ranked: my best of ‘07

Far be it from me to miss an opportunity to chime in with more lists. I’ve revised my albums list since the last time I posted it, and I also run on (and on and on) about my favorite movies.

Fifteen Favorite Records of 2007
1. M.I.A, Kala
2. The National, Boxer
3. Miranda Lambert, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
4. LCD Sounsystem, The Sound of Silver
5. My Teenage Stride, Ears Like Golden Bats
6. Jay-Z, American Gangster
7. Wu-Tang Clan, 8 Diagrams
8. Paramore, Riot!
9. Gallows, Orchestra of Wolves
10. The Good, the Bad & the Queen, the Good, the Bad & the Queen
11. Chris Letcher, Frieze
12. Saigon, Return of tha Yardfather
13. Against Me! New Wave
14. Burial, Untrue
15. Prodigy, Return of the Mac

Favorite Songs of 2007, Unranked
M.I.A., “Paper Planes”
LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends”
Against Me!, “Thrash Unreal”
Alicia Keys, “No One”
My Teenage Stride, “To Live & Die in the Airport Lounge”
Anaal Nathrakh, “Der Hölle Rache Kocht In Meinem Herzen”
Public Enemy, “Harder Than You Think”
Arcade Fire, “Keep the Car Running”
Bruce Springsteen, “Girls in Their Summer Clothes”
Rihanna, “Breakin’ Dishes”
Nelly Furtado, “Say it Right”
KRS-One & Marley Marl, “Rising to the Top”
Jay-Z, “American Dreamin’”
Britney Spears, “Piece of Me”
Miley Cyrus, “Start All Over”

Favorite Movies of 2007, Ranked
1. There Will Be Blood
This is, pardon the expression, a motherfucker of a movie. Good God. It’s awesome and towering and imposing from its first few seconds and it just does not let up. A harrowing nosedive into the blackness at the center of the human soul (black as oil, in fact), a commentary on capitalism and Christianity and their place deep in the roots of America, and a centerpiece for a performance by Daniel Day-Lewis that left me speechless. Amazing.

2. No Country for Old Men
I liked this a good deal more than Yancey did. To me, it wasn’t so much that the Coen brothers were “weird” again, it was that they had control again. I felt like all of their movies thru Barton Fink were driven by a deep and unsettling ‘heart of darkness’ — even Raising Arizona had the devil-incarnate Randall “Tex” Cobb character. They lost that focus over the years, descending more and more into movies that felt slapdash and episodic. No Country again finds them at the peak of their powers, making movies that are chilling and bleak and masterful.

3. The Flight of the Red Balloon
I saw this at the New York Film Festival — it hasn’t been released wide yet, so it’s probably lame that I’m including it, but there you go. A beautiful, stirring, genuinely touching film loosely based on the old French children’s movie The Red Balloon. I’ve always sort of passively liked Juliette Binoche in the past, but she is a revelation in this movie as a henpecked single-mother trying to hold the disparate strands of her life together. Nothing much actually happens in Red Balloon, but it’s somehow still gripping and heartbreaking and profoundly moving.

4. Colossal Youth
Spectacular. You can’t come by any of Pedro Costa’s movies in the US (I had to have a friend get me contraband DVD-Rs of his previous movies), so when his latest came to New York’s Anthology Film Archives, I made it a priority to get down there. I was not disappointed. Caveat: I like long, slow, quiet movies in which nothing much happens, and Colossal Youth is that to the extreme. On the day his wife walks out on him, a man named Ventura wanders — as if in a trance — through ramshackle tenements in Lisbon, encountering people he knows or used to know along the way. As the film progresses, time comes unstuck. Scenes occur out-of-sequence, explanations are given before questions are introduced. Through it all, Ventura remains numb and passive — the shifts start to seem more and more like a reflection of his own disconnection from reality. The narrative is held together by a gorgeous speech about love and devotion that, when it arrives for the final time near the film’s end, brought me to tears. Yeah, you heard me.

5. Silent Light
Another NYFF movie, but another truly spellbinding film. I’d never seen anything by Carlos Reygadas before, but my first move after Silent Light ended was to update my Netflix Queue. This is another slow-moving film: the opening, static shot of a sunrise takes about 5 or 6 minutes from start-to-finish, but again the slowness is what lends gravity. The plot is fairly simple: a Mennonite farmer has been carrying on an extramarital affair, and the weight of it has started to gradually take its toll. On my own blog, after I saw it, I wrote: “The film is gorgeously lethargic, holding silences for eternities, reducing paragraphs of emotion to a handful words, dedicating whole scenes to following a car as it drives down a deserted country road. Carlos Reygadas flair for images is flat-out astonishing — the composition of most of these shots is breathtaking. Because it’s so methodically paced, when true wrenching human emotion finally does surface — in the middle of a rainstorm, no less — it’s devastating, a final awful payoff for two hours of watching silent agony build and build and build.” The final act is a total betrayal in a lot of ways (I won’t say why, ‘cuz that would be spoiling), but suffice it to say that it would be an even better movie without the weird left turn it takes in the final 10 minutes.

The Best Things I Ate in 2007
1. Icelandic Hot Dogs.
2. Sesame pancake sandwiches at Vanessa’s Dumplings.
3. The pork burrito at Ssam.
4. The curry goat from this tiny Jamaican restaurant in Brooklyn whose name is escaping me.
5. The chicken meatballs & spaghetti squash I cooked the day after Christmas. Go, me.