Macresarf1's TEN BEST MOVIES OF 2006: The Year America Examined Its Conscience Again, at Last.
Apr 27 '07 (Updated May 10 '07)
The Bottom Line For this one year, half of my picks were didactic in nature because scarcely 22% of the American public believes we are leading ourselves, the World, in the right direction.
Amazingly, little of the disintegration of our Democracy and place in the World was reflected in the Movies of 2006. In fact, this was the year when movies as a theatrical experience appeared coming to an end. Great numbers of movies, those relative few which found distributors, were being shown briefly in major cities and sent quickly to DVD. Theaters were laboring under the weight of advertising and scheduling films they could never turn a profit on.
BUT . . . in this year, "THE MOVIES WERE BETTER THAN EVER"!
Which hadn't been saying much for over twenty-five years.
BUT, to my mind . . . the few films that did touch on the crucial developments (for this one year only, I hope) pushed some more smoothly made artistic efforts, such as THE DEPARTED or THE LIVES OF OTHERS, to one side on my list.
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Of the Movies at hand, a couple of the very best were hardly seen, a few of the better ones were given a gander late in the year, and according to leading critics, some of the the worst (i.e., # 2, NIGHT IN THE MUSEUM, Gross,$249,478,795; #5, THE DA VINCI CODE, Gross, 217,536,138) were attended in super-colossal numbers.
My choices for the TEN BEST MOVIES OF 2006, then, were made this year under the pressure of many nightmarish visions which the American citizenry, in its peculiar Post-9/11 mixture of happy ignorance and fear, was only now rising to meet. [According to the latest MSNBC Poll, a scant 22% of Americans believed our country was on the right track.] To the extent people go to real movies anymore, most Americans had avoided seven out of ten of my picks, altogether; their DVD sales were scarcely better.
A few weeks ago, a particularly well-fed example of Corporatist wisdom-bringers on Neil Kavuto's Cable finance show, attempting to tamp down unease about the economy, made the following remark:
"Ah, Neil, you know that the areas of pharmaceuticals , defense, computer services and banking will sustain the economy. Of course, there are some businesses that will collapse in the coming adjustment. For instance, ask a Publisher what his firm does, and he may say, 'Well . . . we edit, print and merchandise . . . BOOKS.' That's his problem, and the problem of the Publishing Industry. BOOKS are going away. No one in a truly economic sense reads BOOKS any more. They will soon be a thing of the past, as will be the written word."
And so, what of MOVIES?
The 50th San Francisco Film Festival, the oldest in the United States, will premiere next week the first feature length motion picture made entirely on a cell phone. What comes next, we can only imagine with apprehension. The terrorist acts of Seung-hui Cho last week at Virginia Tech may give a suggestion.
See these TEN BEST MOVIES OF 2006 while you can. They may soon be replaced by video games based on comic book versions of "the long war" or the senseless ramblings of madmen.
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10. THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO -- The list begins and ends with films which are technically not up to the standards of a Ten Best selection, but which convey such important information, they demand inclusion. Director Michael Winterbottom's semi-documentary deals with some young British Muslims. "The Tipton Three," part of a wedding party gone wrong, foolishly traveled in March 2003 from Pakistan to Afghanistan, where they were "sold" by the Afghan Northern Alliance, it would seem, to the CIA as terrorists. They were held and tortured for over two years at Guantanomo Prison in Cuba before, at the intercession of Prime Minister Tony Blair, being sent back to the UK. After examining the evidence gathered against them, British Security released them in one day, without charges. The International furor ensuing, in part, prompted the CIA to send people to other countries for torture interrogation. The film's extraordinary rendition of 2003-2005 events was marred by a strange style of mixed documentary footage and live re-creation. Still, no American film makers equaled it on the subject.
http://www.epinions.com/content_239362674308
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9. AMERICAN DREAMZ -- Director Paul Weitz's satire of "The Reality Show" craze suffered because it was released about a year too early. Some critics seemed to want this satire of our World, circa 2006, to be simply a guffawing parody. Others didn't get the joke at all. As I put it in my Bottom Line: "AMERICAN DREAMZ, not an entirely successful satire, is a first well-aimed humorous theatrical film attack on our society's and our present Administration's preoccupation with keeping us greedy, dumb, oblivious." Though uneven, the picture will look increasingly better in a few years time, when American society realizes the cruelty of the joke played on us, much as they valued Frederick Lewis Allen's chronicle of the 1920's madness, Only Yesterday, after the Crash of 1929. With Hugh Grant, Mandy Moore, Dennis Quaid, Marsha Gay Harden, Willlem Dafoe.
http://www.epinions.com/content_223594319492
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8. DON'T COME KNOCKING -- This little indie fable by Writer/Actor Sam Shepard and Director Wim Wenders has haunted me since I saw it. It combines Playwright Shepard's regrets about perennial father/son relationships and the German Wender's fascination with the West, in a film concerning the ever-present generational gap. It is gentle, wry, whimsical, but also honest and truthful. The first art film on my list, one about an America which has either failed to grow up, or has had to grow up all-of-a-sudden, leaving behind our folk and movie Western myths: Full of wise women (Eva Marie Saint, Jessica Lange, Sarah Polley, Fairusa Balk) and blustering men (Shepard, Tim Roth, Gabriel Mann, Jim Gammon). Shot entirely on location at Moab, Utah, Elko, Nevada, and Butte, Montana.
http://www.epinions.com/content_224836882052
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7. VENUS -- As I predicted Peter O'Toole won an Oscar nomination for his performance in this British film about a distinguished old actor trying to retain or reclaim some of the reality of his past life. He was backed by a great veteran supporting cast, and a young newcomer, Jody Whitakker, whom we shall hear more of. The picture fitted our theme because the Western World is growing ever older, and in the way of The New World Order, elders not in the upper 3% are being pushed aside to accommodate the young. Unfortunately, the "opportunity gap" becomes ever more wide, and both the young and the old of the Middle Class will be at an increasing disadvantage. VENUS quietly illustrated that plight in a genteel English theatrical setting.
http://www.epinions.com/content_289893158532
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6. THE ILLUSIONIST -- Of all the films here, in another time, I would have made this one my top pick. I loved the picture, an old fashioned romance in the 1930's Hollywood tradition, laced with magic, color and music (Philip Glass), about the break-up of the now nearly forgotten Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. Edward Norton was magnetic and handsome in the title role. Jessica Biels proved herself an actress as well as a beauty as the Princess Sophie. Paul Giamatti, playing the head of the Imperial Secret Police, lived up to his hype. And Rufus Sewell created the aristocratic villain in a manner that Carl Esmond, or even Basil Rathbone, might have admired.
http://www.epinions.com/content_246576615044
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5. PAN'S LABYRINTH -- In the van of the recent Mexican artistic invasion, Guilermo del Toro's darkly intricate coming of age fable told of a young girl on the brink of womanhood, who is suspended between the realities of Fascism after the Spanish Civil War and the imaginative paganism of her childhood. A film as memorable as a hot summer's day in the forest when we were young. Epinions offers a number of excellent full reviews.
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4. FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS/LETTERS FROM IWO-JIMA -- Not really cheating in the old-timey Epinions sense, I put these two Clint Eastwood films together because they are a yin and a yang for each other. They tell the story of the men on both sides who fought the Battle of Iwo Jima. The rocky volcanic isle was an approach to the Japanese Homeland for the Americans, and for the Japanese, first piece of the Homeland itself to be defended from invasion. Eastwood concentrates on the forces which placed the men there, how they reacted to them, and the aftermath. For the men lionized for raising our flag over the island there was was a postwar life and, for some, considerable guilt and regret. For most of the Japanese defenders, death according to their military code was the result. See both films, for a quiet, elegiac presentation of the heroism and waste of war.
Of many excellent reviews, I liked weirdo87's review of FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS --
http://www.epinions.com/content_270300712580
And stactom's concise, insightful analysis of LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA --
http://www.epinions.com/content_309635812996
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3. WHY WE FIGHT -- Eugene Jarecki's documentary, taking its title from Frank Capra's famous applications of Paul Goebbels' propaganda methods to the American WWII war effort, uses as its thesis President Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Address on the dangers of the American Military Industrial Complex. Director Jarecki shows how those dangers have grown, as Eisenhower feared they would, to infect every aspect of our society. The film suggests that our actions of the last fifty years, particularly the last six, have begun to turn us into a populist mirror image (from Blitzkrieg to Shock and Awe) resembling the forces of Fascism we fought in World War II. Quite one of the most memorable and fact packed documentaries of the year.
http://www.epinions.com/content_222396845700
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2. CHILDREN OF MEN -- Clive Owen plays a surrogate Joseph to a Black Madonna (Claire-Hope Ash!tey) in this futurist film set in the World of 2027, when we have fouled our natural and political environment so much that nothing works, including ourselves, at the most primal level. With Michael Caine and Julianne Moore in supporting roles. Gritty, rough, crude, but a picture that hangs in the mind like the portrait of a nightmare.
http://www.epinions.com/content_326664883844
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1. AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH -- More than any other picture, one might say work of art, in decades, this documentary may be said to have changed mankind's thinking. We are rather rapidly now setting about to fry, freeze, drown, starve, and infect ourselves to death because of our foolish greed and industrial commercialism. Desperate counter-attacks on that fact by flacks brandishing sheaves of anecdotal counter evidence, and novels by Michael Crichton, have been to no avail. Last week, Canada was the latest major nation to violate the American wait-and-see attitude. They are going to attack the problem with a national effort. Mean attacks on Ex-Vice President Al Gore, or arguments that there had been climate change in the past, do not absolve us from asking the question: What are we going to do about Climate Change, whoever is responsible, right or wrong? Time and Tide literally will no longer wait for any of us. Everyone, certainly every American, should see this documentary.
http://www.epinions.com/content_236909334148
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These are are my TEN BEST FILMS OF 2006. I hope you will see them and profit from the experiences.
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macresarf1
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Location: San Francisco, Ca.
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12/21/09: Ten years ago, today, I published my first epinion. Many thanks!
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