Best of 2007

10. Black Snake Moan

Your love of Craig Brewer’s second film will depend on how much you buy its tonal U-turn half way through, some felt cheated out of a good old fashioned Tennessee Williams B movie Southern sleazefest. I think the film’s transformation is ballsy; it deepens and expands the picture in a way that Tarantino has been unwilling to do since Jackie Brown. Black Snake Moan is Samuel L. Jackson’s best work since JB, and Christina Ricci’s best work period, she manages to humanize a virtually unplayable Madonna/whore/ fetish role. The film eventually becomes a story of unwavering love as an answer to unmanageable, inexplicable anxiety, and I bought it wholesale.

9. Away From Her

Actress Sarah Polley stepped behind the camera and made the directorial debut of the year with Away From Her, an adaptation of the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”. This film is that rare thing: an honest, graceful weepie, a work of intimidating maturity from any filmmaker much less one so young. Everyone is talking about Julie Christie’s work, and they should be, but the success of the film hinges on Gordon Pinsent. Away from Her is HIS story, HIS movie, and his gradual acceptance of his new situation, and feeling that this may be just a teensy weensy bit of poetic justice, is romantic and heartbreaking.

8. Black Book/ Lust, Caution

I usually find the critics who hide forty movies in their Best of Lists to be indulgent and annoying, but I couldn’t help doing it just this once. Black Book and Lust, Caution are both contemp covers of the age old screwing someone you hate but you might actually love but you might still hate for the good of the government tale. Black Book is a thrilling adventure with a surprising anti-war after taste. Lust, Caution is a more obsessive tale of bedroom politics. Together they cover the gambit of the story’s potential, and carry Hitchcock’s Notorious into the new millennium. Together they also contain the two strongest female performances of the year in Carice van Houten and Wei Tang’s sexy, star making portraits of the irrepressible will to survive.

7. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

I enjoyed Burton’s revamp of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but Sweeney Todd is the true return to form that Burton fans have been waiting for since his career best Ed Wood thirteen years ago. Todd may be an adaptation of another’s work, but it feels like pure, unhinged Burton, the true gothic that’s been driving his films all along. Unlike some certain past Burton films, Todd is a bloody, bitter, enraged work that doesn’t feel the need to dilute with half-assed satire, this thing stings and offers no apologies.

6. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Possibly Sidney Lumet’s most purely entertaining film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is streamlined and focused in a way that Lumet films rarely are. Lumet’s classics are (in a good way) more humane and meandering, Devil is a black heist aftermath noir with good actors rivaling their career best work. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, and Albert Finney gave us the most fascinating, stylized, uncomfortable family of 2007.

5. I’m Not There

I normally don’t go for the super duper art house stuff, call me a philistine but there you go. I normally find those films to be just as false as Hollywood’s only self-congratulatory and boring. Not I’m Not There though, this film rocked me in a primal, existential way that I still can’t quite articulate. This is the brilliant Todd Haynes’ best work, a passionate, lonely, fleeting look at the intangible little somethings that fill in our lives. Yeah, it’s also about Bob Dylan, but the universality of the film is going to stun you, as is the cast, which includes a traditionally underrated Richard Gere.

4. Zodiac

In year where half a dozen of America’s best filmmakers made their best film, David Fincher rose above the dated Gen X chic of his prior work to make a timeless masterpiece about the universal urge to explain the boogeyman away. Robert Downey, Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Jake Gyllenhaal lead a top to bottom terrific cast.
The ending is a stunner.

3. The Host

I forgot, The Host is just a monster movie. Then why does the film nearly bring me to tears every time I re-watch it? The Host is an uncompromising dark comedy about a family that tries and tries to overcome their personal limitations when faced with an unimaginable tragedy. And they just can’t. And director Joon-ho Bong plays our hopes and expectations against us again and again. The Host is an amazing tightrope of a film, a film that crosses every imaginable genre boundary without the slightest hint of strain. The monster is terrifying. The little girl is brave and charismatic. This is just a plain and simple great fucking movie.

2. No Country for Old Men

Yes, it IS that good. No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brother’s best film, is also about the boogeyman, only this time it’s us, and our apathetic refusal to save the society that’s slipping through our fingers. I know, I know, that sounds like a slog, but the Coens are more interested in entertaining than preaching. They’re too hardwired into the meat and potatoes mechanics of the thriller to make a boring movie. Javier Bardem, as the personification of the payback that’s coming down the pike, is one of the iconic human monsters of the American cinema.

1. There Will Be Blood

Again, I feel the need to preface: it IS that damn good. The year of 2007 seemed to be the year when our best filmmakers faced the anxiety of our current period (and I’m not talking about the Iraq movies) in a variety of original and disarming ways. The cinemas were bleak last year, and one of my friends, before a midnight show of this picture, said “why aren’t any of the good movies fun?”

I laughed her off, but I shouldn’t. It’s a good point, depending on your perspective. I happen to think bleak movies ARE fun. If I have one wish for 2008 though, it’s that Hollywood come closer to producing some of the great comedies of yesteryear without the bullet proof snark that seems to come with the territory these days. Unlikely I know. Hollywood doesn’t seem to be able to do light and frothy anymore, all of our wits are too cynical. Alexander Payne has it in him, and it’s about time we hear from him again anyway.

Of the bleak cinema of 2007, There Will Be Blood was the least compromising, the most nightmarish, the confirmation of our darkest fears of consumption and betrayal. The film marked a staggering leap forward for its filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, who was already one of the most daring and interesting directors working, and it showcased one of our best actors, Daniel Day Lewis, in an unforgettable vaudeville of cunning, animal, cluelessness, hunger, and pitiful loneliness. The final line of the picture is unforgettably simple and direct: “I am finished.” Anderson certainly isn’t.

Posted on January 11th, 2008 in Features |

© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress.