The best and worst films of 2006.
We critics like to play our little games at the end of every year, whereby we bestow certain movies the gift of being shortlisted as the best (or worst) of that particular year. Of course, this is always a personal choice, influenced by the tastes of the writer, but written as if part of a great canon that will be taught in hallowed halls for years to come. Usually, we like to slip something in that comes as a ‘surprise’–in my case, perhaps, that would be Slither–as if to indicate we’re ahead of the curve in some respects. I can’t speak for other critics, but I imagine everyone wishes they could have recognized, say, Blade Runner as the classic that it would turn out to be, or like Pauline Kael, see the new Bonnie and Clyde in 13 Tzameti. It’s a sincere hope of mine that something I’ve pegged as a best of will settle, like a leaf on the soft mud, and harden into something that will be studied in years to come.
But it’s certain scenes in a picture, in conjunction with a feeling, or a moment of sublimity, that helps to make a film endure. I’ve chosen to list the films that moved me this year, remembering certain parts, certain responses I overheard, or my own particular feelings when confronted with an arresting image: a subtle gesture, a breast exposed, some gore, a reaction on a character’s face to witnessed gore, the irritable grunt behind me to something that is not quite satisfactory. If you’re still reading this site after this year, you know that this has been a personal journey, watching these movies. This is what I encountered in the dark over the last year, the best in movies in 2006, in somewhat chronological order. (The worst are at the very bottom):
The World’s Fastest Indian–fun film that prompted my neighbor, an elderly gent obsessed with making a steam-powered motorcycle, and a pal who is in love with engines himself, to tear up over Anthony Hopkins’ small victories.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada–Tommy Lee Jones’ melacholy western, which seems to be all they make anymore, but an exciting film with a strong ensemble cast…
Eight Below starring the critically beleaguered Paul Walker, an actor whose range is probably as limited as a hermit crab’s, reacting to the abandonment of his dogs as if they were really his…
The Monster of Phantom Lake is a local black and white b-grade movie that’s lots of fun, and is usually screened with its director and producer in tow. Also, I sat next to one of the pretty stars, dressed to a ‘T’…
Slither features zombies, space aliens shooting spikes into people’s guts, a guy pumping baby slugs into a white-trash woman, slugs that burrow into people’s brain’s through their mouths, no nudity, lots of gore, and healthy lack of respect for anything except the genre…
In The Bridge, one of the Walker’s Marshall Plan films, a pair of soldiers waltz together on a tarmac to the music in a teddy bear, one of the most striking moments I saw this year…
Don’t Come Knocking is as beautiful as a paint truck colliding with an ice cream vendor. This colorful mess was written by both Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard, who penned it in Shepard’s remote Minnesota cabin, which eventually was taken over by Japanese beetles. Some great music in this movie that will probably never end up in a soundtrack…
Brick suggests that the noirest of all worlds in America today is the local high school. What kid wouldn’t want to have been a dork shamus like Joseph Gordon-Levitt…
L’Enfant, the relentlessly bleak Palme D’or winner by the Dardenne Brothers, took a perfectly melancholy morning, a cold, rainy morning, and left me thinking, holy shit, there but for the grace of God go I…
United 93 transcended Rush Limbaugh’s blowhard urgency and relived the horrors of September 11, without being a polemic. Marvel at Ben Sliney, playing himself, who, at one moment, looks to a screen filled with literally thousands of little dots representing airbound planes and taking the leap to ground them…
The Proposition is a western from Australia about flies. The damned flies crawl over everything, sticking to the sweat on a man’s brow, his back, and tickle the lips and ears of every filthy, compromised man. This vision of hell was unjustly overlooked, it’s violence more intense and real than anything Mel Gibson has ever accomplished. With the great Ray Winstone in a performance that should not be soon forgotten (but has been forgotten already, for the most part)…
The Da Vinci Code is unquestionably the best comedy of the year, with the best line: “I’ve got to get to a library!”. With its seething albino monk (a performance as great as anything from Monty Python), snarling Frenchies, lengthy explanations of Jesus’s progeny, piles of riotous backstory, and Hanks as a long-haired professor, there’s no better comedy than this…
Drawing Restraint 9 is a pointless, shallow, yet hilarious film involving Vaseline sculpture and sake toasting whalers…
Water is a classical story of a young girl, widowed at age eight, who finds herself in an ashram, to live the rest of her life as a mourner. The ashram is something out of Dickens–poor, each character clinging to dreams, the most beautiful prostituted out to keep the ashram afloat (and to keep the head woman in her eats). Beautifully shot, acted with verve by all the women, Water is another film that is ignored–and if it were made in the U.S. would have been an Oscar contender…
Scoop is certainly one of Woody Allen’s lesser films, but don’t tell that to the audience I encountered–charmed by Scarlett Johansson and her luscious boobs (as Allen undoubtedly was) and by the old man’s Catskills shtick, Scoop was a blast, a film I hope never to see again, as the joy I encountered was lightning in a bottle, and will never be recaptured…
Cache is a small, quiet film, lacking a score, and seems, at times, static. But, good God, there’s no movie I’ve seen this year (or in my memory) that is so disturbing. About terrorism, about our place in the world, about the secrets we’re all guilty of hiding. I saw it in Saudi with a 12 year old who couldn’t keep his eyes off it–this is a kid with the usual 12 year old tastes, who’d been enjoying the new Pink Panther over and over until Cache came on–and had to leave at the one scene of extreme violence. Perfect for an American in Saudi, but nothing that helped me to sleep on a sleepless vacation…
Nothing is resolved in Richard Linklater’s cynical duo, A Scanner Darkly and Fast Food Nation, two nearly classic American films whose studio hadn’t a clue as to how to market them. Both movies vanished, lost now to the afterlife of DVD and, hopefully, the imaginations of filmgoers uninterested in palliatives for their spiritual and political questions. With Altman dead, will anyone recognize Linklater as the successor–and, often, superior–to that acclaimed filmmaker? He’s better with his actors, trusts his audience (which Altman never did), and doesn’t shy away from hard endings…
Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Guantanamo never found its audience, in part because it is a severely uneven film, at times a powerful indictment of conditions at Guantanamo (and the conditions) that brought poor souls to Guantanamo. But the scenes of the three men–the real people–who endured these years, is worth watching, their testimony and good manners reflecting their deep faith…
Army of Shadows, that existential French resistance noir masterpiece, finally hit U.S. shores after thirty some years of languishing in some French warehouse. Watch for the big, black cloud of nothingness that envelopes the protagonist, the meaninglessness that’s more acutely threatening than the Nazis themselves…
Little Miss Sunshine is a fun movie, uneven and cliched, but boasting one of the best ensembles this year. “You’re not speaking because of Friedrich Nietzsche?” asks Steve Carell, who plays the #1 Proust scholar in the United States is one gem; every scene with Alan Arkin and Abigail Breslin is also to be cherished…
The Descent dumps you into dripping caves with white faced ghoulies, a horror flick with just enough intelligence and economy to make it a midnight staple…
The Science of Sleep. Oh, beloved Science of Sleep. Do not see this film alone. Watch it locked in the arms of someone you love and want to make love to, as it provokes your laughter, strengthens your soul, riles up your loins, and deepens your faith in other people and in movies that make you feel alive. Michael Gondry loves you and wants to people the planet with children borne from the love that his movie has made…
Hollywoodland is a near-classic noir, filled with weirdos and shot in a sun-bleached land, but was upended by its weakness for backstory. However, in making the thing a real mystery, in which a man’s murder or suicide is not the point–the point is that he’s lost his soul–gives the film a subtle grace…
Dead Man’s Shoes is a small British film that never managed to get into theatres. It’s a B-Movie to be compared with Ulmer’s Detour: gritty, violent, and with its finger on the pulse of those lousy good-for-nothing little towns that exist here and in Britain…
Skid Row is the best film I’ve seen this year, part of Phil Harder’s showing of found footage that he’s collected and curated over the years, a handmade film of tremendous beauty, by the King of Skid Row, Johnny Rex. Mr. Rex filmed his charges, drunk, fighting, dancing, smiling and toasting the camera, all of this in glorious color and narrated by the King himself…
Flags of Our Fathers, the first part of Clint Eastwood’s two-part Iwo Jima series, is about what it really means to be a soldier, one of the very few films that can ever make that claim. It’s closing, with the boy soldiers swimming in the sea after a grueling battle, is as poignant as anything ever shot in a war movie…
Infamous got screwed. This wonderful and exciting picture was the second of the Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood films and far superior to the first. Toby Jones deserves the Oscar for being the wind-up toy that was Truman, but he’ll be lucky if he gets his paper nomination…
The Last King of Scotland gave us a rollicking first half and Forest Whitaker’s whacking take on Idi Amin–part Godfather, part Charlie Parker, pure evil and entertaining all the way…
For Your Consideration had a few dozen hilarious gags, gave us Parker Posey and Jane Lynch, kept the audience buckled over, but was strangely forgettable…
Jesus Christ, 13 Tzameti is the movie that every young filmmaker should study. Cheap black and white to create a haunting world of betrayal and distrust, the look of fear on the face of the protagonist as a gun is cocked to his head, a puff of smoke rising from a forehead, and a simple plot that will grind down your molars to stubs…
Jamestown: Life and Death of Peoples Temple is a powerful documentary, culling together some amazing footage and heartbreaking interviews, including an elderly woman, crying and mourning the loss of heaven. The film does not defend Jones, but nor does it damn his followers as kooks; rather, they are beautiful people seeking a better world…
Volver is certainly one of Almodovar’s lesser films, but one of his minor masterpieces would validate the career of a hundred filmmakers. A film of considerable beauty, referencing Hitchcock, Capra, and Mildred Pierce, Volver makes the bold suggestion that the melodrama of those films is not as important as the flutterings of a human heart…
When I’m damned to hell, these will be the films playing in the Beezlebub Cineplex, over and over with only diet Sprite and unbuttered popcorn:
Friends With Money–hateful, shallow film about shitty people.
Kinky Boots–boring, unsexy Full Monty rip-off.
The Notorious Bettie Page–I walked out of this dull, zombified flick that hadn’t a clue about its subject.
Down in the Valley–incomprehensible art-house, Oscar begging-flick with Ed Norton as cute Travis Bickle like character who is loved by those he shoots in the stomach.
Ask the Dust–a part of Robert Towne’s What The Fuck Was I Thinking series, a pointless adaptation of one of the best novels ever written about So. California. Starring a pair of hardbodies in Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, who play unattractive bums.
Mission: Impossible III and Superman Returns–To hell with the people who made these dull corporate time-wasters.
The Illusionist–decidedly unmagical film with Ed Norton trying again to get an Oscar nomination. Manages to make Paul Giamatti look awful.
Talladega Nights–Gotta have that NASCAR money, so this movie can’t cut to the bone, instead making its few funny jokes ramble on and on and on. Wastes its female comedians shamelessly.
Al Franken: God Spoke and An Inconvenient Truth–two lengthy political advertisements that took up space at the art-houses (space that could have been better used Dead Man’s Shoes or 13 Tzameti). Save this crap for the conventions, or PBS…
Factotum–Matt Dillon and Marisa Tomei as bums? Please…
World Trade Center–a real life Towering Inferno, only twice as dull.
Death of a President–Could have killed this president from utter boredom.
The Departed–marks the sad end to the Scorsese who used to take chances, used to cast small, decent actors in key roles (like, say, Ray Winstone over Jack Nicholson), and who used to know how to make his extravaganzas exciting.
Borat–Hateful, predicatble, and uncourageous film about how stupid certain people (frat boys, Southerners) can be. Sacha Baron Cohen seems like nothing more than an asshole.
Casino Royale–The best Bond in years–as crappy as the 70s Bonds, is a half an hour longer, and takes itself so much more seriously… which is something you should never do with James Fucking Bond.
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