The 10 Best Movies I Saw in 2007 (with alternates, caveats, special awards and a hall of shame)

A "director's cut" of my Oregonian top-10 list....

This was a pretty horrible year for Hollywood blockbusters (those "threequels"! Egad!) -- but probably the best year for film overall since 1999.

My point being: The process of boiling my candidates down to a mere "Ten Best" was long and brutal and wishy-washy and borderline unhappy, but for the happiest possible reason.

Also: The bottom half of the following list could be replaced with any of a dozen other 2007 films, depending on my mood.

Anyway. After the jump, my ten favorite movies of 2007 -- with all the necessary qualifiers.

MY 'TEN BEST'

1. There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Calling this (or any) movie an "instant classic" is reckless, but the temptation is overwhelming when it comes to Paul Thomas Anderson's Kubrickian study of an oilman (Daniel Day-Lewis) who drinks black gold out of the ground and the life out of his rivals in turn-of-the-century Texas. The script is poetry. The ideas are merciless. The photography is perfect. The music unsettles. And Day-Lewis gives what may be a career performance (imagine how good that would need to be) as a pure capitalist predator.

2. Zodiac (dir. David Fincher)
David Fincher's '70s-flavored, carefully researched procedural follows three investigators (Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.) as they tumble into the abyss while obsessing over the identity of the Zodiac killer. The movie never found an audience in theaters, and I'm guessing the problem was partly one of marketing: People expect a Fincher serial-killer movie to feel like "Se7en," and "Zodiac" feels like nothing so much as "All the President's Men."

3. No Country for Old Men (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)
The Coen brothers bring over two decades of filmmaking experience to "No Country for Old Men," and the years have taught them to do more with less. Their faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel concerns a man (Josh Brolin) who finds (a) a bag of money and (b) himself chased by a mop-topped psychopath (Javier Bardem) who might as well be the Angel of Death. The camera points exactly where it ought, and the characters speak bleak Texas poetry. Perfect.

4. Persepolis (dir. Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi)
This animated feature about comic artist Marjane Satrapi's childhood in fundamentalist Iran and her subsequent European exile does something remarkable and sneaky with bold, simple lines: It reminds us that complex and strong-willed human beings are suffering under all that East-West rhetoric.

5. The Host (dir. Bong Joon-ho)
The year's angriest political satire was a South Korean monster-movie comedy. The monster -- a freaky mutated land shark -- ends up being less dangerous than the local government, which is more interested in cover-ups than life-saving.

6. Exiled (dir. Johnnie To)
Hong Kong genre master Johnnie To reunites with the stone-cold cast of 1999's "The Mission" to tell a story of hit men torn between duty and friendship when they're asked to kill an old friend in Macau. It sounds familiar on paper, but what ensues is so gorgeous and weird and clever and balletically violent, it reminded me why I fell in love with Hong Kong movies in the first place.

7. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (dir. Seth Gordon)
This shamelessly manipulative documentary follows two middle-aged men who compete for the world-record high score in "Donkey Kong." The easy choice for director Seth Gordon would have been to point at the dorks and laugh. Instead, by film's end, you're into the human drama and out of your chair rooting for underdog Steve Wiebe. (Well, that and you're laughing. Hysterically.)

8. Hotel Chevalier / The Darjeeling Limited (dir. Wes Anderson)
In his fifth feature, Wes Anderson reaches for many of his usual devices -- the meticulously composed frames, the deadpan tone, the slow-mo, the concern for the costumes of the privileged. (It's all too gorgeous for me to call it a "rut.") But he also uses those devices to push himself and his characters into new geographic and spiritual territory.

9. Black Snake Moan (dir. Craig Brewer)
A righteous Southern bluesman (Samuel L. Jackson) finds a nymphomaniac (Christina Ricci) beaten senseless on the side of the road -- and then he chains her to his radiator and tries to cure her of her "wickedness." It sounds unrepentantly lurid, but the neat surprise is that writer-director Craig Brewer ("Hustle & Flow") is all about repentance: "Black Snake Moan" ends up being a funny, big-hearted movie about true Christian forgiveness that also contains one of Jackson's finest performances.

10. Hot Fuzz (dir. Edgar Wright)
The genius of this carefully plotted comedy by the "Shaun of the Dead" team is that it goofs on American buddy-cop movies by aping their style perfectly. "Fuzz" is actually a tightly edited piece of action filmmaking in its own right -- the humor mostly comes from setting all that Jerry Bruckheimer mayhem in a quaint English village. A lot of media-saturated filmmakers make movies about movies; few do it as joyfully as Edgar Wright.

MOVIES THAT COULD HAVE COMPLETELY DISPLACED ITEMS 6-10, DEPENDING ON DAY, MOOD, BLOOD-SUGAR LEVELS and/or BAROMETER READING

Eastern Promises, The Lives of Others, The Bourne Ultimatum, Lars and the Real Girl, Rocket Science, Ten Canoes, The Lookout, The Mist, The Namesake, the unplanned-pregnancy trilogy of Waitress/Juno/Knocked Up, Superbad, Brand Upon the Brain!, Tekkon Kinkreet, Ratatouille, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Once,  Breach, Black Book (loopy melodramatic final hour only), Hear and Now 

MOVIES I WOULD NOT BE EMBARRASSED TO RECOMMEND

Starter for 10, The TV Set, Black Sheep, Beowulf, Transformers (yes, Transformers), Sunshine, Bug, Atonement, Paprika, American Gangster, The Great Debaters, 300, I Am Legend, 1408, Blades of Glory, Chalk, First Snow, Walk Hard, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Iraq in Fragments,  Romantico

MOVIES I REALLY SHOULD HAVE SEEN BEFORE WRITING THIS

Darius Goes West: The Roll of His Life, Michael Clayton, Charlie Wilson's War, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Sweeney Todd, I'm Not There, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, La Vie En Rose, Rescue Dawn, In the Shadow of the Moon, Across the Universe, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, The Simpsons Movie, Stardust, 3:10 to Yuma, In the Valley of Elah, Into the Wild, The Kite Runner, The Kingdom, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, Margot at the Wedding, Youth Without Youth, Away from Her, Romance & Cigarettes, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Grace Is Gone, Killer of Sheep and Gone, Baby, Gone

MOVIES THAT MADE ME WANT TO REMOVE MY EYEBALLS AND APPLY A BELT-SANDER TO THE RODS AND CONES

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, Catch and Release, Dan in Real Life, El Cantante, Georgia Rule, I Think I Love My Wife, Martian Child, Miss Potter, Norbit, Perfect Stranger, Eagle vs. Shark,Reservation Road, Southland Tales, Spider-Man 3, The Condemned, The Golden Compass, The Number 23, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, Thr3e, Trade, the last hour-and-change of Grindhouse

SPECIAL AWARDS

Best Triple Feature of 2007
Portland's Living Room Theaters shows foreign films, oldies and indies in a relaxed setting -- but there was nothing relaxed about watching Chan-Wook Park's brilliant and unsettling "Vengeance Trilogy" ("Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," "Oldboy" and "Lady Vengeance") when the Living Room booked all three films last May.

Best Action Sequence
There was a lot of mayhem onscreen in 2007, much of it drowning in special effects. But the year's best action eschewed CGI and got back to basics -- especially the motorcycle chase followed by the rooftop chase followed by the hand-to-hand (and book-to-face) combat in "The Bourne Ultimatum." RUNNER-UP: The brutally intimate bathhouse knife-fight in "Eastern Promises."

Best Digital Nudity
Angelina Jolie, "Beowulf"

Worst Digital Nudity
Anthony Hopkins, "Beowulf"

Strangest Recurring Comedy Topic of 2007
Unplanned pregnancy. "Waitress," "Knocked Up" and "Juno" all found smarter-than-usual laughs by saddling terrific actresses (Keri Russell, Katherine Heigl and Ellen Page) with what Juno MacDuff described as "a fat suit I can't take off."

Best Monster Attack
The walking land-shark laying waste to the Seoul waterfront in "The Host"

Action Movie Most Likely to Cry
"Spider-Man 3"

Action Movie Most Likely to Type
"Live Free or Die Hard"

Action Movie Most Likely to Attend Long, Pointless Meetings
"Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"

Best Hair
The luxuriant mane affixed to video-game superstar Billy Mitchell's head in "The King of Kong"

Box-office Disappointments We'll Still Be Watching in 20 Years
"Zodiac" and "The Mist"

Worst Movie with Best Intentions
"Trade"

Least Welcome Appearance by a Director-Cum-Actor
Kevin Smith, who seems to affix the word "sir" to half his dialogue in "Catch and Release," "Live Free or "Die Hard," and "Southland Tales." RUNNER-UP: Quentin Tarantino, multiple roles, "Grindhouse."

Most Stunning Career Meltdowns
Writer-director Richard Kelly, "Southland Tales"
Lindsay Lohan, "Georgia Rule" and " I Know Who Killed Me"

_____

Mike Russell's Top Ten (The Oregonian, Dec. 22, 2007)

PREVIOUS BEST-OF LISTS: [ 2006 ] [ 2005 ]

SEE ALSO:
Shawn Levy's Top Ten
Marc Mohan's Top Ten

Comments

[Christopher Walsh]

Wow, your hatred of "Spider-Man 3" is doubled. You listed it twice.

I understand: http://chris-walsh.livejournal.com/305708.html

[Mike Russell]

Oops. Fixed. (Though I really DID hate Spider-Man 3 enough to list it twice.)

[mcdaddy]

I love you.

I love your reviews.

I love garfield most...Why you no write about he?

What he do?

He funny orange kat. What problem?

Funny. Orange. Kat.

Show him love Mr. Russell.

That Odie is dumb dog. HAHAHA

[Nathan]

Woah, what didn't you like about the end of Grindhouse? I thought Death Proof was one of the most audacious and amazing movies I had ever seen.

[DiGiTaL_SiN]

Dude, Zodiac sucked A$$!

That movie was LONG, BORING, and completly unrewarding till the end.