There Will Be... updates (and close shaves, and blood)

Imagine the usual fraught pre-Christmas scramble -- the organising and attending of various social events, the fulfilment of job duties, the buying of presents, the reviewing of Fred Claus, under pain of death. You know, the usual. Now try doing it without having anywhere to live. That's the situation I'm in -- "between flats", I guess you'd have to call it -- and it's wreaking havoc on this blog. (Or rather silence, if one can really wreak silence.)

So there's hardly been time to talk about how good There Will Be Blood is -- how likely this brazenly ambitious, brilliantly acted and in general quite scarily inspired movie is to be my film of the year, beating even the likes of I'm Not There, my other straight 'A' from the last few months. Nor has there been a moment to deal with the many successes and minor structural failings of the Coen bros' No Country for Old Men; the sense of stuffy self-inflation wedded to unignorable technical virtues in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; the nifty narrative gimmickry and addictive dialogue in John August's underrated The Nines, featuring Ryan Reynolds's first three attempts at acting; the exasperating yet perversely exhilarating mess that is Southland Tales; or, perhaps most pleasurably, the uncompromising grimness, sure-footed sense of the macabre, and smashing musical dexterity with which Sweeney Todd has been brought to the screen, and which I think make it Tim Burton's best film since Edward Scissorhands.

No time for any of this yet, or for another task I've set myself: the updating of my top 100, to be found at the bottom right of this blog, which is a couple of years old now and needs at least 10-15 new films squeezed into it somehow. By new I don't necessarily mean recent, and they won't all be surprises, if you've followed this blog and its sidebars from time to time. One or two of them might be. We like these guessing games, right? Comment away on what you think my new entries might be, which films you insist I must keep or scrap, or anything else you want to sound off about. Go on! Mi casa su casa, except in the real world, where mi casa isn't even mi casa...