MY FAVORITES MOVIES OF 2007
Stéphane, As you know, I am not too fond of Hollywood blockbusters, but that does not mean that I do not like well-made and original American films, on the contrary. But, last year, more than ever, I badly missed my regular trips to France that used to give me opportunities to see the major French, Asian, South-America, Middle-Eastern and European films that are rarely distributed here, and that NETFLIX does not necessarily acquire rapidly after their public release in theaters. I missed several good films from China, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, France, Germany and Italy, that were shown in Europe and won awards in international festivals. They appear in most ‘’ Ten Best” lists in European film magazines, like “Les Cahiers du Cinema” that I suscribe to. I am on the waiting list at Netlix for several of them: "We own the night"(James Gray), "Still Life" (Jia Zhang Ke), "Chansons d'amour"-Love Songs (Christophe Honoré), '' Alexandra'' (Alexander Sokurov), ''Paranoid Park'' (Gus Van Sant), ''Secret Sunshine'' (Lee Chang Dong), Honor de Cavalleria (Albert Serra), '' The Man from London'' (Bela Tarr), ''Ne Touchez pas à la Hache'' (Jacques Rivette), '' La Forêt de Mogari'' ( Naomi Kawase), '' I don't want to Sleep Alone'' (Tsai Ming Liang), ''My Blueberry Nights'' ( Wong Kar Wai), '' Syndromes and a Century'' (Apichatpong Weerasethakul). 5 of them are to be released within the next two months. So, once again, it was not a great year for good foreign films in Chicago movie theaters.
The MUSIC BOX that used to have a very interesting selection of foreign films seen in important festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, or Toronto, does not show them anymore, or very rarely. The best three venues for foreign movies are the CHICAGO FILM CENTER that benefits from the very astute and knowledgeable programming from Barbara Scharres, in the Loop, FACETS on Fullerton avenue, and LANDMARK CENTURY on Clark St. Our favorite venue for films, CENTURY and FILM ARTS, in Evanston, that was always showing interesting foreign or indie films, has been acquired by a new company, CINEMARK, that is more interested in showing blockbusters. Therefore their programming policy has become totally risk-free and boring. What a pity. But, anyways, we managed to see a few good American, French, German, and Asian films, either in commercial venues or from FACETS, or I rented them from NETFLIX. Like it was the case last year, I compiled two separate lists. The first one, that I am publishing Today on the blog, consists of films I have seen in Chicago theaters. The second one is made of films, not necesarily recent, that I rented, or borrowed, and screened at home from my DVD player. That second list will be published within a couple of weeks.
LIST 1: Films I have seen in Chicago theaters:
1. CLIMATES Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey, 2006) I loved Ceylan’s last film, UZAK (Distant), a very somber, claustrophobic, but beautiful and thought-provoking movie that obtained the Grand Prize at the Cannes film festival in 2003. I loved this new one, his fifth feature film, even more. It starts with a very painful end of a relationship between a professor (Ceylan himself, who in real life is also a very gifted photographer) taking pictures of ancient Roman ruins, during a very hot summer afternoon, and his wife, or mistress, (Ebru Ceylan, his own wife who is also a very beautiful and convincing actress). She observes him and silently starts to cry. One of the most powerful scene expressing solitude and despair I have ever seen in a film. After many episodes, one of them involving a very unusual and somewhat funny sex scene with another mistress, the film will end in an almost surreal winter landscape in a mountainous area in Western Anatolia, where the professor travels to visit with his former lover (or wife) who is involved in some kind of social work in a little town, perhaps with the hope to restart their extinguished passion . The cinematography, that integrates perfectly the protagonists of this story in the landscape, as Antonioni used to do so well in some of his best films, is superb. Ceylan is both the producer and the script writer of this haunting movie, that, for me, places him among the top ten most interesting directors of our time.
2. LADY CHATTERLEY Pascale Ferran (France, 2007)
To me, the real sunshine of last summer, was Lady Chatterley, a very powerful and intelligent piece of cinematic beauty that was directed in 2006 by Pascale Ferran, a very gifted film maker who, unfortunately, does not make films very often.I was very moved but a bit disturbed by her first feature film, "Petits arrangements avec la mort"(Coming to terms with death), an intimate study on grieving the death of loved ones, that revealed a real ‘’auteur de films’’. From the first 5 minutes of Lady Chatterley I felt a pure cinephilic joy. This film is so intelligently composed, framed, and directed, that you do not SEE the ‘’mise en scene’’, you are literally swept by the rhythm and the beauty of each scene, and forget about its construction. That for me is the proof of a very clever ‘’mise en scene’’. Marina Hands is stunning as Constance: Her beauty is luminous,and I am looking forward to see her again in "Le Scaphandre et le Papillon" . Jean-Louis Coulloc’h, a non-professional actor has the necessary physical presence as the gamekeeper, and his awkwardness is often very touching. Hippolyte Girardot, as Sir Clifford, is perhaps the most surprising choice of the casting. Pascale Ferran was very successful in establishing a perfect balance between the sensuality, that is never too erotically charged, of the couple and of the situations in which they evolve, and the powerful impact of the environment in which they move. Rarely a director has used natural settings, like forests, meadows, rivers, rural houses, etc. as authentically as Pascale Ferran did in this movie. Nature, beautifully shot by Julien Hirsh, and the protagonists of the story are totally and perfectly intertwined, and never appear as being two different elements of the same film. What is also incredibly strong in this film, is the respect that Pascale Ferran has for the characters and her actors. Everything is perfectly honest but restrained and the sensuality remains beautiful and exhilarating all the time, never threatened by any faux-pas or risqué move. Whatever your age, you can project yourself in these two marvelous characters without feeling embarrassed or voyeuristic. D.H Lawrence would have been proud of her.
3. PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES (COEURS) Alain Resnais (France, 2006)
I can’t believe that this man, one of the greatest French living directors (Hiroshima Mon Amour, On Connait La Chanson, Mon Oncle d’Amerique, La Guerre Est Finie, Providence) who is pushing 86, is preparing to shoot his 18th full length feature film in 2008. He also directed many extraordinary shorts and a very moving documentary on the Holocaust, Night And Fog in the late fifties and early sixties. Resnais's cinematographic creativity is fresher and more satisfying in its honest simplicity, but brilliant style, than the efforts of many younger, and more commercially susscessful, contemporary film makers. This time, he has the nerve to shoot a whole film,supposedly taking place in the newly built and already very “in” sections of the 13th arrondissement in Paris, entirely in a studio’s sound stage. And practically the whole time, he makes us believe that it is really snowing outside. Once again he adapts a play from the very popular British playwright Alan Aickbourne ("Smoking-No Smoking" was already an adaptation from the same author). The story is typical of this genre of very British “théatre de boulevard’’, but it is completely “Frenchified” . The characters could not be more French: A shy real-estate agent secretly in love with his colleague who is not as repressed and prude as it looks, a depressed and lonely bartender and his nasty sick and bed-ridden old father, a young woman looking desperately for a lover through classified ads, an alcoolic veteran mourning the separation from his beautiful Italian mistress. All these people, most of them played incredibly well by some of the veteran actors of Resnais ‘’ensemble” (Sabine Azema, André Dussolier, Pierre Arditi, and Lambert Wilson) and two newcomers, Isabelle Carré and the beautiful Laura Morante (who was so moving in ‘’The Son’s Room’’ of Nanni Moretti) come and go through all kinds of chance encounters and dramatic situations interspersed with very funny but always a bit melancholic episodes. The camera work of Eric Gautier is stunning. But it is the very efficient ‘’mise en scene’’, that reminds you of the charm and elegant visual style of some Hollywood romantic comedies of the forties and fifties. You cannot help but thinking about Lubitsch, Walsh, or Capra. A must.
4. LIFE OF OTHERS Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck (Germany, 2006).
It is difficult to believe that this very disturbing story, a fiction but so realistically told that it might be based upon real facts that happened in Berlin a few years before, and a couple years after the fall of the wall, is a first film. The 30 year-old (at the time of shooting) German director shows an incredible assurance and know-how in both writing a very well constructed script, shooting and editing with a very tight and precise technique. He avoids the usual spectacular and artificial ‘’show-off” shots so common in political thrillers, and directs very good actors with an obvious respect for their characters and personalities. Ulrich Muhe, in particular, is brilliant as a captain of the infamous Stasi, the state police of the former East-Germany, whose assignment is to do a complex surveillance job on a very popular playwright, played by Sebastian Koch who was very good in ‘’Black Book”, and his girlfriend, a famous actress,played by the beauttiful Martina Gedeck ("Mostly Martha"). He is under pressure from his boss, who himself is a minion of the Minister of Culture, a strange and ambiguous fellow who is madly in love with the actress and calculates that he could get rid of the playwright by finding something politically bad about him. All this takes place in the turbulent context of the approaching end of the communist regime in East Germany, and the acceleration of the the repression by the Stasi. Sadly enough Ulrich Muhe, a well known stage and TV actor in East-Germany who was a militant of the liberation movement from the communist regime there, died of cancer a few months after the film’s release. This little masterpiece of efficient cinema won many awards in international film festivals and ended up with winning the Oscar for Best Foreign film in Hollywood in 2007. The musical score by the French composer Gabriel Yared ("The English Patient") is a perfect accompaniment.
5. ZODIAC David Fincher (U.S.A, 2007)
I had not seen Fincher’s 1995 "SE7EN", a serial killer story, that got good reviews. But I was very impressed by the innovative storytelling process, the superb, mostly digital, cinematography, and a very tight editing that keeps your attention focused, in spite of a slightly overlong 2 hours and 38 minutes running time, of this new serial killer story, an adapatation of the autobiographical and very successful book by Robert Graysmith. But the length of this movie is totally logical if we consider that this true story of the maniaco-obsessive search by newspaper cartoonist Graysmith, played very efficiently by Jake Gyllenhaal, of the famous self-nicknamed Zodiac serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco area in the Sixtes and the Seventie is taking place over an almost 20 years span. Graysmith is helped, during the first ten years or so by a colleague, a chain-smoking alcoholic crime reporter played very convincingly by Robert Downey Jr., and a policeman played by a good Mark Ruffalo, who becomes progressively skeptical about the elusive pursuit of this murderer-provocateur who sends clues to the newspaper about his crimes, and in the end was never charged for any of them. And even though Fincher takes the unusual decision to keep the same physical appearance of the major protagonist from the beginning to end of the movie in spite of the number of years that elapse between them, the atmosphere of the wole film remains extremely realistic the whole time. This film is a great study of what real police work and investigative reporting are about. And it also describes almost clinicallly the effects that such an obsessive beahavior can have on a marriage (Chloe Sevigny is very good as the wife of the cartoonist who dumps him and takes her children away when she realizes that a normal family life with him has become impossible ) and on relationships with colleagues and friends. But once again, what makes this film one of the most creative American movies of the last couple of years is his masterful directing and editing.
6. EASTERN PROMISES David Cronenberg (U.K- Canada, 2007)
This very interesting Canadian director is probably,along with Scorsese, one of the most original storytellers working in the North-American film industry over the last twenty years. Not all of his films are equally good, and some of them (Crash, Videodrome) border on a sometimes shocking taste for the horrific and the macabre. But his best movies, like "History of Violence" (2006), "Naked Lunch", "Dead Ringers", or "Spider", are very powerful material and visually stunning. The very complex script of this film, shot in beautiful dark colors by his regular director of photography Peter Suschitzky, was cleverly written by the British screenwriter Steven Knight. It tells the story of a midwife Anna (excellent Naomi Watts) in a London hospital who finds a diary, written in Russian, and a business card for a fancy London restaurant “The Trans-Siberian”, in the belongings of a drugged and severely beaten adolescent who dies in her arms while delivering a baby girl. Anna decides to track-down the family of the girl and this process, that will prove very dangerous for people aware of the existence of the diary, put her in contact with the owner of the restaurant, Semeyon, (Armin Mueller-Stahl in one of the best roles of his long career),and his neurotic and violent son Kirill, played by French actor Vincent Cassel at his scarriest. She will also meet with Nikolai, the mysterious and somewhat sexy driver, bodyguard and dead bodies “cleaner”, played in a very deadpan and seductive way by Vigo Mortensen, who already delivered a superb performance in "History of Violence". It turns out that Semeyon is the godfather of a very powerful Russian crime organization in London, who has played, we will learn later, a very nasty role in the death of the adolescent girl. We will also find out that Nikolai is a Russsian government agent working with the London police to infiltrate the Russian gang. That gang has also to battle Chechen killers from another gang seeking revenge. All kinds of violent and sometimes very touching episodes mark this film in both very dramatic and suspenseful ways. One of them involves one of the most spectacular and hair-raising battles between naked men in a Turkish bath that I have ever seen in a commercial film. For film buffs I will mention that the role of Stepan, Anna’s Russian uncle, who will translate the diary against his own judgment, is played with lots of gusto by Jerzy Skolimowski, one of my favorite Polish directors of the sixties and seventies ("Walkover", "Le Depart", "The Shout", "Rysopsis" , "Deep End", "Ferdydurke", etc). Do not miss this minor but very satisfying masterpiece of precise storytelling and directing, that forces the viewer to ask himself uneasy questions about some serious moral dilemmas the characters, especially Anna and Nikolai, have to face. Besides, the whole experience is pure cinephile’s pleasure.
7. I’M NOT THERE Todd Haynes (U.S.A, 2007)
This film was perhaps the nicest surprise of the year. I never expected such a risk-taking experience where the director, Todd Haynes, embarks on a very creative cinematic and musical essay trying to define some of the many contradictions found in the persona of Bob Dylan in the early stages of his career. So, instead of a traditional linear and chronologically correct itinerary illustrating the various battles and complicated relationships that the singer had to live, fight, or passively refuse, with friends, co-workers, lovers, managers, fans, or with his own internal demons, Haynes prefers to reflect in an impressionist, or sometimes expressionist, style, on the importance of some fragmented episodes of his life, as if they had been perceived by different parts of his personality. That is why these various elements of who he might have been at different stages of his life are played by half a dozen different actors or actresses. The most surprising performances are offered by Cate Blanchett as a rock star in London, Ben Wishaw as a poet, Marcus Carl Franklin as a very young black guitarist, and Heath Ledger as an actor. Both Julianne Moore and the French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg manage to create some very moving characters too. The music score is very rich and helps recreating some sense of the different periods involved. The sets also play a very significant role in establishing links with Dylan various social or cultural environments in the sixties. And of course there is a plethora of original recordings of Dylan’s own songs played and sung by himself or others. A very complex and precise cutting job, and the alternance of equally beautifully shot sequences in black and white and color, add an almost surreal atmosphere (like in very strange scenes in an old Western village with Richard Gere as Billy the kid) to this haunting film that should be seen more than once. At the end of two hours and 15 minutes of projection, you feel a bit dizzy but are ready to ask for more
8. THE SAVAGES Tamara Jenkins (U.S.A, 2007).
Another very nice surprise. When I saw the trailers, I thought that it was sort of a comedy. But believe me, it is not. Despite some much needed very humorous sequences, this is a film that deals with a dead serious topic: How can two adult sibblings, a brother and a sister in their mid-forties, who are both confronted by serious personal problems ranging from different types of failure to achieve their goals to inability to make serious decisions about their own lives, deal with the sudden decline of their father who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease and starts to have episodes of dementia, They are called by the management of a retirement home in Arizona, where he causes some difficult situations for the other guests and staff members, and where he obviously is not welcome any longer, to take care of him. The dual problem that they have is that that father abandonned them earlier in life, is not particularly happy to see them, and that they have little choice but to find a nursing home closer to where they live on the East Coast to be able to take care of him. This experience is a very painful but self-revealing one for both of them. Both actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a more sober than usual and very touching performance, and Laura Linney, who plays a very different character than in her previous films, are very convincing in their expression of pain, annoyance, frustration, and difficulty to communicate honestly with each other and with the dying father (great Philip Bosco). The very nuanced cinematography adds an authentic feeling of winter depression to the atmosphere. This movie deals in a very non-Hollywood honest way with those serious matters that are aging and its related miseries, fear of dying, solitude of non-married middle-age persons, and honesty in communicating with other family members in times of crisis. The whole treatment by Tamara Jenkins is so perfectly balanced that, at the end of the movie, you are very grateful to her for helping you to accept certain difficult situations that might affect you someday with a more healthy and humane perspective. And it is true that several really funny well-paced moments, help a lot.
9. THE COMEDY OF POWER (L’IVRESSE DU POUVOIR)
Claude Chabrol (France, 2005) I have been following the very prolific career of Claude Chabrol (56, and soon 57, full length feature films in 50 years), who was associated with the early stages of the French New Wave in the lates Fifties, since his first film “ Le Beau Serge” . This ‘’classic’’ was shot in black and white with a limited budget in his native rural Creuse in 1958. I have to confess that after a first decade of very good films, his work was marked by ups and downs, as far as originality and quality are concerned. And frankly, I disliked several of his movies produced between the mid-seventies and the early nineties. But then, over the last 15 years, the 77 year-old veteran director, has been progressively climbing back to the top of his art. I did not see his last film, “La Fille Coupée En Deux”, but “The Comedy of Power” is probably one of the most typical examples of the ‘’Chabrol style’’, a mix of irony, ferocious observation of the hypocrisy and double standards of the French bourgeois class, and passion for strong women. Chabrol has always recognized being influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, and once again this influence is obvious in this film. Not only because of his way to depict the darkest and most evil inner secret sides of his protagonists, but also because of his very fluid and precise framing of each sequence, where shots and camera moves actually mean something and reflect the intentions of the director. Sometimes, like in Hitchcock’s films, they can be deceptive and lead you to a false perception of a situation or of the intentions of the character. His way of directing his leading actresses, in this case the always very expressive Isabelle Huppert with whom he worked in 7 other films, is also somewhat Hitchcockian. This particular story involves a very tenacious, honest but ambitious, female judge who is in charge of a case involving corruption of high-profile executives of a large French oil group that, under the cover of the state, conducted some illegal operations for their own profit. This film obviously refers to the famous Elf-Aquitaine trial, and its hero the judge Eva Joly. It will also remind you of course of the Enron affair in the U.S. Isabelle Huppert plays a role that is very different from her previous impersonations of bad, neurotic, or criminal women. But you completely believe in both her moments of strength and of weakness, when she realizes that her obsession with success in prosecuting those powerful men at the same time threatens to ruin her marital and family life. François Berléand is great as the powerful corrupt and sick executive. Eduardo Serra’s photography is as efficient as ever.
10. LETTERS FROM IVO JIMA Clint Eastwood (U.S.A, 2006)
One of the most claustrophobic and depressing films that I ever seen. But what a piece of great cinema. I consider Clint Eastwood as one of the most important American film directors of the last two decades. I think that " Unforgiven" (1992), for which Eastwood was awarded an Oscar for best director, remains one of the best American movies of the early nineties. But here, he creates a very important rupture both in terms of style and theme, with the rest of his work. He is taking an enormous risk in filming from a Japanese standpoint and in Japanese (with sub-titles) the famous 1945 Iwo Jima battle between American soldiers trying to invade this tiny inhospitable island in the middle of the Pacific, and the Japanese soldiers who have orders to defend it at any cost including their lives from their government that believe that the US might use it as a launching pad to invade Japan. In fact he makes us share the terrible intimacy of these soldiers in their very uncomfortable underground bunkers and tunnels as they wait for the American attack and progressively realize that they will all die in the name of the Emperor, but also for a stupid lack of intelligent strategy and rationale on the part of their top military brass. The ambiguity of the situation is that we cannot help but feel empathy with the general Kuribayashi, played by the great actor Ken Watanabe, who has been assigned as a commander of the island to punish him for incorrect political and pro-American sentiments, whose strategy to defend the island is not shared by his staff and some soldiers. We also feel sympathy for one of his officers, the aristocratic former olympic champion Baron Nishi, and a couple of simple soldiers like this baker, Saigo, who did not want to go the battle and writes painful letters to his wife. In fact the whole film is constructed around the letters written by these soldiers, that were unearthed 40 years later, some of them read in voice-over by the general and the simple soldier. But at no time does Eastwood let himself be trapped in moral or political judgment. His cameras, that do a superb job in black and white and sometimes color under the masterful direction of cinematographer Tom Stern ("Million Dollar Baby" and "Mystic River") capture the essence of the emotions of these men, and the rough terrain around. The battle scenes, with the help of savy computers, are hyper realistic. This film, that was shot in Iceland, at Iwo Jima and in Californian studios, is everything but hollywoodian. It demonstrates the senseless stupidity and the ambiguities of wars, where so many millions of people die without real reasons. It studies without pretensions the complexity of the moral fights and contradictions that notions like honor, pride, heroism, patriotism, duty, fear, resentment, and blind obedience, in wartime, can generate in individual as well as collective consciences. And it is a great example of cinematographic freedom.
10.(tie) NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN Joel and Ethan Coen, (U.S.A. 2007)
I have not always been a fan of the Coen brothers films, but out of the 12 feature films they made together I really enjoyed "Fargo", "Miller’s Crossing", and "The Big Lebowski". To me this one is their best so far. I often thought that their approach to script-writing, directing, and editing was a bit too simplistic, heavy-handed, and formulaic at times. But I have to admit that I had a lot of pleasure watching this “Neo-Western” taking place around 1980 in Western Texas. Anyway I've always been a sucker for any film including lots of small Texan towns and desertic landscapes, especially if they are treated well by one of their natives, Tommy Lee Jones who did a splendid job, both as director and actor, in "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" in 2005. Here TLJ plays, with great gusto and empathy for his character, an aging sheriff about to retire, who is very depressed about the rising crime rate in that area of Texas, and tries without great energy to do his job. He will be soon facing a demoniac serial killar, who uses a cattle stun gun to execute his many (I lost count halfway throough the movie) and mostly innocent victims. This smiling but terrifying psychotic guy, sporting a very strange hairdo, played with sometimes overzealous mannerism by Javier Bardem, is tracking down a bag containing 2 million dollars that was taken by pure chance by a poor welder (Josh Brolin) who discovered it while hunting at the site of a terrible massacre resulting from a botched drug deal in the middle of the desert. The whole story, sometimes a bit complicated to follow, revolves around this guy trying to escape some Mexicans and the serial killer who tries to get the money back, his wife whom he tries to protect and send away, the sheriff who tries to arrest the killer and prevent the welder’s wife from being killed, and a bounty chaser who tries to get that same money back for his corrupt corporate big city clients. Lots of violence, lots of chases, lots of spectacular landscapes, and lots of bravura acting moments, as well as incredibly beautiful and efficient cinematography, coupled with a very smart editing job.
Runner-up:
DANS PARIS Christophe Honoré (France, 2007) Dans Paris: Like so many films of the early sixties, it is a film about ruptures. Ruptures between generations, ruptures between life styles, ruptures between sexual tendencies, ruptures within families, ruptures between men and women. In this case two brothers are involved. Paul , the oldest beautifully played by Romain Duris is returning to Paris, in an advanced state of depression, to live in his divorced father’s apartment, after the end of a difficult love affair with a beautiful, but demanding, young woman. He spends his days in or on the bed of his younger and much livelier brother, Jonathan, played by Louis Garrel. The father, played by the great Guy Marchand (remember him in "Cousin Cousine"?) does what he can to help. The brief visit by the mother (still stunning Marie-France Pisier) called to help in a crucial scene, is a very emotional moment. The relationships between the characters are described with a lot of finesse and maturity, that sometimes remind us of Eric Rohmer’s style. All these movements inside and outside of the apartment are filmed with an evident cinematic pleasure and great elegance by Honoré. But do not count on seeing much of Paris.This is a not a film about Paris, but about characters whose lives evolve within a restricted area of Paris. And for a cinephile it is a real treat to detect all the references to all these directors of the New Wave that Honoré loves so much: Godard (who in some way could be partially identified with Paul) and Truffaut, or more specifically his ‘’projection’’, Antoine Doinel- Jean-Pierre Léaud, who sometimes can be partially identified with Jonathan. But the marvelous sequence where Paul sings on the phone a love duo with his former mistress, is a direct homage to Jacques Demy.
Other films I liked a lot this past year:
BLADE RUNNER , THE FINAL CUT Ridley Scott (U.S.A, 1982, 2006)
LA TOURNEUSE DE PAGES (The Page Turner) Dennis Dercourt (France, 2006)
DAYS OF GLORY (INDIGENES) Rachid Bouchareb (Algeria, 2006)
MICHAEL CLAYTON Tony Gilroy (USA, 2007)
I saw THERE WILL BE BLOOD, the glorious epic by Paul Thomas Anderson in early January 2008. Otherwise it would have been No, 4 or 5 on my ten Best List
