I drink your milkshake!

I'm not watching the awards show tonight, though this year was marked by several movies that I enjoyed thoroughly: Michael Clayton, Juno, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood--all excellent. As an ethically-challenged American, I found Michael Clayton to be rather illuminating regarding the inherent inadequacies in the American legal system, a system that requires its opposing sides to argue for biased outcomes in order to find justice, while at the same time keeping me on the edge of my seat. Juno, in addition to being a sweet, sardonic, wholesome, and affecting film, has the added benefit of featuring lots of music by Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches, a band K-dog interested me in light years ago. So, I get to look superior and on-top-of-it, music-wise. Or, at least, feel superior, since I never told anyone about the music thing. No Country for Old Men was amazingly thrilling. It had a continuous rumbling-landslide inevitability that gave its characters mythic proportions, contained only by the unforgiving landscape. My favorite film of the year, though, has to be There Will Be Blood. Day-Lewis and the Dano convinced me that they each believed in a universe created for only them and the movie almost made me believe one of them might be right.

Honorable Mentions: Black Snake Moan, 28 Weeks Later, The Simpsons Movie, Superbad, Eastern Promises, The Darjeeling Limited, American Gangster, Once

To See: Atonement, Zodiac, Ratatouille, Sicko, Sunshine, Rescue Dawn (and precursor Little Dieter Needs to Fly), The Bourne Ultimatum, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Into the Wild, Lust, Caution, Gone Baby Gone, Sweeney Todd, Walk Hard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly