SuicideGirls' Top Ten Films of 2007

By Ryan Stewart


It was a crowded, cut-throat year in which audiences were ready to say good riddance to entire subgenres of film -- good luck in 2008, torture porn and Iraq-guilt movies! -- as well as a year in which the increasing omnipresence of a cohesive, online movie media and the rapidly-shrinking, theater-DVD window began to radically change old ways of distributing and marketing films. In this atmosphere of uncertainty it was, surprisingly, the old lions of cinema who made the biggest collective stand, delivering several well-crafted films of singular vision that echoed the most daring work of their early years. Directors such as Paul Verhoeven, William Friedkin and Tim Burton were firing on all cylinders in 2007, while younger filmmakers such as Joe Wright and Paul Thomas Anderson continued to establish themselves as the masters of today's generation. Wright especially, with only two films under his belt, is showing himself to be as preternaturally skilled in the art of filmmaking as Stanley Kubrick.

It was a poor year for actresses -- Oscar bean-counters are scratching their heads over who deserves accolades -- and a bad year for counting on audiences to indulge risk-taking, as the makers of Grindhouse found out. It was an exceptional year for Westerns, as is any year in which more than one is actually released. It was also a year that christened many new stars in front of the camera and behind -- Diablo Cody, Carice van Houten and Tim Olyphant were among those who burst onto the main stage in 2007 and are unlikely to leave it. Creating a list that recognizes the best of the best in this year's movies is no easy task. But here goes...



1. Atonement

A single word, unimaginably dirty and out of place for upper-crust 1935 England, accidentally enters the mind of an innocent child and together, the word and the child form a virus that wrecks several lives. Thirty five-year-old Joe Wright has created an unlikely masterwork from Ian McEwan's acclaimed, complex novel about a little girl's mistake that causes a chain reaction of tragedy and leaves her with a lifetime of overwhelming shame and a powerful urge to put things right again, in any way possible. Wright's ice-cold precision as a filmmaker, his deliberate and attention-grabbing shot compositions and his innate understanding of how to move and even gut-punch an audience make him one of the most formidable directors of his generation. Atonement is the best screen romance since David Lean's 1945 classic Brief Encounter.


2. Black Book

Paul Verhoeven's childhood experiences of war were followed by a lifetime lost in the dreams of cinema, and those two seas of memory come crashing together in the Dutch master's very best movie. I call it a movie deliberately -- with echoes of John Sturges and a dozen other influences, this is a smashing, thrilling adventure story about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Holland who comes to realize that safety is only for those who join the resistance. Her black hair dyed platinum blonde, her fear swallowed, Rachel transforms herself into a Nazi bed-hopper and a daring spy. Carice van Houten is, at the very least, the find of the decade -- she may be the best new face since Garbo. Note that this small film was enough to land her her next two projects, starring opposite Tom Cruise in Valkyrie and Leo DiCaprio in Body of Lies. She's the real deal.


3. There Will Be Blood

During a candid moment late in this film, early California oilman Daniel Plainview expresses his personal philosophy, "I don't like most people. I want to earn enough money to get away from them." It's that last part, the implied promise that once he has his own security, he'll go away and stop siphoning off the resources of the poor and the credulous, that somehow sets him up as possibly morally superior to his religious alter-ego, Eli Sunday, a shameless evangelical charlatan with no such insights into his own black heart. Two of America's founding lynchpins, big business and big religion, are treated to their own masterfully-observed dual biopics in this, a huge but welcome departure for cinematic showman and iconoclast P.T. Anderson. The childish quarrel between Plainview and Sunday over who is the more righteous conman gets more depressing and soul-sucking by the minute and before it's all over, see title.


4. Days of Darkness

The sexual fantasies of men, a subject often mined for comedy in the movies, is given a serious and thorough examination in Days of Darkness. This incredible French-Canadian film comes from Denys Arcand and follows a Walter Mitty type in his late 40s whose declining libido and increasingly chaotic fantasy life seem to portend the coming of old age and death. Is the tendency to fantasize a kind of inborn optimism -- a method of constantly visualizing best-case scenarios? When elaborate sexual fantasies can no longer bloom in the mind, when there's no longer an ideal for a man to seek out (in vain or not) is that nature's way of telling him it's time to die? This film certainly thinks so. Days of Darkness has serious things to say about growing old, the boundaries of make-believe, resigning yourself to reality, and what constitutes happiness -- it's a must-see for serious film lovers.


5. Bug

There have been movies before about two people who were "wrong for each other" but not like this. Agnes, a small-town waitress who has been emotionally frozen since her son disappeared out of a grocery cart years ago, has the cosmically bad luck to run into Peter, a drifter who turns out to be a psychically damaged drug fiend with yarns to spin about military experiments gone awry and complaints of bugs crawling beneath his skin. Somehow these two people unlock the deepest self of each other, and they pass one lonesome night by doing drugs and trading sad stories, all while an underlying tension hums ever louder. William Friedkin's Bug offers amazing insights into how emotional vulnerability can impair judgment and make you participate in another person's delusions. Ashley Judd, always something of a green-screen actress without the green-screen, finds her perfect niche here as a woman who walks around blind to reality.


6. The Nines

This clever little magician's box of a movie, unfairly overlooked on its opening, was made for a song but entertains more than any ten blockbusters. A meditation on the nature of reality set in the land of unreality, L.A., the film honeycombs its way through three overlapping and intersecting stories, each starring Ryan Reynolds as a different character -- a popular actor, a reality TV showrunner and a video game developer -- all of them struggling through a personal crisis. Also, each of these characters may ultimately be the same character, in the sense of being a vessel for a mischievous God who is body-hopping in order to get a ground-level view of what the hell is happening on Earth, to the consternation of two opposing angels. There's also a conspiracy involving koala bears who control the planet's weather, but I need to see it again before I get that deep into it.


7. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Andrew Dominik's strange and beautifully sleepy hagiography of notorious outlaw Jesse James contains some of Brad Pitt's best work. Portraying James at a hard-lived 34 years, with greasy black hair and the penetrating eyes of a snake, Pitt gives a performance that sometimes borders on the anachronistic -- I doubt Jesse James exhibited that peculiarly modern strain of anti-social madness -- but the character works on its own level, as an object of simultaneous revulsion and adulation for the spindly loser Robert Ford, a third-tier hanger-on who ultimately shoots James from behind while he's dusting a picture on the wall. A late scene, of Ford and his equally worthless brother Charley earing a living by enacting the assassination on stage for the public, takes on chilling dimensions when the dead Jesse James seems to somehow move the spirit of Charley towards not wanting to play the victim any more.


8. It's a Free World

Everyone has the right to earn a living, right? Ken Loach's excellent London-based drama shoots holes in that assertion from multiple vantage points. Angie, a 33-year-old with a child to feed and a start-up employment agency business that she's intensely proud of, begins to find it impossible to resist the increasing pressure from competitors to funnel illegal immigrants to her clients. They're dirt cheap, maximally exploitable, and uneducated -- not passing them on to the factory bosses who employ her starts to smack of overlooking first-round draft-picks. But who is exploiting who? And why does the law overlook Angie's actions and the actions of those who end up exploiting her? It's a Free World deftly explores a subject on which society is still profoundly of two minds. Watch for the scene where Angie is confronted by a crowd of ripped-off workers -- is she screaming at them, "It's all sorted!" or "It's all sordid!" ?


9. Sweeney Todd

Remember Tim Burton? He was the filmmaker who, before disappearing into the wilderness of the studio system for 15 years, made Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Edward Scissorhands, two films that viewed adulthood itself as a perversion to be mocked and mocked hard with a child's self-righteous, mean-spirited anger. That climactic, jarring-as-hell moment in Scissorhands in which a stabbing occurs -- that's the real Tim Burton. Well, he's back. Sweeney Todd, the ghoulish, almost Elizabethan musical about a London barber hell-bent on grisly revenge for spending his youth in prison on a false charge, could have been candy-appled by Burton (I'm sure Paramount was expecting that) but something about the demon barber awoke the demon in Burton and in this film he uncorks his deepest and most personal filmmaking instincts, both visual and dramatic ones, that haven't been seen on screen since Wino Forever was Winona Forever.


10. Death Proof

It used to be said of Oliver Stone that although he was capable of making bad films, he was incapable of making boring ones. We found out that wasn't true with Alexander, but the maxim still holds true when applied to Quentin Tarantino. No Tarantino film has ever been anything less than exhilarating eyeball-glue and Death Proof is no different. It's a pity that Tarantino's latest arrived handcuffed to a boring Robert Rodriguez zombie picture, but the marketplace took less than six months to sort out that mistake. Half stalker-horror and half revenge-empowerment, with a coat of Tarantino's trademark conversation-heavy scripting over everything, it all combines to create a uniquely weird movie in which both the good guys and bad guys seem to make life and death choices based on how their movie heroes might do it. This film also re-confirms that Tarantino is in the top tier of action directors.


Honorable Mentions: No Country for Old Men, The Girl in the Park, The Bourne Ultimatum, 3:10 to Yuma, Right at Your Door, Lake of Fire, You're Gonna Miss Me, This is England, The Page Turner, Chrysalis.