Secondly: Now the Oscars are over and done, I still don't think I could conjure one. See, I'm still a little bitter.
Not in a major way, because NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a perfectly fine film and as deserving a winner as any. It's dark with an underlying sadness, it's beautifully made in all areas from cinematography to editing to sound, finely crafted by master filmmakers, and has an enigmatic ending which has gotten people talking. And no-one would really begrudge the Coen Brothers -- two of the finest 10 (or less) filmmakers to emerge from America since the 1970s -- a long-overdue Academy Award.
But the film just didn't hit me the way I wanted it to, the way it had connected with so many other people. I had my own issues with it: Something in the last act ate at me, and it wasn't anything that's been mentioned in the endless discourses about this film (none I've read anyway), and I can't work out why it hasn't. Everyone's so damned obsessed with why we didn't see a certain confrontation -- which, to me, was irrelevant, just like it was to the Coens -- when all I could ask was why another certain confrontation just didn't happen. Because I felt that one was so, so much more relevant. The world we knew colliding with the world that is. It builds up all this tension and then... poof! One second, two characters are there, and the next, one isn't, and there's no explanation or apparent reasoning why. A very good friend of mine has posited a massively intriguing and awfully metaphysical reason for this scene, but I haven't heard similar sentiments brought up anywhere else, which makes me think it may be one very brilliant man's interpretation and not necessarily the filmmakers' intention. Or maybe it was, and my learned friend is the only one who can see it; the proverbial one-eyed king, if you will.
The reason I'm a little bitter at Oscar this year is because I saw a pair of flicks in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, that were as great as any films released this decade. Genuine, 100%, no excuses, perfectly formed, pound-for-pound heavyweight champions.
And they were both nominated for Best Picture.
Yet, when the dust settled, they each came out with just one major award... and an indent to the forehead courtesy of Anton Chigurh.
(* To be fair, the second of the two also won a big technical Oscar but, for the purpose of this article, when I say "major awards" I mean Picture, Director, Acting and Writing awards, as opposed to Technical and Musical. If this sounds disrespectful, it's not, it's mainly a media-driven distinction. Carry on.)
Firstly...
JUNO just blew my head clean off, in a way I never could have anticipated.
Granted, my expectations were not high. I'd braced for a too-cool-for-school, this-year's-LITTLE-MISS-SUNSHINE quirkfest... and got what might just be the most perfectly well-rounded film I've seen since who knows when. The performances were note-perfect. Diablo Cody's script set the scene, introduced its characters, then their dilemmas and worked through them in a way that was natural, organic, graceful -- and rare. Not for a second did this picture feel false. The direction was beautifully measured, Jason Reitman made the right visual choices, crafted the right mood and paced the thing perfectly. When it was funny, it was laugh-out-loud hilarious. When it was sad, it made me cry like a small child, like I haven't done at a new movie in years. (It took me about three or four minutes to stop. I'm serious. As a card-carrying adult male, I'm not necessarily proud of this becoming public knowledge, but caved in to illustrate the absolute spell this story had me in.)
It's quotable, relatable and repeat-watchable. What really amazed me was, unlike most movies these days, it wasn't too anything. It wasn't too quirky, too sentimental, too smart, too fractured, too long, too short, too cold, too emotional, too cerebral, too anything. It was just right. And that, if you'll check your dictionaries and thesauruses (thesaurii?), is just another way of saying Perfect.
Then...
There was THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Which couldn't be any more different, but equally effective.
An epic as harsh, remote and tough as the turn-of-the-century Californian landscape it depicts, this is beautiful, powerful cinema, a towering work representing Paul Thomas Anderson -- in my opinion, the best American filmmaker under 40 -- approaching the peak of his powers.
Much has been gushed about Daniel Day-Lewis's supercharged, thoroughly deserving Oscar-winning performance as misanthropic oilman Daniel Plainview, or the amazing twelve-minute dialogue-free opening... but much less has been said about Paul Dano's searing turn as the fiery, manipulative preacher Eli Sunday, or the quietly beautiful work from Dillon Freasier (who had never acted professionally before this film!) as Day-Lewis' son H.W., or Jonny Greenwood's pounding, driving, haunting score, or the sheer mania which drives this flick -- from the characters' fervour for power/riches/influence/control/you name it to PTA's own love for cinema -- and the writer/director's wicked sense of humour which pops its head up, ever so subtly, every once in a while, particularly in the film's stunning final scene, capped by one of the greatest closing lines in cinema history. Not to mention, one scene in particular flat-out broke my heart. In two.
Like all the best epics, Anderson's film works equally well at the physical and emotional ends of the scale: it's as attractive a film as you will ever see, but not in an artificial, glossy way, instead as a force of pure cinema, with a full appreciation for the sublime abilities of the movie camera and the dangerous beauty of the landscape. What's more, Plainview's relationships with everyone around him, particularly his son, are brought into sad, bruised, chilling life with Anderson's beautiful penchant for observation and human behaviour. Damn, this is a great picture.
Why did we have to wait till 2008 to see the best films of 2007? These pictures would've owned my 2007 Top 10 List. What's more, there's been Joe Wright's excellent, surprisingly sly ATONEMENT and Todd Haynes' inspired, innovative, if overly cerebral, Bob Dylan biopic I'M NOT THERE... With all that in mind, 2008's list has gotten off to a flier... and a much better start than last year, I might add! (There ya go... some of that positivity I keep threatening you with!)
Why is it that Oscar Season continues to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat of so many movie years? And in what other year could I possibly imagine being ever-so-slightly aggrieved that the Coen Brothers swept the awards?!? (Okay, what I REAAALLLY wanted, was for the Coens to win Best Director and THERE WILL BE BLOOD Best Pic. Just to make it abundantly clear I'm not being anti-Coen. Which would be akin to being anti-Film Buff, I would think.) Just after I had written off 2007, two of the best gems in years, both 2007 holdovers, come my way...
Proving yet again, as dark as it may seem, there is always hope. Like Axl says, all we need is a little patience...
TSIK
