The Best and Worst of 2007

Looking back over the couple of hundred reviews I filed this year, I was struck by how many fine films I saw in 2007. On top of that, there were a couple of really good ones, films that slipped comfortably into the mantle of greatness.

I have listed them here in no particular order, but if I had to pick one above all the others, it would be The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which is still playing in Irish cinemas – but only six of them. Andrew Dominik’s revisionist horse opera found a new and exciting way to tell an old story, a legend essentially. I saw four other movies that week, but there was only one still playing in my head.

The Coen Brother’s No Country For Old Men and PT Anderson’s There Will Be Blood are released here in January and February respectively. From the jumping arrows on my anticipation meter, either film would otherwise have vied for top spot.

American Gangster – Ridley Scott’s sprawling, funk-era narco-epic might be as shallow as a paddling pool, but it’s great fun to watch.

Inland Empire – David Lynch’s digital nightmare frightened the daylights out of me when I saw it, a sense of disintegration and collapse that lingered.

Eastern Promises – For the most galvanising scene of the year; Mortensen fighting off the Turks in the bathhouse. Outrageous.

Knocked Up / Superbad – A double-bill of instant comedy classics. Superbad just shades it, but there’s only a hair – dark and curly, obviously– between them.

The Lives Of Others – This coruscating history of the East Germany and the Stasi is a gripping spy thriller and a profound celebration of the human spirit.

The Bourne Ultimatum – Greengrass and Damon turn the dials all the way up for this balls-out trilogy-ender. Seriously smart and thrillingly stupid.

Zodiac – David Fincher returns to form for this open-ended dissection of San Francisco’s Zodiac killer. The best ensemble cast of the year, and a close second in the ‘best scene’ stakes. When Gyllenhaal went down to the basement with the creepy collector, the few hairs remaining on the back of my neck stood on end.

Into The Wild – Emile Hirsch and Sean Penn made the saddest and the most uplifting film of the year with this autobiographical road movie, with Hirsch establishing himself as one of the finest young actors working today through little more than empathy and understanding, two difficult emotions to communicate sincerely.

Atonement – Joe Wright’s lush adaptation of Ian McEwan’s doorstopper looked gorgeous, felt real and offered complete narrative satisfaction.

Days of Glory – A French war movie with heart and guts and deeper things to say about colonialism, patriotism and sacrifice.

This Is England – Shane Meadow’s brilliant Thatcher-era semi-autobiography had a captivating central performance from ten year old Thomas Turgoose and a cracking soundtrack of ska and reggae classics.

Ratatouille – Brad Bird’s visual feast was a delight varnished with genius.

Mr. Brooks – A serial killer movie that was as dumb as a bag of hammers, but Costner and Hurt were a great double act.

Michael Clayton –Clooney doing sullen in a fragmented story about a legal fixer. Bleak and smart, it was filled with ideas and talking points.

Notes On A Scandal – Dench and Blanchett teamed up for this blistering revenge story, a portrait of a demented bitch that never flinched from honest depiction.

Apocalypto – Say what you like about Mel Gibson, he can make action movies. Non stop thrills and a vivid sense of blood.

Away From Her – Sarah Polley’s Alzheimer’s drama was one of the saddest and most crisply drawn stories of the year.

Control – just for the horrible sense of fate that filled the shadows of Corbijn’s black and white screen.

The Last King Of Scotland – Forrest Whittaker and James McAvoy battle it out in Uganda for this scorching biopic of Idi Amin.

The Illusionist – The Prestige is probably the better story, but I liked Edward Norton’s lush, dreamy film.

300 – Aaaaargh!

Yella – Kann Mann ‘David Lynch’ sagt? Still, this was a trippy, downbeat story of German capitalism.

Babel – Three sad stories, stretched to the point of agony.

Black Book – Verhoeven’s madcap Dutch Resistance adventure was a hoot.

The Science of Sleep –Gondry’s semi-autobiographical story had the most imagination of any film this year.

Once – Because success deserves applause as much as songs do.

Black Snake Moan – Soundtrack, soundtrack, soundtrack. And Ricci in her smalls.

The Family Friend – a scorching, sickly humorous story about a small-time Italian loan shark.

Ten Canoes – otherworldly.

Transformers – really, really loud and surprisingly funny.

The Simpsons Movie – just because.

Hallam Foe – More so for Sophia Myles than Billy Elliot, but I liked this Scottish drama’s sense of perversion.

Kings – for the lonliness.

The Darjeeling Limited – The bright, sweet road movie was cut with an acid sourness.

Worst of the Year

Or indeed, the worst of any year since the invention of the motion picture camera. If I had to pick one above all others, it'd be, oh sweet Jesus, don't make me pick...

The Dark Is Rising

Speed Dating

Are We Done Yet?

The Number 23

Southland Tales

I Want Candy

Goal! 2

Mr Bean's Holiday

Employee of the Month

Norbit

The Last Legion

Perfect Stranger

Good Luck Chuck

Daddy Day Camp

Wild Hogs

Ghost Rider

Material Girls

For the best book about movies I read this year, it’s a toss up between Simon Callow’s brilliant Orson Welles biographies Road To Xanadu and Hello, Americans or Christopher Sandford's Polanski.

My song of the year would be Radiq’s 'Rude Boy Anthem' from the album Graffiti & Rude Boy 67', although I got a huge kick out of hearing Sam Cooke’s 'A Change Is Gonna Come' when it popped up, in its entirety, in the movie Talk To Me.

Heading South

Six years ago Donnie Darko, the tangled, semi-permeable story of a teenager and his imaginary rabbit counting down to the Apocalypse, arrived from nowhere, caught the zeitgeist current and went on to become a cult sensation. It made the tricky-to-spell name of star Jake Gyllenhaal and announced its writer and director Richard Kelly as one to watch. Southland Tales, his follow up, is a shambles; a pretentious, unfocused, terminally witless mess. Connoisseurs of derivative nonsense should find it to be an endless source of amusement, starting with the opening fifteen minutes, a wilfully incomprehensible mix of important-sounding voiceover, split-screen computer animation and pounding post-industrial metal.

The central story, if I have it right, concerns America’s recovery from a nuclear attack on Texas and the elections, three years later, that will see the sinister Eliot (after the poet, “this is the way the world ends…”) brought to high office and signal the end of liberty and the start of World War III. Eliot and his vice-president Frost are in turn, connected with a futuristic German energy company, led by Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), who has developed a way to create power from sea water called Fluid Karma, which is also the name of his top-secret military hallucinogenic. Meanwhile, in celebrity news, top action star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson), who is married to the vice-president’s daughter (played by Mandy Moore), disappears in the desert, only to turn up a short time later with total amnesia and a new woman in his life, porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), host of a reality television show and co-author of Boxer’s new screenplay, The Power.

On top of this, there’s a racist cop played by Jon Lovitz, a gang of Marxist revolutionaries (Cheri Oteri and Amy Poehler), an Iraq war veteran turned cop in search of his missing twin (Seann William Scott) and a Bible-thumping, drug-addicted army sniper (Justin Timberlake), whose deranged ramblings also serve as a narrative voice-over.

Kelly becomes entangled in his own web of reference and allusion, from Kiss Me Deadly to Repo Man, Mulholland Drive to Demolition Man, all infinitely better films, even the Stallone. Perched at the top of this pyramid of homage is the collected works of Phillip K Dick, the fractured, paranoid sci-fi visionary whose writing, with the exception of Blade Runner, has been poorly treated by Hollywood. Kelly does nothing to redress the balance, fiddling about with his kaleidoscope of standardized science-fiction images, clichéd dystopia and carefully fragmented hallucinations. It is simply impossible to follow coherently, and far too precise and calculating to allow the viewer to abandon themselves. From one moment to the next, Southland Tales is a biting Bush-era satire, a noir-tinged apocalyptic thriller, a twitchy fantasy or a punk musical. Any one of these treatments might have made for a compelling film; all of them at once is just exhausting.

Kelly is at pains to point out that in order to ‘get’ the movie, it should be viewed multiple times, that it is full of symbols – what he fails to understand is that good symbols should communicate meaning at first glance. Apparently the misery doesn’t stop with the feature film; an expanded version of Southland Tales (part four of the story, according to the credits) will be presented as a six-part interactive DVD alongside three separate graphic novels and a comprehensive website. Whatever, the film as it is, all two hours and twenty five minutes of it, is shockingly incoherent, wilfully obscure and terminally dull. The young director’s ambition is admirable, but he is simply unable to present his ideas in an interesting, compelling manner. Donnie Darko papered over the cracks in logic with a charming mood of suburban boredom, but Southland Tales has too many cracks and not nearly enough paper. The actors visibly struggle with the camp, theatrical tone and paunchy dialogue, their performances in turn being scrambled by the attention-deficit editing and constantly flashing graphics.

Despite the ensemble of characters, there is no single voice to guide us through this labyrinthine mess, no Donnie to empathise with and come to understand. Initially meaningless, the film devolves into a thick, unappetizing digital soup made from little bits of everything else but with no discernable flavour of its own. Worryingly for Kelly’s future, Southland Tales is a film made without a screed of passion; for its own crammed ideas or for the medium the director has chosen to communicate them in.

Dead Man Walking

In 2001 Australian director Andrew Dominik made his debut with the true-life story of notorious criminal Mark Brandon Reed. Now he tells us another tale of criminal autobiography, but where Eric Bana’s Chopper was a brutal psychopath and a mouthy comedian, Brad Pitt’s Jesse James is a bruised, introspective poet, a ten-gallon outlaw adrift in a sparely-staged opera.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford begins in 1881, as the already legendary Jesse James (Brad Pitt) and his brother Frank (Sam Shepherd) prepare to rob a train, with the help of trusted lieutenant Charley Ford (Sam Rockwell), Jesse's cousin Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner), his pal Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider), and the teenage Robert Ford (Casey Affleck). After the job, Frank heads out on his own and Jesse retires to town, returning to his wife and children while his gang hide out in a rural farmhouse. There is a price on all of their heads and they can no longer trust anyone, even each other.

In adapting Ron Hansen’s novel for the script, Dominik subverts our expectations by unfolding events as if remembered from a particularly lucid dream, a series of clear-headed recollections that together account for the last days of the infamous bandit and his gang. It recalls those misty, allusive revisionist Westerns; from Pale Rider and McCabe & Mrs Miller in the 1970s, through to Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven. Jesse James has the same grounded, gritty reality, the same sense of context and history played out against a vast landscape and most of all, the meaty complexity of its twinned psychologies. From the first time we see them together, it is clear that Ford is fascinated by James; Affleck’s oleaginous attempts to get tight with the gang not concealing his twitchy hero-worship. He has read every one of the cowboy books, popular accounts of his exploits printed while he was alive, that fed the self-perpetuating legends of the Old West even while it was still old. Ford collects the penny novels, alongside newspaper clippings and mementoes, in a shoe-box under his bed, further hinting at his complications. James, for his part, hardly notices Ford at first, happy to have another pal to run his errands especially when he knows he is running for his life.

Pitt plays James with soul and awareness, paranoid and frightened as the circle closes around him but without ever visibly losing control. It is Pitt’s best performance in years, forceful and gripping. Jesse is both man and myth, an archetypal anti-hero who can charm women for hours or bring death in a moment. His own moment, when it comes, asks further questions about his state of mind. Beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins, Jesse James is a film of space, splayed against infinite blue-tinged mountains and rolling prairies, that seems to stifle itself when called to stop at frontier towns when James attempts a normal life with his wife Zee (Mary Lousie Parker) and their two children. Suited and booted, he makes for a restless gentleman of leisure, nervously scanning the newspapers for details of police attempts to catch him.

The elaborate, theatrical title might tell you more than you want to know about the plot, but Dominik proves the depth of his story by taking us past those central moments and on into the after-lives of the Ford brothers, while making space to reference classic Westerns (a silhouette in a doorway from John Ford, a robbery from D W Griffith) and analyze and correct a few dusty legends. Newly famous, the Ford Brothers extend Dominik’s theme of creating myths and half-truthful histories when they take to the stage as actors in their own autobiographies; Robert playing himself in kohl and pomade while Charley stands in for James, enacting the truth in a way that feels like make-believe.

The Assassination of Jesse James is a masterfully made epic, directed with sensitivity and grace and brilliantly performed. It’s the film of the year, a majestic work of cinema.