BC Magazine's Best Films of 2007
Published January 02, 2008
moviejohn: Lars And The Real Girl
To make a movie this sweet, innocent, and touching about a man who believes he is having a real relationship with a life-sized love doll is some kind of a miracle. Another terrific performance by Ryan Gosling, making a U-turn from last year’s brilliant one in Half Nelson, anchors this story of a man whose deep loneliness is nursed with bottomless generosity by the entire town that loves him.
Lars And The Real Girl is the kind of movie that gives me hope that life need not be lived as jaded as most people think and gets me to embrace once again the positive side of humanity we can all aspire to. Other great films have treated their everyday world with admirable austerity but this movie dares me to believe in a level beyond it.
Sombrero Grande: Ratatouille
Ratatouille ranks among Pixar's best films, and with a catalog like Pixar's that's really saying something. In Ratatouille, Pixar served up a fresh and new multi-layered story, chock full of engrossing performances (both vocal and animated) and coated with a lustrous eye-catching glaze that actually managed to achieve tasty-looking CGI food!
The climactic moment of the film comes down to a very tiny thing — the mere tasting of an item — yet the result is so simply, brilliantly and elegantly executed that it actually brought a tear to my eye and proved to be the single most memorable cinematic moment of the year for me. While it may not ensnare the attention of small kids as easily as Finding Nemo or Cars, like Ratatouille's writer/director Brad Bird's other Pixar film, The Incredibles, this story skews older and is targeted more to the adult kids-at-heart in the audience than the little rugrats. This is one to savor with or without kids around.
Here's hoping that 2008 yields another bumper crop of good movies.
Many thanks to the writers who contributed to this article, and many thanks to the writers (and readers) who keep BC Film hopping all year long — a happy new year to all!
- BC Magazine's Best Films of 2007
- Published: January 02, 2008
- Type: News
- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: Film and TV Business, Video: News
- Writer: Lisa McKay
- Lisa McKay's BC Writer page
- Lisa McKay's personal site
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No apologies necessary.
I'll take both Blood and Old Men over I'm Not There. Although the Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale parts were fantastic, the rest of the movie was boring and forgettable. After reading your article, it sounds like the previous two are not overrated, but rather thematically unsatisfying to you. Most of the praise stems from the performances which you acknowledge are warranted.
(btw, The Departed was not one of the best of '06. It had some good scenes, particularly when Wahlberg and Baldwin were in them, but Nicholson was terrible in his hammy performance, and the script was unbelievable. How could Costello not figure out that the new guy was the mole? The film falls apart on repeated viewings.)
Simple sure, but what was dumb about 300? Best action film I saw. You want dumb, the two worst films of the year were Smokin' Aces and Waitress. Shoot 'Em Up was pretty bad as well.
I agree about Waitress, although it showed up on Time magazine's top 10. I could only get through the first 20 minutes of the DVD and back it went to Netflix. Life is too short.
I avoid most movies I know I'll hate, so my list of dumbest movies is very incomplete. I went to see 300 in Imax out of curiosity. It's certainly the dumbest Imax movie of the year. But it's not uninteresting to look at.
"Most Overrated" doesn't mean worst, just that those two films [T.W.B. Blood and N.C.F. Old Men] have been praised to high heaven. I believe there will be others like myself who find them too heavy to be entertaining, and too steeped in shallow nihilism to succeed as art, despite the talent involved. The Anderson film in particular will not play in Peoria. [But neither did Citizen Kane, so what do I know.]
The two worst films of the year were Good Luck Chuck and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Shoot 'Em Up at least knew what it was doing and presented itself in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion, making it a send-up of action films. It also had some really rich satire tucked in it, so I'm not really buying it as a bad film.
No Atonement mention? For my money, that's the finest film of the year.
I really liked No Country For Old Men - up until the ending. It was rather bizarre, to say the least. The funny thing is, it actually made me think about it for the next few days - and, upon further review, I was rather impressed by the film's "outside of the box" approach ...in the end.
Most underappreciated film:
The Bourne Ultimatum
Add your comment, speak your mind
(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/72538)
I would add:
Zodiac
Across the Universe
I'm Not There
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The Bourne Ultimatum
And the documentaries
Lake of Fire
The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-65
And [sorry, El Bicho], worst [well, maybe just dumbest] movie of the young century:
300
Most overrated:
The Lives of Others
There Will Be Blood
No Country for Old Men