year. Maybe my favourite one was Eusebio by Giulia and the Tellarini, known by their song Barcelona featured in Woody Allen’s Vicky, Christina Barcelona. Nevertheless I doubt I could write a complete post about it. A subject I really want to talk about is books, but, although I try to read a book weakly, I don’t really read many new books. I think this year I have just read a couple. Nevertheless, I really think The Graveyard Book is going to be my favourite 2008 book, I have just read two chapters, so it’s kind of precipitated to name it the best 2008s book (however I’m surely going to write about it as soon as I finish it).  So I guess this list has gone with the 2008. And now it’s time to live this new year and everything that is waiting for us in it.  I hope the 2009 have many dreams, joys, nice surprises, knew things to learn, and people who love you, for you.

Best of 2008; Best TV Series; Lost Season Four

I have heard many people who liked (or they said they liked) the first season of LOST, saying they hated the second and third seasons. I don’t know why. For me every single season, excepting for some few episodes, is amazing. For me, Lost is the best TV show of this century. It has been completely consequent and I really believe Lindelof know perfectly, since the beginning, how everything will finish (yes Lindelof; who for me is the real mastermind behind LOST, who cares J.J.).

But if there’s something I agree with almost everyone who watch Lost, is that fourth season was totally amazing. There are many cool things in it. First, the flash forwards. The end of season three was shocking thanks to the flask forward, this recourse changes completely the way we look at the show. And suddenly the show is no more about getting out of the island, but about getting back. Well, just in a superficial way, because we know it’s about much more. And taking about what is Lost about, I guess this season, more than any other, shows us the TIME is one of the main issues in it. And then, the flash backs and forwards, aren’t just a narrative recourse, but a symbol of the subjective and bending perception of time. This perfectly exposed in the absolutely best episode of the season, The Constant. In it, doesn’t exist flash forwards nor flash backs, they aren’t necessary and wouldn’t be enough to show us the brilliantly complex time relations. It is an amazing time paradox where the future affects the past making it affects the present. It reminds me the best works of Phillip K. Dick. Just amazing.

This and many other things (including the participation of Brian K. Vaughn.) makes Lost the best TV show of 2008.

PD: maybe I would write other post of the best of TV, maybe best new show, which by the way is The Mentalist, but I’m not sure, because nothing is even close to the greatness of Lost. 

Best of 2008; Best Movie; Let the Right One In

Vampires are, or must be, deep grim, and dark creatures. For me they are closer to Mahler than to a heavy metal song. They aren’t wild animal and absolutely they are not beauty teens that shine in the daylight. They are a metaphor of us, of our darker side, which maybe is the most human one. Vampires are melancholic, sad and introspective.

Swedish films are beautiful and poetic. They, or at least the Swedish films I like, are intimate approaches to our deepest emotions, deeper fears and questions; memories, death and the infinite and apparently senseless search of happiness. Swedish films are melancholic, sad and introspective.

Adolescence is a hard age. Everything looks pointless; you can understand neither the world nor even yourself. Having twelve isn’t the happier stage in people’s life (Or maybe it just wasn’t for me), and having twelve for many years, shouldn’t be funny at all. Adolescence is melancholic, sad, an introspective.

And that’s why everything fits so well in Let the Right One In to make it a beautiful and poetic film. A melancholic tale about: loneliness, innocence, friendship, love, brutality, and off course, vampires.

With a cold city covered with snow as backcloth, which resembles the cold of the human relationships of its inhabitants. The human contact practically doesn’t exist, besides the brutality by action or by omission. There the young Oskar suffers the loneliness and the hostility of the world. The Indifference of his mother, and the abuse of the local bullies. But all this change when Eli enters his life, and so, two solitudes turn into a friendship. And the movie show us how we can survive the grimmer world, if we have someone at our side.

Let the Right One In is melancholic, sad and introspective. As any good fantasy story, it’s a beautiful metaphor that show us the deeper sides of the human nature, that reality sometimes can’t show.

 

 

 

Best of 2008; Best Comic Book; Y: The Last Man #60

There are few stories that really catch you since the start and doesn’t let you stop reading or watching them until you know how everything finishes.  Some stories that are so exciting that you consume them in a quasi-obsessive way. I remember I watched the first season of Lost on DVD in about three days, and that I read the first four Harry Potter’s books in no more than a month.

As with them my approach to Y: the Last Man was late, actually I start reading it when the last number had already some months out. Thanks to this, I shouldn’t wait, as the people who read it since it first begin publishing, five long years to know how the journey of the last man ends. In spite of my wait wasn’t too long, I doubt’ it was less exciting. I doubt my interest and expectation for the 60th issue was smaller than the one of any other fan. And all my expectation wasn’t just fulfilled, but exceeded.

Y #60 could be an end or an epilogue, but for me is more like a good bye. It’s nostalgic, even sad, and the use of flashbacks remarks this. They make you feel that everything you knew has gone. Nevertheless in the other hand it shows that life continue beyond us. And this is what gives to Y, not just a happy but poetic ending. Six panels which show us nothing but life. The Eros defeating the Thanatos. And finally, Y as any good story about Death, was really a great story about life.

“Alas poor Yorick, I knew him…”