In last week’s issue of Time mag­a­zine their film critic Richard Corliss wrote a rather lengthy arti­cle on why he thought that all of the best movies this year were block­busters. Some of his favorites from the past year were Iron Man, Speed Racer, WALL-E and The Dark Knight, and while I agree with two of his choices, Speed Racer didn’t appeal to me (so I didn’t see it) and, hate me if you will, and if you loved it you prob­a­bly will, but I didn’t care about see­ing WALL-E. At all. I’m a big fan of the Pixar pic­tures, but WALL-E just didn’t inter­est me.

But I have to agree with Corliss on his sec­ondary point; being the end of the year this is the time for awards-caliber films, and this year is look­ing pretty lame. Early on I was inter­ested in see­ing Gran Torino but then my inter­est fiz­zled out for no per­cep­ti­ble rea­son even though I love Clint East­wood. The Reader sounds so bor­ing and Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire deals with under-aged pros­ti­tu­tion so they’re out in my book.

But Corliss doesn’t bring up the biggest glar­ing omis­sion that he made about the two films that we do agree on. The Dark Knight was directed by Christo­pher Nolan who did the fan­tas­tic Memento sev­eral years back and John Favreau directed Iron Man. Favreau started out in indie films (Swingers, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Cir­cle) and then moved on to direct­ing (Will Ferrell’s sec­ond most under­rated per­for­mance — Elf) Indie direc­tors tend to focus more on story and plot than, say, Michael Bay or that dufus McG because their bud­gets are usu­ally in the high hundred-thousands or the low mil­lions. What’s been great about Nolan’s and Favreau’s careers is that they so far have kept the indie ethic of sto­ry­telling first and just tack­ing on the spe­cial effects to aide the visuals.

I doubt Iron Man or The Dark Knight will get nom­i­nated for the big awards, other than Heath Ledger, but the were enjoy­able and inter­est­ing films that deserved the crit­i­cal acco­lades, and the piles of money, that they earned.