Life is hard. Making money is hard. Being on your own is hard. Recently, these messages have been ingrained into our brains from every media outlet and from all our friends that suddenly decided to forgo a financial career and take a stab at the LSATs. Therefore, it is difficult to sit through another movie that reiterates how depressing life can be without monetary resources. No wonder people willingly gravitated towards the dazzling, though excessively impractical, Slumdog Millionaire this past year for a fantastical escape.

Cult comic book nerds rejoice! The film rendition of your beloved Watchmen is at long last in theaters. Having been in development hell for over 20 years — suffering from a revolving door of directors, innumerable re-drafts and legal battles between studio backers — the 2009 Zach Synder-directed incarnation of Watchmen is finally upon us as the movie goes public. And to be honest, I would rather the film just go back to its dusty shelves, as Synder’s much-anticipated adaptation of the world’s most celebrated graphic novel is an insufferably interminable adaptation of the ’80s graphic stories, whose reverence for its origins suffocates nearly all the intriguing nuances of its parent novel.

Who wouldn’t love to watch a movie about the sexual awakenings of 15-year-old girls, especially French girls that spend a good portion of the film frolicking in swimsuits (sometimes not even that) and kissing each other? Water Lilies may seem like the dream movie for every male pervert, but beneath the surface, this film is a frank coming of age study that is intimately relatable to the female viewer.

Boy, are they remaking every horror movie classic or what? First The Hills Have Eyes and its pointless sequel, then Rob Zombie’s (re)take on Halloween, then Prom Night (ugh), and Black Christmas (blarf) and now the unholy goalie Jason Voorhees gets the treatment. What next? Elm Street again? Last House on the Left? Wait they are remaking those? Really? Why? Why?!

Visiting architect Peter Eisenman ’55 introduced a sceening of three short films by Michael Haneke on Wednesday including Funny Games.

In Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, a scene-by-scene Hollywood remake of Haneke’s own foreign feature, two effete young men who claim to be guests of the neighbors visit a family in their vacation home in order to borrow eggs. The shell of the family’s complacent bourgeois lifestyle quickly breaks open, however: The boys, named Peter and Paul, refuse to leave. Playing on the host/hostage dialectic, the boys subject the family to irrational games of “do unto others,” as if parodying the concept of Christian charity in the guise of a sadistic Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Over winter break, one of my friends, who has a notorious taste in terrible movies, dragged me to see the movie Yes Man. Although I had heard absolutely nothing about it, I decided to give it a chance and see what Jim Carrey had up his sleeve.

It is impossible to deny that Jim Carrey is a talented and successful comedian. He has taken the lead role in some of my favorite movies, including Dumb and Dumber, Liar Liar and the Truman Show. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that Carrey’s recent choices in movies are bringing his career to a spiraling downfall. This fact is further supported by Carrey’s most recent movie, Yes Man.

Were it not for Kimberly Roberts, the fiercely tenacious protagonist of Trouble the Water, this documentary would have left many in tears. While television media seemingly only covered the disaster after the Hurricane Katrina, Trouble the Water brings us right into the thick of the storm: the rising flood waters overcoming street signs, houses, trees, footage of the death of neighbors and family and the rotten corpse of a dog in the street. Roberts, along with her husband Scott, shares her videotaped documentation from directly before Katrina hit, during the storm itself and the struggle to survive afterward.

Revolutionary Road opens with a party scene: a woman who wants to be an actress meets a man who doesn’t quite know what he wants to be, so long as he gets to be interesting, and she finds this to be extremely alluring. They dance, lock eyes and the scene cuts to many years later. After vows, two children and a house in the suburbs, April Wheeler has failed as an actress, her husband Frank has taken a meaningless office job and the disillusionment of the “hopeless emptiness” has settled into the wreckage that’s become of their beautiful, beloved ideal.

I toyed around with the idea of calling this article “Top Ten Reasons Why The Wrestler is Awesome and Slumdog Millionaire Sucks,” but after a threatened lawsuit from David Letterman and several friends telling me that I’m a heartless scrooge who doesn’t believe in miracles, I thought better of it. But that doesn’t change the fact that The Wrestler, a film by acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain), is a truly great film and easily the most snubbed movie of this year’s Oscar nominees. 2008 was a great year for movies, bringing us such memorable films as The Dark Knight, Milk, WALL-E, Forrest Gump II: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the soon-to-be timeless cinematic classic, Twilight.

It is difficult to ignore the recent impact Bollywood has had on Hollywood and beyond, with movie moments ranging from the upbeat dance scene at the end of The 40-Year Old Virgin and Mike Myers’ abysmal flop The Love Guru to the land of drama and “serious film,” such as Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and Danny Boyle’s Oscar contender Slumdog Millionaire. As anyone who has received a 21st-century telemarketing call can attest to, to focus on India at present is certainly to focus on a new and rapidly expanding center of the world.