Year 2007 in movies (Part 1)

I realize it is February, a little late to be posting 'best of 2007' lists. But this list has been sitting in my Mac for the longest time; I've been hesitating to post it ever since I wrote it. I have a love-hate relationships with lists - the definitiveness of listing things down only contradicts the arbitrary nature of taste. If I hadn't held out this long to post this, I know I wouldn't have seen one of the great films of the last 2 years, Inland Empire. And now that I've already made up my list, I find it hard to displace any of the films below. So perhaps I should let it be known that I'm ready to abandon ship on my list any time. 5 years may pass and I might look back in horror - as is the case with my lists of previous years - but at least they serve as landmarks of my time.



10. Southland Tales

Just brilliant. The debate that started over it since its Cannes premiere now seems passé, and its defenders (J. Hoberman, Amy Taubin & Manohla Dargis) have made their points so well that there's really nothing else to add. But I'll just say one thing: it says more on the part of the critical institution than the audience it's 'defending' when Richard Kelly is slammed for precisely the same reasons that made Robert Altman so acclaimed in the 70's with his messy, bustling experiments. Southland Tales is as sarcastically funny as those films, and probably captures the new millennium's zeitgeist and celebrity culture better than any film I've seen so far.



9. No Country for Old Men

With the Oscars around the corner, the Coen brothers have been getting the exposure and acclaim they deserve with this pitch-black, dark-as-hell thriller. Recalling the macabre relentlessness of their first feature Blood Simple, this film is even sparser, and more intense, taking a potboiler premise and metamorphosing it into a monster all of its own. The Coens' biggest accomplishment however - and definitely also cinematographer Roger Deakins' - is the film's obsession with spaces. Using the premise of a chase, it shows different characters revisiting the same spaces, feeling the traces of the people who were previously there and leaving imprints for the people that would come after. This sense of space is already present in the plot of the McCarthy book, but the ability of the Coens to translate this sense of space onscreen, together with the intertwining of time, makes this one of their finest achievements.


8. Flight of the Red Balloon

The central concern of virtually all Hou Hsiao-Hsien films - how to make ultra-mundane conversations/scenarios engaging. Solution: to play with the texture and illusory/realistic quality of film itself. Referencing LaMorisse's The Red Balloon only slightly, Hou's film is aglow with warmth. It is an ode to modern life (in a foreign city) as much as it is an ode to cinema; or instead of finding bad metaphors for his film, perhaps it's more appropriate to say that his films are odes to life, itself. His hand is, as usual, characteristically light, and he seems to be able to use life as his raw material, capturing moments of wonder in fleeting scenes of magic.


7. Shortbus

If I had my way, Shortbus would be the poster queen of Indiewood. It has all of Indiewood's pitfalls - headlines-making 'taboos,' snappy 'I-wish-I-could-talk-like-that' dialogue, characters that were worked out sitting round a conference table ('Okay, you're the sex therapist that has never had an orgasm!'), an indie-cred soundtrack, themes (interconnectivity! alienation!) and most of all, sex sex sex and more sex. How did it go from a recipe for disaster (please refer to Little Miss Sunshine) to a 'work?' I wish I could answer that question. Maybe it's the gung-ho spirit with which John Cameron Mitchell and the ensemble cast approached the material - they don't so much pump up the characters and their arcs (minimal backstory, thank god!), as they iron them out and flatten them, ironically making it more sincere. Even the requisite uplifting un-happy ending is believable and, truly uplifting.


6. Children of Men

Perhaps a re-evaluation of the computer generated image is in order. Artistry in that field has reached new highs (Transformers) and new lows (Robert Zemeckis' shit) that it is cockeyed to just follow the critical trend of damning the use of it. CGI has become its own type of cinema altogether - it no longer makes the effort of covering up its falsity, parading, instead, the detail and artistry that went into its making. Beautifully rendered images, like that of Transformers has made them the attraction instead of the stars or plot; some, like the computer animation called Superman Returns tries to excel at both but succeed at neither. The fact that anything CGI could be called out immediately by any kid further removes the immediacy of cinema - we are so faraway from the times when audiences would run in horror at the image of the train pulling into the station in Lumiere's film. Some would say that the advent of CGI has killed the magic of going to the movies, I don't really know whether to agree. The CGI is a Brechtian technique too.

It is perhaps partly in reaction to this trend that determined the style of Children of Men. While Alfonso Cuarón has been using his long takes for ages (even in his bland Harry Potter entry), there is a strong determination to blur the lines between what is technically and realistically achievable with the camera and what is not. CGI and fancy camera trickery play a big part here, of course, but they counter the philosophy of the CGI spectacle altogether - instead of wondering how he did the shot, we wonder if we are going to escape alive.

In the 1950s André Bazin wrote, 'the screen reflects the ebb and flow of our imagination which feeds on a reality for which it plans to substitute.' Cuarón style is Bazin's theory in the CGI age. Although at times the long takes threaten to verge on showiness, Cuarón controls the bullet-speed pace with a tight rhythm of mise-en-scène. The effect is not awe at the maker but awe at the spectacle.

The relevance of the plot to reality is terrifying. I have dreams like these sometimes, and seeing them being transposed directly onto the screen breaks down the barrier of screen for me. It reclaims somewhat the magic of going to the movies.

To be continued.