…having said that, tho, some things I do feel thusly qualified to call. Or at least self-indulgent enough to bother with.
2007 was quite a cinematic boon here at “Cut! No, no, no…”. ACMI continued its struggle t’wards right-headed programming, Our Cinematheque was almost overloaded with mouth-breathingly good times, and the Astor stayed in the hands of the largely righteous. Maybe it was April’s Michael Mann retrospective or something, but Melbourne’s darkened chambers of magic seemed bountiful indeed.
MIFF was, as always, ripe with wonderful things, and chief among its treasures was the retrospective of Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Japan’s most wonderful living director. Alongside his most recent work – the somewhat whimsical deconstructionist samurai film Hana – was 2001’s Distance, his austere comment on the 1995 Tokyo subway attacks that is as much about grief and survival and the painful memories inherent to both as it is an indictment of Japanese society’s disconnected fragmentation, as well as his unspeakably moving masterpiece After Life, a haunting and sublime meditation on death and cinema. A Shohei Imamura retrospective was also welcome, in particular his acclaimed Hiroshima tragedy Black Rain, his Cannes-winning death-on-the-mountain epic The Ballad Of Narayama, and his exceptional and disturbing Vengeance Is Mine, a true-crime procedural that, much like Fincher’s Zodiac, is about the ripples of damage felt by those caught up – and few were not - in an unrepentant though charismatic asshole’s murderous spree.
On either side of July/August’s annual pilgrimage there were pleasures both great and greater. The year’s opening half, while lighter on worthy works than its extraordinary complement, nonetheless produced a good many high-quality films - Soderbergh’s The Good German, with its use of period equipment to ape/homage said equipment’s era’s aesthetic, was the year’s most technically ambitious work (or was that Aronofsky’s dazzling epiphany The Fountain?). Melbourne homie Matthew Saville’s sonically brilliant Noise had all in earshot claiming an Australian cinema rebirth. De Niro’s splendid second directorial effort The Good Shepherd was a mainstream-cinema-released three hours of surprisingly subtle yet pointedly critical US political history. Esoteric experiments like the transcendental Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, the awesomely melancholic Daft-Punk-created Electroma, and the subtle Will Oldham-starring Old Joy enjoyed surprising cinema runs, while more publicised releases such as Pan’s Labyrinth and The Lives Of Others seemed to be spoken of as endlessly as their seasons were long.
The year’s end, however, provided much of 2007’s glory. Boxing Day alone was a genuine cine-nanza, with wonderful new works from Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes and the Bros. Coen on the same goddamn day. Ocean’s 13 proved that it is Hollywood’s only dependable true franchise, while similarly Paul Greengrass continued his Bloody Sunday -ing of the Bourne series with an alarming amount of success. The wonderfully wordy Sorkin-porn Michael Clayton was this year’s most aggressively verbose work, while the paper-thin comic fragility of Mike White’s vegan-ascension opus Year Of The Dog was only out-subtled by career-best lead Molly Shannon’s equally slender sincerity. Lagerfeld Confidential, a wonderful observational piece on Chanel bitch Karl Lagerfeld, was the year’s most surprisingly humane documentary, with naught but a kind ear in place of the usual anti-fashion-industry slagging, and if ACMI’s extensive Catherine Breillat retrospective wasn’t enough her wonderful new work An Old Mistress is one of her finest, an emotionally devastating depiction of weak wills and romantic ruin.
Indeed most of this year’s-best list were culled from either MIFF or later, and if to illustrate this so, even in the year’s dying breaths the also-released-on-Boxing-Day Atonement appeared from under the triumvirate of works from the afore-mentioned era-defining dudes (and from somewhere resembling the rear of anyone’s expectations) to claim for its bad self the honour of being possibly the most esoteric film in it’s competitive Xmas competition, and possibly in mainstream cinemas all year.
Some sadness: the loss of The Erwin Rado, MIFF’s personal screening room. The lovliest cinema in all of Melbourne, it also operated as a private cinema, often in the service of some wonderful film societies. Chief among them was the always lovely Metropolis, and one can only hope that both the Rado and the Metropolis crew find a new home. Projectionist extraordinnaire/proprietor Ross says “maybe”…hopefully more on that here sometime soon.
Out of the darkness and into some kind of daylight, there were DVD premieres that were worthy of note, and the onslaught of classic and worthy works getting a commentaried release abated none, but christ, this post has to end sometime.
To wit, I’ll tell you exactly how fascinating and memorable ‘08 was: an Australian film is not only amongst my year’s best – it was the best thing I saw all year.
And so, after the jump…
Today:
THE BEST FILMS OF 2007
10) The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford- Neither a typical deconstructionist Western nor a straight-up genre work, this lugubrious period piece/character study is overflowing with wonderful performances – notably ever-reliable genius Sam Rockwell and a jaw-dropping Casey Affleck - and is as visually dynamic as it is eloquent. The most directed film of the year, it benefits greatly from a script that is unendingly poetic, and also from perhaps the film’s finest performance – the tone-setting and moving narration of Hugh Ross.
9) Brand Upon The Brain!- Guy Maddin’s ongoing experiment with the actual substance of film and its malleable aesthetics is one of the most fun history lessons one could hope for. An hilarious psuedo-personal looking-glass of silent-era Soviet cinema, this is camp as hell, and maybe the most amount of fun a rigorous homage is allowed to be.
8) Honor De Cavalleria- By far the most challenging film of the year (the MIFF walkout king!), Albert Serra’s wonderfully rewarding interiority/exteriority epic re-reads almost behind the lines of Cervantes’ Don Quixote to create an unbelievably transcendental cinematic tone-poem; an tranquil magic-hour beauty that is as demanding and narratively austere as it is drenched in insight and sheer audio-visual rapture.
7) Into The Wild- Fulfilling the husky promise of his hearty-though-flawed earlier directorial efforts and then some, Sean Penn’s overwhelmingly moving tribute to/criticism of one man’s costly strive for purity in the decidedly un-suburban wilds of Alaska benefits greatly from the inclusion of Thoreau and Jack London, but more than succeeds on its own literate merits.
6) Half Nelson- Ignoring the myriad self-righteous and simple works that thematically and ideologically precede it, Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden’s piercing portrait of two modern American communities and what drugs mean to both avoids every pitfall in its path, and what could have become so much Sundance-bait is instead ambitious and urgent and compassionate, whilst also remaining resolutely unresolved and unapologetically complex.
5) No Country For Old Men- After the disappointment of Intolerable Cruelty and the sheer unadulterated horrors of the excruciating Ladykillers, the Bros. Coen prove no Woody Allen with this amazing return to form. Gruesome, intense, and full of melancholy, they convey McCarthy’s sense of existential world-weariness while amping up the menace to near-unbearable. Using its premise as a mere springboard for a generational commentary on an ever-changing and entropic world, it nonetheless wisely never forgets to be a genuine thriller, its shocking narrative machinations and arcs working in tandem with its unforgiving silence and its unsettlingly beautiful visual sumptuousness.
4) 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days- A gruelling realist work, Christian Mungiu’s amazing Dardenne-like abortion/Ceaucescu heartfuck transcends its possible miserabilism by being largely about context, and emerges as simultaneously political, social, and psychological, whilst never allowing Anamaria Marinca’s intensely personal characterisation to encase anything larger than her singular internal landscape.
3) I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone- Tsai Ming-Liang is possibly the most renowned director of film-as-art in the world right now, and this serene and intense “tale” of unrequited love will certainly not be his fall from lofty grace. Both his most touching film and his most rigorously composed mise-en-scene yet, its awesomely dense imagery is the purest of cinema; a divine epic that says so so much more with each frame than most things ever will.
2) The Science Of Sleep- At once somehow the least romantic film of the year and indeed the most romantic film of the year, this uber-personal tale of a very contemporary man-child and his ‘intrigue romanesque(s)’ is the very embodiment of Michel Gondry’s entire body of work. A complexly ornate work, it is as much an ode to creativity itself as it is a heart-breaking/-warming weave of unabashed sentiment and twirly-whirly dream-logic.
1) Corroboree- After delivering one of the most ridiculously presumptuous and self-confident introductory speeches in MIFF history, directorial debutant Ben Hackworth left the stage. Who knew he was being honest? So easily my favourite film this year, it is so many great things that this paragraph could not contain the superlative rain. A rumination on art, on meaning, on performance and identity and the conflict between the disconnectedness of everything and the inerconnectedness of same, it’s perhaps the finest film about death since Death In Venice, and the best film ever made in this country.
