"I Am The Super Mother Bug!": The Best of 2007

This is my list of the best films of 2007, as it appears in the Edmonton, Alberta alt-weekly SEE Magazine. Keep in mind that a lot of titles that are popping up on a lot of these lists didn't reach Edmonton in 2007, including I'm Not There, There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Lake of Fire, Syndromes and a Century, and The Savages. There are also a few titles, like Sweeney Todd, Charlie Wilson's War, and Juno, which I won't be able to see until later this week.

Is that the last of my caveats? I think so. Let's roll up our sleeves and get cracking!

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Assembling my list of the best movies of 2007 forced me to make some difficult choices. Which deserves the greater respect: craftsmanlike precision and magisterial control over every aspect of the filmmaking process (à la No Country for Old Men, Zodiac, and Children of Men), or go-for-broke, tonally inconsistent trainwreck craziness (à la Brand Upon the Brain!, Bug, and Romance and Cigarettes)?

I decided to make a little extra room for the trainwrecks this year. Those filmic masterpieces can be so intimidating; it’s nice to have a few flawed movies around to bring your affectionate side out.

Here’s my list. Watch out: it’s dark in here.

(1) BUG
I’m as surprised as you are to see this one sitting in the top slot, but William Friedkin’s claustro-phobic thriller about two lonely people succumbing to paranoia and madness inside a dusty motel room is the movie I find myself thinking back to more than any other film from 2007. Ashley Judd gives the performance of the year as Agnes White: after years of forgettable romcoms and woman-in-jeopardy thrillers, her fearlessness here is downright inspirational. She is the super mother bug!

(2) ZODIAC
I hated Se7en—I thought it was pretentious, mannered, over-designed, and loathesome in the way it savoured the twisted ingenuity of its killings. I half-wonder if director David Fincher hates it too, because Zodiac repudiates all of Se7en’s most distinctive stylistic and thematic elements. It’s a long, understated, painstaking, often frustrating film that suggests that a fascination with murder leads nowhere except down a very long, dark hole.

(3) NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Another period serial-killer flick—this one set in the sunbaked Texas of the 1980s, although Javier Bardem’s remorseless Anton Chigurh seems less like a human being than a demon who’s been wandering the plains ever since the 19th century. Like Zodiac, it breathes new life into the serial-killer genre to refusing to grant the audience the final, conclusive confrontation between good and evil that we’ve been trained by hundreds of lesser films (and presidential speeches) to expect.

(4) THE ASSASSIN-ATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
Andrew Dominik’s art Western is at once a stunning evocation of a bygone time and place (the breathtaking train-robbery sequence is like watching fact turn into legend before your eyes) and also a contemporary-minded commentary on the nature of celebrity. Alberta hasn’t looked this good on film since Terrence Malick came here in the late ’70s to shoot Days of Heaven.

(5) CHILDREN OF MEN
A latecomer to Edmonton from 2006, Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian sci-fi picture is like a grittier version of Blade Runner—no technological wonders to gape at, no sexy women to fantasize about, just an ordinary man too busy protecting the last glimmer of human life to worry about any artificial lifeforms running around.

(6) BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!
Gender-bending teenage detectives, brain-control experiments conducted in lighthouses, mechanical devices that allow lovers to communicate with each other across any distance: that Guy Maddin had quite a childhood. His latest “autobiographical” exercise in silent-movie style may be his funniest and most emotionally satisfying film yet. Perverse, obsessive, and probably half-demented: the man’s a national treasure!

(7) THE TV SET
Jake Kasdan’s satire about a writer who compromises pretty much every shred of his art and his personal dignity while ushering a show he’s created through pilot season seemed amusing but slight when I first saw it. But in the weeks it followed, it seemed to stand for something larger and more important: the way anything smart or complicated or “downbeat”—movies, politicans, ideas—gets sanded down and smoothed over before the public is allowed to hear it.

(8) NO END IN SIGHT
Charles Ferguson’s summary of the United States’ epic misad-venture in Iraq will get you angry like no other movie made this year—angry at the Bush administration for completely botching what Ferguson argues was actually a winnable war, and angry that this engrossing, intelligent, admirably fair-minded documentary was seen by so few people.


(9) INTO THE WILD
Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction account of the life and untimely death of youthful adventurer Chris McCandless is every bit as wide-eyed, charming, and uninterested in playing by society’s rules as its subject. Emile Hirsch gives a breakthrough performance in the lead, but it’s the excellent supporting players—especially Vince Vaughn, Hal Holbrook, and Brian Dierker—who give the movie its texture.

(10) ROMANCE & CIGARETTES
John Turturro’s bizarre musical begins with a New Jersey ironworker played by James Gandolfini striding out his front door, standing in the street, and belting out Englebert Humperdinck’s “A Man Without Love.” From that moment on, this crazy movie had me on its side, and I stuck with it through every ridiculous plot twist, every celebrity cameo (Steve Buscemi! Amy Sedaris! Christopher Walken!), even the scene where Gandolfini tries to spice up his affair with Kate Winslet by getting himself circumcised. Hey, Hairspray: this is how you make a musical!

HONOURABLE MENTION: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Black Book, The Bourne Ultimatum, Iraq in Fragments, Rescue Dawn, Stephanie Daley

MOST OVERRATED: Atonement, Hot Fuzz, The Lives of Others, Ratatouille, Julie Christie in Away From Her, Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There

MOST UNDERRATED: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, The Darjeeling Limited, Hostel: Part II, Redacted, Gordon Pinsent in Away From Her, Richard Gere in I’m Not There