Yea. That sure is a great way to describe his performance. Brando isn’t good in The Godfather either. He wears a mustache. He sits in a chair. Whatever.

James Stewart isn’t good in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington either. His hair is always sweaty. He has a suit. Whatever.

I don’t get to a lot of theatrical screenings (except for film festivals) during the year, so at the end of a given calendar year, my Top 5 list is heavily slanted to festival stuff. After a few years, I catch up and it gets a bit more solidified (I think I’m about ready with 2004 at this stage…). Having said that, I’m still contributing to these lists (well, just since 2006 anyway). For 2007, my top 2 films (both seen at TIFF) were “You, The Living” and “A Gentle Breeze In The Village”. They are criminally not available in R1 unfortunately (I just got a region free player and snagged “You, The Living” for it as the first title). I’m forgetting what else I submitted – I think “Silent Light”, “Chacun Son Cinema”, “Once”, “NCFOM”, “Heima”, but forget which were top 5 and which were runners up. And though “4 Months…” is an astonishing film, I didn’t submit it as Top 5. Should I have? Short of the date debate, I don’t know – I tend to lean towards submitting films I want to see over and over. As great as 4 Months was, I don’t think I’d want to see it again and again. But is that a valid way of choosing? Well, for favourites, yes.

Still grappling with why I love TWBB so much. It is pure unabashed spectacle on one hand. Pure technique in service of eliciting a response while watching. I thought the personification of unfettered capitalism through a pure visual medium to be quite effective. And yes, like the milkshake speech, it is bombastically funny to boot. It is a strange mix of the shrill and the serious (See also: Videodrome)

For my personal end-of-year lists, I make one that’s “best I saw this year” that includes even older stuff, and one that’s “best released this year,” going by limited/wide release or original country release for foreign films (not counting festivals, unless the film never gets distribution, in which case I count the first festival screening date). The second list is always ripe for lots of revision for several months. And that way of counting release dates will, I’m sure, not be agreed upon by everyone.

As far as the date discrepencies on these posts, most of them have occurred because we submitted our initial top five and a few honorable mentions based on our own lists or Wikipedia, sometimes without checking IMDb first. So festival releases, foreign films, have gotten on the planning drafts with date discrepancies from the get-go and we haven’t always hashed them out fully. Next decade, we ought to be more careful about this. That said, I don’t think anything would really have changed in the consensus lists if the few date discrepancies left had been fixed.

Personally. I try really hard to stick to what was released “officially” in the given year. The Cannes winners are a different story though. They roll out so late around here and usually they make my list and I want to mention them so I put them on the list. We’ve had this discussion around here before, but some people put movies that simply got theatrical releases in their neck of the woods that year (like in Ashley’s example of the newspaper guy). Other will only go by what IMDb says. others do a mish-mash. Festivals also make things difficult. I think Kurt puts movies he saw at TIFF on his list even if they don’t officially get released for another two years.

When I do this year’s list. I will list only movies that were publicly released (not a festival or private/press screening) in theaters somewhere in the United States during the given year. Sort of the same way the academy does it. But to each his own. I don’t think there is a wrong way to go about it.

As for revisions, yeah I sometimes go back and change them. But I don’t go back and re-edit my posts. I just make mental changes and make those changes on the fly if the subject is ever brought up. Like now..

Rescue Dawn is fucking boring and pointless. The first 3 minutes are amazing, but the next 90 minutes of Chicken Run-antics with skinny people in the jungle sucked.

I agree that imdb release dates should be used, to avoid this confusion. I mean is the list best-of-2007 or best-of-whatever-i-watched-in-2007?

Films that overtook Grindhouse in my personal list:

I’m Not There
Silent Light (the best directed film of the year) – Rot’s review
Black Book
Rescue Dawn
Wind that Shakes the Barley
Atonement

etc etc.

It seems everyone’s annual opinions and discussions would be a lot more consistent if there was an agreed-upon universal release date for all films. I know it’s difficult with foreign films, and with films that travel a long festival circuit or have a slow commerical rollout. When in question, I always refer to the year of the IMDb entry, not the year on my movie ticket stub. There Will Be Blood, for example is a 2007 film. Seems that’s the consensus around here, but it irked me a little bit when TWBB appeared on a best of 2008 list in the local paper simply because the critic didn’t get around to seeing it until February.

Genius is a strong word, I wonder if Kurt has some weird rationalization for liking TWBB that has nothing to do with why I enjoy it. I’m sure he does.

TWBB, Death Proof, Zodiac, 4,3,2. 4 good-to-great movies, apparently all from this year. And No Country For Old Men isn’t that bad, it was fun in the theatre, just more bland and forgetable than the rest.

Re: TWBB, I don’t even like DDL that much. I get that he’s good at that style of acting, I’m just not a fan – again, too over the top and bombastic for me.

Prepare for Blindness in the 2008 list! Haha.

I don’t get the infatuation.

And Roy don’t even get me started on the Jesse James snubs that occurred at the Oscars that year.

y’all been had.