info-fetishist

my personal best-movies-of-2007 list

Every year, Shaun and I sit down in a pub after the last movie we see in the year and make our personal top 5 lists.  The only rule is that we had to see the movie, in the theater, in that calendar year. So we usually end up with some movies that were officially released the year before.  This was my list this year, in the order in which we saw the films:

Children of Men
Volver
Persepolis
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
I'm Not There

Children of Men was actually the first movie we saw in 2007. When we left the theater that day, Shaun said that he wouldn't be surprised if it didn't end up being the best movie he saw all year. Because we usually get a bunch of critically acclaimed or Oscar-bait movies opening down here in January, it's not unheard of that the first movie we see holds up.  This year we're going to be seeing Charlie Wilson's War first, though, and I doubt that that will be on my end of the year list.  Maybe - but I kind of hope not.

This was kind of an unusual year in that we ended up seeing a lot of good movies, but we didn't have that "big movie that everyone must see" experience.  I have two movies on my list that I really, really liked, but they're the kind of movies I would be very careful about recommending to others (Jesse James, and I'm Not There). It's not weird for me to have one movie on my list like that, or to have a movie that I don't recommend because of something like violence, but not movies like this that I love a lot but that I know many people I like, and whose taste I respect, wouldn't really like at all.

This was also an odd year because we went to the Toronto Film Festival. A third movie on my list, Persepolis, hasn't even opened here yet so I couldn't recommend it to anyone even if I wanted to.  As a matter of fact, the last decision I had to make for this list ended up being between My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin's deeply idiosyncratic and personal "documentary" about his hometown, and Persepolis. One of the things that made that choice so hard was trying to tease out the impact that the movie had on me apart from the experience of seeing it in the same room as the filmmaker (and in the case of My Winnipeg, seeing it performed in part by the filmmaker).

One of my favorite movie experiences of the last year was seeing Chats Perches, because of the way it brought back My Winnipeg for me.  I saw  on DVD as part of the Tournees Film Festival at Western Oregon -- so it can't qualify for this list -- but the juxtaposition of these two movies -- one deeply personal, psychological and autobiographical/ the other deeply personal and set against a huge geopolitical backdrop -- was really powerful.  Both movies are visually very personal and individual; both movies are essentially (or in the case of Maddin, actually) read to you by the filmmaker. I wouldn't have expected at the beginning of this year to see movies that would make me spend a couple of days thinking about Winnipeg and Paris, together, but I did and it was awesome.

Here's the full list of films we saw in the theater in 2007:

Children of Men
Curse of the Golden Flower
Pan's Labyrinth
The Last King of Scotland
Volver
Zodiac
Breach
The Lookout
The Namesake
Waitress
The TV Set
Ocean's 13
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Nancy Drew
Once
You Kill Me
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Bourne Ultimatum
Talk to Me
Persepolis
Hollywood Chinese
My Winnipeg
Chansons d'Amour
Vexille
3:10 to Yuma
Michael Clayton
Gone Baby Gone
The Darjeeling Limited
American Gangster
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
No Country for Old Men
I'm Not There
Lars and the Real Girl
Sweeney Todd

ETA:  The cat above is an example of the cats featured in Chats Perches.

Edited again to add: Shaun's list is available now.

YouTube & me

The Royal Family apparently started a YouTube channel about two months ago, but I don't think many people over here noticed it until it came time for the Queen's annual Christmas message.  At least, I don't remember seeing anything about it two months ago, but I've seen it mentioned on three or four blogs this week.

I'm trying to figure out why I think this is such a good idea.  If the Bush Administration suddenly started a YouTube channel, I wouldn't think anything good about it.  And I don't think that's entirely partisan.  I don't see myself watching 20 minutes of old Clinton home movies on the morning after Christmas either.  But this morning, that's what I found myself doing with the Royal Channel.  An old movie depicting events from the death of King George to Elizabeth's coronation, followed by a silent movie about the Queen Mother's wedding and all of a sudden it was 20 minutes later.

Interestingly, they've disabled embedding.

I think there's some aspect of admiration for whoever in the Royal Household had the idea of putting video proof of charitable acts and royal family events out "where the people are," to use that tired phrase -- but I don't think that by itself explains why I'm taken with this idea.  I think that combined with the kind of information the royal family has available to broadcast in this way -- those old videos, the historical stuff -- is what makes this seem right to me.  Most of the time that's where I end up losing time on YouTube.  Thirty minutes searching for Mario Savio talking about the machine, two hours of old Olympic coverage.  This is where my actual time has actually gone in the last year.

So that leads me to the question - is this just the historian in me?  Am I taken with the royal family channel because it's way to see historical artifacts I wouldn't otherwise easily see?  Or is this a more objectively cool example of the right medium for the right message?

Hmmmm.....