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4. I'm Not There
Todd Haynes. This guy is one of the most interesting filmmakers working today. He works in the tradition of another gay director who holds a special place in motion picture history: Nicholas Ray. Like Ray, Haynes genre hops liberally. From Safe to Velvet Goldmine to Far From Heaven Haynes has made his life work the exploration of genre, dissecting them from the inside out.
No wonder Judi Dench fell in love with Bob Dylan in Notes on a Scandal.
With I'm Not There, Haynes goes several steps beyond his masterful Far From Heaven, and serves up a genre pastiche which is superficially about Bob Dylan, but is fundamentally more concerned with identity construction and the life and times of The Artist. Not Dylan, necessarily, but any Artist.
Does knowing Dylan's life help the experience of I'm Not There? I would argue that it does only if one's primary interest is information. If cinema exists for you as a information delivering mechanism, then knowing the musician's life would be helpful. But if, like me, cinema is a vehicle for aesthetic expression and play, then one could experience I'm Not There knowing nothing about Bob Dylan and still come out satisfied by a picture that is exceedingly well-built, and has a lot to say about what it is to be a human being who lives in a chronic state of conflicted self-examination.
5. Zodiac
People really slept on this movie. I mean, this movie really put some people to sleep. When I saw it in the theater I was not impressed. It was not, at all, what I was expecting. Fincher's Panic Room is so clean, so contained, and so beautifully orchestrated that I entered Zodiac with certain expectations, which is usually a bad thing going into any movie.
I ended up getting the DVD and watching it at home. David Fincher reached deep down and channeled his inner Stanley Kubrick. Zodiac is deliberate in a way movies aren't anymore. It is not made for the ADD generation.
Fincher is a guy who knows that in 50 years his film will be discussed in film studies courses all across the planet, and all the things that are important to box office geeks and studio execs and those who make a living off the industry and, yes, even the reaction of contemporary audiences will not matter to anyone any longer. It is built with the sort of detailed grandeur that one feels went into the design and construction of Egypt's great pyramids. It was built to stand the test of time.
6. Spiderman 3
Talk about digging deep. Sam Raimi reached down deep and channeled his inner Sam Raimi on this one.
The first Spiderman was the most accessible to the mainstream. With Part 2 Raimi pushed both the action genre and the superhero genre to another level. But really, Part 2 just feels like Part 1 got bit by a radioactive spider. It is, quite literally, the second part of a story.
Spiderman 3, on the other hand, exists apart from the previous two films. Spiderman 3 is great and epic because it is basically the distillation of Sam Raimi's essence - it is the culmination of Raimi's oeuvre, his work as a film artist. Where the first two revealed his ability to compromise and work with the studio, Part 3 is like a portal into the purest Raimi aesthetic. If one were to look at the Evil Dead series, Darkman, The Quick & The Dead, or The Hudsucker Proxy (which he co-wrote), they will see this wacky-ass superhero movie is actually a part of a body of work which is informed equally by the Three Stooges, Golden Era Hollywood Musicals, B Horror movies, and Pop artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein.
Ultimately, Raimi is a unique voice in the contemporary cinematic landscape, giving a genre that often suffers from taking itself too seriously (Superman Returns, anyone?) a much needed injection of fun, bombast, and reckless abandon.
Plus it's awesome to see the guy from Wings kick some ass.
7. Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
This is full-blown noir melodrama in the classical mode. Before The Devil Knows You're Dead has more in common with Out Of The Past or Casablanca or The Big Heat or Man With The Golden Arm than with anything released from a major studio in the past couple decades. It is what they used to refer to back in the day as a "male melodrama".
Comments (7)
Good picks!
I am glad you included "Zodiac" "Before the Devil Knows Youre Dead" and "Hot Fuzz"
Dont you think Robert Downey Jr. deserved an Oscar or Golden Globe nod for "Zodiac"? I thought he was great!
I would give "No Country" more than a Honorable Mention.....I loved it....and honestly I forgot it was a Cohen Bros movie. I just thought it was pretty darn good!
I cant wait to see "There Will be Blood"
I'm gonna have to check that out ASAP
1 of 7 | Posted by Anonymous | Posted on February 4, 2008 5:26 PM
it's anniedawg25 by the way.....not sure why my comment above posted anonymous!
:)
2 of 7 | Posted by anniedawg25 | Posted on February 4, 2008 5:36 PM
I don't know about any of the other movies listed, since I haven't seen them, but Spiderman 3 in a "best of 2007" list? Really?
I can't imagine liking a Spiderman movie with dance numbers!
It failed on SO many levels, not the least of which were an excess of villains, an unnecessary and forgettable love triangle, horribly miss-cast comedic actors as the main villains and a transparently predictable ending.
The visuals were amazing, as usual for these films, but the rest of the film was just painful to watch.
Spiderman 3 was Marvel's Superman Returns.
Raimi should have stuck to his guns and never let the studio talk him into a Venom story. It seemed obvious that his heart just wasn't in this at all.
Where you saw the inner Sam Raimi, I saw him phoning it in.
3 of 7 | Posted by greybishop | Posted on February 4, 2008 5:37 PM
Glad to have you with us Damien. You seem to have a little bit different taste in movies than Sutter.... this makes for a better collective critique.... does that make sense? That said.....
I disagree on two of your choices.
Spiderman 3 was a total diappointment to me and I'm a comicbook fan. I agree with Greybishop. Too many villians to deal with in one movie. the action and storyline were all over the place. But I agree that the guy from "Wings" kicking ass was kinda cool, but I found it hard to believe that he was the killer of Uncle Ben.
My other disagreement was with "SuperBad." I got alot of flak for critisizing this movie but I found it just plain stupid. It was totally predictable and stereotypical. The nerds and the hot girls has been done to death.
Hope to here more from you in the future.... maybe you could delve into the classics and not just the new releases.
4 of 7 | Posted by chooch850 | Posted on February 4, 2008 7:43 PM
Hi All.
Well, this is fun. You know, in an earlier draft of this list I prefaced the Spiderman 3 entry by saying, "Okay, I'm probably going to lose a lot of you on this one...", but I felt it was too presumptuous to assume a readership with my first submission. Apparently not.
I'll just point to greybishop's comment about not imagining liking a Spiderman movie with a dance number. Well, it is precisely this sort of joyful whimsy that elevated this film for me. It was actually precisely at that moment when I said to myself, "Raimi is one of the bravest filmmakers working today because no other director in his right mind would try this."
I think time will see the dancing "emo" Spidey as the most memorable. It already provokes the strongest response...
5 of 7 | Posted by damienbelliveau | Posted on February 5, 2008 12:58 PM
Damien-
Hey, to each his own.
And boy, you can have the dancing emo Peter Parker.
It's rare that I wince when watching a movie. I winced and cringed a lot during this one.
Watching the dance number made me wonder if Raimi put such an awful scene in the movie as a protest against having to do the Venom story he swore he'd never do.
Perhaps movie fans in general might find the film-making aspects appealing, but for this comic book fan it was simply the brutal gutting of a once great franchise.
I only react out of surprise that anyone actually enjoyed it. Otherwise a totally forgettable film that I don't ever intend to suffer though again.
6 of 7 | Posted by greybishop | Posted on February 5, 2008 1:37 PM
Welcome aboard, Damien!
7 of 7 | Posted by sutterkane | Posted on February 6, 2008 12:11 PM