Ten Best Films of 2007

Penelope
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Post by Penelope »

Johnny Guitar wrote:Plus we're upsetting Magilla.
God forbid we should upset anybody.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston

"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
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Post by Zahveed »

Akash wrote:
Zahveed wrote:I haven't seen a list in a while so...

Juno (****)
Michael Clayton (***1/2)
Atonement (***1/2)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix (***1/2)
American Gangster (***1/4)
Knocked Up (***)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (***)
300 (***)

Hmm, I think I'd have been better off not seeing this list.
I guess I'm just easily entertained :p
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Post by Johnny Guitar »

--Sonic Youth wrote:Oh, we're still going to debate insignificant tangents, are we?

I never said it was editing. My meaning was, that particular point wasn't addressed once I brought it up. But I can see how it might read that way.

But YOU said I said it was editing. You quoted "editing", as if I had said it and you were using my own words back at me. But I never said it was edited. Well, if we're engaging in blatant conflations, it was only a matter of time before unattributed quotations came up.

FFS. When you point out something tangential, it's a-ok. When I follow up on the point you brought up, you make the rhetorical ploy of attacking me for debating an insignificant tangent. You also are misreading my use of the word "editing." It's OK. I acknowledge the editing-in-quotes was ambiguous, and that was my mistake. But don't stress yourself about my meaning, which I promise was not meant to be nefarious, or to be ascribed to you. At all. (And if your first impulse here is to say, "Come on, Zach, how could you not have been trying to ascribe it to me!?" then I would suggest you calm down and think about it for three seconds...)

This is going nowhere, you're clearly not understanding a single thing I'm saying, and probably you feel the same way about me. Plus we're upsetting Magilla. Unfortunately off-topic shit is all I have to talk about here, so ...




Edited By Big Magilla on 1284439916
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Post by Akash »

That's a pretty solid list anonymous. I'm still working on mine (and I still have a few more films to see) but I was with you on Ratatouille for most of the year. After seeing No Country for Old Men, I'll have to bump the Pixar film to number two. It's still the best thing they've done since Toy Story 2 though.

Oh and I love Julie Delpy but I wasn't really impressed with 2 Days in Paris. Nice to see it mentioned though.

I LOVE 28 Weeks Later and I'm sorry it's number 10 on your list, because that just means it will lose its spot to make room for Sweeney Todd :p
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Post by anonymous1980 »

Back on topic.

This is my current top 10 of 2007 list. I still haven't seen many of the year's late releases and Oscar contenders yet.

01. Ratatouille (Brad Bird)
02. We Own The Night (James Gray)
03. Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck)
04. Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi/Vincent Parranoud)
05. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)
06. 2 Days in Paris (Julie Delpy)
07. Zodiac (David Fincher)
08. Bug (William Friedkin)
09. The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman)
10. 28 Weeks Later... (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo)




Edited By anonymous on 1199162710
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Post by Steph2 »

Hmm, I wonder who will be the first butt nugget of 2008?
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Post by Okri »

abcinyvr, I've been looking forward to I Served The King of England on the off chance it gets a miniscule release next year. It's the Czech Republic's submission this year. It's good to see that my hopes aren't (entirely) misplaced.

Penelope, I love the fact you rank Once so low. I think I liked it a bit more than you (the oft mentioned "Falling Slowly" sequence is quite beautiful), but I couldn't get over how UGLY the whole thing looked. Just dreadful. Primer, with a smaller budget, managed to look pretty good. Once, on the other had - it's like they smeared dirt on the lens or something.
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Post by Steph2 »

I'd have ranked Atonement and Knocked Up even lower, but overall, cool list Pen!
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Post by Penelope »

Yes, it appears to have been a failed attempt to steer the thread back on-topic....
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston

"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
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Post by dws1982 »

Okri wrote:So, was it just me who noticed that Penelope's rankings of his ***1/2 films is almost in reverse alphabetical order?

Just me? crickets...
I didn't notice because I had forgotten that there were even top ten lists and things in this thread anymore.
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Post by Okri »

So, was it just me who noticed that Penelope's rankings of his ***1/2 films is almost in reverse alphabetical order?

Just me? crickets...
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Post by Akash »

And some personal responses to the article:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/question?bid=16&pid=70764
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Post by Akash »

The Nation
When Your Banker Takes Charge of Your Life
by NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN

[posted online on March 22, 2006]


Last week Howl was screaming about the jump in student-loan interest rates and, more generally, about the whopping debts college and professional-school graduates are taking with them into the world. The piece elicited reader response that you may find interesting.

Jena from San Francisco says:

"One of the reasons I am homeless was that I chose kids over education. Now that they're grown and on their own, and their father long ago 'started over' with someone thirty years younger, and the city where I grew up and raised them (alone for nine years) is gentrifying (auctioning off the basics to the highest bidder), I can't afford to live here except as a street person with stays in friends' garages or dens.

"My kids can't afford to live here either. All have kids, two have college debt and one isn't working, so can't afford to help me in any way. I don't expect that. But I can't even afford healthcare working two jobs at $5 an hour. Never mind housing. Plus, it's up to me to take care of my mother, who is in her 90s. I was a middle-class person thirty years ago, even twenty. I didn't know that kids were becoming a kind of luxury possession. In my mind, having kids would mean building a strong and helpful family unit. Everybody would work to help others. That hasn't been true. Some of it is character flaws I gave my kids, some is their own, some is social change. I think it's true that I love my kids. But if I had to do it over, I'd choose education, a good job and being child-free. I'd get the best education I could manage and spend the rest of my life paying it off if I had to, because I'd still be a person with more skills and wider perspectives. I'd choose being a productive member of society who could die saying, 'I didn't contribute to an increase in human numbers.' I'd take care of kids with no families or lonely misunderstood kids, like I talk to on the street."

Wendy from Tampa, Florida, writes:

"I am a 32-year-old PhD student. Having taken some time off right after my undergraduate degree to travel, I may be a bit older than others. Having to pay for graduate school myself, I had no choice but to take out student loans. I have always maintained an assistantship and even tuition waivers. However, ten hours a week and the increasing fees attached to waivers forced me to take out loans. As an applied anthropologist interested in public housing and community development issues, I do not see a high-end salary in the near future. I do not see any home ownership or children in my future due to my student loan debt."

Bridgett from suburban Cleveland, Ohio, says:

"I loved your article 'Student Debts, Stunted Lives.' This is exactly the situation my husband and I are facing, only we have a student loan debt of $140,000... not $40,000 or $50,000.

"I have friends who are in the same financial boat that we are, with the same level of debt. There appears to be no way for many of the middle class (too poor to pay without loans and too rich for financial aid) to get an advanced degree without accumulating that kind of debt. We are in the same position and may have to be childless as a result, though we don't want to be.

"The college teaching market (which requires doctoral degrees) collapsed (moving from full-time tenured profs with benefits and good salaries to relying on part-time employees without benefits who do the same amount of work as a full-timer for $8,000 a year) about the time we were finishing up our degrees. I was getting my masters at the time and did not continue on to my doctorate because of the market shift. Now we work in administrative jobs wherever we can to try and make our $1,200-per-month student-loan payments... and our jobs are not high-paying.

"Please realize that the debt load of many students is often three times that of what you printed in your article. We will be paying until we are over 60, and what is not paid by then, we will be taxed on. The problem is much worse than even your article illustrated."

And then there is TJ from Rensselaer, New York, who e-mails to say:

"As of right now I am $74,000 in debt, and I am probably going to double that by the time I finish graduate school. My sister, by the way, is standing close to $108,000, and she has not even begun graduate school. She wants to be a social worker, so that's $108,000 in debt plus graduate-school debt on a social worker's salary. We are going to be two very smart, highly educated poor people. I can't wait to live the next thirty years working it off, to find later at retirement that the Social Security system went bankrupt. All the while I was supposed to be saving for retirement and paying $500 to $600 a month on student debt? My generation is really going to have a fun time. I can't wait!"

This is not debt from self-indulgence that we are talking about. This is not aimless-shopping-mall debt, going into hock for $200 jeans and $300 sneaks. This is debt for going to school. Education debt.

Debt is thralldom. Debt means you take the job you do not really want. Debt means you cannot afford to serve others. Debt means you cannot take a crack at the important things that do not pay. Debt means no experimentation. Debt means your banker, not you, decides if you are going to have a child. Debt means you cannot take a chance. Debt means you must go along with other people's politics and their social arrangements because you cannot stick your head up to protest. Debt means you are a slave.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060403&s=vonhoffman




Edited By Akash on 1199155249
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Post by Sonic Youth »

Akash wrote:
Johnny Guitar wrote:So is the loan program (which we both agree = nickel-and-diming) repressive and pulverizing to the populace, or not? Is your only grievance one of delineating the particulars of intent?

Thank you Zach. Seriously, immunity for life.

Exactly. Of course the way the base and superstructure dynamic works is that power is conflated at the top, and endorses any option that maintains the status quo. It doesn't mean there's some rich guy circle jerk where they all twirl their mustaches and hatch an evil plan. If anything it's more insidious because it works through a systematic understanding among people with a common goal. It's cultural and ingrained. My point was that capitalist values (value assignments along monetary lines, viewing people and relationships as a way to get from point A to point B) are so ingrained in our society that the capitalist will always lobby for programs that protect his/her interests while the larger underclass is forced to choose between the already limited "A/B" options and doesn't even realize he or she is being pressured to do so.

This has nothing to do with students getting drunk and laid in college. Of course ALL loans (education and otherwise) are insidious in the way that they allow the borrower a period of phony respite before the time to pony up. But that doesn't mean that students aren't being coerced by this process to choose a particular major, choose a particular line of work and then actually HAVE to pursue that path because you know, loans do have to be repaid, leaving them no time to do any other number of things, including yes, political activism.

So do it on the weekends.

How did I manage to hold a 40 hour job and still manage to strike against my employer, with 12 months of union meetings, phone banks, pamphlet giveaways, etc, preceding it. How did the hundreds and hundreds of my co-workers manage it?

How did people who worked longer work-weeks generations ago manage it?

How are the hundred-thousand or so volunteers currently working on presidential campaigns managing it?

Raising children is a greater detriment to political activism. That and the tremendous amount of leisure activities and electronic diversions. With a 40 hour week, one can find the time if they have the ability and the will. There are MANY other reasons there is no political will (including a 70 hour work week)

And your rhetoric is driving me nuts. What is a "phony respite"? A respite is a respite. Is it pretending to not be a respite?

Now shut up, all of you. I need to cook the New Year's dinner. Happy friggin New effin' Year.




Edited By Sonic Youth on 1199154650
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Post by Akash »

So anyway Zach, yes -- the American high school system is atrocious. Have you or anyone you've known been to Cuba btw? I was able to go there when I was in high school and (to Eric too, since he showed interest in this discussion) yes even Cuba's high schools are better than ours.



Edited By Akash on 1199154334
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