Well, this year was a pretty big deal in a lot of ways. On January 19 I flew back home to Tucson, just getting over a massive bout of norovirus, to get to work on Scare-Izona: A Travel Guide to Arizona’s Spookiest Spots. It was enormously freeing, exciting, and kind of terrifying.
The set up was that I would stay with my aunt, uncle, and cousin for three days on the weekend, then I would go to my parents’ place in Saint David to help my dad build the house and do whatever else they needed me to do on the property for the other four days. I left my cat, Hermione, behind because I was planning on coming back in six months. My ex-wife and I had discussed the distance and decided to have an open marriage during this time as well. This was my first step into the world of ethical non-monogamy and it would not be the last.
It was fairly weird to go from feeling desperate and trapped to feeling free and working on a dream I had had since I was a kid. I was back with my friends and family and had more support that the previous four years had afforded and almost immediately it felt like things clicked back into place.
I exercised a lot during this time. When I was in Saint David I was doing a lot of manual labor but I also ran on the treadmill and lifted weights on the boflex. I was tired of the weight I had been carrying and was ready to feel healthier. It started to work and I regained some confidence and energy from that.
I wanted to get into acting locally and doing martial arts fights. Katie’s husband Mikal and her kids were acting in local independent movies and I asked if she could help put me next to some people to see if I could get in involved. I went to the set of a movie her son Liam was working on and I met the movie’s producer Gabi who was friends with Katie as well. I also met local actor Sam Doane in passing on that movie. Gabi wanted to be our publicist for the book and I expressed to her my desire to act in movies. She got Katie and I on a movie as extras.
The movie was called Forward and it was a sci-fi time travel movie by local filmmaker Peter Leon. It starred Sam who I had just met and Katie and I were set to be background extras. I was lab tech number 4. We didn’t really have a lot to do on the movie besides vaguely computery stuff in the background and then look sad, shocked, and panicked at different points throughout the movie. Because it was shot out of sequence my weight loss was tracked backwards and it kind of looks like I took a character’s death hard and let myself go.
Despite not having a lot to do, we were in a lot of the movie which meant we were on set a lot. I talked to other people and became friends with one of the other actors, Robert Linden, who was also a martial artist and stunt performer. We talked martial arts and between takes when we weren’t needed would go into side rooms and do light sparring and other martial artsy shit. This eventually led to me being cast in some of the things that he was doing, including some martial arts projects (I am currently a fighter in a project he is working on now).
This also put me in proximity with Peter and when he noticed that I was paying attention to what he was doing at a wedding reception scene, he offered to let me look at the monitor and talked a little bit about the set up. My ex-wife was in town this day and appears as an extra in the reception scene and got upset that my character had a scene in which I was having a meet cute with another woman on set. That was a weird argument to have.
When the movie was completed, quite a while later, I was not able to go to the premiere but Peter hit me up about getting the DVD to me and said that he was impressed by the background acting I had done and asked if I was interested in being in his next movie which would involve being a cop and learning how to fire an assault rifle. He had me at assault rifle but that is a story for another year. But this was the beginning of an almost 20 year creative relationship that sees our ninth movie that Peter and I wrote together, Two Old Cops, being released in less than two months on December 5th at the Loft in Tucson.
I was really sad to have left Hermione behind and on the morning of my 31st birthday my mom woke me up holding the prettiest kitten I have ever seen in my life. She said that one of the ‘barn’ cats, Blackie, had a litter of kittens and when they were ready to be separated from her I could have one since I missed Hermione Doo. She said it didn’t have to be this one but she wanted to bring to show me because she was so pretty.
One of the jobs that I had while I worked out there was feeding the animals and I eventually started feeding the kittens who were in a cage outside. When I would approach, the pretty one hid from me, the other stripy girl ran right up to me, and the stripy boy ran to the back of the cage and hissed at me. She and the boy were always snuggling when I walked up and then she would run to me and he would run to the back and hiss. It became very clear that the one I would be taking was the stripey girl.
When the day came, I picked her up and started to carry her away. She ran up to my shoulder and started crying. I heard crying behind me and saw that the boy was on his hind legs with his claws through the cage crying for her. I stopped and told my dad, I need to take him too. So dad brought the boy with me to the trailer I was staying in out there. I decided to name them Tim and Daisy after the main characters on Spaced.
Tim really hated me. He ran from me and hissed at me and nothing I did changed it. I offered food, treats, play items, everything I could think of and he had none of it. But he loved Daisy so much so I kept trying. Eventually, I was walking up to the porch and Blackie was walking around and I stopped to pet her and she rubbed up against me. I went into the trailer and it was a whole different ballgame with Tim. He was all about me. Sometimes it isn’t what you know but who you know. Me smelling like his mom was all the endorsement he needed and we were fast friends from that day forth. He would sit in my underwear like a hammock when I was going to the bathroom and he snuggled with my at every available opportunity. He was my best little buddy.
A few weeks went by and I came back from Tucson and entered the trailer and heard a kitten crying. I looked at Tim and Daisy and they looked back with the equivalent of a shoulder shrug and I followed the sound to the bathroom where the litter box was and in the litter box was the pretty one. I went into the garage apartment and asked my mom what was up. She said that because of her coloring, the pretty one wouldn’t survive outside and I could have her if I named her Buttons. I said I was naming her Marsha, after another Spaced character, and that was that.
Now, you might be thinking that getting three more cats when I was heading back to Arkansas in six months would be a crazy idea but by this time something else had happened: We got two more book deals. I was going to be in Arizona writing books for the foreseeable future so I was now going to stay and we were going to work out my ex-wife and step son moving down.
That Christmas was one of my favorites. She and my step-son came down to visit and we had a huge family Christmas in Saint David. It was pretty amazing and was the last time we were all really together. I played Rock Band with my cousins, ex, and stepson. It cut through my cynicism about Christmas and is burned in my head as one of the last great family moments I was ever going to have. I didn’t know that at the time but it was the last big gathering before things were forever changed three years later.
2007 ended on a very high note and it was a truly great year for me. It might seem with so much travel, acting, video game playing, and exercise there would be no room for movies but there was a lot of movie going during this time. I would go on Thursdays when I got back into town, usually with my friends and sometimes on Sundays I would go to see them by myself before heading back to Saint David. When I went back to Arkansas to visit, we went to movies. I was still all about movies, maybe more than the previous years. There was a lot to love and it was a pretty big year.
Runners up in roughly release order: Alpha Dog, Smokin’ Aces, Reno 911: Miami, 300, TMNT, Blades of Glory, Grindhouse, Disturbia, 28 Weeks Later, Shrek the Third, Knocked Up, Ocean’s Thirteen, Eagle vs Shark, 1408, Ratatouille, Transformers, the Simpsons Movie, Bourne Ultimatum, Hot Rod, Stardust, Death at a Funeral, Superbad, Balls of Fury, 3:10 to Yuma, Shoot Em Up, 30 Days of Night, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Hitman, the Mist, Juno, I Am Legend, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 2007 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 19-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!
1.Gone Baby Gone-Ben Affleck
After a pretty rough run of box office disappointments, Ben Affleck took a step back from acting to direct an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s 1998 novel Gone Baby Gone. It ushered in a new era for Affleck and unlocked another favorite author for me.
Based on book four of the Patrick and Angie private detective series, Gone Baby Gone find Boston-based private investigators (and dating couple), Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), hired by Bea McCready (Amy Madigan) to find her kidnapped niece Amanda (Madeline O’Brien). They agree to take the case despite Amanda’s uncle Lionel’s (Titus Welliver) reluctance to want to hire them in the first place. They quickly discover that Amanda’s mother Helene (Amy Ryan) is involved in drugs and crime and was fairly profoundly neglectful. Patrick and Angie get involved with the police detectives on the case Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton) and cooperate until a ransom drop leads to Amanda’s apparent death in a local quarry.
The investigation shifts to find out what happened and who is responsible. The story becomes a twisted trail of wrong that leaves you feeling like you need a shower. None of that compares to the ultimate solution to the mystery and what Patrick does about it. It is a resolution that sees Patrick and Angie end their relationship. The future books in the series reflect this and the last book in the series, the Moonlight Mile, is a direct sequel to Gone Baby Gone that shows the repercussions of Patrick’s decision.
Gone Baby Gone is a dark and gritty crime story with powerful performances, excellent writing, and a story that really sticks in your head whether you want it there or not. The ultimate moral decision made in the movie continues to drive debate to this day, even with Lehane’s own resolution two books later passing his particular judgement on it. When I saw Gone Baby Gone in the theater, I saw a friend group almost come to blows as they shouted at each other in disagreement over the ending.
This was a massive announcement for Affleck. He won a best screenplay Oscar with Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting but a lot of people assumed for years that Damon was the major driving force there, apparently assuming that Affleck’s character Chucky in that movie was autobiographical. Affleck put that argument to bed with Gone Baby Gone.
The direction was bold, confident, and not perfect for the material. He rightfully stayed out of the movie, choosing instead to direct his younger brother Casey in the lead role. Casey Affleck really nails Patrick here and the performance is its own announcement that Casey isn’t just Ben’s nepo hire little brother. The weight of the decision Patrick makes in this movie is felt all through Affleck and everything we’ve seen from him leading up informs the why of the decision.
Similarly Michelle Mongahan’s Angie is perfect. She also earns her counterpoint all through the movie in the way she deals with both Patrick and the other characters. She is never Patrick’s side kick or second fiddle and she carries Angie with strength and authority. The relationship the two build and extend throughout the movie makes their ending much more painful.
The supporting cast, which includes Morgan Freeman, are all amazing as well. Amy Madigan’s Bea feels very real and never descends into shrill territory with her constant and unwavering insistence that hiring the detectives is the right thing for Amanda. Titus Welliver gives an incredible performance leading up to his character, sober for 25 years, having to take two shots of Cutty and a tallboy. Amy Ryan, who was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for this role, gives a powerful performance that has no hints of the actor flinching at how much of a twat she is. She is not a good person and Ryan delivers on that with full commitment and makes the complications feel so much more real than they otherwise might have been.
It was awesome to see John Ashton in this and Harris is amazing as usual. Freeman stands out as a police captain Doyle as he always does but if he doesn’t work here then the movie doesn’t work. The movie works. Rapper Slaine is another standout as Bubba, a recurring character from the books, who helps Patrick and Angie when they need a contact on the wrong side of the law and is perfect here. Likewise, Micheal K Williams turns in a solid performance as Patrick’s detective friend Devin, even if he feels under utilized.
I saw Gone Baby Gone in the theater while visiting Arkansas and it was maybe the best part of that trip which was largely disastrous. I loved the movie and loved the complicated ending. My own feelings on it are a kind bit of fence riding. I understand why Patrick did what he did but it was probably the wrong move. I tend to be a rule follower so I likely would have done the same thing. That being said, I saw this before working in behavioral health with kids so the current version of me would likely have sided with Angie if I read/saw the movie for the first time now.
This started a run of great Affleck directed movies and I think it remains my favorite of them. Unfortunately, he has hit a bit of a rough patch on his directorial output of late but I really hope he gets back on track. I think he is a tremendous talent and I want more. I would have loved if he would have adapted more Patrick and Angie books (Darkness Take My Hand in particular) but sadly the only other Lehane novel he has adapted is Live By Night, which is a good novel but not a great movie.
Gone Baby Gone is not a feel good movie. It is a gritty and dark crime movie that asks really hard questions and provides equally hard answers. It isn’t something to pop on to cheer yourself up but if you want a dark, adult crime story that has a lot to say about the state of child welfare, then you cannot do any better.
2. No Country for Old Men -Coen Brothers
Not to be outdone in the dark, gritty crime category, Joel and Ethan Coen offer up this adaptation of the Cormack McCarthy novel of the same name.
Taking place in 1980, No Country for Old Men follows Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a hunter who stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong and steals the two million dollars left behind. This puts him on the radar of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) a psychopathic hitman who kills with a bolt gun designed for killing cattle and is obsessed with the chance of a coin toss. Local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is in the mix investigating the growing string of murders left behind as Chigurh pursues Llewelyn. Also on the hunt for Moss is Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), a bounty hunter trying to get to Moss before Chigurh and whose purpose in the story seems to mainly be to tell and show the audience how much of a monster that Chigurh is.
No Country for Old Men is equal parts western and crime drama. The movie is a mixture of drama, suspense, and existential crisis. It builds slowly and thoughtfully and leads to a confrontation that the audience is denied. The film absolutely drips with style and substance to equal measure and offers a creeping desperation toward a disastrous conclusion set in motion from the moment Llewelyn takes the money. No matter what he does, nothing will stop ‘force of nature’ Chigurh and the question becomes how complete the carnage will be. Will Bell join Moss and Wells in death? Will Chigurh walk away alive? Will anyone? And most importantly, why is two million dollars of drug money worth all of this death and destruction? What does bravery mean if that bravery is ultimately futile?
These questions set this story apart from your bog standard crime story and the bleak reality of McCarthy’s work feels almost more oppressive than the dystopian desperation of the Road. In an apocalypse, everything is over and the oppressive pressure of reality has an end point because eventually it will kill you. In No Country, the veneer of a regular life, the hint that other people and other lives are not doomed to death by air propelled bolt to the head absolutely squeezes the hope out of someone caught in this web of death and destruction. I am not making a case that the world of the Road is not worse than in No Country, but just that being trapped in a nightmare while looking outside the fence of a motel at a normal life now forever denied you is a special kind of oppressive desperation that adds a much closer ‘what might have been’ twist of the knife.
Add to this Chigurh’s insistence on calling a coin toss to determine the fate of his victims adds an additional element of chaos that becomes further maddening in its desperation. You can’t reason with him, you can’t convince him, and if you call it wrong, an act of chance, then you go away. It is as fair as it is horrifying and uncontrollable. There is no quarter given here and room to breathe. Just the march of the inevitable.
Shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins, No Country effectively captures this desperation with the wide, desolate vistas and close, claustrophobic interiors that make the existential elements manifest. The movie feels hot and oppressive and the tightening of the noose around Llewelyn cuts off the viewers’ airway with every one of Chigurh’s murders. This movie looks fantastic and feels fantastically terrible.
The film trims some details and characters from the book but for the most part delivers an accurate adaptation. One thing excised is a moment in which Bell describes a case of a drug traffickers murdering a federal judge in San Antonio which is kind of strange in that it was ‘Maximum’ John Wood who was murdered by Charles Harrelson, a Texas based contract killer and father of actor Woody Harrelson who is in this movie. Charles Harrelson was convicted of the murder in 1982 and was given two consecutive life sentences for it in Federal prison. He died in prison in 2007 (!). His wife, Jo, was sentenced to 25 years for conspiracy and perjury for helping him. Wild stuff.
I saw this in the theater and I was absolutely blown away by it. I am a Coen Brothers fan and this is top tier Coen Brothers output. Their ability to blend genres between western and noir so seamlessly is on full display here and while McCarthy lays the story groundwork, the craft they use to bring it to life is second to none. The Academy agreed, nominating the film for eight Oscars, and winning four: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor-Javier Bardem. This was also the Coens’ highest grossing movie until True Grit in 2010.
No Country for Old Men is a masterwork of style melded with substance and while it is bleak and nihilistic, it is incredibly rewatchable. It should be pretty clear by now that I love crime movies and this is absolutely one of the best. The pacing, performances, writing, and photography are top notch and is one of the best arguments for the Coens as master directors. Say what you will about their current output and I will point back to this and tell you they have earned the right to make whatever the fuck they want.
3.There Will Be Blood-Paul Thomas Anderson
A powerhouse drama very loosely based on ‘Oil’ by Upton Sinclair, There Will Be Blood is an epic tale of silver prospector turned oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) and his mission to dominate oil rights in the late 19th Century and clashes with a local reverend (Paul Dano) and his family.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood is a sweeping epic that takes Plainview and his adopted son HW (Dillon Freasier) from low level prospector to full on oil tycoon and abhorrent villain. Plainview goes to battle with Eli and Paul Sunday (Paul Dano playing twins) over land and ultimately destroys the Sundays before beating Eli to death with a bowling pin. This is a major oversimplification of the almost three hour movie but they are the broad strokes.
Daniel Day Lewis puts on an absolute clinic on acting both subtle and over the top as he gives us charismatic businessman at times and unhinged madman at others. The performance is absolutely nuts and is a marvel to watch. Director Anderson has said that the performance is almost entirely Lewis as he needed no real direction. Anderson wrote the character and Lewis took it from there. Daniel Plainview is a compelling character while he is absolutely without scruples and is an unhinged psychopath filled with nothing but greed and avarice.
Paul Dano also gives a fantastic performance here with both of his characters offering compelling and unhinged sermons and sniveling desperation to equal measure. The chemistry between Dano and Lewis is of paramount importance to the success of the movie and both deliver.
There Will Be Blood was filmed at the same time and in the same area as No Country for Old Men which is kind of remarkable. At one point during filming, No Country had to pause because of There Will Be Blood’s exploding oil derrick test put black smoke in the air. It is wild to think that two of 2007’s best movies filmed right next to each other. There is a fair amount of synchronicity this year and that is just another example.
I saw this in the theater with friends and I was less keen on it than they were at the time. When the argument comes up between which movie is better between this and No Country, I am solidly in No Country territory. But the pull of this movie is undeniable and the quotable lines and impressions of Plainview are god tier. From ‘I drink your milkshake’ to ‘I’ve abandoned my boy!’ the quotable lines from the movie are like earworms. They dig in your head and don’t leave easily.
I revisit this less than I do No Country but having watched it within the last year, I can say it is also stupidly rewatchable. If Daniel Day Lewis was not in this movie, I don’t know how well it would have faired or aged but as it is, the performance is so good that it is worth visiting every so often. He might leave a bad taste in your mouth but you want to drink it all the same. YOU DRINK IT UP!
4.Zodiac-David Fincher
Let’s have a grim police procedural for a change this year, shall we? Zodiac is a decades spanning examination of the famously uncaught and unidentified serial killer who plagued northern California between 1968 and 1983 that offers up its own theory of who the killer was.
Based on the book by Robert Graysmith, played here by Jake Gyllenhaal, Zodiac follows Graysmith, a political cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle who helps solve elements of the cipher sent in by the Zodiac killer and leads him to join forces with Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), an investigative reporter, and Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) the lead detective on the case (and also the inspiration for Bullitt and Dirty Harry). The movie spans the decades of investigation as the Zodiac continues to kill and taunt the police. There is sadly no resolution as he was never caught or identified but the almost three hour movie makes sure you know what happened and who it thinks it was.
Zodiac is a meticulous telling of this story with a crazy attention to detail and historical accuracy. Director David Fincher gives a more grounded procedural here than in Seven but does not shy away from the horrors of the murders. There are early echoes of his series Mindhunter and even in the longest and most ponderous passages maintains the audience’s interest in the compelling mystery.
This movie was right up my alley as I have spent a great deal of time studying serial killers and it did not disappoint. It is kind of insane that it didn’t get more awards consideration until you consider this year’s competition. Somehow, this manages to be one of the more upbeat crime/killer movies of the year which says a lot about how bleak the previous three movies on this list really were.
David Fincher is one of my absolute favorite directors and this movie is him at the top of his game. He isn’t relying on shock or spectacle, but just good, engaging storytelling. He has some bangers coming but this one is great, if long re-watch. The performances are awesome and I think it has a fairly credible theory of who the killer was. Who knows if we will ever really know but I wouldn’t be surprised if Fincher got it in one.
5.Hot Fuzz-Edgar Wright
Despite being a comedy, Hot Fuzz is weirdly very comfortable on this list of dark crime movies.
The second in the Cornetto Trilogy from Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, Hot Fuzz turns its attention to buddy cop movies and gives us a comedy that sees officer Nick Angel (Simon Pegg) being moved to a small town because he is going way too hard as a cop in London. He is paired with Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) a laid back cop who is as much a handler for Angel as he is a partner. When Nick notices that a lot of people are dying in bizarre accidents, he uncovers a conspiracy based around a cult in the town who are killing people who they feel are unsavory for the town, for ‘the greater good.’ The conspiracy reaches all levels of local authority and all hell breaks loose.
Hot Fuzz is a parody of cop movies but it done through a decidedly British lens. Wright and Pegg also turn things on their head by including ‘action movie montages’ of paperwork and the sorts of police duties you don’t see in Lethal Weapon. The characters are quirky and everything is decidedly weird and off kilter. It is awesome.
I ran to the movie theater to see this. Obviously, I had seen Spaced by this time and my love for Wright, Pegg, and Frost was at a fever pitch. I like this movie less than Shaun of the Dead but that is no slam on Hot Fuzz. It is delightful on its own and is just as quotable. This was just what I needed upon returning home and embarking on this new creative journey. I maintained a pretty steady diet of Wright and Pegg material at this time and this is just top tier comedy in a year of pretty great comedy.
I return to Hot Fuzz quite a bit to this day and ‘Narp’ is a permanent fixture in my vocabulary. This is another ‘hanging out with friends’ kind of watch and I love hanging out with them. Nick Angel is less relatable than Shaun but that is kind of a good thing. I don’t think I would want to relate to Nick much. Even still, it is a lot of fun to watch him stab Santa in the hand, especially when that Santa is played by Peter Jackson.