by Jimmy Nightingale

Created on: January 05, 2009   Last Updated: January 06, 2010

2008 was a strange year for the comedy genre. After 2007's "Juno" and "Lars and the Real Girl", two off-beat and clever, rather than big belly laugh comedies, it was always going to be a tough act to follow.

The biggest hyped movie of the year, as far as Australian audiences were concerned, was Baz Luhrmann's homage to the romantic epics of film-making. This movie was of course "Australia". Part drama, social commentary, comedy and action movie, it suffered from some poor marketing and an inability to define itself. There is certainly a strong comedic strain running through-out the movie, from Lady Sarah's (Nicole Kidman) first glimpse of kangaroos, the interplay between the Drover and Lady Sarah, and the demise of King Carney (Bryan Brown), to name a few. This a long movie and a visual treat that passes in a blur that belies its near three hour length. Sadly, the critics have largely panned this one, and in my view unfairly as this is the kind of movie that cinemas were designed and built for. Having said that, it is a victim of its own quirkiness and mix of genres. It is sad that the comedy of the first half of the movie fades into what then becomes a rather serious drama. It is one of the better movies for 2008, but it is difficult to define this movie into any one category.

Therefore, we will have a look at three movies that have no such identity crisis:

The first one is a Disney-Pixar effort. By all the usual standards of comedy, "Wall-E" should never have worked. It is an animated adventure that follows the destruction of the Earth as we know it, involves a couple of robots and very little dialogue. But funny it is and, despite being a movie primarily directed at children (with near limitless scope for merchandising), it works effectively at all levels. The animation is superb and the visual gags are well crafted and paced. The gags mostly flow out of Wall-E's relentless boredom through trying to clean up Earth's trash over more than 700 years. Things like collecting all manner of odds and sods and then trying to work out whether to put a spork in with the spoons or forks, finding a bat with a ball attached to it, solving a Rubik's cube in two seconds, creating patterns with the rubbish and the interplay between Wall-E and a cockroach. The two best scenes are the sunset date between Wall-E and Eve - where he wants to hold her hand so much, a very human touch, eventually doing so and her hand snaps back and crushes his - and all the obese humans aboard the

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