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December 27, 2006

37 Great Films of 2006

Every publication that I write for has its own restriction on the rules. The standard one is that there be only ten on the list, an arbitrary number based on the decimal system, which is based on the fact that we have ten fingers. Then there's all this stuff about where they opened, and for how long. The "cool" critic pick for number one this year seems to be Melville's ARMY OF SHADOWS, which I have not seen, but I think it's stretching the rules a bit to say that the best movie of 2006 is one that came out overseas long before I was born. I can be a stickler for such things within a certain window -- I may have seen such movies as Kim Ki-duk's TIME and the Hungarian animated film THE DISTRICT this year at festivals, but since both are likely to be formally released next year, I prefer to make them contenders for next year's list. But then you have something like PAPRIKA, which did one unheralded week in Los Angeles in advance of an April release next year. It may be arbitrary of me here, but I'm considering it a 2006 movie. It's up for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and has no chance in hell.

Other great movies from this year that I expect may be on future lists include WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY, THE LOST, DOA: DEAD OR ALIVE, and BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON.

And now to the list. Kenneth Turan in the LA Times used the occasion of Clint Eastwood's WWII double-header to make his a list of double-features. He did not, however, credit this technique to the man who beat him out for a Press Club award in 2000, that being Gregory Weinkauf, who consistently rates the best of the year in terms of double features.

I'm going to borrow the technique because duality really stood out to me in many instances this year, but at least I give due credit. This is not a list of every single movie I liked, nor is it technically "in order," since the doubleheader nature usually invoilves me liking one of the pair more than the other. My top tens you'll see elsewhere will be different, adhering to the various requirements.

1. UNITED 93/A LION IN THE HOUSE. You might not want to actually make this a double rental night, because first of all A LION IN THE HOUSE is around four hours long, and also both movies will emotionally wreck you. The latter is a documentary, and the former a painstakingly staged re-creation; both punch a big gaping hole through the conventional Hollywood notions on the subjects, those being hijacking and cancer. The theme of both could be summed up as "No-one really dies nobly." We all go kicking and screaming, scared and vulnerable, as flawed and as human as we ever were. Perhaps the best one can hope for is to be memorialized in a movie that will make others think.

2. SUPERMAN RETURNS/ROCKY BALBOA. Childhood heroes of the '70s and '80s return, a little worn around the edges, but still ready to be our buddies in times of need. In the case of Rocky, we get the real guy back; in the case of Supes, the best facsimile money can buy. The cynics dismissed both, but I'm too hardwired to love these guys and besides, to embrace Superman and Rocky is inherently to renounce cynicism. I'm all for dark and tortured souls, but every once in a while it's nice to believe in a hero who'd be your best friend too. Bring on the Flash Gordon remake, and be sure to include Queen music.

3. CHILDREN OF MEN/FREE ZONE. One reminded us of the virtue of the long tracking shot; the other, of how a story could be told almost entirely via close-ups inside a moving vehicle (including a nearly ten minute opening closeup shot of Natalie Portman crying till makeup runs down her face). Both tell of worlds torn apart, but one is sci-fi and the other only feels like it. Both have journeys to "free" zones, but the outcomes are radically different, even as they point to similar themes. And neither is didactic in taking sides, though both long for hope in a landscape of hopelessness.

4. TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY/STRANGER THAN FICTION. How do you make a film of an unfilmable book? Make it about the attempt to do the impossible. A postmodern movie about a novel that was postmodern before the term existed, and a postmodern tale about the inner lives of characters affected by their author's writer's block, both of which heartily amuse with their existentialism. Marc Forster, along with Darren Aronofsky who we'll get to later, gets my award for Most Improved Director of 2006: every one of his films is substantially better than the last. Oh, and since it's in vogue to cite Charlie Kaufman, let me be clear -- both of these movies own Charlie Kaufman's arse. BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND are indeed masterpieces, but HUMAN NATURE and ADAPTATION? Not so much. If TRISTRAM SHANDY and ADAPTATION fighted, Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan would handily win.

5. MAD COWGIRL/SORRY HATERS. See what digital video plus one fearless actress can do. Jeff Stanzler's meditation on terrorism and paranoia took advantage of the mobility and intimacy of the medium to let us into the world of a very disturbed Robin Wright Penn, while Greg Hatanaka's MAD COWGIRL...well, look, I hardly need to write anything more about that, do I? Obviously I'm hugely biased, but arbitraily leaving it off the list because of my involvement doesn't seem right either.

6. SAW III/SILENT HILL. In the year of studios not screening stuff, two of the movies not shown proved to be far more creative than the rest. Both were horror movies that depended as much on atmosphere as anything else, with stories that were thought through quite carefully, so much so that many were confused. In subtle ways, both also speak to very real fears...SILENT HILL to the fear of fundamentalism and nuclear terror, and SAW III to the notion that torture and revenge are not things we can separate ourselves from or always blame on the villain. If Anthony Hopkins could get an Oscar for Hannibal Lecter, Tobin Bell more than deserves one for his performance as Jigsaw. I'm dead serious. Pyramid Head from Silent Hill just deserves an action figure.

7. CRANK/ A SCANNER DARKLY. Two drug movies that try to actually get you into the high itself. The genius of CRANK is that, even though it’s an action movie about adrenaline, it doesn’t just do the ADD/Michael Bay thing, but duplicates everything about a stimulant high including, the weird slo-mo lows that you start to feel around 5 a.m. SCANNER, meanwhile, duplicates hallucinogen highs via rotoscoped animation, and finally delivers a Richard Linklater movie where the endless philosophizing makes sense within the story – druggies do that all the damn time. Keanu Reeves has never been more, uh, animated. As for Jason Statham in CRANK…the naked standing-up bike ride, and the public doggystyle Amy Smart adrenaline-fuck in front of an audience while talking on the cell phone at the same time, well…surely no commentary necessary?

8. JACKASS NUMBER TWO/BORAT. I don’t feel that either has a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but the nude wrestling in BORAT and just about every other scene in JACKASS made me laugh harder than anything else on the big screen this year. I don’t need any other justification to have them on my list.

9. PAPRIKA/AMERICAN DREAMZ. This may well be the biggest stretch I make on this list, but hey; both involve dreams, and feature unlikely romances. PAPRIKA is one I don’t think anybody really saw but me, yet it convinced me that animator Satoshi Kon is consistently one of the best directors working today. The story, in brief, involves an attractive but repressed scientist and her unbound id/avatar, Paprika, who can enter other people’s dreams via a new technology, one that has also fallen into evil hands. AMERICAN DREAMZ was unfairly criticized for what it wasn’t (a razor-sharp critique of George Bush) without being appreciated for what it was – the odd coupling of the admitted asshole Simon Cowell character played by Hugh Grant, and the impossibly shallow, unfeeling Kelly Clarkson-esque social climber played by Mandy Moore was unexpectedly real and even strangely touching. As a commentary on the bizarre quest for shallowness that is reality TV, it worked; yet managed to create likable characters nonetheless. Revisiting it recently, I liked it even more than I did the first time. PAPRIKA had one of the coolest soundtracks ever, but I think DREAMZ needed to be a bit more absurd in its parodies, though “Mommy, Don’t Drink Me to Bed Tonight” is a standout.

10. LADY VENGEANCE/CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. You can tell just by looking that Park Chanwook and Zhang Yimou have carefully considered every single composition, right down to the color and shape of each individual object onscreen. This year, both used that meticulousness to convey the intricate revenge schemes of a woman scorned. While I still think HERO and OLDBOY are better movies, those are high standards, and the fact that both directors managed to reach close to the same heights again is good news for filmgoers.

That’s ten double-features, but why stop there?

11. THE FOUNTAIN/PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER. Darren Aronofsky’s first movie PI was so bad I never would have guessed he’d make something I unabashedly love. Tom Tykwer’s first U.S. release (but not his first movie) was RUN LOLA RUN, one I loved a lot that he followed with several tedious, overlong meditations on silence or whatever; I doubted if he would ever make another one I loved. Both struck back with movies about attempting to capture the essence of something transient – a brief life, the scent of a woman – and both protagonists ultimately realize that there is no joy to be had in artificially capturing that which nature has chosen to take away.

12. CLERKS II/VENUS. I had become so disillusioned with Kevin Smith over the years that I began to wonder whether my love of his earlier films had all been some kind of immature delusion, but then I saw this and he won me back, which was no small feat. Smith’s gift is understanding people like himself, and conveying that onscreen – his gift is NOT high-concept fantasy-comedies like DOGMA. Revisiting his original slacker “heroes” ten years later, he finds them still “stuck in second gear” (the phrase is way more relevant here than it was on the “Friends” theme song, so I’m appropriating it), contemplating what seems to be an ever decreasing list of options. I’d be happy if Smith makes a new CLERKS movie every ten years, and if he ever gets to part 6 it might look a whole lot like VENUS, with Peter O’Toole and Leslie Phillips as aging bachelors who hang out at the coffee shop talking shit and complaining about failing health problems.

13. THE QUEEN/FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. I may be a little more susceptible to the charms of THE QUEEN than most; when you grow up around the British Isles, you get the royals on TV a whole lot, and seeing James Cromwell as Prince Philip is just hilarious. But the real hook with both these movies, and one that resonates in the era of “reality” celebrities, is the changing nature of heroism, with the old guard who favored stoicism and silence versus the new celebrity whose every flaw is tabloid fodder. Should the Queen/American soldier be seen as a larger than life icon, or are both more heroic if they reveal their vulnerabilities? Both movies argue for the latter, but I’m not sure it’s always the right answer.

14. WATER/THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS. Two controversial films about young children in hellish situations; one inflammatory because it told an unpleasant truth, and the other because it didn’t at all. Deepa Mehta tells of a child bride widowed and thrown into a religious sanctuary for the discarded; Asia Argento of a boy born to a terminal fuck-up who insists on remaining his legal guardian despite her obvious inability to parent. Whether the stories are 100% true is a red herring of sorts – neither is a documentary, after all. But both serve as testaments to the resiliency of youth, and indictments of adults without the imagination to see beyond long-held boundaries, social and emotional. They make it look easy, but just check out Terry Gilliam’s TIDELAND to prove it ain’t.

15. SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS/BRICK. A documentary about murderers learning drama, and a detective story about teens playing 1930s gumshoes. Both deal in the power of words, and use artifice to get to deeper issues.

16. TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY/PAN’S LABYRINTH. Jack Black and Kyle Gass reconstruct some of their greatest hits, and Guillermo del Toro does likewise. Both movies are dominated by giant horned demons – Doug Jones as a mystical faun who assigns life-threatening tasks to a young girl with a literal fascist of a stepfather; and Dave Grohl as Satan, pissed as hell that his tooth has been made into a guitar pick and ready to challenge anyone in possession of his property to a rock-off.

17. RENAISSANCE/ULTRAVIOLET. Two near-cartoons that have significant flaws and yet remain hypnotically beautiful and immersive. RENAISSANCE bore the scars of dubbing, yet even in the original French, the voice cast weren’t the same as the actors who were actually motion captured for the black-and-white stylized animation. In the U.S. dub, the voices sounded particularly disconnected from the action onscreen, which didn’t help the already convoluted storyline…but as I said at the time, the unique and immersive style of the thing is enough of a hook to induce repeat viewings. I’m not sure ULTRAVIOLET even has anything resembling a plot, but watching Milla Jovovich ballet-fu her way through a Tron-meets-fashion-runway futurescape on the screen at the Cinerama Dome was one of my favorite viewing experiences of the year.

18. THANK YOU FOR SMOKING/THE PROPOSITION/PERVERT! Okay, I’m stumped here. There isn’t any connection between these three, save that they’re very good at what they do. A solid social satire, a bloody Aussie western, and a Russ Meyer tribute featuring a homicidal claymation penis. You should watch them all.

Posted by LYT at December 27, 2006 1:48 PM [Message Board]

Comments

Posted by: David N. Scott at December 27, 2006 2:10 PM

Posted by: Julie Scott at December 28, 2006 4:07 PM

Posted by: lemming at January 4, 2007 5:24 AM

Posted by: LYT at January 4, 2007 12:40 PM

Posted by: lemming at January 5, 2007 3:20 AM

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