Ten Canoes
Here're my official bests for 2007, weary and worrisome hag that she was:
1. Syndromes and a Century
Thailand’s great, mysterious, life-affirming, diptych-entranced, meta-meta-man Apichatpong Weerasethakul does it again, twice, or maybe more, while seeming to do nearly nothing at all. A dream had by us all, and just as maddening and gorgeous.
2. Once
Who knows how long the heart-kneaded buzz from this beloved greatest-musical-since-Demy may last, but in my seat it was an all-viscera epiphany, and it’s made moviegoing since a little bloodless.
3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
The greatest of the Romanians so far, Christian Mungiu’s patient knuckle-biter is at least 50% off-screen space and trauma; the mercilessly suspenseful birthday dinner scene alone is more concisely conceived and effective than any ten American films this year.
4. Half Moon
Northern Iran has supplanted the American West and the Australian Outback as the globe’s most expressive road-movie topos, and Bahman Ghobadi’s mythic Kurdish bus trip is simultaneously hilarious, magical-realist and tragic.
5. There Will Be Blood
Didn’t see it coming – P.T. Anderson sheds his pretentious snark-generation-ism for Upton Sinclair’s period saga of catapulting capitalism, scene for prickly, crazy scene the most fascinating new American film of the year.
6. Regular Lovers
May ‘68 awaited its definitive film portrait until the arrival of Philippe Garrel’s impressionistic personal meditation, which manifests the cataclysmic, liberating, and finally tragically disillusioned emotional thrust of resistance, coupled with the electric sense of being 19, sexually alive, responsibility-free, and ready to dope up and drop out, all of it seeping out of this neglected three-hour epic like fragrance from a valley of lilacs.
7. Killer of Sheep
Charles Burnett’s legended, much-hailed, rarely seen 1977 classic about being black and poor and spiritually unmoored in ‘70s L.A. finally saw theaters, a full 17 years after it’d been an early choice for national Film Registry canonization. It’s a ghost movie, returned to haunt us.
8. 12:08 East of Bucharest
Another Romanian, Corneliu Porumboiu’s deadpan comedy picks at the scab of the 1989 revolution, revolviong around what must be the eloquent and entertaining three-shot in recent cinema.
9. Los Muertos
Lisandro Alonso’s lovely, remarkably eloquent naturalist odyssey tracks an aging convict as he is released in rural Argentina, and heads upriver to find his daughter and grandson. Exposition is all but absent; the focus is on the moment, the soothing re-establishment of intimacy with nature, performed and captured in astonishing single takes.
10. Michael Clayton
Semi-hack screenwriter Tony Gilroy steps definitively into the men’s club with this ethical torture device, thought-through and written and acted with a startling concern for the sickening quotidian of power culture.
Runners-Up, in order: The Host, No Country for Old Men, Lars and the Real Girl, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Brand Upon the Brain!, Czech Dream, 3:10 to Yuma, The Boss of It All, Zodiac, Lust, Caution, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Into Great Silence, The Lives of Others, Tears of the Black Tiger, We Own the Night, Dans Paris, Broken English
Candidates for Bests and Runners-Up, Had They Been Released Theatrically Instead of Debuting to DVD, which Should Qualify Them for Full Consideration in Any Case, by This Point: Vibrator (Ryuichi Hiroki, 2003), Pitfall (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962), Five (Abbas Kiarostami, 2003), Green Chair (Park Cheol-su, 2005), The Way I Spent the End of the World (Catalin Miltescu, 2006), The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997), Quiet Flows the Don (Sergei Gerasimov, 1957), Moscow Elegy (Alexander Sokurov, 1987), Black Test Car (Yasuo Masumura, 1962), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (David Lee Fisher, 2005), Able Edwards (Graham Robertson, 2004), The Call of Cthulhu (Andrew Leman, 2005), Isolation (Billy O’Brien, 2005), Horrors of Malformed Men (Teruo Ishii, 1969), Casshern (Kasuaki Kiriya, 2004), The District (Aron Gauder, 2004), I Am a S+M Writer (Ryuichi Hiroki, 2000)
Skol!
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