There are very few “perfect” films. The handful that exist are a precious resource to viewers who, say, suffering from the flu and numerous aches and pains, require an entertainment to delight and distract them. There is The Apartment. There is The Searchers. There is North by Northwest and Charade and L. A. Confidential and The Seven Samurai. The Lady Vanishes is another member of this elite group, and it now enjoys a re-release as part of the Criterion Collection in a new double disc set. It is a joyful opportunity to reacquaint oneself with this wholly American entertainment.

Did I just say “American”? Isn’t The Lady Vanishes the crown of Alfred Hitchcock’s “British period,” released in 1938 and submerged in churlish British characters and the local political tensions of the time? These things are true, but it is interesting to note that when Hitchcock got into the film business, back in the silent era, it was by joining Paramount (in its earlier incarnation), which opened up a branch in London. Hitchcock trained under the mentorship of American filmmakers, with their narrative values of speed, and spent a later spell in Germany to refine his skills further. His interests were America-oriented: his favorite magazine was The New Yorker, whose bullpen he cherry-picked when he eventually got to Hollywood, and thanks to his interest in train schedules, already knew New York City by heart. Hitchcock’s superior knowledge, along with his Catholicism, made him something of an outsider in British filmmaker when he finally joined a British studio toward the end of the silent era, and he brings this outsidership or alienation to his portrayal of British quirks in The Lady Vanishes and other films from the 1930s.

The Lady Vanishes, as is well known, concerns a young woman named Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) returning from a holiday in the fictional country of Bandrika (according to one spelling) back to London to be married to a swell. Alone on the train she befriends a Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty). But later, when Miss Froy seems to vanish, no one will believe her. She does find an ally in the insouciant Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave), a sort of British Alan Lomax, a musicologist collecting Bandrika folk tunes, with whom she feuded back at the lodge. Why are so many people on the train unwilling to admit the existence of Miss Froy? Everyone has their reasons. For Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), it would mean a delay in getting back in time to watch a cricket match. For Todhunter (Cecil Parker) it might compromise a judgeship if it were learned he was on the train with his mistress. But for the people ultimately behind the plot, exposure would have international consequences.

Written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder before Hitchcock came on board (and adapted from a novel called The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, who also wrote The Spiral Staircase, and from which several important departures are made for the final Lady Vanishes), The Lady Vanishes takes a surprising amount of time to get rolling. There is about 20 minutes of backstory that in a contemporary film would have probably been excised, with everyone simply meeting on the train (as it is in a remake that came out in 1979 with Elliott Gould, Cybill Shepherd, and Angela Lansbury). Yet here the background creates a sense of the country the people are in, the cacophony of languages on display, and forges an intimacy with the characters that pays off later when events turn wicked.

“Tell your story through your objects,” Billy Wilder used to counsel, and he might have had a film like The Lady Vanishes in mind. From Gilbert’s flute to Miss Froy’s tea bags to the telltale high heels on a nun, the objects in the film press the story forward. The most famous objects are a pair of brandy snifters containing sleeping potions that loom large in the foreground. The succession of objects adds to the richness of the film, which also has a wealth of characters and incident, yet packed into a 97 minute running time. What carries the film also is the charm of the two leads, Lockwood and Redgrave. Michael Redgrave is the unheralded great actor of the generation that included Guilgud and Olivier. He was the only one who was a natural for the screen yet he disliked it the most. A large part of what makes The Lady Vanishes a perfect movie is Redgrave’s youthful, gung ho frame of mind, his ability to form instant loyalties, and his face, which comes alive with the reassuring intimacy and promise of Christmas lights whenever he is on view.

Disc one is more or less the first pressing (which came out in 1998), though with, according to the box, an all new digital transfer, and with the same audio commentary track by Bruce Eder. The image is windowboxed so that the viewer gets the whole screen.

The second disc contains all new material. First off, there is Crook’s Tour, a 1941 reuniting of the Caldicott and Charters characters, based on a radio serial. The 80-minute film, directed by John Baxter, is agreeable nonsense that has the traveling pair in the Arabian Desert, then mixed up with German spies who have secreted a message in a record album unwittingly placed in their hands. The pair travels to Bucharest to a German castle and thence to London without ever leaving the studio.

“Hitchcock-Truffaut” is a 10-minute edited excerpt about The Lady Vanishes from the 1962 tapes that the French director used to compile his famous interview book. Hitchcock Truffaut was probably the first film book I bought or got, way back as a wee cultist, and I still have the same copy. These excerpts have popped up on other discs in the past, but I hadn’t tried to read along with the text. The original was in French, of course, with Hitchcock’s English translated back from French for the American edition (rather than going to the tapes and starting over). But I was shocked at how florid the translation rendered Hitchcock. There is a gulf of difference between the tapes and the book. The translators appeared to use the director’s chat as a launching pad for speculation about what he meant, perhaps twice over in the re-Englishing. Whole sentences are simply made up in order to provide transitions. I suspect that we would have a

drastically different book if someone went in retranslated the tapes from scratch. Hitchcock endured some 50 hours of interviews with Truffaut, and even this short excerpt suggests how those hours must of taxed Hitchcock’s patience, with Truffaut’s translator Helen Scott essentially tamping down the narrative flow of this natural raconteur. In any case, I feel rather disillusioned and don’t know how much I can trust this once-beloved book to give me unvarnished Hitchcock.

In the 33-minute “Mystery Train,” Leonard Leff, a specialist in Hitchcock’s Selznick years, offers an audio-visual essay on the film. He contextualizes it within British cinema of the day, positions it within Hitchcock’s six thrillers made in the 1930s and why they were made, tracks the history of the screenplay, and considers the array of naturalistic acting on display. He also notes a few elements that slipped past the censors, all of a political nature. Finally there is a gallery with 22 images.

Included in the box is a 24-page booklet containing chapter titles, cast and crew, transfer information, stills, and essays by Geoffrey O’Brien and Charles Barr. The Lady Vanishes hit the street on Tuesday, November 13th, and retails for $39.95.

If The Simpsons is the Flintstones of the Matt Groening universe, theJetsons. Unfortunately, I feel about Futurama the way I felt about both Hanna-Barbera shows, that they weren’t funny, simply conventional sitcoms tricked up with gimmicks.

Just this evening, I sat before the television tube and laughed out loud at the newest episode of The Simpsons. But earlier this week I watched the whole of the Futurama: Bender’s Big Score (Fox Home Entertainment, 88 minutes, $29.99, full frame, DD 5.1, commentary, deleteds, making-ofs, galleries, street date Tuesday 27 November, 2007) without cracking even a smile. This straight-to-video TV movie wasn’t boring. Nor was The Simpsons Movie, which was geared down to attract broader audiences. I just didn’t get into the characters or situations, and the jokes seemed crude. I’ve never seen the show itself, and this one-off may not be representative.

Apparently it was a big tragedy when the show was canceled by Fox, and the very beginning of the film takes a few cracks at Fox because of it. In fact, this is the first of four movies that will be broken up into 20-minute episodes that will be shown as a phantom “fifth season” on Comedy Central.

The plot of Bender’s Big Score concerns some aliens who invade the show’s central delivery service location as spam mailers, enslaving Bender, the go-to robot. In the course of the show, he travels into the past and raids the world of its art objects and collectibles, hence the title. Another sub-plot concerns main character Billy Fry and his jealousy over the one-eyed Turanga Leela falling for a young doctor. Both narratives have unexpected conclusions.

As with The Simpsons, the plot takes crazy twists and turns, pauses for digressions, kills people with impunity (only to bring them back mostly unharmed), and riots in in-jokes. In fact, it is clear why the show has a cult following, as it caters to the prejudices and interests of science buffs, the sort of people who live their lives like the guys on The Big Bang Theory. One of the supplements of the disc makes this clear. The producers invite a mathematician who has written a book about
Futurama to give “lessons” in math and in the secret languages that viewers are invited to decode.

In fact, Futurama: Bender’s Big Score is notable for having better extras than a main feature. Supplements include a hard-to-follow, overpopulated commentary track with Groening, head writer David X. Cohen, director Dwayne Carey-Hill, producer Claudia Katz, writer Ken Keeler and “voices” Billy West, John DiMaggio, and Phil LaMarr. There are three deleted scenes (about three minutes’ worth), a whole early draft of the script (”Bender’s Big Score: The Original First Draft Of The Script”), plus a joke feature that purports to provide a full episode of that favorite show of the future, Everyone Loves Hypnotoad. In addition to the aforementioned math lecture (”Bite My Shiny Metal X: A Mind-Shattering Futurama Math Lecture”), there are also a couple of San Diego ComiCon recordings of the cast orally interpreting a comic book story about the show’s rebirth (”Futurama Returns! A Live Comic Book Reading By The Futurama Cast”), and a five minute ComiCon promo for the series. There is also a fake trailer called “A Terrifying Message From Al Gore” who is also in the movie itself (this comes with an optional commentary by Al Gore, Matt Groening, and David X. Cohen). Finally, there are several galleries, including “New Character Design Sketches.”

Joseph McBride is unusual among current Orson Welles scholars for having spent real time with the director. Only Peter Bogdanovich (when his critic’s hat is on) had socialized with Welles more, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of a book reviewed previously in this series, met Welles at least once. McBride, who played a part in The Other Side of the Wind, and wrote the scripts for various minor Welles events, has put his long term exposure to Welles to good use in the very unusual biography What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (University Press of Kentucky, 344 pages, $29.95, ISBN 978 0 813 12410 0), which also happens to be about one-third autobiography.

McBride concentrates on the last 10 or so years of Welles’s life, with the goal of showing that Welles was highly productive indeed and that his filmmaking procedures were far outside the norms and expectations of commercial Hollywood, which looked down on him as a reckless failure. “The seemingly willful ignorance of much of the press toward his work, and his own secretiveness, meant that he operated largely invisibly,” McBride writes.

The book is divided into six chapters, the first of which positions Welles in relation to show biz, while the following five look at his politics, chart his years in exile (due to the political climate, McBride suggests), describe his first years back in Hollywood, chronicle the making of Wind, and survey his various post-F is for Fake projects, with Fake itself described as his retort to Pauline Kael, who famously undervalued Welles’s contributions to Citizen Kane in the New Yorker. McBride argues convincingly that Welles invented the now-common essay-documentary style seen in the films of Michael Moore and others, while some of Welles’s later unmade projects, such as a film about the mind control of Sirhan Sirhan, sound fascinating.

Ironies abounded at the end of Welles life: Paul Stewart, who played the butler who found Kane, later in real life found Welles’s body; Welles’s daughter Beatrice has became a real life Goneril; and Welles considered doing another Hearst movie, but on Patty Hearst. What’s most valuable about this finely written book is its personal voice and its frankness (though McBride does keep secret the name of the now-prominent director Welles derides within McBride’s hearing on page 154). McBride has no patience with the neutral voice of academic criticism and thrusts himself centrally onto the stage, where his ambivalence and confusion of feelings about Welles are fascinating to read about, and where his tentative questions about Welles’s sexuality prod a subject as taboo as Wittgenstein’s homosexuality once was, a closely guarded secret for decades after the philosopher’s death.

But the other voice one hears in the book is Welle’s own distinctive plaint. His lamentations over not being taken seriously while yet being one of the world’s most famous directors are heart-breaking, and he is highly quotable and insightful. “Happy endings,” he once said, “depend on stopping the story before it’s over.”

Can Americans talk anymore? Can they speak clearly? Is it possible for them to utter a single sentence unburdened with qualifications and padding? I think not, on the evidence of the otherwise terrific Orson Welles Remembered: Interviews with His Actors, Editors, Cinematographers, and Magicians, compiled by Welles expert Peter Prescott Tonguette (McFarland, 206 pages, $35, ISBN 978 0 78642760 4). If the index were to include with all the proper names and film titles such filler phrases as “like”, “sort of”, “kind of”, and “pretty much”, it would be 20 times as long. It’s maddening to read an interview that could have been half as long if the subject didn’t continually qualify his statements with “kind of” and “sort of.” Jesus man, did you or didn’t you, was it or wasn’t it? No wonder America is in a political crisis. Half its citizens are mealy-mouth sentence-padders afraid to say what they mean, to state clearly and firmly that (to quote Michael in The Deer Hunter) “this is this.”

That being said, Orson Welles Remembered is an enjoyable read (especially when the interview subjects are oldies, whose lingo is free of padding) and a fine adjunct to the numerous new bios of Welles published recently. Tonguette gathers up chats with 30 people covering Welles’s career from Citizen Kane to The Other Side of the Wind and beyond. Tonguette interviews Norman Lloyd about the Mercury Theater and Robert Wise and Sonny Bupp, the kid who played Kane’s son and who died recently, about Kane, tracks down two Macbeth, one Lear and two Fountain of Youth contributors, and seven people who shared Welles’s interest in magic tricks. Personally I found the enthusiastic reports by relatively unknown people from his later years such as Jonathan Braun (Welles’s “last editor) much more fascinating than the well-trod tales of the early years by Robert Wise or the re-hatched anecdotes of Peter Bogdanovich. Braun tells a good illustrative tale on page 185, and fellow magician and historian and Jim Steinmeyer offers up a touching insight into Welles on page 172. Though there is the occasionally typo (page 167), the book is modestly but effectively illustrated with rare candid photos, and is a must-have for Welles aficionados. For the rest, it’s sort of, kind of informative.

To a certain sensibility there is nothing that drains the spirit faster than the prospect of seeing a string of animated films come the holiday season. Well, any season, really, but they seem to be concentrated near Christmas. And they don’t even have to be about the holiday. They just have to be animated. Animated films are either the ne plus ultra of filmmakers, since you can create within the frame anything you desire or can imagine, or a degradation of the cinematic art, thanks to animation’s betrayal of the reality the camera can record. For some of us, though, the generic quality of most commercial animation movies is imprisoning, more limiting than even the most conventional blockbuster.

Stepping into a theater about to show The Golden Compass or Beowulf is like stepping into a pirate movie and knowing you’ll see parrots, eye patches, doubloons, earrings, plank walking, and the rest of the short list of pirate movie conventions. In the child’s fantasy world type of animated movie you have sweeping vistas of unreal worlds, cute creatures who serve as best friends and advisors to the main character, twisty travels through complex interiors, and a tale of quest or rescue. The Golden Compass, essentially an animated movie despite the presence of a few filmed human beings, consists of these elements.

The Golden Compass is an adequate movie for its genre, but also suffers some of its problems. There is far too much explanation and scene setting at the film’s beginning so while you’re trying to process that overload, the story carries on and introduces an onslaught of people and creatures. From there the narrative progresses to external souls called familiars, a strange compass looking device, old fashioned dirigibles like those seen in recent animes, and animals that flutter about as in a Disney movie. Everything is ornate and rococo in a fey attempt to create a colorful alternative world, straining to awe you, but the effects are derivative (as are story elements, be they from Philip Pullman’s novels or the conventional script by writer-director Chris Weitz of American Pie fame); Sam Elliott’s cowboy character, for example, is based on a similar character in the original novel of Dracula. It’s a road story into another world like Oz, a rescue tale like all the animated films that have come out in the last few years, a series of captures and escapes alternating with “meetings” containing more information conveyance.

If The Golden Compass is an animated film posing as a feature film, Beowulf is a feature film pretending to be an animated movie, thanks to its “realistic” performance-capture technology. In fact it highlights the same animated tropes as The Golden Compass with the forced exhilaration and sweeping camera movements. And like The Golden Compass it is based on a book, in this case the fragmentary poem from the 8th to 11th century. However, Robert Zemeckis’s film bears as much resemblance to the epic poem as O Brother Where Art Thou does to the Odyssey.

Again the heart sinks as one sits in the theater and the title rises amid chantings and aged pan flutes and people with ornate headbands engage in 8th to 11th century frivolity with mead and chicken legs (actually the film pretends that the events are taking part in Denmark very specifically in 507 A.D.). Beowulf proceeds to kill a few monsters and evil beings and makes a deal with the devil (a change from the book) and the faux noble language deadens one’s spirit. They call them animated films but I’ve never seen anything so lifeless.

Apparently Hollywood believes that since we are going to be depressed visiting our families over the holidays anyway, we are likely to aggravate the sore by seeing somber movies about dysfunctional families. Three are available on the big screen right now. Starting Out in the Evening concerns a novelist in the twilight of his career; King of California concerns a failed jazz musician turned madman cared for by his daughter; and The Savages dissects a brother and sister whose aged and estranged father suddenly needs care. All three are made by C- or B-list directors with a couple of small movies (or fewer) in their past.

Starting Out in the Evening is directed by Andrew Wagner, who made a quasi-documentary called The Talent Given Us that sounds a lot like Little Miss Sunshine. It’s adapted from a novel by Brian Morton and shows how an elderly and near-forgotten Henry Roth-style novelist named Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella, who displays his aged tackle again just as he did in Lolita), one of those New York Intellectual types, has his life disrupted and then replenished by a Brown University student, Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), doing a Master’s thesis on his work, which entails the unusual task of tracking down the novelist and pestering him with questions. Starting Out in the Evening, shot without dire evidence on HD over the course of 18 days, offers up the Manhattan of Woody Allen’s movies, all rust colored evenings and quiet book lined apartments. Schiller is blocked and out of date while Heather is an opportunist always with an eye out for the main chance. She’s always in seduction mode, seductively taking off her sweater or kicking off her boots to make a late breakfast. But it’s when she starts “dressing” him that things get weird; one night in his kitchen she mysteriously starts to rub honey on his face (maybe it makes sense in the source novel). Langella establishes one of those affect-less performances that European films proffer, but the best observed parts of the movie are Heather’s pretentious way of talking about books, a lingo and manner of speaking painfully familiar to those who have spent too much time around those playing at being literateurs. Also good is Jessica Hecht as a Village Voice book review editor whom Heather cultivates, a role that captures the sense of constant insinuating challenge that defines conversation amongst the types portrayed in the film. Lili Taylor as Schiller’s baby-hankering daughter is actually cute in the film. Starting Out in the Evening ends the way Atonement begins, with a typewriter clacking into the airwaves.

King of California is written and directed by newcomer Mike Cahill and on the level of the script suffers from some of the sins of ambitious amateur screenplays, including a passive central character, a quirky quest, and not enough story for its running time. Nevertheless, high profile talent was lured to the project in the form of Michael Douglas as Charlie, just released from Bedlam, and Evan Rachel Wood as his high school age daughter Miranda, who has been getting on just fine on her own these past years, thank you very much, working and driving her own car and living in splendid isolation under the radar of child services. Once Charlie is out, however, he gradually unveils a scheme to find buried Spanish gold hidden, it turns out, under a Costco. Increasingly implicated in the hunt for gold, Miranda gets a job at the Costco so she can case the joint and eventually steal the keys for the night when Charlie intends to prove his claim, drawing upon the tools in supply at the store itself, including diving equipment, it being decided by the film’s creators that there be an underground lake hidden under the Costco for Charlie to eventually and mystically disappear into. This is one of those movies in which characters are called upon to exhibit the same emotion over and over (exasperation in Miranda’s case, or manic determination in Charlie’s) until … they’re not. The grim realism of the film’s first 80 minutes is then undermined by the magical realism of the last 10 as we are invited to rejoice in the fact that, gosh darn it, some times people’s dreams are downright noble, no matter how crazy.

The Savages is the first feature film by Tamara Jenkins since indie favorite Slums of Beverly Hills back in 1998 (does it really take independent filmmakers a decade to fund movies these days?). It concerns Wendy (Laura Linney), a failed playwright), her brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a mediocre academic with a specialty in Brecht, who over a holiday have to fetch their father (Philip Bosco) from his retirement community in Arizona, where he has descended into dementia, and set him up closer to Jon’s home, in Buffalo. The movie will be too real for some viewers’ taste as it relays the bureaucratic minutia of an old person’s final days and its effect on estranged children. Neither Wendy nor Jon are likable, both being chronic liars of convenience, self-absorbed, self-destructive, But like Starting Out in the Evening it’s a muted, grimly plain movie, flashing only one real argument scene and shot in settings designed to remind us of America’s ignored industrial ugliness. Unintentional or not (and true or not) the film’s final message appears to be that we can only be free to be you and me once our parents are dead, as the film concludes on an optimistic note of achievement for the two losers. The Savages may only eat their own but the diet proves oddly beneficial.

The last time screenwriter Diablo Cody was seen in the pages of Entertainment Weekly she was stumbling down a side street near an obscure Hollywood pensioner’s bar called Rustic in search of yet more Wild Turkey (though writer Karen Valby characterized it as walking off a buzz). Now, with this week’s issue, No. 970, Miss Cody has been elevated to last-page columnist under a banner called “Binge Thinking.”

Cody’s rise has been phenomenal. Born Brook Busey-Hunt, Miss Cody was a prep school girl and white collar drone with a degree in media studies from the University of Iowa who became a pole dancer and peep show girl in Minneapolis, experiences which became fodder for, of course, a blog, which then, of course, became a book, Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper. A producer in Hollywood, ensorcelled by the blog, approached Miss Cody for screenplay ideas, according to EW. Having none handy as a showpiece, Miss Cody batted out Juno, which itself had a meteoric rise from pages of text to strips of film. The film, about a sass-mouthed pregnant teenager played by Ellen Page, has been praised by everyone from the New York Times to the Ebert show. It’s got a Golden Globe nomination and is widely viewed as a shoe in for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Entertainment Weekly ran its praise-filled profile in issue number 963, then reviewed the movie itself glowingly a few issues later. Miss Cody is very much au courant, with color-steaked black dyed hair, her short skirts, torn stockings, and combat boots, and ostentatious tattoos; she’s one of those girls, a pasteurized Suicide Girl. Now Miss Cody has joined the ranks of Stephen King and Dalton Ross as final-page columnists for the nation’s number one general entertainment magazine.

Bearing some kind of “Good Will Hunting” style intervention from a notable if silent screenwriter, Juno is an impressive highly strung gag fest, an anthology of one liners that Bruce Vilanch would envy. It is also contains the kind of story and characters that the writers for The Gilmour Girls could ring out between lattes.

Miss Cody kicks off her debut column by talking about … herself. After some preliminary praise for the ultimate groupie movie, Almost Famous, Miss Cody then goes on to compare Cameron Crowe’s movie to her experiences on the road promoting Juno. She was going to be just like Jason Lee in Crowe’s film, only, in a gag characteristic of the column’s childish imitation of the Vilanch-style, “with less facial hair.”

I suppose we could expect no less than self-absorption from a blogger’s foray into adult journalism, since blogs, whence comes Miss Cody and her talent, are all about the narcissism of talking about oneself as if the world cared. At least Miss Cody’s processed prose isn’t as horrid as the untampered-with dictations of Stephen King, monthly anthologies of every current verbal tic.

EW has been undergoing a gradual redesign these past few weeks, and Miss Cody’s ascension is yet another measure of contemporary print journalism’s panic in the face of lapsed subscriptions and fleeing advertisers. Instead of reclaiming readers (and advertisers) through innovative web presences and striving to be “must reads,” newspapers and magazines are pandering to younger readers in obvious and intelligence-insulting ways. Thus, instead of hiring truly witty writers such as Cintra Wilson or Stacie Ponder to share their insights, they go for the flavor of the week. Adding Miss Cody to the masthead must strike the brainiacs at EW as a cool move. Will it be so in two years if her career washes out (as, statistically, it might)? Until then, we can enjoy such future columns as Diablo Cody on winning the Golden Globe, Diablo Cody on winning an Oscar, Diablo Cody on meeting Steven Spielberg, Diablo Cody at Telluride-Sundance-Cannes, and maybe even Diablo Cody on reading about Diablo Cody.

The print media are invested in the fact that ultimately their works are better written and more dependably accurate than weblogs. Yet continually I am seeing blogs and talkbacks that are more insightful and sharp-edged than the web edition of mainstream publishing. As an example I can point the reader to today’s New York Times, in which A. O. “Tony” Scott reviewed I Am Legend. Scott’s review is almost convincing, as he cites it as a film “not without its enchantments” and one that rides on the charm of its lead actor, Will Smith, a specialist in science fiction films. Mr. Scott paints a bucolic vision of the film’s post-apocalyptic Manhattan in which Smith’s sole survivor frolics: “From his home base in the elegant Washington Square town house he was lucky enough to own (on a government employee’s salary) before the big die-off, he makes daylight forays that are like an adventure-tourist fantasy. He does a little deer hunting on Park Avenue and some indoor fishing at the Temple of Dendur, picks fresh corn in Central Park and smacks golf balls across the Hudson from the deck of the aircraft carrier Intrepid.”

It all sounds so cozy. But then, just after the review, is a reader comment by someone with the user name kevindrooney. He basically annihilates Mr. Scott’s review — without having even seen the film. “Chasing deer in a Mustang? What is that supposed to mean? Driving golf balls off an aircraft carrier? Why? I can see why smug men in predictable, comfortable lives play golf, but once the world disappears in a flash and you are hunted by cannibals at night, who has the equanimity or plain simple-mindedness to want to knock golf balls into a looming void? It sounds from the review like Will’s character should be working at hunting, not golf, anyway. And why kill animals at all when you live in the middle of many square miles of canned food?” I strongly recommend that readers take in Mr. Scott’s review and the talk back retorts, and I salute Mr. kevindrooney and all other sharp-eyed posters who keep the big boys in the dallies on their toes.

If 2007 goes down in the books as a great movie year, 2008 (from this vantage) looks less promising. How do we know this? Look at the log of Sundance movies announced on November 28th. The Sundance Festival goes from January 17th to 27th, and among its 121+ films slated for 2008 premieres (thus dictating the flavor of “independent” films for the next two seasons) are films featuring Marines on short leave, dysfunctional families on journeys, troubled people fleeing to small towns or into relationships with video clerks or illegal immigrants, brothers at odds with each other, troubled gangsters and depressed hit men, and neurotic siblings. More details can be found in two Variety stories.

Look also at the sequels and remakes that 2008 has in store: Among the intriguing and no doubt profitable sequels are Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Sin City 2, J. J. Abrams’s take on Star Trek , and the next James Bond film. Those that create an aching inner sense of boredom and emptiness are Ace Ventura 3, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Incredible Hulk, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The Dark Knight, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Rambo, Saw V, Madagascar 2: The Crate Escape, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The big hits of the year will no doubt be Horton Hears a Who!, Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, Sex and the City: The Movie, Get Smart, Step Brothers, Where the Wild Things Are, and Hannah Montana: The Movie.

Of more modest interest in the next calendar year are Cloverfield , Be Kind Rewind, Funny Games , Baby Mama , Valkyrie , The Pineapple Express , Trailer Trash , The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , and two sci-fi remakes which could either be vast improvements or disasters, The Day the Earth Stood Still , and When Worlds Collide .

Taking the long view early, 2007 is looking to be one of the great years for American movies. Any year that has a Wes Anderson film, a David Fincher thriller, a new Coen Brothers movie, and a PT Anderson masterwork has got to be a great one. It may end up rivaling other great years, such as 1939 and 1972 and 1980. Since there is little chance that a commercial Hollywood title on the level of the great ones released already is going to pop up (unless Walk Hard is a secret masterpiece) I’m going to go ahead and go through the ritual of my 2007 best list now. Like Christmas leapfrogging over Thanksgiving to throttle Halloween, each year the pundits and award-giving bodies endeavor to get their “bests” out earlier. Soon they’ll be coming out in August (especially if the publicists cater to them by steering screeners their way).

There are a few broad lacks on my list. Living in Portland, Oregon, I end up being pretty weak on European and Asian art titles, and I don’t really care about animated movies since they are all the same (Persepolis might turn out to be an exception, but right now it looks like an arty chick flick). If I were diligent and saw every movie, rented every new DVD, and downloaded the rest, this list might be a whole lot different, instead of sounding like everyone else’s. But from among the titles allowed to cross the state border, these are the ones I liked the most. Bear in mind that, as I have tried to make clear for years on one newspaper or web site after another, I don’t like 10 Bests lists, finding them something of a racket that plays into the promotional-industrial complex. In addition, my sole criterion (which is probably also that of most ordinary viewers) is which movies from the previous year would I care to see over again, get its DVD, and make a part of the permanent library. So below is my list, in random order. Explanations follow.

American Movies
There Will Be Blood
The Darjeeling Limited
Breach
Zodiac
No Country For Old Men
In the Valley of Elah
Grindhouse
Die Hard and Live Free
The Bourne Ultimatum
Superbad

Foreign Films
Hot Fuzz
The Lives of Others

Documentaries
Sicko
In the Shadow of the Moon
Terror’s Advocate
Helvetica

Breach and Zodiac register as two homages to ’70s cinema (and its aesthetic values) that no one wanted to see. The Darjeeling Limited is a redemptive Wes Anderson film on several levels. No Country For Old Men and In the Valley of Elah is a Tommy Lee Jones - Josh Brolin trifecta (if you threw in Grindhouse; hmmm, actually, that doesn’t work). No Country For Old Men is not the greatest Coen Brothers film ever made, but it is better than most of the films released last year (I didn’t like its ambiguous last 15 minutes). In the Valley of Elah was made by Oscar-winner writer and director Paul Haggis, and I like this film much better than the Oscar winners. In addition, it’s the best of all this year’s Iraq movies. I treasure Grindhouse as the double bill, with all the cool fake trailers and adverts, released to the theaters for three weeks before the craven distributors chopped it in two for international sales and DVD. The two best action films of the year were Die Hard and Live Free and The Bourne Ultimatum, and I look forward to seeing them again and again. Of the Judd Apatow related films, I favored Superbad, and most definitely not Knocked Up, which I’ll go into more detail about when I review the DVD. I’m constrained by publicists from formally reviewing There Will Be Blood, but I suppose they won’t mind my adding it to this list and noting that it may be the very best film of the year. More details later.

Among foreign films (to use the term loosely), I loved Hot Fuzz and The Lives of Others, which Oscar has already honored. Documentaries were also strong this year. Sicko may have been the most important. In the Shadow of the Moon was the most moving. Terror’s Advocate was the most intellectually challenging. Helvetica, about a typeface, was the most delightful.