Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

2006 Wraps Up ...

I like movies. Sometimes I think that makes me a bad cricket. A lot of prose I've read lately from reviewers, especially within year-end screeds, has a cruel, even Messianic whiff that seems to deny the potential of any pleasure to be gotten, however fleeting, from the essential, dream-like character of the shadow play of movies. There seem to be fewer thugs behind the camera.

So: a top 20, plus a documentary top 10, and then some more. I didn't see as many movies in 2006 as most of the stalwarts on the annual international film festival death march, but there were many moments that reminded me: I like movies. (Some wanna-sees are at the very end.)

1. Children of Men. With a vigorous, headlong visual style and an eagerness to dispense with explication, Alfonso Cuarón's canny present-tense futurism, a thriller set in the London of twenty years from now, is also about the present moment, dispenses with superficial science-fiction trappings to weave an enthralling fable about the issues of immigration presently facing both First and Third World nations.

2. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Cristi Puiu's epic of disintegration is also deceptively low-key shaggy-dogginess that earns the now-disfavored encomium of "humanist." The title tells it: a depressed, often-drunk old man is ferried around a Bucharest night in a quest for treatment. Many of the other healthcare workers are impatient women, at first resembling a flight of noble, curative female angels, but exhaustion and a refusal to be patronized leads them all to forget their role. The sudden ending is wondrous and mysterious: the word "handsome" has seldom been as sweet and sincere-sounding.

3. United 93. Paul Greengrass' approach is mostly without big-picture posturing, instead working with small strokes of telling detail and framing and cutting with the same visceral authority demonstrated in the intimate kinetics of his first two features, Bloody Sunday and The Bourne Identity. The widescreen compositions show rare, quiet intelligence, which benefit foreordained dramatic events in a story like this. For instance, as the hijackers prepare to board, there is a simple swish pan across their faces as they walk through the Newark airport, and for a split-second, the camera holds on an advertisement in the corridor: a pair of smiling women, cleavage exposed; the libidinous excess of a culture these men supposedly disdained. What is the larger picture? Vast systems fail. Art attempts to reconstitute failings and start conversation.

4. Climates. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose Distant is a marvel, is funnier, more emotional, more intimate, and even more visionary in his high-definition dissection of a failing marriage between a middle-aged man and his younger wife (played by Ceylan and his wife). In an altogether different fashion, Ceylan's use of HD is as groundbreaking as Michael Mann's.

5. Little Children. Todd Field's superb, tonally impudent Little Children juggles comedy, satire and earnest drama, exploring the effects of the return to a sunny suburb of a convicted sex offender who's taken for a child molester. By story's end, there's a question whether we've seen even a single grown-up taking their life into their own hands.

6. Pan's Labyrinth. Guillermo del Toro: a stirring fabulist.

7. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Verrrrry nize.

8. The Proposition. John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave's Western murder ballad is a beautifully paced gem, temperate of insufferable things. Cain and Abel never had it so bloody bad.

9. Overlord. A narrative that sees forest and trees, Stuart Cooper's great, strange film, never released in its original cut in the U.S., asks, does the man dream the machine or the machine dream the man? Epic, stoic, willfully peculiar, Overlord is a hybrid of fiction and fact, of the Futurist and the post-modern, tracking the preparations of one supremely ordinary 20-year-old soldier to become part of Operation Overlord, or D-Day. Novel in its time, Cooper's selection of archival footage to determine the fictional portions is inspired.

10. The Departed. "Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe fuck yourself."

11. Army of Shadows. Rialto and Criterion are always to be thanked for bringing restored editions of Jean-Pierre Melville's economic, assured masterpieces to the States. This one's strange, cool, and semi-autobiographical.

12. Day Night Day Night. Julia Loktev pares both image and sound to spare particulars in an effective, jolting witness to the actions of a potential suicide bomber, a tiny, obliging young woman of indeterminate ethnicity who's about to walk into the center of a U.S. city.

13. Fateless. Lajos Koltai effectively refracts the memory of memory pieces about the Holocaust.

14. Marie Antoinette. There is a moment in Sofia Coppola's "New Romantic" musical when a torch-bearing mob has surrounded Versailles and Marie tentatively approaches, emerging from darkness to watch them wide-eyed. There is a hush. She curtsies quietly, deeply. Then the crowd begins to boo again. It's hard not to be reminded of the death of Coppola's character as Michael Corleone's daughter at the opera that ends the ill-fated Godfather III. The magnificent shot at the very end of the picture that counts as a true, very knowing coup de theatre. Then again, the pictures' palette is drawn from pastel macaroons found in Paris' Laduree bakery.

15. The Dead Girl. Fury, Furies. Karen Moncrieff's spare, cutting ensemble drama etches the changes in half-a-dozen women's lives after a woman's body is discovered in a field, and there is blunt power and a pitiless stare to her filmmaking. Shards of female fears and the effects of loss are as brutal as anything in the jungles of Apocalypto, and Brittany Murphy, Toni Collette, Marcia Gay Harden and especially, Mary Beth Hurt, are starkly sensational in their very different roles.

16. Fast Food Nation. "There's a reason it costs ninety-nine cents." The echoes of Blood of Beasts. The exit of Greg Kinnear's character from the Fairfield Inn, the sliding doors and empty vestibule, like the last shot of The Searchers crossed with the last shot of L'argent.

17. Three Times. The composure of the first romance; the cacophony and depicted narcissism of the third. Hou Hsiao-hsien's other U. S. release in 2006, Café Lumiere, has its pleasures as well.

18. Good Shepherd. Screenwriter Eric Roth says there's a four-hour version drawn from his brilliant roman-a-clef of American clandestine skullduggery; DeNiro's patience in the tale of the shaping of a nefarious watcher is quite fine.

19. Brothers of the Head. Narcotic beauty, gorgeous apocrypha, and pastiche post-punk penned by Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks.

20. Déjà vu. Tony Scott's Vertigo. Ghost meets CSI meets 9/11 survivor grief in post-Katrina New Orleans in a jaw-dropper in a good way, and, no! Not because you've seen it before, but because Scott and his screenwriters have the daring and valor to go gonzo on the story's most exotic turns. Slickness a few microns shy of risible Michael Mann-erisms, in love with terms of art like "wormholes" and "Einstein-Rosen bridges," this strange yet assured movie delves into String Theory, parallel universes and fearsomely powerful surveillance that uses terabytes of tech so complex that it can short the electrical grid (and is credited for the Northeast blackout of several winters ago). Scott's visual style is cleaner than in the manic Domino, yet the work is still bold and painterly. The layers-upon-layers of the glimpses backwards into time, including a wall screen with seventy-two tiles of surveillance imagery, are dense with information yet a gorgeous visualization of the tangled web we've woven when we practice to observe.

NONFICTION

Deliver Us From Evil, Amy Berg. Shattering: clergy abuse personalized, its effects glimpsed, its wee Irish perpetrator unrepentant.

When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee. We lost a city. Me, you, the USA. Lee's fire after Katrina is righteous.

Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot), Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Fast food planet.

I Like Killing Flies, Matt Mahurin. An accomplished visual artist uses the crudest of video to explore the largest of characters: New York restaurateur Kenny Shopsin in his kitchen.

Jesus Camp, Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady. Child abuse in the form of impassioned, militaristic indoctrination. Sorrowful, horrifying.

51 Birch Street, Doug Block. Beneath the footage, between the sheets: family secrets are sometimes… inconvenient.

An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim. Al Gore and his passions, without the filter of media determined to hate, belittle and mock him, as in the 2000 election. Plus love to the polar bears.

Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple. Stanley Nelson's unforgettable, even magisterial doc about the 1978 Guyana mass suicide of over 900 followers of the Rev. Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple captures both the utopianism and eventual madness of the life and death of Jones and his followers.

Shut Up & Sing, Barbara Kopple, Cecilia Peck. Natalie Maines: big mouth; patriot.

Iraq docs: The fiery, infuriating snapshot of government disdain toward returning veterans in The Ground Truth (Patricia Foulkrod); the poetic contemplation of Iraq in Fragments (James Longley); the postcards from the edge of The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton).

Plus: American Hardcore; Ballets Russes; Crossing the Bridge: The Sounds of Istanbul; The Devil's Miner; Heart of the Game; Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man; Our Brand is Crisis; Sketches of Frank Gehry; Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.

THE REST OF THE BEST

Art School Confidential. Jim Broadbent's bathrobe and his character's key query about potential success in the field called "Art": "What kind of c-sucker are you?"

Babel. The implacable, surrealist swoon of the Japanese passages.

Battle in Heaven. Carlos Reygada: the fourth hombre left out of most considerations the international success of Mexican directors in 2006. Qué provocador!

Casino Royale. Craig. Daniel Craig.

Catch a Fire. Philip Noyce's crisp, crackerjack filmmaking was overlooked by reviewers and audiences not cottoning to the theme, but the questions of what constitutes a terrorist, torture by feigned drowning, and "What will your children say about you?" are painfully topical, even timeless.

Cavite. Larry Cohen goes Manila; creative tension for the price of two plane tickets between San Diego and the Philippines.

Clean. A word suited also to describe the cutting style in any film by Olivier Assayas.

Clerks II. That last scene is sentimental without a stripe of idealization and a lovely coda.

Dead Man's Shoes. Shane Meadows, working it out, kicking and screaming, and getting better with every cracked enterprise.

The Devil Wears Prada. The onset of disenchantment of the privileged twentysomething gamine in Manhattan is neatly sketched, alongside a purr-ific Meryl Streep.

District B-13. Feet first.

Don't Come Knocking. Franz Lustig's non-digitally enhanced cinematography is an eyeful.

Dreamgirls. The renaissance of the movie musical considered as a downhill speed chase.

Edmond. Scabrous horror, and the chance of contentment, hurled about in William H. Macy's funny-looking head.

Factotum. Matt Dillon, unplugged. And a great sustained take of two alcoholics awaking in the same bed to different spins.

Family Law. Daniel Burman's brisk, cosmopolitan comedy-dramas are personal, and also an interesting slice of the Buenos Aires middle class.

The Fountain. Made with the kind of marvelous hubris that produces masterpieces, or, failing that, a febrile folly like The Fountain.

4. Ilya Khrjanovsky remembers that an adjective often applied to Russian filmmakers is "crazy." Who'd've imagined such rowdy putrefaction?

Friends With Money. Space and light: a recognizable but not entirely satirized Westside.

Half Nelson. Ryan Gosling.

Happy Feet. Animated animals not to hate, plus Prince, eco-awareness and a fine sugar-rush on IMAX.

Hollywoodland. Ben Affleck's lack of vanity getting killed in three different scenarios while overweight and naked; Diane Lane, brittle and warm at once; Allen Coulter's attention to sound design.

I Am A Sex Addict. Caveh Zahedi offers a splendid example of the way things can be explored in essay films to come, documentary or semi-fiction, or, or… whatever he's doing now.

Idiocracy. Fox at its Fox-est and dumped-est: Mike Judge's scathing, scatological satire of contemporary culture a couple hundred years down the line deserved better.

In Between Days. Among the virtues of So Yong Kim's portrait of the sexual and emotional frustrations of a teenaged Korean-Canadian girl, the portrait of a figure lost in the shadow and chill and reflective surfaces of Toronto in winter.

La Mustache. An exquisitely executed comic anecdote about how we see others and ourselves.

Last King of Scotland. Well, there is Forest Whitaker…

Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of Our Fathers. Clint: good. Sometimes very good.

Little Miss Sunshine. Funny, with exemplary moments of timing, plus Dayton and Faris know how to dress a set with understatement, and they also recognize another facet of Toni Colette's beauty.

Miami Vice. "Michael Mann exploits the HD process mostly for a painterly scumble of vivid digital grain in the hardly illuminated night, but in simple summary, Miami Vice is Mann's foreseeable triangulation of Friedrich Nietzsche, linen-edge designers like Ozwald Boateng and distinguished painters of geometric abstraction, like the great Richard Diebenkorn."

Notes on a Scandal. Hot and cold and sour and acidic; a perfectly ripened and thrown tomato.

Over the Hedge "Play!?"

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Cold visual brilliance at its best moments.

Prairie Home Companion. "One long movie" comes to an end, or in Altman's words, "What is an ending? There's no such thing. Death is the only ending."

The Prestige. Top hats, kitty cats and David "Tesla" Bowie.

Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs). At 84, Alain Resnais turns out another civil, crisp comedy of underplayed emotion drawn from an Alan Ayckbourn play.

The Queen. Screenwriter Peter Morgan's quiet sense of comedy is underplayed further by Stephen Frears and Helen Mirren knows just what to do.

Requiem. Sandra Huller's performance as a troubled young woman and exorcism victim is grounded yet tremulous.

The Science of Sleep. Charlotte Gainsbourg when she pauses to think. Michel Gondry when he plays with yarn and string.

Shortbus. Bittersweet pansexual utopianism.

Snakes on a Plane. Shiny bunkum and dumb fun.

Stranger than Fiction. On one hand, there's the post-Groundhog Day/Truman Show fun of Charlie Kaufman-peer Zach Helm's script, but also Marc Forster's sense of design, filigreeing the texture of Chicago streets, buildings, cupcake bakeries and apartments as few directors recently have, and even proudly affixes at the tail-end of the credits, proud words indeed: "Shot entirely on location in Chicago, Illinois." Forster actually sees a city and improves on its small glistens in dozens of imaginative ways.

Syndromes and a Century. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's experimental double take of a narrative is dryly funny and strangely satisfying.

Talladega Nights: the Legend of Ricky Bobby. "You taste like America."

Thank You For Smoking. And for the bitter aftertaste.

Tideland. Terry Gilliam: given his head, which he shares with a decapitated doll. A brackish folly and an impassioned trainwreck.

Time to Leave. François Ozon's compact story of the last days of a young, self-involved narcissist sears at moments.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. For the feigned knowledge of the films of Fassbinder in a potential hook-up.

V for Vendetta. Hermetic.

Venus. Peter O'Toole.

Volver. Almodovar in all his auteurist finery.

World Trade Center. A screaming comes across the sky.

SMALL FLAVORS: Colma: The Musical; Dance Party; Interkosmos; Mutual Appreciation; Old Joy; Young American Bodies.

DIDN'T GET IT: L'enfant; The Illusionist; Flushed Away; Days of Glory; Brick.

EAGER TO SEE: Inland Empire (a necessary second go); Black Book; The Lives of Others; Brand Upon the Brain!; Inside Man; Gabrielle; Taxidermia; Red Road; La morte rouge (Victor Erice); Two by Jia Zhangke, Still Life and Dong; The Wind that Shakes the Barley; Born and Bred; 49 UP; God Grew Tired of Us; Lights in the Dusk; Colossal Youth; This Is England; The Host; Regular Lovers; Unconditional Love (Chris Petit); Mary; Strip Search; Southland Tales; Zidane: A Portrait of the 21st Century.

January 5, 2007

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