'TIS THE SEASON...THE AWARDS SEASON

RICK’S DAZZLING DOZEN FOR 2007

As the years go by, or mount up, depending on one’s point of view, I agree less and less with professional film critics, most of whom were born after the U. S. lost its political and social innocence in the 1960’s and became an edgy, cynical society, and I’m certainly out of step with what the average dumbed-down, fear-fueled, violence-inured American filmgoer pays his and her $8-$11 to see these days.

My number one film of the year has grossed a measly $6.8 million in this country -- disgraceful when one considers the weightiness of its message and its stratospheric level of craftsmanship. Money and the amount of media hype it buys, including sensationalized TV ads and the mass distribution of advance DVD screeners in the mailboxes of those who influence public opinion, go a very long way in determining what people see and how they vote.

I saw 63 films in 2007 that were released in this country during the calendar year. I pick and choose very carefully, based to a large extent on what I read about films beforehand in various journals and on line and the credentials of actors, writers, directors, and cinematographers associated with these productions. Of those 63 films, there were only three that were abject disappointments, failing to be either evocative or entertaining: “Year of the Dog,” “The Nanny Diaries,” and “Dan in Real Life”. They were D-rated by me, even below the level of being annoyingly mediocre. So here, then, are my favorite features in the order in which they dazzled me. Appended to that list are my picks for the award-winning performances of the year.


1. IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH

Based on actual events cobbled together from various case histories, this harrowing, mournful film, a towering cautionary tale by director Paul Haggis, capsulizes the folly, futility, and psychological fallout of today’s wars of terrorism and insurgency and how our involvement is bankrupting the spirit and soul of America by producing a feral breed of returning service personnel, who, even when they emerge from their tours of duty physically intact, are ravaged psychologically from what they’ve witnessed and what they’ve had to do.
Tommy Lee Jones, as an anguished military father, delivers the performance of his career, and Susan Sarandon, as his wife, is mesmerizing not so much for her spare dialogue as the torment and heartbreak that registers on her haggard face and in her dispirited body language. The fact that the film had an abysmal showing at the box office is proof that we’ve morphed from a nation of sheep to a nation of ostriches. The symbolism of the movie’s final scene will not be lost on those with a firm grip on reality -- testament to a country that has lost its way in the world.


2. AFTER THE WEDDING

An exquisite Danish film, written and directed by Susanne Bier and shot in Copenhagen and India, about coincidences, reconnecting lives, second chances, and noble sacrifices, that left me breathless and wanting more. Mads Mikkelsen (Le Chiffre in “Casino Royale”), a magnetic actor in the mold of Clive Owen and Christian Bale, heads a superb cast as a rugged, hands-on humanitarian and sometime surrogate father who administers a food-aid program for orphaned children in India. When he returns to Denmark to seal the deal on a windfall gift from a philanthropic industrialist, he is reintroduced unexpectedly to a former life and comes face-to-face with a future-altering dilemma.

3. THE LIVES OF OTHERS

Set in East Germany in the years before the fall of the Wall, “The Lives of Others” demonstrates the paranoia and repressiveness of a regime that is losing its grip on the activities of its subjects -- particularly artists and writers who totalitarians always suspect of dissidence. The story zeroes in on Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), a mindlessly staunch Stasi operative with apparent ice water in his veins, assigned to spy from a neighboring building on a playwright and his actress lover. But in the course of his eavesdropping Wiesler undergoes a spiritual awakening, and the cat-and-mouse thriller becomes a personal struggle involving his entrenched political allegiance, emerging self-awareness, and the redemptive pull of aesthetic sensibility.




4. THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Daniel Day-Lewis is titanic and forbidding as Daniel Plainview, a sociopathic, early twentieth century oil prospector whose personal philosophy of human interaction is encapsulated in the following observation: “I look at people, and I find nothing worth liking.” However, Plainview finds much to revere in ruthlessly accumulating power and wealth. He is a loner in the extreme, oddly bereft of conscience and compassion. We never know how he came to be so alienated from people, the exact nature of his demons, and that knowledge is not essential to the story.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Boogie Nights) wrote the screenplay based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, “Oil,” and though it’s an unrelentingly grim and terrifying tale of greed, disillusionment, and religious fanaticism -- quite likely, a parable of current obsessions with oil and fundamentalism -- the outcome does have its unexpected pleasures. However, unlike Captain Wiesler in “The Lives of Others,” Daniel Plainview has no epiphanies or transformations. Day-Lewis deserves the Oscar hands-down for his commanding, chilling performance, and Paul Dano (so silent in “Little Miss Sunshine”) is almost as diabolical as Plainview as the self-ordained Bible-thumper with whom the oil man becomes adversarial.

5. ATONEMENT

Despite an oddly brittle, mannered, and emotionally temperate performance by the usually engaging, if stick-figured Keira Knightley, “Atonement” eminently succeeds as an homage to expansive, old-fashioned romantic dramas, thanks to visionary direction from Joe Wright (last year’s Pride and Prejudice), an innovatively constructed and percipient screenplay by Christopher Hampton from a novel by Ian McEwan, and inspired and deeply resonant performances from actors James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan, and Vanessa Redgrave.

Fledgling writer Briony Tallis (Ronan), a 13-year-old wise beyond her years, is not wise enough to grasp the dire consequences of accusing her older sister Cecilia’s (Knightley) lover Robbie (McAvoy) of a crime he did not commit. She does so partly from immaturity, partly because of an overactive imagination, and partly for spite. The story spills into World War II and well beyond, as Briony spends the rest of her life trying to put things right. Wright’s 5 1/2-minute tracking shot that pans the vast beach at Dunkirk as British soldiers are fleeing is elegiac, punctuated by Dario Marianelli’s haunting, fateful original score, featuring a clacking typewriter and sometimes superimposed in counterpoint over a men’s chorus. This is inspired filmmaking at every level.

6. BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD

From high-octane octogenarian director Sidney Lumet comes this blistering morality tale that validates Murphy’s Law as perhaps none other on film, leading to the inescapable conclusion that even low-end heists should be left to practiced crime professionals. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) Hanson are brothers caught in the trap of their excesses. Andy, a real-estate accountant and con artist, is already cooking the company books to fund his high-end drug habit. Hank, the younger, more hapless, and affable of the two, is months behind in his child-support payments. Hank’s marriage has already failed; Andy’s is on the fast track to doom.

Andy has a plan that will shore up their collapsing lives. They’ll stick up their own parents’ jewelry business on a morning when a family employee will be alone in the store. They’ll fence the gems, which are fully insured, pocket a sizable take, and no one will get hurt. Right? Wrong baby wrong. Haywire is too benign a term to describe the fallout from this hastily hatched caper. As the dominoes fall one by one, the family’s dirty laundry mounts to a precipitous pile, and central to the antagonism and strife is how each brother perceives his relationship with the remote, taciturn Hanson patriarch Charles (Albert Finney). This taut, tawdry, tantalizing thriller is another underappreciated 2007 film.


7. ONCE

About as low-budget as musicals ever get, “Once,” produced by the Irish Film Board and shot entirely in and around Dublin with a hand-held camera for the meager sum of $150,000 by little-known writer-director John Carney, is a slight movie of rare majesty, not as much a musical as a transitionary tale about two people, who remain nameless throughout, whose lives intersect by mere chance only long enough for them to forge a tune-based bond that empowers both of them to gain a clearer vision of their former lives. In between instrumental harmonies and vocal duets, the Guy, a scruffy, unassuming busker with a tender heart, and the immigrant Girl who takes a shine to his music and befriends him, are pulling their separate lives out of the spiritual doldrums through mutual validation, becoming non-sexual soulmates and tunemakers in the process.

The dialogue in “Once” couldn’t be less confrontational; in fact, the Guy, played by real-life band leader (The Frames) Glen Hansard is tentative and clumsy with the spoken word -- far more articulate in song. The music itself is not my cup of tea, but I realize there are at least two generations of listeners who respond to the metallic sounds in a positive way. Hansard and Czech actress Marketa Irglova give low-key but deeply stirring performances.


8. GONE BABY GONE

Last year, it was “The Departed,” this year it’s “Gone Baby Gone” striking a bulls eye hit on the peculiar brand of tight-knit, tough-turf mentality that pervades the teeming blue-collar neighborhoods of Boston that stand in stark contrast in the shadow of the city’s glistening towers of world-class commerce and luxury living. These are enclaves often defined by the Catholic parish that anchors them, white ghettos of surly streets where men are boys and women are men, and from where law enforcement agencies recruit working-class sons and daughters with a yen to rise from ordinariness and get a leg up on the system that once subdued them, by hook or by crook.

Ben Affleck knows the terrain well, his little brother Casey maybe even better. They hung out in the pubs of Southie, Ch”ahl”estown, and “Daw”chester before their higher callings, still do to reconnect with buds during visits home. And together they made one of the year’s grittiest, most galvanizing, location-authentic films, with Ben in the director’s chair for the first time and Casey getting the long overdue meaty role he could really sink his chops into. As former street tough turned private eye, Casey’s character Patrick Kenzie and his girlfriend Angie work in tandem and at high risk to piece together the puzzle of a child abduction, having to sift through contradictory accounts from a noxious assortment of disreputables and degenerates, including the child’s own trash-talking mother from hell (a powerhouse performance by Amy Ryan).

“Gone Baby Gone” is a toxic morass of gross mendacity, and by the time the nastiness plays out, only four characters remain unimpeachable, and the plainspoken, principled Kenzie is left to contemplate whether doing the right thing is always the right thing to do.

9. KNOCKED UP

After getting through “Mr. Brooks,” which I paid to see, I surreptitiously adjourned to another multiplex auditorium to catch a few frames of “Knocked Up,” just to judge for myself what the critical buzz was all about, figuring I’d only be able to stomach 15 minutes max of what passes for humor in the Judd Apatow realm. Surprise, surprise. This movie starts out as a crude, rude yarn about a salacious slacker shlob named Ben (Seth Rogen) -- an indolent klutz who rooms with a bunch of equally feckless penis-driven stoners with hazy dreams of internet entrepreneurship -- who meets the stylish shiksa stunner of his jerk-off fantasies, Alison (Katherine Heighl) at a singles hangout one night. They dance, chat each other up, get hammered, go back to her place and copulate without benefit of condom.

The next time they meet is when she summons him to announce she’s pregnant and intends to have the kid. It is at this point that “Knocked Up” takes a sharp turn from raunchy giggles and becomes a fresh, frank, and richly observant story about a mismatched pair embarking on the rocky adventure of getting to know themselves as well as each other. Along the way, there are flare-ups and setbacks, but also a gradual reordering of priorities and values and a warming toward and accommodation of each other’s differences. I like to think that the film’s humanist revelations, stirring and gratifying to the keen observer, were not lost on the legions who showed up looking only for libidinous laughs.



10. LARS AND THE REAL GIRL

How to make a movie with a queasy premise go down palatably with its audience. Director Craig Gillespie and lead actor Ryan Gosling -- remarkably, resourcefully -- got it just right in “Lars and the Real Girl,” all about a gentle, amiable, well-meaning 27-year-old social retard who becomes romantically involved with a life-size, anatomically correct, mail-order doll named Bianca he’s purchased on the internet -- presumably because she doesn’t make demands he can’t meet. Lars is dead serious about his doll, but Gosling shades his ardor with a soothing lilt in his voice and a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. This is not a gag, but neither is it a test of anyone’s yuck tolerance. Lars’s brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer) get him to see a psychologist (Patricia Clarkson), who calms their alarm by diagnosing Lars’s bizarre fantasy as a temporary way of sorting through his innate social clumsiness and fear of intimacy. She urges indulgence, support, and the provision of safe space, and before long, just about everyone in their tiny, upper midwest community is rallying around the unique couple.

In what is no small miracle of moviemaking, Gillespie and his cast have crafted a film that avoids the opposing extremes of comic hokum and clinical case study, keeping the psycho babble to a minimum and the diagnostic implications ambiguous. Even when Lars arrives at a reality checkpoint and goes through a process of self-discovery, Gillespie and Gosling keep the hand-wringing to a minimum, and warmheartedness prevails.

11. MICHAEL CLAYTON

This compelling and disturbing film is essentially about people whose lives are running off the rails because they muck around in corporate subterfuges and hate themselves for doing so. It deals with the moral mindlessness, the lapses in ethical judgment that creep into job performance when all that glitters are billable hours, the preservation of company image, and the glory and rewards of finishing on the winning side, conscience be damned.

Michael Clayton (George Clooney at his most earnest to date) is his law firm’s “fixer,” a well-paid niche player called in to rescue cases in danger of slipping away. He jumps into the fray when Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) has a crisis of conscience over continuing to defend an agrochemical company accused of manufacturing a weed killer that is as lethal to humans. When Edens melts down and acts out, Clayton is rushed in to pull him together and get the defense case back on track. But he also has to contend with gambling losses, family conflicts, and the agrochemical company’s in-house counsel, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), a fearsome ice princess thoroughly disassociated from issues of morality.

While Clooney turns in his most fully invested performance to date, it’s UK imports Swinton and Wilkinson who steal this film’s thunder.

12. RESCUE DAWN

What does Christian Bale have to do to earn an Academy Award nomination -- die? When an interviewer asked Matt Damon last summer how he felt about being shut out of the 2006 Oscar sweepstakes despite high-profile turns in “The Departed” and “The Good Shepherd,” he modestly diverted the question to amazement at how Christian Bale’s performances in “The Prestige” and “Harsh Times” could have been overlooked by the Academy. I couldn’t agree more, and now this year, the handsome Welshman, twice demonstrating his uncanny ability to play American right down to the distinctive mannerisms, in “Rescue Dawn” and “3:10 to Yuma,” has again been ignored by Oscar voters. There is no justice.

With unfailing instincts,” Bale plays the gutsy, quirky Dieter Dengler, an American navy pilot shot down on a secret mission over Laos during the early stages of U. S. military involvement in Southeast Asia in the 1960’s. Dengler was a freewheeling spirit, with a screw just loose enough to make him indomitable. This was a grueling shoot that required Bale to shed 50 pounds, submit to quasi-sadistic director Werner Herzog’s real-life rigors of hell in the jungles of Thailand, and even consume a bowl of wriggling maggots -- for real.

The account of Dengler’s capture and brutal imprisonment by either the Pathet Lao or the Viet Cong operating in Laos, and his subsequent valorous escape with fellow inmate Duane (a transfixing performance by Steve Zahn) was an endurance test for the two actors and is an assault on the sensibilities of the audience.


A host of films that failed to make the cut but are eminently watchable and feature one or more exceptional acting performances -- in no particular order: “Away from Her,” “The Kite Runner,” “Into the Wild,” “Juno,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” “No Country for Old Men,” “A Mighty Heart”, “The Savages,” “3:10 to Yuma,” “The Namesake,” “Talk to Me,” “Becoming Jane,” and “Breach”. “For sheer feel-good entertainment value, combined with good writing and excellent production values: “Across the Universe,” “The Valet,” “P. S. I Love You,” “Death at a Funeral,” “and “Enchanted”.

These 30 movies should keep you busy with NetFlix or your local DVD rental outlet for a good part of 2008.

And now for my acting and directing nominees. An asterisk denotes my first choice.

Best Leading Actress Nominees

Marion Cotillard* - “La Vie en Rose”
Angelina Jolie - “A Mighty Heart”
Julie Christie - “Away from Her”
Laura Linney - “The Savages”
Ellen Page - “Juno”

Best Leading Actor Nominees

Daniel Day-Lewis* - “There Will Be Blood”
Tommy Lee Jones - “In the Valley of Elah”
Philip Seymour Hoffman - “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”/
“The Savages”
Christian Bale - “Rescue Dawn”
James McAvoy - “Atonement”

Best Supporting Actress Nominees

Amy Ryan* - “Gone Baby Gone”
Susan Sarandon - “In the Valley of Elah”
Tilda Swinton - “Michael Clayton
Emily Mortimer - “Lars and the Real Girl”
Saoirse Ronan - “Atonement”

Best Supporting Actor Nominees

Hal Holbrook* - “Into the Wild”
Javier Bardem - “No Country for Old Men”
Rolf Lassgard - “After the Wedding”
Tom Wilkinson - “Michael Clayton”
Paul Dano - “There Will Be Blood”

Best Director

Paul Haggis* - “In the Valley of Elah”
Paul Thomas Anderson - “There Will Be Blood”
Tony Gilroy - “Michael Clayton”
Joe Wright - “Atonement”
Craig Gillespie - “Lars and the Real Girl”