J Caleb’s Best and Worst Movies of 2006

T.S. Eliot wrote that April was the cruelest month, but he was a poet rather than a film critic, and thus he never endured weeks of January releases.

Hollywood’s annual dumping ground, January is where the movies with no hope of winning awards or making summer blockbuster bucks are banished to. For the films, January is one step up from sitting on a studio shelf forever; for the film critics, it’s one step up from being in hell (which, incidentally, only plays movies which originally opened in January).

I think that may be why the last weeks of December and the first week of January is why you see so many top ten and best of the year lists from critics and commentators. It’s not just that they need something to fill up magazine, newspaper or website space while they blow off work for the holidays (though there’s some of that too), but rather that they’re stealing themselves for what January will bring them. Looking back at and remembering all of the great films that came out in the previous year gives them the strength they need to face another year.

So as we prepare for Codename: The Cleaner, Happily N’Ever After, Primeval, The Hitcher and Epic Movie, lets take the opportunity that this annual ritual provides to remind ourselves that for every Pink Panther and Big Momma’s House 2, there’s also a Clean.

In alphabetical order, here are my favorite movies from 2006:

Babel (read my review)
I was initially disappointed that Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga, the director/screenwriter team responsible for 21 Grams and Amores Perros, were sticking to their comfort zone, digging into a niche they’ve obviously grown comfortable in. But there’s no shame in doing what you do well, and here they do it as well as they ever have, if not better. Pulling back, the pair present us with a larger, more diverse cast from a larger, more diverse geographical base, suffering through cataclysmic personal melodramas, each of which tie into and feed one another, and all dealing with human beings’ inability to communicate with one another, even when we do speak the same language.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (read my review)
On the subject of best of’s, Sacha Baron Cohen’s feature length extrapolation of his TV sketch show’s most inspired character wins hands down in the “best title of the year” category. My first time through, I was rather resistant to a lot of the comedy—anti-semitism in the service of anti-anti-semitism is still anti-semitism, and there is a real mean-spiritedness to some of the jokes, due in part to the fact that Cohen is a raging forest fire focusing on so many little straw men. But the more I thought about B:CLAMBGNK, the more meaning I found in it’s jackassery, and honestly, how many dumb comedies demand further thought and reevaluation, yielding rewards as you strip back elements of it? It’s not just a big dumb comedy with aspirations of a smart comedy, it’s a brilliant satire that comes in the form of a big dumb comedy with aspirations of a smart comedy. Damn, Borat just blew my mind—again .

Brick
Writer/director Rian Johnson’s debut film is on the surface a simple matter of genre cutting-and-pasting, taking the plot, character types and, most dizzyingly, the dialogue and slang of old detective fiction and crime noir films and grafting them onto the setting of your typical teen movie. But despite the deceptively simple inspiration, Johnson works a subtle alchemy, and the result is not unlike a Resse’s Peanut Butter Cup—so much more than the sum of its obvious parts. Consistently deadpan hilarious, Johnson’s cast’s rat-a-tat-tat delivery of anachronistic dialogue might just as well be the words of a magic spell, inducing a bizarre enchantment over the viewer and transporting us to a world we’ve never really been to before.

Children of Men
Director Alfonso Cuarón and a small battalion of screenwriters (including Cuarón himself) adapt P.D. James’ science fiction (in the truest sense of the word) novel into a bleak portrait of the end of humanity in the near future. It’s a future, and a type of apocalypse, that doesn’t look all that different from the world today, just a bit worse. That’s the blunt beauty of the world-building and speculative storytelling they do here, taking today and adding time to it to come up with tomorrow. It’s a beautifully designed and lensed film, including several sequences (particularly near the climax) that feel automatically like classic scenes. It’s everything that a film should be and one I expect you’ll be hearing quite a bit more about in the next few months.

The Departed (read my review)
If you’re going to steal, at least make sure you steal from the best—and fess up. That’s what Martin Scorcese did with this adaptation and Americanization of Hong Kong crime film Infernal Affairs, which played with the undercover cop motif by adding a dark double to the overly-familiar character type, an undercover criminal posing as a cop. Brilliant. This is very much an actor’s film, with the bulk of the cast played by instantly recognizable famous faces (many of whom are giving some of their very best performances here). But though it wears it’s artificiality on it’s sleeve, it’s still a thoroughly engaging bit of suspense. Still not sure how I feel about that last image, however.

Pan’s Labyrinth
If I had to narrow this list down to just one movie, it would probably be a toss up between Shortbus and Guillermo del Toro’s powerful war-time fantasy. Though he’s best known for his mainstream horror/comic book movies like Hellboy and Blade II, del Toro’s best film was 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone, which set a gothic ghost story in an orphanage at the end of the Spanish civil war. This film uses similar subject matter and techniques, but expands them all to epic, practically operatic levels. Pan’s Labyrinth is packed with sharp visuals, and features strong doses of horror, drama, humor, action, and special effects (in other words, pretty much everything anyone goes to the movies to see), but what makes it a really great film instead of merely a great one is its usage of fantasy—while it’s child heroine escapes periodically into a dark fantasy world (One that’s more Labyrinth than Narnia), del Toro doesn’t use film fantasy as mere escapism or lazy political parallelism, but to address the real world head on.

The Prestige (read my review)
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Christopher Preist’s novel about two warring illusionists in turn-of-the-(last) century London is constructed like an elaborate trick of stage magic. Piling narrative levels upon narrative levels until the story shines with the many facets of a kaleidoscope, Nolan dazzles us with a bravura bit of pop filmmaking. Some of the tricks are actually rather easy to spot before their secrets are reveled to us, but then, that’s part of the film’s fun—Nolan treats his audience members as fellow “imagineers,” daring us to find his tells and figure out how he pulls off the impossible over and over.

Shortbus (read my review)
Sex-positive paradise proprieter Justin Bond encourages Sook-Yin Lee to look around NYC club Shortbus with the words, “And remember: Voyeurism is participation.” Thus viewers are invited to join the orgasmic fun that is director John Cameron Mithcell’s party of a film. Not that it’s all sunshine and rainbows on your genitals, of course. There’s an orgy of melodramatic plots hanging like a spider web between the various characters, but by film’s end most of them are happily resolved, and Shortbus ends with such a triumphant note that the whole experience seems downright transcendental. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, Short Bus is pretty much a perfect film.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
The third film in Chan-wook Park’s so-called “Revenge Trilogy” lacks the anvil-dropped-from-great-height impact of Old Boy, as well as imagery to match the highlights of that head-cracking flick, but Lady Vengeance is an incredibly beautiful film, one mixing horror and humor to come up with a truly affecting look at revenge in general (and revenge movies in particular), daring us to look at how hard vengeance is on the person committing it, and what role we play simply by sitting in a theater watching it being exacted on fictional characters.

Thank You For Smoking
Christopher Buckley’s novel provided Aaron Eckhart with the role of his career in Nick Naylor, the conflicted spokesman for the tobacco industry whose job—nay, his purpose in life—is to lie to people and trick them into slowly killing themselves. All while trying to be a good father. Nobody gets him, except for the spokespeople for the gun industry and the alcohol industry, with whom he regularly kibitzes. Director Jason Reitman turns out a razor sharp satire that would probably feel a few years too late, what with the tobacco industry flailing as it is, if political spokespeople haven’t filled the void left by the likes of the real-life Naylors.

And because I’d hate to let 2006 turn into 2007 without kicking these movies one last time, here are the Worst Movies I Saw in 2006. Like the list above, this one can hardly be considered definitive, for the simple fact that I did not see every single movie that was released in 2006 and, in the case of a lot of those which seemed like strong contenders for this list, I steered clear quite intentionally.

So while it’s possible that the Wayans brothers’ Little Man or Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties were actually all around worse movies than the five soul-crushing films listed below, I didn’t see them, so I can’t say.

Apocalypto (read my review)
The week Mel Gibson’s latest torture epic was released, I read a lot of articles talking about the Oscar buzz surrounding this movie and, having just seen it, I was shocked. If this thing even gets nominated for an Oscar, I think I may sell all my possessions and move to Los Angeles, spending the rest of my days tracking down the members of the Academy and punching them in the face.

Gibson’s movie certainly has its pleasures, bringing to life an incredible setting, but Gibson is so intent on filming violence and gore that it undoes every story he tries telling, this one moreso than even Passion of the Christ. I laughed through this film pretty much start to finish, right up until The Climax, where that really stupid thing happens (a few centuries earlier than it really did, of course, or else these “lost” Mayan-ish people wouldn’t be lost, now would they?). Gibson could have had a herd of centaurs or a fleet of flying saucers come onto the screen at that point and it wouldn’t have been any sillier.

Hoodwinked
This repulsive, rightly ignored film did exactly one thing right—it actually cast a few actors with excellent, distinctive voices to provide voice to the horribly designed, horribly animated computer-generated creatures that star in this Little Red Riding Hood re-telling. But only a few (Andy Dick, Patrick Warburton). All the money wasted on hiring the likes of Anne Hathaway, Glenn Close, Jim Belushi and Anthony Anderson to badly voice their characters probably would have been better spent on hiring someone who knows the first thing about character design, animation, script-writing or filmmaking. In a year full of shitty computer animation, Hoodwinked managed to distinguish itself by being the shittiest by far.

Lady in the Water (my review)
I’m no psychologist, but not long into this film—about the time when the narf named Story started explaining the bit about the scrunts—I realized that M. Night Shyamalan isn’t just a one-hit wonder running on fumes, he’s totally, completely bat-shit insane.

Ultraviolet
How could a movie starring Amazonian beauty Milla Jovalich as a sword-wielding vampire fighting evil pharmacists in the future not be at least a little bit fun to watch? You could ask writer/director Kurt Wimmer, although I doubt he’d be able to answer—he couldn’t have made a movie this bad if he was actually trying to suck. Even by the exceptionally low standards of a bad action movie or a bad sci-fi movie, this movie seems terrible.

Underworld: Evolution
Not a good year for movies beginning with the letter “U” was it? Kate Beckinsale returns to the dull, exposition-filled world of 2003’s Underworld, this time for an even more complicated story involving twice the exposition, twice the bullshit fantasy politics and history and half of the excitement. On the plus side, Beckinsale still looks good in leather, and, um, Jesus, that’s all there is on the plus side, isn’t there?