TOP TEN FILMS OF 2007

You can read my reviews (they are coming!) if you want some clarity as to the picks...but without further adieu, here are my top ten films of 2007.

Editors Note: I have not yet seen the following films and consider them inelligible for my list, but might have very well been on it: There Will Be Blood, Into The Wild, Gone Baby Gone, American Gangster, The Assisination of Jesse James, 3:10 to Yuma and Eastern Promises.

1. Juno
2. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
3. Waitress
4. Away From Her
5. Hairspray
6. Atonement
7. Superbad
8. Zodiac
9. Once
10. No Country For Old Men

Top 5 Honorable Mentions (In no particular order)
Ratatouille
Micheal Clayton
Rendition
Charlie Wilson's War
Sicko

Attonement

Unfilmable eh?

I think we should all pay attention to Joe Wright. He is a director, a young director, of a callibre I have seen outside the veteran precense of the likes of Spielberg, Coppala, Scorecese, etc.

Attonement is a film I need to see again. Not because I am not sure I liked it, but because it demands a second viewing to absorb all its glory. Is that a criticism? Maybe. But I am looking forawrd to a second go at it, so maybe it's part of the brilliance?

With muse Keira Knightly in hand, Wright tells us the story not of Knightly's character Cecelia, but of her sister Briony, played with sheer brilliance by all three actors in the role (Sioarce Ronan, Ramola Gairi and Vanessa Redgrave). The story is one of confusion and imagination and an imagination so mature that in such an inmature mind can have devestating concequences.

I need not go into the plot - it is thick in detail and I would not do it justice and I think it would be an injustice to you to ruin your experience.

I will say that like Pride and Prejudice, this is a beautiful looking film supported by great performances. While I typically prefer to opposite, it is nice to see once in a while that someone working today has those classic sensibilities and the passion to recreate them.

While the first act and devesating final act were well paced and served their purpose, the middle act seems to be it may have been better served in a book where words could mean to much more than a look. In a story about carefully or poorly chosen words, we are operating in a medium that depends on looks and without the proper insight in some ways I felt a little jaded following the film. I thought I deserved more of the truth and wasn't as sympathetic to Briony as I felt I should have been. Maybe I wasn't meant to. I wanted to forgive her, but all the time I kept thinking "What if". So for a film entitled Atonement, I'm not sure it was ever fully realized, but the effort was sure there.

Again, with a second look and knowing how it ends, perhaps the clues are in fact in the performance and carry more weight, but I took the scenes at face value and needed more.

Having said that, I would still very much recommend this film and you just might see it sneak into a top ten list...

4 out of 5

THUNDERCATS ARE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That level of excitement might only be about an ounce of the excitement I felt before, during and after this film. I set the bar high going in, I wanted this so badly to be everything I expected - but it wasn't - it was so much more.

I'm not sure where I can begin. Pehaps the screenplay? I've read and heard that a criticism of the film is that the dialogue, exclusively from Juno is almost too clever that it distorts the reality of the film, to which I would reply that perhaps people missed the brilliance. It's true, it is a form of hightened language, it does crackle, and crackle often - but this is Juno's defense mechanism. This is how she has survived. It's worked. Because it worked, it developed. I thought from what I knew about Ms. MacGuff, these words were painfully appropriate coming from her lips.

I don't know how they managed to make suc ha comedic gem about teen pregnancy without it coming our as pretentious, offensive or stupid. Instead it came out as honest, clever and smart. I thoght about why and it's because they didn't try and give it a treatment, it was given the "life happens" approach, and we latch onto that, cause that's the life WE are living in.

Ellen Page is frightening incredible in this performance. There is nothing else to say. Her performance was complete, it was definitive, it was dynamic, honest, complelling, beautiful. You name it. She was it.

Michael Cera may be a one trick pony with hin uncanny to deliver a line the way only Michael Cera can, but it's a good trick and has worked for him in all of his substantial roles to date. It will grow tired, but worked well in this film, in limited capacity.

Garner and Bateman shine as the would be adoptive parents of Juno unborn baby. Garner walks the tight rope between honesty and sterotype but never fell off on the wrong side. Bateman handles his delicate role with class. With a similar challenge to Garner, we need to love him, hate him but ultimately understand and sympathize with him as much as we do with Garner - and in less capable hands I think this role could have been stale and hurt the heart of the picture.

Simmons and Janney as Juno's parents were marvelous. However, where Janney held onto credibility with some over the top lines, Simmons doesn't do the job quite as well, he doesn't seem to be able to understate his lines the way the rest of the cast does, but then recovers with his moments in between.

What can I say? Director Rietman, who gave us the best film of 2005 with Thank You For Smoking, follows it up with the best film of 2007.

5 out of 5 (I'd give it six if I could)

Away From Her

The knock against Canadian film for the most part is that we tend to focus on heritage, as if wevery film out of our country also has to act as a tourist magnet. This probably has something to do with the fact that Canadian film funding demands so much of its projects that scripts are changed to reflect this all over the place and while Away From Her didn't shy away from heritage it was so much more than that.

Where a film like "The Notebook" succeeds is in its ability to make us fall in love with the romance on screen, so that when that romance is shattered, especially by something out of its control, we are devestated, we feel their ache as we feel a loss ourselves. Where a film like that does not succeed is in it's lasting and resonating impact. We all have a good cry, maybe it stays with us for a day, and then we are able to move on, because it is easy to distance outselves from a Hollywood romance, regardless of how well it was made.

In "Away From Her", we get a similar story, but in favour of Hollywood (which I do NOT mean as a knock against the aforementioned film) we get honesty. There we times in this film where I almost felt like I was watching a documentary or I was someone connected to the film on a much more personal level than simply a viewer. Nothing was glossy (though, the underrated cinematography in this film is something to behold), nothing drew too much attention to itself, it just walked us through the pain of loss, grief, confusion and the human ways we try to repair the damage, not because it's simply easier, but we have to, for personal survival.

Though I thought Julie Christie turned in an excellent performance, the real credit of the film (outside of directo Sarah Polley, who though I know it won't happen, should get careful consideration for an Academy Award nomination) lies in the performance of Gordon Pinsett. Christie's was a great performance, Pinsett's broke the barriers. I know that man. I see him every day. I felt for him. Another performance you hear nothing about from this film comes in the form of Kristen Thompson and Kristy. Again, I felt like I knew her, I felt her honesty - that's what seperates those two from Christie, while she did an incredible job convincing me of who she was, the other two didn't have to convince me at all.

This was a movie that will sit on myself and become a treasure in my collection, something I will pick up when I need some perspective.

Beautiful work Ms. Polley.

5 stars out of 5