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2007 Year in Review
It's a Gusher
by Nathaniel R January 5th, 2008
Intro / Underappreciated & Special Citations / Top Ten

The story is familiar. The calendar year begins and there's dross in the movie theaters (along with a few platforming highlights from the previous year). Minor pleasures follow in the spring and summer. They valiantly struggle to catch public attention amidst cacophonous 8 figure ad budgets of vapid blockbusters. The weather cools and then, as suddenly as people stop going to the theater in droves, real cinematic triumphs arrive. (Funny how that's so backwards. Like leaving a party as soon as the A-list guests show). And then a curious but predictable thing happens: the holidays hit and all the remaining movies are viewed sight unseen as "the best" of the year. Until they open that is. Inevitably, November and December feel a little flat. All buildup and no delivery; Christmas morning with so-so gifts.

But not 2007. This year the movies Hollywood stingily withheld actually delivered. Well, most of them at any rate. As a result, the year kept getting better as it went, gathering speed as it barrelled toward its rather cataclysmic end. December had three major offerings emblematic of this tendency: Sweeney Todd's bloodbath, Atonement's guilty backwards glance and There Will Be Blood's disturbing implosion ...all shocking and rather final finales in their own individual ways.

"You Can't Stop What's Coming"

The tag lines for No Country For Old Men were brilliantly matched to that film's bleak steamroll of a narrative and it's rather neat and fitting that the movie year surrounding it had a similarly unstoppable forward thrust. I don't wish to overstate the case. I know that most stories are filled with conflict and build towards big climaxes. But how often are the finales so messy, challenging and unavoidable? Consider stories as diverse as The Year of the Dog, Bug, I Am Legend, Into the Wild, Gone Baby Gone, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Zodiac, Away From Her, The Diving Bell and Butterfly, 300 and Michael Clayton among others and marvel at the way they're all building inevitably towards either unresolved emotional distress, identity disintegration, 'no way out' moral conundrums, loss of faculties and death and more generic CG-ready destruction. Apocalypse Now might even be a fitting title for the year's cinema.

Even in films without a high body count there's an audible tick-tock. One of 2007's most visible subjects was pregnancy (Juno, Knocked Up, Waitress, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days and A Mighty Heart again) which has its own natural countdown clock. "I hear that pregnancy can often lead to an infant" says smartass Juno and who would argue?

"There Are No Clean Getaways"

The year's other foregrounded topic was the war in Iraq. Mainstream audiences may have ignored the more overtly political or contemporary films that were released this year (A Mighty Heart, Lions for Lambs, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, Grace is Gone) but their communal presence was felt, even if it was only in that elephant in the room sense. And as Todd Haynes reminded us not too many years ago with Far From Heaven, sometimes the most resonant way to get at the current political climate is to come at it from an unexpected angle like the past and/or the genre film. Surely the two films warring it out for "Best of the Year" status in the nation's critical circles (...Blood & No Country) are like gut punches when viewed in the context of this worsening world in which they premiere. Blood offers up the possible DNA of what ails us (unfettered greed and capitalism gone to its darkest dehumanizing side and the unholy union of big oil and religion) and No Country, which is oddly both calmer and more nihilistic, throws up its hands in despair.

"There Are No Laws Left"

Much has been made of No Country For Old Men's antagonist Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) as an abstraction (death, destruction, terror, etcetera...) rather than a human character. But if that's so, looking back through the past twelve months, I'm leaning towards the notion that Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is also representing. He might just be the signature movie character of 2007. Like so many basically good people walking through this minefield of a planet, he's gone all impotent with contemplation and despair. He fears that time is up. Bewildered by the world gone to shit around him, he inches forward --move man, move!-- unsure of how or perhaps unable to stop the expanding darkness around him. It's not an optimistic motion picture and neither is the year's other great feelbad movie (There Will Be Blood) but, as it often the case with artistic triumphs, you can still feel great watching it. Even if there's little hope and a lot of death within their stories, they make the cinematic artform look healthy and full of life.

The audiences still aren't there for the great films being made but maybe they will be. It's hard not to imagine that the movies of 2007 will be reverberating for some time to come, finding larger audiences slowly but surely. I feel optimistic about that. None of 2007's best movies were perfect exactly but there sure was a lot to embrace and chew on as a movie lover. The movies were served up deliciously raw. The last great film to arrive summed it up as well and profoundly as No Country's advertisement's did.

"There Will Be Blood"

I'll say. It wasn't just those carotid arteries in Sweeney Todd that were gushers in 2007. Check your boots for blood, viscera and oil on your way out.

Continue to...
Underappreciated Films & Special Citations

and
My Top Ten of 2007 (in progress)