Erik Moe Art & Design

Once you do something twice, is it a tradition?

After looking at Movie City News’ masterful chart of 2007 critic’s lists I realized just how many good films I did see this year, despite feeling like I was in something of a film-free coma as I learned the ways of Washington campaigning. Still, there are plenty of foreign and indie movies in the “class of 2007″ that didn’t play D.C. or Chicago (where I lived until May) in a timely manner (or at all). With that, please consider the following in-exhaustive list thoroughly and unnecessarily disclaimed:

1. I’m Not There – Todd Haynes’ experimental Bob Dylan biopic was far and away the most incredible thing I saw on the screen in 2007. Not only did Haynes create six unique personas loosely based on the life and times of Mr. Dylan, but he adapted and invented lush visual languages to go along with each storyline. So what if the average viewer might not get all the references from Dylan’s career? I can’t say for sure how the film reads to audiences unfamiliar with Ginsberg, Pennebaker, Baez, Guthrie, or even Bringing it All Back Home, but I suspect it stands as a whirlwind lesson in how myth and art blurred to form our new national pastime: deconstructing celebrity. And besides, is a little cultural literacy too much to ask of an audience?
2. There Will be Blood – Daniel Day-Lewis is riveting as usual in his performance as pioneer-turned-oilman Daniel Plainview. Paul Thomas Anderson’s depiction of the emerging petroleum economy circa 1900 is a fine reminder that the energy industry we have now has been an all-corrupting mess from the start. Plus, it’s loosely based on Oil! by Upton Sinclair, with whom I’ve been obsessed since reading Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! early in ‘07 (in which Sinclair has the ability to rise from the grave and keep on muckracking through the 20th Century). So Blood tidily brings it all back home.

UPDATE: Paul Dano’s supporting role as the creepy, hapless, opportunistic preacher in There Will be Blood means he is two-for-two in supporting roles in second place films on my two annual exercises in list minimalism (he played the quiet brother in last year’s number two, Little Miss Sunshine).