Ticket stub regained

• Lucky You (5/4, Crit)--Largely a good film--the poker stuff is as good as I've seen. But the boy-girl stuff is utterly unconvincing, and even though I'm a big Drew fan, I gotta say I don't think it's Bana's fault.
• Children of Men (1/14, Orange)--Wow, we're way back now, aren't we? This was my ex's no. 1 film of 2006, and while I liked it a lot, I ranked it only no. 2 among the Tres Amigos' films--which is to say, in order, del Toro (El laberinto del fauno), Cuarón, and González Iñárritu (Babel). Still, I need to see this again in the not too distant future--it has stayed with me, and not just the shock of [SPOILER ALERT] My Future Wife Julianne Moore's getting blasted out of the story early in the second act.
• Breach (2/24, Crit)--Chris Cooper, you know what I'm sayin'? Eleven-plus months later, all I remember is that what might have been really pedestrian worked because of Chris Cooper. Hell, I think I'll put Breast Men in my Netflix queue! Maybe not.
• The Astronaut Farmer (2/23, Crit)--Sweet, but I never believed it for a minute.
• The Pink Panther (1963) (3/11, Crit)--Another one that, against all convention, I had never seen. And, sorry, I never need to see again. Love Dr. Strangelove, but I don't get all jiggly about Peter Sellers.
• Grindhouse (4/6, Crit)--Found Rodriguez's Planet Terror amusing enough, but I was ready for it to be over some time before it was. Tarantino's Death Proof, on the other hand, was sheer adrenaline-rush feminist kickass.
• Little Children (1/13, Crit)--I'm never going to tell while I find it disconcerting as well as arousing to see Kate Winslet naked--them what needs to know knows, them what don't doesn't need to. Anyway, good flick, but it seduced me (along with Election) into buying the new Tom Perrotta novel, whereupon I discovered how much the guy has been helped by real screenwriters and directors.
• Les climats (Climates) (2/25, Crit)--Deliberate--well, let's just say slow--depiction of an affair with everything stacked against it. Turkish.
• El laberinto del fauno (Pan's labyrinth) (1/15, Crit)--Went into this not expecting to say, "Well, damn: no doubt: this is the best film of 2006," but that's pretty much the reaction I had. Having seen it again recently, I'm less confident of that assessment, but absolutely certain that it's a nearly perfect fairytale for liberal grown-ups.

OK, that's the 140 or so flicks I saw in the movie theater in 2007. Now let's add a few things that eluded me in the theater but which I caught up to on Netflix and turned out to be among my favorites of the year:

• Colma: The Musical (c. 11/25)--This was one of those movies that about three minutes in I thought, "I've got to make sure [my daughter] Jen sees this!" Low-budget, low-production-values brilliance: a sort of Seinfeldian musical about nothing, except that it's everything: what are recent graduates in a suburb of San Francisco famous only for its cemeteries gonna do w/ their lives? Listen and learn.
• Shi gan (Time) (c. 11/21)--Think Vertigo via Seoul. Not sure why this nailed me so completely, but if I was wrong, I'm stuck with the disc, which I just bought, along with . . .
• La Faute à Fidel! (Blame it on Fidel!) (c. 11/16)--Just flat one of the best films of the year, a child's look at politics, and at adults who either (1) don't act on what they believe, (2) act fatally on what they believe, (3) or don't examine their beliefs enough to know whether they're worth acting fatally on. Only the profoundly sober-faced protagonist (played by one Nina Kervel-Bey, who will have a long, splendid career if either God or Fidel exists) really takes political questions seriously. Not long after, I rented Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart, which would make a great double feature with this.