George Clooney looks a gift horse in the mouth

2007 was a good year for movies, or at least for movies I liked and still like. 2007 was a formative year for my taste in movies, or at least the culmination of all my formative years watching movies.

The Best Picture nominees at the Oscars for that year were Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Atonement, and Juno. I’m not saying that’s a best group ever list because I don’t say things like that, but that’s a solid set of movies. I can’t remember whether I saw Juno in a theater or not, but I liked it when I saw it. I still maybe haven’t seen Atonement, but I’ve listened to the novel on a CD I checked out from the public library a few years ago, which isn’t the same as reading the novel or seeing the movie. I feel like I’ve seen at least part of the movie. Maybe I saw a commercial for Atonement. I’m not really here to talk about Atonement, but I need Atonement to at least be a decent movie so that my thoughts and sentiments about the year’s Oscar nominees hold true.

In 2007, I saw No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood in the theater. I saw the former on a date and the latter on my own. I’m not really hear to write about either of those experiences. This paragraph is more of a post-it note to myself that I started an essay draft about each of those experiences and never really did anything with either and…