The Screengrab

When you're named after a mythological figure (in some traditions, a co-ruler of Hell), and your mentor is the deeply strange Stan Brakhage, and your most well-known production to date is a nearly silent comedy whose big claim to fame is having been shot on stolen film, you'd have to go pretty far not to be considered the weird one in your family. 

Unless, of course, you're Azazel Jacobs.

Jacobs escapes being the strangest fruit hanging from his family tree by virtue of who his father is:  the legendary experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, director of the brilliant Tom Tom the Piper's Son and the infamous found-footage epic Star Spangled to Death.  Given his parentage, it's not surprising that Azazel Jacobs started making movies that are more than a big off-kilter; what's surprising is how resolutely normal they seem in comparison to his dad's work.  Nonetheless, his movies have garnered Jacobs the Younger a reputation as a rising star in independent film; his last movie, The GoodTimesKid, was a quirky, unpredictable physical comedy, and his latest, Momma's Man, takes advantage of his father's skills -- not as a director, but as an actor.  As the Jacobs explain to the LA Weekly, the film is a gauze-thin metaphor where a young man (not played by Azazel Jacobs) goes to visit his aging parents (played by Azazel Jacobs' parents) and suddenly, inexplicably, finds himself unable to leave.  The apartment (played by Azazel Jacobs' parents' apartment) is both comforting and terrifying, a huge, strangely angled place that is filled with eerie emptiness and amusingly odd piles of junk ("What junk?" protests Ken Jacobs; "It's my life.")

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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 what may be, and indeed, had damn well better be, one of the very last outbreaks of opinion regarding the movies of 2007, the seventh annual Village Voice Film Poll (now joined at the hip to the L.A. Weekly) has arrived in port. Topping the list, which is based on the views of 102 voting critics: "Paul Thomas Anderson's wildly ambitious meditation on God, oil, and family values," There Will Be Blood. (The description is from Voice critic and living institution J. Hoberman, whose own person top ten list begins with I'm Not There, to which he devoted umpteen memorable words last November.) Other to picks: Blood star Daniel Day-Lewis, I'm Not There's Cate Blanchett and No Country for Old Men's Javier Bardem for Best Supporting Actress and Actor, Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight, and Sarah Polley's Away from Her for Best Forst Film. The Best Actress nod went to the highly deserving Anamaria Marinca of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a movie which landed in fourth place in the Best Film rankings--not bad at all considering that the movie wasn't actually shown here in 2007 except on the festival circuit. Considering that it opens theatrically here soon--we just saw a trailer for it today, in fact--we're not sure why so many critics agreed that they just couldn't wait until next year to vote for it, but hey.

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.