Wednesday, April 6, 2011

The Top Ten Films of 2007



What do I remember about 2007? I think that I graduated from college that year, but I’m not completely certain. Mostly what I remember is that it was probably the best film year I’ve ever experienced in my life. There were just so many movies that I enjoyed that came out over the course of the year, and then the last month, when all of the art films hit theaters, I had almost a complete overload of cinematic love going on inside of me. I’m pretty sure when other people saw me walk into a room they probably heard “Walking on Sunshine” playing in their brains. 1994 was the year that I had seen so many interesting movies that I became a real cinephile, and 1999 was probably my favorite film year to this point. Comparatively, the first half of the 2000s felt like a pretty big letdown, and possibly the beginning of the end as far as humanity was concerned. And then 2007 came around and everything suddenly seemed right again. Before December rolled around, this would have been a pretty strong year already, but then two of the greatest movies ever made were released by two of my favorite filmmakers back to back, and the experience threw every all-time list I had ever made into complete upheaval. Were these my favorite films ever made? How did they manage to come out right after one another? And which one did I like better?

10-Elegy ****

In Elegy Ben Kingsley plays an aging professor who is very intelligent and very successful, but who lives a life of relative isolation. He has friendships, he has affairs, but he doesn’t have any real sense of intimacy with anyone. Even his son believes that he is an unfeeling monster. But this all changes once he seduces one of his young students (Penélope Cruz). Suddenly he finds himself acting like a lovesick teenager. He jealously follows her to parties and spies on her; he obsesses over the fact that she might leave him. But when it turns out that she is just as enamored as he, and that she wishes to turn what they have into a permanent relationship, Kinglsey’s character begins to feel a pull between his newfound infatuation and his long established fear of anything permanent. Why I liked it is simply because Elegy is a fun indie about good characters. They’re three-dimensional, they have sharp dialogue, they’re played by good actors, and they develop over the course of the film. What more can you ask of a movie? I mean, except for boobs, which this movie also has. So there.

9-Chop Shop ****

Ramin Bahrani got a lot of attention for his 2005 film Man Push Cart. It was a small, quiet film about a formerly successful musician from Pakistan who now very anonymously sells coffee out of a cart in New York City. It didn’t do all that much for me, but I appreciated the way Bahrani used the camera, and they way he allowed scenes to germinate and linger. With Chop Shop, Bahrani was able to take his unique approach to filmmaking and apply it to characters that I cared about. Chop Shop is about a dirt poor, young street hustler that lives in the back room of a junkyard in Queens. He’s up for anything to make a buck, but his dream is to eventually have his own food truck so that he can take care of himself and his older sister Isamar. Over the course of the film he learns some hard truths about life on the street and loses quite a bit of his innocence. But Bahrani’s films aren’t really so much about anything, more so they are a very documentary feeling slice of life. What Chop Shop is, mostly, is just time spent with interesting people in an interesting place, all presented with some beautiful photography.

8-Hot Fuzz ****

Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost: their names have become geek legend. The first film they all made together, Shaun of the Dead, was half a send up of zombie films that was very heavily steeped in reference to the genre classics and half a legitimately good zombie movie in its own right. Their second film, Hot Fuzz, keeps up that tradition but lives in the world of the action film rather than the zombie movie. Hot Fuzz is a film that fetishizes Point Break, and for a guy that fetishizes Point Break, that’s a pretty great thing to be. The movie is funny, the action is over the top, and the characters ridiculous, but like Shaun of the Dead it never fully crosses over into the territory of parody. In addition to being funny, Hot Fuzz often manages to just be a kickass action movie. Nick Frost is predictably great as the chubby, bumbling, small town cop; but what is kind of impressive is how good Simon Pegg is as a badass action hero. All 140 pounds of his pale English ass get presented as a hardcore action machine, and he actually manages to pull it off without looking ridiculous. Good on that nerd.

7-Knocked Up ****

I was already a huge fan of Judd Apatow when he entered into his modern film career. Before he started directing features he had already worked on about 1000 TV shows that I really loved and helmed his own two shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, which are among my favorite of all time. When The 40 Year Old Virgin came out, I was ecstatic. It was smarter than most broad comedies while still being riotously funny, but it also managed to maintain that trademark heart that Apatow always brought to his TV shows. His film career since then has had a law of diminishing returns. Every film that he has made since has been longer, more indulgent, and more involved in matters so personal to Apatow that they start to become unrelatable. But to be fair, all of those criticisms are really being hurled at Funny People. Knocked Up only has a hint of these emerging negatives, and as a whole is a hugely enjoyable film. So much so that it’s on my top ten list. In retrospect, I can pick apart bits and pieces of it that serve as a warning that Apatow’s screenwriting process was going off the rails, but in the moment of seeing the film for the very first time, I was generally very pleased with it. It’s really funny, it presents a protagonist that learns lessons and changes, and it’s not all that different from everything that I loved about The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Apatow’s TV work. It’s just a little too long, and a little too sentimental to reach the same heights. Just a smidge.

6-Ratatouille ****

I have a confession to make. I wasn’t always that much of a Pixar fan. I had seen Toy Story, and I thought it was decent, but I didn’t get what all the hype was about. After that, I didn’t bother to see any of their films. And while reading the reviews I might have gone off on an ill informed rant or two about how people were snookered by computer animated films and would orally felate any of them that came out. Then I saw The Incredibles because I liked super heroes and I remembered that Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant was one of the better movies that I saw during my childhood. I liked The Incredibles a lot, but it sold me on Brad Bird as a director, not Pixar as a studio. When Ratatouille came along I saw it because of the director, but I walked out of it with enough good will to see the next Pixar movie, no matter who made it. And now, I’ve liked everything they’ve done since better than the last. Ratatouille is where all of that started. It combines my love of cooking shows and the city of Paris to create an adorable little film with funny moments, memorable characters, and a strong message. It feels more like a French film than it does anything made for modern American children. And it was so delightful that it didn’t even trigger my extreme loathing of rats at any point during its rat filled runtime. Although it did address my anti-rat prejudice by using it as a bit of racial allegory in the story. Undertones man, subtext; and in a kid’s film. You don’t get that everywhere. As a matter of fact, you usually only get it with Pixar.

5-Lars and the Real Girl ****

Lars and the Real Girl clearly had an interesting premise, but other than that I didn’t really know what to expect from it going in. It was the director, Craig Gillespie’s first film, it was about a man who falls in love with a love doll and deludes himself into thinking that she’s real, and it was starring Ryan Gosling. That’s all I knew. I’d heard good things, and I’d kind of fallen in love with Gosling after watching Half Nelson, so that was good enough for me to check it out. What I got in the theater was so much deeper, funnier, and more memorable than anything I was prepared for. There is dark humor peppered throughout the film, but it doesn’t use the love doll plot for laughs like I thought it would. Instead it’s a real character drama that introduces you to people that you come to really care about and then puts them through some pretty tough times. Gosling is amazing in the lead role, Paul Schneider is great as his brother, Emily Mortimer is delightful as his brother’s wife, and all of the supporting roles are played by character actors that each lends some sort of individual charm to the movie. Lars and the Real Girl really makes you fall in love with and care for a creep that carries around and dresses a life sized sex doll, and at no point makes what you’re watching seem exploitive. That’s a lot to accomplish for a first time filmmaker. And then he went on to make Mr. Woodcock.

4-Snow Angels ****

Snow Angels may be the greatest film that I have ever randomly decided to put on late at night right before I went to sleep. I didn’t get very far into it before it became clear that I wasn’t going to be falling asleep after all. I had seen All the Real Girls before this, but David Gordon Green had yet to be on my radar as a director to watch. After the end credits of Snow Angels rolled, I definitely knew his name. This is an oppressively bleak, uncomfortable film that somehow is able to be, at the same time, infinitely watchable. Sam Rockwell is so good in his role that it’s a shame somebody hasn’t made a Sam Rockwell museum somewhere. His relationship with his daughter is heart warming, his ex-wife Kate Beckinsale heart breaking, and his ex wife’s current boyfriend Nicky Katt side splitting. And by the time the film reaches its heartbreaking conclusion, the way it affects you is not unlike a sledgehammer to the gut. The fact that the other half of the film is taken up with a teenage love story between Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby seems like it would be a strange, unwelcome addition; but somehow it all works and manages to feel like a coherent whole. After my initial viewing of this film I just sat for a while, dumbfounded at what I had seen. It was 5 in the morning and I still wasn’t in the mood to go to sleep. I had no choice but to spend some time thinking about how awesome Snow Angels is and planning a shrine to Sam Rockwell.

3-The Darjeeling Limited *****

I’m something of an unapologetic fanboy of Wes Anderson. The movies he makes probably couldn’t be any more perfectly suited to my semi snooty, mostly quirky, hipster tastes. He gets a lot of flack for making movies that are very similar, which I recognize but don’t really agree with. It’s called being an auteur people! His previous film to this, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, often gets criticized as a sprawling mess.  Critics say that all of Anderson’s stylistic fetishes went out of control and consumed his film. Once again, I recognize that this is partly true, but I couldn’t have enjoyed the excess of The Life Aquatic any more than I did. Nonetheless, I was happy to see Anderson buckle down and tell a smaller story with fewer characters than he had in a while for The Darjeeling Limited. What results is a film that is sharply focused on the brotherly trio that make up its protagonists. As a result, every facet of their individual personalities and how they chafe against one another gets to be explored. The Darjeeling Limited is beautifully photographed and works as an amazing travelogue through India. The train that the three brothers spend most of the ride on gives Anderson a perfect canvas to work with his particular brand of intricate, hand crafted production design; but is still more sparsely designed and naturalistic than the excesses of locations like the Tennenbaum house in The Royal Tennenbaums or Zissou’s ship in The Life Aquatic. While Anderson’s dry sense of humor is still very present in The Darjeeling Limited, it felt to me to be less of a comedy and more of a drama than anything else he has ever done. Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson both give maybe my favorite performances from either actor, and they still somehow have the film stolen out from under them by Anderson newcomer Adrien Brody. Despite his accolades and acclaim I wasn’t sold on Brody until this film. As a matter of fact, I was kind of disappointed at his casting. I was dumb. The tragedy on the river aftermath and the train car montage set to “Play With Fire” have become some of my favorite Anderson moments with multiple viewings, and who doesn’t like watching the three brothers getting goofily messed up on all sorts of combinations of potent Indian medicine over the course of the film? I don’t hear much talk about The Darjeeling Limited whenever talk turns to Anderson’s career, and I think that’s kind of a shame. I think that it’s a perfect film, and it seems to be hugely underrated by many. 

2-No Country for Old Men *****

No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were the biggest one-two punch of filmgoing I’ve ever had in my life. I saw them both probably less than a week apart, and they are both two of my very favorite films of all time. Seriously, this is elite level filmmaking in my eyes. From what I recall, there was a lot of back and forth debate about which was better back when they came out. When I made my initial top ten list in early 2008 I put No Country in the number one spot. I was amazed at the genre bending way that it was able to create slasher film level tension in a film noir that was set in a western. I loved the way that it subverted the traditional narrative build in a very calculated way to craft a viewing experience different from anything else I had ever seen. And I think, ultimately, I felt that it was able to create something that was at least as important and powerful as There Will Be Blood, but while being a much more mainstream film. There Will Be Blood is an amazing achievement, but it is in every way a very experimental art film. I gave No Country some currency for affecting me just as greatly, but by using fewer bells and whistles to get the job done. No Country is just a solid piece of storytelling, and it proves that storytelling is enough. It’s tight and well crafted. There Will Be Blood was much more epic and subsequently was a bit more of an indulgent mess. But, for some reason, when I look at the two titles sitting in front of me right now, my heart wants to put There Will Be Blood in the number one position. I’ve done a flip-flop. I realize now that I’ve re-watched There Will Be Blood more often than I have No Country since they were released. While No Country is a film that hit me more immediately, There Will Be Blood has managed to grow more in my esteem over time. Yes it’s indulgent, and yes it’s a little bit crazy, but every time I watch it I feel that crazy in my bones. That’s not to take anything away from No Country though. It’s a beautifully shot film, with astoundingly interesting characters, an engaging cat and mouse plot, and a ton of moments that are flat out iconic. If Javier Bardem hadn’t turned Anton Chigurh into one of the first classic, lasting film characters of this century, this film would still be remembered for the performances of people like Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly MacDonald. But Javier Bardem was in this movie, and what he did pushed this film even further into the stratosphere than it ever would have gone otherwise. In fifty years when people are making lists of the greatest movies and characters in Hollywood history, Anton Chigurh and No Country for Old Men will be sitting right alongside the films that we think of now.      

1-There Will Be Blood *****

And speaking of next level performances and iconic film characters, what is there to say about Daniel Day-Lewis’ oilman Daniel Plainview? How can you adequately convey what was accomplished by Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson with this movie? While No Country is a great film that has Anton Chigurh as a great villain, There Will Be Blood is Daniel Plainview. The character is the film, and Day-Lewis’ performance is the character. There is no separating any of it, and there’s no way this film could ever exist without Daniel Day-Lewis cast as the lead. There Will Be Blood is quite possibly the greatest acting showcase ever created. Everything about the film is crafted to spotlight and celebrate what Daniel Day-Lewis can do as a performer, and he rises to the occasion more sublimely than any other film performance I can think of at this moment has. The word mesmerizing gets thrown around a lot in review writing, but I can think of no way to describe the experience of watching Daniel Day-Lewis work in this movie as anything other than completely mesmerizing. Almost dwarfed by the character of Plainview is the rest of the film, but if you remember to look for it, there’s a lot of other great stuff going on here as well. The photography is gorgeous. Johnny Greenwood’s score is a piece of high art unto itself. The screenplay finds a way to create a series of rather quiet moments that somehow build to a sense overloading cacophony of insanity. Sure, there is something to be said about Paul Dano’s performance. Yes Day-Lewis overshadows him in every scene, and yes it is a bit uncomfortable watching him try to go big to compensate and flail and panic a bit in the process; but even that works thematically for the film. Dano’s character relates to Daniel Plainview in the film exactly the same way Dano relates to Day-Lewis as an actor. And I don’t think that’s an excuse. I think that this effect was at least in some way crafted. And when the film builds to the moment where Dano takes a mud bath, or the climax where he confronts Plainview over a game of bowling, I think that sort of dichotomy between the two performances is absolutely essential in creating the visceral effect that those scenes have on the audience. There Will Be Blood isn’t a movie that you think about in your brain, it’s one that you feel boiling in your blood. And I think that physical reaction I have to watching it might be why I’ve watched it more than No Country over the past few years, and it’s probably why I put it in the top spot right now. But, at the same time, I could probably flip-flop back to my original position if I were to re-watch them both right now. Who knows? And how much does it really matter? Almost certainly not at all. What’s most important is that No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are two exceptional pieces of art, and two of the greatest films that I have ever seen in my life.