The pre-holiday weekend got off to a sad start Friday as the news began to hit te paper and the Internet that Mike "Mad Dog" Bell had died. Bell, 37, was found dead while staying at a rehab center in Costa Mesa, California. (At this time, a cause of death has still not been determined.) Bell had been a professional wrestler, but "Mad Dog" wasn't a handle that he concocted just to wear in the ring; as audiences learned from Bigger, Faster, Stronger*, the documentary made by his younger brother Chris, it was a childhood nickname that stuck, just as his and Chris's brother, Mark has been fated to go through life known to one and all as Stinky. Bell's movie, which played in theaters this past summer, and which stands out as one of the more fascinating specimens of the recent vogue for personal, semi-professional documentary filmmaking, explored his and his brothers' lifelong obsession with physical strength and size, an obsession that, as the boys grew older and continued to work as weightlifters and personal trainers, inevitably involved the use of steroids. (Paul Clark wrote about the movie at this site last week in his "Reviews by Request" column.)

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As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

Watching Chris Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (*The Side Effects of Being American), the first thing that I noticed was that Bell didn’t look like the typical documentarian. Of course, there really isn’t a mold for what a nonfiction filmmaker ought to look like, but normally documentary filmmakers tend to look either like intellectuals (Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman) or self-styled man-of-the-people types (Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock). By contrast, Bell is a good-looking thirtysomething, broad-shouldered and well-muscled, in keeping with his life as a former bodybuilder. But in making this, his first feature, Bell obeyed the first rule of writing- when in doubt, write what you know. Or in Bell’s case, film it.

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Hey, all the cool kids are doing it.  With Andrew Osborne posting his favorite films of the first six months of 2008 last week, and Paul Clark doing the same only yesterday, who am I to drop the ball?  This list, already heavily revised just since last week thanks to some illuminating July 4th viewing, will no doubt undergo serious revision before anything on it makes it to a Best of 2008 list; living in a city where first-run movies are hard to come by unless they're American and released by a mainstream production company, I've come to reply quite heavly on home video releases, film festivals, and other avenues of distribution that make assessments of this sort quite difficult so early in the year.  That said, here's what's flicked my switches so far in a year that follows one of the best in recent memory.

My top five:

1. WALL*E - They say that the studio system is dead, and that the releasing company no longer tells you anything about the quality of the film.  That's true to an extent, but Pixar is a glorious exception to the rule.  The computer animation studio has hardly released a single film during its entire existence, and their latest, concerning a robot whose job is to clean up the detritus of a dead world, has raised the wrath of conservatives while managing to be perhaps the greatest movie Pixar has yet made.  Especially daring because it largely abandons the clever dialogue of previous releases, it instead gives the eyes a feast like they've never seen before throughout its long periods of silence.   An astonishingly successful film with heart, spirit and intelligence, proving that great art can be commercial.  Or vice versa.

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