.The Ten Best Movies of 2007

Throw away your maps and catch up with the ten best movies of 2007. Then go ahead and complain. It's your right.

Surveying 2007 at the movies is a little like exploring a mysterious continent. Even with the advantage of hindsight and the best maps available, it’s dauntingly diverse and confusing, and once we get away from the population centers, the wilderness is overwhelming.

The “population centers” are the top-grossing films of 2007, the so-called tent poles that gather in the big bucks, the Spider-Man 3s and Shrek the Thirds. With a couple of notable exceptions — The Bourne Ultimatum and Ratatouille among them — few of these mega-moneymakers are of any interest to anyone older than twelve. But the “wilderness,” the land of genres, indies, foreign films, one-offs, and curiosities, is full of promise, although ruled by disagreement and complaint.

Some movie-biz commentators thought there was a glut of serious films this autumn, too many, too quickly to get a handle on. By the time you heard of a potentially interesting film, it had closed last Thursday. Others bemoaned the soft box office figures in general in the face of increased competition from video games. Some were upset about the torture-porn fad of sadomasochistic thrillers pitched at young males. Some critics hooted derisively at anything reeking of the dreaded Boomer. As always in the Bay Area, there were far too many film festivals — you might as well say there are too many subcultures.

Ticket prices in general are too high and heading higher, while savvy chains charge “amenities fees” for patrons willing to pay extra to sip a saketini while watching I’m Not There. Almost everybody thinks teenagers should have their own theaters where they can talk loudly to their friends and play electronic games and make calls on their cell phones during the show, and leave the rest of us, who want to watch the movie, alone — everybody except the teenagers, that is. And what’s that stuff they call “butter flavoring” on the popcorn? Don’t ask. In the midst of this, the Writers’ Guild went out on strike, and the Directors’ Guild and the Screen Actors’ Guild are threatening to walk out in June. And (sob!) Rosanna Arquette and Kelly Lynch are pushing fifty. Is there no justice? Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. In the wilderness, there is no consensus. It’s Balkanization, American style. Welcome to the Culture of Complaint, motion picture division.

We’ll return to the Complaint Dept. occasionally as we discuss individual titles and persistent trends, but first let’s take a look at the Ten Best Movies of 2007. There were a lot of films released in America this year — some 679, according to The-Numbers.com. But that’s no more than in 2006, when 721 movies opened theatrically in the US. A few 2006 films played for the first time in the Bay Area in 2007, and, aside from such lost-in-the-cracks mavericks as David Lynch’s Inland Empire, our field consists of “new” movies getting either their first run or first rep/museum showing here this year. Here, then, are the Top Ten, in more or less the order seen:

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

dir. Ken Loach

Bug

dir. William Friedkin

Rescue Dawn

dir. Werner Herzog

The Bourne Ultimatum

dir. Paul Greengrass

Into the Wild

dir. Sean Penn

Lust, Caution

dir. Ang Lee

Across the Universe

dir. Julie Taymor

The Kite Runner

dir. Marc Forster

No Country for Old Men

dir. Joel & Ethan Coen

I’m Not There

dir. Todd Haynes

As usual, writing and directing are the prime determinants, with writing getting the ultimate nod. An encouraging number of experienced — read: mostly older — directors made intelligent, multidimensional films in 2007: Loach, Friedkin, Herzog, Greengrass, Penn, Lee, Taymor, Forster, the Coen Bros., and former bad-boy Haynes from the above list, plus veteran stupefier Lynch (Inland Empire is probably his most baffling), Paul Schrader (The Walker), Mike Nichols (Charlie Wilson’s War), Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Lasse Hallström (The Hoax), Tom Tykwer (Perfume), Brian De Palma (Redacted), Ridley Scott (American Gangster), James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma), Frank Oz (Death at a Funeral), Neil Jordan (The Brave One), David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises), Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard), Judd Apatow (Knocked Up), Luc Besson (Angel-A), Alexander Payne (for his wonderful vignette in Paris, Je T’Aime), aging sleazemeisters Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (Grindhouse), and David Fincher (Zodiac), to name a few. These are films you could sink your teeth into. And let’s not forget octogenrian Sidney Lumet, whose New York crime drama (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) was one of the year’s strongest films.

Add in work by the talented group of relative newcomers — Jason Reitman (Juno), Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), Guy Moshe (Holly), Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound, maybe the best overlooked pic of the year), Noah Baumbach (Margot at the Wedding), rock-vid auteur Anton Corbijn (Control), Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl), Eran Kolirin (The Band’s Visit), Gavin Hood (Rendition), Alison Eastwood (Rails & Ties), Tamara Jenkins (The Savages), Sarah Polley (Away from Her), Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), Shane Meadows (This Is England), Andrei Kravchuk (The Italian), and Zoe Cassavetes (Broken English) — and it’s clear that it was worthwhile setting foot inside your local multiplex (or more likely, your local art house or museum) in 2007. Also, that the woods abound with grown-up movies if you know where to hunt for them.

All the year’s best films engage the world we live in, but at least four of them focus on true events in a relatively realistic narrative way. The Wind That Shakes the Barley takes us back to Ireland in the 1920s, when after centuries of British rule the Irish people decided they’d had enough. The O’Donovan brothers, Teddy (Padraic Delaney) and Damien (Cillian Murphy), join the clandestine Irish Republican movement and eventually their paths tragically diverge — that, after all, is the Hibernian way. Barley is helmed by Ken Loach, the well traveled English filmmaker whose low-key, down-to-earth portraits of working people — Kes, Riff-Raff — share space in his filmography with such dramas of revolution and protest as Hidden Agenda, Land and Freedom, and Bread and Roses. According to Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty, the IRA was born to avenge the shocking brutality of the English overlords, but the real struggle was between competing Irish versions of the aftermath: a puppet Irish Free State beholden to the British king, or Sinn Fein’s socialist system of a workers’ democracy. Loach leaves the final decision up to us, at least figuratively.

Christian Bale turns in one of the acting performances of the year in Werner Herzog’s Southeast Asian jungle adventure Rescue Dawn, a narrative version of the director’s documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Vietnam-war-era US Navy pilot Dieter Dengler gets shot down over Laos on his very first bombing mission, is captured, tortured, and imprisoned by the Pathet Lao in an up-country prison camp, escapes, and literally bites the heads off snakes in order to survive in the bush. Herzog has an affinity for jungles, and Rescue Dawn ranks with Aguirre the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo for its ultra-realistic profile of a man driven to extremes in a strange and beautiful forest.

For all its wham-bam editing and the sheer velocity of Matt Damon’s ongoing role as guilty-minded US intelligence op Jason Bourne, director Paul Greengrass’ encore wrangling of The Bourne Ultimatum achieves a certain hectic poetry of the soul to go along with mind-boggling acrobatics by Damon and various stuntmen. All Jason wants is to have a moral center, something denied him by his CIA handlers. Greengrass understands — it’s more or less the same impulse on display in his previous films Bloody Sunday, United 93, and The Bourne Supremacy. If it’s a thinking person’s action film splashed with 21st-century skepticism that we demand, Greengrass and Damon can deliver. Makes James Bond permanently irrelevant. I hope this series never ends.

The Kite Runner has attracted complaints from critics who find it mawkish. And it does deal sentimentally with ancient preoccupations like self-esteem, personal loyalty, and redemption. That it tackles these Big Themes inside a flashbacked drama of two boys growing up in Afghanistan in the days before the Russian invasion and the rise of the Taliban would seem to overload the proceedings, but director Marc Forster and writers Khaled Hosseini (novel) and David Benioff (screen adaptation) have one tremendous advantage: an unbeatable human interest story. Amir, the film’s young writer protagonist, has a compelling tale to tell. The character acting is superb, especially by Homayoun Ershadi and Shaun Toub as the wise elders in little Amir’s life.

Now, as always, the notion of the director as star proves too compelling to dismiss when totaling up the year’s most thrilling on-screen moments. William Friedkin, Ang Lee, and the team of Joel and Ethan Coen, a trio of above-the-title directorial superstars, proved their reputations weren’t a fluke. Bug, set inside a beat-out Oklahoma motel lined with aluminum foil, begins as a potentially violent character study about unreliable people, then swerves into outer space, courtesy of Tracey Letts’ adaptation of her stage play, termitic performances by Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, and Friedkin’s skill with pent-up emotions in confined spaces. Judd deserves every acting prize available for her role as harried waitress Agnes White. Shannon, also seen to menacing effect in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, glows in the dark like an evil Lava Lamp.

Ang Lee’s main claim to fame has been his ability to bridge the gap, often touchingly, between Asian and American styles of cinematic storytelling, most convincingly in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain — both of them classical stories of destiny under pressure. At first glance, Lee’s Lust, Caution seems to stride confidently into Wong Kar Wai territory with its period drama of Japanese collaborators, Chinese nationalist spies, mah-jongg, and rough sex in the drawing rooms and boudoirs of WWII Shanghai and Hong Kong.

But there’s something else going on behind Tony Leung Chiu Wai’s rigid exterior and the demure, movie-fan-turned-harlot determination of Tang Wei. The movie’s most memorable set piece occurs not in bed or hallway but in a Japanese inn in occupied Shanghai, where Mr. Yee (Leung) and Wong Chia-Chi (Tang) have secretly met in a tatami room. Listening to a typically plaintive Japanese love song coming from down the hall, Yee compares Japanese music to the sound of dogs howling. His lover takes the cue and launches into a classical Chinese aria. In that moment, China wins the war.

One of the Complaint Dept.’s most frequent communiqués is that the Coen Bros.’ visually extravagant Texas desert shoot-’em-up, No Country for Old Men, is finally too pessimistic for its own good, meaning that it sends some audience members — not all — out the door despairing for humanity. It’s true that Javier Bardem’s indestructible monolith Anton Chigurh, a disturbing combination of the Terminator and Hannibal Lecter, has caused nightmares. And it’s arguable that Cormac McCarthy’s novel, which the Coens adapted, is, in the words of one critic, pretty much a snuff flick.

Just how important is feeling better about yourself and the human condition coming out of a movie, anyway? The Coens, we’re sure, delight in raising the question, although they still have a way to go in the perversity arena compared to, say, Cronenberg. The feel-good elements in No Country mostly center on the person of Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. The final five minutes of the movie, with the sheriff calmly, sadly recounting his dreams to his wife (Tess Harper), are among the most reassuring moments in the Coens’ slim volume of such things, alongside Marge Gunderson’s homey repartee with her husband Norm in Fargo. The Coens aren’t in business to make us feel better but to show us things as they see them — and they generally see a world of shit. The shit is frequently very funny, and that’s justification enough.

Speaking of received wisdom and perceived bias, three of the finest films of 2007 — Into the Wild, Across the Universe, and I’m Not There — have been disparaged in some quarters as egregious examples of Baby Boomer mush-headedness. I beg to differ.

The transcendent musical fantasy Across the Universe has the great good fortune to be directed by Julie Taymor and to be built around the pop songs of Lennon & McCartney. So we take a magical mystery tour of the American ’60s as they might have been, through the glazed eyes of a traveler from Liverpool. What a trip. English filmmaker Taymor’s exuberant visual and narrative flair is a wonder to behold, but you don’t have to know anything about the ’60s or the Beatles to be swept up by this story of the young Liverpudlian named Jude (Jim Sturgess) who follows his destiny to New York and meets his true love, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), amid a psychedelic recap of the Flower Power era.

The tour includes powerhouse re-imaginings of the Greenwich Village hippie scene, Vietnam war protests, California cults, college life, recreational drugs, and sexual experimentation, all set to brilliant new productions of Beatles hits sung by the actors themselves. Highlights: “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and Bono singing “I Am the Walrus.” It’s better than the actual ’60s. The deceptively lightweight screenplay is by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais from a story they wrote with director Taymor (Frida, Titus). Special kudos to the supporting cast: Joe Anderson as a frat boy turned soldier, Dana Fuchs as Janis Joplin (here called Sadie), and Martin Luther McCoy as Jimi Hendrix (aka Jo-Jo).

A few jealous grumps have moaned that they’re sick of the Beatles, the ’60s, and Boomers in general, and they’ve got a point. That decade has been recklessly strip-mined. But there’s no hint of smug generational superiority in any frame of Across the Universe. Its appeal is to innocence, a celebration of a time when people from different places were united by hope for the future — the same unifying thread that runs through the other two Boomerville films, Into the Wild and I’m Not There.

Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, probably the most penetrating film in his thoughtful, actor-driven filmography as a director (The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard, Pledge), has a main character that drives Boomer-haters batty. To them, wanderer Christopher McCandless is a spoiled brat whose lonely “finding himself” journey is beyond cliché. One critic went so far as to complain that the abandoned school bus where McCandless finds shelter in the Alaskan outback is a cop-out.

But Penn’s true triumph is in transforming a self-absorbed whiner into an outwardly directed seeker. McCandless aka “Alexander Supertramp” (played unforgettably by Emile Hirsch) manages to synthesize the most attractive qualities of the beats and hippies with the quintessential literary spirituality of McCandless idols Thoreau, Tolstoy, Whitman, et al. He’s the descendant of Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and the muscular American tradition of the intellectual outdoorsman. If we can’t relate to Penn’s vision of Christopher McCandless, we’re numb to everything else this wide world has to offer.

Another American original, probably the most discussed musical artist of the 20th century, is Bob Dylan, subject of Todd Haynes’ masterpiece, I’m Not There. Even hippie-baiters who hooted at Across the Universe and Into the Wild stand in awe of director/co-writer Haynes’ impressionistic imagining of Dylan’s great speckled career. The transcendentals, beatniks, and hippies were all hopelessly academic philos compared to Dylan and his all-embracing musical mosaic. Haynes opens up the idiom and lets it rip. French symbolist poets meet blind black bluesmen meet Hank Williams meets Woody Guthrie meets the Great Depression meets photographer Robert Frank meets Allen Ginsberg meets the Band at Big Pink meets Eddie Vedder (who, incidentally, supplied original songs for Into the Wild). They all rally in a place called Old Weird America, Dylan’s hometown, not far down Highway 61 from the log cabin in the North Country where this most urban of troubadours was born. I’m Not There is the best film of 2007 because it barely contains the energy it describes, and wouldn’t dare to be the last word on the Zimmerman saga. As with Dylan’s tunes, you could riff on Haynes’ images forever.

A few achievements in this year’s film crop deserve special mention. In the category of Best Actor, Christian Bale should take top honors for his work in Rescue Dawn and 3:10 to Yuma. Tommy Lee Jones was his usual magnificent self in No Country for Old Men and In the Valley of Elah. Also: Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Savages; Richard Gere in The Hoax; George Clooney in Michael Clayton; Don Cheadle in Talk to Me; Benicio Del Toro in Things We Lost in the Fire; Gordon Pinsent in Away from Her; Brad Pitt (that’s right, scoffers) in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; and Pat Healy in the little-noticed but well-written Great World of Sound.

For Best Actress: Ashley Judd’s portrait of paranoia in Bug edges out Julie Christie’s portrait of senile dementia in Away from Her. Also noteworthy: Laura Linney in The Savages; Ellen Page in Juno; Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There; Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose; Keri Russell in Waitress; Tabu in The Namesake; and Jodie Foster in The Brave One.

Among the Supporting Actor standouts, busy P.S. Hoffman was typically incisive in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Charlie Wilson’s War. But it was really Josh Brolin’s year — his character work in No Country for Old Men, American Gangster, and Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror helped make those films special. Other winning supporters: Peter Fonda in 3:10 to Yuma, Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies in Rescue Dawn; Alfred Molina in The Hoax; Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild; Michael Shannon in Bug and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; and Kene Holliday in Great World of Sound.

The Supporting Actress field boasted sophisticated, nuanced performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh in Margot at the Wedding and Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone. But the others were strong, as well: Emily Mortimer in Lars and the Real Girl; Charlotte Gainsbourg in I’m Not There; Catherine Keener in Into the Wild; Sylvie Testud in La Vie en Rose; Joan Chen in Lust, Caution; and Lili Taylor in Starting Out in the Evening.

The auteur theory, the creaky old formula that recognizes filmmakers — usually directors — as the authors of their films, has taken quite a beating since critics at Cahiers du Cinéma developed it in Paris and American critic Andrew Sarris, writing in the old Village Voice, popularized it here. But it comes in useful in years like 2007, when these directors helped lead the way out of the commercial cotton fields: Todd Haynes for I’m Not There; Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men; Sean Penn for Into the Wild; William Friedkin for Bug; Werner Herzog for Rescue Dawn; Ang Lee for Lust, Caution; Sidney Lumet for Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; Paul Greengrass for The Bourne Ultimatum; Ken Loach for The Wind That Shakes the Barley; Julie Taymor for Across the Universe (a bona fide director’s picture); and Andrew Dominik for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

No end of worthy documentaries this year. Here are a few highlights: No End in Sight, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, Manufactured Landscapes, The Rape of Europa, My Kid Could Paint That, The Old Weird America, War Made Easy, Into Great Silence, What Would Jesus Buy?, and Nanking.

In the Foreign Language category, these films leaped out of the pack: Claude Chabrol’s Comedy of Power, Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit, Andrei Kravchuk’s The Italian; Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and the overpowering Lust, Caution, presented variously in Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese.

For Best Original Screenplay: Todd Haynes and Oren Moverman for I’m Not There; George Smith and Craig Zobel for Great World of Sound; Kelly Masterson for Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; Paul Laverty for The Wind That Shakes the Barley; Tamara Jenkins for The Savages, and Werner Herzog for Rescue Dawn.

The best in the Adapted Screenplay category: Sean Penn for Into the Wild; Tracey Letts for Bug; Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men; James Schamus and Hui-Ling Wang (screenplay) and Eileen Chang (story) for Lust, Caution; Sarah Polley for Away from Her; and David Benioff for The Kite Runner.

The San Francisco Film Critics Circle awarded its 2007 Special Citation to a locally made film that played numerous festivals in 2006 and finally got commercial distribution in 2007: Colma: The Musical. Directed by Richard Wong and written by H.P. Mendoza, who also composed the songs and played the part of Rodel, Colma captures the foggy flavor of that SF Peninsula suburb in an irresistibly charming slice of life about three graduating high school students venturing out on their own.

Many of the above-named films are currently playing theatrical engagements in East Bay movie houses and most are destined for the home video market, eventually. But for those tired of passing through the wickets, here are a couple of suggestions for a quiet evening in front of the home theater. Milestone Film & Video has released works by two vitally important filmmakers, Charles Burnett and Mikhail Kalatozov, in smartly produced DVD box sets. Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection gathers together two features by the renowned African-American writer-director — the achingly poignant Killer of Sheep (1977) and the hilarious-when-it’s-not-pathetic family portrait My Brother’s Wedding (in the original 1983 version and a 2007 director’s cut), plus three Burnett shorts. If you’re not familiar with Burnett (he has appeared at the Pacific Film Archive and Bay Area festivals), you owe it to yourself to remedy that.

I Am Cuba (1964) was made by Soviet director Kalatozov on location in Cuba during the early years of the Castro regime as a tribute to that country’s revolution. Few people saw it. It was shelved by both the Russians and Cubans, who didn’t understand it, then unearthed years later by the Telluride Film Festival’s Tom Luddy and filmmaker Martin Scorsese. It’s been a legend ever since, hailed by everyone from programmer Anita Monga (who brought it to Milestone) to then-PFA director Edith Kramer and then-San Francisco International Film Festival artistic director Peter Scarlet, all of whom flipped out at the film’s amazing kaleidoscope of images and emotionally powerful vignettes. Now, Milestone has packaged it in a clever cigar box called I Am Cuba: The Ultimate Edition — featuring the film with digitally separated Spanish or Russian voiceover tracks (in place of the competing double voiceover) — plus two documentaries about the production and the filmmaker. Think of these two box sets as continuations of the open, accessible, world-embracing experiences embodied by the best films of 2007. It sure beats crying in the wilderness. 

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