2007 Wrap-Up
by Eugene Novikov
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's critics who end each year with the sentiment that it was "the worst year in recent memory," without even considering the possibility that perhaps it was they and not the movies that changed. In 2007, fortunately, these sorts of pronouncements have been few and far between, since the industry consensus seems to be that it was the best film year in recent memory. That might be right. Looking at my "best" list, I marvel at the sheer variety of great movies we saw -- horror, western, sci-fi, naturalistic drama, legal thriller; and at the top of the list, something utterly singular. The year even brought us a fantastic musical biopic -- a true rarity -- in addition to a parody of the genre. I realize that these year-end round-ups of mine usually read like an onslaught of deranged optimism (I think it's better than whining, at any rate). But if you saw the best of what 2007 had to offer, I hope you too found something to love.
Here's my take on the year. Thanks for reading.
The Ten Worst Films of 2007
10. Revolver (Guy Ritchie) - It was bound to happen: Madonna has finally driven Guy Ritchie mad. Not that he was a model of emotional stability when he made crazy, glibly violent movies like Snatch, but at least he wasn't wasting our time with a lot of pseudo-Freudian gibberish.
9. Love in the Time of Cholera (Mike Newell) - Could be this sort of earnest, decade-spanning, vaguely "spiritual" melodrama just isn't "my thing," but Jesus -- I wasn't this straight-up bored in a theater all year. Javier Bardem annoyed me so much with that sickly smile of his that I reviled his character in No Country for Old Men all the more.
8. National Treasure: Book of Secrets (Jon Turteltaub) - There is no better illustration of the fine line between "entertaining" and "idiotic" than the two National Treasure films. The first was silly and charming; the second, despite being virtually the same movie, is bang-your-head-against-the-wall stupid and deadly at 130 minutes. Maybe the mere fact that it's an absolute retread has something to do with it.
7. War (Philip G. Atwell) - What the hell? You pair Jason Statham and Jet Li and then you don't... have them... fight... at all. Certainly not each other, and not anyone else either. The most useless movie of the year.
6. Norbit (Brian Robbins) - Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence don't just share a tendency to dress up as obese women on screen, they also both get more shrill and insufferable as they age. This is Murphy's turn to piss everyone off with his most insanely abrasive character yet. A painful chore.
5. Code Name: The Cleaner (Les Mayfield) - Not a travesty of any sort, just an egregious example of a completely anonymous and artless time-waster. The kind of thing that really makes me wonder whom movies are being made for, who is paying to see them, and why those people don't revolt.
4. Captivity (Ronald Joffe) - Gives "torture porn" a bad name, playing right into the hands of the idiots who want to cast moral aspersions at horror filmmakers and fans. Just hurls graphic torture scenes into a random, stupid serial killer plot, without the mood and style of the Saw films or the wry subtext of the Hostels. Sometimes "eew" is a perfectly appropriate reaction.
3. The Messengers (Danny and Oxide Pang) - Like a parody of J-horror -- so silly it almost has to be --but apparently it's for real. Still has one of my favorite awful scenes of the year, wherein Dylan McDermott, playing a down-on-his-luck sunflower farmer (I swear I am not making this up) tries to punch a bird in the face. And like the worst incarnations of the genre, the rest of the film is entirely arbitrary and uninvolving.
2. Pathfinder (Marcus Nispel) - Nispel, you may recall, directed the masterful remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which made my top ten list in 2003. I'm not sure what happened here, but this would-be epic about Vikings is breathtakingly inept -- as incompetent as American studio movies get.
1. Sydney White (Joe Nussbaum) - It's the fifth year in a row that a comedy has grabbed the coveted top spot on this list. I think that's because dramas usually aren't made for a quick buck, and action/horror/sci-fi often requires someone to put up some cash, which forces the people entrusted with that cash to invest at least a modicum of thought into what they're spending it on. But comedies are cheap, and an easy draw. So you get nasty, insulting garbage like Sydney White, which thinks "nerd" is code for "retarded" and that "Snow White in college" is such a brilliant concept that no further ideas are needed. Viscerally repulsive.
The Ten Best Films of 2006
10. Breach (Billy Ray) - Tom Clancy it ain't: a political thriller that takes place entirely in office buildings and generates some of the year's best suspense through an obsession with nagging little details. Chris Cooper does some of his best work as the fearsome and brilliant CIA traitor, and Billy Ray continues the exploration of intra-institutional corruption he began in Shattered Glass. Ray's writing and direction are taut and efficient, but with a flair for the theatrical, too -- dig that dramatic final scene.
9. Joshua (George Ratliff) - It bombed at the box office, and no surprise: this is a nasty, unpleasant, genuinely disturbing horror film, albeit not a gory or particularly violent one; the rare movie that is psychologically stressful even to someone who sees 300 films a year. I appreciated the formal brilliance it took to make that happen (particularly from a first-time director), but Joshua doesn't just put you through the emotional wringer for the heck of it; it's a film about the way parents' notions of what having children should be like lead them to betray the children they actually have. A rebuke to those who equate cinematic significance with anodyne Academy-friendly "seriousness."
8. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu) - Part of a recent wave of ultra-naturalistic Romanian films that tackle their country's social and economic travails with simple, intense observation; see also last year's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. This tragic, unflinching look at a woman's attempt to procure an illegal abortion for her friend in the 1980s reveals a hellish maze of red tape, bureaucracy and indifference, and is as searing an indictment of socialism as I've ever seen in a work of fiction.
7. Sunshine (Danny Boyle) - Recently I was trying to explain to someone why One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is not one of my favorite films. One thing I mentioned is that I rarely connect with films that get described as being about "the triumph of the human spirit." I think that's because so few movies take that idea seriously, preferring instead to make much out of the unexpected success of one downtrodden individual -- which of course is fine too, as far as it goes. But Sunshine is a deeply humanist film that is very serious indeed about depicting the triumph of our spirit. Even more extraordinary is the fact that it sets that triumph against a cosmic backdrop that emphasizes humanity's ultimate insignificance. A rare treat for lovers of serious science-fiction.
6. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy) - The best show on television is, as I'm sure you've heard from others if you don't know it yourself, The Wire. One of the reasons for its astonishing, unmatched brilliance is its insistence on depicting oft-romanticized institutions -- the police department, inner-city schools, City Hall -- with an unrelenting, gritty realism. The ins and outs of Michael Clayton's storyline are considerably more fanciful than anything on The Wire, but its view of the legal profession -- cold, sterile offices, long hours, high pressure, unseemly clients -- is sort of like that. This nod toward reality and the film's old-fashioned thriller craftsmanship were among the year's greatest pleasures.
5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik) - I panicked when I heard the comparisons to The Thin Red Line, but I need not have worried. Yes, the film is deliberate, even slow, but it is not ponderous, and it certainly isn't boring; in fact, it offered two and a half of the fastest hours I spent at the movies in '07. A complex character study and a universal rumination on the downsides of celebrity, it's a beautiful and heartbreaking film.
4. Into the Wild (Sean Penn) - The points of fiercest contention regarding this film turned out to be: a) whether Christopher McCandless is in fact a pretentious fool, and b) if so, whether the film adequately acknowledged this. The first standing alone seems irrelevant to the merits of the film; as for the second, Penn's is undoubtedly a sympathetic portrayal, but I don't see how the protagonist's misguidedness or even idiocy would preclude that. Into the Wild feels for the kid, but it doesn't let him off the hook either, and his ultimate realization of his fatal mistake ("Happiness only real when shared") is literally unforgettable. Accusations of soft-pedaling are refuted, I think, by how deeply troubling the movie turns out to be.
3. 3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold) - As much as I relish unclassifiable fare like the film that tops this list, my true love is genre, and no filmmaker has treated the western this well in years, maybe decades; certainly not since Unforgiven. Red-blooded and exciting, it creates fully-realized characters and explores the moral system of the wild west (Hollywood's version, at least) while offering the kind of gun-slinging adventure They Don't Make Anymore. The best performance of Russell Crowe's career, and the best film of James Mangold's.
2. The Mist (Frank Darabont) - The rare supernatural horror film that's wide-eyed with wonder instead of grimly determined to horrify. It's determined to say something meaningful about human nature, culminating in the year's most downbeat ending that nonetheless conveys a note of optimism about our capacity to endure. What's amazing is that it doesn't shortchange its terrifically spare fantasy conceit in the process, not providing concrete answers but suggesting something truly terrifying in scope. As with last year's Brick, I feel like The Mist is my movie, made with precisely my tastes and inclinations at heart. I am immensely grateful for it.
1. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson) - A boring and predictable choice, I know, but hey -- sometimes everyone else is actually right. I need at least three more viewings to get a full handle on PT Anderson's staggering epic (and possibly award it the exceedingly rare Masterpiece rating), but one go gave me a sense of its nigh-insane ambition (it's a nuanced character study that expands to reveal a bird's eye view of capitalist enterprise), its unbelievable intensity (I am not sure I have ever felt this absolutely engaged with every frame of a film), and its daring, unforgiving harshness. Bottom line is simple: no one else working in the movies has balls enough to try anything like this, which is just as well, because I suspect no one else would have the talent and clarity of vision to pull it off.
Some honorable mentions (in rough order of preference): Control, Superbad, 28 Weeks Later, Away From Her, The Lookout, The Savages, Gone Baby Gone, Charlie Wilson's War, Vitus, Grindhouse, Bridge to Terabithia, Ratatouille, The Devil Came on Horseback, Fido.
Overrated: I'm Not There (Todd Haynes) - An obvious choice for me, since I think the adoration for Haynes's bizarro biopic is equivalent to the love for the man who, in my opinion, is basically the original naked emperor. It makes sense, I guess, that the same folks who fall all over Dylan's inscrutable gibberish love this film. Count me out. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story managed a better take on the man in the span of a two-minute sketch.
Also: The Orphanage, The Great Debaters, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The King of Kong, La Vie en Rose, Enchanted, Talk to Me, The Darjeeling Limited, The Hoax, Starting Out in the Evening, After the Wedding.
Underappreciated: Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi) - Not up to par with the first two films, certainly. But much like Ang Lee, who took a beating for daring to experiment with Hulk, Raimi was blasted for trying to do something interesting with an overexposed genre. 3 sacrifices conventional excitement for its characters, and allows some endearing goofiness to intrude on the self-seriousness that had dominated the franchise; it is completely unlike any other comic book movie that has been produced, or is likely to be in the future. Sure, it's over-plotted, and there are a number of miscalculations. But after this, I don't want to hear any more complaints about the same-old of the superhero genre. You had your chance.
Also: Shooter, Martian Child, The Invasion, In the Land of Women, Finishing the Game, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, Disturbia, Shoot 'Em Up, Severance, Shrek the Third, The Astronaut Farmer, Redacted, No Reservations, The Last Mimzy, The Brave One, We Own the Night, Vacancy, Vitus.
Performance of the Year: Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's War. His whirlwind entrance -- "Excuse me, what the fuck?" -- may be the year's most giddily awesome movie moment, and every second he's on screen thereafter is an unadulterated joy. With a breezy confidence that stands perpendicular to his sweaty, hassled appearance, Hoffman's Gust Avrokotos is the year's finest comic creation. The actor's downright supernatural timing is proof positive that he is simply the best in the business.
Runner-Up: Sam Riley in Control.
And a Few Movie Moments I'll Still Remember in 10 Years:
- Gust Avrokotos revealing that he bugged the bottle of scotch in Charlie Wilson's War.
- Chris Pratt breaking the fourth wall in the last freeze-frame of The Lookout.
- Zoe Bell alerting her friends that she's okay in Death Proof, Tarantino's half of Grindhouse.
- The bloody rain that opens and closes Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
- Ben Wade's last act of kindness in 3:10 to Yuma.
- A train approaches in the night in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
- Our heroes, piloting an SUV into the unknown, glimpse something breathtaking and unspeakable through the mist in -- what else? -- The Mist.
- Seth tells a gaggle of attractive girls what the funny thing about his back is, in Superbad.
- Eric O'Neill encounters a busted Robert Hanssen in the elevator in Breach.
- A sea monster gallops merrily along the riverbank in The Host.
- Willy Beachum stands alone at the prosecutor's table at the end of Fracture.
- A launched rocket goes horribly astray in Severance.
- Churchgoers and bar patrons swap places in The Simpsons Movie.
- Paul Sunday enters Daniel Plainview's office with a proposition in There Will Be Blood.
- Otilia finds herself trapped at a dinner table in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
- Rae soothes a frightened Ronnie with a rendition of "This Little Light of Mine" in Black Snake Moan.
- Christopher McCandless signs his real name in Into the Wild.
©2007 Eugene Novikov