There are always three ways to define the Year in Film, three prisms you can peer through as you view the last 12 months: Hollywood (Commercial), Hollywood (Artistic), and Rest of the World. This year, for the first time in ages, all three aligned very sweetly – even the second category, which is often a bit of a joke. The result, to quote just about everyone, was “the best film year in recent memory”.
Hollywood (Commercial) always seems to have a great year, though of course it depends how you look at it. Most big-studio films lose money, and the average cost of making a Hollywood movie just keeps soaring. If it weren’t for the blockbusters, Tinseltown would likely go bankrupt. But year in, year out, the blockbusters save the studios’ bacon – especially in recent years with the advent of multiplexes and the global audience (that’s us, folks) who’ll happily watch anything as long as it’s hyped. Even disappointments like Shrek the Third and The Golden Compass made up for depleted dollars at the US box-office by amassing euros, pounds and yen from the global sheep.
Here, for the record, are the Top 10 films of the year at the worldwide box-office (not counting I Am Legend, which just opened to record receipts in America and may well end up among the top tier):
1. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END
2. HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX
3. SPIDER-MAN 3
4. SHREK THE THIRD
5. TRANSFORMERS
6. RATATOUILLE
7. THE SIMPSONS MOVIE
8. 300
9. THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM
10. LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD
No real surprises there, though I’d be curious to hear how many of the punters who watched the year’s “No. 1 film” actually think it’s the year’s No. 1 film. Overlong and convoluted, oppressively crammed with sub-plots and twists, the Pirates threequel offered the exact opposite of the blithe, carefree experience one expects from a pirate movie. Then again, that annoyance is more than balanced by a pair of pleasant surprises. (That’s the kind of year 2007 was.) The mass audience doesn’t always choose wisely, but this year they turned out in droves for two of the year’s bona fide best movies. The Bourne Ultimatum is a tremendous techno-thriller, featuring possibly the year’s most exciting action sequence (“Waterloo Station”) and the year’s second-most-dynamic editing (I’d give first prize to A Mighty Heart, the remarkably gripping reconstruction of the Daniel Pearl murder that’s so much more than an Angelina Jolie vehicle). Even better was Ratatouille, taking cartoons to a new peak of sophistication; the moment when forbidding food critic Anton Ego tastes the titular dish – transported back to his childhood, and the first stirrings of aesthetic sensibility – gives me chills just to think about it.
So much for Hollywood as money-making machine – but 2007 was also a year when the big studios also supplied the most-acclaimed American movies (compare 2006, when reviewers fawned over fiercely ‘independent’ entries like Old Joy and David Lynch’s Inland Empire). Hollywood (Artistic) also triumphed this year, though it’s not like we had dozens of deserving candidates – more a case of just about everyone lauding the same few Undisputed Masterpieces. None of these were massive hits (critics’ darlings never are), but the praise they’ve been getting is unbelievable. Most of them appear on the following Top 10, a poll by Indiewire asking over 100 North American critics for their picks of the year (the full results – with extensive cross-referencing, plus Performances of the Year and other good stuff – may be found at http://www.indiewire.com/critics2007).
1. THERE WILL BE BLOOD
2. ZODIAC
3. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
4. SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY
5. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS
6. I’M NOT THERE
7. THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
8. COLOSSAL YOUTH
9. KILLER OF SHEEP
10. OFFSIDE
Four of those are actually foreign-language films (we’ll get to those later) and one of them – No. 9 – is actually an old film released for the first time in the States in 2007. But the five remaining titles are eliciting a level of hosannas that’s startling both in its intensity and unanimity.
There Will Be Blood is a tale of rapacious capitalism in early-20th-century America, starring Daniel Day Lewis – who’s looking at an Oscar nomination, at the very least – as a ruthless developer. Powered by a dissonant score by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, it’s said to be both offbeat and spectacular, “a chamber drama on the scale of an Old Testament allegory,” according to critic David Edelstein.
Zodiac (the only one of the five to have been shown in Cyprus) is ostensibly a serial-killer procedural that ripples out audaciously, staking unexpected new territory. It becomes a film about obsession – our hero (Jake Gyllenhaal) obsessed with solving the Zodiac case long after it’s become a dead-end – and a film about information, pointedly set in the pre-digital (and pre-DNA) age when everything was murkier, more opaque, more cumbersome. It ends at the dawn of computer technology, which of course is entirely appropriate.
No Country for Old Men has already scooped any number of critics’ awards, and is a sure thing for Oscar recognition – all of which is very, very strange, because this has to be the nastiest, most upsetting, most pessimistic film in many a year. The latest from the Coen Brothers remains a supple thriller, at the very least – but future generations will look back on its mainstream acceptance and shake their heads. Clearly, the US is going through a dark phase.
I’m Not There is the most cerebral of the five, and the most ambitious – a dreamlike fantasy based on the life of Bob Dylan, though not remotely a biography. Instead, six different actors play facets of Dylan’s personality – and if that sounds rather academic … well, it is. But its fluid, shape-shifting style is also exhilarating.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the least successful of the five – a massive flop, thrown away by its studio, despite the presence of Brad Pitt as the titular Wild West outlaw (though the show is stolen by Casey Affleck as the titular coward). Don’t believe the anti-hype: this slow, lyrical Western is among the year’s most distinctive movies.
The Big Five are all very masculine films (not a Best Actress candidate in the lot), which may be a reflection of most film critics being men; but the list of worthy American films in 2007 goes way beyond that, including such gems as Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding – an acidic family comedy that leaves you unsure whether to laugh or be horrified – and Ellen Page as Juno, a pregnant 16-year-old with a splendidly irreverent attitude. Pregnancy also featured in Knocked Up (the year’s most implausible comedy), while teenage hormones ruled Superbad (possibly the funniest).
Then there was Denzel Washington vs. Russell Crowe in American Gangster (just opened in Cyprus); Ben Affleck – and aforementioned brother Casey – making the impressive Gone Baby Gone; Sondheim adaptation Sweeney Todd, featuring Johnny Depp, mass murder, rivers of blood and some of the wittiest songs in recent Broadway history; George Clooney angling for a second Oscar in Michael Clayton; based-on-fact mountaineering saga Into the Wild; and crime drama Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as two brothers planning an ill-fated robbery. All these films won the kind of plaudits that normally translate into critics’ awards and Oscars, yet all were more or less overshadowed by the even more acclaimed Big Five. That’s the kind of year 2007 was. (And I loved Grindhouse, the insanely entertaining double-bill of Death Proof and Planet Terror padded out with fake trailers for sadly non-existent
B-movies.)
Anything we’re forgetting? Yes indeed: the Rest of the World, i.e. everything non-American – which was also exceptional. Here’s another Top 10, this one from UK magazine Sight & Sound (who also have a cornucopia of results from individual writers at http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/pdf/films-of-the-year-2007.pdf):
1. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS
2. INLAND EMPIRE
3. ZODIAC
4. I’M NOT THERE
THE LIVES OF OTHERS
6. SILENT LIGHT
7. THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
EASTERN PROMISES
Note the presence of four out of the Big Five – but note also Silent Light, a Mexican drama set in a German-speaking Mennonite community that won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Note also Syndromes and a Century, a strange and life-affirming film from Thailand – first seen in 2006 but released widely in ’07, as was The Lives of Others, probably the year’s biggest Euro-hit (along with Black Book, the marvelous Dutch drama with a WW2 setting).
Non-American films take a while to make their mark, so look for The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly in 2008 – the French drama based on the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle who was almost completely paralysed by a stroke, only able to move his left eye (yet somehow ‘wrote’ a book about his condition). Look for Persepolis, a charming yet hard-hitting cartoon about growing up in Iran under the mullahs. Look for Atonement, the British adaptation of an Ian McEwan book, starring Keira Knightley. Look for The Band’s Visit, an Israeli crowd-pleaser about an Egyptian military band getting lost on a trip to Israel and bonding with the locals. Look for The Orphanage, a Spanish chiller with some spine-tingling moments. Look for Import Export, a ferocious Austrian tract on the State of Europe. Not to mention the non-US films that have already made a splash in 2007. Marion Cotillard channelling Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose. Iranian women fighting for the right to watch football (!) in Offside. Reclusive monks in the three-hour French documentary Into Great Silence. Post-punk England in Control and This is England. Graphic sex and exquisite repression in Ang Lee’s Taiwanese Lust, Caution. Hollywood cop movies spoofed in the hyperactive Hot Fuzz.
Not everything worked; in particular, the slew of Iraq/Afghanistan/War-on-Terror movies (Lions for Lambs, Redacted, The Kingdom) mostly proved a damp squib. But consider 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the Romanian drama about a young woman seeking an abortion in the bad old days of Ceaucescu – a film that came out of nowhere to win the Golden Palm at Cannes, then won Best Film at the European Film Awards, then opened all over Europe with America coming up in January. Who’d have predicted that a year ago? Who’d have predicted such a bounty of fresh, challenging movies alongside the Pirates and Spider-Mans? “Best film year in recent memory”? Probably.
