The best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing... but the worst thing is nothing.

Sage has been telling me to get my best lists in for the year. Unfortunately, I can’t give the same rundown like she has; I don’t keep track of when I see movies, just the year they came out. But that’s never a great top 10 list, as I never see all the 2007 movies I want to see in 2007. (The ones I haven’t seen from 2007 that are at the top of my list are: There Will Be Blood; Into the Wild; The Savages; Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.) It’ll probably be quite a few months before I do. But anyway, here’s what I’ve got. (And my comments are 100% my own, unlike others who post on this blog and steal their recaps from Netflix.)

Top 10 movies of 2007, seen so far:

10. A Mighty Heart. The story of the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter researching a story in Pakistan, and the search for him by his wife Marianne. Angelina Jolie gave a great performance, and the movie clicked right along, showing the investigation into who kidnapped Daniel, and the fight by Marianne to insist everything gets done to find him alive.

9. Eastern Promises. A look into the Russian mafia in London, and how Naomi Watts gets inadvertently involved with a member of it played by Viggo Mortensen. Not without a few twists and turns, this movie by David Cronenberg surprised me several times.

8. Gone Baby Gone. An outstanding directorial debut by Ben Affleck, and starring his younger brother Casey as a PI in Boston’s Southie neighborhood who is hired to try to investigate the disappearance of a neighbor’s young daughter. With great performances by Affleck, Amy Adams, Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris, I really got involved in this flick, and I kept thinking about the ending for days and days afterwards. It really raises some intriguing moral and ethical questions. Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane.

7. Atonement. Ian McEwan’s novel is easily one of my favorites from the past 10 years, so I was a tad skeptical going to see the movie version with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. The movie definitely doesn’t have the same emotional oomph that the book has, and the movie dragged a tad in the last 1/3, but the first hour was fantastic, and director Joe Wright did a great job showing scenes from different points of view, and how the interpretation of those points of views can have devastating effects.

6. Michael Clayton. Good movies are like good cakes: they have a lot of different layers. Michael Clayton fits that bill to a "T". This is the story of a corporate lawyer who tries to clean up a mess one of his firm’s partners makes in a huge class-action lawsuit. Almost every character has much more going on than at first glance, and the story is told by jumping forward and backward in time, making you think again about what you may have seen already, and where it will lead.

5. Sicko. First, let me say that I’m not an idiot. I know that when Michael Moore makes a movie he’s much more interested in provoking rather than making a true documentary. But I also know that Moore pushes buttons which make people think about their status quo – and to question ways of thinking that have been fed to us by the government, by the media, and especially by corporate America. Sicko is Moore’s take on the American health care industry – why it’s so flawed, how it got that way, and how other countries around the world do it better. Again, I’m not stupid enough to think that everyone who lives in Canada, England or France don’t have problems with their health care. But having said that, one would think that a nation’s society should be able to care for their own – be it education, social services, or health care – instead of turning it into a for-profit business where it’s more important for an insurance company or hospital to make a profit instead of doing all it can to treat a person.

4. No End in Sight. Another documentary, this one dealing with Iraq. This movie is NOT about the reasons the Bush Administration went to war in the first place, but the huge mistakes it made in the aftermath. Told in first person accounts from members of Bush’s own administration, as well as soldiers from Iraq, policy personnel, and those who tried (and failed) get a new Iraq government off the ground, but were given so little help or support to get that done. This is a huge eye-opener, and one that comes down really hard on the administration’s complete short-sightedness in not knowing how to finish what they started.

3. Once. The story of a street musician in Dublin, who meets up with a young Czech immigrant who plays piano, Once has been described as a non-musical musical. I’m not sure what that even means, but the story is simple enough: These two young people meet, help each other make music together, and along the way help each other with their respective personal lives. While they may be falling in love as well, the movie is less about what they mean to each other, but what each DOES for the other. Filmed in 17 days, and featuring great music, this soundtrack has been burning up my iPod since I saw the movie.

2. Juno. I had a hard time choosing between #2 and #1 on my list – I’d almost have to call Juno 1-A on my list. This movie surprised me every step of the way, with characters that were completely cliché-free and dialogue that at times was completely ridiculous but was still too smart to hold that against it. The acting was fabulous, with Ellen Page, Jason Batemen, Michael Cera and JK Simmons not missing a note along the way. I didn’t feel like any of the characters acted formulaic, and the decisions made along the way felt heartfelt and real. On top of all that, the music and soundtrack helped the story move along, instead of getting annoyingly in the way like so many soundtracks do. I can only describe the songs as “childishly mature”, which pretty much sums up the movie as well.

1. No Country for Old Men. This movie is probably as diametrically opposite of Juno as you can get. A very dark story of a drug deal gone wrong, a man who finds a case full of money, a killer on his trail, and a Texas sheriff trying to figure it all out. No Country for Old Men treated its dialogue like it was from a Joyce short story: It doesn’t say much, but it also doesn’t waste one word. The tension the movie built up is unbelievable every step of the way, and then the movie takes a few hairpin turns toward the end, ending with three of the best scenes I’ve seen in movies recently. Javier Bardem is getting all sorts of Oscar buzz, but Tommy Lee Jones gives one of the best performances I’ve seen this year. He shows his age as the sheriff, and you can read more emotion on his face with simple looks than most actors can show in a year. And on top of it all, the Coen brothers kept the look of the movie completely desolate, not even including any music during the entire movie until the end credits. I wanted to see this movie again as soon as I walked out of it, and I think about it often. Signs of a great film.

Worst 2007 movie: Shooter. Without a doubt, one of the biggest wastes of two hours I had in 2007, and that is saying something. The worst part is that the premise wasn’t horrible, and that it was written by Stephen Hunter, a film critic at the Washington Post that I actually like from time to time. But it went downhill almost from minute 5, and became more and more eye-rolling until it went to its completely unbelievable ending.

Best DVD movies seen (or, older movies that I didn’t see until 2007).

#1: The Lives of Others. This movie takes place in 1980’s East Berlin, and deals with an officer of the German secret police (the Stasi) who is put in charge of wiretapping a playwright’s house on the orders of a corrupt party official. The usually toe-the-line policeman finds himself questioning the motives for the reason he’s bugging this house, and starts to get more involved with the couple’s lives. The best thing I can say about this movie is that I kept thinking about it for months after seeing it, especially the last 20 minutes.

Runner-ups: The Weather Underground, a documentary about the violent acts of anti-war protesters known as The Weathermen in the 1960’s and 1970’s; An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s eye-opening slide show showing the science (yes, it’s science) behind global warming; Volver, Pedro Almodovar’s latest movie about a woman who begins to see her dead mother; and The Good Shepherd, Robert DeNiro’s movie about the start of the CIA.

Top Books read in 2007

2007 wasn’t a great year for me reading books. I only got through 16 new books (though I did re-read several books, including The Sound and the Fury and Pale Fire, two of my all-time favorites), so I think I’ll only make this a top 5 list, including both fiction and non-fiction.

5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows by J.K. Rowling. I had some complaints about the final installment of the boy wizard’s story. I felt that the middle part of the book, with Harry, Ron and Hermione roaming the English countryside, went on way too long without anything happening, and then she rushed through the final act and the long-awaited showdown with Voldemort. But even with those minor complaints, I still couldn’t put the book down, and it (thankfully!) answered most questions and tied up a lot of loose ends.

4. A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon. Haddon’s follow up to his great The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time isn’t as unique as that first novel, but it’s still a great read. It covers the four lives of one English family, their dysfunction trying to live and cope with each other, and the lies and secrets they keep.

3. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. After seeing the movie adaptation on HBO, and not thinking it was very good at all, I decided I needed to get the entire story and read Dee Brown’s book. Incredibly heartbreaking, Brown outlines the fate of dozens of Native American Indian tribes between 1860 and 1890. It’s a bit of a dry read, but also a sobering reminder of the price that the American Indian paid for wanting to keep the land of their ancestors.

2. A Simple Plan by Scott Smith. I loved the movie version of this book, and Sage read the book a while back and told me that it’s a lot different than the movie. Even so, it’s a great read, and shows how easily everyday people can be led to do horrible, extraordinary things in the face of trying to improve their lives. After finding millions of dollars in a snowy woods, three men make mistake after mistake in trying to figure out a way to keep the money without anyone finding out. Smith is a great writer, and leads me to my #1 book of 2007…

1. The Ruins by Scott Smith. This book completely freaked me out. In all truth, it’s nothing more than a horror story: A bunch of young kids on vacation in Mexico go looking for Mayan ruins and find themselves trapped in a horror they can’t get out of. I’d rather not go into details of what that horror is – while it’s not entirely a spoiler (especially if you’ve seen the trailer for the movie that’s coming out this year), I think it would give a bit too much away too soon – suffice it to say that the “enemy” in this book has ALWAYS creeped me out. I’m not sure why, but it has. And while some might find the premise this book is written on pretty ridiculous, I think it showed why Smith is such a great writer: he can turn a simple situation into pure terror.

Worst Book read in 2007: Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. Another Da Vinci Code pretender, Labyrinth cuts between two stories: a young woman in the 13^th Century in southern France whose father is part of a secret of historical proportions (hint: it rhymes with Moldy Trail) and a young female archeology student in present day southern France who finds a secret cave. Predictable, ridiculous, and very poorly written, it can’t even be considered good pulpy fun.

Best Television of the Year

Best TV watched on TV: EPL Review Show. This weekly show on Fox Soccer Channel is great for any fan of English Football. In an hour you get the highlights from that weekend’s English Premier League action, expertly edited into a nice tidy package. For some reason professional soccer is disdained in the United States, and most people say that because “it’s too boring”. I hear this mostly from American football fans, which I find quite amusing. Let’s see: In a 60-minute Professional football game, there is an average of about 110 plays from scrimmage. Each play lasts an average of 6 seconds. That’s 660 seconds of action, or a total of ELEVEN MINUTES! So in a period of 3 hours you get 11 minutes of actual plays. Now I won’t sit here and say a soccer game is non-stop excitement for 90 minutes. I get bored from time to time during games, especially when the play is poor or a team is playing defensively for a draw. My biggest argument with people who say soccer is boring is that they haven’t seen good, proper soccer being played. Watching MLS and saying all soccer is boring is like watching a Junior College football game and complaining that no one is any good. Watching the skills of European footballers probably won’t change most people’s minds, but I think it’s a thing of beauty. And every week the EPL Review Show puts that beauty on display, in 60 short minutes.

Runner-ups: Ken Burns The War, with its wonderful first-person accounts of World War II, along with how the war was received, thought about, and fought at home; The last episode of Lost, which was brilliant with its twist ending and set up for a great final 3 years (and made up for a lot of dead air during the season); and The 2006-2007 season of The Office, which finally brought Jim and Pam together and included some great laughs (unlike the beginning of the 2007-2008 season, which has been pretty poor in places.)

Best TV watched on DVD: The Wire. Having now seen seasons 1 through 4 on DVD, I can say, without hesitation or doubt, that The Wire is the best Television show I’ve ever seen. Great writing, great characters, great story lines. The last season is now on HBO, and when it’s over, I can’t wait to go out and buy the entire run and watch it all over again.

Best Music of the Year

Best CD: Radiohead—In Rainbows. The British band released their latest album online and had a new business model for purchasing it: Pay what you want. Whether it was $0.01 or $100, you got the album for what you thought it was worth (plus a $0.99 service fee). Radiohead has experimented with all sorts of electronic music and drum machines since their great album OK Computer in 1997, to various degrees of success. In Rainbows doesn’t go back to their roots, per se, but it does see them creating more melodious tunes that don’t entirely sound like hens getting butchered. I know that doesn’t sound like a great review, but trust me, it is. Well, I liked it anyway.

Runner ups: Wilco – Sky Blue Sky; The Shins – Wincing the Night Away.

Best Soundtracks: Once and Juno. As I mentioned earlier, both of these movies had great music with them, and they kind of deserve their own category. Once is filled with songs written by the two leads of the movie, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, and they are almost the entire plot of the movie. Juno’s soundtrack is a mix of previously released music (The Kinks, Belle and Sebastian) and new songs by Kimya Dawson, whose music and lyrics will make you smile as you listen.

Best Song: Here It Goes Again—OK Go. Probably only because of their treadmill video, a YouTube hit. But a fun tune anyway.

Other Best and Worst of 2007

Best Podcast: The Tony Kornheiser Show. Known as 50% of the Pardon the Interruption show on ESPN, Kornheiser’s daily radio show will touch on any topic, from sports (obviously) to movies to gun control debates. His self-defacing humor keeps me coming back to listen.

Best Meal: Oscar’s Restaurant, Springdale, Utah. This small southwestern themed joint right outside Zion National Park was recommended to us last summer by a hotel clerk, and I loved it. Good food, cold beer, and no pretensions. And tiled tables – I love tiled tables!

Best Cheap Eats: The Varsity, Atlanta, GA. This place is an institution, but I had never been to Atlanta before last year’s Chik-fil-A bowl, so we made sure we stopped. Hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries, onion rings and milk shakes, The Varsity serves it all like it’s still 1955, with prices to match. ($1.19 for a hamburger? Are you kidding me?)

Best Beer: Harpoon’s Oktoberfest. I bought this on a whim in the fall, and I was shocked about how great it tasted. Can’t wait for next fall to get some more!

Runner up: Okocim from Poland. I first had this beer at Brickskellers in Washington, DC (home to over 1,000 different beers), and I actually saved the label I loved it so much. Then last month, wandering around Total Wine in Durham, I found a six pack! I hope it’s going to start getting more distribution, as this lager is refreshing and tasty.

Best View: Under the Rim Trail, Bryce Canyon National Park. Sage's blog from back in August recounts the less-than-ideal backcountry hike we had in Bryce, but there was a great view after the 1^st mile that I’ll never forget, looking down the canyon, toward the Grand Staircase. And then a stupid helicopter flew by with a bunch of tourists, skimming the tops of the trees, and that pretty much ruined that day.

Runner-ups: Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah; Canyon Overlook, Zion National Park.

Best Hike: Hidden Canyon/Echo Canyon, Zion National Park. The Zion trip was a little disappointing as the backcountry hike we wanted to do was closed due to wildfires. After looking over what else there was to offer, we decided on this hike to Hidden Canyon & Echo Canyon in the main Zion Canyon (pretty much the only hike inside the main canyon we hadn’t done over the years). Starting off in the early dawn, we had Hidden Canyon all to ourselves, and it was great. A slot that’s hidden on the side of the canyon (so aptly named), it leads a mile or so down a sandy wash, with the walls of the slot rising over 100 feet overhead. The hike then led through Echo Canyon, another slot, though wider than Hidden, but the trail went along a narrow escarpment of rock which led down a few hundred of feet to a small stream below. It also cooled off about 15 degrees in Echo Canyon from outside in the sun.

Runner-up: Grayson Highlands State Park, VA. Read my blog about this hike back from October. I can’t wait to go back and experience it in better weather conditions, but the mist and fog made this one special.

Best Live Sports Event: Virginia Tech beating Florida St., Lane Stadium. We finally got you Bobby!

Worst Live Sports Event: Virginia Tech losing to Boston College in the final minute. It still makes me sick.

Best Sports Moment: (tie) Virginia Tech beating Boston College to win the ACC; Red Sox coming from 3-1 down to beat the Indians and win the AL Pennant. Winning the ACC was huge, and getting revenge on Boston College while doing it only added to the pleasure. The Red Sox victory was great too, but I actually thought the games against Cleveland, being down 3-1 and fighting back to win the ALCS, were a lot more satisfying than sweeping an overmatched Colorado Rockies team in the World Series.

Biggest headache: Moving to North Carolina.

Worst day: April 16

Best Use of My Brain: Trying out for Jeopardy. I still haven’t gotten the call, but I’m expecting it any day now! (Yeah, right.)

Strongest wind: Grandfather Mountain, NC. I’ve witnessed and experienced some strong winds in my day (after all, I did have to trek across the Drill Field to get to classes almost every day), but nothing compared to the winds we felt on the top of Grandfather Mountain in western North Carolina. It was the only time I can remember feeling like the wind was actually going to pick me up. And I haven’t missed many meals lately, if you know what I mean.