(Almost) The Last of 2007: No Country For Old Men, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Simpsons Movie

Here are 3 of the last 5 films I saw in 2007. All three are some of the biggest acts to debut before the year's end, though my reaction to each of them spanned from "great" to "meh."

Monday, December 17, 2007

No Country For Old Men: I was terribly underwhelmed by this nebulous story on a western man in the dusk of his life, and thought it veered toward viciousness and violence rather carelessly. Stylistically, No Country is stunning, don't get me wrong. I have to tread on this thumbs-down criticism lightly, because there is no question the Coens are two of the most important and talented filmmakers of my generation. But at the same time I can't help but think the movie was too callous in the handling of its subject (the American West, its people) to be received with such adulation. I know I'm in a minority on this one, but I felt cheated by the movie's end; after two hours of slaughter there was hardly any account for its characters, as if they didn't matter to begin with. There is such a distance between the Coens and the characters they create that each one always feels forcefully drawn up, making it that much easier for them to be, finally, expendable.




Friday, December 21, 2007

And then came director Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly: a sheer visual delight, and a film that has such tenderness for human life. French Elle Editor Jean-Dominique Bauby is suddenly paralyzed from a stroke, and learns to communicate by blinking his left eye; one blink for "yes," two blinks mean "no." By these means he writes a short novel chronicling his experience trapped within his own body, with the assistance of a speech therapist who recites the alphabet until he blinks "yes" for the letter needed to complete his word. The film is based on this true short story, and features a performance by Max von Sydow as Bauby's (Mathieu Amalric) father that rivals for the most emotionally devastating moments on film.

If you don't like this movie, you can't be human.






Sunday, December 30, 2007

Yeah, I know, I got to this one right under the wire, just hours before the end of '07, and even then it's sort of pathetic to think I waited all this time for The Simpsons Movie to arrive before my eyes on DVD format. You could see the complexity of the animation, how this "episode" was crafted specially for the big screen. I kick myself for missing this one in theaters last summer for this reason; it truly was a spectacle that I missed (if not a cinematic phenomenon, it was surely a cultural one.) And yet, if you look at the animation there is nothing done that hadn't been done before, and the story was your typical Simpsons arc: Marge and Homer arguing, the whole family suffering a public humiliation for something minor one of the family members (most likely Homer) could have prevented easily; Lisa in love (and Milhouse in love with Lisa); Bart exacerbating an already bad situation by misbehaving; and Maggie as the mystery shooter. So yeah, it was, like, the greatest Simpsons episode ever. I still will always refer to this great review that sums up about everything there is to be said about The Simpsons Movie.