Second, the film is not conventionally satisfying the way most thrillers are – instead, it’s the work, the gathering and sorting of information that provides the dramatic thrust. The above-mentioned meticulousness and precision of the film’s own construction provides an entry point into those concerns, demanding that the audience watch for and prescribe significance to subtleties on screen. Its most tense moments play off the fact that the audience is actively watching, although very little may be actually happening. It’s a cliche by now to point out that Zodiac is a film made by an obsessive filmmaker about obsession. Perhaps it’s more useful to say that what both Fincher and his protagonist fetishize are order and methodology, and because of that (and despite its many flaws), few films have pored over this corner of the human mind in quite the way Zodiac has.

15. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik; USA)

Despite the obvious Malick influence, I think this series of voice-over heavy scenes goes to show that Jesse James makes much more sense in reference to Kubrick than to Days of Heaven or Badlands. It’s been disparaged as a three-hour book on tape, but wasn’t that the point of Barry Lyndon? In fact, Casey Affleck’s Robert Ford bears more than one character trait of Ryan O’Neal’s Barry.

Not that any of this holds a candle to Kubrick – just that the tone Dominik strikes has similar advantages. The train robbery at 3:21 in the above clip, it must be said, is up there with the best stuff any filmmaker’s got to offer.

14. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; Germany)

The Lives of Others is really superior entertainment, and an embarrassment to most other recent thrillers. Part of the reason why is the consummate worksmanship displayed in its set-ups and payoffs (most of them spinning out from the central conceit, of a man assigned to spy on another man in what was then Eastern Germany). The other reason is that the thrills are earned, the sense of danger and loss palpable because the audience is compelled to believe that the characters, and what happens to them, matter.

The film’s secret is not its humanism per se. Its ideas are rather broad good vs. evil/individual vs. society type stuff, the kind of sap that lesser films would drown themselves in. Take the above. First, a man mourning the death of his friend (indirectly at the hands of the authoritarian government) via playing the piano presents an emotional land mine in and of itself. This action then manages to soften the heart of his Stasi spy. What next? The man asks: “Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean truly heard it, really be a bad person?” This would normally get multiple winces, but the film’s secret is how it takes otherwise obvious questions and well-worn tropes, and makes them feel desperately urgent.

13. I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-Liang; Taiwan)

What’s missing from this trailer is the way this shot begins: Nothing but a still pool of water (a “lake” in the middle of a construction site, as beautifully seen here); then, some strange object begins to patiently float downward from the top of the screen – for a good few seconds you have no idea what it is. The slow unfurling revelation in itself is half the magic; the other half is the way it flips what should be a bleak film about loneliness into a surreal and almost playful moment of closure. Could have been the most memorable final shot last year.

12. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien; Taiwan)

This runs (an admittedly distant) runner-up to the stunning, Malickian first teaser for
style=”font-style: italic;”>There Will Be Blood as far as self-complete trailers from last year go. The actual film is not as whimsical or emotionally engaging – in fact, I found myself increasingly impatient with its unremarkable subject matter and stubbornly detached tone. (Hou’s last, Three Times, may have also been slowly paced, but transfixed me with its unspoken intensity between characters and clear purpose in visual storytelling).

Scene after meandering scene of watching this harried mother, her young son, and their new nanny walking around Paris for the most quotidian of reasons, taking no particular interest in each other, and confronting an equally uninteresting conflict involving the boy’s father – at first it all leaves one (though admiring its eye for scenery and small moments) slightly aloof. I didn’t realize how content I was until I stepped out of the theater, which suddenly gave me the always-welcome sensation of cold water being splashed onto my face.

I’m not sure how much I want to ever have a beer with the guy – but more than those of any other filmmaker, I’d like to walk the streets of Hou’s films. They (like those of his fellow countryman, Tsai Ming-Liang) are ultimately more than the sums of their respective parts, slyly imposing onto the audience the peculiar way their maker looks at the world – namely, Hou’s profound, almost Daoist appreciation for everyday details. The rhythm of ordinary sights and actions becomes a pleasure in and of itself; it’s hard to leave a screening and not, for a moment, carry that out with you.

11. The Host (Bong Joon-Ho; Korea)

The first time you see it, you see all of it – motionless, in broad daylight. The next part of the scene, as the bystanders bystand, is classic monster movie stuff, right down to the tension/release timing of the tentacle threateningly snatching the floating beer can in the water.

Usually, the rules state that the first attack has to be some poor schmuck or pair of schmucks by themselves, at night or in some other isolated environs. Something will flash out from the corner of the screen, too fast and blurry to make out; there will be screams; the audience will be left scintillated.

But who need tricks when you can just say: “Here’s a fucking monster.”

So from the moment you see it lumbering toward the camera, there’s that same elated stab people probably felt back when the rules were being made up in the first place.

10. No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson; USA)

Though other Iraq documentarians have proven adept at finding human stories and putting cameras in front of faces, they’ve also either ignored or struggled with the legwork required to provide any larger context beyond the scope of outrage.

Then there’s Charles Ferguson, a reputable academic with a resume that includes a doctorate from MIT and three years at the Brookings Institute (and who supported the initial invasion), who in his first try irrefutably proves the Bush administration’s incompetence in handling the first months of the invasion.

First, he gets all the right interviews – the officials initially put in charge of Iraq, a few well-picked journalists and experts, and higher-ups that even include former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. But No End in Sight‘s strength, as the above clip shows, is in the clarity of its arguments and explications. All the brambles and historical amnesia are pushed aside; it amounts to a historical document that one could pass on to the next generation’s classrooms.

9. Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-Dong; Korea)

Minutes 1 through 5 of this clip are as emotionally tumultuous as it gets (and mostly wordless, so don’t worry about the lack of English subtitles). The female protagonist’s son has just been kidnapped and murdered (films about kidnapping are practically their own subgenre in Korea). She’s been devastated and withdrawn since, and this scene marks the previously unreligious woman’s unexpected re-entrance into society.

It’s refreshing how Lee Chang-Dong eschews formal experimentation for a commitment to human complexities. One of the successes of this scene is that it reminds you of a lingering emotional falseness in the setting – the band, the cheesy graphics – while delivering genuine and thorough catharsis.

The character’s transformation afterward, as she becomes involved with the local church and finally finds herself able to recover and communicate with others again (or, it is suggested, perhaps for the first time), makes a surprising argument for religion’s irreplaceable power to support and connect people while other societal institutions fail.

It’s usually enough for a film to have one crystallizing moment like this, but Secret Sunshine turns out to have two, and the next one is even more powerful precisely because it turns this first idea on its head: When our protagonist makes the crucial and Christian decision to forgive her son’s killer in prison, he reveals that he’s happy to have recently found – and so already been forgiven by – the dear Lord as well. Suddenly, horrifyingly, religion is no longer the crutch it seemed.

8. Once (John Carney; Ireland)

The only thing I hate more than feel-good indies are me-first whiners with acoustic guitars.

Still, the remarkably grounded Once captures something about live music and the creative impulse (and dare I say, the struggle of mediocrity) that few non-documentary films have attempted to. Or, that’s what I keep telling myself.

7. The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach; Ireland)

For one, The Wind That Shakes the Barley makes immediate the consequences and brutality of its subject – no small feat for any historical epic. Furthermore, though historical epics as a genre tend to be pretty uninterested in history itself, Ken Loach considers some very complicated and uneasy arguments with his retelling of the Irish War of Independence and subsequent Irish Civil War.

After heart wrenching sacrifices are shown to be made in the cause of the revolution, this
debate scene encapsulates the splintering of opinion as to why, exactly, the war was being fought in the first place, and how its fighters envision the future of their country. The uproar of the Anglo-Irish treaty will soon lead to civil war. Now, Loach is a pretty unapologetic socialist, and the audience is meant to side with the more radical faction embodied in Cillian Murphy’s character – but the fact that he sides with the historical losers, if you will (the victory by supporters of the Anglo-Irish treaty didn’t ultimately prevent Ireland from gaining independence some years later), and that Loach shows such empathy for both sides, is what keeps the film from being neither propaganda nor a neutered universal tale.

6. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett; USA)

In the 1970s, a UCLA film student by the name of Charles Burnett shot his MFA thesis down in Watts, over about a year’s worth of weekends. The film was released theatrically for the first time last year, after finally securing music rights.

There is the cultural significance of it essentially being the only well-known black art film from that era, sure, and the unique way it updates the Italian neorealist formula of the 1950s to address South Central Los Angeles some two decades later. And you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more immediately likeable and sympathetic protagonist than the down-on-his-luck title character.

But one reason we love film is its inherent sight-and-sound ability to approximate a visceral, living experience. And so the part of Killer of Sheep that stays on for me are those shots of children playing in the streets of Watts – racing down alleys, dirt on their shoes, and perfectly framed.

5. No Country For Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen; USA)

My two favorite things about the coin-toss scene:

1) Javier Bardem’s character as newspaper-editor-like defender of the English language. “You already asked me that”; “‘Now’ is not a time”; “You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?”; and, my favorite, “I don’t have some way to ‘put it.’ That’s the way it is.”

2) The expanding wrapper at 2:38.

4. Still Life (Jia Zhang-Ke, China)

One could argue for Jia Zhang-ke’s current standing as the world’s most socially important filmmaker, as he insistently confronts the human cost of globalization in a country where expression is censored, yet where change hurtles forth on an internationally unsettling scale.

The backdrop of Still Life is the ongoing construction of the Three Gorges Dam, a massive project which has already wiped out entire towns and displaced a million and a half people. It’s in this environment that two separated couples seek each other out for reasons of personal resolution. Above all, the viewer is never allowed to forget the characters’ often painful struggle to hold onto their humanity, amidst all the mechanized chaos and rubble.

3. Syndromes and a Century (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul; Thailand)

The course of Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s career, and indeed of the individual films he’s made, is one of variation in repetition. Most of his films can be said to feature: shape-shifting characters who turn into animals, portrayals of sexual longing or acts, musical performances, escape from civilization into rural areas, local superstition (or mysticism), and acts of storytelling. Even further, each film is divided into halves (or, in the case of Mysterious Object at Noon, multiple partitions), inducing this kind of variation in repetition within the same film.

Dualism is the primary vehicle for Syndromes and a Century, which tells two love stories set in Thai hospitals 40 years apart, using the same actors and much of the same dialogue.

The dialogue in this scene, retelling a story about a lake that fills up with gold and silver, is not repeated within the film, but instead taken from a similar story told within Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (albeit in that version, the story has a different ending). The most striking part here is the solar eclipse from 1:34 to 2:13. The image itself is echoed in a sequence at the end of the film, which moves to inspect an open suction pipe in a hospital boiler room with a near-sacred reverence. But in this instance, the eclipse is part of the story-within-a-story, an illustration of, again, local mysticism that shuns urban conventions: “This is a powerful place. No matter what people do, no matter what we do, something always watches us.”

2. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel; France)

A film by and for The Sixties. When former Nouvelle Vague figure Philippe Garrel throws on The Kinks, he’s not adopting Wes Anderson’s Oedipus complex for an era that never loved him, but reliving that same cultural revolution he can rightfully claim a part of (see the self-aware jump cut at 1:27, which takes you nowhere at all, other than to the idea of the jump cut itself); when Garrel later plays a Nico song, he’s remembering not Nico the fashionable symbol, but the very “regular lover” he had a ten-year professional and romantic relationship with.

Regular Lovers is so deliberately slow and aimless that it will drive most to exasperation; it’s necessary to surrender to the idea that the film uses time as part of its argument. Garrel’s three-hour meditation warps back into the haze of his presumably drug-fueled youth in Paris, of the student-led protests of May 1968 and their aftermath (that “69″ is no mere building number), of that paradoxical conflict between world-is-your oyster limitless possibility and suffocating entrapment which marks every post-adolescence worth its salt – of that feeling of being a member of the only generation of young people to have ever lived, and lost.

1. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas; Mexico)

Here is the capital-G Great film that even Carlos Reygadas’s outspoken detractors were waiting for him to make, a perfect storm in which his previously too-uncompromising talents have finally been disciplined into something transcendant.

I hope the trailer hints at (there’s a Spanish-subtitled version that highlights better scenes) how a sense of almost otherworldly power looms over Silent Light‘s static and often mundane trappings. It’s a feeling that loses some steam in the film’s middle act, along with the narrative, but the patience-thinning of its geological pace, I think, only redoubles the force of the conclusion. The plot is set in a religious Mennonite community in northern Mexico (hence the Plautdietsch dialogue and Spanish subtitles), and cursorily about a married man who falls in love with another woman. I’ll leave you with three scenes:

*The opening shot of a sunrise, glimpsed briefly in the above-linked Spanish trailer, performs no less than the miracle of Genesis in a mere six or seven continuous minutes.

*The family’s routine excursion to bathe in a creek becomes material for a visually ecstatic set piece. It’s the kind of balanced idyll that’s difficult to convey with mere words, as if the down-by-the-river enlightenment at the end of Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours were instead to be a narrative’s starting point.

*The final, irreversible shudder that finishes off the rest of the film’s slow, inevitable shifting of tectonic plates: An unlikely family reunion springboards a go-for-broke climax, one that boldly meets life, death, God, and all the rest of it head-on.

***

Thanks, folks.

1. UGK ft. Outkast – “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)”: mp3
2. LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends”: mp3
3. Spoon – “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb”: mp3
4. St. Vincent – “Marry Me”: mp3
5. Radiohead – “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”: mp3
6. Wilco – “On and On and On”: mp3
7. Ravens & Chimes – “January”: mp3
8. Justice – “The Party”: mp3
9. Lucky Soul – “One Kiss Don’t Make a Summer”: mp3
10. Andrew Bird – “Simple X”: mp3
11. Jens Lekman – “Shirin”: mp3
12. Animal Collective – “For Reverend Green”: mp3
13. Saturday Looks Good To Me – “Make a Plan”: mp3
14. Of Montreal – “Suffer for Fashion”: mp3 / “Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider”: mp3
15. David Gilmour Girls – “Young Rats”: mp3
16. Ryan Adams – “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.”
17. The Acorn – “Antenna”: mp3
18. Field Music – “Working To Work”: mp3 / “Kingston”: mp3
19. The Main Drag – “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter”: mp3
20. Lewis & Clarke – “Before It Breaks You”: mp3
21. Les Savy Fav – “Raging in the Plague Age”: mp3
22. Maritime – “Be Unhappy”: mp3
23. New Buffalo – “You’ve Gone My Friend”: mp3
24. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – “Emily Jean Stock”: mp3
25. The Everybodyfields – “Aeroplane”: mp3

And the rest, in alphabetical order:

The Afternoon Naps – “Postcard”: mp3
The Autumn Defense – “This Will Fall Away”: mp3
Avril Lavigne – “Girlfriend”
Bill Callahan – “Diamond Dancer”: mp3
The Bird and the Bee – “Fucking Boyfriend”: mp3
Bright Eyes – “Tourist Trap”: mp3
The Broken West – “So It Goes”: mp3
Centro-matic – “Atlanta”: mp3
The Clientele – “Winter on Victoria Street”: mp3
Club 8 – “Whatever You Want”: mp3
Dungen – “Familj”: mp3
Feist – “1234″
The Good, The Bad and the Queen – “Nature Springs”
Iron & Wine – “Boy with a Coin”: mp3
John Vanderslice – “Numbered Lithograph”: mp3
Kanye West ft. Dwele – “Flashing Lights”
Laura Veirs – “Don’t Lose Yourself”
Liars – “Plaster Casts of Everything”: mp3
Loney, Dear – “Saturday Waits”: mp3
Marissa Nadler – “Diamond Heart”: mp3
Math & Physics Club – “Nothing Really Happened”: mp3
Menomena – “Muscle’n Flo”: mp3
Midnight Juggernauts – “Twenty Thousand Leagues”: mp3
The Narrator – “Surfjew”: mp3
The National – “Ada”: mp3
Ola Podrida – “Jordanna”: mp3
The One AM Radio – “Your Name”
Pants Yell! – “Reject, Reject”
Richard Hawley – “Tonight The Streets Are Ours”
Richmond Fontaine – “The Disappearance of Ray Norton”: mp3
The Shins – “Sleeping Lessons”: mp3
Sondre Lerche – “Say It All”
Studio – “No Comply”: mp3
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – “Bomb. Repeat. Bomb.”: mp3
The Thrills – “Restaurant”
Thurston Moore – “Fri/End”: mp3

The National

Grizzly Bear (at the Troubadour; at UCLA)

Quasi

Eric Johnson of the Fruit Bats

The Clipse

Vampire Weekend

Spoon

The Sea and Cake

The Pipettes

Already looking forward to next year’s show-going. And maybe getting a real camera. Cheers, 2007.

Andrew Bird – “Simple X”: mp3

Sounds like a Radiohead b-side in the best possible way. Gorgeous.

Avril Lavigne – “Girlfriend”

Tell you what, Avril would beat the shit out of that “Hey Mickey” girl. If you’re a 13-year-old girl who hasn’t discovered the Shins yet, this is still the best song in the world.

Bright Eyes – “Tourist Trap”: mp3

This song is so fucking forlorn. It sounds like a great Ryan Adams or Will Oldham or, yes, Conor Oberst song, some lost tune recorded at 3 a.m. on a particularly lonely night. “The road finally gave me back / But I don’t think I’ll unpack / Because I’m not sure if I live here any more,” Oberst sings. Tell me about it.

Field Music – “Working to Work”: mp3 / “Kingston”: mp3

“Working to Work” is a polar opposite to that Bright Eyes track. It’s almost too peppy for words, hitting every note exactly on beat and requiring you to pump your fist in strict rhythm. It’s all peaks and valleys and peaks again, moving with ballerina-like accuracy: “DIVING TO DROWN / and coming up for air.” Phew. And “Kingston?” Like all my favorite songs, it’s dour and pretty.

The Clientele – “Winter on Victoria Street”

Watching a movie and getting bored / trying to get UP with a girl next door … I’m SO WIRED and nobody’s tired. These guys redefine “evocative.”

Lucky Soul – “One Kiss Don’t Make a Summer”: mp3

Best chorus on an album full of ‘em, and the best verse lyric: “You’re just a P.S. on a postcard home anyway.” Or are you? Ali Howard can’t decide, but damned if she’s not going to get a great pop song out of it either way.

More:
The Autumn Defense – “This Will Fall Away”: mp3
Bears – “You Can Tell”: mp3
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – “Emily Jean Stock”: mp3
Studio – “No Comply”: mp3
Centro-matic – “Atlanta”: mp3
Of Montreal – “Suffer For Fashion”: mp3

Download all the MP3s in one folder: zip

“Dave! Where’s ‘D.A.N.C.E.’?!?!” Here.

Previously: Best of 2007, Halfway: Albums

5. The Clientele – God Save The Clientele

The Clientele – “Bookshop Casanova”: mp3

The Clientele don’t just drip nostalgic lovelorn depression — they’re soaked through with it. And they play guitar solos, too. (Previous post, concert photos)

4. Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog

What’s great about this album is it’s completely alien and incomparable to The Creek Drank the Cradle, Iron & Wine’s debut and best album. This could be his best album, too; they’re so different that ranking one against the other is a difficult conundrum. So what if we rank this one against indie-folk in general? It comes out on top. More accessible than Animal Collective, more charismatic and song-oriented than Califone, weirder and more no-holds-barred than Lewis & Clarke, this is as good as progressive folk gets these days. And — hear that slide guitar? — he hasn’t forgetten where he came from, either, even if now he’s into tribal rhythms and backwards recordings. Perhaps most importantly, Beam is one of the best singers, period, and on this album he cuts loose more than ever before.

3. Wilco – Sky Blue Sky

What?! No experimenting? It’s just songs? That’s what I thought the first time I listened to my favorite band’s latest. Then I listened to it again. Nels Cline’s miraculous fretwork has gotten most of the buzz, but the album’s unsung hero is Pat Sansone, who — if his work with the Autumn Defense is any indication — is largely responsible for the ’70s soft-rock influence. Jeff Tweedy’s vocals continue to improve as he gets older, and I appreciate the honest, unguarded sentiment he offers on songs such as “Either Way” and “On and On and On,” both songs that should rank highly in the Wilco songbook.

2. The National – Boxer

The National – “Fake Empire”: mp3

This was the front-runner for quite some time. I’ve listened to this more than anything else released this year. It’s overwhelming and confident in a way that few albums are in a way that begs for repeated listens. You can tie a different adjective to each song: “Slow Show” is aching, “Ada” is exciting, “Fake Empire” is mysterious… and on and on. Alligator still has the edge for me, but this is another classic from a band that’ll be churning them out for years to come. (Concert photos, download the White Session)

1. Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Spoon – “The Underdog”: mp3

As I noted in a previous post, this is the most fun album Spoon’s ever made. The songs are bursting at the seams with cool production tricks (note the use of reverb on the backing vocals on “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” or on the guitar on “Eddie’s Ragga,” or on any song on the album, really) and a big, full sound that throws the band’s trademark curtness into a stereophonic whirl. All that and a bunch of great songs by one of America’s most consistently great rock bands. (Previous post)

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Very honorable mentions:

New Buffalo – Somewhere, Anywhere.
Laura Veirs – Saltbreakers
St. Vincent – Marry Me
Hauschka – Room to Expand
Lewis & Clarke – Blasts of Holy Birth
Lucky Soul – The Great Unwanted
Boris – Rainbow
Bright Eyes – Cassadaga

And on and on…Keep an eye out for a best songs of ’07 list next week.

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