Gerald Cooperberg
12-23-2007, 04:08 PM
The Sunday Times landed on my doorstep this morning with a lengthy Arts section inside ranking their critics' favorites in art, dance, theatre, music, and film from the last 12 months. This week's Onion had a whole spread on the year in cinema, and the AFI came out with their ten unmissable movies from 2007 (admirably resisting the temptation to rank them). That must mean that the year-end list season is in full swing... unfortunately, I don't feel like I can participate. It's not that I haven't seen any movies this year-- I've caught almost 40 current releases in the theater or on DVD since last December, not exactly an Ebert-caliber number, but I'm guessing more than the average bear-- but many of the films that populate critics' lists have yet to play at my local cinema. Yes, that's right, I'm one of the 280 million-odd Americans who don't live in New York or Los Angeles.
To be sure, I've seen some fine films and performances in 2007. I don't know if anything that has yet to be released could top the slow burn of David Fincher's Zodiac, the complicated grace of Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (or the queasy interplay between its stars, Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck), or the brutal perfection of the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men. It's also hard to imagine that I'll have more fun at the multiplex than I did during Black Book or The Host or laugh harder than I did at Hot Fuzz or Superbad. And I've been excited about a flurry of recent openings at local theaters but have yet to fit them into a holiday schedule busy with family & work commitments-- films like Juno, Atonement, Sweeney Todd, Youth Without Youth, and I'm Not There. But the list of movies I wouldn't be able to see if I wanted to is staggering: lauded titles like There Will Be Blood, Persepolis, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, Colossal Youth, Paranoid Park, Syndromes and a Century, Tales From Earthsea, The Savages, and countless others. I'm sure many of these will trickle into Minneapolis theaters in the run-up to the Academy Awards, and you can be sure that I'll be looking forward to seeing them then. So I'm serving notice that for me, the year in cinema runs from March to March.
See you at year's end, in two and a half months.
-Coop
To be sure, I've seen some fine films and performances in 2007. I don't know if anything that has yet to be released could top the slow burn of David Fincher's Zodiac, the complicated grace of Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (or the queasy interplay between its stars, Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck), or the brutal perfection of the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men. It's also hard to imagine that I'll have more fun at the multiplex than I did during Black Book or The Host or laugh harder than I did at Hot Fuzz or Superbad. And I've been excited about a flurry of recent openings at local theaters but have yet to fit them into a holiday schedule busy with family & work commitments-- films like Juno, Atonement, Sweeney Todd, Youth Without Youth, and I'm Not There. But the list of movies I wouldn't be able to see if I wanted to is staggering: lauded titles like There Will Be Blood, Persepolis, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, Colossal Youth, Paranoid Park, Syndromes and a Century, Tales From Earthsea, The Savages, and countless others. I'm sure many of these will trickle into Minneapolis theaters in the run-up to the Academy Awards, and you can be sure that I'll be looking forward to seeing them then. So I'm serving notice that for me, the year in cinema runs from March to March.
See you at year's end, in two and a half months.
-Coop