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The fact is that I am way behind on my movie viewing. Soooo behind. I only finished watching 2006’s great movies at the end of 2007. Is it because I don’t have a real TV right now (movies lose something on the 17-inch laptop screen)? Maybe because I had a crappy summer? But then I should have been spending it in a movie theatre. Oh wait, nothing decent comes out in the summer … except A Mighty Heart and Once and maybe 3:10 to Yuma and … alright, so I was just lazy.

Now, there are some movies I’m not going to see. I don’t care how many editing awards Transformers is going to get or that Norbit has a shot to win the makeup prize … nothing short of a million dollars is going to make me put Eddie Murphy in fat-woman drag in my Netflix queue.

Here’s a partial list of what I have missed and am sorry I don’t have the chance to see before the big day (although there is still time to catch up on them before Sunday):

• No Country for Old Men
• Juno
• Michael Clayton
• Sweeney Todd
• Away From Her
• Into the Wild
• Savages
• Gone Baby Gone
• The Diving Bell & The Butterfly
• Lars & The Real Girl
• Enchanted

But I would like to give a shout-out to some performances and movies (released in 2007) that stood out for me, that lingered in my mind long after the movie was done. I mean, that’s what makes a good movie, right? Not so much all the technical stuff but those scenes, ah those scenes.

• Once: Every time they sing together but particularly that song which I can’t seem to get out of my head.
• No End in Sight: As footage of looted Iraqi national museums and libraries are shown, emptied of treasures as ancient as the beginning of recorded time, Rumsfeld makes a joke about broken vases.
• The Bourne Ultimatium: not the hand-to-hand fight scene (which is great) or the chase across rooftops (also great) but when Nicky is forced to go into hiding. She dyes and cuts her hair and over her shoulder in the mirror she sees Jason Bourne cradling his bruised knuckles. It mirrors the first Bourne movie and so makes the trilogy complete. Because we, the audience, remember the scene in the first movie and what it means for Marie and Jason, there is the faint sad acknowledgment by the viewer of what has been lost by Bourne. There is also then a hint of what might happen in the future for Bourne. If for no other reason, this scene made this movie more than vapid summer action flick.
• For the Bible Tells Me So: When Mary Lou Wallner begins to cry on camera and you can’t even begin to imagine the shame and guilt and overwhelming sorrow of a mother who will always regret never saying “I’m sorry and I was wrong” to her daughter.
• There Will Be Blood: “I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!” Really, do I need to say anything else?
• Eastern Promises: Nikolai takes from behind one of the young, underage women that his employer, a Russian Mob organization, is smuggling into London; his boss (and son to the godfather) Kirill watches from the doorway. Maybe this scene is just gratuitous (that one’s for you, mom) or an example of their abuse of the women; one critic has said that it shows Nikolai ’s haunted horror of the self. But I think it’s only later in the movie, maybe really at the end, that you truly understand why Kirill made Nikolai do it, why Nikolai actually does it, why Kirill watched, why it was the position it was, what it meant for Kirill that it was the position it was, the use of sex and power — not always in the ways we assume — and Kirill’s desperate, maddening, soul-killing struggle in between who he is and what he is. And we know this not because we see it in Kirill’s face but in Nikolai’s. And that’s why Viggo Mortensen is the actor he is.
• I’m Not There: Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger (but also Richard Gere and Christian Bale .. and did I mention Cate Blanchett). Seriously, they were all Dylan for me. Seriously.