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Don’t Believe the Hype
It was a remarkable year for performances, and one movie after another was raised to another level thanks to its actors. Among lead actresses, Wei Tang in Lust, Caution, Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, and both Saoirse Ronan and Romola Garai playing the same character at different ages in Atonement all more than rose to the occasion. The late Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others, Mark Ruffalo in Zodiac, and young Thomas Turgoose in This Is England made memorable male leads. Special mention goes to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as a great brother/sister act in The Savages. In supporting roles, Ed Harris and Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone, Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There, Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton, and Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men were all astonishing. And if there were any justice, most of the cast of Control, Juno, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Margot at the Wedding, and Private Fears in Public Places would contend for the year’s acting awards. Time to get to my ten best. I’m only including U.S. commercial releases in calendar yer 2007 on my list, on the assumption that people other than obsessive cinephiles should have had the opportunity to experience these films. That means some of the best movies that debuted at festivals or in other countries won’t be found here; it might otherwise be a much stronger list. It also means next year is already looking amazing. So be on the lookout for Cannes Palme d’or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Gus Van Sant’s latest reverie Paranoid Park, and South Korea’s Secret Sunshine as that country continues its hot streak on the international scene. Now forthwith, my ten favorite movies of 2007: #10: Music and Lyrics The plot of Music and Lyrics is perfectly routine rom-com, so no movie was a more pleasant surprise all year. Hugh Grant plays a has-been pop star from the ’80s who gets a chance to return to the spotlight. He has become a lighthearted cynic, fully accepting of his mediocrity, who will whore himself out at any opportunity. Drew Barrymore is an accidental lyricist who is Grant’s last hope, and she plays her Jean Arthur-like role to perfection. The movie has a lot of fun satirizing pop music fads from the ’80s and now; it’s so good-natured and funny that it’s hard to turn against it, even when the ending goes into deep sap territory. #9: Juno Here’s a movie that takes a while to overcome its annoying surface-level American indie schtick, but overcome it does, mostly due to 20-year old Ellen Page. She plays a wise-cracking pregnant 16-year old looking to give her baby to an infertile young yuppie couple. The last time such a young actress gave this refreshing a breakout performance must have been either Christina Ricci in The Opposite of Sex or Reese Witherspoon in Freeway. But really, the entire cast — which includes Michael Cera, J.K. Simmons, and Jennifer Garner — is terrific. #8: Lust, Caution Ang Lee’s period piece about a student actress trying to assassinate a Chinese official for collaborating with the occupying Japanese circa 1938 has a lot of missed opportunities, but it’s still pretty damn good. The first two-thirds is all set-up and the film takes its own sweet time, but the last third finally pays off in spades. The infamous sex scenes, which really are daring, tells us more about the characters than their everyday demeanors do, which is fitting when the characters are trying to hide so much. #7: Sicko Appraising a Michael Moore movie often turns on how much he gets in the way of the message he’s pushing — in this case, American health care reform. His sarcasm, his inability to resist easy cheap shots, and his failure to tell the whole story can turn into pandering overload. In Sicko, Moore is actually pretty well-behaved up until the end (when he rounds up some suffering 9/11 aid workers and takes them to Cuba for free medical care). The rest of the movie, though, is surprisingly powerful. Whatever spin one wants to put on its politics, nothing can take away from the personal, often tremendously moving stories Moore puts on display and the crisis of the health care system they represent. Yet Moore always makes me distrust my reaction a little bit, and that’s not a feeling I like. #6: Once
While Lust, Caution reveals character through sex, Once reveals it through song. The film — about a Dublin street musician and a Czech immigrant who combine their efforts to land a music contract — feels like a subdued, kitchen-sink romance until the characters start singing. #5: Margot at the Wedding It’s rare these days to get an American talkfest with the sophistication of an Eric Rohmer movie, but that’s what we’ve got here. Witty and amusing, the story is about novelist Margot going to her sister’s wedding and muddying the waters when she disapproves of the unemployed groom. Nicole Kidman is good in the lead role whose expertise is annihilating passive aggressive put-downs of others, but she’s trumped by her peers, especially Jennifer Jason Leigh, radiant in her dowdiness. Jack Black and John Turturro are also as down-to-earth as I’ve seen them. Margot at the Wedding is not for people who can’t stand characters indulging in casual cruelty, as it’s a minefield of mind games. Writer-director Noah Baumbach knowingly captures these characters and their lifetimes of emotional baggage together. Here is a woman who thinks family is important out of habit, but the only way she still knows how to engage them is through torment. #4: No End in Sight This doc doesn’t feature much new information for those following the Iraq War closely, but no documentary thus far encapsulates so concisely what went wrong and why. Its meticulous detail and the efficient manner in which it delivers so much consolidated information makes all the incompetence and corruption by the Bush administration that much more scathing. It calmly lays out the jaw-dropping facts about how a small band of people with little or no military experience — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer —made gross errors in judgment after judgment while Bush negligently looked on. The only thing missing is Bush giving Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom to seal the venality demonstrated here. #3: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly How exciting can a movie be about a man who is completely paralyzed except for one eye, through which he communicates by blinking? Very, answers director Julian Schnabel. This true story of Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby delves into how being trapped in one’s own body ultimately helps him pinpoint what’s important in life. Schnabel does a tremendous job keeping us locked into Bauby’s perspective, making us realize just how mercurial consciousness is and just how isolated we are in our own heads even in our everyday lives. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski uses a short depth-of-field, among a plethora of other camera tricks, to emphasize this subjectivity, viscerally capturing Bauby’s memories and fantasies. Mathieu Almaric is a wonderful actor in his typical comic, bumbling persona, but surprisingly marvelous here as Bauby in a straight, serious role (while also being really funny). He’s ably assisted in supporting roles by Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Cosigny, and the great Max Von Sydow. Even silent Emma de Caunes is exquisite as a figment of Bauby’s imagination. #2: Manufactured Landscapes An 8-minute tracking shot showcasing a humongous Chinese factory is a fitting opening for a documentary about photographer Ed Burtynsky, who specializes in industrial landscapes. It’s just one of many stunning visions showcased here by director Jennifer Baichwal. The strength of Burtynsky’s photographs comes not only from balanced compositions and expressive colors, but from the idea that humans have the power to warp nature on such massive scales. They elicit reactions of horror as well as a sense of superiority. The scale of the photos are often mind-boggling; whether the subject is strip-mined land, discarded tires, looping highways, or expansive oil fields, the immensity of what’s on display screams human excess. Baichwal frequently enhances the effect by starting her image on a small portion of one of Burtynsky’s photographs, itself startling in scope, and then zooming out, suddenly magnifying the impact tenfold. Perhaps the most startling footage in the film is of the Three Gorges Dam being built. It looks like an alien landscape where the entire planet is under construction. In image after image, tiny human figures are dwarfed by the metal monstrosities they’ve created. The documentary and Burtynsky himself could be seen as using environmental concerns as an excuse to relish in aesthetics, or using photography as an excuse to explore environmental concerns; but it doesn’t really matter when both are addressed so vividly. #1: Killer of Sheep This may be a bit of a cheat, but Charles Burnett’s monumental 1977 student thesis film at UCLA did not get a commercial theatrical release until this year. It also happens to be far and away the best movie I saw all year. Holding its release back was the expensive task of buying the rights to the 22 songs he used on the original unauthorized soundtrack. Enter a generous donation by Steven Soderbergh and a restoration by UCLA, and people can finally experience one of the all-time great movies. While the film’s style is sometimes compared to Italian neo-realism, it is as lyrical as anything Terrence Malick ever made and as big-hearted as Jean Renoir. It mesmerizingly captures a place and time with knowing specificity and intimate immediacy. Whatever Burnett’s intentions, the film memorializes the people of the Watts ghetto, their struggles and their joys; but more than that, he crafts a tale of shared humanity, something we forget all too easily. Killer of Sheep is now available on DVD. It’s a must-see. Honorable mentions: The Bourne Ultimatum, Control, Flanders, Into the Wild, Ratatouille Worst film: 300 (although Black Book is a close runner-up) What I wish I had seen before the deadline for this article: There Will Be Blood |
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A lot of people thought this was a great year in movies, but I found it fairly average. I just didn’t share the enthusiasm for a lot of movies over which my fellow critics gushed. No Country For Old Men? Could have been a great genre film until its higher aspirations worked against it. Hot Fuzz? Not so hot: tediously overlong, and absurdly Grand Guignol for a cop comedy. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead? Promising premise that’s botched by fashionable but dramatically fizzling jumps in chronology. I’m Not There? If only the rest of it was as good as Cate Blanchett. Actually, I found myself saying this about a lot of movies this year — if only the rest of it was as good as its stars. 
Then it turns absolutely transcendent. Glen Hansard, of the Irish rock group the Frames, puts everything he has into every song. It’s all the more potent because it lacks the self-conscious flash and spectacle that describes most musicals today. 