Much this year has been made that 2007 is a great year for movie - Ebert described a phenomenon of watching one great movie open after another, and awards season is packed with surprising movies, perhaps not surprising because they are great, but because they managed to live up to their pre-release hype. That in and of itself is a bit of an accomplishment.
A bit of one. I think 2007 is a great year for movies, but mostly because it comes after some fairly lousy ones, and it's not the movies that many mentioned that are so great. I had issue with No Country For Old Men, as I wrote on here last month. I cannot really discern why it is I saw There Will Be Blood, although it's hard to deny how brilliantly it is made. Juno is more charming than it should be, I guess, and I'll be honest - very little will convince me to get to the theaters to watch the triumph-of-the-parapalegic-will art snooze The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, although clearly Julian Schnabel is a great visionary.
To me, the reason I can say that 2007 is a great year for movies begins and ends with looking at what I think is clearly the picture of the year, Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. Pure and simple, I've never seen anything like it, a movie of monumental passion and vision, that fuses myth and music and ideas and creates story and emotion that expands their great sense even further. From Cate Blanchett's searingly dead-on portrait of a strung-out 60's Dylan, to a confused, blank Christian Bale positing Dylan's revised propheteering in the 80's, to the daze that is Richard Gere wandering through a Basement Tapes boom town. It's a head trip and an emotional wallop, an expansion of film as much as music and celebrity, and it's Todd Haynes's first movie about identity and society that is as astonishing and affecting as it is bold and visionary. To me, you can call it a great year for movies if something stood apart from the rest of the great movies of the year by being more than a movie, by connecting on all levels and creating a few you didn't know you were missing.
And then looking at the rest of the movies in my top ten list, I have to say I love all of them too. The genre explosion of The Bourne Supremacy seems to me as perfect a movie as any of its kind, and it was written by Tony Gilroy, the writer/director of Michael Clayton, a legal thriller that only looks like a legal thriller, with astonishing human characters barely containing their desperate anxieties in the face of corporate America. Its human dynamics and the chilling human dynamics of Before The Devil Knows You're Dead make their crimes the least of their concerns. Grindhouse was throwback fun, and The Lives of Others has to be the bravest political movie to have been released in an age when they seem to be everywhere. Further, I say that Knocked Up comes out over Superbad in the comedy war because of the genuineness and detail Judd Apatow uses to characterize his secretly loving and sweet group of characters. There were a lot of great romantic comedies with a lot of great dramatic and comedic performances by its stars - Waitress, Year of the Dog, and Dan In Real Life each charmed me far more than Juno, but why nitpick? With this many great movies to choose from, there's no need.
When it comes to performances of the year, there will be some that will win Oscars (Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone, Daniel Day Lewis in Blood), but I propose a couple of other deserving great performances. Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before The Devil Know You're Dead are so scary and trenchant and desperate and brilliant, that they should be duking it out for the best actor trophy. Ashley Judd in Bug is the type of acting every former starlett should do once in their life, if anyone could muster the greatness she achieved. Molly Shannon in Year Of The Dog gave such specific humanity to a woman devastated by the loss of her dog, that even her most lunatic moments feel frantically lived in. And Christian Bale deserves an Oscar for being Christian Bale anyway, but in Rescue Dawn and 3:10 To Yuma, he showed two drastically different studies of desperation, and each one is worthy. I'll be happy if Julie Christie later wins an Oscar for her sensitive work in Away From Her, and if Blanchett wins for I'm Not There, to give a little credit where it will clealry be given, but my winners are the ones in this paragraph.
Best Movies of 2007
1. I’m Not There
2. The Bourne Ultimatum
3. Michael Clayton
4. Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
5. Grindhouse
6. The Lives of Others
7. Bug
8. Waitress
9. Year Of The Dog
10. Rescue Dawn
A bit of one. I think 2007 is a great year for movies, but mostly because it comes after some fairly lousy ones, and it's not the movies that many mentioned that are so great. I had issue with No Country For Old Men, as I wrote on here last month. I cannot really discern why it is I saw There Will Be Blood, although it's hard to deny how brilliantly it is made. Juno is more charming than it should be, I guess, and I'll be honest - very little will convince me to get to the theaters to watch the triumph-of-the-parapalegic-will art snooze The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, although clearly Julian Schnabel is a great visionary.
To me, the reason I can say that 2007 is a great year for movies begins and ends with looking at what I think is clearly the picture of the year, Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. Pure and simple, I've never seen anything like it, a movie of monumental passion and vision, that fuses myth and music and ideas and creates story and emotion that expands their great sense even further. From Cate Blanchett's searingly dead-on portrait of a strung-out 60's Dylan, to a confused, blank Christian Bale positing Dylan's revised propheteering in the 80's, to the daze that is Richard Gere wandering through a Basement Tapes boom town. It's a head trip and an emotional wallop, an expansion of film as much as music and celebrity, and it's Todd Haynes's first movie about identity and society that is as astonishing and affecting as it is bold and visionary. To me, you can call it a great year for movies if something stood apart from the rest of the great movies of the year by being more than a movie, by connecting on all levels and creating a few you didn't know you were missing.
And then looking at the rest of the movies in my top ten list, I have to say I love all of them too. The genre explosion of The Bourne Supremacy seems to me as perfect a movie as any of its kind, and it was written by Tony Gilroy, the writer/director of Michael Clayton, a legal thriller that only looks like a legal thriller, with astonishing human characters barely containing their desperate anxieties in the face of corporate America. Its human dynamics and the chilling human dynamics of Before The Devil Knows You're Dead make their crimes the least of their concerns. Grindhouse was throwback fun, and The Lives of Others has to be the bravest political movie to have been released in an age when they seem to be everywhere. Further, I say that Knocked Up comes out over Superbad in the comedy war because of the genuineness and detail Judd Apatow uses to characterize his secretly loving and sweet group of characters. There were a lot of great romantic comedies with a lot of great dramatic and comedic performances by its stars - Waitress, Year of the Dog, and Dan In Real Life each charmed me far more than Juno, but why nitpick? With this many great movies to choose from, there's no need.
When it comes to performances of the year, there will be some that will win Oscars (Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone, Daniel Day Lewis in Blood), but I propose a couple of other deserving great performances. Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before The Devil Know You're Dead are so scary and trenchant and desperate and brilliant, that they should be duking it out for the best actor trophy. Ashley Judd in Bug is the type of acting every former starlett should do once in their life, if anyone could muster the greatness she achieved. Molly Shannon in Year Of The Dog gave such specific humanity to a woman devastated by the loss of her dog, that even her most lunatic moments feel frantically lived in. And Christian Bale deserves an Oscar for being Christian Bale anyway, but in Rescue Dawn and 3:10 To Yuma, he showed two drastically different studies of desperation, and each one is worthy. I'll be happy if Julie Christie later wins an Oscar for her sensitive work in Away From Her, and if Blanchett wins for I'm Not There, to give a little credit where it will clealry be given, but my winners are the ones in this paragraph.
Best Movies of 2007
1. I’m Not There
2. The Bourne Ultimatum
3. Michael Clayton
4. Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
5. Grindhouse
6. The Lives of Others
7. Bug
8. Waitress
9. Year Of The Dog
10. Rescue Dawn
