Best of 2007: At the movies, having the time of your life

Originally posted December 28, 2007:

Top 10

1. "No Country for Old Men"
2. "I'm Not There"
3. "A Mighty Heart"
4. "Killer of Sheep"
5. "This Is England"
6. "51 Birch Street"
7. "Once"
8. "Away From Her"
9. "The Astronaut Farmer"
10. "Talk to Me"

It would be so easy for me to blame the "Idiocracy."

Mike Judge's frustrating look at our bleak future was sneaked into a few theaters in fall 2006 (where it earned less than $500,000) and then dumped off to DVD release this past January. While Albuquerque's homegrown idiot savant didn't match the manic brilliance of 1999's "Office Space," the futuristic slapstick of "Idiocracy" had just enough nuggets of truth about a world bled of dignity and culture that the easy laughs belie an unsettling message.

That's how I started my movie year, and as you might have heard, this annus horribilis is ending with an execution - a shot from an air-powered cattle gun straight to the cerebral cortex of a newspaper, an industry, a career. They did warn us "There Will Be Blood."

If the future, rendered in cartoon form in "Idiocracy," is a depressing world to visit, then maybe I can be forgiven if most of the movies on my top-10 list tossed me back into the past. I like to think of it not as a retreat (that would be defeatist) but rather a re-examination (more therapeutic, like on an HBO series).

On back-to-back days I saw the equally brilliant "I'm Not There" and "No Country for Old Men," which bookended my childhood experience, respectively, from the mid-1960s to the dawn of Reagan.

"I'm Not There" is less about Bob Dylan than it is about the rest of us and how we (journalists, especially) like to pigeonhole; how we build people up just to knock them down; how we insist they fit our formula. The movie begins and ends with that steady, rambling freight train leading us both forward in time and back. It takes a Midwest boy on a journey, to the big city out east as well as to the Old West, into the future and through the past.

"I'm Not There" is Todd Haynes' most fully realized film, reminding me of the equally offbeat "Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," in which Wes Anderson perfected his vision and was a maestro in the zone. (Anderson's offering this year, "The Darjeeling Limited," deserves another viewing, and I might wish a few months hence that I'd put it in my top 10.)

"No Country for Old Men," the best film Joel and Ethan Coen have made, took us back to 1980 and to the brink of a new era. Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff ached with the realization that the world he came of age in no longer needed him around and that our ultimate fate is obsolescence. Those meandering final 20 minutes magically capture the onset of such aimlessness.

For me, adrift in my analog world, I watched a neighborhood video store succumb to the times, and I gave in to Netflix. But I refuse to shrink with the times.

Odds are movie theaters, if not newspapers, will last as long as I do. And it was often in sparsely attended matinee screenings that I did my time travel this year:

I was moved to tears by Don Cheadle as a DJ at the unraveling in the 1960s ("Talk to Me") and by -- it's excruciating to admit it -- Adam Sandler having a meltdown after losing his family in the 9/11 attacks ("Reign Over Me").

The other 9/11 film, "A Mighty Heart," made me glad I had skipped the Daniel Pearl headlines five years ago and instead waited for Michael Winterbottom to devastate me with the story.

"This Is England" also slugged me in the chest with its stark depiction of brutal boys bonding in Maggie Thatcher's England. (It's often no country for young men, either.)

"The Hoax" was a hoot as it celebrated the '70s, and "Charlie Wilson's War" had a similar dark revelry, sharpened by Aaron Sorkin's ebullient script.

"51 Birch Street," a near-perfect documentary about a postwar couple yearning to be themselves, captured the evolution of a culture and a mind-set.

The sweet films "Once" and "The Astronaut Farmer," while set in the present day, were clearly throwbacks to another era, with the talented Polish brothers paying homage to Frank Capra in the latter.

"Fido," the most unexpected joy of the year, was a sly spoof of Eisenhower-era boy-and-his-dog sappiness that made me glad I didn't come along until after the '50s.

And then there was a film literally made 30 years ago: "Killer of Sheep." Charles Burnett's minimalist masterpiece defies description (Cassavetes meets "Good Times"?) and could fill a semester's film class. To watch a man and his wife slow-dance to Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth" is to witness time standing still, with molecules fizzing into the ether like soda-pop bubbles.

My descent into the past extended to the small screen, as I got lost in the world of "Mad Men," the series about Madison Avenue brutes at the dawn of the 1960s. In fact, this year I found some of the most powerful drama on cable TV, of all places.

It felt like my year didn't truly begin until the final season of "The Sopranos" did in the spring, and 2007 didn't feel complete until last week when I finally watched the last episode of another HBO show, "Tell Me You Love Me."

When asked to name my favorite movie of all time I say "The Decalogue" by Krzysztof Kieslowski. That 10-part gem was made for Polish TV in 1989 and 1990 before making it to U.S. theaters.

"Tell Me You Love Me," which was dismissed early on because of its explicit sex, offered 10 chapters that often did for romantic relationships what "The Decalogue" did for human interaction and spirituality. The examination of four couples was a tour de force from Cynthia Mort, whose previous claim to fame was being a writer and producer on "Roseanne," one of my occasional guilty pleasures from the 1990s.

"Tell Me You Love Me" was short for a TV series, but, of course, like "The Decalogue," you can savor it like an epic film. With its slow, European pacing and long takes, it offered something too often missing from the movies this year: real life in real time.

I can't tell you how many times I nodded my head uneasily and felt like Mort had tapped my phone lines to come up with dialogue or simply was reading my mind. Once everything clicked on Episode 4, I felt like I was ensconced in expert French cinema.

It was a mixed-up year like that, in which foreign films barely registered. I loved "12:08 East of Bucharest" and caught up with last year's indie favorite, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" - both from Romania. And I wish I'd made it up to Santa Fe in time to see Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days," which is likely to cap its yearlong awards run with a foreign-language Oscar, probably around the time it opens in Albuquerque.

The most foreign of films to nearly crack my top 10 was as American as the French could be: "2 Days in Paris," Julie Delpy's sharp examination of (what else?) a relationship being torn apart by mistrust and denial.

Then again, I found Julian Schnabel's elegiac "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" to be too French - beautiful women will continue to dote on a jerk and fight over him even when he's immobilized.

On the other end of the spectrum, Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" struck me as insufferably American. It's a panoramic travelogue (mawkishly so) that somehow hammers most of the humanity out of a fundamentally human story. (Of course, it's a period piece, too, taking place in the early '90s.)

"Into the Wild" is about a college grad who shuns the modern world, abandons his family and returns to the earth - literally, as he outsmarts himself and starves to death in the Alaska wilderness, alone and yearning for the embrace of his parents.

As romantic and gloriously organic such a road trip might seem to a newsman losing his job, my itinerary this year was destined to be confined to time travel. Life itself is a journey (or maybe, in the end, just a Journey song, as "The Sopranos" suggested), and it's that fourth dimension that opens up exponential avenues and possibilities.

Time goes both ways, forward and back, like a pendulum.

"Age will flatten a man," Tommy Lee Jones laments in "No Country for Old Men."

Like a dutiful journalist, I wrote that line down in my notebook.

Age, though, also gives a man perspective. It reminds him where he's been. It gives him insight into what will come after him.

It puts him in his place.

***

Honorable mention: "The Darjeeling Limited," "You Kill Me," "Inland Empire," "The Italian," "The Hoax," "Reign Over Me," "Czech Dream," "The Black Book," "Year of the Dog," "Waitress," "2 Days in Paris," "Red Road," "Fido," "Police Beat," "Charlie Wilson's War"

Wish I'd seen: "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," "Into Great Silence," "Lars and the Real Girl," "Sunshine"

Best director: Michael Winterbottom, "A Mighty Heart"

Best actress: Cate Blanchett, "I'm Not There"

Best actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," "Charlie Wilson's War" (and probably "The Savages," too)