Greetings, battle-scarred vets of the 2007 movie wars.
It was a year when matters of conception and mortality were the stuff of comedy. And a year when many American films reconsidered the 1960s - the politics, the music, and the social upheavals.
It was also a year of musicals, including the big, bouffant Hairspray, the small, hushed Once, and the experimental Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There.
This was a year when There Will Be Blood (opening Friday) might serve as a description for many movies, especially those about Iraq. In films such as In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, Lions to Lambs, and Redacted, Iraq the Movie played on and on.
It's not unusual to see movies critical of war, like the best of these films, Charles Ferguson's exceptional documentary No End in Sight (which, like other titles boldfaced here, made my 10 Best list). In lucid interviews with policymakers, it explained why we are in Iraq and why it's so hard to get out. What appears to be unprecedented is that this year's flood of Iraq pictures critical of the war came out while the war is still in progress.
The bloody impasse they depict looms over so many nonwar films that one might regard movies such as Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton's splatter operetta of vengeance, and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's circa-1900 account of the pitched battle between an oilman and a religious man, as displaced war movies.
The life cycle - with an emphasis on childbirth and parental death - likewise dominated American movies.
Where once the runaway bride provided romantic conflict in movies, the unplanned pregnancy did so in 2007.
In coming-to-term farces such as Knocked Up, Waitress and Juno, Jason Reitman's uproarious comedy starring fresh face Ellen Page, pregnancy is the situation that drives the plot to the delivery room. Once upon a time, unwed mothers were stigmatized in films; today accidental moms are celebrated.
At the other end of the life cycle, the demise of Dad was Topic A of many indie films.
The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's intriguing dramedy, features brothers literally and figuratively unpacking their emotional baggage. Mira Nair's vibrant The Namesake depicts an American child of immigrants rejecting, then embracing, his father's heritage. And Tamara Jenkins' The Savages is a darker-than-black comedy about siblings caring for the dementia-impaired father who never cared for them. Do these films about the passing of the elders suggest a generational changing of the guard?
