Like last year, I am going to revisit the previous year's best of list, now that a better sample of the world's films have made it to town. (Though there are plenty more to come: I notice that the 2006 film I singled out last year - Jia Jiang-ke's Still Life - only made it here in the last couple months, this year...) The list I made in January (here) has been significantly augmented... I don't obsess over lists and ranks like I used to - but it's fun and to go back, think about what I thought about films, think about what's held up and so on; see which filmmakers have risen in my estimation, who's built on promise, etc.... Like last year, I may take also rework some older lists in the next week or so. List-o-phobes may need to look away....
But here it is - best of 2007, from 1/3 of the way into 2008.
1. Secret Sunshine - South Korea - Lee Chang-dong
2. There Will be Blood - US - Paul Thomas Anderson
3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days - Romania - Christian Mungiu
4. The Flight of the Red Balloon - Taiwan/France - Hou Hsiao Hsien
5. Zodiac - US - David Fincher
6. California Dreamin' (Endless) - Romania - Christian Remescu
7. No Country for Old Men - US - Coen Brothers
8. In the City of Sylvia - Spain - Jose Luis Guerin
9. Darjeeling Limited - US - Wes Anderson
10. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - US - Andrew Domenik
11. Some Photos from the City of Sylvia - Spain - Guerin
12. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - France - Julian Schnabel
13. Don't Touch the Axe - France - Jacques Rivette
14. Paranoid Park - US - Gus Van Sant
15. Persepolis - France - Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Parronaud
16. Away From Her - Canada - Sarah Polley
17. Married Life - US - Ira Sachs
18. Michael Clayton - US - Tony Gilroy
19. Grindhouse - US - Quinten Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez
20. Eastern Promises - Canada - David Cronenberg
21. Taxi to the Dark Side - USA - Alex Gibney
22. Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street - US - Tim Burton
23. Vanaja - India - Rajnesh Domalpalli
24. Witnesses - France - Andre Techine
25. Bourne Ultimatum - US - Paul Greengrass
(Quick reference: my January 1 top 10:
1. California Dreamin' (Endless)
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
Showing posts with label 2007 list. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2007 list. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Sunday, January 06, 2008
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...
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...
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Music 2007 records
And tonight, continuing the end/beginning of the year roundup, we turn to music. Music top ten lists are a different matter than films. While I could never see all the films in a given year, even all the films I ought to see - I usually have a pretty good idea what I have missed. My favorites of the year bear some resemblance to what was actually there to see. But music? I can't even begin to crack what's available. And that's assuming I get around to listening to everything I buy... The iPod (for all its benefits) has made that even worse - I put everything on there and hope for the best - I barely play CDs at all anymore. So what it means? this is a really tentative list, and while I'll stand by the quality of what I like, this is very explicitly a list of favorites. Any resemblance to the best of the year is pure coincidence. But will that stop me? will it even slow me down? What do you think?
1. Boris & Kurihara - Rainbow: Boris' usual thundering din, married to songs, and Kurihara, the world's best guitarist right now, in a setting that lets him rip. Probably a contender for the best of the decade.
2. Grinderman - Grinderman: Nick Cave's stripped down outfit - howling and throbbing and thrashing. The older I get the more I like Nick Cave and everything he does.
3. Sigur Rus - Hvarf/Heim: This is one of the main beneficiaries of my project to listen to only 2007 music over the last month or so. Every time one of the songs from this record comes up on the iPod, it surprises and delights me. Beautiful soaring melodies, fine musicianship, and I have grown to love Jonsi's vocals. They've been around a while, I've half accepted them over the years, but not quite. This record, for some reason, has convinced me.
4. White Stripes - Icky Thump: What can you say? For all the hype and rock nonsense around them, they never seem to disappoint. This is another great record - probably their best since White Blood Cells (which is a contender for best of the decade.) This may not be a contender for best of the decade, but it's first rate anyway. Never gets old. If records you plan to listen to in the future are a criteria of value - this is a given.
5. Six Organs of Admittance - Shelter from the Ash: Just got this, so I'm not sure how well it will really turn out to be - but so far, it seems to be a fine piece of work by one of my favorite artists. Coming soon to a club near me! I might see my second concert in less than 3 months (instead of the usual 3 years.)
6. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are you the Destroyer?: This came out early, and I have been listening to it almost all year. At first, trying to figure out how much I liked it, but now, I think I know - the more I hear it, the more impressed I have been, by more of the songs on it than I imagined at first. I don't know if featuring a 12 minute song that name drops Bataille is a recommendation or not, but it's damned impressive.
7. Son Volt - The Search: Another major beneficiary of the all 2007 program on the iPod. I didn't listen to it much at all before that - lately I have, and have been impressed. Jay Farrar makes an odd comparison with Jeff Tweedy: Tweedy has continuously changed, styles, sounds, personnel - while Farrar has basically worked the same style for the last 18, 20 years. Yet everything Tweedy does sounds old and worn out - been there, done that - while everything Farrar does sounds fresh. Originality is overrated sometimes - better to do something right than to do a bunch of things less than right.
8. M.I.A. - Kala: I don't know if I like the whole record or just a handful of songs from it - but some of the songs from it (Bamboo Banga, Paper Planes, Mango Pickle Down the River) I can't get enough of. Maybe not as much as from her first record (a near classic) but still, really good.
9. PJ Harvey - White Chalk: This one will grow on you - ethereal songs, vocals and pianos, stripped down and haunting, PJ's voice strange and keening. I suspect, though, this will suffer a bit from the iPod - if I were ever to get back to listening to whole records, I think this might be served better. You need to immerse yourself into records like this, to really get them.
10. Ghost - In Stormy Nights: I am always happy to have a new Ghost record to listen to. This one has a couple really great rave ups - Caledonia, notably - and some long form freakouts. Not as good as their previous record, but still working at a high level.
And - using, Will I ever listen to this again, as a criteria: most records have a song or two, promoted in iTunes (3, 4 5 stars) - the following (plus the ones above) are records I'm likely to listen to whole, down through the years...
Devendra Banhart - Smokey Rolls Down the Thunder Canyon [hit or miss, but great when it's on]
Bishop Allen - Broken String [the 2007 shuffle has sold me on this, even if Atrios keeps promoting it]
Dungen - Tio Batar [not far off the top 10]
Earth - Hibernaculum [very reliable at what they do]
The Fall - Reformation Post TLC [still quite fine - I haven't followed them regularly through the years, but maybe I should]
Iron and Wine - the Shepherd's Dog
New Pornographers - Challengers [pretty close tot he top 10, probably]
Interpol - Our Love to Admire [I still haven't done this justice, though when songs come up I like them...]
Boris & Merzbow - Rock Dreams [fulfilling the noise requirements for the year]
Wilco - Sky Blue Sky [though I'll probably fast forward to the guitar solos]
Linda Thompson - Versatile Heart [still in marvelous voice]
Damon & Naomi - Within These Walls [that's three Kurihara records in the top 20 - no accident...]
Spoon - Ga ga ga ga ga [I can't entirely buy them, but they are pretty reliably interesting]
That's not all - I like the Thurston Moore record, Einsturzende Neubauten - the only thing wrong with the Liars, Melt Banana, Deerhoof, Richard Thompson records is that their other stuff is better, and I have plenty of it...
Anyway - there's no point denying the power of the iPod and its effects: songs make more impression than albums these days - so here are 10 songs, one per artist, that I will keep in rotation in the coming years...
1. Rainbow - Boris & Kurihara
2. Bamboo Banga - MIA
3. Grinderman - Grinderman
4. Hafsol - Sigur Ros
5. Caledonia - Ghost
6. Prickly Thorn but Sweetly Worn - White Stripes (it's not all guitar wanking on this list - sometimes, it's bagpipe wanking)
7. Mon Amour - Dungen (but there is a lot of guitar wanking)
8. Systematic Abuse - The Fall
9. Parting of the Sensory - Modest Mouse (about the only thing worth repeating - not a bad record, but a huge disappointment - what's the point?)
10. Tonado Yanomaninista - Devendra Banhart
Leaving out Mutiny, I promised You (New Pornographers), A Plague of Angels (Earth), Dad's Gonna Kill me (Richard Thompson), The Past is a Grotesque Animal (of Montreal), Keep the Car Running (Arcade Fire), Coming to Get You (6 Organs), Circadian Rhythm (Son Volt), Impossible Germany (Wilco), Mexican Guy (the Stooges), This Song (Meat Puppets), and quite a few more... But that's enough for now.
The video choice is obvious: Rainbow, live:
1. Boris & Kurihara - Rainbow: Boris' usual thundering din, married to songs, and Kurihara, the world's best guitarist right now, in a setting that lets him rip. Probably a contender for the best of the decade.
2. Grinderman - Grinderman: Nick Cave's stripped down outfit - howling and throbbing and thrashing. The older I get the more I like Nick Cave and everything he does.
3. Sigur Rus - Hvarf/Heim: This is one of the main beneficiaries of my project to listen to only 2007 music over the last month or so. Every time one of the songs from this record comes up on the iPod, it surprises and delights me. Beautiful soaring melodies, fine musicianship, and I have grown to love Jonsi's vocals. They've been around a while, I've half accepted them over the years, but not quite. This record, for some reason, has convinced me.
4. White Stripes - Icky Thump: What can you say? For all the hype and rock nonsense around them, they never seem to disappoint. This is another great record - probably their best since White Blood Cells (which is a contender for best of the decade.) This may not be a contender for best of the decade, but it's first rate anyway. Never gets old. If records you plan to listen to in the future are a criteria of value - this is a given.
5. Six Organs of Admittance - Shelter from the Ash: Just got this, so I'm not sure how well it will really turn out to be - but so far, it seems to be a fine piece of work by one of my favorite artists. Coming soon to a club near me! I might see my second concert in less than 3 months (instead of the usual 3 years.)
6. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are you the Destroyer?: This came out early, and I have been listening to it almost all year. At first, trying to figure out how much I liked it, but now, I think I know - the more I hear it, the more impressed I have been, by more of the songs on it than I imagined at first. I don't know if featuring a 12 minute song that name drops Bataille is a recommendation or not, but it's damned impressive.
7. Son Volt - The Search: Another major beneficiary of the all 2007 program on the iPod. I didn't listen to it much at all before that - lately I have, and have been impressed. Jay Farrar makes an odd comparison with Jeff Tweedy: Tweedy has continuously changed, styles, sounds, personnel - while Farrar has basically worked the same style for the last 18, 20 years. Yet everything Tweedy does sounds old and worn out - been there, done that - while everything Farrar does sounds fresh. Originality is overrated sometimes - better to do something right than to do a bunch of things less than right.
8. M.I.A. - Kala: I don't know if I like the whole record or just a handful of songs from it - but some of the songs from it (Bamboo Banga, Paper Planes, Mango Pickle Down the River) I can't get enough of. Maybe not as much as from her first record (a near classic) but still, really good.
9. PJ Harvey - White Chalk: This one will grow on you - ethereal songs, vocals and pianos, stripped down and haunting, PJ's voice strange and keening. I suspect, though, this will suffer a bit from the iPod - if I were ever to get back to listening to whole records, I think this might be served better. You need to immerse yourself into records like this, to really get them.
10. Ghost - In Stormy Nights: I am always happy to have a new Ghost record to listen to. This one has a couple really great rave ups - Caledonia, notably - and some long form freakouts. Not as good as their previous record, but still working at a high level.
And - using, Will I ever listen to this again, as a criteria: most records have a song or two, promoted in iTunes (3, 4 5 stars) - the following (plus the ones above) are records I'm likely to listen to whole, down through the years...
Devendra Banhart - Smokey Rolls Down the Thunder Canyon [hit or miss, but great when it's on]
Bishop Allen - Broken String [the 2007 shuffle has sold me on this, even if Atrios keeps promoting it]
Dungen - Tio Batar [not far off the top 10]
Earth - Hibernaculum [very reliable at what they do]
The Fall - Reformation Post TLC [still quite fine - I haven't followed them regularly through the years, but maybe I should]
Iron and Wine - the Shepherd's Dog
New Pornographers - Challengers [pretty close tot he top 10, probably]
Interpol - Our Love to Admire [I still haven't done this justice, though when songs come up I like them...]
Boris & Merzbow - Rock Dreams [fulfilling the noise requirements for the year]
Wilco - Sky Blue Sky [though I'll probably fast forward to the guitar solos]
Linda Thompson - Versatile Heart [still in marvelous voice]
Damon & Naomi - Within These Walls [that's three Kurihara records in the top 20 - no accident...]
Spoon - Ga ga ga ga ga [I can't entirely buy them, but they are pretty reliably interesting]
That's not all - I like the Thurston Moore record, Einsturzende Neubauten - the only thing wrong with the Liars, Melt Banana, Deerhoof, Richard Thompson records is that their other stuff is better, and I have plenty of it...
Anyway - there's no point denying the power of the iPod and its effects: songs make more impression than albums these days - so here are 10 songs, one per artist, that I will keep in rotation in the coming years...
1. Rainbow - Boris & Kurihara
2. Bamboo Banga - MIA
3. Grinderman - Grinderman
4. Hafsol - Sigur Ros
5. Caledonia - Ghost
6. Prickly Thorn but Sweetly Worn - White Stripes (it's not all guitar wanking on this list - sometimes, it's bagpipe wanking)
7. Mon Amour - Dungen (but there is a lot of guitar wanking)
8. Systematic Abuse - The Fall
9. Parting of the Sensory - Modest Mouse (about the only thing worth repeating - not a bad record, but a huge disappointment - what's the point?)
10. Tonado Yanomaninista - Devendra Banhart
Leaving out Mutiny, I promised You (New Pornographers), A Plague of Angels (Earth), Dad's Gonna Kill me (Richard Thompson), The Past is a Grotesque Animal (of Montreal), Keep the Car Running (Arcade Fire), Coming to Get You (6 Organs), Circadian Rhythm (Son Volt), Impossible Germany (Wilco), Mexican Guy (the Stooges), This Song (Meat Puppets), and quite a few more... But that's enough for now.
The video choice is obvious: Rainbow, live:
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
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.]
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.]
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