Guru

By Craig Phillips

Some fine adaptations are central to this year's diverse list. Looking back on it all to try to find some overarching pattern emerge doesn't work as well, but that's what I like about the best films of 2007; they're unique and they made blood pulse through my veins in excitement. A few of them made me laugh. At least one of them made me slightly queasy.

Maybe this expansive list will counter those who've said '07 was a weaker than average year. Nonsense, I say. While I'm fortunate in that, unlike newspaper critics, who are forced to sometimes see truly bad films against their will, I can usually pick and choose films that I at least think will be interesting. But I certainly saw my share of Disappointing Films With Merit. (And by deadline time, I'd still missed more than I would've liked, too - see the list at the bottom*.) But these are the 15 films that lifted me somewhere special, and which I'd revisit again. And, as you can see, I didn't punish films just for being released much earlier in the year.

No Country For Old Men: Disturbing as hell, no question, but the Coens' were at the top of their game for this one, and the film was so utterly suspenseful that I was often able to disassociate myself from just how skin-crawlingly evil Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh was (you'll never look at a coin flip the same way again). He's an unforgettable creation. The film offers up one knockout set-piece after another (the pit bull chase into the river is particularly jaw-dropping). West Texas' arid landscape (shot beautifully by Coens' fave Roger Deakins) makes for a rightly bleak backdrop, and Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin (a great year for him), and Woody Harrelson round out the spot-on cast. Jones' final soliloquy may not tie everything up in a neat little bow, but it's the perfect ending to this modern day Treasure of the Sierre Madre. One of the best of the Coen Brothers morality fables.

Into the Wild: We could not have asked for a better adaptation of Jon Krakauer's book based on the sad but beautiful last few years of Christopher McCandless, portrayed in heartrending fashion by Emile Hirsch. Sean Penn's script embraces McCandless's ideals while also acknowledging the cruel hardships he put his family through as he disappeared into the American wilderness. It's gorgeously shot (but not showy) and edited just right, moving back and forth between his tragic final months in Alaska and the other parts of his often amazing journey. If the people he meets along the way, including, wonderfully, Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker (a Colorado River guide making his acting debut) as a hippie couple with their own sad past, sometimes seem a bit too smitten with him, this is apparently not at all inaccurate; he was a ghost that moved through others' lives. Only other debit: Penn's occasional penchant for trippy POV camerawork. Regardless, the movie is enormously affecting and the end result appropriately moving.

By Erin Donovan

These were the best documentaries I saw this year, new to theaters or new to DVD in '07.

51 Birch Street - Doug Block, so incensed by the betrayal of his father getting remarried just 3 months after the death of his mother, turns an investigative lens on the once romanticized memories of his childhood to discover (via decades of journals, interviews with friends and home-made movies) the starkly different inner life his mother was leading to the woman he'd grown up with. Through the discovery of sad and ordinary dysfunctions 51 Birch Street is as much a touching family portrait as it is a window into the generational contrast between expectations about marriage.

Girl 27 - A surprising documentary that played to quiet appreciation at Sundance this year. Girl 27 starts out as a true crime expose about a vicious assault and the cover up by the svengalis of 1930s Hollywood but becomes a touching (platonic) romance about how intertwined a documentary film-makers can become with their subjects.

King Corn - Two affable food activists grow an acre of corn in Iowa and attempt to trace it into our food system only to learn that between starchy fast foods, artificial sweeteners and preservatives Americans eat so much corn that an acre (producing 10,000 pounds) is a mere drop in the bucket. In the vein of Super Size Me, co-stars/directors Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis create an oral history of a declining farm town as well as illuminate some of the absurdities of food production in America.

Manufactured Landscapes - Director Jennifer Baichwal (already having demonstrated a flare for creating fascinating portraits of artists with her previous work The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia and Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles) uses the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky to examine the human toll and ecological exploitation of global industrialism. Manufactured Landscapes plays like the cinematic, silent film version of Inconvenient Truth.

Best Movies Seen on Screen or Via GreenCine in 2007

By Dylan de Thomas

Like most of us who don't work for major newspapers - or live in Manhattan or the City of Angels - I haven't had the chance to see many of the year-end must-sees, like Paul Thomas Anderson's much-anticipated and discussed There Will Be Blood, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or even Tamara Jenkins' The Savages. These either haven't made it up here to sleepy, rainy Portland, Oregon, or I just haven't made the time to make it out to the theaters to see 'em. Instead, I offer my favorite moments from mostly new-ish DVDs that I was able to see in the comfort of my own home, in between changing diapers and having tea parties with short, messy people. I gotta say, even from this distance, it's clear that it was a great year for film. Here are some of my favorites, split into neat categories for easy consumption.

The Ones Everyone Saw:

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): *** 1/2

All hail the throwback new action film The Last Legion--or, if not all, at least those of us who fondly remember films like The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn, from an era before special effects had effectively drowned out pesky little things like plot and characterization. Remember when an exciting action scene could stimulate the eye, ear and mind without non-stop, let's-be-in-twenty-places-at-once editing, and a villain could command the screen without having to be an eight-legged monster, robot or shape-shifter supreme? For those interested in discovering what a movie might look like that adheres to those elderly verities yet commands the skills of today's writers, director and crew, take a chance on this barely-seen-theatrical surprise that has an almost child-like innocence and delight--as though a tale such as this had never before been told.

The story is co-credited to Carlo Carlei (whose 1993 Flight of the Innocent remains one of the better first-theatrical motion pictures in memory), the screenplay to Jez and Tom Butterworth (Mojo and Birthday Girl); and the direction to Doug Lefler (who's worked in TV). Together, they've managed to come up with a genuinely pleasant and exciting diversion that, I suspect, deliberately looks back to those old-time action/spectacle movies many of us loved so well. The setting is that period when Rome was falling and Britain just beginning to rise, and one of the many little pleasures of the movie is how its diverse cast of characters manages to reflect today's Britain, as well as this nicely re-imagined scenario of its birth. The plot, simple but not stupid, involves protecting the youngest Caesar and smuggling him to safety from the Barbarian hordes, including a vicious leader (played by Peter Mullan) and his even-more-so second-in-command (a very scary Kevin McKidd, of Rome).

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Would you imagine that the line "What are you talking about?" might provoke one of the bigger laughs of the movie year? And not once--but twice in the same film? Dragon Wars, the Korean all-time box-office blockbuster, is that movie. The line arrives first from the lips of a little boy to whom Robert Forster is reciting perhaps the biggest bundle of hodge-podge exposition to leave one mouth for another's ear in movie history. All of a sudden, in the midst of Forster’s babbling—Bam!—comes this funny, five-word deflator. Then the scene suddenly shifts from 21st-Century Los Angeles to 16th Century Korea, where a character who appears to be the Korean equivalent of the "Shogun" begins telling his underling more HPE (hodge-podge exposition: Dragon Wars may have coined a whole new descriptive phrase) until fellow number two also asks, in seeming desperation (and English subtitles), "What are you talking about?!" Really, a laugh this big does not happen that often. Savor it.

The movie? Just as silly as you'd expect, but maybe twice as much fun. The special effects are super, particularly those amazing titular dragons. The action scenes are extremely well-done, too (especially the destruction of downtown Los Angeles), and since these comprise at least half the running time (which is quite short: barely 80 minutes plus credits), even if you hate the movie, you'll have wasted much less time here than with this-was-supposed-to-be-good-so-why-it-is-such-crap films currently decorating our theatre screens with color and light. I can't imagine what must have been going through the minds of the American actors (who include the likes of Forster, Chris Mulkey, Elizabeth Peña, Jason Behr, among others) as they were making this movie. I do hope none of them were practicing "the method," because trying to find "motivation" amidst the many eye-and-mind-popping plots twists would have driven Stanislavski himself around the bend. Better not to worry and consider instead the generous paycheck each cast member probably deposited.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **** ½

A big, fat "thank you" to Martin Scorsese for his championing of Golden Door, which is up there among (if not THE) best-ever renditions of the immigrant experience. It makes "Titanic"--for all its multi-million-dollar budget and billion-dollar gross--seem something paltry in comparison. Scorsese gives a short intro to the film on the current DVD, and his name was associated front-and-center with the theatrical release in May of 2007. Reviews were generally respectful, but the movie soon disappeared into the usual foreign film obscurity which bedevils our current times, particularly where Italian movies are concerned. (Earlier in the year, Golden Door had been Italy's submission for Best Foreign Language Film but, shockingly, did not make the final five nominees.) Now that I've finally seen it, I must place it near or at the top of the list of last year's best films.

From its first frame, the film jars then compels you because its visuals are so strong, bizarre and immediate. Yet writer/director Emanuele Crialese, prefers to show, not tell. There is little exposition as we follow three generations of a poor Sicilian family making their difficult way toward America, with their tag-along companion, a somewhat mysterious British woman, played by the elegant and odd Charlotte Gainsbourg. Both the large events and small moments throughout the film are so specific and completely imagined that--real or not--they come across as truthful. Based on Crialese's earlier film, Respiro, I would not have pegged him to create anything this amazing, and because so much of the reason the movie works is due to its visual beauty and imagination, I suspect that its cinematographer Agnès Godard (Beau Travail, Backstage, The Intruder) bears at least some of the responsibility.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ***

The “quirky” documentary has had a long history of sad subjects with goofy, yellow-colored posters, the marketing departments correctly assuming that people would rather laugh than squirm at unflinching looks at humanity. So filmmakers have mined deeply the vein of odd folks at the fringes of society, and this film is no different.

The characters of Matt Ogens' Confessions of a Superhero (produced and introduced by Super Size Me's Morgan Spurlock) come from the same funny/sad dichotomy as the denizens of American Movie, Grey Gardens or even Errol Morris' folk from Vernon, Florida and Gates of Heaven. It's the kind of movie where, at first blush, the viewer is supposed to think “Freaks,” before softening near the end and learning something about society and themselves. Or at least that's the hope.

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): *****

If there's one word that best fits Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest experiment in cinema, it would be "enigmatic." In almost every review about Syndromes and a Century writers mention that, as the director himself admitted, the film's distinctive two halves deal with his parents' lives before they got romantically involved, and that each one of them represents his mother and father respectively. The extent to which the statement is useful for understanding Syndromes varies according to what the viewer wishes to take away from the movie; even for the most open, receptive, and film-techniques-savvy cinephile there isn't even the slightest hint pointing to that direction.

Reviewer: Henry Leineweber
Rating (out of 5): ****

"Helvetica is like air. It's instantly recognizable and forgettable." These words are spoken fairly early in Helvetica, a surprisingly fascinating documentary about, of all things, typefaces. Specifically, the Helvetica typeface which was first introduced to graphic designers in the 1960s and has since become a worldwide phenomenon. From its roots in classical Danish printer's workshops, to the explosion of '60s mod culture, to its eventual adoption by corporate and government public-relations teams, I found myself realizing that I see the Helvetica typeface (don't call it a font) dozens of times per day without ever noticing it.

Helvetica is a short, sweet, and to-the-point documentary, and a great viewing experience. As an added bonus, you will no doubt start to find yourself spotting the typeface in the most unexpected places.

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): **½

The Man With the Screaming Brain marks B-Movie sensation Bruce Campbell's first attempt at filmmaking (the actor had previously directed several Hercules and Xena episodes but never a feature film), and if it's perhaps not the actor's most triumphant achievement, at least he finally realized a project that, along with producer and pal David M. Goodman, he had been struggling to finance for a little over two decades.

For some of Campbell's fans, Man might be something of a disappointment. This quite wacky film fails to stand up to the camp magnificence of the Evil Dead series, for which the actor is beloved. But the hard-to-wrap-one's-mind-around plot and the confusing, disturbing, and mind-boggling implications it makes, should not be taken lightly. Campbell plays William Cole, a pharmaceutical company CEO who travels all the way to Bulgaria in order to make an investment in an unfinished subway project that will give him a major tax break. He drags his Jackie O-look-alike wife (Antoinette Byron) along with him, thinking that the trip might refresh their dying marriage. Little does he know that they'll be joined by their former-KGB-agent taxi driver Yegor (Vladimir Kolev) and a gypsy woman named Tatoya (Tamara Gorski), to form an unruly quartet.

The overly complex story of how and when it all happens makes it hard to connect with. Suffice it to say that thanks to cuckoo Professor Dr. Ivan Ivanoff (Stacy Keach) and his recent transplant surgery breakthrough, Cole and Yegor, and Jackie and Tatoya, come to literally share the same body and brain respectively. A comment on the possibility of a peaceful co-existence between capitalism and communism? A suggestion that getting married means taming one's wild side? Or perhaps it's all simply an excuse to give Bruce Campbell an opportunity for physical acting.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

Bertrand Blier is at it again: pushing those envelopes; surprising, delighting and confusing us; in short, shaking us up. This award-winning writer/director (César, Oscar, National Society of Film Critics and more), with 21 films to his credit, is now approaching age 70. From his first international hit Les Valseuses (titled Going Places here in the U.S., and which gave Gerard Depardieu his breakout role), to his Best Foreign Film Préparez vos mouchoirs, through Buffet froid, Beau-Père, Menage, Trop belle pour toi, Un deux trois soleil and Mon homme, he has pretty consistently knocked around our ideas about men, women, love, sex, society and relationships. His latest, How Much Do You Love Me? (Combien tu m'aimes?) does it all over again, while providing succulent roles for a prestige cast: Bernard Campan (seen this past year in The Man in My Life), Monica Bellucci, Depardieu, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Edouard Baer. Though the film had a (very slight) theatrical release in 2006, you couldn't prove it by me. The only American reviews seem to have come from little-known sources--mostly, I suspect, from those viewing the just-released DVD.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Writer-director Michael Cahill's King of California is a "little film" with a solid script that came and went from theaters in the blink of an eye - not a big surprise, given the oddball plot. While no classic, it certainly deserves an audience on home video.

Michael Douglas plays Charlie, a wayward father and former jazz musician whose estranged, and much more together, teenage daughter Miranda (a most-appealing Evan Rachel Wood) picks him up upon his release from a mental hospital. She's been working at McDonald's instead of finishing high school because someone's got to bring home the McBacon. Her mother, his ex, a former hand model, ran off too. Charlie may have issues, but at least he cares. It doesn't take all that long for Douglas to present his character as a major league eccentric, but to his credit he doesn't overdo it (except for a few wild-eyed moments), and he quickly garners our sympathy for his obvious love of his daughter. The plot - centering on Charlie's obsessive belief that Spanish treasure is buried underneath the local Costco - requires some suspension of disbelief to be sure, and yet Cahill's on to something, too.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ***

The fiction-film debut of Spellbound director Jeffery Blitz, Rocket Science is, like its non-fiction predecessor, a finely wrought and authentic portrait of the world of unusual and gifted kids. Instead of plumbing the depths of the world of spelling bees this time around, Blitz tells a story about - among other things - high school debate teams.

The film follows one Hal Hefner, a high school outcast marked by a profound stutter, played to squirming perfection by Reece Thompson, as he tries to overcome his speech disorder by joining the competitive debate team at his New Jersey suburb's high school.

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ****

Kirikou and the Sorceress, a strikingly animated feature by French filmmaker Michel Ocelot loosely based on a West African fable, is a most unusual coming-of-age tale. Kirikou is a minuscule boy whose aggressiveness, stubbornness, and curiosity are so intense that while still in his mother's belly, he demands to be born. Upon his self-imposed arrival into this world, Kirikou effortlessly cuts the umbilical cord once and for all, proudly announcing his name.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

Director Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990) suffered for his art. Nearly age 40, and bored with documentaries and other films that were Soviet-approved, he balked and began making films for his own pleasure. From there, he suffered years of butting heads with the authorities, arrested, prohibited and otherwise hounded, he managed to squeeze out only a few more films in his career. Now Kino Video has released a four-disc box set of essential Parajanov films: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), The Color of Pomegranates (1968), The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988); watching his breakthrough feature Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors reveals an undeniable sense of joy -- and even release -- in every frame.