Lists. SFBG.

"Because this year brought the last days of some beloved directors (including Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Curtis Harrington), and because United States leaders and moviegoers have endorsed the American tradition of soldiering forward blindly into the future with no memory, it seems appropriate to render this year's film issue as a memorial," writes San Francisco Bay Guardian film editor Johnny Ray Huston, adding, "The past 12 months brought a pair of great films specifically devoted to memorials, Heddy Honigmann's Forever and John Gianvito's Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind." And his own list of 12 is topped by José Luis Guerín's En la Ciudad de Sylvia: "Pure cinema, and perhaps even lovelier than the women it watches and to whom it pays tribute."

Cheryl Eddy finds "some thematic similarities worth noting." "Buns in the Oven," obviously, but also "Horror is Dead." Her #1: No Country for Old Men.

"I felt fully prepared to dig [Todd] Haynes's panoply, and after seeing [I'm Not There] three times I'm pretty sure I do," writes Max Goldberg in an overview of 07's music narratives and docs. "In its constant double-edged critiques and heady invocations of the nonexistent, I'm convinced the film represents one of the most energetic (and perhaps cathartic) directing performances of the year. And yet something's lost in I'm Not There's reshuffling of the biopic deck." His "Baker's Dozen" is divided into three sections: "On Beauty," "Remnants of the Real" and "Nervous Nightmares."

"This year Americans liked their war with a good dose of comic book fantasy and clearly fictitious spectacle, their tongues teasing the CGI-enhanced teat, preferably attached to the too perfectly uniform six-pack abs on one of those hunka-hunka-burning-Spartan tough-love monkeys in 300," writes Kimberly Chun, whose list is an eclectic collection of "Pop Tops."

"In 2007, as life increasingly resembled lurid or delusional fiction, movies stepped up to the social-responsibility plate and started presenting a franker version of reality," writes Dennis Harvey. "That is, the movies nobody saw.... That the year's better feel-bad dramas didn't take off despite their star power is disappointing, if not unexpected. But it truly depresses that Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, the year's best documentary — and arguably best movie, period — failed to break out despite universal raves." He opens his "Alphabetical Narrative Top 10" with Adam's Apples.

Jason Shamai weighs the highs and lows not of list-making but of all the disclamatory premabling that usually goes on before docking each film in his top ten (plus three alternates) a point or two for this or that.

"Though it's been pronounced dead so often and for so many years, the western lived again in 2007, sprouting like a gnarly weed through a cracked desert shelf," writes Jeffrey M Anderson. "These new-millennium westerns, however, are a little tougher, a little wiser, and more prone to fits of sadness and moments of darkness." His #1: Inland Empire.

"Unsettling subjects such as fatality by bestiality and landscapes ravaged by industry might conjure coarse, sensationalist images - straightforward visions of debauchery and exploitation," writes Kevin Langson. "But if you are Robinson Devor or Jennifer Baichwal, they conjure bittersweet visual poetry: Devor's Zoo and Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes are two stunning documentaries released this year that cleverly wield visual beauty to convey an apparent distortion in the human relationship with animals and with the environment, respectively." And both make his list, of course.

The SFBG wraps its package with quite a "bevy of top 10s, rants and raves" from filmmakers, critics, programmers and other city lights.

Posted by dwhudson at January 2, 2008 6:49 AM