Best of 2007*.

The box office rebounded – mightily! – in a year replete with box office giants seemingly every month; but that doesn't mean the year was wanting for quality – heck, occasionally even some of those giants managed to be good. The multiplex was host to a whole slew of brilliant, and brilliantly experimental, films (I'm Not There, Fay Grim), a couple of vastly entertaining jaunts (The Bourne Ultimatum, Knocked Up), and one or two examples of just exactly what it means when a genre is re-invigorated by the very best it has to offer (Sicko, Zodiac, Michael Clayton). Also of note were the other media arenas: television and music (and books I imagine – though, sadly, this year I won't be able to exclude the best from this latter category; thank my non-forward-thinking literary instincts for that) were both vessels for some incredible stuff this year. Just what exactly do I mean? Read on, dear reader, and discover for yourself.

The Top 10 Movies of 2007:

1. I'm Not There

Who but one of our country's most talented experimental filmmakers could take such a bold leap as this? Todd Haynes gambled big when he followed up his worthily adored Far From Heaven – already a deep-thought meditation on the nature of '50s soap-operas – with I'm Not There, a film somehow even more complex…and somehow even slightly more rewarding (if only for your brain, and not your heart). Haynes' film follows six esteemed actors (and then a few, not so much) as they interpret six different figments of legendary folk musician Bob Dylan during six different periods of his life; all the while, several times more than that number of his songs are playing – serving as elegy and poignant reminder all along (think of these melodies as the exclamation point at the end of Haynes two-hour long statement "Dylan was a genius!"). Filmed with even more of the clever period intricacies than the director did for Heaven, written with all of Haynes plain yet addictive spiritual obsession (here, too, he cribs dialogue from actual Dylan interviews and press conferences), and acted by some Hollywood men and women giving their all (Cate Blanchett, decked out in a frazzled mini-afro and slurry cutting delivery, especially stands out), I'm Not There is a head-trip of a bio-pick; a journey into the deep recesses of a mythic-man's creation and existence. And what do we discover after having taken the journey? Not a huge grasp on Bob Dylan's history, for sure, but nothing less than a new-found level of admiration for the heart, hurt, and soul that goes into the creation of Self; and the visionary power music that pours from said Self can attain.

2. Hairspray

If it's not as satirically relevant as Chicago was or as show-stopping as Dreamgirls occasionally could be, then Hairspray is more entertaining than both previous Broadway-to-film adaptations combined (plus, it boasts a more complex transition cycle, going from John Waters-comedy to stage then back again in this Adam Shankman-directed ode to the glorious powers of a good groove). Though it follows a girl on a serious quest – one Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky) trying to end Baltimore segregation – and boasts a Serious Message, Hairspray is no more heavy than the warmest, most soothing breeze; a fitting comparison too, since the choreography (hello final number!), musical numbers (hello "Mrs. Baltimore Crabs"!), and performances (hello John Travolta – a shockingly, delightfully, lithe performer – in drag!) nourish the heart and soul, leaving a viewer shaking with joy as the credits roll by.

3. Knocked Up

Judd Apatow, that blessedly-gifted purveyor of all things geeky and witty, had his biggest year yet; what with Superbad, Rock Hard (a film yet untested, but hey – I predict good things for it), and of course, his breakout about one rudderless man-child (Seth Rogen) who gets a beaut (Katherine Heigl) pregnant: Knocked Up. It isn't just because it's a nearly flawless comedy – from perhaps the third scene or so, every punch line and performance begins to crackle – or that it's also yet another showcase for writer-director Apatow's vastly underrated talents as an empathetic humanist – if nothing else, his study of Paul Rudd's marriage to Leslie Mann should definitely stifle the groans from the back of the theater – Knocked Up is great because it's a perfectly modern blend of both; wise yet grungy, fast-paced silliness while being emotionally mature, and heart-warming without being saccharine. So utterly lovable I had to see it twice in the same weekend.

4. Michael Clayton

George Clooney began his career in a stressful workplace, the life-or-death arena of ER, and as of late this paragon of glamorous movie-stardom has been enjoying a renaissance of dramatic performances: from his perfectly enjoyable, perfectly square Good Night, and Good Luck to that movie where he lost a finger-nail (Syriana), and now Michael Clayton – Tony Gilroy's tightly controlled, quiet yet unnerving, John Grisham-meets-talent study of sophisticated corporate malfeasance. Clooney speaks in the wounding, seductively articulate words of Gilroy's script in scenes with actors giving the performances of their respective years (Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton), and working through a story that doubles-back on itself – watched all the time by a ghostly, subtle camera – with sudden unseen cleverness. Michael Clayton may seem on the outside a studiously normal corporate-legal thriller, but everything from Wilkinson's mad attorney to Clooney's own bedraggled mug caught in a world progressively yuckier seeks to unsettle and captivate the viewer, and succeeds.

5. Waitress

As sweet-yet-tart as the pies the titular character – played with a brazen, beautiful, litany of emotions by Keri Russell – crafts in those exquisitely wry overhead shots, Waitress is, in outline, a fairy-tale structured like a sitcom. Yet that description gives away nothing of the sort of refreshing, sprightly, and funny awakening-of-the-soul material writer-director-actor Adrienne Shelly summons for this, her tragically final film. She casts some comedic greats (Andy Griffith, still wielding that twinkle in his eye like a pro) to support her funnier (and, ok, more rote) material; and crafts the dramatic subtexts to her plot (Russell is bearing the baby of her psychologically-abusive husband, a creature that makes her none too happy, and is involved with the town OB-GYN) with a finesse that, given time, would surely have blossomed. If nothing else, at least in Waitress that skill allows the blossoming of another kindred soul: Russell – and oh, what a marvelous event to witness.

6. Zodiac

A classically crafted true-crime film, surely director David Fincher's best, that is also one of the year's most sprawling, intricate, and factually minute. It's the type of movie that follows three men – Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), and Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) – obsessed with the Zodiac Killer during his spree of the late '60s and early '70s but also the type that has the frame of mind to keep the cameras rolling on into the later decades, capturing each man's own struggle with that Great Unsolved Mystery; the sly joke is that these later years would behold the Age of Information and the birth of the very technology that made catching Zodiac thirty years ago impossible, and so utterly haunting. Fincher himself employs none of the ghastly overheatedness that pervaded Panic Room nor any of the gimmicky gritty atmosphere of Se7en (except perhaps in those later Gyllenhaal scenes); instead he utilizes a beautifully simple style, full of lush photography and home to James Vanderbilt's clever script, that gives the mystery of Zodiac room to breathe, and the viewer room to be haunted.

7. The Bourne Ultimatum

There's a reason director Paul Greengrass has made it onto my year-end list for two years running, and it has a little something to do with the way Greengrass took a seemingly rote franchise and re-invigorated – in the process re-invigorating critics bemoaning the popcorn-thriller and audiences bemoaning the un-amusing thriller. Certainly, after the director was done carving up the screen with his signature (and breathlessly genius) shaky camera work and quick-cut editing, The Bourne Ultimatum was neither dumb nor boring; and as a final installment of a nearly-great trilogy of chase films, it delivered entirely and completely for its two-hour running time. Also of note: the filmmaker's prodigious skill at making bland conceits thrilling experiences (as last year's United 93 was); Tony Gilroy's blossoming talents with the ever more complicated narrative; and the cast's steely determinations, of which David Straithairn was the cold-hearted stand-out.

8. Fay Grim

A crucially, and critically, misunderstood gem; writer-director Hal Hartley's bizarre mash-up of tangled-noir romance and satirical craftsmanship swept me along with its wacky camera angles and so-sly-it-isn't-but-still-is wink at every film convention Hartley himself was simultaneously paying tribute to and terrorizing. The plot: Fay Grim (Parker Posey, a delectably frazzled siren) must discover some secrets for some government for her imprisoned brother (James Urbaniak) to help her wayward son (Liam Aiken). Along the way terrorists are encountered, mad-men with slick charms are taken prisoner by said terrorists, and friendships are re-kindled (again, the terrorists). If it all sounds too zany, too "cutesy-indie", my discovery runs counter to that: Fay Grim is a delight of deadpan comedy (kudos to the marvelously game cast), a skilled twist on the twistiest of genres, and in the end, a film I could actually care about. To me, perhaps even more than Juno (which I haven't had the pleasure to see yet), it may be the year's Great Indie Film; treasure it.

9. Sicko

Michael Moore it seems, just like good wine or cheese, can only get better with age – oh, and more crafty and heart-wrenching too. In his screwball-outrage attack on American health insurance, politicized documentarian Moore summons all his vast powers of zany black humor and graceful splicing to produce a work that will leave the audience needing a doctor; that is, sickened and hurt at the diseased bureaucracy America lets prevail everyday on its own doorstep. Yet the true up-lift of Sicko isn't in the incendiary way Moore destroys the healthcare industry, it's in his contemplative and logical final thesis – that if other, "lesser" nations have found plausible alternatives (e.g. Britain, France, Canada, and Cuba), then why can't we? – and the catharsis he allows himself, a wiser and more thoughtful filmmaker, and the audience to draw from that.

10. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

The ironic contradiction at the heart of Sweeney Todd is that, usually, a very good movie begets some level of enjoyment (hey, even The Departed, with its brain-busting climax, thrilled me) in its audience; Todd, yet another stage-adaptation (this time, by Gothic maestro Tim Burton – a vastly underrated director), does occasionally delight – the sweepingly cynical "A Little Priest"; the minuscule opener "No Place Like London" – but so much more of its charge comes from the tragic melodrama at the core of the film. Namely, there's a murderous barber (Johnny Depp, in grand emotive form) out for revenge against a conniving judge (Alan Rickman, trilled to his own sarcastic baritone) who gets involved with a cannibalistic, pragmatic pie-maker (Helena Bonham Carter…who can act!) while slashing the throats of his own customers. It is, obviously, violent, disturbing, and tragic stuff; and the biggest surprise isn't that Burton & Co. manage to (mostly) pull off Sondheim's deepest-black production, it's that the talent involved – from the actors, to the director (finally, perhaps, getting wide-scale award recognition), to the legendary composer/lyricist himself (who wrote some of his most operatic, heart-rending, and bleakly funny material for Sweeney) – deliver the top of their game. The result can only be this final product, a film to chill and shake you.

The Top Two Television Shows of 2007:

1. 30 Rock

Like being plugged into a line of pure laughing gas for thirty minutes a week, 30 Rock – Tina Fey's improbably enjoyable sitcom about the travails behind a hit sketch show – leaves one feeling giddy and a little unsteady ("Can a sitcom really be making me feel this happy?!") but nonetheless helplessly addicted. Alec Baldwin, as NBC executive Jack Donaghy, stands alone as his own hit of pure glee; and definite, minutes-long applause are in order for the sheer amount of high-wire witty, silly, energy that is packed behind each minute of Rock by Fey and her writers. How nice it is to sit one night a week on a couch with friends or family or a nice cup of tea and laugh, pure and simple, along with a show that can laugh at itself.

2. Friday Night Lights

Sure, it bogged itself down for nearly all of this first-part of the season's run with an uncouth storyline about an attempted-rape-turned-murder while also bogging down two of its most beloved characters – Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki) and Landry Clarke (Jesse Plemons); and sure, I'll give you that Friday Night Lights' secret weapon (or one of them at least), that of intimate and heartfelt character interaction between friends (Landry and golden-boy QB1 best friend Matt Saracen – an anguished, if newly underused, Zach Gilford) and family (Kyle Chandler, as Coach Taylor, with Connie Britton, as his delightfully real wife), was nary given a chance to shine these last episodes. And, ok, it wasn't as quintessentially stirring as its first season; but Lights – though it had entire episodes that rang false, and a few too many odd character turns – still retained its awe-inspiring power to shake a viewer, to shake me, and leave one breathless at its unique brand of power: to transcend its confinement, and give life – nay, soul – to its very own small-town discontent. More flawed than I like, but still more gracefully true than most everything else airing.

The Top Two CD's of 2007:

1. Lily Allen: Alright, Still

Though it became a rave-sensation late last year as a British import, Lily Allen's debut album was officially released stateside in January (making it to my list just under the wire, thank goodness) and just as blogs the Internet over went crazy last winter at Allen's cutting, hip-hop influenced lyrics and musical fusions, twice that many came to adore here over these last seasons. Alright, Still is a spiky debut, teetering (in theory) on precociousness, and Allen is by no means a vocal goddess; but she is a talented singer-songwriter and her affinity for warping and curving all manner of musical styles to fit her decidedly unique, and sassy, aesthetic serves her delectably well. Put on "Smile" when you feel self-righteousness; "LDN" for when you're feeling worldly; "Alfie" when you hate to love your family; "Not Big" and "Friend of Mine" for when romance has you down; and Alright, Still when you need to be reminded what true, melodic, smart and catchy talent looks like.

2. Miranda Lambert: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Who says there can't be a great country album this year – one of the best in fact? Quite a lot of people, it seems; and so it has always been for Miranda Lambert, whose debut in 2005 was snubbed by country radio but still became a hit. But, if nothing else, Lambert's album proves that her pre-emptive snub by – gasp! – elitist country fans was a huge mistake. On Crazy Ex-Girlfriend the once dreamy-eyed romantic ("Me and Charlie Talking") goes wistful, introspective, fiery, and oh so harmonic. Her second album is a concept album about the concept of small-town romance and the women it affects, and it does the astounding (and, to me, unthinkable): it makes neo-feminism sexy. Lambert, who co-wrote the majority of the songs, views these gals through a multi-faceted prism, be it angry vigilantism (the opener, "Gunpowder and Lead"), sarcastic observance ("Famous in a Small Town"), or (most consistently) the twin nature of wishful pining: regret and desire (lust?). Yet in her hands, these last two feelings go through a re-birth, a cauterization of the heart and are re-born into a catalyst of open-hearted loaner freedom (the Patty Griffin cover "Getting Ready"). Still, she can wax sadly truthful, and two of her best songs – "More Like Her" (an ambiguous and knotty rumination on a love triangle) and "Desperation" (which features the year's most melancholic, powerful refrain: Complicated words slippin' off your tongue and ain't one of them the truth/ I'm still desperate for you) – finally prove it without a doubt: she isn't just this year's Country Best, she may be its best for years to come.

*Note: my list, obviously, has its flaws. I haven't seen half the stuff that is currently setting the award-season abuzz (e.g. Atonement, Into the Wild, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, etc.), and I can only watch and listen to so much music and television (plus: I don't get HBO, Showtime, and other more prestigious channels with more prestigious fare). I will eventually get to all of this stuff and you will surely know if I've overlooked something. Until then, this is all I have; tell me what I did wrong.