Best of 2007 (Films)

Happy New Year! Time to post a list! I'm not one to post a best of the year list in the middle of December - it's barely soon enough now. Certainly too soon to do justice to films made in 2007 - just in the next week or so, There Will be Blood and Persepolis and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days will be coming out - I'm too dependent on commercial releases, I'm afraid, to get any head start on those lists... so for now, stick to what got released, in a commercial theater, for the first time (as far as I know) in Boston in 2007, whether I'd seen it before or not. Which is why the #1 film is 30 years old, and has been a fixture on my all time lists since I saw it, 8-10 years ago at some art house or other.... Without further ceremony:

1. Killer of Sheep - Charles Burnett - not that it got a very good release - but it did appear in theaters, finally, and I am going to put it where it belongs. A masterpiece.
2. Syndromes and a Century - Apichatpong Weerasethakul - this didn't get the best release either, but did play here and there - haunting and beautiful, telling stories with the subtlest of indications.
3. No country for Old Men - Coen Brothers - a fine return to form; a genre picture that in some ways might be as radical and strange as the two films ahead of it on this list - the way everything at the end is indicated and not shown, though it's clear enough what is happening. How people decide to face death...
4. Zodiac - David Fincher - Somehow, this has been forgotten already - how can that be? as inventive and surprising and great looking as No Country for Old Men, working, like the Coens' film, completely within an established, mainstream genre.
5. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Julian Schnabel - what threatened to be uplifting schlock (an inspirational story of a paralyzed man triumphing over the odds to write a book), turns out to be something genuinely wonderful - Schnabel finds a really amazing formal means of telling the story; and shows complete control over the medium, using it to tell the story, to communicate Bauby's point of view and first person narration, and to inflect the story with emotional detail: like the way the camera moves outside his body, moves to integrate him into the environment as his ability to communicate integrates him into the environment and his imagination comes to encompass the world around him.
6. Brand Upon the Brain - Guy Maddin - somehow managing to get weirder than the usual Maddin fare, with terrible family secrets, polymorphous perversity, distressed film and all manner of montage tricks, voiceover narration by Isabella Rossellini, a symphonic score, orphan choirs and a boy soprano... that's the distributed version - the original version, with the music and narration done live, might be too much...
7. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone - Tsai Ming Liang - Lee Kang-sheng turns up in Malaysia, playing two people, a homeless guy and a paralyzed guy, attended by a Malaysian worker and a girl;all suffer terribly - this might be Tsai's most depressing film - until the end, when the homeless guy, the girl and the worker end up floating together on a mattress, in their own little utopia.
8. Triad Election - Johnny To - Louis Koo and Simon Yam compete for head of the triad societies in the usual ways - murder, torture, kidnapping and the like. Rather elegant and restrained for To, underplaying even the nastiness (which is extremely nasty).
9. Into Great Silence - Philip Groning - contemplative cinema in the most literal sense, a long slow meditative film about meditation and the flow of time.
10. Darjeeling Limited - Wes Anderson - Armand White said in a world with Wes Anderson, Sidney Lumet should be put in jail - the problem is, if that's your standard, most directors should be doing time. Even a lot of films that might actually be better films than Darjeeling Ltd seem infinitely smaller than anything Anderson does. He is distinctive, has a sensibility, and even the criticism of his films is aimed so much higher than anything anyone to the mainstream side of him is doing (except maybe the Coens and, this year - finally - David Fincher) that it just proves the point, again - that he is one of the great directors. If this is the worst he's likely to do, and maybe it is - he's competing with David Lynch and Tsai Ming-liang and Claire Denis and Kiyoshi Kurosawa - he's up with the big boys. Even more than the Coens. Overall, I suppose this is a modest, rather generic film, pleasant enough, but nothing all that new, in the story - but it is made with such assurance and skill, even as a story, but especially as a work of filmmaking, that it utterly transcends the great mass of films made - knowing that it exists in the world makes watching films like Juno or Lars and the Real Girl or 3:10 to Yuma - perfectly well made, entertaining pictures - almost painful. Why do they bother? can't they give me something to look at? You will note the films ahead of it on this list are, in fact, all extraordinary looking - in different ways, to different purposes, but they all do something with the form.

And now , that out of the way - here's another, say, 15 films, to give us 25: all very good films - this won't exhaust the decent films released this year. I don't know what order these are in; it's not important.

Tears of a Black Tiger - Wisit Sasanatieng
Offsides - Jafar Panahi
Bamako - Abderrahmane Sissako
The Wind that Shakes the Barley - Ken Loach
12:08 East of Bucharest - Corneliu Porumboiu
Eastern Promises - David Cronenberg
Election - Johnny To
The Host - Bong Joon-ho
Away From Her - Sarah Polley
The Case of the Grinning Cat - Chris Marker
Grindhouse - Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
Red Road - Andrea Arnold
Climates - Nuri Blige Ceylan
Margot at the Wedding - Noah Baumbach
Vanaja - Rajnesh Domalpalli

As for performances and such - keeping the list short:

Actor - Christian Bale, Rescue Dawn
Actress - Nicole Kidman, Margot at the Wedding (though a close run from Amy Adams in Enchanted)
Supporting Actor - Javier Bardem, I suppose, is the default winner, though that's a kind of 1A role... Jeremy Davis and Steve Zahn in Rescue Dawn have more conventional supporting parts, and keep up with Bale, no easy task. And James Marsden ought to be a dark horse for Enchanted.
Supporting Actress - Cate Blanchett, again, is the obvious choice, getting Dylan down pat - Alison Janney in Juno is the more conventional supporting choice...
Ensemble - Darjeeling Limited
Script - Guy Maddin and George Toles, Brand Upon the Brain - why not? stranger is sometimes better. Though Charles Burnett probably deserves it more...
DP - while mildly tempted to pick the "automavision" nonsense Lars von Trier was touting for Boss of it All - I'll go for Harris Savides for his DV work on Zodiac
Director - I have to say that it was a director heavy year - all the high films are director's films: there aren't all that many films that sneak in on their scripts or performances... making singling out the best direction harder than usual. I think I'll take the Coen brothers, though, since they brought in everything to make No Country for Old Men the success it is - they are auteurs in the fullest sense (even if it is an adaptation), creating the script, directing the film, getting the outstanding performances they got, making it look the way it did - a first rate effort, so why deny it?

And now - an early cut at the best films made this year. This will be greatly eroded as early as the end of this month, so we will have to revisit it over time. But now:

1. California Dreamin' (Endless) - Christian Remescu - I've heard rumors of a regular release for this film, an unfinished posthumous Romanian effort - if so, look for it again in 2008.
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Zodiac
4. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
5. Darjeeling Limited
6. Eastern Promises
7. Away From Her
8. Grindhouse
9. Margot at the Wedding
10. Vanaja - in a year full of unwanted pregnancy films - this and Waitress were far and away the best. They should have gotten the attention that Knocked Up and Juno get....

A decent crop, even for now. And finally - what was the worst film of the year? Well, I'm sure there were quite a few worse, but for my money - 2 films stood out: Southland Tales was a long silly boring mess, though there were some fine moments - I won't give up on Richard Kelly quite yet. But the real stinker was Across the Universe - again, it had moments, and even in its bad moments, you could glimpse something thrilling hiding behind it - but that thrilling film isn't on the screen, except during the second half of the trailer.... I'm a bit more likely to give up on Julie Taymor, though I don't want to...

[if anyone notices: I've come back and corrected the more egregious spelling and typo problems - never hurts to proof-read.]