Bastard in a basket!

From now on, The Film Vault will be online-only. I don't write for the Independent any more, for the simple reason that I don't go to Purchase any more. I graduated.

I'm currently writing this from the Purchase College library. As of January 7th, I've essentially been homeless: most of my things are in a storage locker in Port Chester while I've been living out of a suitcase and sleeping on friends' spare beds and couches, from Bronxville to Long Island and now back at Purchase since school is in session again. I haven't found a job yet and most landlords are wary of renting rooms to unemployed young people, so it looks like I may be That Guy--the one who's constantly on campus despite no longer being a student--indefinitely.

I actually made a video as my senior project. I've given out over 20 DVDs already and it looks like I may have to burn more copies; the demand was higher than I'd anticipated, considering it's 55 minutes long and not many people have seen my previous video work. The response has by far been favorable over all, with much praise in particular for the editing and cinematography (my default picture here is a still taken from my project). Thus far, I've heard from people who've seen it that it reminds them of such directors as David Lynch, Werner Herzog, and Ingmar Bergman. Eventually, when I have access to editing software again, I'm going to cut it up and post it to YouTube and MySpace. It's good to know I can watch some craptastic film and be able to say, in complete honesty, that I could make a better movie than that, considering I already did.

At some point soon, I'll make a post regarding all the behind-the-scenes bullshit that occurred in the making of my video, which probably won't make much sense or have much interest for random internet people who happen to come across this page with no way to actually watch the video itself (yet). For now, I'll discuss movies other people made in 2007: moving pictures which, unlike mine, were actually released in theatres and made their creators some amount of money.

Yes, it's that old (and by this time, rather belated) cliché of the end-of-the-year movie list. I can't even call it a top ten list because as far as I can recall, I only saw ten movies that came out in 2007: there was a slew of others I wanted to see, but movies are expensive and I preferred to save my pennies for movies I was pretty sure I would definitely like. Almost half of them were screened at Harlan Jacobson's Talk Cinema at Purchase's Performing Arts Center since tickets were only $5 for students. These are ranked in rough order of how much I liked them.

1) There Will Be Blood

Hands-down best movie of 2007.

I was, as always, skeptical when reading the glowing reviews beforehand: even the best movies often have some nagging flaw, or are overhyped into being underwhelming. The only film of P.T. Anderson's I'd seen previously was Punch-Drunk Love, and while I liked it--Adam Sandler's obnoxious man-child persona was transported to some semblance of the real world and naturally came off as psychologically disordered--I didn't equate its director with the production of Great Films. Besides, isn't that title incidentally a quote from one of the Saw movies? I expected it would probably be good, but not that good; very few films are actually that good.

There Will Be Blood is that good.

There's Daniel Day-Lewis's performance: with his oil-encrusted fingers, strong profile, brushlike moustache, and gruff-yet-gentle voice with peculiar and antiquated diction, he actually looks and sounds the way one might imagine of a turn-of-the-20th-century oil prospector, rather than a 21st-century attempt to imitate a turn-of-the-20th-century oil prospector. (Think of, say, a movie made in the 1940s about life in the 1890s, how its choice of costumes and sets, its conceptions of beautiful women and handsome men, even the way the actors enunciate their lines, clearly mark it as a product of the 1940s, and how a film made even twenty years later is going to have a radically different aesthetic interpretation of the 1890s that still, nonetheless, marks it as a product of its own era.)

There's Jonny Greenwood's score, especially with the taut, ominous string sections that one might expect from a horror film. I was glad to note the absence of quaint, generic banjo and acoustic guitar music many directors might be tempted to use in scoring a film set on the Western frontier.

There's the cinematography: the burning oil well alone is as beautiful as anything in Herzog's Lessons of Darkness.

And then, of course, there's the plot itself, the Citizen Kane-like story of a man who loses his humanity as he gains power and wealth. His relationship toward his son is clearly loving, yet deeply flawed and refreshingly unsentimentalized; the children in this movie are actually portrayed as human beings with inner lives of their own rather than idealized Darling Little Things for adults (in the film and the audience) to want to protect and coo over. His power struggle with a local adolescent preacher and would-be faith healer--himself a charlatan, albeit an extremely devout one--condemns both the former's sardonic atheism and the latter's smug righteousness and self-assurance without ridiculing the staunchly-believing townspeople (as an atheist myself, it annoys me when films hold black-and-white opinions about religion in either direction). Some people didn't like the ending, but I thought it made sense for his character, an ultimate rejection of everyone and everything who led him to that lonely mansion years ago.

This movie stayed in my head for a long time after I watched it, which happens rarely enough; maybe I'll notice more flaws the next time I see it, but it definitely ranks among my favorites, and not just of 2007. If it doesn't win the Oscar for Best Picture I will be sorely disappointed (though the Oscars don't mean as much as they used to: Crash over Brokeback Mountain?), but a little less so if loses out to:

2) No Country For Old Men

This would be the hands-down best film of 2007 if There Will Be Blood weren't around. The Coens were already among my favorite directors and No Country ranks among their best work, with its quiet-yet-involving and constantly-more-entangled plot that essentially begins with the accidental discovery of drug smugglers' bloody corpses and the briefcase full of money they died trying to obtain. Throughout the movie, many more will die for that wad of cash--like a darker Fargo, with all of its accidental or impulsive murders ending with Steve Buscemi in a wood chipper for "a little bit of money," as Frances McDormand says--through the efforts of the most memorable character, Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, a coldly-charismatic hired killer in a Prince Valiant pageboy.

This ending was more widely reviled than There Will Be Blood's, perceived as a "non-ending"--a woman at the theatre sitting near me was heard to mutter, "Um, okay?" when the credits began to roll--because it doesn't go out with a bang (I mean, aside from all the people who get shot throughout the film) or offer secure Hollywood closure. Yes, just like real life, sometimes the "bad guy" gets away, and sometimes it's after killing a "good guy" or two, and sometimes other "good guys" realize certain truths about human nature that they cannot change.


Okay, I was going to review all ten in one post, but this is getting pretty long and time-consuming and I've got Craigslisting to do. Look for part two, starting with Sweeney Todd, at some point whenever I feel like it.