Moments of 2007

I am getting to the end of my Year in Review Posts. I'll have to start coming up with real content again... Hopefully, the second annual Contemplative Cinema blogathon will inspire - it should... Anyway, in honor of the old Film Comment "moments in time" feature, currently living at MSN movies, here are a few of mine - I'll stick to a simple list of 10 or so...

1. The little kids rolling a tire in the background of the shot of the brothers chasing a train in Darjeeling Limited. Though of course Wes Anderson makes films that come as close to being one long moment of the year....

2. Anton Chigurh flips an ordinary quarter in No Country for Old Men.

3. The Beatles in Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story.

4. The end of Syndromes and a Century - a lamp, then a cut outside, to a city full of people - a kind of inversion of the end of Antonioni's L'Eclisse: the characters gone, but the city alive and well...

5. Anton Ego's flashback in Ratatouille

6. Margot chasing the bus at the end of Margot at the Wedding.

7. Pretty much every minute Philip Seymour Hoffman is on screen in either Before the Devil Knows You're Dead or Charlie Wilson's War. I couldn't work up the courage to see The Savages, but guessing from the trailers, he's just as good in that. If I had to single something out - the way he goes in and out of the room the first time he meets Wilson...

8. "I'm Finished" - There Will Be Blood.

9. Zoe Bell hanging on for dear life in Grindhouse.

10. "why don't you do some of your older stuff?" in I'm Not There.

Meanwhile - great moments don't all come from good films: consider - Peter Dinklage signaling his intention to blackmail in Death at a Funeral; or Jesus Christ, living it up in Mexico in The Ten (bet you all forgot that existed, didn't you? unless you saw it, in which case you probably just wished you could forget it) - Justin Theroux demonstrating his comedic chops. Or John Malcovich making Colour Me Kubrick worth seeing, or Eddie Izzard doing his thing in Across the Universe...

And finally, as a bonus - some particular moments from older films I saw for the first time in 2007. It was a really good year for that - bunches of Bela Tarr films, Rivette, Pedro Costa, etc. I'll try to keep myself to one per filmmaker, so this doesn't turn into a shot by shot description of Satantango or Vanda's Room.

1. Celine and Julie disrupting the old melo and saving the girl in Celine and Julie Go Boating.
2. The Dance in Satantango.
3. Alberto Sordi, paying back his debts to the mafia in Mafioso - meeting Hugh Hurd on the street in New York.
4. The African western, with Danny Glover, in the middle of Bamako.
5. The execution of the Hungarian who was talking with the nurse in The Red and the White - the most intense of the long takes, with their depth of field, multiplane compositions and stagings, people moving between planes, and so on.
6. The not quite dying paterfamilias, getting up from his sick bed to go to the bathroom, trailing farts, in Ozu's End of Summer.
7. "You aren't a man - you aren't even a very good sample!" - Barbara Stanwyck telling off her useless husband in Ten Cents a Dance.
8. In Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow - a particularly magnificent shot after Barbara Stanwyck leaves Fred MacMurray, Fred staring out a rain streaked window while Rex the walking talking robot boy tramps across the frame.
9. Vanda offering medical advice in Vanda's Room.
10. Karloff seduces/murders Lugosi in The Body Snatcher (one of a bunch of Val Lewton films I finally got around to watching this year. In time for next week's blogathon!)

And I suppose I should note one more thing - a long immersion in WC Fields films providing more quotable lines than I know what to do with: from all the names, to the phrases he builds routines around ("stand back and keep your eye on the ball" or "ain't a fit night out for man nor beast!") to the dialogue ("is this a game of chance?" - "Not the way I play it") - right up to the great catch phrases: "You can't cheat an honest man - never give a sucker an even break, never wisen up a chump." I had a good year of movie watching...