The Screengrab

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.

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In the L.A. Weekly, two staffers take decidely different approaches to the presence of children in film:  looking back at the history and the development of the on-screen child, from The 400 Blows to Little Miss Sunshine, Ella Taylor notes a reflection in contemporary cinema of our curious blend of overprotectiveness and overpermissiveness, and wonders why Hollywood has, unlike other countries, had such great difficulty promoting the development of a great director who makes films primarly for kids.  In the same issue, John Anderson, taking a very different tack, notes that increasingly, children have a shorter and shorter life expectancy -- on screen, at least.  Citing a recent crop of movies from Pan's Labyrinth and Planet Terror to 1408 and Lonely Hearts, Anderson points out that it's becoming even more dangerous to be a child on screen than it is to be an adorable puppy or a wise-cracking black sidekick.