I figured before the calendar left January, I’d better get around to posting my other round-ups of 2007. I already gave you my book highlights. Tonight, I offer you the best of my movie watching over the last year:

1. Juno

If you haven’t yet seen this movie about a quirky teen who discovers she’s pregnant by her best guy friend, get ye to a movie theater! The movie’s title character manages to retain her unique voice regardless of what situations she finds herself in. Utterly delightful and a total must-own when it comes out on video.

2. The December Boys

This Australian film focuses on four orphan boys in the 1950s who go to a tiny seaside community for some summer fun and a Christmas reprieve from their desert asylum. The boys vie with one another for a more permanent home, try to define their characters, and grapple with the definition of family.

3. Hairspray

A fun musical that we didn’t catch until it came out on DVD, this movie-cum-play-cum-movie focuses on a Baltimore teenager who is comfortable in her own skin and who tries to pass that confidence on to everyone around her.

4. Paris, je t’aime

Filmed throughout Paris, this movie looked at how so many different realities can co-exist simultaneously in one place. The movie was broken up into arrondissements (neighborhoods) and filmed by different directors and starring both renowned and unknown actors.

5. The Hula Girls

This sweet Japanese movie focused on a coal mining town following WWII and how the coming of a Hawaiian-themed resort is promised as the community’s salvation. In order to support their families, teen girls must struggle with the concept of traditional female ideology versus a more modern definition of what girls can be. The fact that this was based on a true story made it even more touching.

6. Reign over Me

I felt like this Adam Sandler/Don Cheadle film deserved more attention than it got. It’s the story of two men, former dental school roommates, living in current-day Manhattan. One has a family that’s driving him nuts, partners in his dental practice who treat him like an idiot, and a female patient who’s coming onto him. One day, he sees his former friend, who had been affected by the September 11 tragedy, and reaches out to him. To everyone’s surprise (including themselves), they discover that each one has something to offer the other. A tear-jerker without easy answers.

7. Miss Potter

Phenomenal scenery and a great cast knocks this biopic of Beatrix Potter into the top ten. Renee Zellweger pulls out her British accent again, this time as the creator of Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddleduck, and Tom Kitten, a spinster yearning for more freedom while living under the thumb (and the roof) of her parents. Ewan McGregor plays her publisher, a man hoping to prove himself to his older brothers in the family business.

8. Charlie Wilson’s War

I know Sweetpea was aggravated by this film’s overlapping of comedy and pathos, but I found it oddly poetic. I mean, isn’t that the whole point of wars elsewhere? We go about our daily lives thinking about our commutes and our bills and our dates and in other parts of the world people are killing each other and suffering and fleeing tyranny? But because the suffering isn’t in front of us, we’re able to ignore it? This movie focused on a congressman from Texas and his quest to help the Afghans fight the Soviets. He succeeded — and failed — in a most overwhelming way.

9. Becoming Jane

While it was a terrible biopic, it was a sweet movie. So I consider the characters in the film divorced from the real live Jane Austen, even if the names and occasional events were snipped from her life. Nonetheless, you really root for Jane to find love and success and happiness, even if you know she can’t — and won’t — have all three.

10. The Great Debaters

In this movie, Denzel Washington plays a real-life literature/oratory professor at an African American college in the south in the 1930s. He also coaches the college’s debate team, comprised of three young men and a young woman, who travel the country winning debate after debate and hoping for a chance to debate a white college team. In his off hours, the professor also works organizing sharecroppers and farm laborers, a dangerous endeavor that puts him on the wrong side of the law more than once. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the scary and mean sides of the Jim Crow south, but it also offers characters who care about their quests and each other. A well done piece of historical filmmaking.

Coming up later this week, I write about knitting(!!) and offer pictorial evidence that I do still play with yarn.