Steve Erickson's Ballot
Gay City News, City Paper, Nerve, Film and Video

Best Film
1. Syndromes and a Century
2. Day Night Day Night
3. Colossal Youth
4. I'm Not There
5. Offside
6. Gone Baby Gone
7. Black Book
8. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
9. Triad Election
10. West of the Tracks


Best Performance
Woody Harrelson, The Walker
Vanda Duarte, Colossal Youth
Luisa Williams, Day Night Day Night
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises
Carice van Houten, Black Book


Best Supporting Performance
Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Margot at the Wedding


Best Director
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Syndromes and a Century


Best Screenplay
Todd Haynes and Oren Moverman, I'm Not There


Best First Film
Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck


Best Documentary
West of the Tracks, Wang Bing


Best Undistributed Film
1. At Sea
2. The Romance of Astree and Celadon
3. Profit motive and the whispering wind
4. Secret Sunshine
5. Frownland
6. El Custodio
7. Dog Bite Dog
8. Operation Filmmaker
9. Paraguayan Hammock


Critic Comments
In 2007, cinephilia meant spending a lot of time in mourning, thanks to the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Ousmane Sembene and Edward Yang. Proclamations of Bergman's irrevelance were answered at length in the blogosphere, but even if the director's reputation has fallen since the '60s, he lived a long life and made a vast oeuvre. Yang died in his 50s and only got to direct seven films. His fate seems emblematic of the current state of art cinema. The classic arthouse has been romanticized beyond reason, but even without rose-colroed glasses, it seems clear that for reasonably hip, well-educated young people from the '50s through the '70s, going to see foreign films was part of their common experience. That's no longer the case for contemporary college students, although "Little Miss Sunshine" and "An Inconvenient Truth"- or even TV shows like "The Sopranos" and "The Wire" - may occupy the place in our culture once held by Bergman. Due to illness, Yang never got to cash in on the success of "Yi Yi," his only film released in the U.S. Its two million dollar gross suggested that he was never really as uncommercial as American distributors thought, but nevertheless, he was marginal even in his native Taiwan. Despite the cries of doom in so many Bergman and Antonioni obituaries, art cinema isn?t dead. I'm not sure that it?s in ill health. However, I doubt that it will reach beyond a tiny niche audience in the U.S. often again. Shortly after Bergman and Antonioni's deaths, a traveling retrospective of Portuguese director Pedro Costa's singular films arrived in New York. While some are understandably divisive, why the hell did it took six years for the relatively accessible documentary "Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?" to get a single screening here? Despite Costa's talent, his sole New York Film Festival exposure was a short in the "Views From The Avant-Garde" sidebar this year. "Colossal Youth" may be difficult going for some, but it suggests what Andy Warhol's "Chelsea Girls" might have been were it shot in a Lisbon slum. Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" may not be the year's most overrated film, but for me, it was the most irritating. It's a male fantasy not just in the obvious, geek-scores-with-beauty way, but in its belief that respecting women equals putting them on a pedestal (but not before shaving off their pubic hair). A smarter film might equate a website guiding viewers to nude female celebs with the Paris Hilton worship of the E! Network, but not Apatow's. The middle third of "Knocked Up" is strong enough to make me understand why it?s so overrated, but it quickly abandons a complex view of marriage's ups and downs in favor of valuing women and babies as magic tools to make men grow up. The film's view of single men as pot-and-porn-addled losers may be as insulting as its view of women. In the Farrelly brothers' best films, the mixture of gross-out and sentiment feels organic; with Apatow, one gets the feeling that, at best, he?s trying to appeal to a stereotypical view of what both male and female audiences want and, at worst, the poo jokes are supposed to cover up his worldview's conservatism. "Superbad" was even worse - a below-average '80s teen comedy that looks particularly cheap and ugly. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films go down easier than similarly challenging work by other filmmakers because they're sensual experiences first and foremost. On one level, "Syndromes and a Century" is such a joy to watch that its meaning remains besides the point. Still, it wouldn't belong on this list if it added up to nothing. Beneath the surface, Apichatpong's earlier films questioned the way sex and love are usually made into narratives. "Syndromes and a Century" does much the same with individual identity. What if a life could be remixed so that its echoes resonate across time and space? That notion, no doubt drawn from Buddhism, forms the starting point for its dual tales of hospital life. Less directly but just as radically as Apichatpong's previous film, "Tropical Malady" it expands the possibilities of love stories much the same way "2001: A Space Odyssey" rewrote science fiction's rules.