Film Freak Central’s Top 10 of 2007

Well the road is out before me
and the moon is shining bright
what I want you to remember
as I disappear tonight
today is grey skies
tomorrow is tears
you'll have to wait 'til yesterday is here.

-Tom Waits, "Yesterday Is Here"

Break it down: 2007 resets the early days of the New American Cinema–the last years of the Apollo space program (and sure enough, we have a documentary about the remaining Apollo astronauts in David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon) and Watergate, the death twitches of the 1960s gradually revealing themselves in pictures. Whether this leads to another Golden Age or merely another stutter-step on the road of our grief remains to be seen, but past the halfway point of the first decade of the new millennium (and six years after 9/11 hit its own reset button), the 2000s have already established themselves with the usual single-minded purpose. At the least, celebrate the resurgence of American cinema–the mainstream re-establishing itself as not just a dream factory, but a garden of auteur delights as well. 2007, above anything else, heralds a banner year for the auteur theory (Paul Thomas Anderson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Coens, Tarantino, Sean Penn, Cronenberg, Brad Bird, Kim Ki-duk, David Fincher, Ken Loach, Ang Lee, Brian DePalma–and flicks I didn't catch by guys like Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, Tsai Ming-liang, John Sayles, and so on), with the films, like Sweeney's razors, functioning as extensions of the directors' biological selves.

Thirty-some years hence, more savvy now than then, perhaps more ruined by experience (certainly more nihilistic by half), we look to ourselves for any hints of char to flame into activism–vestiges of this belief that we can affect real change in a world that seems to be run entirely on entropy and the evil men intent on spinning our benign Brownian motions into the apocalypse. Though the best pictures of this year have their echoes in New American pictures, they're stained down to the weave, distinguished by a desperation to recapture what's been lost and what is, in its purest essence, entirely unrecoverable. (Turn on the TV to see Dennis Hopper shilling for financial planning.) I don't think it's an accident that Ridley Scott's long-awaited "final cut" of Blade Runner makes its appearance this year, nor that the slogan above the plastic surgery clinic in Kim Ki-duk's Time promises a "new life" akin to Blade Runner's Offworld promise; the future is all that's left of us, and there's no future left for us. It explains all the apocalyptic stuff in the cineplex this year, too.

The most hopeful of these pictures (like Ratatouille, or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, or The Golden Door) present the past as something that can be kept in masonry: a killing jar–amber if you're romantic. The less hopeful suggest that Eden was never a promise and always a lie, and is still the only thing to look "forward" to in the slow heart of our dying collective dream.–Walter Chaw

WALTER CHAW'S TOP 10

Honourable Mentions: Away From Her; I'm Not There; Nanking; Margot at the Wedding; Gone Baby Gone

Dishonourable Mentions: The parade of Liberal weltschmerz melodramas (Charlie Wilson's War, In the Valley of Elah, Grace is Gone, Lions For Lambs, Rendition, Shooter) that make conscientious objection seem as pussified, weak, and condescending as the GOP would have you believe it is. Also, anything with Mandy Moore and/or Diane Keaton.

Notably Missed: Honeydripper; Youth Without Youth; The Band's Visit; The Walker; The Last Winter; Zebraman; My Best Friend; The Boss of It All; Flanders; I Don't Want to Sleep Alone; The Wayward Cloud; The Taste of Tea; Control

How Best to Honour the Death of Adrienne Shelley: Make Trust available on Region 1 DVD!

11-20: Zodiac; Exiled; Into the Wild; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; Death Proof; Eastern Promises; Into Great Silence; Persepolis; Once; The Golden Door

BILL CHAMBERS'S TOP 10

10. The TV Set (d. Jake Kasdan) As much as it irks me that comedy's resident imperialist Judd Apatow got his hooks in Jake Kasdan, writer-director of the shamefully underrated Zero Effect, The TV Set wouldn't exist without Kasdan having been there for the inception of Apatow's network sacrifices "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared"–and the world would be short one keenly-observed satire at least as trenchant as (if a lot less ambitious than) Network. Note how the casting ingeniously underscores the very pecking order the movie's about: Small-screen stars David Duchovny and Justine Bateman play the artist hero and his wife, respectively, while big-screen stars Sigourney Weaver (who's hilarious) and Ioan Gruffudd play the corporate heavies.

9. Breach (d. Billy Ray) A pick almost entirely hinging on Chris Cooper's wrenching performance, Breach nonetheless makes a worthy companion piece to its clear model Donnie Brasco.

8. The Last Winter (d. Larry Fessenden) I still think about The Last Winter, sixteen months after I kinda sorta dismissed it. So like all of Larry Fessenden's films to date, it's resonant as all get-out, but what's lingering this time is less the moral of the story (at this point, nature-in-revolt films are basically preaching to the choir) and more the remarkable number of indelibly spooky images: a cassette tape that fills the 'scope frame, a Blair Witch shocker, the lone survivor learning she's not alone… Wonderful cinema.

7. Grindhouse (ds. Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino) This is on here more for the totality of the experience–now this is a night at the movies–than for the debatable merits of either film on its double bill. I had fun, man.

6. The Host (Gue-mool) (d. Bong Joon-ho) I knew I would love The Host as soon as I realized that the man in the surgical scrubs was none other than national treasure Scott Wilson, who manages in his brief cameo to distil all the atomic terror of Rubber Suit cinema into a single barb of Western arrogance. This is a movie that makes its points succinctly while offering a life-affirming portrait of the Everyman; comparisons to Spielberg's Jaws, Jurassic Park, and especially War of the Worlds are inevitable, but unlike Spielberg of late, director Bong Joon-ho doesn't cop out.

5. Time (Shi gan) (d. Kim Ki-duk) Probably–hopefully–the closest thing we'll ever get to a remake of Seconds, Time, like most of Ki-duk's work, strikes me as a reluctant horror movie, but a horror movie all the same, one with its finger on the pulse in showing the effects of an expendable society on a person's self-esteem. It's the one film on my list I can safely say is mesmerizing from beginning to end.

4. Lust, Caution (d. Ang Lee) It's Blackbook minus the Hollywood horseshit, although only later, at home in the dark, does the full weight of Lust, Caution's misanthropy come crashing down on you. If Lee is ultimately too prosaic to ever be anything but a great middlebrow filmmaker, consider what an oxymoron that is; we're lucky to have him.

3. Zodiac (d. David Fincher) Audiences mostly resented Fincher's attempt to give the lie to his own Se7en by probing the ever-expanding vortex surrounding a serial killer's reign of terror, seeing it as a bait-and-switch tactic to make something as salacious as the Zodiac murders the focus of a talky procedural. I for one was never less than compelled, in part because the auteurist in me sees it as Fincher's Rosetta stone–a deeply personal apologia for his notorious obsessiveness. However you choose to take it, it's a haunting piece of work.

2. The Darjeeling Limited (d. Wes Anderson) Familiarity may breed contempt, but don't blame the one-picture-every-three-years Wes Anderson–blame pretenders like Mike White and Jared Hess, whose attempts to codify Anderson's je ne sais quois have effectively genre-fied him, diluting the potency of the original. Wes Anderson can only make Wes Anderson movies and only Wes Anderson can make Wes Anderson movies; and no, thematically, it's not tired, but rather another piece in a devastating mosaic of grief. Truthfully, it might be minor Anderson, though that in itself is a virtue after the grandiose The Life Aquatic.

1. No Country for Old Men (ds. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) While I've never considered them to be lacking in versatility, colour me gobsmacked that it took the Coen Brothers, of all people, to succeed where so many others have failed in resurrecting "Bloody Sam" Peckinpah at his most laconic. "Fucking masterpiece" indeed.

Notably Missed: There Will Be Blood; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; I'm Not There; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Youth Without Youth

Honourable Mentions: Ratatouille; Gone Baby Gone; Offside; Into the Wild; Eastern Promises

Dishonourable Mentions: Blackbook; Fay Grim; Flanders; Romance & Cigarettes; 300

10. Time (Shi gan) (d. Kim Ki-duk)
South Korea's Kim Ki-Duk tackles existential horror, Vertigo/Eyes Without a Face-style. Updated for the zeitgeist and weighted with enough queasy ideas and indelible images to span a normal career, Time is a madly ambitious film that follows the director's penchant for transforming familiar genres into unfamiliar forms. He weds here the quietness of his 3-Iron with the rage of his The Isle (no accident that both films make a cameo, one literally) as a jealous young woman takes refuge in a different face and body to administer a test her boyfriend couldn't possibly pass. Seconds directed by Hitchcock, it's the best film about gender politics since Miike's Audition and Denis's Trouble Every Day. Time, with its obsession with reclamation in the face of the essential truth of reclamation's fruitlessness (existence as a function of a deal with the devil), inaugurates 2007's best ten in high style.

9. Paprika (d. Satoshi Kon)
Find in Paprika the précis version of director Satoshi Kon's own brilliant serial anime Paranoia Agent, in addition to the analogue/lover of his Perfect Blue–a dip into the wet cellar of the collective unconscious that explores the boundary between our selves and the culture that erupts from us unbidden in gibbous ropes. A movie Roland Barthes would've written a book about once upon a time, it holds film as its own monument, distinct in and of itself and requiring of no signifiers in its progress of multifoliate signs. An animated Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman joint exploring the ways in which our consciousness has been embedded with the glut, relentless, of consumer images and corporate suggestions, Paprika comes on like a thriller but leaves a long aftertaste of disquieting self-reflection.

8. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (d. Tim Burton)
Tim Burton discovers his muse in Stephen Sondheim. Who knew? Perfectly sensible in hindsight, the marriage of Sondheim's best (and favourite) musical and Burton's latent misanthropy has distilled the best moments in Burton's pictures (the death of The Penguin, the child murder and iron maiden in Sleepy Hollow, the climax of Edward Scissorhands, the odd couplings of Ed Wood, the perversity of Mars Attacks!) down to this angry little bit of Victoriana. Topical for its themes of the terrible toll of vengeance, of course, but there's also in it the idea that too much time looking for bogeys results in the inevitable overlooking of allies and heroes. For Sweeney, his younger, "other" self is "naïve" to the oppressive evil of time's dismal tide of atrocity; thus begin the cycles of blood and actions performed in the heat of passion–and regretted ever after with no one to teach and no one left to learn.

7. Syndromes and a Century (Sang sattawat) (d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
An impressionistic diary of his doctor parents' courtship, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's picture evolves in two parts (feminine/masculine?), with events repeated in each against opposing backdrops: natural/rural vs. industrial/urban. Its suggestion of autobiography (the parents' memories are the stated structure, such as it is) tantalizes like the title of an Ezra Pound poem–an external prod just as, Weerasethakul suggests, all of our reactions to film are essentially personal and intrinsically separate from the film itself. That doesn't stop it from being oblique, however, as unconcerned with narrative sense as it is with texture. There's the thought in here that the past is Narcissus's pool, a reflection of the dark present: we never seem to learn from the past, but dip too long and it ossifies any illusion of progress.

6. Ratatouille (d. Brad Bird)
Restaurant critic Anton Ego touches something to his lips and is transported to his childhood in the most heartbreaking, ebullient moment in 2007 cinema. It leads to a critique that speaks eloquent to what the true critic thinks and feels when set before the object of their attention. Surgeons take an oath to protect and do no harm before committing otherwise felonious acts of assault with deadly weapons in the pursuit of preserving the body politic. In moments of self-pity, I wonder why people don't think of critics the same way. Here's a picture with the courage to be about genius on the one hand and, more astonishingly, about the mechanism that recognizes and tolerates genius on the other. It touches on the vagaries of acceptance–the possibility for art in whatever form to reflect the face of sublimity. Another of Brad Bird's pictures dealing with the absolute, precious commodity of being special, its story of a rat rising from obscurity to become the top chef in Paris can be taken as straight, delighted entertainment; as an allegory, as some have taken it, for coming out; or as a celebration of story and performance. Mostly, though, Ratatouille should be taken as the most optimistic of the best of 2007–this belief sterling that the past may be gone and filtered to incomprehension besides, but there's a possibility to carve out a little haven of yesterday in all our tomorrows.

5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (d. Andrew Dominik)
One of seemingly dozens of dreamscapes in 2007, The Assassination of Jesse James… captures the essence of novelist Ron Hansen (projected to film under the hand of DP Roger Deakins and hyphenate Andrew Dominik), his unquiet lyricism shining through the roughness of the story and milieu. I never thought an adaptation of Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy was possible but see now that that was only for my own lack of imagination. Brad Pitt is remarkable as a wraith, a mythological beast emerging from the noisome black to disturb the imaginations of lesser men. A film about memory, it speaks to how the past can lend hope to the future even as it speaks to how that hope is a chimeric amalgamation of misunderstanding and mis-remembrances. A Proustian refutation of biography as an individualistic pursuit, The Assassination of Jesse James… takes on modernity in its poeticizing of the past. In its poesy, it posits itself as the canniest, most meta flick of the year.

4. 28 Weeks Later (d. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo)
Insurgency, colonization for their own good, the impossibility of containment, and the transformation of friends and neighbours into slavering, blood-thirsty animals forms the thematic crux of this picture. The heart of it, however, is a domestic deconstruction: a wife betrayed by a husband, children betrayed by a father, and, trickiest, the resentment that foments in the heart of the one who wrongs. Another 2007 picture about unjustifiable acts of vengeance and the fictionalization of the past, it does what the best genre pictures do in reflecting the fear and loathing in a culture before the culture itself articulates it in dictating its course. Superior to the original for any number of reasons in any number of ways, Fresnadillo's post-apocalypse is a more compelling vision than any of its myriad competitors (from the good ones like Live Free or Die Hard to the muddy ones like The Mist to the bad ones like I Am Legend) in that, like last year's Idiocracy, it's so accurate a satire that it plays more like documentary. Its American soldiers are heroic, its American leadership is blinkered, and questions of patriotism are moot before waves of despair, madness, ignorance, and violence. The best twist? 28 Weeks Later's every tragedy is predicted by good intentions.

3. The Darjeeling Limited (d. Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson describes the downward trajectory of the father/son relationship with the same kind of obsessive focus that Ozu brought to father/daughter. In the past, it's taken at least a second viewing before I got the rhythm, but The Darjeeling Limited had me from the first reel. A startling juncture of irreverence and seriousness, extreme artifice and surprising naturalism, Anderson's pictures are distinct and, criticism to the contrary, deeply personal and extraordinarily affecting. The way he sculpts male grief is so insightful that it can double as therapy; I haven't watched his The Royal Tenenbaums since my father died four years ago, though I've thought about doing so every single day–and while I wouldn't presume to chart a course for his further adventures, I do wonder where he'll go now that he's come from the father surrogate of Rushmore to the father redeemed of Tenenbaums to the father absent of The Darjeeling Limited. Life as a train is literalized in this picture, and the idea of predestination has never seemed so hopeful. If Ratatouille offers the only real hope on this list, The Darjeeling Limited offers the only real succour: that in the midst of it all, there's brotherhood, even if it's not enough to fix everything.

2. There Will Be Blood (d. Paul Thomas Anderson)
It's amazing, this two-hour-and-forty-minute epic of California oil wildcatters at the turn of the century–not for its subject matter (which you have to think about whenever you bend over at the never-more-aptly-named pump for your dose of foreign crude), not exactly for the force of Daniel Day-Lewis's typically extraordinary performance, but for the clarity of its astonishments. Anderson has never been more restrained in his direction; he fulfills the promise of his Punch-Drunk Love by locating exactly the suture point between the image and a score of Morricone howls and orchestral plaints by Radiohead's resident genius Jonny Greenwood. (The whole of it plays like a Sergio Leone hybrid, organic in a terrifying, ineffable way.) Watch how Day-Lewis strides across this Martian landscape; I offered with Gangs of New York that either Day-Lewis was in the wrong movie or everyone else was but that, in any case, his was the movie I wanted to see–and less than a decade later, here it is. Day-Lewis is Daniel Plainview, who, with his son H.W. (Dillon Freasier), seeks to corner the market on Golden State black gold–endeavouring to do so by raping the land of Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) and his illiterate, goat-farming family. Religion clashes with commerce in a ferocious baptism I do believe only Day-Lewis could get away with–same goes for a showdown on a bowling lane that's truly indescribable. There Will Be Blood is the sickness of the American spirit, poisoned by too long at the teat of the American Dream. Its hero sits on a thorned seat in an empty castle as our spirit spirals down the proverbial drain, swallowed whole by ruined expectations and disenfranchisement (from politics, religion, commerce: we don't trust, don't believe, don't have money). It's the most scathing excoriation of the way things are in a year that saw a lot of really stupid, really terrible movies try to do the same thing with wizened Tinseltown royalty dispensing doddering bon mots from some imaginary on high. There Will Be Blood does it all and better with an opening half-hour of silence in Hell and closing with a half-hour of raging in Heaven. Watch it with someone you love.

1. No Country for Old Men (ds. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)
Hardly the surprise pick, it's more the surprise that the Coens, after so long in the wilderness, have funelled the best moments of their oeuvre into one brutal vision. (Just like Tim Burton, this picture reveals the filmmakers' latent misanthropy through the adaptation of another's work.) No Country for Old Men explains Cormac McCarthy, the most "internal" of our modern masters, to me the way that Branagh's Shakespeare adaptations explain the Bard to me: it hears the music and extrapolates it out into the visual medium in a way so complementary as to give lie to the pop aphorism that film adaptations always fall short of their literary antecedents. The picture is a masterpiece of craft, no question, but when the visceral shock of it wears off, left are Tommy Lee Jones's extraordinary monologues, in which 2007 is laid bare like a patient etherized on a table. The "dismal tide" is coined in this film, and any subsequent examination of this period could be called that–the idea that good men like the sheriff played by Jones are completely helpless against the entropy (chaos, chance, destiny?) embodied by the slightly-askew Anton Chigurh. "I got here the same way as the quarter," Chaos tells his quarry: they've spent the whole of their existence on this single moment of crisis in which they're suddenly defined. There's no hope in No Country for Old Men because there's no talking about it. It's Cronenberg's insect politicians; the crisis is over because the crisis has won, and all that remains is our new state of despair. It's the best film of 2007 because in that portrayal of utter hopelessness and spiritual divorce, there is enough poetry to somehow stave off the loneliness of absolute black.