Best of the Year

I know it has been a few weeks since my last post, but before I update everyone on Christmas in Belfast, I thought I'd give everyone my best of the year lists.

Top Ten Movies of 2007

10. Apocalypto

From the powerful epigraph to a wrenching finish, this film is adjective city. It is probably everything you heard it was, including epic and harrowing. With this vision Gibson loses a little more of his mind, devolves into a nastier creature he was in Braveheart, daring an audience to abandon as much sanity as he obviously has. Jaguar Paw is a Melvillian hero full of youth and violence. His escape, his pathway and its destination is a deflated awe. We stand with him on the beach, breathless; victorious and captured all at once.

9. Sunshine

Though spaceship philosophising owns a long heritage in films, Boyle frames this analogical trip to the sun with scientists and astronauts that are so good looking they should be film stars - and pulls it off! Chris Evans recently graduated from the school of serious acting and grew serious facial hair to prove it (other somber beard laureates include Steve Carrell, Luke Wilson and Ryan Gosling). Cillian Murphy demures around the spaceship malls and weird things happen and the unreal becomes a living spectacle. Compared to 2001 or The Fountain, Sunshine has very little to say, but Boyle has a formula that will hook me every time; brooding loss, triumphal and stunning visuals and a killer soundtrack. The movie is a reaffirmation of Boyle as a distinct visionary with a sharp curiosity in the spirit world along with Aronofsky and Cuaron. Cillian Murphy exercises new acting muscles with the abandon of a baby calf on wobbly joints, but his bravery in the transformation he goes through (from Hollywood heartthrob to a channeling of Jason Lee's The Crow) is admirable. The execution of the movie is what saves the film, it is manic and desperate. This is a deliberate cinematic swelling of apocalyptic dementia.

8. Michael Clayton

Throughout this movie, George Clooney is convincingly exhausted. I wonder how far removed he is from Cuaron's Children of Men anti-hero, Theo. For all the fascination in police procedure and legal dealings (ahem, Dick Wolf, we're looking at you), Clooney boils down a wordy and dark script to a human tale of odd redemption and catharsis. Many will cite the scene where Clooney crests a hill at daybreak and meets face to face with a large white horse as nearly sublime. And sure, in a film where the drama comes from the tension between historical human struggles (i.e. insane vs sane vs moral vs immoral) comes to conflict in mostly urban settings, the Romantic transcending of silence and open spaces is poignant and beautiful. But the scene I found most cinematic was the special intimacy of Clooney in a taxi, off center, rubbing his face, completely stressed out and the credits begin to roll.

7. The Darjeeling Limited

While I was committed to disliking this film, I eventually submitted and ended up finding a lot of pleasure in Wes Anderson's artifactual and nuanced kitsch. We're meant to feel a lot in this movie and we're meant to think a lot of things are funny / sad. Where this film is impressive is when, more than not, those moments succeed. The pivotal scene is the river rescue and the flashback following. We get the feeling of a Salingeresque family thread, old money New York blue bloods playing adventurers and intellectuals. Slow motion, a seemingly non-sequitur quip, a Kinks song, an abstract pronouncement or a thinly veiled epiphany, repeat for two hours and throw in an artful montage.

6. Red Road

This tense Hitchcockian enigma unwinds around the surprisingly untapped creepy CCTV motif. Though the payoff is much more disappointing than Rear Window or even Chinatown, the dreariness of Glasgow's slums and desperation of the female lead combined with the audience being told nothing directly makes for a nervy little film about the tiny gods watching us from the street corners.While clever to a fault, this movie manages a very interesting parallel of the hyper modern city and the marauding creatures still feeding and fornicating at the fringe. Jackie is the omniscient seagull as a perplexing and often ugly scavenger, redeemable only for her moments of anticipated soaring loveliness. Clyde is the creepy fox, devoid of pretense or snark. He is deplorable and attractive in his character made up only of desire. These distinction are mapped out obviously, but not artlessly and if the movie ended on as large a scale as it began, I may have been inclined to applaude it more excitedly

5. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

This is an example of reconstructing the comedy in form instead of content. This is a new idea film has taken from television. Like how crime movies are two hour long police procedural dialogues aping CSI and Law & Order, this movie follows the form of expanding a Judd Apatow sitcom into a full length feature film (though it does not feel like a Judd Apatow full length feature film). It appears new, uncovered and urbane, largely due to its precision and awareness. Most comedies of this timbre rely on timing and irony, while this relies on the suspension and immersion of pity. The pain is palpable and it's fall from the punchline is uncomfortable, but somehow art. Garlin seems well versed in his cinematic lineage, but depressed of it as well. The outcome is a comedy that is as successful as The Squid and the Whale, with none of Wes Anderson's kitsch softening the bitterness. For all it's supposed flaws, I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is clever and observant and deserves it's place as one of the best films of the year.

4. Grindhouse

Less film than experiment in the worlds digital and analog movie making. There is a joy in this the reckless regard for humanity's sacred organs, including our patience during Death Proof's girly coffee talk. At different points in both films, the irony loosens and it seems as if the characters know the spoof and can see they are being filmed, otherwise the cartoony dialogue and laughable violence is inexcusable. This is a film for people who know Rodriguez and Tarentino and know what they're doing. It is hilarious and gross and awesome, a palate cleanser for the oppressing gloom of film makers who think they are revolutionaries and sages.

3. Killer of Sheep (1977)

This film saw new release this year and I include it in the top three because of how moved I was when I saw it. During a decade of Shaft and Superfly, this movie was made. I would venture to say the feeling and emotion of this movie is supernatural, larger than its parts. Perhaps this is true movie magic in the poorly recorded sound, the awkward cutaways and still being important and teaching without being suspicious of important and teaching. The brilliance of the movie is inescapable. The pain and torment is almost unbearably beautiful. Remarkably poignant and touching. This movie is quiet and cunning in its execution. And yes, the soundtrack is amazing.

2. Children of Men

Or How Michael Caine Almost Ruined an Amazing Film. Yes, despite Caine's goofy and distracting Jasper, Cuaron has envisioned so detailed a nearly pre-apocalyptic England that I owed most of my thoughts for the rest of the week to this film. The images are haunting and Clive Owen's half drunk shoeless chain smoking Theo is not only rooted for, but elevated to savior. The composition of a world fully imagined, the grim realities, the wonderful details, let alone the best title screen sequence since The Departed... There is no doubt Children of Men in any other year would capture my number one slot. This movie is universal and challenging. It could be a companion film to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth or an analogy to Jesus Christ. Unlike so many movies about the end of the world which drag with bleakness and incurable darkness, Children of Men is fueled with an organic hope, a blood spattered tearful reckoning and in a year full of "journey to enlightenment" pictures, Cuaron does not over simplify the future. While everyone else is rushing towards Revelation, Children of Men is a post-post modern Genesis.

1. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The most profoundly stirring movie experience I have had since last year's The Fountain. It offers a similar challenge to the audience; that of relinquishing expectations and committing to a vision which may be flawed or at best, something unusual. The images are haunting and spectacular, the intoning narration a stark sign post in the midst of a sometimes aching pace. The movie is spiritually grisly, offering insights and bizarre peculiarities at random. Organizing the film by brick requires patience throughout and the several climaxes are as quiet to hear a show scuff, yet feel extreme. The transformation of Robert Ford from a plump teenager into the spindly rot of a man he becomes is a harrowing thing. No doubt the viewer will be weary of heart at the perversion of our cowboy and vigilante myths, at the tragedy of humans odd and magnificent splinter, decay and break. Sam Rockwell is a professional here if nowhere else in cinema and Brad Pitt wears his crags and age with expert control. The real show is Casey Affleck's toothy snarl or grin and the depth of his portrayal is complex beyond his stoical dialogue. The movie develops glacially and the gradual shift from character study into a post-modern psychological tragedy is so gradual that the film has become a masterpiece without anyone expecting it.