by Peter Sobczynski
As usual for this time of year, there will be at least 37 different articles purporting to list the best films of 2007 and as usual, this particular one will be the only completely correct one.
There is no other way to say it, so I will jut get right to the point–2007 was a great year for going to the movies. Oh sure, there were plenty of missteps, misfires and outright disasters (more about those next week) and there were plenty of deserving titles that unfairly got pushed to the sidelines while monstrosities like “Wild Hogs,” “Transformers” and “Norbit” made depressingly enormous sums of money. That sort of thing happens every year but what doesn’t happen every year is that when the films were good, they were very good indeed and there were a lot more of them around than usual, especially in the last couple of months of the year, a virtual bumper crop of creativity not seen in American theaters since the second half of 1999. In some years, scraping together ten titles worthy of being considered the best has been a challenge but there were so many excellent films this year that picking only ten among them was a difficult task–as it stands, every single film in my top ten could have easily taken the #1 slot in a normal year and the ten runners-up could have easily made up a more-than-worthwhile Ten Best list if the ones that I actually chose never existed and even then, I was forced to cut a number of eminently watchable works.
Without further ado, the Ten Best Films (and more) of 2007.
1. ZODIAC (directed by David Fincher): I first saw this sprawling exploration of the decade-long investigation of the infamous Zodiac murder case back in February but I doubt that a day has passed since then in which I haven’t thought about it at least once. Instead of giving audiences a slickly-made serial killer thriller in the vein of his earlier “Seven,” Fincher instead surprised everyone with a straightforward and unflashy throwback to the kind of smart, densely packed and adult-oriented narratives that flourished for a time in the 1970's in the works of people like Alan J. Pakula and Sidney Lumet before the industry decided to toss the audience for such fare aside for silly popcorn entertainments aimed at the lowest common denominator. The result is arguably Fincher’s finest work to date, one of the most gripping police procedurals that I have ever seen and I guarantee that after seeing it, you will never again be able to listen to Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” without feeling a shiver go down your spine. Yeah, it didn’t do that great at the box-office but this is one of those films that will be attracting and intriguing new viewers long after the hits of the year have been forgotten.
2: THERE WILL BE BLOOD (directed by Paul Thomas Anderson): After shifting gears with the deliberately low-key “Punch Drunk Love,” Anderson once again swung for the fences with this jumbo-sized examination of power, greed and obsession that started off as an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s “Oil” and then went off on its own equally brilliant path that culminated with one of the most stunning final scenes ever seen in a film. In the performance of his career, and that is saying quite a bit when you consider his career, Daniel Day-Lewis was absolutely mesmerizing as the turn-of-the-century oilman whose unceasing quest for money and power (even after amassing more of each than any one man could use in a lifetime) causes him to gain the world, lose his soul and puts him in conflict with his young son (Dillon Freasier) and a charismatic preacher (Paul Dano) with outsized ambitions of his own. In the past, Anderson has had his films compared to the likes of Altman, Scorsese and Kubrick but with this, his fifth effort, such comparisons are no longer necessary–he is now officially in their league as a true master of the cinema.
3: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (directed by Joel & Ethan Coen): In bringing Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel, in which an ordinary schlub (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon the remains of a drug deal gone bad, impulsively grabs $2 million that was left behind in the carnage and finds himself pursued a mysterious man (Javier Bardem) who will do anything to retrieve the money and a decent-but-outmatched sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), to the screen, the Coen Brothers eschewed the ironic distance of their previous efforts and the result was a spare, haunting and disarmingly direct work that was as gripping, terrifying, thoughtful and darkly funny as anything that they have ever done. As a bonus, Bardem’s portrayal of the amazingly ruthless Anton Chigurh, not to mention his way with a coin flip and a cattle gun, made the character the most instantly iconic screen embodiment of evil since Anthony Hopkins first graced the screen as Hannibal Lecter.
4. I’M NOT THERE (directed by Todd Haynes): Almost from the moment that he first appeared on the music scene in the early 1960's, people have been attempting to explain Bob Dylan–both his work and the personas that he has regularly adopted and abandoned over the years–but I can’t recall any that has done a better job of understanding the man, the myth and the music than Haynes’ take on the subject, a film that works as historical fiction, cultural analysis and as a formal experiment (starting with the decision to have portrayed by six different actors of different ages, races and genders, none of whom are referred to as “Bob Dylan”) as poetic, hypnotic and audacious as an actual Dylan song. As a bonus, Cate Blanchett, of all people, turns in the performance of the year as the film’s version of the “Don’t Look Back”-era Dylan–it may sound like some kind of art-house prank but she is so completely convincing in the role that it may take people a few minutes to realize that it really is her up there.
5. BLACK BOOK (directed by Paul Verhoeven): Seven years after the release of his last film, the disappointingly mundane “Hollow Man,” Verhoeven returned to his home country of Holland and came back with a thrilling, thoughtful, darkly funny and seriously sexy World War II epic about a beautiful Dutch Jew (Carice van Houten in a stunning debut) who dyes her hair (all of it) and goes undercover to work as a secretary for a local Nazi bigwig (Sebastian Koch), unexpectedly falls in love with him and winds up going on the run with him when the Nazi regime collapses and she is mistakenly identified as a traitor. At once a exciting war melodrama and a complete subversion of the entire genre, this was a stunning return to form for Verhoeven, a director who is as often overrated for his shock tactics as he is underrated for his genuine filmmaking chops, and is one of the very best films of his entire career.
6. GRINDHOUSE (directed by Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino): Although the conceit of this film–a detailed replication of the sleazy exploitation film double-bills that used to flourish in drive-in and run-down theaters back in the 1970's–may have proven to be too obscure to lure audiences into theaters, those who were attracted by the names in front of and behind the cameras, the notion of two films for the price of one and the instantly iconic image of Rose McGowan with a machine-gun leg were treated to the year’s most purely entertaining film. Rodriguez’s zombie epic “Planet Terror” may not have been a masterpiece but it was 90 minutes of goofy, gory fun and Tarantino’s “Death Proof” was an inspired action-horror fusion that felt like what might have resulted if Mario Bava had somehow been hired to direct the likes of “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.” Even the fake trailers concocted by Rodriguez and guest directors Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie and Eli Roth were more entertaining than any number of full-length films I could mention (Roth’s “Thanksgiving” and Zombie’s “Werewolf Women of the S.S.” were arguably the best things they have ever filmed and I sincerely hope that Rodriguez’s “Machete” and Wright’s “Don’t” get turned into actual films someday). The only drawback is that unless you were lucky enough to get an awards screener from The Weinstein Company, it is currently impossible to see “Grindhouse” as it was meant to be as the two films were split up for separate DVDs with all the trailers and ephemera (aside from “Machete”) being left behind–hopefully the studio will put it all back together for the inevitable DVD double-dip and will do so sooner than later.
7. REDACTED (directed by Brian De Palma): Of all the fictional films that used the current conflict in Iraq as a starting point, this low-budget and decidedly experimental effort from the always-underrated De Palma was the one that hit the hardest and cut the deepest. Using a variety of faux-media sources–video cameras carried by soldiers, news reports, video blogs, security cameras and an ersatz French documentary–the film told a horrifying tale (inspired by actual events) of an atrocity committed by a group of frustrated and poorly trained American soldiers stationed in Samarra against a young girl and her family in a manner that indicted everyone–the soldiers who committed the crime, the military that tacitly allowed such a mindset to develop through their shoddy planning for the conflict, the enemy combatants whose own savagery is not to be underestimated and a media corps that has allowed itself to become a toothless joke–as being equally responsible for what transpired. With this film, De Palma once again embraced the kind of angry and socially committed storytelling that he first made his name with back in the days of “Greetings” and “Hi Mom!” and the fact that the results outraged viewers on both sides of the political spectrum may well suggest just how well he succeeded this time around.
8. EASTERN PROMISES (directed by David Cronenberg): In the hands of virtually any other director, this film, which tells the story of a British midwife (Naomi Watts) whose attempts to track down the family of a recently deceased patient inadvertently lead her into the clutches of the Russian underworld, might have just turned out to be an ordinary thriller but in the hand of a master like David Cronenberg, it became a haunting, brutal and unforgettable exploration of the question of identity–a notion that has long fascinated him over the years–that was anchored by the hypnotic lead performance from Viggo Mortensen as a mob associate whose interest in the woman and her search is more complex than it seems. Oh yeah, it also contains one of the nastiest and most brutal fight scenes ever filmed to boot.
9. JUNO (directed by Jason Reitman): Now that the backlash towards this indie comedy about a snarktastic teen dealing with her unplanned pregnancy seems to be proceeding at full steam, allow me to recount the reasons why the film actually fully deserves all the hype that it has received. The performances from the ensemble cast are all extraordinary–Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner did their best big-screen work to date as the prospective adoptive parents of the unborn child, J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney were hilarious and touching as the surprisingly supportive parents and Ellen Page simply knocked it out of the park with her star-making turn in the title role. Jason Reitman’s direction showed that he could simultaneously create great comic set-pieces (the first meeting between Juno and the adoptive couple is a little masterpiece of observational humor) while also showing a deft touch towards the more sincere character-driven material–between this and his previous film, “Thank You for Smoking,” he is now definitely a filmmaker to keep an on in the future. And yes, there is the brilliant, quip-heavy script from first-timer Diablo Cody–while the lines that her spunky central character speaks may not be “realistic,” as some detractors have charged, they are still filled with the kind of life and wit that is found in the best screenplays and the unusually touching final scenes show that she has a strong sense of story and character to go along with her facility for highly quotable dialogue. Easily the best pregnancy-related film of an unusually fertile 2007 and one of the best human comedies to come along in a long while.
10. ROMANCE & CIGARETTES (directed by John Turturro): In a year filled with unexpected delights, this defiantly oddball musical-comedy-drama about a romantic working stiff (James Gandolfini) torn between his wife (Susan Sarandon) and his firecracker-hot mistress (a never-sexier Kate Winslet) was the most unexpected and delightful of the bunch. As a straightforward film, its blend of earthy humor, earnest emotion and a colorful cast (which also included the likes of Steve Buscemi, Mary-Louise Parker, Mandy Moore, Elaine Stritch and the invaluable Christopher Walken) would have made it more than worthwhile but the inspiration to turn it into a lower-middle-class variation of Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You,” in which the characters suddenly burst into popular songs (including the works of Connie Francis, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and Janis Joplin) as a way of venting the feeling that they cannot express in mere words was a stroke of genius that transformed it into a one-of-a-kind gem. Although one of the most crowd-pleasing films imaginable, this was the film that almost got away–after sitting on a shelf for a couple of years, a victim of a studio merger that resulted in the loss of the executives that championed it in the first place, writer-director John Turturro decided to step up and distribute the film himself and for doing so, he single-handedly balanced the karmic scales for his appearance in that “Transformers” monstrosity.
My ten runners-up, all of which you should check out for yourselves as soon as possible, were Andrew Dominik’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” Werner Herzog’s “Rescue Dawn,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales,” Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Luc Besson’s “Angel-A,” Charles Ferguson’s “No End In Sight,” Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her,” John Carney’s “Once,” Craig Gillespie’s “Lars and the Real Girl” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Youth Without Youth.”
Among the other films that I enjoyed in 2007, listed more or less in the order that I saw them, were “Le Petit Lieutenant,” “Opal Dream,” “Black Snake Moan,” “The Astronaut Farmer,” “The Host,” “Music and Lyrics,” “Breach,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” “Year of the Dog,” “The Lookout,” “Private Fears in Public Places,” “Hot Fuzz,” “Color Me Kubrick,” “Meet the Robinsons,” “The Hoax,” “Blades of Glory,” “Fracture,” “Knocked Up,” “Lucky You,” “Exterminating Angels,” “Brand Upon the Brain,” “Fay Grim,” “28 Weeks Later,” “Death at a Funeral,” “Paris, Je T’Aime,” “You Kill Me,” “Mr Brooks,” “A Mighty Heart,” “Bug,” “Day Watch,” “Surf’s Up,” “Paprika,” “Fido,” “Ocean’s Thirteen,” “La Vie en Rose,” “Joshua,” “Stardust,” “Sicko,” “Ratatouille,” “1408,” “Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea,” “Joshua,” “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” “Superbad,” “Hairspray,” “2 Days in Paris,” “Moliere,” “The Simpsons Movie,” “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “The Hunting Party,” “Private Property,” “In the Shadow of the Moon,” “The King of Kong,” “The Invasion,” “Michael Clayton,” “3:10 to Yuma,” “Feast of Love,” “Mr. Bean’s Vacation,” “Starting Out in the Evening,” “Jimmy Carter–The Man From Plains,” “The Brothers Solomon,” “Sydney White,” “The Kingdom,” “The Darjeeling Limited,” “I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With,” “Gone Baby Gone,” “Lions For Lambs,” “August Rush,” “Control,” “We Own the Night,” “Sleuth,” “Slipstream,” “Dan in Real Life,” “Lake of Fire,” “It Is Fine, Everything Is Fine,” “Oswald’s Ghost,” “American Gangster,” “The Mist,” “Beowulf,” “Persepolis,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “Atonement,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “The Orphanage,” “Honeydripper,” “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” “Walk Hard” and “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days.”
Finally, I would like to highlight a couple of items that I wasn’t able to include on any of the above lists, mostly because they weren’t actually brand-new feature films, but which deserve to be singled out anyway. They include “The War” (a documentary on World War II from Ken Burns that was so all-encompassing that it may well be the definitive non-fiction take on the subject, “Killer of Sheep” (Charles Burnett’s long-unavailable 1977 debut film, finally restored and given a proper release), the final episode of “The Sopranos” (sorry, haters, but that final cut to black was pretty damned brilliant in the way that it neatly subverted all expectations), “The Key to Reserva” (a brilliant short spoof/homage from Martin Scorsese in which he brings 3 ½ pages of an allegedly discarded Alfred Hitchcock screenplay to life that is so skillfully done that you don’t even mind the fact that it is actually an extended commercial for Freixenet wine), the “Cloverfield” teaser (a snazzy work of pop-art perfection that actually had more people talking than most of the films that it appeared before) and the music videos for M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” (which captures the casual amorality of the contemporary drug dealer with far greater clarity in four minutes than most feature films have in two hours), Beyonce & Shakira’s “Beautiful Liar” (for reasons that presumably need no explanation) and Eduardo Cruz’s “Cosas Que Contar” (a family affair featuring Cruz’s real-life sisters, Penelope and Monica, that pretty much needs to be seen to be believed since you wouldn’t believe me if I told you).
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2338
originally posted: 12/30/07 14:20:50
last updated: 12/30/07 14:33:26
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