In The Company Of Glenn

If I had the chance to do it all again...

I'd have made my 25-best a 30-best, and I would have added: Syndromes and a Century (pictured), Grindhouse, No End in Sight, The Savages, and a player to be named later Offside.
But as I'm still officially on vacation and one of my goals was to catch up on some reading, I'm not going to apply myself to the question overmuch, or defend the choices just now. These reconsiderations were prompted by both my own musings and the suggestions/protestations of some commenters below. Although it's still "no" to American Gangster (distinguished dud) and 3:10 to Yuma (enjoyable but slight with a near-unforgiveable Hannibal Lecter punchline.)

One of the things I wanted to do whilst ensconced in lovely Missouri with My Lovely Wife and Welcoming In-Laws is catch up on my reading, and one of the books in my satchel is the first compilation of movie writing by the great Kent Jones, whose ever-probing acuity illuminates not just individual films and filmmakers but the condition of cinema in the here and now its very self. Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism, it's called, and reading it is making me eager to re-experience some favorites Jones and I share (various Hou Hsiao-hsien works, for instance) and also to reassess some Jones enthusiasms that didn't really hit me where I or any part of me lived the first time around. That would be Spanglish, and my memory of it is such that I'm not sure another viewing will bring me round—although I appreciate, in part, the specificity Jones cites in its defense, I'm not sure his evocation of Cassavettes in praising the Tea Leoni role/performance really makes it—but he's a forceful enough arguer that I'm willing to spend the time to look at and think about it again...if only to strengthen my own posisiton.

Jones' characterization of the art of Wes Anderson, part of an essay on The Royal Tenenbaums, holds as true now as it did then, and I almost inserted it into the comments section of my best-of-year post, wherein Steve M. of Kinophilia and Don Lewis of Film Threat were having a lively, um, debate. I reproduce a pertinent section of it below the fold:

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.

In which Private Pyle gets a commendation of sorts (updated)

Now Army Times approved!

Via my bestest buddy Ann Althouse (who gets up a helluva a lot earlier than I've ever even considered doing, apparently), I see that Army Times is getting into the movie list business, naming its "Top 10 best military movies of all time." "Top 10 best?" you might quail, shuddering at the redundancy, but I'm just going to give the piece and its author C. Mark Brinkley points for enthusiasm. I'd rate over half the pics on the list as decent-to-great, with the likes of The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape rising to the top. Then again, the inclusion of A Bridge Too Far and Top Gun attests to the non-cineaste's indifference to such niceties as mise-en-scene and, uh, coherence. And the stunning exclusion of any work by frequent war-moviemaker Samuel "Film is a battleground" Fuller, including his magnificent The Big Red One, attests to a shameful lack of auteurist depth on Brinkley and Army Times' part.

I do approve wholeheartedly of the number one choice, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which Brinkley says is "about as real as it comes without signing a contract." To which I can only respond, "Holy shit!"

Below the fold, some fave war pictures, none even AFI-nominated (yes, the Army Times piece is another riff on the AFI "100 Years, 100 Movies" update), that Mr. Brinkley and company might enjoy...

Sisters are doing a film list for themselves...

Gawd that's a cheesy hed. Eye catching, though, I guess. I'm told you can't go far wrong with Eurythmics references. Anyway...

The Alliance of Women Film Journalists held a lunch on Monday to announce its Top 100 Film List, 2007 Edition. AWFJ cofounders Maitland McDonagh and Jennifer Merin were on hand to introduce the list, as was the esteemed critic Carrie Rickey, who enlisted your humble correspondant to help her enact a nasty joke that she heard five times on a recent reconaissance trip to Hollywood. (The transcript of her remarks, including my plucking from the audience, is here.)

The idea of a female-centric list occured to Rickey after she went over the nominations list for the most recent AFI 100 Years, 100 Films thingie and was appalled by the paucity of female filmmakers on it. 4.5 of the 400 films were directed by women.

But the subsequent AWFJ list, which you can mull over here, didn't take shape in the way one might have expected. It wasn't limited to films be female directors. It wasn't even necessarily limited to films with a strong female perspective. The call for nomination was made "without issuing directives nor suggesting that only films made by and/or about women be eligible." Also, the final list was to be non-hierarchical—alphabetical order rather than order of rank.

The result was interesting, and to several parties attending the lunch, vexing. While bearing the distinction of being one of the few lists of its ilk to include Maya Deren's Meshes of an Afternoon, the list has a total of only 16 female-directed films, which "shocked" Women Make Movies executive director Debra Zimmerman.