There’s no way to fit a year’s worth of opinions about movies into a single 700-word column, especially when your editors keep valuing such irritants as “coherence” and “concision.” How glad I am that we have the Internet, a place where we all lay down these burdens and ramble at length. My list of the best movies of 2007 has inspired a few questions that have actually been asked by readers, and several more that I think ought to be asked by somebody. So I’m just going to ask them to myself. The Internet: Now with even more self-indulgence!
First, a quick refresher: My 2007 Top Ten Movies list looked like this:
1. There Will Be Blood
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Superbad and Knocked Up (tie)
4. I’m Not There
5. Margot at the Wedding
6. Offside
7. The Host
8. King Corn
9. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
10. Breach
And now, to your questions:
1. Why should we trust your opinion? You probably shouldn’t. Going into this year’s Top Ten list, I had the dubious opportunity to examine my previous choices—and boy, have I made some bad ones. Take 2005, for example: Under my previous employ, I named The Squid and the Whale the year’s best film—a fine selection, if I do say so myself—but placed Walk the Line at number two and King Kong in the ninth slot. The Johnny Cash movie already seems like a remarkably unsophisticated pick, and as for Peter Jackson’s giant-ape picture…well, it has some very nice dinosaurs, but it doesn’t belong anywhere near a discussion of excellence in cinema. So as we proceed, let the buyer beware.
2. Isn’t There Will Be Blood actually the best movie of 2008? What are you, a lawyer? In fact, tomorrow’s midnight screening at Cinema 21 assures that the movie will have a Portland release before the New Year. But that doesn’t address the larger question, which is: What exactly constitutes a 2007 release? The Far From Hollywood Film Society—Portland’s loosely-defined colloquium of movie critics—says that any flick that opened least once in Portland after the start of the year counts, but that just opens up the Children of Men question. Alfonso Cuaron’s dystopia came to Portland on Jan. 5, 2007—and I didn’t put it on my 2006 Top Ten list, because it hadn’t opened by the cut-off date. But putting it on the 2007 list (where it would battle There Will Be Blood for the top slot) now seems anachronistic. It’s clearly a 2006 movie. (I guess we could call it the best movie of 2027—when it’s set—and hope that nobody notices by then.) So from here on out, if a movie opens in New York and L. A. before the end of the year, and I’ve had a chance to see it, I’m counting it on my list. It’s a terrible system, but it’s what I’ve got. Honestly, I hope I never have to discuss this again.
3. Is There Will Be Blood that much better than No Country for Old Men? Well, it’s one spot better. Actually, this was a tough decision: Any one of the top six movies on my list could have been the first pick, and every one of them was for about 24 hours. But the choice finally came down to Blood and No Country: two movies that were both shot in Marfa, Texas, that both tell allegorical stories of sociopathically ambitious men and the greedy fools who get in their way, and that both convey a profound feeling of disquiet about what America has become. No Country has the advantage in subtlety—Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones all underplay their roles—and ambiguity. The movies stand together a shoulder taller than anything else this year in pure imagery (cinematographers Roger Deakins and Robert Elswit should just split an Oscar now) and both have endings that toss everything that came before on its head. Blood gets my nod because its scope and ambition are unlike anything in American movies since Michael Cimino put down his camera, because Daniel Day-Lewis has created a character that will go down as one of the indelible screen creations, and because—and this is the crucial nub here, really—I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t think I’m ready to join Scott Foundas who, rather superciliously, wrote of Blood: “There are great films (like No Country For Old Men) and then there are films that send shock waves through the very landscape of cinema, that instantly stake a claim on a place in the canon.” That’s an awfully fine distinction there, Scott, and it betrays a dangerous weakness for movies that imperfectly attempt great things over movies that completely realize a slightly smaller vision. But what can I say? I’ve got that weakness too. You shoot for the moon, you hit the roof: I’m going with There Will Be Blood.
4. Isn’t Knocked Up, like, sexist? I’ve heard the complaint from several female friends that the women in Knocked Up are thinly drawn, that they lack the three dimensions of the much funnier men in the movie. And I’ve also heard from several male friends that the movie is secretly a chick-flick fantasy—about settling down and raising a baby—disguised by dick jokes. See? There’s something for everybody!
5. Isn’t Superbad, like, stupid? Fogell, shut the fuck up. And take off that vest. You look like Aladdin.
6. I’m Not There isn’t the best movie of the year? But it’s Todd Haynes! It’s Bob Dylan! It’s Portland! And it’s great: marvelous acting, intricate structure, and a real emotional core previously lacking in Haynes’ work. I was seriously considering it for the top slot. But I couldn’t help thinking that the best movie of year should be something that could be understood by anyone walking into a multiplex. I’m Not There, like Margot at the Wedding, assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge from the audience—about Bob Dylan’s mystique in one case, about the insular world of middlebrow fiction writers in the other. This doesn’t diminish them as works of art (and really, if you don’t know something about Bob Dylan, there’s very little I can do for you) but it does make them slightly more rarified and less catholic.
7. What about Once? Or as one reader told me, “I guess you didn’t see the movie Once.” I did, though, and I liked it. I just didn’t like it that much. It might, barely, have slipped into my Honorable Mentions. I know that lots of people, including many whose opinions I respect, positively adored this movie—a sweet, slight musical about demo tapes and impossible love. I just wasn’t one of them. Sorry. I thought it was very nice.
8. What other movies made your Honorable Mentions list? I’m glad you asked: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Darjeeling Limited (but its prologue, Hotel Chevalier, even more so), Deep Water, Eastern Promises, Hot Fuzz, I Like Killing Flies, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, No End in Sight, Outsourced, Zodiac, the first 80 minutes of Charlie Wilson’s War, and the last 30 minutes of Juno. Of that group, the hardest to leave off the list were Outsourced and I Like Killing Flies. I think I’m going to regret those omissions within a month.
9. What were the worst movies of the year? No, I’m not going to say Sicko—it may have gotten my dander up more than anything else I saw (and rewarded me with some wonderfully fervent hate mail), but it was never less than entertaining, and its first hour was actually a useful complaint. If I have to think back on the most excruciating hours of my year, I find the mainstream garbage falls into two camps: the completely unredeemable and the stuff I just didn’t get. In the latter camp, there’s Cave of the Yellow Dog (which my estimable colleague N. P. has placed in his own Top Ten, but which passed the limits of my stamina for cute animals and small children) and David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which has amazing shots but about 120 minutes of Laura Dern checking out hallways. In the first category—the truly worthless—Norbit springs to mind, enormous and cruel, and is followed hard upon by Rendition, the very worst of the hand-wringing Iraq-policy movies, mostly because it couldn’t be bothered to make any goddamn sense. But here’s what I’ve learned from my first year of watching movies as a full-time job: The worst stuff isn’t the Hollywood dreck, but the low-low-low budget documentaries. Movies are perhaps the only art form where self-publishing doesn’t carry a stigma, and that means that any concerned Denis Kucinich voter can pick up a DV camera, find some stock footage of Mosul, Port-Au-Prince, or racist old movies and chuck together a montage on Final Cut Pro with a Green Day song in the background. I’m not going to name any of these movies: There’s no need to embarrass their earnest makers, and I think I watched something like 457,000 of them in August alone. It makes me all the more grateful when a doc like King Corn comes out of left field as a wonderful, thoughtful surprise.
10. Why does your paper hate Philip Seymour Hoffman so much? This is the letter I’m getting the most this month, along with the “Make up your mind on Hoffman” letter, which at least has the virtue of noticing the divergent opinions our writers have about him. In truth, it’s very simple: Nobody in our office has a moderate opinion about Philip Seymour Hoffman. I think he’s a pleasure to watch, perhaps the most magnetic actor since the young Chris Eigeman. Kelly Clarke loves him too. N. P. Thompson thinks Hoffman is a preening hack. Byron Beck agrees with him. So, since I prefer not to censor the opinions of the people I ask to write with me, we’re having this debate in the pages of our section. It’s called a friendly argument. You should try it sometime.
And on that note, and before I get so huffy that I alienate every single reader, I encourage you to read the Top Ten lists and analyses provided by the two most faithful contributors to these Screen pages, those brothers in initials, AP Kryza and N. P. Thompson. Sometimes they agree with me. Sometimes they think I’m nuts. And vice-versa. That’s what makes this so much fun that I can’t wait to start another year.
Chris Eigeman was sort of a hottie, though. Hoffman looks like, uh, how to put this charitably, like he rightly belongs in a truckstop.
Why does that description sound so familiar?
"It
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. Mr. Delaney may not care for my display of ire here (which is meant to read as tongue-in-cheek, although the effect may have failed), but it’s MY display, not the “official” editorial direction of Willamette Week as some monolithic whole. It’s not N. P. Thompson’s writing, or AP Kryza’s, or Kelly Clarke’s. The failure to distinguish between individual opinions (and to chalk them up to the newspaper entire) is exactly what had me in such a huff in the first place.
On the other hand, Mr. Delaney is right that my sniping was so broadly sprayed that it makes me guilty of the same lack of discrimination between individuals that frustrated me. So point taken: I should probably restrain my reaction, though it’s hard when the provocations are so heavy on the ground.
is that why you don’t have ‘Inland Empire’ listed on the screen page? For anyone who wants to see the best film of 2006, you should go to the NW Film Center showing of David Lynch’s brilliant latest, at the Portland Art Museum Sunday the 6th at 2:00 pm.
The showing of "Inland Empire" — a single showing at 2 pm on Sunday — is placed with the NW Film Center’s Lynch program in our listings. We try to organize our listings as befits the actual showings; it’s certainly no effort to censor the movies available.
You’re right about the the date, though: Inland Empire didn’t show up in Portland until last year, but it made its U. S. premiere in 2006. These dates are going to exhaust me long before 2009.
The U.S. date situation can be a rough, especially when there are brilliant films that only play in NY every year. My top ten are updated over the course of years, as certain films become available to me.