Can you handle another year-end top ten list? Can you handle it? We don't think we can, but the L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor is determined to try our patience. At the very least, she takes a fresh approach to it: in her run-down of 2007's most interesting on-screen characters, she rejects the conventional wisdom that this year's prime crop of good films reeked to an unseemly degree of masculinity and cites an unusually high number of strong woman characters haunting our cineplexes, from Catherine Keener to Lili Taylor. She particularly bigs up Meryl Streep, who, rather than dominating Oscar fare as usual, turns the trick of having "redeemed two bad movies"; Amy Ryan's "hard but not cold" single mother in Gone Baby Gone, and, in an interesting defection from a number of critics who found the female characters in Knocked Up to be half-formed caricatures, Leslie Mann, who "brings to the controlling-bitch-wife role that makes women squirm a kind of cathartic, rhythmic lyricism" that's "full of hilarious menace". The piece isn't exactly a vital chapter in the history of cinema circa 2007, but it does serve as a refreshing tonic to an increasing number or critics who praise this year's movies because of their unrelenting and unapologetic masculinity.
Elsewhere in the Weekly, there's plenty more end-of-year stuff, as J. Hoberman introduces the 2007 critic's poll; Luke Thompson argues that torture-porn and the new wave of shock-horror has captured the attention of critics but failed to capture moviegoer dollars at the box office; Nikki Finke provides a postmortem recap of the star-crossed temper tantrums and I-dare-yous that lead up to the WGA strike; and Scott Foundas argues that, at a time when America isn't exactly making friends in the rest of the world, Hollywood is the best diplomatic organization we have to offer this year.