Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
Wow. I can’t believe 2007 is done.
I think one reason is because so much of what began in 2007 for me is still unresolved. My wife’s been pregnant for what seems like forever now, and isn’t due until March. And the writer’s strike keeps grinding on as well, unresolved, no immediate end in sight.
And for the last few weeks, I’ve been immersed in a number of last-minute films from 2007, films I needed to catch up on to feel like I had an accurate sense of the year as a whole. Even with all that last-minute work, I still feel like there are titles I’ve missed, things I wish I could have seen, things that may well have changed this list if I had seen them.
But that’s the way it goes. And in a year like this, asking for more treats makes me a big fat Augustus Gloop, a bitchy little Veruca Salt who can’t keep her hands to herself. This has been a phenomenal year of film, a year that reminds you why you love movies in the first place. This has been the sort of year where a top ten list just won’t do the trick. Where even a top twenty list doesn’t quite cover it.
Nope... this year, I’m doing a top twenty-four list.
There are only twenty spots on the list itself... ten runners-up, and the top ten... but there are ties in two places, and so I’m going to be precise and call this a top twenty-four. These are my favorite movies that were released or screened in LA in the last twelve months. The only requirement for the film to be on the list is for it to be either new to 2007 or unreleased prior to 2007, and for me to have seen it. I know that must frustrate some of you if limited release titles haven’t made it to your neck of the woods yet, and I’m sorry about that, but this is my list... and all I can do is be honest about what the films were that meant the most to me. I’m amazed how often people get angry or defensive or crazy about what is or isn’t on someone’s list.
For example, I was reading the talkback over at Capone’s Best Of List, and I came across this very well-reasoned response:
What I dont understandand about AICN
by theycallmemrglass
Jan 4th, 2008
06:19:12 AM
Is the sight hypes up about and geeks the shit out of blockbuster films such as Transformers, Rocky Balboa, Pirates, Spiderman, harry Potter, snakes on a plane etc. Then totally ignore them in their ARTY top 50. I've been an AICN reader for years and I see the same pattern. I remember how Harry loved Attack of the Clones and then totally ignored it in his list. Then revenge of the Sith. SO what about this years blockbusters that AICN geeked out on? Spiderman 3 for instance, not the greatest film but it sure had entertainment factor on the high end of the scale and harry dug it (apart from the venom). Pirates of the Caribeean was a major major dissapointment so I will move on! Transformers was geeked to high kingdom (I personally just thought it was fun but no geeky love for it). How about Rocky? I just dont understand why this site is about COOL not ART oscar calibre films, and to be fair most of it is but that geekness and COOL factor never reflected in the best of the year lists. I dont knock most of the best of list either but I find it somewhat hypocritical. How about a geeky top 10 then, films that were enormous fun and rewatchable for the fun factor.
Okay... fair enough. But I think there’s something wrong with the idea that we “hype up about and geeks the shit out of” the big giant blockbuster movies. Those films get a lot of coverage here, but I guarantee that there’s stuff we just plain don’t post about those films, and in every case, someone complains we didn’t post it. Even if it shows up on 37 other sites and I don’t see any reason to post it just to post it, someone will give us shit about it. You guys want excessive coverage of those films. You demand it. You are angry if you don’t get it.
I’m happy to do it, of course. And so is Harry. And Quint. And Merrick. And everyone else who contributes. Because that’s the nature of being a geek.
But take some responsibility, people. You are hype. You. The audience. You feed the hype in an organic way that can’t be manufactured. You choose what you want to get hyped about, and then you let yourselves get hyped. Over and over and over again.
I do it, too, of course. You can’t be a movie lover without coming to terms with that give and take. You know that you’re going to get burned sometimes. And you know that sometimes you’ll get blindsided by things you didn’t expect. But sometimes, films will live up to the hype, and when that happens... oh, man. It’s like watching an athlete do something perfect, something superhuman, or watching a musician pull off some particular impossible move.
I mean, speaking for myself, I always want those giant films to be great. I always want them to be every bit the movies that the trailers all promise.
But the other day, Harry and I were talking on the phone, geeking about this and that, and we were talking at one point about Alex De La Ygelsias, and that’s the whole reason Harry and I are friends in the first place... because he’s enough of a film nerd that he can HAVE that conversation with me. Being a film geek the way I live it, it’s about the whole world of film. Big stuff, small stuff, foreign language titles, American independent cinema, comic book movies and remakes and sequels, festival fare, direct-to-video... I’ll pretty much give anything a shake, and I hope all of it is good. That’s not hype. That’s just a general philosophy about film. Of course it’s not all good, but if I didn’t approach every single movie I watch with some degree of optimism...
... I’d stop watching them. I mean, I read some people who post in our talkbacks, and it’s like they hate and dread the entire experience of seeing a movie, like they hate filmgoing and can’t relax enough to enjoy anything they see, and I wonder... why would you read a movie news and review website? And more importantly, why would you post on it?
But I digress. Let’s get back to the point that “TheyCallMeMrGlass” made. Why do we seem enthusiastic about geek cinema most of all in terms of coverage, but our year-end lists don’t always reflect that? If someone goes crazy for a SPIDER-MAN movie during the summer, shouldn’t it end up on their best-of list at the end of the year?
Well, it depends. I don’t draw any distinction between “geek cinema” and “regular cinema,” so I don’t go out of my way to put only “real” movies on an end-of-the-year list. I’ve certainly ended up with summer movies on my list in the past, and I’m sure I will in the future as well. But for me, when I get to the end of a full year of cinema, my perspective is very different than it is as we’re actually living through the year, week after week after week. When I’m writing reviews, I am trying to contextualize not only the experience I had watching a movie, but the movie itself in terms of genre, careers of the people who made it, and the film industry as a whole. I always try to judge a film based on its intent, not on some absolute scale where everything is exactly equal.
For example... if I see a comedy, the thing that is most important to me is whether or not I laugh. And in judging that film, how much I laugh is going to be a major factor. And when I write about that film, I’m going to do my best to talk about how it succeeds or fails at what it is trying to do. And maybe it succeeds completely at what it’s trying to do, and I say so. Does that mean that at the end of the year, it’s automatically going to end up on my list of my favorite films? Nope. And there’s nothing hypocritical about that. A superhero film might be a great superhero movie, loads of fun to watch, and I still might not put it on a list because there are other films that I think work better overall. That’s not a slam on the superhero movie, either. It’s just that the very nature of making a list is the inclusion a very few things and the exclusion of everything else.
I mean, my god, the films that aren’t on my lists. I’m a little bit shocked, frankly. I’M NOT THERE. LUST, CAUTION. TEKKONKINKREET. GONE BABY GONE. THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM. THE DARJEELING LIMITED. JUNO. MICHAEL CLAYTON. RESCUE DAWN. STEPHANIE DALEY. THE TV SET. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY. CONTROL. These are all movies that I think are amazing. Not just good, but amazing. I will own all of those movies. I will watch them more than once, I’m sure. If I were to publish that list of the Top Twelve Movies that aren’t on my Top Twelve Movies list, it would be an amazing list, all of them worth your time and attention.
Another reason I’m late is because, frankly, I was worried about writing the piece. I was scared I couldn’t do justice to the year that we just witnessed. The last time this happened, it was 1999. I decided to write the now-infamous ‘90s list as a way of warming up to the task of writing about 1999, one of the best movie years I’d ever lived through.
Never got there. I’ve still never published a list for 1999. I never weighed in on IRON GIANT vs FIGHT CLUB vs THREE KINGS vs AMERICAN BEAUTY vs THE INSIDER vs THE STRAIGHT STORY vs BEING JOHN MALKOVICH vs MAGNOLIA and on and on and on. I just plain hit a wall with writer’s block in terms of writing about what that year meant to me personally here at AICN and as a filmgoer.
So the fact that I’m writing this 2007 piece and it’s still January… that’s progress. Give me some fucking credit. Please. Besides, one of the things I hate most in this world is people who want to influence the Oscars. I know that writing a best-of list is, by definition, a political act. You’re making a statement about what art has more value to you. But it’s not just political... it’s also deeply personal. When you read someone’s list, you’re getting a very intimate look at who they were emotionally that year. I think that’s why people get so defensive about the ordering on lists, and it’s definitely why I’ve taken so long putting my own together. So... we’re here for the countdown. But before that, a special award that simply has to be given. There’s no way to put 2007 to bed without talking about this in some form...
THE EVENT OF THE YEAR The WGA Strike
Duh.
In the future, this is the image that 2007 will bring to mind for me:
I haven’t written a lot about the strike here on AICN. And now that it’s almost done... god willing... it seems like any attempt to sum this all up will fall short. It meant something to me personally as a working writer, something I don’t expect anyone else to understand.
Yes, there’s a chunk of our readership that works in the industry, but there’s a much higher percentage that don’t, that simply love movies as an audience and as fandom. And based on the mail I’ve gotten, the conversation is so difficult to have with someone not living and working in Los Angeles that it’s not worth the effort. I don’t want to fight with someone about how I make my living or have to defend my professional choices to someone who reads my reviews. That seems so intrusive that I can’t believe people really feel invested in this.
Fighting about it in the media is a mistake, in my opinion, because it somehow creates the impression that the public gets a vote in how things end. And they don’t. Not in any significant way. The only way the public could ever really force the AMPTP signatory companies to change is if they used organized, surgical, significant financial boycotts. If they shut down Disney’s money machine for seven days... if they seriously interrupted the cash flow on a level that could not be ignored... that might make a difference or send a signal.
That will never. Ever. Ever. Ever happen. And short of that, the public isn’t going to end this strike... a signed deal is going to end this strike. And I don’t think that’s going to happen tomorrow, but I hope sincerely that it’s going to happen before too long.
Before we move on, and because I haven’t seen anyone in the Writer’s Guild say this to anyone else in the business, allow me to say the following:
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry for every dollar this is costing every single real human being in the Los Angeles area. People in the business, people who work in industries that depend on the people who work in the business... the families of the people this strike is directly affecting... to all of you, I am sorry that this strike happened, is happening, and will continue to happen for a little while longer.
I’m sorry for the real human impact this is having on family life for people, and I’m sorry to anyone who is struggling with keeping their home as the market collapses. I’m sorry about the perfect storm of shit that I’ve heard several people have struggled with as this strike has worn on. I’m sorry, because my own personal nightmare is the loss of comfort or security for my family. I work as hard as I do because I want to make sure they are provided for, and right now... in a strike economy...
... well, like I said... I’m sorry. And I want to say one other thing. I made a crack not too long ago in one of the many strike-related talkbacks, in which I rolled a hand grenade into the conversation of who the “creators” of a movie are.
I laid out the argument that the only “creative” force on a film is the writer, since the writer is the one who creates what everyone else then works on. That makes everyone else an “interpretive” artist, and the writer the “creative” artist. It’s an asshole argument, of course, and a dumb semantics game, and I don’t mean a word of it.
Anyone who has ever worked on a film set knows the truth of it, which is that every single person on that set has something to do with that film being either good or bad.
And so as films and TV shows are shut down all over the city, and people have to sit it out, not working at the crafts they’ve chosen, I know exactly how that feels right now... only I got to at least vote about it. You didn’t. And for that, as much as anything else... I absolutely want to say to all of you... I’m sorry.
And if we don’t take the DGA deal, and we feel like we have to strike for a while longer to get what we need to get from the AMPTP... well, I’m sorry for that, too. I’ll still be at NBC Burbank on Monday picketing, but I’m sincerely sorry all the same.
No one has to agree with me about the strike. No one has to agree with the excellent UnitedHollywood. I’m saddened when I see people blindly swallow AMPTP propaganda, and I’m also puzzled why anyone would be reflexively pro-studio. But let’s try to keep the sloganeering to a dull roar in the talkback below, okay? Let’s talk about the movies, the real reason we’re here.
And now let’s get into the runners-up list. The following twelve titles are ranked from #20 to #11 on my list, with a tie at #11.
I’ll let you in on a secret... most years, the film that finds itself at #11 is one of my very faves... something that will end up getting an abnormal amount of play in my DVD player. I’ve got a real soft spot for #11, historically speaking. Is that true this year as well? We’ll see...
#20. SUNSHINE dir. Danny Boyle scr. Alex Garland
I’ve watched it three times now, and I have no idea what it cost. That’s exciting. Could be $30 million. Could be $95 million. I have no idea, and it’s impossible to tell. I like movies where it could be just plain ingenuity that created the visuals I’m seeing, and SUNSHINE’s a great example of that. I’ll bet Danny Boyle is a big fan of Peter Hyams’s 2010: THE YEAR WE MADE CONTACT. Well, me, too. I think SUNSHINE’s script is flawed in a few fairly major ways, and there are a number of films that just narrowly didn’t make this list that are much better-written. No doubt. Scientifically, it’s sort of ridiculous and insane. Like THE CORE in space. But the look of it... the feel of it... the persuasive way Boyle brings this deep-space trip to life... it’s the detail and the reality of it that I find so seductive. It’s a great “space truckers” movie, a sub-genre I have a real fondness for anyway. It’s hypnotic. There are a couple of characters in the film who love to use this one observation chamber where they can open the outer shields a little bit so they can get some direct exposure to the sunlight they’re flying into. They can only handle something like .00002% direct exposure, of course. It’s still super-heavily shielded. But just that flirtation with incineration is a rush for the characters. The images that Boyle created have that same kind of hypnotic draw, even when Alex Garland’s script is laughably lunkheaded. There were films with much, much better scripts than this that did not make it onto my list, but they didn’t equal SUNSHINE as a visual experience, and sometimes, that’s what I want from a movie. As a science-fiction fan, there are times I feel like I’m starving to death, and then a film like SUNSHINE comes along, and it scratches the itch, nourishes me deeply. It’s not perfect. It goes off the rails a bit in the third act that, oddly, recalls the disastrous ending of KRULL in some ways. That ridiculousness has long been the burden of the serious science-fiction fan, and I have a pretty high tolerance for it. And there’s just a little bit of it, thanks to Boyle’s mostly-sure hand as a director. He and Garland are an interesting team... I’m not sure I think Garland is as strong a writer as John Hodge overall... and the best stuff in this film plays to Boyle’s strengths. Anything that has to do with the hardships of space travel is pretty great. For a long time, the film looks like it’s just going to be a slice-of-very-difficult-life adventure-drama. But there’s something ominous about the overall aesthetic that had me worried, and well over an hour into the film, I turned to my buddy Scott and said, “Oh, god, I hope this doesn’t turn into EVENT HORIZON. Please… pleeeeeease… don’t let the devil show up.” If Garland had just trusted himself and his ability to create tension and fear using just the difficulties of deep space, I think SUNSHINE would be much higher on this list. That’s how deeply I respond to the things this movie does right. It’s just that, sure enough, things get sort of HELLRAISER or, like I said, sort of KRULL. Still, one of the things that keeps me so interested in Boyle is the fact that he’s so imperfect, so frustrating, so uneven. His gifts as a filmmaker are undeniable, and at his best, Boyle is world-class. He just makes crazy decisions, and I find them so crazy at times that it makes me like his movies even more. Cliff Curtis, Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans… they all do strong character-driven work, and they’re one of my favorite crews in a film since Ed Harris and his team in THE ABYSS. I always judge a science-fiction film by how well the cast inhabits their science-fiction environment, and pretty much everyone deserves special mention here. Chris Evans should be treated better by fandom in general based on how he’s the MVP in the FANTASTIC FOUR series and based on how well he anchors this film. Cillian Murphy has worked with Boyle before, of course, and I wonder if he’s becoming Boyle’s new Ewan McGregor, his everyman he’ll take from film to film. Murphy’s eyes are too creepy for him to truly be an everyman, though, and I really like the way Boyle uses him here. Cinematographer Alwin Kuchler is, simply put, the shit. I love his work on MORVERN CALLAR and CODE 46, but with SUNSHINE, he has taken a huge leap forward in terms of ambition and accomplishment. I think the great cinematographers have to do genre films in order to really push the boundaries of their craft. I’m excited that he’s shooting Romanek’s THE WOLF MAN next based on how his work’s been evolving so far. I’m not sure SUNSHINE is for everyone, but based on everything I’ve written, you should know by now if it’s the sort of thing you’re interested in. It’ll all boil down to one question: can you set aside a few major stumbling blocks in order to enjoy something as precisely and powerfully crafted as this is?
#19. BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD dir. Sidney Lumet scr. Kelly Masterson
What an exciting collision of the old and the new. Sidney Lumet is, of course, one of the best of the old-school ‘50s TV directors still working, a defining voice in ‘70s cinema, and still vital. Kelly Masterson is a new writer making a debut here. As a result of that particular alchemy, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD is familiar material brought to life with a master’s touch, but told with the urgency and reckless radical disregard for narrative convention of a young man. I love the way the sleaze in this film is turned up to high. The opening is a sexually graphic liason between Marisa Tomei and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the frankness of the moment and the onscreen presentation of it is enough to let you know just how rough Lumet intends to play everything. It’s dark and funny and a little creepy, and it sets a tone that much of the movie matches. What surprised me is how bleak things get, and how the movie puts the screws to Hoffman’s character, Andy Hanson, as well as Hank Hanson, his brother, played by the jittery and maddening Ethan Hawke. Tomei’s a player, but she’s not the one who has to pay according to the rules of tragedy. And this is, make no mistake, big-time Greek tragedy. A family member ensnares another family member in something, and then it spreads like cancer until it burns their entire family down, erasing years of good in a spiral of horror. And did I mention that Tomei makes 42 look goooooooooooood? Here’s my original review!
#18. ATONEMENT dir. Joe Wright scr. Christopher Hampton based on the novel by Ian McEwan
For those of you keeping score at home, I can’t stand Keira Knightley. And I didn’t have much reaction at all to Joe Wright’s PRIDE & PREJUDICE aside from a sort of detached bewilderment when people started freaking out about it. So color me shocked that this film ended up anywhere near my list at all this year. Much credit has to go to Christopher Hampton for his remarkable, creative adaptation of Ian McEwan’s literary, largely-internal and unadaptable novel. McEwan’s book is built around a conceit that seemed to me, upon first reading it, impossible to duplicate on film. I’m not sure I’d say Hampton exactly equals the impact, but he finds a way to play the same sort of perspective game with someone watching the movie. The last third of the film is where I found myself really reacting to it, impressed by where it takes you. When you look at the trailer for this film, it appears to be cut from the same Merchant-Ivory/Miramax Oscar bait cloth that I normally don’t have much tolerance for, but again… that book. The source material. It could easily be turned into a really stiff and lifeless movie genetically designed to play nice with the Oscar voters, or it could be made into something angrier, something that weaves a complicated story of timing and class and honesty and our almost pathological need as a culture for happy endings. It’s a smart film that carries a real emotional punch, a rare combination. One of the things that surprised me is just how credible Knightley is in her scenes with James McAvoy, who emerges here as a real leading man, someone with some weight and some substance to him that I haven’t seen in anything else he’s done. The discovery of the film is Saoirse Ronan, playing the equally-hard-to-spell Briony Tallis. She’s the one who basically drives the entire film. Her actions set a series of devastating events into motion. It’s her testimony that destroys so many lives in so many subtle ways. She’s the one who intercepts a private letter, the one whose shocked reaction to a single word (“CUNT” has never been utilized to more devastating personal effect in a movie) combined with jealousy so raw and unformed that she can barely articulate it leads her to make a snap decision that she regrets for the rest of her life. The atonement of the film’s title… it’s hers. And this is the character and these are the performances (Briony is played by two other actresses as well, Romola Garai and the great Vanessa Redgrave) that make this movie something more than just a period romance set against the backdrop of war. That stuff is well-done, sincerely-played, and familiar in many ways. I will confess… I was so startled by the scene on the beach the first time I saw it that I had to play it back twice. Much has been written about the five-minute continuous tracking shot that Joe Wright pulls off, and most of the time I think it’s a shame when people talk about a particular shot removed from context. To me, that normally is a moment where a director is very clever, but sometimes at the expense of the honesty of a moment. It’s great to put together one shot that features thousands of extras and featured cast and a huge outdoor set and pyro and horses and everything else… but if it doesn’t communicate some idea, something essential to the movie at that particular moment, then it’s just an empty camera move. I thought in PRIDE & PREJUDICE, there were moments that felt like showing off, choreography for the sake of it. Here, this beach scene tells a complete story. It’s beautiful. It’s a class in economic storytelling on a grand scale. And it’s right for the moment, right for the movie. Yes, it’s an amazing technical moment, but more than that, it’s right. Like when Cuaron pulled off a few spectacular moves in CHILDREN OF MEN... they felt like more than an FX reel. They pulled you into those moments viscerally. I think all involved come off looking good, and ATONEMENT has to rank as one of the biggest surprises of the year for me. I love being proven wrong in a case like this.
#17. BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA dir. Gabor Csupo scr. Jeff Stockwell and David Paterson based on the book by Katherine Paterson
This stuck with me. I saw it early in the year, and then I saw it with my wife when they sent it to us on video, and since then I find that it’s really stuck with me. It’s a shaky beginning for the film. It feels like a thousand other youth market movies… sort of plastic and trying too hard and a little on the cute side. But then the two kids (Josh Hutcherson and AnnaSophia Robb) meet and they visit the forest together for the first time and… … and it just works. The film is never what it seems like it’s going to be, with some big surprises throughout its running time, and since I’m unfamiliar with what I’ve since learned is an ubiquitous book in the American public school system, I didn’t know the third act twist. Let’s just say it did the trick... and it did it to my wife, as well. It’s a beautifully acted piece, and I’m impressed by the work by Gabor Csupo, known for his work in the world of animation but not for live-action fare. He gets better-than-average work from his whole cast. Even Zooey Deschanel in a small role comes in and kills, adorable as can be. A story like BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA can make all the difference to a young person in equipping them to understand some of life’s most important moments. It’s rare that Hollywood gets hold of a piece of material that’s written with this kind of sensitivity and then they actually translate it to the screen intact, with integrity and with real heart. It’s due in no small part, I’m sure, to the involvement of David Paterson, the son of the author of the original book. As we start to really dig deeper in to the catalog of youth fantasy and youth fiction in general and as studios desperately try to tap into that POTTER-primed market, I can only hope that more filmmakers will (A) pick material this good and (B) treat it with the same respect. I have a feeling I’ll be sharing this one with my own kids in years to come. Here’s my original review!
#16. THE MIST dir. Frank Darabont scr. Frank Darabont based on the novel by Stephen King
On the other hand, here’s a film my kids will never, ever see. If they did, they’d probably sleep with one eye open for a while, scared shitless that Daddy might stop by while they’re snoozing. This is one bleak, painful movie, and as much as I thought I knew what it was going to be based on knowing King’s novella and hearing Frank Darabont talk about it over the years, I really wasn’t ready for something this… wounded. Billy Wilder impresses me as an artist because of the way he evolved. He was amazing throughout his career, but his voice changed. His outlook on life changed. He wrestled with an abiding cynicism and occasionally lost that battle, and there are jet black moments in his career that shock me even now because I can’t believe any studio on earth let him make those films, especially in the ’50s and ‘60s. I bring this up because I think Darabont is changing as he gets older. For one filmmaker to bring both THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and THE MIST to the screen is hard to imagine. In a way, though, they both make the same point, which is that hope is the one thing we can never give up. When we do, we die. It’s that simple. Hope keeps us moving. Hope keeps our hearts beating. The death of hope is worse than death itself. It’s just that SHAWSHANK shows us a best-case scenario that lifts us up, inspires us, while THE MIST rubs our noses in the worst-case scenario hard enough to leave scars. People think of Darabont as sort of sunshiney and mainstreamy and he is indeed a preposterously nice and charming guy. But he’s not some bland Pollyanna. He’s capable of blistering anger, focused and articulate, and I think he’s reached a place in his career where he’s so absurdly well-off that the only thing that can get him to show up to a set or sit down at the typewriter is passion. He has to mean it. And it’s obvious watching THE MIST that Darabont was not in a sunshiney place when he set out to tell this particular story. It’s not just the monster stuff that’s bleak, although he certainly makes it seem impossible to survive an encounter with the twisted biology that rolls in when the mist does. It’s the view the film espouses of society, of our behavior when left to our own devices in small groups. Cut off the outside world, leave 50 of us alone, and see how long they last. They will die from the inside like an animal with cancer before the things outside ever get a chance to finish them off. That’s just the nature of human beings, and that’s what makes THE MIST such a bitter pill. Even the film’s final awful lesson about hope is a case of a gesture meant well that goes godawfully wrong. A decision is made. It seems like the only decision. And then… that bit of daylight that seemed impossible, that hit of fresh air, all a moment too late. People in this film are punished for their own nature, a sign that no matter how the mist is explained away, its real purpose is practically Biblical. It is rolling metaphor, Travis Bickle’s cleansing rain finally falling hard, and this is one of the great horror films of the last few years as a result. Here’s my original review!
#15. PARANOID PARK dir. Gus Van Sant scr. Gus Van Sant based on the novel by Blake Nelson
The more I think about this one, the more amazed I am by it. Gus Van Sant has been working towards this film for the last five years, and with the help of Christopher Doyle, I think he’s finally done it just right. But what is “it”? What has Van Sant been doing in GERRY and ELEPHANT and LAST DAYS? What is this sort of meandering aesthetic of his, this real-time long-take mundane reality thing that he’s been doing, refining from film to film? I finally saw Alan Clarke’s ELEPHANT from 1989, and it’s obvious that was what inspired Van Sant to adopt this style as his own, right down to making his own version of ELEPHANT. That was the opposite of his PSYCHO remake, though, which was notable only for how faithful it was to Hitchcock’s original. ELEPHANT was simply him taking the visual plan and the basic idea -– show an act of violence in a removed, distanced context that is almost completely realistic, shot on location with complete unknowns –- and doing it in a whole new time and place, holding a mirror up to high school shootings instead of IRA violence. GERRY is a sort of Ionesco comedy, wandering idiots talking about big issues and low ideas. LAST DAYS is the biopic through that filter, missing the big moments, painting an oblique picture on purpose as a sort of meta-statement about the unknowable nature of celebrity. Here, Van Sant’s taken a novel that was written for teenagers, a first-person diary piece about a kid who is involved in a terrible accident and who doesn’t tell anyone. It got decent reviews and was evidently well-written and had some well-drawn characters. Van Sant saw something in it, a chance to make a movie in this style he’s been developing that has a great little story, a compelling mystery driving it forward, and an authentic voice. Gabe Nevins is the lead in the film, and if he never works again, it doesn’t matter. He’s given one great performance, real and unaffected and devastating. I really believed in this kid, and it reminded me of the performance Linda Manz gave in DAYS OF HEAVEN. He’s got that same heavy-lidded disconnect, this way of looking through people that makes him seem so much more than just a kid sometimes. Van Sant shot the film in Portland, and it’s got a great grounded sense of time and place. Like I said... Christopher Doyle was the director of photography on the film, and it’s hard to overstate just how great his work is here. I’ve seen most of the great skate films, seen most of the ways people have shot skateboarding and skateboarding culture, and the coolest part about the film is that I don’t think Chris Doyle has watched much of that stuff at all. It’s not shot the same way we see everything else shot. There’s a dreamy underwater feeling to the entire movie. Something terrible has happened to Alex, the character that Nevins plays, and he’s sort of moving through his whole life wide awake but dreaming, drowning in this surreal series of unfolding events. My favorite subplot involves his girlfriend Jennifer (Taylor Momsen), a self-aware little hottie-in-training who is determined she’s going to lose her virginity to Alex. Momsen (who is, shockingly enough, the little girl who played opposite Jim Carrey in THE GRINCH, and who is also on GOSSIP GIRL at the moment, all growed-up) is pitch-perfect, and considering how many movies and TV shows she’s been in, and how few (as in none) Nevins has been in, they never feel mismatched. She makes him better in their scenes together. Van Sant deserves enormous credit for the work he does with his young cast. I feel about this film the way I do about THE OUTSIDERS. I think it’s got a great young cast, I think it tells a big sweeping emotional teen story, and I was genuinely moved by the way it all comes together. This is sort of storytelling that I think Haggis aspired to with CRASH, but done with a grace and a feather touch that Haggis is incapable of. I think if you don’t mind that sort of unsubtle approach, it’s fine, and believe me… I’m the guy who wrote PRO-LIFE, so I know unsubtle when I see it. Van Sant takes this style he’s been developing, he plays pick-up sticks with the chronology (in a way that snaps every single dramatic step into sharp focus), and he delivers a lean hour-and-a-half long film that points the way to what I hope is the rest of his career. I never want him to make another FINDING FORRESTER or GOOD WILL HUNTING again. I never want to see Van Sant directing Robin Williams in tears again or Sean Connery growling, “Where’s my Oscar, you cunts?” I want to see him push this further. The thing the movie captures so perfectly is the way you make choices at that age that you can’t take back, and some of them result in these amazing adventures that belong only to you, things you know you can never tell your parents, things you might not even ever tell your friends. And some of those choices result in catastrophe. And you find yourself at a loss to explain what led you to that place. It’s like you’re dreaming it. I know there was one weekend when I was 17, when I was first driving, and I was working at a theater in Brandon, Florida. It was a rainy winter Saturday afternoon when I got to work to open the theater, and my manager was losing his shit because we were supposed to have a studio sneak of a movie that night, and the print was delivered to a theater in Orlando by mistake. Orlando, keep in mind, is about two hours away if it’s raining so hard you can’t see ten feet. Which it was. I was under strict orders from my parents to only take the van to work and then home. I had not proven myself to be the most reliable of human beings by that point. Shocking, I know. And I knew full-well that my parents were not going to love the notion of me venturing out in a storm to pick up a print. But I used to really bust ass at that job, and I was already the head projectionist. I saw it as my responsibility to get that print. So I went. With a busted heater. With zero visibility. And along the way, I managed to fuck up the entire passenger’s side panel of the van. I peeled it back like the top of a tuna can as I tried to leave a parking lot. I rolled over a cement divider and then in trying to back the van off, I made things worse. And I lost it. I panicked. I had made a bad decision to get to that place, and all I could do that that point, it seemed, was make more bad decisions. One after another, each one compounding it. On the way back to Tampa, absolutely terrified about what was going to happen to me, I managed to stop at a gas station and fuck up the other side of the van as well. It was just so impossible to imagine it happening that, of course, it did. And it only compounded my panic. I’m lucky I made it back to Tampa alive. To this day, I’ve never really been able to explain the day to my parents, and not because I don’t want to... it’s because I can’t. I just can’t explain how it all went so insanely wrong. It doesn’t seem real. Watching Alex as he works his way through his dilemma in this film, I felt for the kid. Van Sant’s crafted an honest movie that still works as an unconventional thriller. It’s also got perhaps the single greatest money shot of Van Sant’s entire career, one of those images that I’ll never shake when I think of this year in film. I really can’t say enough good things about this film.
#14. EASTERN PROMISES dir. David Cronenberg scr. Steven Knight
In a perfect world, this would turn out to be only one in a series of films that David Cronenberg, Steven Knight, and Viggo Mortensen make about Nikolai, the provocative anti-hero they created with this film. He’s an awesome character, and one of my favorite things about this film is the way it hints at Nikolai’s larger story without giving it all up in one ridiculous expository monologue. We pick up Nikolai at a particular point in his life, and when we last see him, his story is far from over. The film tells the story of the character played by Naomi Watts, and the way her life intersects with Nikolai... that’s the drama. That’s the meat of the thing. She steps into a larger story that’s already in progress, and when she finally leaves this world behind, changed permanently for having dipped into it, that’s where the film ends, even though this larger story is still unfolding. This is just one of several films this year that pulled this sort of thing on audiences, and some people seem to hate it. Me? I just want them to eventually give us more stories. Sequels that are about characters I love sound like heaven instead of sequels based on release dates and brand awareness. The crime world that Cronenberg and Knight create here is a meticulously researched one, and they use this world to simply deal with the basic struggles of the human heart. I think Cronenberg has turned the corner into a new phase of his career where he is making films about human monsters, about the things that live beneath the skin of all of us. I think he loves to show the weakness in monsters, the way even the most unrecognizable of them still has something human about it. It’s an awful thing to consider sometimes. Here, Nikolai wrestles with his own nature as a result of the lifestyle he has chosen to lead. He is a monster. Sometimes. And sometimes he is a man sworn to stop monsters. And neither side is pretend or just a role, but neither side is really him, either. Nikolai has a laser focus until Anna (Watts) crosses his path, and she stirs that small remaining bit of beating human heart. She touches that essence of humanity in him. And it changes the way he behaves. He is forced to adapt and change the way he goes about his business. I love the way Nikolai seems constantly shocked by his own reactions to Anna. I’ve never seen a character wish more fervently that they were able to disconnect their moral compass, and it’s striking the way Cronenberg and Knight dramatize it. Mortensen and Watts bring a great adult weariness to their roles, and they both do beautiful work. Vincent Cassel and Armin Mueller-Stahl both chew the scenery with aplomb as members of the family that Nikolai works for. Peter Suschitzky’s work is some of his best with Cronenberg in his long history as cinematographer for him (DEAD RINGERS, NAKED LUNCH, M. BUTTERFLY, CRASH, eXistenZ, SPIDER, and HISTORY OF VIOLENCE), lurid and pulpy and sort of hyper-noir without the self-consciousness of something like SIN CITY. The much-discussed bathhouse fight scene is one of the great action sequences of the year, thrilling and brutal, and it reminds me that even at this stage in his career, Cronenberg still feels like a director with something to prove, something he has to say, someone with a reason to keep making films. He’s long been a favorite of mine, a hero to me artistically, and to see him continually deliver films of this caliber is reward for all the faith I’ve had in him over the years. Here’s my original review!
#13. THE NAMESAKE dir. Mira Nair scr. Sooni Taraporevala based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri
What a beautiful, generous movie this is. There was a lot of darkness on display in the theater in 2007, and I loved a lot of it, but no film this year had more to say about the beauty of family than this one. I’m not one of those people who thinks you have to have a family to be complete, or even that you have to be married to be complete. I think we all need different things in this world to make us whole, to balance us, to connect us to whatever community it is we are drawn to or born into. I know that I was one person before I had a family, and I’m a very different person now that the word means “my wife and my child” and not “my parents and my sister.” I’m no longer defined as someone’s child. I have people who depend on me, people who I am responsible for, responsible to. And I love that. It has made me a much better person, a much happier person. There have been large parts of my life where I’ve been positively rock-bottom, and I somehow soldiered on as we all do, making all my little compromises and accepting all the various disappointments we are so often dealt, and during those times, I’ve felt like I was never going to be happy again. And then I turned a corner, unexpectedly, thanks to someone’s arrival in my life, and everything was right again. And those passages in our lives, those defining seismic shifts, are hard to portray with any degree of delicacy on film. You have to do a lot of legwork, and it can be phony, forced. This film covers something like thirty five years in the life of an extended family, and it runs 122 minutes, so it’s always pushing forward. I was afraid it might feel too episodic, but the screenplay is almost surgical about what it shows and what it doesn’t, wisely picking its moments. It allows room for intimacy, for the film and the characters to slow down at times and really breathe. I haven’t read the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, but the film is rich and culturally specific, and as someone married to a person who is still part of the immigration system, still working her way towards a citizenship, I loved the way it painted the immigrant experience. I think most people casually glancing at the cover of this or at a description of it are going to focus on Kal Penn, the one generally familiar face here. Irfan Khan is the real star here, though, and he deserves to be remembered for his work as Ashoke Ganguli. I think it’s the most wrenching and spiritual portrait of fatherhood since IN AMERICA, and it affects me the same way. This movie says so much about the hopes we have for our children, the things we want for ourselves, and Ashoke is the one who makes it all happen. He’s in a horrific train crash near Calcutta at the start of the film (particularly odd if you remember his work in THE DARJEELING LIMITED this year as well), and he is changed by the experience. He decides to fulfill his part in an arranged marriage, but only if she’ll move with him to New York City. It’s the late ‘70s, and nothing’s easy for Ashoke and his bride Ashima (the great Tabu). What really makes the film powerful is the difference between Ashoke and Ashima and their kids, Gogol Ganguli (Penn, who is so good here he changed my opinion of him) and Sonia (Sahira Nair). That gap between first and second generation immigrants is almost unbreachable, and the film expertly captures the small ways it breaks Ashoke and Ashima’s hearts every day. Gogol grows up with a ready tap of fury thanks to the way he feels like an outsider, a freak, with a strange name and a strange background and strange parents. He hates the things that make him different. Many of the families I’ve met thanks to my wife have kids who are living the same life that Gogol does in this film, foreigners in the homes of their parents. They are American, unshakably, and their parents don’t recognize themselves in these kids they’re raising. It’s the way it works, but it can be incredibly painful at times for the parents to have their culture rejected wholesale. They want to pass on some sense of where they came from to their kids… they need to. It’s such a natural urge. And the process by which Gogol comes to peace with his father and his name and his identity… it just flattened me. Mira Nair’s had some ups and downs in her filmography, but when she has a good piece of material, she can put together a lush and inviting final product. She worked with screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala before on some of her best early films, like MISSISSIPPI MASALA and SALAAM BOMBAY! I’m not really sure why they haven’t worked together since then, but now that they finally have, the results make the wait completely worthwhile.
#12. JOSHUA dir. George Ratliff scr. David Gilbert and George Ratliff
I loved George Ratliff’s documentary HELL HOUSE in 2001, and I thought the thing it did best was balance tone. It’s definitely roasting the people it presents, but it’s hard to say exactly what wrong the film does to them. They are, after all, given room to present their own material their own way, so they can’t really claim anything in the movie is out of context. How Ratliff pulled off that balance is what made the film so exciting, and he’s done much the same thing with this year’s most egregiously mis-marketed picture, the disturbing and terribly sad JOSHUA. Based on how this was sold, I was under the impression this was an art-house riff on THE OMEN, but it’s not. It’s not a horror film at all. Instead, it’s about the fears of parenthood and, more significantly, what it’s like growing up in a family where you don’t feel any connection to the people around you. Jacob Kogan’s performance as Joshua is astonishing, especially when you consider than he’s only 12 years old, and most adults couldn’t pull off what he does here. It’s one thing to watch a person act in a film, but to spend a film watching a character think, and more importantly, to know what they’re thinking... well, that ain’t easy. As Brad (Sam Rockwell) and Abby Cairn (Vera Farmiga) should be celebrating the birth of their baby girl, things are complicated by a subtle change in the behavior of their son Joshua. He’s a strange kid, but it goes deeper than that. The first clues you get about what’s wrong with this family come when Joshua starts gently insisting to his parents that “it’s okay if you don’t love me.” He’s basically warning them from the start of the film that he feels incapable of being part of the family, incapable of being loved by them. He craves love, obviously, but he doesn’t think he can get it from his parents because he feels so radically different from them. He is an alien in their house, and it’s obviously eating at him even before the new baby is born. But her birth changes things, and Joshua realizes that if he’s going to be happy, he’s going to have to take responsibility for that happiness, no matter what. As I said in my thoughts about THE NAMESAKE above, I am not one of those people who believes that everyone has to do the same things or have the same sort of family experience or even want a family. And watching JOSHUA, I am reminded why I believe that. Some people just aren’t wired right for family life, and I can’t think of anything more awful than realizing that after you’ve started the family, once there are people depending on you, believing in you. Sam Rockwell doesn’t get a lot of opportunities to play a lead, and I’m always intrigued when someone uses him that way. He’s not the sort of bland everyman that most people use in horror films. In fact, he’s so odd, so prickly and eccentric that Joshua doesn’t seem like that much of a mistake. He’s very much his father’s son. And Vera Farmiga does really harrowing work here as a woman who struggles with massive post-partum depression after both of the pregnancies. We see videotapes of her first go-round with it while Joshua was still nursing, and then it hits her again once she brings the new baby home. The difference this time is that it seems to get worse as it goes, accelerating from day to day, and the film drops hints that Joshua not only understands what’s happening to Mommy... he may actually be encouraging it, helping it along. Farmiga is not afraid to look weak here, not afraid to let herself look terrible, and I love the way the film never quite answers whether Joshua is trying to destroy his mother or whether she’s just unable to get a grip on her own mental health issues. Ratliff mines every bit of sorrow implicit in the idea of realizing that you are raising a child you cannot possibly connect with, and Farmiga sells it. What startled me most is how the film was sold as an overt horror film, and it’s anything but. In order to explain why, I have to spoil the film a bit, so if you haven’t seen it and you’re concerned, you should stop reading here. But what really struck me is how this is basically a film about a kid who realizes very early on that he’s gay and that his immediate family will never understand or accept him, so he sets out to make sure that they don’t love him so he won’t feel rejected. He does it on his terms, and it’s chilling even if there’s nothing overtly violent or evil happening. In particular, watch the final scene when Joshua is finally alone with his Uncle Ned (Dallas Roberts), who the film strongly suggests is gay without quite spelling it out. Throughout the film, Joshua is drawn to his Uncle, and in scene after scene, we see a difference in the way Joshua is with him and the way Joshua is with anyone else. There’s an eagerness to please, a genuine desire to connect. Around Uncle Ben, Joshua’s the boy he can’t be around anyone else. And in that final scene, Joshua connects the dots, spills his guts, lays his heart out there, confident that his life is finally on-track and he can finally be himself. Watch Roberts. Watch him put it together. This is a film that works on many levels, that has a lot to say about the fears that come with parenting and the worst possible sorrows of childhood, and in the film’s final frames, Ratliff lets the silent recoil that Joshua never notices sum it up.
#11. (THREE-WAY TIE) GRINDHOUSE dir. Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, and Rob Zombie scr. Robert Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, Jeff Rendell, Eli Roth, and Quentin Tarantino HOT FUZZ dir. Edgar Wright scr. Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg 300 dir. Zack Snyder scr. Zack Snyder & Kurt Jonstad and Michael Gordon Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lyn Varley
Nerdvana. All three of these films have already been internalized. They’re movies I feel like I know inside out, and I can’t imagine not enjoying them. My reaction to them borders on the chemical. If you don’t like them, that’s fine. I think all three speak to very specific film nerd fetishes, and in a way, I’m amazed they even exist. I can’t believe geek culture has become so pervasive that we’re actually allowed to make and release movies like this. But thank god, because these are the types of experiences that recharge my battery more than any other.
Do I think GRINDHOUSE is high art? Hell, no. Do I think it’s a “better” film than something like GONE BABY GONE or I’M NOT THERE? I don’t even know how to answer that. I know that there were very few experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater that were as much fun as all four times I saw GRINDHOUSE in the theater. And for my money, the only version that matters is the giant three hour plus version with the fake trailers and everything else. That’s GRINDHOUSE. That’s the experience that I adore. I love the way it’s sequenced, the edits of the two films, the insane length of it. It’s BNAT in a box. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a condensed version of what QT Fest is like, and for those who can’t understand the genuine non-ironic thrill of great trash, I can’t imagine that GRINDHOUSE makes a lick of sense. For those who would have braved the worst of Times Square in order to soak up the insane programming at the height of the grindhouse era, though, the film is overloaded with things to love.
I think Rodriguez made a movie that is one of the most unabashedly fun and playful things in his career, and by enjoying the cheese and embracing it, he seems to have been set free. It’s liberated filmmaking, fast and dirty and ridiculous, and you can feel a genuine joy in every single set-up. It’s the most inspired visual work Robert’s ever done, and I sort of wish he’d just go nuts and make a shitload of direct-to-video lunatic crazy exploitation movies that don’t apologize for being what they are. That’s an art form, and it’s not something everyone can do well. I think Rodriguez may be better at it than he even realizes. Tarantino, on the other hand, made what I think is the most personal film of his career disguised as a drive-in movie, and I’m sort of amazed he was willing to bare himself to the public to the degree that he does in this film. I wonder if anyone’s ever going to decode the entire thing in public, though, or if Quentin thinks he’s hiding in plain sight. By turning all of his biggest fetishes and peculiarities and libidinal indiscretions into fodder for this film, it just becomes part of the lore. Again… you can tell that this film was something he burned while making. There’s a feverish manic feeling to the whole thing that builds to almost unbearable tension in a few places. Seeing it in the theater with a full crowd, watching them react to the final car chase with Stuntman Mike, it was a mainline spike of audience connection, one of the reasons I go to the theater. I love it when the audience just snaps into a sort of group high, all of them riding the same wave of adrenaline and excitement and laughter and screams. GRINDHOUSE did that for the audiences I saw it with, and for the entire time I sat there each and every screening, I felt like I was really getting the most out of what you can experience with a movie. I left full. Stuffed. Satisfied to the point of stagnation. Add the fake trailers to the meal, like the “wafer-thin” mints offered to Mr. Creosote, and I honestly feel spoiled by something so rich and rewarding. If I could have justified it, I would have seen the film another four times while it was out, and I resent that I can’t have that version on DVD.
On the other hand, I’m going to officially ask Universal here and now to stop releasing new versions of HOT FUZZ. It’s been less than a year, and I have 47 different editions of it already between regular DVD and HD.
Not that I’m really complaining. I love how hard Edgar Wright and Nick Frost and Simon Pegg all work to promote their films and to pack the DVDs with original content. HOT FUZZ, if you’ve got all the various stuff they’ve put out, gave birth to a pretty amazing batch of stuff from the boys, not the least of which is the movie. I think the film is as good as Zemeckis-Gale in their prime. I think the script is tight and smart and funny and it manages to make nimble jumps from genre to genre without ever once feeling like one of those pathetic fucking jukebox parodies like MEET THE SPARTANS. Yes, Edgar Wright gets his Michael Bay on something fierce in this film, but that’s not the point. At the heart of it, it’s still about the characters, and the cast, and Wright put together this INSANE cast of English character actors that any real movie fan should be celebrating. They’re all incredible, all funny, all of them game for anything Edgar throws their way.
And the last thing anyone can accuse HOT FUZZ of is being mean. So often, really slick action movies with a giant body count are somewhat nihilistic amoral affairs. One of the reasons I love BAD BOYS 2 is because of how vile it is. It’s GRAND THEFT AUTO as a film. It’s reprehensible. There’s not a single person in that film to like or admire, and I don’t care. With HOT FUZZ, I love both Nick Angel and Danny Butterman. They’re so richly played that by the end of the film, I don’t want it to end. I’d like to see what Angel and Butterman are doing now. I’d like to see more adventures from them. I’m not literally saying I want the guys to just churn out sequels… but I don’t feel like the movie said everything you could say with these characters. Just like I was saying about Viggo Mortensen in EASTERN PROMISES.
Hey… what if Nikolai moved to Sandford..?
300 is an unapologetic celebration of and ode to the iconography of film heroism. It is an action movie as thesis paper on action movies, pretty much pure kinetics for much of its running time. I think there are things about it as a dramatic piece that are indefensible, and so I won’t bother defending them. I think the film is amazing to watch. It’s beautiful and terrible. It’s empty, but that allowed a lot of people to bring their own agendas to the film, and different people had very different experiences with it. It’s like an action movie litmus test. Is it a film about the tradition of storytelling as propaganda? Is it, in fact, propaganda? Is it an attack on current political leadership? Is it simply a historical fantasy conveniently timed? I’m not about to tell someone else that what they see in the film is wrong… I just think that it’s based on the viewer, not the movie. I saw it a few times, including an IMAX screening, and I’ve watched both the Blu-Ray and the HD-DVD versions, and I feel like I know the film pretty well at this point. I think it should be studied by kids in film schools, if for no other reason than because it didn’t cost half of what you think it did. Zack Snyder is one thrifty and slick motherfucker, and if you aren’t at the very least excited by what kind of visual thunder he can summon, then I’m afraid you and I have different definitions of what we want from action films.
These are all movies that are easily attacked, easily torn down, easily dismissed as indulgent. These are all films that had enormous fan expectations placed on them before they came out, only to experience plenty of inevitable (but in my opinion unwarranted) backlash. And I think all three are going to endure as movies and experiences worth having.
Oh… and one last thing. I want to keep those theatrical prints of GRINDHOUSE in release. Keep them circulating at midnight films. Don’t let that version go away. Or get it out on home video on a realistic time-table and treat us like adults and tell us when to expect it. If you’d like to give us a domestic version of that Japanese mondo box set coming out soon, I’d appreciate that. Thanks.
Here’s my original GRINDHOUSE review!
Here’s my original HOT FUZZ review!
Here’s my original 300 review!
And on that note, I’m going to take a quick break, then come back to finish up my top ten list, which will also feature the films I most loathed sitting through this year, better known as The 20 Hours I Want Back.
See you soon.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
