2007 films ranked
Submitted by ephender on Sun, 03/18/2007 - 12:46
Casey Affleck, Gone Baby Gone
Olivier Gourmet, Congorama
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Margot at the Wedding
Billy Mitchell, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Charles Nelson Reilly, The Life of Reilly
Ben Foster, 3:10 To Yuma
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Margo Martindale, Paris Je'taime
Chris Mintz-Plasse, Superbad
Kristen Wiig, Knocked Up
Tags:
- ****
- ***½
- Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett; 1977) [* I was relieved that it was not (as I'd presumed it would be) transcendent, beautiful and poetic ... at least not in the ways those words traditionally apply to cinema. Instead, it's overpoweringly heavy and uncompromising. As one character says: "You always in a nasty frame of mind." This is humanism from the most human place: the one capable of talking shit.]
- No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen) [* right about now, the unstoppable hegemony of the Coens' critics' awards is starting to grate, but this is the most visually and thematically confident film of their careers ... and I say that because of the last five minutes, not in spite of them.]
- ***
- trailers from Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez/Rob Zombie/Edgar Wright/Eli Roth) [* aw, what the hell. I'll just admit that the sideshow struck me as better executed than the two features.]
- The Life of Reilly (Frank L. Anderson and Barry Poltermann) [* I was as enraptured by Charles Nelson Reilly here as I was underwhelmed with John Waters last year, and he didn't even mention Brett Somers once.]
- Black Book (Paul Verhoeven) [* naughty Nazis felled by even naughtier Jew minx. I just can't imagine why the Academy preferred The Lives of Others over this.]
- **½
- There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson) [* at this point I just have to assume I will never ever lurve a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, no matter how much in thrall I am of his technical expertise.]
- Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright) [* Wright's two-minute Don't was the highlight of Grindhouse (in a tie with the Acuna Boys Tex-Mex advert), and Hot Fuzz is a much more adept genre reshuffle than the Rodriguez-Tarantino twofer. Or at least it stumbles more brazenly along the line between homage and parody. Eventually becomes too much of a purposefully bad thing, but maybe the inevitable sequel-cum-piss take on Renny Harlin will open the door for something Manny Farber could endorse.]
- Masters of Horror: "Pro-Life" (John Carpenter) [* I'm knowingly overrating it, and willfully including it in the wrong list (since it actually aired in Nov. 2006), but it certainly felt like an appropriate exorcism of 2007's dippy Roe v. Vague trend when I finally got around to it, especially since that Romanian movie won't be released in Minneapolis until next month.]
- Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck) [* alternately far too tentative or neophyte on the part of Director Affleck to really be the great film it almost accidentally is thanks to Actor Affleck's Bostonian veracity and Dennis Lehane's understanding of the class-mindedness informing both Afflecks' moral confusion.]
- The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman) [* true: it's a working combination of both new and old school "Simpsons" in that its jokes are still pretty abstruse (i.e. Spiderpig, which I ... did not get) but yet the focus remained on the Simpsons at the expense of reducing almost everyone else in Springfield to walk-on cameos. Also true: they come more gratifyingly close to emotional resonance than they have in years ... maybe since "Mother Simpson." Still even more true: they used to be able to do this in 23 minutes on a week-to-week basis.]
- The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson) [* probably his most self-aware movie. And, for anyone sane enough to accept there will never be another Rushmore, the way he almost achieves a literal shedding of baggage before reverting to cutesy symmetry is actually pretty devastating. Thank God he didn't reprise Hotel Chevalier under the end credits.]
- **
- Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer)
- main features from Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino)
- Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev)
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik) [* I'm sorry, but Casey was better in Gone Baby Gone.]
- Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach) [* shriekingly fake, especially when dealing with the family's children, but impossible to not pay full attention to for all that shrieking bad behavior. Jennifer Jason Leigh does the best job selling Baumbach's would-be zingers. "If I could read your handwriting I'm sure I'd be furious" should not be as funny as it is.]
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel) [* and the Oscar for "Most Cinematography" goes to ...]
- Atonement (Joe Wright) [* not as risible as I'd feared, though it seems as though only Vanessa Redgrave truly rose to the task. Then again, she does get to deliver what eventually reveals itself to be a 3-2-2 changeup. (Baseball metaphors, keepin' it real here.) Suffice it to say, I'm sure her role works better in the book, but I'm also sure I wouldn't catch myself with surprising tears welling up in my eyes were I reading it on the beach.]
- Superbad (Greg Mottola)
- Knocked Up (Judd Apatow) [* For months I've been repeating, as a mantra, "comedies should not be 130 minutes." Now I realize the error of my logic. Knocked Up is drama. I'm not so against heteronormativity that I can't recognize Apatow's intuition (or rail on its supposed hidden pro-life sentiments), but let's not go overboard. Love means never having to say that shitty line about how 'Everybody Loves Raymond' is funny.]
- Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton) [* the "By the Sea" number sort of stands in for the film itself: attempts to wrap underachieving voices around overachieving melodies, pulsating art design and cinematography dancing circles around dour, emo Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (who at least puts a distressing exclamation point on her character's capacity for Medea-worthy deeds), that 12-year-old boy stealing scenes without protest. An upswing in both Burton's recent career and the recrudescent movie musical genre, but it could've been a lot more than a bloody parlor trick.]
- Into the Wild (Sean Penn) [* no other movie this year more clearly demonstrated the maxim "save the best for last." I was tolerating Supertramp's nose-thumbing voyage, and just barely, up until Hal Holbrook appeared and threw down 100 percent authority that had me absolutely reeling and teary-eyed.]
- The Host (Joon-ho Bong)
- The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona)
- *½
- La Vie en Rose (Olivier Dahan) [* responded to it a bit more than most biopics, probably because of the 52-card pickup structure, which sort of beats the genre's usual narrative weakness at its own game. I'll also admit I got choked up at The Little Sparrow's music hall debut, conveyed sans vocals but instead via lap dissolves and lush waves of orchestral triumph.]
- The Golden Compass (Chris Weitz) [* basically has nothing to offer as a standalone film aside from the abrupt end to a fight between two polar bears, and all the mentions of dust had me constantly hearing Marjorie Dawes' voice, but there is potential for interesting future installments which I never got from the first LOTR or Narnia films and the callously soft-pedaled religious subtext still managed to put me in a holiday mood. Also manages to occasionally suggest the feel of overblown Russian fable epics of the Communist era, but that's probably not on purpose.]
- The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon) [* I'm grateful for this documentary for introducing me to people whose interests I would not care about in the outside world and whose records I couldn't possibly care about less.]
- 3:10 To Yuma (James Mangold) [* work it out, Miss Foster.]
- Redacted (Brian De Palma) [* and bear in mind I always overrate De Palma movies by one or two stars. This one's problematic only in ways that do not share loci with constructive cognitive dissonance. De Palma's subject matter precedes him.]
- Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy) [* this is precisely what happens when subplots are allowed to drive narrative tension. Clooney's high-priced loser turn would be a lot more impressive if the film didn't so consistently lift him above rock bottom.]
- Juno (Jason Reitman) [* note to Diablo Cody: enough with the Minnesota references already! Note to the rest of the pop culture world: stop loving everything and everyone related to Arrested Development already!]
- Once (John Carney) [* what it does well is to convey the sensation of musicians dicking around on their instruments -- it can be an often comfy movie. What it doesn't do is much of anything else, really. And, while the music is solid, I'd say one too many characters react with awe at first listen.]
- Hotel Chevalier (Wes Anderson) [* microbic in both form and function. The rest of you can trick yourself into finding artistic value in Natalie Portman's sensitive nudity if you want.]
- Starting Out in the Evening (Andrew Wagner) [* much ado about nothing, which is basically all this self-consciously "little" film has to offer beyond Frank Langella's dutiful central performance.]
- First Snow (Mark Fergus)
- Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (Mary Jordan)
- Padre Nuestro (Christopher Zalla)
- Congorama (Philippe Falardeau)
- Talk To Me (Kasi Lemmons) [* at least some of the other recent biopics give you some clue as to why you're supposed to care about their subjects enough to tolerate the genre's inherently ineffective narrative arcs. I'm to understand Petey Greene talked a few people down off their ledges during the riots following MLK's death, and ... that's it. Worse yet, the initially irresistible performances of Don Cheadle and Taraji P. Henson are flattened out and betrayed as the film itself goes increasingly soft. Unforgivable.]
- *
- The Savages (Tamara Jenkins) [* if the hysterical faux-"magical realism" of the Linney character's off-Broadway portrait of the Savages' hellish childhood is any indication, this movie left out all the good stuff in favor of, yes, class-minded whining.]
- Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog) [* a total fumble. I'd be more likely to admit I really dug the last scene for what I could tag as anti-moral faux-idiocy if I didn't find everything preceding it so flimsy. The "Herzog's docs eclipse his fictional (or, in this case, fictionalized) films" meme gains yet more traction.]
- The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck) [* easy to see why it won over Pan's Labyrinth, as it represents the complete absence of style and the unspoken belief that if subtitled cinema is good for anything, it's good for keeping tabs on the histories of other nations. The plot gets sort of nifty, but the coda cocks it up by self-importantly reiterating that, gee, that plot was sort of nifty.]
- Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet) [* hackery in full effect.]
- The Man Of My Life (Zabou Breitman) [* Turns out the reason gay men shouldn't lust after straight men is that they're gutless wimps who don't ever stop talking.]
- ½
- The Brave One (Neil Jordan) [* words fail, so that's when I reach for my revolver.]
- 300 (Zach Snyder)
- Rome Rather Than You (Tariq Teguia)
- •
- Creepshow III (Ana Clavell & James Glenn Dudelson)
- The Kite Runner (Marc Forster) [* that does it.]
- The Bucket List (Rob Reiner) [* comes frustratingly close to being a camp masterpiece for the first 20 minutes, right up until the decrepit CGI of the skydiving sequence, but Reiner's insufferable sentimentality has clearly metastasized beyond his own lingering grey matter and now infects every last one of his collaborators.]
- Hated so much I think I looped back to liking them again.
Author Comments:
My favorite performances of the year, if you were curious:
Leading Performance
Supporting Performance
personally, I thought Black Snake Moan was about to be a great movie and then sold itself short. I hope to write about it on LJ somewhere, sometime, but I'd be interested in your thoughts. Because even when we disagree on a film's rating, I almost always agree with what you have to say about it.
I actually name checked you in my The Science of Sleep mish mosh.
Speaking of enjoying movies because of all their flaws...
is that in reference to Grindhouse or is there something I missed?
Yeah. The whole thing is a pile of flaw, chiefly that the trailers do the grindhouse thing (i.e. selling is more important than delivering) better than the two features.
Yeah, it was odd -- the trashy energetic spirit was there, but they had to muck it up with all that quality. Still, considering how often I've been fleeced by the genre, I'm not complaining.
Based on the few minutes I've seen of "Rescue Dawn" I figured it would be a disaster - I still haven't seen it yet, but I'll probably rate it the same. I don't know why the man hasn't stuck with the experimental doc/experimental visual odyssey stuff he's (in my very small opinion) so damn good at ... one could argue "Lessons of Darkness" is one of the best films ever made about the Gulf War.
One could also argue that Lessons of Darkness on of the best films ever made, period. I would be willing to do that, if anyone would let me.
I still maintain that Edvard Grieg is doing a good chunk of the heavy lifting in Lessons of Darkness. Which doesn't really make it all that much less a great film or anything ...
The Talk to Me capsule up there encapsulates every single thought I had about the film in a far more concise way than I could ever hope to write. I am jealous.
But no love for Chiwetel?
Not particularly. I'll only give him credit for playing an unplayable character.
I think the only saving grace of Pro-Life is its inital refusal to take a side by making everyone loathsome and horrid. That lasts for about fifteen minutes. Then everything goes to shit, from where I stand.
Which is a perfect distillation of the rhetoric on abortion, really ... or at least more accurate than whatever the hell happened in Juno.
But, yeah, it's no great movie. I'm sort of disturbed that my top ten as it stands here dips well into low pro/high mixed territory.
I love how you hate everything.
Nah, just the stuff that I see.