My Best of the Year, or, "I'd like to have an argument, please."

My pal Stitch and I would like to alert you to the fact that my year's best, 25 in all—a top ten plus fifteen, because what's the web if not FREEDOM!!!!—has been posted on Premiere's "proper" website, here, in slideshow form, with pretty pictures once you click the prescribed geometric shape[s].

Of course, on the "proper" website there's no function wherein you can tell me how brilliant and/or full of it I am, so, for the purposes of encouraging such a discussion, I reproduce the list here, so as you might chime in.

1) There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson’s extraordinary fifth feature comes dressed in the trappings of a period epic, but this study of Western oilman Daniel Plainview and his engagement with and retreat from the larger world is in fact an absurdist, blackly comic horror movie. It’s resolutely unlike anything Anderson, or anybody else, has made before. Daniel Day Lewis’ lead performance is as visceral and ruthlessly focused as screen acting ever gets.

2) No Country For Old Men
A genre film with apocalyptic intimations, Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel features some suspense set pieces that Hitchcock would have been proud to put his name on. And speaking of horror movies, Javier Bardem’s coin-flipping, cattle-gun-toting killer Anton Chigurh is a cinematic baddie for the ages.

3) Killer of Sheep
Charles Burnett’s astonishing, poetic 1977 slice of African-American life in Los Angeles finally got its due this year, with something approaching an actual theatrical release—to call its ’77 exhibition “perfunctory” would be a drastic overstatement—as well as a spectacular DVD. As Melville’s 1969 Army of Shadows did last year, Sheep hit with the force of revelation, earning the right to be treated as a “new” film.

4) Private Fears In Public Spaces
French master Alain Resnais mounts a delicate, studio-bound adaptation of a strangely touching Alan Ayckbourn comedy of interweaving characters and their lonely and sometimes surprising lives. A masterwork of mise-en-scene, it overflows with magical visual touches that always bolster its wistful, moving wisdom.

5) The Darjeeling Limited
Director Wes Anderson earns a bit too much critical disdain for making Wes Anderson movies. That is, movies with sharp style and particularly quirky humor. Actually, the quirks are turned down a bit in this trim, engaging story of three estranged brothers who meet up in India for a too-self-conscious “spiritual journey.” Anderson’s supposed emotional disconnection is in fact detachment, and said detachment gives this story a special resonance.

6) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Brash artist Julian Schnabel adapts the extraordinary memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French magazine editor who was completely paralyzed after a massive stroke at age 42. Completely, that is, except for his left eye, which he used to blink out said memoir. Schnabel, working from an excellent script by Ronald Harwood, festoons the tale with ever-pertinent visual detail, and Mathieu Amalric is amazing as “Jean-Do.”

7) Zodiac
Director David Fincher’s chronicle of obsession. Not the twisted obsession of the never-caught Zodiac killer himself, but the obsessions of the men who tried to bring the killer, who terrorized ‘70s San Francisco, to justice. And although these men were the good guys, their obsessions could get pretty twisted themselves. Dense and detailed, Fincher’s film is a procedural par excellence.

8) Ratatouille
After faltering a bit with Cars—a merely excellent feature rather than an extraordinary one—Pixar (and Brad Bird, who also made The Incredibles) came back in a big way with this daring tale of a French rat, yes, rat, who yearns to be a master chef. Eye-popping visuals, great good humor, and a story line that never stops sizzling.

9) I’m Not There
Semiotics stalwart Todd Haynes makes a Dylan biopic with no Dylan in it. Instead, he creates six different characters, each inspired by a different Dylan phase or persona, and puts the blender on “pulse,” and then “high.” The result is a beguiling, sometimes frustrating, always challenging look at Dylan, his music, the times he observed changing and the times he changed.

10) Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Stephen Sondheim’s daring musical—Grand Guignol mugs Brecht and Weill in Tin Pan Alley—finds an ideal interpreter in macabre maestro Tim Burton, while its title character finds a remarkably sensitive portrayer in the always-adventurous Johnny Depp. The bloodiest musical since Monty Python imagined “Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days,” it’s engrossing, vivid, and strangely, terrifyingly moving.

11) Control Photographer and video director Anton Corbjin makes his feature debut with a remarkably evocative portrait of troubled, charismatic Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, portrayed with a near-frightening intensity by newcomer Sam Riley. Among other things, the film boasts the most beautiful black-and-white cinematography this side of any given Bela Tarr film.

12) Rescue Dawn
Werner Herzog makes a Hollywood film—sort of. A deft fictionalization of tales he already covered in the great documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Dawn is yet another film to put Christian Bale through the wringer. Here he plays a flier shot down in Laos in the mid-‘60s, a very cockeyed optimist who engineers an escape from the prison camp where he’s meant to rot. Gripping, eccentric, and ultimately rousing.


13) The Assassination
 of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
New Zealand-born director Andrew Dominik follows up his brash 2000 debut Chopper with a very different look into the lives of men of violence, this a mood piece that takes an unusual look at a legendary outlaw and his killer. Brad Pitt’s Jesse James is cold-hearted, paranoid, unpleasant; Robert Ford, beautifully played by Casey Affleck, is a rather dim but eager believer in the outlaw dream, until his days of outlawing reveal the cheap pettiness of those who live said dream. Beautifully shot and measured, it’s a thoughtful, bracing trip.

14) Joe Strummer
: The Future Is Unwritten
Julien Temple fashions a refreshingly anti-nostalgic look back at the history of the late Clash co-founder Strummer, in a warts-and-all portrait full of wit, wisdom, and killer tunes.

15) Black Book

Paul Verhoeven’s complexly plotted tale of a Jewish beauty (Carice van Houten) who puts her life on the line for the Dutch resistance in WWII is about five different movies in one, and each of them a beautifully realized and gripping stunner. It’s also replete with touches that reveal the director of Showgirls and RoboCop still has laugh-out-loud perversity to spare.

16) Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days
Christian Minghu’s story of two friends seeking an abortion for one of them in ‘80s Romania is filmed in a style of intensified realism that makes it sometimes play like a suspense thriller. Anamaria Marinca’s performance, as the friend who tries to buck up Laura Vasilu’s pregnant, strangely bovine roommate, is one of the finest of this year.


17) Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi, with the help of fellow comics artist Vincent Paronnaud, adapts her own autobiographical graphic novels about her girlhood in Iran and subsequent displaced-personhood in Europe. Sharp and funny, with a deceptively simple graphic style, it’s another reminder—and it’s too bad we need reminding—that animation is not a second-class cinematic genre.


18) Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
Veteran director Sidney Lumet’s deeply twisted melodrama bristles with nasty electricity. A lot of it comes from the director’s energetic approach, and a lot more of it comes from the cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman as a bad son, Ethan Hawke as an ineffectual son, Albert Finney as their seething dad, and Marisa Tomei as the trophy wife of one son and mistress of the other. 


19) Smiley Face

One doesn’t necessarily expect indeed maverick Gregg Araki to direct a stoner comedy. But one does expect that if Gregg Araki does direct a stoner comedy, it’ll be sharper and funnier than any before. And this is. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Anna Farris, as a fully-baked pothead whose wanderings through Los Angeles find her in possession of a Karl Marx manuscript, here give the most virtuosic portrayal of incapacitation since Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot.

20) Aqua Teen
 Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters
Halfway-decent Dadaist gestures are pretty hard to come by these days, but this ridiculous expansion of the bafflingly hilarious Adult Swim cartoon series certainly qualifies. And the opening five minutes, a parody of “let’s go out to the lobby” style concession stand promos, are the funniest of any movie, pretty much ever.

21) The Host

Korean director Bong Jon Ho’s audacious third feature is a flip satire, an engrossing family drama/farce, and an incredibly scary monster movie all at once, as a giant prawn-like creature—an American creation, in a way—emerges from Seoul’s Han river to terrorize the populace entire and one fractured clan in particular. A real treasure.

22) Hot Fuzz
An exhaustive and exhausting sendup of/tribute to every cop movie cliché ever, it makes the delirious Shaun of the Dead—the prior film from the creative team of director/co-writer Edgar Wright and actor/co-writer Simon Pegg—look like a warmup exercise. The year’s most exhilarating goof.

23) Eastern Promises
David Cronenberg’s most seemingly mainstream thriller is a remarkably insinuating look at the world of the self-morphing Russian gangsters of London, with Viggo Mortenson giving an eerily precise performance as an “undertaker” who isn’t quite what he seems.

24) Once
A simple and remarkably engaging twist on boy-meets-girl, wherein two relatively lost souls—an Irish guitar-strumming busker and a Czech pianist—come together to make beautiful music together. A terrific character study that’s also one of the more convincing cinematic depictions of the creative process.

25) Margot at the Wedding
Writer/director Noah Baumbach, whose last picture was the breakthrough The Squid and the Whale, has a knack for making very engaging movies about very flawed and, frankly, often unappealing people. This movie’s title character, almost too well-played by Nicole Kidman, is a monster of vanity and manipulation, but the movie makes her awful antics both comprehendible and hilarious.

And of course with the hindsight of several hours/days I wonder what it was that made me foresake Syndromes and a Century and No End In Sight. Such are the horrors of making lists. So go on and enumerate more of them below!

Comments

[don lewis]

You lost me at DARJEELING....and stabbed me in the eye with MARGOT.

I thought we were close maaaan...simpatico...then, this?

[don lewis]

p.s. "Smiley" and "Aqua Team Hunger Force??" Duuuude....is there something you want to tell us maaaan. Is Dave not here...or there? Is "Pineapple Express" your most awaited film for 2008?

[jlichman]

fun story:
early morning NYC screening of Aqua Teen. The only people at Magno are me, random guy...and coming in as the lights dim, Peter Travers. While cracking up at the opening animation, I look over and find Travers tearing through an 80-page loose leaf notebook as if we were never being shown this film again.

What does it mean? Who knows considering his half-assed average review of the flick, but damned if he didn't transcribe the entire film.

I only hope ATHF gets the Oscar nod, if only for the ending. And how incredibly weird it was.

...where was I? Challenging your LOL-photo-ness? Oh, I think I was. Hm.

[Mark J]

Interesting choices Glenn. I would have ranked Assassination of Jesse James higher though. That was an astonishing piece of filmmaking, especially in the current studio climate. A shame you didn't have room for The Bourne Ultimatum either. Although it was overpraised on release it is still the best action film since, well, The Bourne Supremacy in 2004.

[vadim]

Whoever did the HTML or whatever on this needs to close the bold tag after the #10 movie. Just saying.

God bless you for not kowtowing to everyone who said Werner misfired. How dare they. But where did your beloved Astree and Celadon go? Down the undistributed sinkhole? Sigh. That shouldn't have happened.

[bill]

I was relatively disappointed in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead". I liked it, but I thought by the end it was all a bit "much", if you know what I mean, and maybe you don't. However, Hoffman deserves every bit of praise for that performance he's received so far, and probably more. Really astonishing.

"Zodiac", on the other hand, knocked me out. I've never been a member of the Fincher Cult, but I'll be damned if now I'm not considering sending in my application and $10 membership fee.

[Glenn Kenny]

Boldness fixed, Vadim...and yes, "Astree" did wind up in the undistributed sinkhole. I actually hear tell it may not stay undistributed and thus hold out hope to put it on next year's list, where the new Rivette already has an assured place...

[Mike De Luca]

Thanks, Glenn, for recognizing "The Darjeeling Limited". Wes Anderson should not be tied to the wheel for developing a unique and lovely comic style of his own. And outside of "The Ultimate Badass"(have not seen "There Will Be Blood") no characters have engaged me this year quite like the Whitman Brothers. Francis, with his wraps and his itineraries, Little Jack with his insistence his works are only "fiction", and Peter, with his needy hold on his father's possessions. And I will say this: Adrien Brody has the best tragic/comic cinema face since Buster Keaton. There, I said it. Haters, fuck off.

[Randy Byers]

I think I'm going to get a Haters, Fuck Off tattoo. Then I'm going to go see ACROSS THE UNIVERSE for the fourth time.

[Andrew]

As I haven't had the chance yet to see "There Will Be Blood", i'd have to bump No Country to number 1. Though I fully expect to like "Blood". Kudos on the inclusion of Hot Fuzz.

[Ryland Walker Knight]

I just saw _Stellet Licht_ (gorgeous) and I thought I remembered you liking it. Does it fall in the same unreleased sinkhole (for now?) as does the Rivette picture? Or just the same fate as _Syndromes_?

Otherwise, _Jesse James_ and a few other choices aside, pretty cool list, dude. You know I'm with you on _TWBB_, _Ratatouille_ and _Darjeeling_. It's funny PTA gave us a big ole pile of bloody steak to chew on while WA gave us one of his typical dim sum (sweet lime?) delights. Maybe, if I start working on my year-end stuff, I can come up with a better analogy. (I mean, even outside their 2007 films both being their fifth offerings, it sorta makes sense to compare and contrast these two _auteurs_, right?) Regardless, this _was_ quite the year for pictures, wasn't it? Doesn't that indieWIRE list come out today?

[tuck]

Glenn -- why is it that critics (for the most part) laud Anderson when he is making the same movie over and over again? And even worse, he's shrinking his palette with each film. Isn't it the duty of the critic to call upon someone with Anderson's considerable talent to branch out, to try something new, or at the very least expand his artistic horizon? As now, he's really no more than the Michael Bay of twee.

To this viewer, his movies have gotten progressively colder and colder, and progressively more superficial. What you see as detachment I do see as a disconnect, as someone far more interested in the neat packaging of his characters' life, than letting the ragged edges show through.

Of course, everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but I wouldn't mind hearing you address the idea of critic as a possible agent of change: should the critic be satisfied with a good film that doesn't seem to break any new ground for the artist (especially if the artist is as considerably talented as Anderson) or does the critic urge the artist upward, even if that means a slip-up, or a bomb, as perceived by the public?

[Andrew]

Tuck, I totally agree. I'm still waiting for Anderson to blow my mind with something different, something new.

[Eric]

THERE WILL BE BLOOD is my most anticipated film for this year. JUNO is a close second and SWEENEY TODD rounds that out. I also wanna see MARGOT AT THE WEDDING and THE SAVAGES... For me the best film of 2007 thus far is BLACK SNAKE MOAN.

[bill]

Tuck and Andrew - Anderson IS something different and new. Not only that, I've never been able to figure out how "The Life Aquatic" is just the same old, same old, even within the narrow context of Anderson's other films. Does someone want to explain how that strange deep sea adventure/comedy/tragedy loosely inspired by Jacques Cousteau and David Bowie is somehow ordinary?

Eric - I also loved "Black Snake Moan". That's in my top ten, no question.

[don lewis]

I love Wes Anderson and I'm all for his "style," but he shows no growth as a filmmaker and not just visually. I'm not even saying he "makes the same film" over and over....he's just stuck in this creepy hipster adolescence. I really wanted to like (hell, I wanted to LOVE) DARJEELING LIMITED, but it was utterly underwhelming and too boringly detached for my tastes. "I lost mine" indeed.

[Glenn Kenny]

I know that neither myself nor Mr. DeLuca are going to change the minds of any W. Anderson/"Darjeeling" haters, but since we're arguing here, no, I don't think it's the critic's responsibility or function to attempt to prod "artistic growth"... and could one of you fans of "artistic growth" please give me a working definition of it, with examples? How did Bresson, or Tarkovsky, "grow" as an artist over the course of a career? Was "The Princess Casamassima," Henry James' stab at a Joseph Conrad novel and an attempt to break out of his little corner—a labor of "artistic growth"!—really such a good idea? An artist does what an artist does, and each work has to be judged not just for where it falls in that artist's body of work but what it actually is. You don't like Wes Anderson, fine. But thinking he's going to make something that you'll like better than his current work by strapping a 16mm camera to his shoulder and strolling into a steel mill, say, is just self delusional.

And by the way, here are two words that absolutely refute the whole idea of "artistic growth:"
The Ramones.

[Aaron Aradillas]

Yeah, but you have to admit some of that mid-to-late '80s Ramones was a little spotty.

[Joel]

First of all, I enjoy Casamassima as much or more than I enjoy The Secret Agent (it's Dostoevsky as well as Conrad). Secondly, Darjeeling does represent some artistic growth. I like how Anderson can make the Whitmans' grief plain and relatable while still making them into complete jerks, something he obviously learned from Malle. Also, he composes the frame around figures of three this time (a motif that goes down to a mom who worships the trinity), not single figures in a wide frame. The long takes are gorgeous and more fluid than in any of his other films, especially the one that introduces us to the village after the boy has drowned, something that I think the auteurists among you might slobber over. It's more of the "same," but only superficially. I'm with the anti-haters contingent on this. Good list.

[Glenn Kenny]

Thanks Joel. Although I have to admit it feels odd to get validated and have my bluff called simultaneously...

[Joel]

What bluff? Lots of people seem to dislike that book, and it's hardly a masterpiece on par with The Aspern Papers (my favorite). It's more defensible to dismiss that novel, I think, than to dismiss the Anderson movie, which is easily the director's best--a perfection of his style rather than a repetition. In my opinion, he got right here what he failed to do in Tenenbaums. The James novel, by contrast, was just a freakish and very entertaining anomaly.

[don lewis]

I'm not asking Anderson to like, change the landscape of cinema, but come on now. He's like a grown man doing a puppet show and the best part of putting on a puppet show is making the puppets, creating the backdrop and thinking about what will be funny to say. By the time you put on the show, all the fun is out of it.

Plus several scenes in DARJEELING really reminded me how limited Anderson is in terms of understanding people. The first was the Schwartzman sex scene. NOBODY, especially a character who is a cad (or, slut), spits in their hand and shoves it up a girls dress to get her going. That is a prime example of a person who knows nothing about sex. It reminded me of something you'd see in an 80's teen comedy where the teenage boy has to learn about sex because he's doing it wrong.

The second was the "death" scene. It was handled like a kid playing with dolls. No feeling, no power....just raw actions without realistic feeling consequences.

That being said, I LOVE LIFE AQUATIC and Anderson's other films as well. I just think the guy is in love with his production design and could give a shit about his characters. And that's a problem.

Now can you defend MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, please? I'm all for lovingly hating characters onscreen, but I hated hated those characters and, like Anderson (Baumbach's buddy ironically) Baumbach hates them too.

[Kirsten]

Glenn, I could go on about picking Margot At The Wedding is one of the craziest things I have ever seen, but since you put both Control and Joe Strummer on a list with Sweeney Todd and Killer Of Sheep, I'll let it slide.
No I won't. Margot was hateful, and Baumbach disappointed me like no one else this year.
And Darjeeling was not an awful movie, just mediocre. It was no Rushmore, but really, what is?

[JWarthen]

Am too far in the provinces to have access to the year-end favorites. But no film on your list made me smile harder than either PAPRIKA or LINDA LINDA LINDA. And MICHAEL CLAYTON was as perfectly realized an entertainment as my Cineplex has brought me. Casey Affleck gets my acting award (for ASSASSINATION...) at least until I can see Daniel Day-Lewis.

[Steve]

Two words re Anderson's lack of 'growth' as a filmmaker:

flashback scene.