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2006, The Year in FilmJan 28 '07 (Updated Feb 09 '07) Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line A very good year. James Bond made a triumphant return to his literary roots and re-booted a franchise that had been slicked up nearly beyond grasp. A British comedian with a small cult following on an HBO variety show made a major comic breakthrough that had us gasping at his shocking feats of societal satire. Another Brit, screenwriter Peter Morgan dropped our jaws by giving us the illusion of being directly inside the lives of two of modern history's most inscrutable - and opposite - personalities, aided by powerful actors and directors at the top of their games. Martin Scorsese, one of the American cinematic legends of the 1970s generation, made his most popular success ever, an adrenaline-pumping film with a spectacular all-star cast. Sundance, after years of being in a slump, discovered THREE worthy new voices. Internationally, filmmakers from the Hispanic diaspora were still having the most impact on us – and Spanish actress Penelope Cruz unexpectedly revealed herself to have the potential to be the earthiest and most resourceful actress since Anna Magnani. Yet with all these, and other, superb accomplishments, the one indomitable reality at year’s end is that the United States is at war. The bleak mess that is Iraq fills our ears and eyes daily with freshly sad and morally bewildering news, scabbing our souls with what feels hopeless and irresolvable. The year’s two very finest movies addressed what we are experiencing in different yet equally shattering ways. Irish filmmaker Paul Greengrass’s United 93 captured the shock of being dragged out of our bubble of American normalcy in a galvanizing and astonishingly sober way, and 76-year-old Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima went back in time to a different war to vividly demonstrate a sparse lesson rarely, if ever, taught well – sadness and moral bewilderment are shared equally on both sides of the fence. United 93 grossed only $33 million at the domestic box office, and was thrashed by some members of the press for coming out “too soon” after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. (Meanwhile, The Deer Hunter and Coming Home were released in 1978 – about 5 years after the Vietnam war ended, the same length of time between the 9/11 attack and the release of United 93.) Many intelligent and well-grounded friends of mine quietly chose not to see it – either in the theater or on DVD after its release – reasoning the experience would be too upsetting. That it is a bracing act to sit through United 93 is undeniable - a testament to the power of Greengrass’s brilliant, innovative technique of subjugating dialogue to the visual and the aural atmosphere as the primary emotional driver of the narrative – but those who ignore this film are missing out on its powerful theme of the heroic ability of the common man to reverse the horror and the hopelessness of what we are experiencing now, on an every day basis. The contrast of the passengers of United 93 and America’s leadership right now could not be more devastating. Many go to the movies for escapism – always a lark, as it is usually the biggest fun machines that tell us the most about who we are in our private moments. Superman Returns wasn’t as big of a worldwide blockbuster as Warner Bros. was hoping for (after the hellacious time they had getting it made) but Bryan Singer’s lyrical direction showed us beautifully and poignantly how desperate we are in these times for true leaders, real men who become super through their ability to fold their human vulnerability into the call to lead by example. Daniel Craig did the same thing as the action hero who plunged ahead driven by secret, unspoken inadequacies – not martinis and trinkets – as the new back-to-basics Bond in Casino Royale, probably 2006’s most thrilling surprise. The Devil Wears Prada, on many levels a rather ordinary princess diary, on another level showed us the dramatic return of a Superwoman, and made many a wise comment on the ferocious uphill battle a woman can face when she answers the call to lead. Ms. Clinton can consider the surprising success of the film a good omen for 2008! That, and it gave us Meryl Streep at the top of her comedic powers – the place where she most realizes her reputation as the finest actress of her generation in our country. Little Miss Sunshine, producer Marc Turtletaub’s salvaging of the adorable Michael Ardnt script, one of the aforementioned Sundance treats of 2006, was a predictable and deserved breakthrough success. It celebrated an oddball family with a loving, warm compassion and a wiser eye than anything the big studios are currently producing – and 73-year-old Alan Arkin and 9-year-old Abigail Breslin, as grandfather and granddaughter, made up the year’s most touching screen pairing. Quinceanera, the film that actually won the Sundance jury and audience top prizes (a rare occurrence), did the same thing for a chosen family of an entirely different group, Latino Americans – and fascinatingly showcased their tensions with Anglo Americans in both conscious and unconscious ways. Unfortunately, this watershed film didn’t make a ripple upon its commercial release in August by Sony Picture Classics – largely due to one of the most misguided niche marketing campaigns of the year. Half Nelson, the third smelling-salt work to come out of Sundance, memorably pointed up a deep fissure in the American psyche – our collective tendency to get into trouble by combating boredom with drug abuse - through a nerve-wrackingly raw performance from Canadian Ryan Gosling and gritty direction from 30-year-old Ryan Fleck. Robert Altman, one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time, died on November 21st at the age of 81, not before giving a gruff and lively speech on stage at the Academy Awards, one of the more entertaining acceptances of a Career Achievement Oscar. (Altman, like many other Career Achievement winners, never won an actual Oscar, putting him in the excellent company of visionary directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese, among others.) Scorsese, meanwhile, set up shop in Boston and came out with The Departed, a jolting remake of a morally complicated cops ‘n’ robbers Hong Kong action film, with a dream cast of Matt Damon, Leonard Dicaprio, Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and a surprisingly good Mark Wahlberg. The Departed lacked some of the thematically rich resonance that marks Scorsese’s true masterpieces – but may finally win him the Oscar he should have won for Raging Bull, GoodFellas and/or The Aviator. Another major American filmmaker, Michael Mann, came out with a new film in 2006 – Miami Vice, a typically beautifully stylish genre piece but not a film that stood up to his best. Oliver Stone and Spike Lee each produced solid, if unprofound, entertainments: World Trade Center and Inside Man. Johnny Depp dangerously flirted with becoming imprisoned behind the title of world’s biggest star as the headliner of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men’s Chest, only the third movie in history to sell more than $1 billion worth of tickets worldwide – but in contrast to his wildly original (and Oscar nominated) performance in the first Pirates movie in 2003, looked sadly trapped in the noisy, lackluster, corporately-conceived and bloated sequel. For breathtaking comic originality of the type Depp surprised us with in years past, one only had to look at Sacha Baron Cohen, the quiet Jewish comedian from the U.K., who took the biggest and funniest risks of the year as as an offending but sweetly innocent character whose fauxmentary cross country trip across America exposed the scary character of our deeply psychotic nation in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Cohen also memorably weirded up an otherwise standard-issue studio comedy, Talledaga Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, as a Perrier-sponsored French gay NASCAR race car champion. Al Gore became an unexpected movie star. His Doomsday warnings of impending global warming catastrophies in his filmed lecture An Inconvenient Truth brought people to the movie theater in droves for a two-hour horrorshow but had no impact where it should have counted – the gas pump. Consumption of fossil fuels by American went up AGAIN in 2006 – not down. What the film, and the response to it, showed is it may already be too late. Unlike United 93, which few wanted to see, everybody wanted to see An Inconvenient Truth, yet the film didn’t hit home viscerally enough with the masses to affect any discernable change. Alfonso Curaon’s Children of Men, unfortunately delayed from September to year’s crowded end by Universal, potentially could have followed through on the An Inconvenient Truth message – a truly frightening vision of a dying human civilization with only 70-odd years of existence left in it (due to mass infertility). Yet despite the great atmospheric set-up, Curaon’s film mystifyingly lacked clarity and backstory and failed to connect with audiences in the mind as well as the gut. The year’s finest films from outside the U.S. came from both expected and unexpected places. Pedro Almodovar’s returned to working with all-women characters in the touching comedy Volver, featuring Penelope Cruz; while not quite on par with his recent masterpieces Talk to Her and Bad Education, it was still evidence of one of the world’s great filmmakers working near the height of his powers. The Mexican director Guillermo del Toro broke through to the international mainstream with a visually unforgettable, albeit at times mystifying, allegoric fantasy, Pan’s Labrynith. From the U.K. came The Queen, Stephen Frears’ film from Peter Morgan’s imaginative script about the Queen Elizabeth II – Tony Blair relationship during the week following Princess Diana’s tragic death brought out the best in actors Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen. Morgan also co-wrote The Last King of Scotland, another speculative piece about the madness of 1970s self-proclaimed emperor (and mass-murderer) of Uganda Idi Amin, which brought out a hypnotizing and spooky career-best effort from actor Forest Whitaker, playing Amin. Less spectacular, but devastating in a Kieslowskiesque sort of way, was Romania’s simple drama, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, about the commonest of common man, a 63-year-old man with a headache that nobody cares about for 2 1/2 hours of continuous screen time. Among the year’s biggest disappointments was the musical Dreamgirls, an over-hyped spectacle of a not-great collection of songs that had some big voices but had the same stale air and arc of Ray made only two years ago and still fresh in everybody’s mind as much superior “crap on wheels”, as Pauline Kael used to affectionately refer to Taylor Hackford’s pictures. Dreamgirls faithfully recreated the costumes, hair and makeup of its different periods, and made a huge effort to bust out of the screen, but simply could not make the magic happen. Jennifer Hudson indeed deserves an award for belting out the big number “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going”, but the award she deserves is a Grammy – not an Oscar. In her non-musical screen time, Hudson’s sassy attitude lacked the nuance a major actress could have brought to the part. Instead, the year’s best musical was also the year’s best animated feature, Australian George Miller’s Antarctic toe-tapper Happy Feet. The exuberant tale of the little penguin that could mixed well-known pop songs in a free-for-all of non-stop wit and fun and outshone Pixar’s rather flat-tired Cars. And the year’s most under-rated film? Stranger Than Fiction. There's a film every year I fall in love with on a deeply personal level that no one else seems to care for, and to my surprise, this was the one. This annual truth really is stranger than fiction. The Ten Best Films of 2006 (alphabetical order) BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU THE DEPARTED LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA THE QUEEN QUINCEANERA STRANGER THAN FICTION SUPERMAN RETURNS UNITED 93 VOLVER  |
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by Stephen_Murray
