Welcome to the seventh instalment of the Noughts Report. Each entry revisits a year in film from the 2000s, highlighting movies big and small and the careers and genres and trends that ignited or flamed out along the way. This attempted kaleidoscope is 100% subjective and AI-free, so if I bag or barely mention a film you love, or orate at length or heap praise upon a film you loathe, I apologise.
Read Part 1: 2001, Part 2: 2002, Part 3: 2003, Part 4: 2004, Part 5: 2005, and Part 6: 2006.
This year’s a daunting one to wrangle. Look no further than the year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, and its opposition frontrunner, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Two rich, stylish, muscular, nihilistic yet tremendous works, one a spartan chase picture, the other fashioned as an American epic.
Both are, at their core, about one-upmanship, whether the tense, silent cat & mouse games between Javier Bardem’s poorly-styled hitman and Josh Brolin’s evading prey, or the hyper-verbose combat of Daniel Day-Lewis’s oilman and Paul Dano’s preacher. Think the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Carl Weathers handshake in Predator, pessimistically refracted through literary works by Cormac McCarthy and Upton Sinclair and executed by modern masters.
Had neither of these all-timers existed, 2007 would still be a year to celebrate, not quite a 1999 in terms of variety and excitement but with its own deepish bench of classics, near-classics, and bangers. I’m not as enamoured with Michael Clayton as some, but I like what it is: a smart, star-driven, adult-oriented drama that revels in its characters’ contradictions and ambiguities. I’m also not the biggest fan of Juno, but appreciate the warmth and lived-in world director Jason Reitman creates from Diablo Cody’s script.
Like the late Rob Reiner two decades before, Reitman would enjoy a great run—across this, Thank You for Smoking, Up in the Air, and Young Adult—exhibiting a Midas touch for serving and bringing out the best in quality scripts and actors, until hitting a wobbly patch where instincts and material no longer served each other as well. He may still course-correct.
Some underrated traditional Westerns have been covered in earlier instalments of the Noughts Report (Open Range, The Missing, The Alamo) as well as neo-Westerns like Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and global riffs like The Good, the Bad, and the Weird and Australia’s own The Proposition. Rumours of the genre’s revival and/or demise tend to be greatly exaggerated, flames of enthusiasm fanned by a hit and then extinguished by the cold splash of a miss. The genre was very well served in 2007, however, by the neo-Western stylings of No Country and a pair of effective traditional Westerns in 3.10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Neither piece of material was new: 3:10 to Yuma remade a 1957 Glenn Ford western spun from an Elmore Leonard short story, while the story of Jesse James is a tale oft-told on film, with everyone from Tyrone Power to Stacey Keach essaying the titular James brother. But directors James Mangold and Australian export Andrew Dominik (of Chopper) deliver handsome, well-crafted, well-acted films that feel fresh despite their hand-me-down trappings, the former a pulpy romp, the latter erring towards the melancholic and elegiac.
Serial killer films are also well-worn cinematic turf, including those by director David Fincher, whose Seven in 1995 would fan that sub-genre’s flames for the next decade, with the likes of Copycat, Kiss the Girls, and The Bone Collector seeing out the 90s and Identity, Murder by Numbers, Taking Lives, and Hannibal Lecter prequels and sequels picking on its remains into the 2000s. Fincher’s Zodiac eschews the pulpier trappings of the genre for a procedural approach ala All the President’s Men, focusing on the investigation of the real-life unsolved Zodiac killings from the vantage points of a cop (Mark Ruffalo), newspaper editor (Robert Downey Jnr), and journalist slash hobbyist (Jake Gyllenhaal). Whilst it quietly spawned, Romero-like, an imitation empire of true-crime podcasts and documentaries, Fincher’s film is meaty, impeccably made, and more interested in creeping dread than visceral shock.
Another serial killer movie, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, is more salacious and interested in the vehicular carnage wrought by villain Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), befitting its origins as part of the failed Grindhouse exploitation double feature. However, befitting a Tarantino film, it’s equally interested in the lengthy dialogue exchanges between (and bare feet of) two sets of spunky Final Girls, one of which joyfully takes down the villain in the film’s delightful and subversive denouement. This is generally regarded as an outlier for Tarantino, and he himself calls it a “left-handed’ movie, but it’s one of my favourites from his body of work. Its Grindhouse companion piece, Planet Terror, is also one of Robert Rodriguez’s best, albeit too slickly produced to be authentic to the assignment.
Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice is a spry, exquisite take on Jane Austen’s classic novel. His follow-up feature Atonement, adapted from Ian McEwan’s historical novel about a false accusation and its fallout against the backdrop of the second World War, is similarly exquisite though more formally conceptualised in structure, compositions, and performance, its stars emulating the clipped tones and poise of vintage British cinema even as the perceived scandals on which the plot hinges carry contemporary charge. I love much of Joe Wright’s subsequent filmography, and how he’s evolved from a savvy heritage film craftsman into a Richard Lester-style dabbler in genres and tones, some films hitting and others missing. However, his initial one-two punch occupies a special, rarefied air.
Three standout crime thrillers of 2007 with lofty ambitions are Gone Baby Gone, Eastern Promises, and American Gangster. Gone Baby Gone, about a private investigator (Casey Affleck) aiding in a child abduction case, was Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, and alongside 2006’s Hollywoodland was clearly part of a respectability rehabilitation stratagem. Though Affleck’s Bostonian bona fides are documented, and though he’s done enough good things before and behind the camera at this point that the revelation he can direct a movie has dimmed, the fact he helmed this particular gem after Daredevil, Gigli, and the ‘Jenny from the Block’ music video felt miraculous at the time. That the film is a tense, textured adult thriller that’s thought-provoking, respects its audience, and—like Michael Clayton—embraces its moral ambiguities makes it continue to feel miraculous now.
Eastern Promises was David Cronenberg’s second (of four) collaborations with actor Viggo Mortensen after the excellent A History of Violence. This film—about a midwife (Naomi Watts) trying to locate the family of an orphaned baby, leading her into London’s Russian underworld—feels less Cronenbergian than their earlier movie, which itself felt like a departure; screenwriter Steven Knight—who’d logged credits on Dirty Pretty Things and Amazing Grace and would soon become very prolific—feels like a vying authorial voice on this project. However, veteran Cronenberg serves the material well, directing with an assured, unflashy hand where others would have lathered on histrionics, and like Gone Baby Gone sketching a milieu that feels authentic and rounded. The fight scene in a bathhouse between Mortensen in his birthday finest and a couple of thugs is one of the most discomforting scenes Cronenberg has helmed despite its lack of Cronenbergian body horror, and the absence of transgressiveness and viscera overall serve to highlight what a classicist Cronenberg is directorially.
In contrast to the milieus painted by Gone Baby Gone and Eastern Promises, there’s an element of dress-up to the 1960s and 70s Harlem and New Jersey conjured in American Gangster. Director Ridley Scott, late DP Harris Savides (who also shot Zodiac and was a regular collaborator with Gus Van Sant and, before his death, Sofia Coppola), the costume and production design crew, the soundtrack curator, and the accomplished cast—led by Denzel Washington as a heroin-dealing crimelord who’s a family man & community leader, and Russell Crowe as a cop of integrity who’s a schlub & deadbeat dad—all put in impressive work, but it’s period authenticity in a very performative way. Nonetheless, the film is engaging and, for a 2.5+ hour historical gangster film, propulsive.
It’s worth pausing to shout out the number of actors who own across these films. This was a banner year for Brolin, a Goonie in the 1980s and jobbing actor of the 90s and early noughts (see Mimic, Best Laid Plans, Hollow Man, Into the Blue etc.) who tapped a vein and revealed himself a formidable screen presence in his late 30s across Planet Terror, No Country for Old Men, and American Gangster. Casey Affleck similarly revealed new depths under his brother’s direction in Gone Baby Gone and as titular coward Robert Ford—and secret lead—in The Assassination of Jesse James. Russell Crowe has less dimension to play with as the charismatic villain of 3.10 to Yuma and flawed hero of American Gangster, but is effective in both roles.
And then there’s Daniel Day-Lewis (amazing), Paul Dano (also amazing, with all due respect to non-fan Tarantino), George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson, Ellen Page, Mark Ruffalo, Rose McGowan, Kurt Russell, the stacked deck of final and not-so-final girls of Death Proof (among them Sidney Poitier, Vanessa Ferlito, Marley Shelton, Zoe Bell, Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Wimstead), Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan, Viggo Mortensen, Denzel Washington, and a dozen others I won’t list here lest I simply start transcribing cast lists. Some all-time greats, some brief greats, some sleeping greats, and in McGowan’s case some sadly, maliciously thwarted potential.
Pauline Kael famously only watched films once, never revisiting and never revising her published opinion. It’s a stratagem I see both perks and shortcomings in, for both viewer and film. For example, I’ve not revisited Danny Boyle’s Sunshine since seeing it in theatres, so my largely positive appraisal of this Alex Garland-scripted cerebral sci-fi film—about astronauts going to revive the dying sun—remains intact and untested by the loud groupthink that says Sunshine falls off a cliff in its final act.
On the flip side, I’ve watched 28 Weeks Later—the sequel to Boyle & Garland’s 28 Days Later helmed by Juan Carlos Fernadillo—several times and flip flop from liking to disliking to back again on each viewing. My median take: it’s a solid sequel with a phenomenal opening sequence that sets a very high bar that the rest of the movie never again matches, and though it lacks the thematic meat and heft of 28 Days Later it makes enough smart world-building choices and delivers enough dumb narrative twists that it’s always interesting, if not edifying.
Side bar: Sunshine was the first time I was really impressed by Chris Evans on screen. Is Glen Powell’s career trajectory of recent years the result of a She’s All That-type bet between Tom Cruise and some execs that he could turn any Hollywood tall glass of water into the superstar Chris Evans should be?
Two other British releases that emulate American genres even more explicitly are Son of Rambow and Hot Fuzz. The former, about a group of children who make their own Rambo movie, is not as memorable as that premise would suggest, but Hot Fuzz is a blast. Edgar Wright’s follow-up to Shaun of the Dead—once again teaming co-writer Simon Pegg with Nick Frost onscreen—takes aim at American action movies, transplanting the aesthetic of Michael Bay and Tony Scott to a quaint British village of the Wicker Man/Midsomer Murders variety. Special shout-out to Timothy Dalton as suspect number one, supermarket owner Simon Skinner, in a delicious performance that harnesses all of Dalton’s theatrical gravitas—outsized in other roles—and should have been showered with awards. Pegg also headlined Run Fat Boy Run, a solid little comedy directed by the presumably friendly David Schwimmer.
Of the American action flicks Hot Fuzz lovingly homages, there was nothing quite of Point Break or Bad Boys’ calibre in 2007, but Shoot ‘Em Up makes a grimy fist for cult adoration and has some of Hot Fuzz’s genre-fawning spirit if not smarts. More generic action programmers included Mark Wahlberg vehicle Shooter and Jet Li/Jason Statham reunion War, both thoroughly forgettable. Statham also headlined a Uwe Boll video game adaptation, In the Name of the King, underestimating his own growing worth. The best old school actioner of the year hailed from Hong Kong in Flash Point, the third teaming of Donnie Yen and director Wilson Yip after SPL and Dragon Tiger Gate and ahead of their Ip Man series.
The year’s blockbusting was largely dominated by sequels, among them National Treasure 2, Rush Hour 3, Ocean’s Thirteen, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. There are things I like about all these movies, though my embarrassing highlight may be Roman Polanski doing a cavity search of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 3; I’m sure the POTUS also dug it.
The Simpsons Movie and Transformers translated beloved cartoon properties to screen. The former was kind of shrugged off, despite being the best Simpsons-related output in years and for many years thereafter. The latter combined producer Steven Spielberg’s patented awe and wonderment with director Michael Bay’s patented pyrotechnics, loving photography of hardware, bad broad comedy, and mugging performances to successfully hawk the vintage toy IP. Its many sequels would ditch the awe and wonderment and double down on the pyrotechnics, hardware, bad comedy, and mugging performances.
It’s notable that all the sequels mentioned above boast the same directors at the helm as previous instalments (Jon Turtletaub, Brett Ratner, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Greengrass, Gore Verbinski) and Michael Bay would similarly steer another four Transformers movies. Beginning with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, David Yates would steer the remaining Harry Potter films (x4) and three Fantastic Beasts spin-offs. It speaks to the growing Hollywood fixation on brand stewardship that these same filmmakers—albeit directors of varying levels of auteurism and cachet—would be tapped again to steer the series they created or, in Greengrass and Yates’s case, firmed up in some way. As a Potter agnostic, I’m loath to speculate what special sauce Yates brought to the series, but he was clearly in the pocket and a fine collaborator.
I find this year’s titles spawned by Harry Potter’s success more interesting than the boy wizard himself: The Golden Compass most obviously, and arguably Stardust and Beowulf. The Golden Compass, adapted from the Phillip Pullman novel by American Pie and About a Boy co-director Chris Weitz—while brother Paul helmed 2006’s American Dreamz—carried some star wattage in Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and was clearly envisioned as a trilogy-starter, but never connected and received flak for diluting its source material; more practically, I suspect its anti-climactic ending—leaving too large a morsel for the next instalment—burnt moviegoers. Stardust is a sweet, charming fantasy romance, perhaps the most benign work Matthew Vaughan has done and the best adaptation of Neil Gaiman (controversy noted) to screen; it was also the first time I clocked Mark Strong as a delightful screen presence.
Beowulf, from source material long preceding any of these titles, is the most frustrating to watch but also the most ambitious and formally daring. Working from a script by Roger Avary and the abovementioned Gaiman (controversy noted), this is the second of Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture animated films, bookended by The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, and is besieged by the same Uncanny Valley effect as those; however, the more adult material affords Zemeckis opportunity for cool creature design and staging some inventive, elaborate action set pieces untethered from live-action photography.
There were, of course, superhero movies, but as I work through each year of this decade I’m surprised to see fewer than expected. Of course, many commentators would still contend there were too many, and at the time it certainly felt like the stream was constant, perhaps because of the incessant hype machine, the speculative bubble nature of the genre, and the perennial coverage of productions and rumoured projects by fawning sites like Ain’t it Cool News. But the number of superhero movies has never rivalled genres like the Western or the musical at their peaks, perhaps because Westerns could be inexpensively cranked out on studio backlots and musicals could be manufactured efficiently with the finest technicians and all the bells, whistles, and affordances of the studio system.
There’s also a clear audience discernment between properties hailing from Marvel or DC and those hailing from imitators and/or attempts to make original superhero movies. While we’ve seen My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Sky High in previous years and would see Hancock and Push before the decade was done, the monopoly of the Big Two ultimately forced quantity and, arguably, quality control over the genre.
Case in point: all three 2007 superhero releases were from Marvel properties: Spider-Man 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and Ghost Rider. Sam Raimi’s third Spider-Man movie is his wobbliest and busiest and archest; the biggest casualties of this busyness are the film’s villains, all perfunctorily handled, though James Franco finally gets some dimension to play with as frenemy Harry Osborn and Raimi & Tobey Maguire mostly nail Peter Parker’s heel turn and redemption. The second Fantastic Four film is serviceable, neither improving on nor dipping from its 2005 precursor. Ghost Rider was Mark Steven Johnson’s second (and last) stab at a Marvel property after Daredevil, a film I professed some fondness for. I don’t have any fondness for Ghost Rider, though I’m happy when Nicolas Cage gets to play characters he loves and is happy.
A Ghost Rider sequel would follow in 2011; Fantastic Four would go on ice and be unsuccessfully rebooted in 2015, then again in 2025; and this iteration of Spider-Man would also be benched, but Spidey would return as the lead of six more live-action films & two animated films and would cameo in three other MCU films over the next two decades. I take back everything I said about the volume of superhero films being smaller than we think.
Despite the continuing onslaught of newer IP, some franchise standbys weren’t ready to be put out to pasture, and 2007 saw some mustier series continuing with Live Free or Die Hard (or Die Hard 4.0), Alien vs Predator: Requiem, Hannibal Rising, and TMNT. The fourth Die Hard film continues the diminishing returns of that series, though the dip from the entertaining Die Hard with a Vengeance was still relatively incremental; the drop between 4.0 and A Good Day to Die Hard would be far steeper. Bruce Willis is still attuned to the assignment as John McClane and director Len Wiseman, on loan from his Underworld series, delivers a solid actioner that nonetheless, at the points where McClane drives a car into a chopper or hangs precariously from a jet, feels a world removed from that skyscraper-bound Christmas gift of 1988.
I saw Alien vs Predator: Requiem in a double bill with No Country for Old Men, which is the only thing I recall about it. The titular critters would revert to versing humans, with more success, in the 2010s. I also remember little of prequel Hannibal Rising, aside from it featuring Gong Li (never a bad thing) and Gaspard Ulliel failing to fill Anthony Hopkins’ shoes. The film was directed by Peter Webber (Girl with a Pearl Earring), another case of an ostensibly arthouse-coded director tackling genre fare with muted results, ala Walter Salles on Dark Water. The computer-animated TMNT, in contrast, is amiable and fulfils its modest brief, though there have been better excursions for those martial arts amphibians before and since.
Rob Zombie’s Halloween was another revival of a musty property, one that’s improbably continued into the 2020s where Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street have not. However, Zombie’s two-film incursion into the franchise is not fondly remembered, with this first film conjuring a ghoulish white trash origin story for the enigmatic Michal Myers in its first half and then inelegantly accelerating through the plot of John Carpenter’s Halloween in its second. I’ll defer to Devin Faraci’s CHUD review to highlight the film’s Zombie-esque conceptual molasses: “There’s a certain point where having Udo Kier … Clint Howard, Tom Towles, Danny Trejo and Bill Mosely all working at the same mental health facility makes you wonder how you could ever cast lunatics to play against these people”.
While the year was light on horror remakes, there were sequels Hostel Part II, Resident Evil: Extinction, Saw IV, and Mother of Tears. George Romero kind of returned to his … of the Dead series with found footage Diary of the Dead, a penultimate reassertion of independence after the studio-funded Land of the Dead. Other titles from the burgeoning found footage sub-genre were Rec and The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Chillers derived from existing material included comic-book adaptation 30 Days of Night; Stephen King adaptations 1408 and The Mist; the third and best, but still wanting, take on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend; and the disturbing The Girl Next Door. Originals of the year included Trick r Treat, The Orphanage, Teeth, P2, I Know Who Killed Me, The Number 23, and My Name is Bruce. Stuck is not a horror film per se, but saw Stuart Gordon exercising his knack for the queasy and theatrical.
For mini-major Lionsgate, the Saw series has been a reliable money-maker, as have the subsequent Hunger Games series, The Expendables movies, and Tyler Perry. Two new Tyler Perry titles—Why Did I Get Married? and Daddy’s Little Girls—established his pattern of alternating between broad comedies and overwrought melodramas, albeit getting some broad comedy in his overwrought melodramas and some overwrought melodrama in his broad comedies.
Speaking of broad comedy, 2007 unleashed another Will Ferrell sports comedy in Blades of Glory; Eddie Murphy vehicle Norbit, not good but earning points for ghoulish enthusiasm; Seth Rogen’s minting as a star in Knocked Up and as a creative force in Superbad; Vince Vaughan as Santa’s overbearing brother in Fred Claus; dreadful parody Epic Movie; dad comedy Wild Hogs; comedy with feels The Bucket List, featuring Jack Nicholson’s final lead role; a pair of acidic comedies in Savages and Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding; and Frank Oz’s likeable Blighty-set dark comedy Death at a Funeral. Rowan Atkinson also dispatched Mr Bean’s sophomore and swansong theatrical outing in Mr Bean’s Holiday; as noted before, my great admiration for television star Rowan Atkinson is somewhat predicated on not watching movie star Rowan Atkinson’s films more than once.
Rom-coms of the year included Music and Lyrics, pairing Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore; Dan in Real Life, pairing Steve Carrell and a stack of pancakes, but also Juliette Binoche; I Could Never Be Your Woman, pairing Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd in Amy Heckerling’s penultimate movie; and at the more offbeat end of the genre, Lars and the Real Girl, pairing Ryan Gosling and a non-real girl. No Reservations, in which chef Catherine Zeta-Jones takes charge of her orphaned niece while flirting with fellow chef Aaron Eckhart, hails unexpectedly from Scott Hicks. My lukewarm thoughts on Shine are documented, but Shine and Snow Falling on Cedars and even Hearts in Atlantis are all films of some substance; No Reservations feels utterly weightless, however capably made.
Side bar: it’s worth highlighting how pervasive a screen presence Catherine Zeta-Jones was in the noughties, after popping in the late 90s with Entrapment and The Mask of Zorro (and before that The Phantom, but mileages will vary). Appearances already clocked this decade include High Fidelity, Traffic, America’s Sweethearts, Chicago (scoring an Oscar), Intolerable Cruelty, The Terminal, Ocean’s Twelve, and Legend of Zorro: never bad, always good, even when the roles and movies were letdowns.
Zeta-Jones also headlines another Australian director’s work this year, Gillian Armstrong’s period romance-drama Death-Defying Acts, as part of a faux-psychic act with her daughter (Saoirse Ronan, also busy in 2007) that piques the interest of Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce). Armstrong’s film feels a little underdeveloped, its intriguingly sketched character arcs never quite satisfyingly rounded out. Tom Cruise jumped to mind more than once in the film’s treatment of Houdini: another superstar with a megawatt smile who performs death-defying stunts and exudes confidence and charisma, but also an extremely private figure with a narrow inner circle and a dark side of sorts. Aesthetically, the film’s smoky visuals—captured by DP Haris Zambarloukos, a regular Roger Michell/Kenneth Branagh collaborator—make subtle use of haze, shadow and light, and reflective and glossy surfaces, accentuating the deceptive appearances and professional duplicity of the characters. The film effectively depicts the upper-class environs Houdini circulated in, but is less successful in conjuring impoverished environs, lacking the authenticity and texture of, say, an Angela’s Ashes. Then again, authentic squalor is not what cinemagoers pay to see in a Houdini-themed period romance starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Before Zeta-Jones’ casting, Rachel Weisz was attached to star; had the film been conceived and made a decade earlier, it might have starred Julia Roberts—given her accented appearances mid-1990s in Michael Collins and Mary Reilly—which would have amplified the Pretty Woman of it all: a wealthy man entering into a business transaction with a woman from the opposite side of the tracks. But the vibe Armstrong and screenwriters Tony Grissoni (a regular Terry Gilliam collaborator) and Brian Ward go for is neither Mills & Boon romance nor Pretty Woman. Despite the built-in charm of its stars and the glow of Zambarloukos’ cinematography, Death Defying Acts is not a warm film: there’s a coolness to it, arguably befitting a tale of smoke and mirrors and subterfuge. It is, to date, Armstrong’s last narrative feature.
Elsewhere in Australian cinema, import star Daniel Radcliffe played an orphan on holiday in Kangaroo Island in December Boys; documentary Forbidden Lie$ dug into controversial author Norma Khouri’s chicanery; Dr Plonk is a curiosity from Rolf De Heer, a black & white silent comedy starring a beloved Adelaide street comedian; Noise and Romulus, My Father are overrated in that way certain Australian titles get overrated in times of scarcity, but both are good and the latter is a particularly accomplished directorial debut for Richard Roxburgh and homecoming role for Eric Bana. Rogue, the sophomore feature from Wolf Creek director Gregg McLean, is an engaging and tense creature feature, while James Wan pivoted from Saw with the supernatural Dead Silence and gnarly Death Sentence.
I’ll wrap the Australian corner of this piece with a pair of multicultural, women-centred dramas. The Home Song Stories is a somewhat autobiographical work from writer-director Tony Ayres, about an immigrant (Joan Chen) who marries an Australian, becomes discontent Down Under, and begins having affairs, culminating in a disastrous one with a young chef. Import star Chen—whose eclectic CV encompasses The Last Emperor, Twin Peaks, On Deadly Ground, and Judge Dredd—is the MVP of The Home Song Stories, playing a character alternately poised and broken, unlikeable and sympathetic. Ayres and company nicely evoke late 60s–early 70s Victoria, creating settings and spaces that feel authentic and lived-in.
Dee McLachlan’s The Jammed, meanwhile, follows three different stories around the theme of sex trafficking: one sees an Australian woman reluctantly help an older Chinese woman search for her missing daughter; in another, a woman recounts the story of her enslavement to an immigration agent; and in the third, where the threads intersect, a group of foreign women are coerced and entrapped into prostitution by threats of deportation, debt, and endangerment. The Jammed is confronting, uncomfortable viewing, never gratuitous but certainly unflinching. The acting is raw and amplified by the film’s digital video aesthetic, which strips texture but gains visual urgency, giving the film a docu-drama flavour, as though the crew infiltrated a dark underbelly of urban life, captured it like lightning in a bottle, and fled the scene. The default casting of a White Anglo-Saxon Person (Veronica Sywak) as the agent of change—a relatable avatar to wade into troubled waters with—is a legitimate gripe given Australia’s multicultural makeup, but not an irredeemable ping.
From the first entry in this series, there’s been a somewhat melancholic strain of counting down winding-down careers. In this instalment, I’ve noted the penultimate feature of Amy Heckerling, the final narrative feature of Gillian Armstrong, and the final film of Frank Darabont (The Mist). All filmmakers alive and (hopefully) well, either muscled out of or consciously uncoupled from the industry. 2007 also marked Curtis Hanson’s penultimate film (Lucky You) and the final films of Mike Nichols (Charlie Wilson’s War), Sidney Lumet (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), and Woody Allen (Cassandra’s Dream).
Just kidding. Cassandra’s Dream doesn’t even crack Allen’s final twelve. Of these titles, I’m lukewarm on the sweaty political satire of Charlie Wilson’s War, enjoy gambling drama Lucky You despite its low energy, and very much like Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Cassandra’s Dream, both films where crime intersects with simmering family tensions. The Lumet films taps the same raw nerve as much of his best work, while Allen’s film dabbles in the same murky morality play territory as Match Point, with Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell well paired as brothers in crime and guilt. Another elder statesman, Francis Coppola, released Youth Without Youth, a curio like so many late Coppola films.
Speaking of curious, I’m confounded how Roland Joffe—the Oscar-nominated, Palme d’Or winning director of the distinguished The Killing Fields and The Mission—directed the grim, torture porny thriller Captivity. Notwithstanding the fact the film was re-edited by its producer, and the unpleasant advertising for the film was likely in the hands of the marketing team and not Joffe, it’s still a perplexing match of material and maker.
There’s no mystery, however, what attracted Kenneth Branagh to adapt Anthony Shaffer’s play Sleuth to screen for the second time: the film is one of the many links in the chain of Branagh's ongoing metatextual flirtation with Laurence Olivier's oeuvre. Michael Caine essays the Olivier role from the 1972 original, while Jude Law fills the role previously occupied by Caine; to his credit, Branagh resisted the Oedipal urge to play either part. This is the last and best of the Caine remakes of the 2000s, superior to Alfie and The Italian Job and, despite my well-documented Stallonean biases, Get Carter; it’s also the second Caine himself appeared in (after Get Carter) and second featuring Jude Law filling Caine’s oversized shoes (after Alfie).
While the noughts weren’t quite a wilderness era for actor-director Branagh, as an aficionado and apologist I'd say they nonetheless feel like a waiting room between his Shakespearean upstart crow era in the 90s and his reset of sorts from the 2010 onwards, where he gets to mug as Hercule Poirot and Russian villains, bring gravitas on tap to Christopher Nolan films, and direct everything from Thor to Cinderella to All is True to Belfast. Sleuth is his best and most intriguing directorial work of this decade, the constraints of the source material and Harold Pinter’s pared-back adaptation curbing some of his typical excesses.
Another intriguing thriller is Bruce A. Evans’ sophomore film Mr Brooks—fifteen years after his debut Kuffs—starring Kevin Costner as a seemingly straightlaced family man and businessman with a serial killer side, manifested via a having-fun William Hurt. Neither Kuffs nor Mr Brooks are classics, but they’re both enjoyable, sneaky little gems that warrant attention. Mr Brooks also milks what I find intriguing about Kevin Costner: that he’s a gigantic fascinating weirdo underneath that vanilla leading man veneer, the kind of cat who doggedly doubles down making The Postman after Waterworld and, in his professional twilight, self-finances a four-part epic Western saga starring himself.
Other notable directors with 2007 releases included Wes Anderson with The Darjeeling Limited, Neil Jordan with The Brave One, Todd Haynes with I’m Not Here, and Michael Winterbottom with A Mighty Heart. I don’t remember a great deal about these particular titles—Haynes’ rumination on Bob Dylan, refracted through a half dozen actors and eras, is a particular blur—but I recall the style threatening to suffocate the pathos on Anderson’s exotic sibling train trip’ Jodie Foster being typically, commendably steely and determined in Jordan’s retribution drama; and Winterbottom’s film taking a level, procedural approach to its fraught subject.
Michael Haneke also issued his carbon copy colour remake of Funny Games, which I find better than the original, perhaps given extra charge and dimension by seeing name actors of the calibre of Naomi Watts and Tim Roth put through Haneke’s punishing regime.
With the passage of time, the screen personalities and life philosophies of Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix seem like oil and water, yet James Gray paired the actors twice, very effectively, across The Yards and We Own the Night, the latter a family drama of cops and criminals. Gray’s filmography is a fascinating and rich one; he doesn’t conjure a lot of directorial thunder and flash, but his films are all impeccably made and acted, telling intimate stories of families and relationships that tap something epic and universal and primal. We Own the Night is of a piece with this body of work, haunted and both muscular and fragile as fine China.
The year also yielded more Iraq War dramas in Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah—about a father (Tommy Lee Jones) searching for his missing soldier son—and Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, which grapples with the conflict from three vantage points, depicting two soldiers on duty, an academic (Redford) dialoguing with a disillusioned student (Andrew Garfield), and a journalist (Meryl Streep) interviewing a slick politician (Tom Cruise). Both films—like most Iraq War dramas of the decade—are well-made, characteristically joyless, neither fish nor fowl, for neither hawks nor doves, and liberal humanist dramas that liberal humanists don’t want to watch. However, the latter grossed $68 million, deemed disappointing given the film featured producer Cruise in a support role; today, that would be hailed as revitalising adult drama.
Lions for Lambs was also notable as the first release of Cruise's very brief tenure atop MGM. Said tenure yielded only two releases, suggesting Cruise is not the best authority on how to run or, indeed, merge studios.
There’s undoubtably a strain of post-911/Bush era anxiety running through The Invasion, the Oliver Hirschbiegel-helmed iteration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but with its depiction of a global pandemic and dangerous mob mentality it arguably resonates more today than in the 2000s. Like Hannibal Rising, this saw a classy director—Hirschbiegel previously directed Downfall—imported to tackle a Hollywood genre property. Studio Warner Bros were unhappy with what he delivered and the film underwent extensive reshoots by the Wachowskis and V for Vendetta’s James McTigue.
The result is unremarkable, but unremarkable in ways I find soothing and engaging. The Invasion trades in its topical concerns in fun movie hokum ways, with a resourceful star (Nicole Kidman) navigating from Complication A to Complication B to Complication C before arriving at Resolution A and so on. Actually, much like her ex-husband’s War of the Worlds, released two years earlier, the film focuses on a parent and child navigating an invasion, with the breakthrough that cracks the issue happening offscreen by other players. It’s indisputably derivative and not a patch on Don Siegel’s original, nor Phillip Kaufman or even Abel Ferrara’s remakes, but it’s entertaining and technically polished. Among Nicole Kidman’s routine concessions to commerce this decade, I’ll take it over The Stepford Wives, Bewitched, or The Golden Compass.
Other European imports of 2007 included The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel’s artfully made, experiential biopic about paralysed fashion editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, poignantly played by Mathieu Amalric; 2 Days in Paris, Julie Delpy’s barbed romantic-comedy about a French woman (Delpy) and her very American boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) visiting her zany family in Paris; and another biopic, La Vie En Rose, thoughtfully made and with a deservedly awards-minted Marion Cotillard performance as Edith Piaf, albeit hitting the same notes as many a musician biopic.
In addition to skewering the musical biopic with amusing if not hilarious results in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, 2007 was also heavy on musicals, including John Carney’s lovely Once, Julie Taymor’s overstimulated Across the Universe, and Disney princess metatext Enchanted. Hairspray adapts the stage musical adaptation of John Waters’ 1988 mainstream breakthrough Hairspray; it’s energetic and enjoyable, but glosses over the subversiveness of its source text. Finally, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd is a blast, refracting Sondheim’s great grisly musical through a Hammer lens and affording a big bounce back (albeit fleetingly) for Burton after the disappointing Planet of the Apes and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Whilst 1998’s Elizabeth was a tad overrated—there are a half dozen other films I’d bequeath its Best Picture Oscar nomination to—it’s also a very, very watchable historical drama-thriller with palace intrigue, a hint of aristocratic bodice ripper, and a superb cast. Elizabeth: The Golden Age has more pageantry than palace intrigue, and feels amorphous and bloated where Elizabeth is sharp and propulsive. Performances are especially disappointing: Cate Blanchett is good but brings nothing revelatory to her older Queen; Clive Owen isn’t as dashing or fun as he could be as explorer & love interest Walter Raleigh; Geoffrey Rush, mysterious and cunning as spymaster Walsingham in the precursor film, has little to do but be boring and sickly here; and nobody in the ensemble pops the way Rush or Christopher Eccleston’s aristocratic malcontent did in Elizabeth, nor brings the insta-class that cameo players Attenborough or Gielgud did. Becoming Jane, in contrast, is a sweet, chaste romance that fulfils its modest ambitions and, thankfully, does not exert and contort itself into becoming a Rosetta Stone for its author-subject.
I’ll close with some thrillers: Perfect Stranger is warmed-up leftovers from the 1990s; Fracture is somewhat tastier warmed-up leftovers from that decade; Flawless is an unmemorable thriller despite being a Blame It on Rio reunion for Michael Caine and Demi Moore; Disturbia is a decent teen Rear Window riff which boosted Shia LaBeouf’s signal, for good or ill, in conjunction with Transformers; Next does not live up to its promise of a Phillip K. Dick adaptation featuring Nicolas Cage as a magician; and You Kill Me is a fun little gem with Ben Kingsley as a hitman who courts Tea Leoni. I remember zilch about the John August-directed, Ryan Reynolds-headlined The Nines, which is not exactly an endorsement for a screenwriter-director with a podcast and blog about the art and craft of screenwriting.
For disclosure, I have not seen acclaimed films from acclaimed directors Water Lilies, My Blueberry Nights, or Lust Caution; family flicks Shrek the Third, Ratatouille, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Bride to Terabithia, Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, or Bee Movie; comedy sequel Evan Almighty; comedy remake (of Australian original) I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry; another Adam Sandler film Reign Over Me; adult animation Persepolis; Sean Penn’s Into the Wild; or Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park.
Thanks for reading. We’ll be back for 2008 and the start of the MCU, the returns of Indiana Jones and John Rambo, and a pair of Eastwoods. Til then …