10 Best Films of 2007: Runners-Up and Other Distinctions

This was an incredibly good year for film. So much so that there is a very clear overflow of films that I either haven't had a chance to see or films that were still excellent (even if not able to be slotted arbitrarily into the top ten itself). Here are a few of the films that fall into those categories.

A List of Films I've Notably Missed: I’m Not There, There Will Be Blood, We Own the Night, American Gangster, Diary of the Dead, Mother of Tears: The Third Mother, The Darjeeling Limited, A Mighty Heart, Atonement, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Juno, Michael Clayton

Runners-Up:

Knocked Up and Superbad: Judd Apatow's two film productions (the former of which he directed as well) this year have catapulted him into the ranks of Entertainment Weekly's "smartest people in Hollywood," but these films demonstrate more than just a savvy awareness of key consumer demographics. Critics who lump this in as a sweeter version of the gross-out sexual-hijinks genre repopularized by American Pie miss out on how he navigates modern romance in the same frustrated manner as Woody Allen used to do when he still had something to say.
Breach and Live Free or Die Hard: Billy Ray's film is a spare procedural "true story" of a security breach in the CIA that offers the keen illusion of objectivity, subtly pointing to how the seemingly objective cinematic eye can never pin down anything with certainty without the imposition of subjective laws. The latest adventure about John McClane goes the other route in detailing its own national security breach, using its balls-out action template to say something the domestic cost of our war on terror.
Shoot ‘Em Up and Hot Fuzz: While both of these films are overt parodies of the action genre typified so well by Die Hard, they couldn't look or feel more different. Edgar Wright's film is a sophisticated mix-tape of a movie, the most joyful game game of "spot the reference" in any pastiche, perhaps because it still feels so coherent and caring toward its characters (it lacks the snark of something like Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, for instance). Michael Davis barely holds up a pretense for coherence, making an action vehicle with the kind of madcap insanity that John Woo or Ringo Lam used to make. It also has the distinction of using the most glorious counter-intuitive casting logic of any film this year by casting Paul Giamatti as a menacing hitman.
Black Snake Moan: For three-quarters of its running time (until it takes on the tone of an earnest Gospel song rather than the blues riff it had been), this is a much better approximation of the grindhouse experience than Grindhouse. Equally a mixed bag as the two movies that comprise the Tarantino/Rodriguez project, this one at least has the strength of its own convictions, however potentially misogynistic and racist those convictions are: this is a movie that genuinely believes in the chain that acts as its primary exploitation trope: those chains that tear apart our flesh and bind it together.
Black Book: Unfairly castigated by critics who refer to it as Schindler's Showgirls, this is a film that is misunderstood both by its supporters and its detractors, mostly because they confuse this with the kind of prestige picture other Holocaust films are generally described as. Less a return to Hitchcockian form for Dutch director Paul Verhoeven after his two decade stretch in Hollywood, this is more of a throw-back to women-in-chains films (see above for this as well) and trash like Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS. Verhoeven has simply added his Hitchcockian obsession with obsessions into the mix, making this a smart thriller that isn't afraid to wallow in sex and shit (literally) for a better part of the running time.
Beowulf and Stardust: The two best fantasy epics of the year, in a year that saw a wealth of LotR and Harry Potter knock-offs, these two films redefine the nature of heroism in curious ways: the former by situating such heroism in the interactive experience of a digitized culture that finds such medieval notions of heroism oddly alien, and the latter by showing in detail how a hero is constructed and performed by a necessarily queer schema.
3:10 to Yuma and Exiled: This year apparently saw the rebirth of the Western, and James Mangold's is the most classically composed, even in its revisionism and in its focus on the aesthetics of self-narrative. And, while it has the best gunfights of the standard Westerns released this year, Johnny To's neo-Western set in contemporary Macau has its gunfighting anti-heroes strike the best poses before staging gorgeous gunfights that were almost cubist in their concerns with the spaces in which bodies move. Both of them feel like re-imaginings of The Wild Bunch, suggesting that the kind of nihilistic malaise we're seeing in film may be international.
The Host: Which brings us to the most spectacular monster movie released in years, a South Korean film that has the balls to point out that America's place in international affairs at the moment is as an ineffective clean-up crew for the messes we created in the first place. In other words, a film very much in Godzilla's legacy, but very much contemporary in its concerns about how to maintain traditional family values in the face of unspeakable crises and even more unspeakable solutions to those crises.