Movies 2007

It's nuts how many great movies were made this year. I'm going back over it to write about my favorites now and my mind is blown all over the walls. (It's very lasagna-y. I want to take a picture of it but I can't summon the motor skills to make it happen. Since my BRAIN IS SPLATTERED ON THE WALL.)

The two closest to my heart were the ones that were brutally philosophical – Sunshine and No Country For Old Men. Each of these seemed to mirror one of my two favorite films in 2006: Sunshine, like The Fountain, was metaphysical, extreme and Eastern; poetry about transcendence hiding out in a mainstream science fiction piece. No Country For Old Men was Eastern too, only instead of using the vacuum of outer space to talk about emptiness, they used the wide, desert vistas of a western. In this way, it was a lot like Australian film The Proposition, based on a genius first script by musician Nick Cave. Between the two, I'm not sure which was more ruthless, but they both had a lot of soul.

I never wrote about The Proposition, though I should have. But here are three posts about the other three, probably the most fun I had writing this year:

Cowboy Taoism: No Country For Old Men

The New Holy: The Fountain

Poetry of Disintegration: Sunshine

So those are the movies that sent me into philospho-geek overdrive. But when I'm not being such an egg head (and when I say egg, think dinosaur egg. My head is... large-ish), I also like to laugh, and I lost my ass in the process of watching Knocked Up and Superbad. I have a pretty filthy sense of humor and so these movies made me feel validated. That is, I am, as a result of their high box office scores and the cultural acceptance this implies, more at peace with my filthy self. Also The Simpsons movie was like a 2-hour episode from one of their more inspired seasons. So, awesome.

The Bourne Ultimatum was, as expected, a great ride. Although it was probably my least favorite of the trilogy. The editing was a little too ADD, which doesn't make for a good view and can blur the effect of the action, a lot of which is hand-to-hand combat. But, as the story tied up the three-film arc of the franchise, it did so while making a really strong, resonant statement about the war, dealing with the folly of loyalty as blind faith. I didn't go in expecting a political message and was surprised at how much I didn't mind, and even admired, it.

Speaking of hyperactive editing, The Departed is one of the most entertaining things ever and owes much of its energy to the way it's cut, high-speed and without fat. I highly recommend listening to this interview with Scorses's long-time, oscar-winning film editor Thelma Shoonmaker.

Tony Gilroy is the writer of the Bourne movies. And this year he also found time to write and direct the somewhat overlooked but unassumingly brilliant George Clooney vehicle Michael Clayton. The opening monologue is delivered in a frantic voice-over by Tom Wilkinson and is such a phenomenal synergy of writing and acting that it was basically worth the price of admission alone. I think Clooney is a serviceable actor and does a fine job, but what sells Michael Clayton is its brainpower. It's two hours of smart. I can't remember a single character on either side of a black and white morality divide in this movie. It's all nuance and ensemble power, rounded out by Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton. If anything, Clooney does a disservice to the material if only by the fact that his immaculately groomed face on the posters suggests a layer of slick that really doesn't exist.

In the world of cartoons, there was Ratatouille and 300. I took my daughter to see Ratatouille, a movie about a rat with fancy airs who rises to the top of the Parisian culinary elite. And, though she claimed to enjoy it, I don't exactly see how. It was pretty talk-y. The Pixar flicks have been going this direction for years but, whereas they used to be movies for kids that can also entertain adults, this was the first one that felt more like a movie for adults that can also entertain kids. It was the most refined thing Pixar has done. Just really immaculate and well-conceived, if a little slow in the pacing department. I think what I liked most, and why I would like to buy it for my daughter, is the way the resolution handles the villain. Without giving anything away, it's with a lot of empathy. To me, the further our children's entertainment material gets away from "us vs. them" ethics and closer to the acceptance of ambiguity that you see in the Japanese animations by Hayao Miyazaki, the better.

300 is basically mythology for professional wrestling fans. I called it a cartoon not because it's soaking in CGI but because of its over-the-top gestures and Rambo-in-a-loincloth aesthetic. And yet... I'm a sucker for Frank Miller's graphic novels and like to think that, in my own way, I live a fairly spartan existence (subsisting only on tortilla chips and V8, NUMEROUS push-ups and stomach crunches, the occasional vanquishing of foes...). So I cheered.

There were movies I liked maybe more for personal reasons. The Darjeeling Limited was probably Wes Anderson's most affecting movie yet. I've always felt that I liked Anderson movies in spite of Anderson and his overly twee art direction. Because of the soul and truly out humor underneath his little hipster dollhouses. But though I couldn't have loved Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums more, I had to jump ship with The Life Aquatic. So I was glad to see him put out something so funny and searching again. Although it's hard to tell if I liked it for its own sake, or because I grew up one of three brothers who regularly pounded the shit out of each other and grew slightly estranged over time.

Same goes for The Pursuit of Happyness. It's possible that this movie was overly sentimental or at least, for other reasons, not as good as I thought it was. But the whole single dad thing was too much for my critical faculties to bear and I had no problem loving this movie unconditionally.

And last, but not least, the Latino Invasion. Or, "The Three Amigos," as the press has been calling them. Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro. Of this spicy trilogy, Iñárritu's Babel was the black sheep; the one with imperfections. I spent the first half of it hating its creator and squirming in my seat. And then an odd thing happened and the film blossomed for me into a colorful, vast thing that I didn't want to end. A lot of that appeal was visual. Iñárritu's pictures have the humidity of Michael Mann but with twice the amount of color. I've seen Iñárritu's last two films, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, which had a lot going for them in the way of guts and energy but, particularly in the case of 21 Grams, were weakened by one-note melodrama. I think that Babel took a lot of steps to avoid that and Iñárritu's by-now cliche technique of colliding disparate storylines into a giant narrative about connectivity survived the transplant to a global scale just fine. Basically, the film talked me into loving it. I'm anxious to see it again.

Cuarón's Children of Men was dystopian perfection. It's set in our near-future, but all of the essential elements of modern life haven't changed. He's saying, the way things are is a recipe for disaster. That the ingredients already exist for a total meltdown; all that remains is for someone to add a little heat and stir the pot. So Cuarón shows us one way that might happen and it's too believable. It's gloomy science fiction based more on plausibility than wishful thinking. Completely unnerving.

And then Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. A genre unto itself. Half horror, half wistful fairy tale. This is Del Toro's second film to be set during the Spanish Civil War and the resistance to Francisco Franco. It's brutal and vivid and sees the world as both lit with enchantment and caked in a sad mud. A strange half-light emotion that, thinking back on it now a year later, I can't decide if it was more grisly or magical. I think neither.