MOVIES
Mike D'Angelo
1. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
Some were unbearably moved by the sight of doomed passengers storming the cockpit in United 93, or by a pregnant woman hushing a battlefield in Children Of Men's dystopian near-future. For me, though, Michel Gondry's exuberant concert doc, featuring a pre-meltdown Chappelle as prankster MC, was the year's most radically political movie. Proudly defiant in its optimism, the film repeatedly and deliberately undercuts its own status as Event, interrupting dynamite performances in Brooklyn (from the likes of Dead Prez, Mos Def, Jill Scott and The Roots) with sequences of Chappelle trolling his adopted Ohio hometown for potential spectators the week beforehand. The result is simply one of the most joyful celebrations of community ever captured on film, and one of the few movies that I can truly say made me feel happy to be alive.
2. The Prestige
It took a recent second viewing for me to appreciate the structural intricacy and thematic richness that Christopher and Jonathan Nolan bring to this brooding tale of feuding turn-of-the-century magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. Deviating from Christopher Priest's source novel in small but crucial ways, their adaptation suggests that only extreme self-sacrifice can rescue us from our dawning certitude that science has eliminated all mystery from the world.
3. Old Joy
A dozen years after her terrific but barely seen debut feature, River of Grass, true indie pioneer Kelly Reichardt returns with a quietly wrenching portrait of friendship lost. Some folks seem determined to read a homoerotic subtext into the awkward relationship between reformed hippie Mark (Daniel London) and unrepentant space case Kurt (musician Will Oldham), who set out together on an impromptu weekend trip to a hot-springs resort deep in the Oregon woods. But Reichardt's true subject is ineffectuality, with the guys' tentative, mostly embarrassing efforts at recapturing their old camaraderie underscored by Air America radio commentary and gently mocked by the serene beauty of their surroundings. A small, brief, understated gem.
4. The Departed
5. Down in the Valley
6. Brick
7. Volver
8. Sleeping Dogs Lie
9. L'Enfant (The Child)
10. Half Nelson
Josh Bell
1. The Science of Sleep
A lovely waking dream from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry, with a bittersweet love story that proves that being lost in your own world may seem romantic, but it doesn't promise a happy ending.
2. A Scanner Darkly
3. The Black Dahlia
4. Dreamgirls
5. The Puffy Chair
This charming indie dramedy is simple, direct and very real, depicting twentysomethings flailing about at relationships and at life, but not overselling its protagonists' neuroses. It's just funny and honest, and a very promising debut for the filmmaking Duplass brothers.
6. The Good German
Steven Soderbergh's ode to 1940s noir (opening in Vegas on January 19) is a stylistic marvel, painstakingly recreating the look and feel of movies like The Third Man and Casablanca, while adding a nasty modern edge that explores the political hypocrisy often just behind cynical noir tales.
7. Unknown White Male
8. Inside Man
9. Thank You for Smoking
10. V for Vendetta
Trend 2006: Why aren't horror films frightening anymore? |
American horror movies have been on the ascendant for a couple of years now, and it doesn't take a mad scientist to figure out why. Shit happened, some idiot started a war and the corporatocracy turned our better impulses against us (and everybody else) while engendering a state of perpetual terror. Let the cinematic nightmares begin. Beyond the craven manipulation and toxic, self- and other-loathing passivity of the cultural moment, however, I'd like to know why none of the scary movies from this or last year have been the least bit scary. Instead, they aggressively rework played-out formulas to titillate our pop-culty knowingness and pander to our jaded appetite for spectacle. That's a recipe for advertising, not filmmaking, and there's nothing fearful in it—at least not intentionally. Recent horror flicks have thus trafficked in absurd pastiche (the misbegotten Project Greenlight stinker Feast), orgiastic xenophobia (Hostel, Turistas), or both (The Hills Have Eyes redux), while others wallow in gimcrack sadism for its own sake (the execrable Saw trilogy) or just regurgitate older movies in flailing remakes nobody longed for (The Omen, When a Stranger Calls, Black Christmas and J-horror-redo straggler Pulse). Few intelligently engage the zeitgeist (this year's overpraised The Descent being a rare exception), and TV trumps the medium on that front anyway. Have Americans become immune to fear? Hardly—we're seemingly afraid of everything. But artfully imagined fright requires collective consent and a certain willing innocence from its viewers (to say nothing of bold, innovative filmmakers), and those qualities have been bullied out of us and reshaped into willful, cowering naivete over the last few years. Moreover, American horror films are fresh out of Old World myths and Cold War techno-paranoia to fuel them, and it appears all that's left is two centuries' worth of memories of our own bad faith and wanton brutality. Grasping that is what made Rob Zombie's 2005 The Devil's Rejects, self-indulgent and repellently misogynistic as it was, the horror high point of the 21st century thus far, but it's hard to see where he can go from there—his announced spin through the Halloween franchise isn't encouraging news. Too bad. The current vein of horror films' puerile, repulsive gore and cynical assessment of the species' general godawfulness is boring and demoralizing, not scary. As long as fear is a deeply abstracted, subtly pervasive societal obsession, though, I suspect it can't be an effective cinematic one. Mark Holcomb |
Mark Holcomb
1. Iraq in Fragments
Yes, scads of Iraq-related docs were released this year, and, yes, most were shoddy, hectoring, or just plain dull. This one, however, has the narrative and visual grace of a feature film, and will no doubt endure. A masterpiece.
2. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
The marketing and box-office overkill did nothing to diminish this movie's excruciating brilliance. Most critics were gaga over its political satire, but I was most impressed by its weirdly touching portrait of America as a place still possessed of (seriously tarnished, frequently faked) decency.
3. The Queen
All the current-events documentaries in the world couldn't touch this film for its incisive portrayal of imperialism circling the drain, and yet (thanks to enthralled bumblers like Tony Blair and, by extrapolation, Dubya) refusing to go down. Moving and complex, it lets no one off the hook.
4. L'Enfant (The Child)
5. Inland Empire
6. My Country, My Country
7. Half Nelson
8. Brick
9. Hollywoodland
10. An Inconvenient Truth
Matthew Scott Hunter
1. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Call me twisted, but I found it easy to relate to the obsessions of this serial killer who found intangible beauty in the form of a woman's scent and devoted his life to capturing its power. Even more impressive than the film's ability to create a sense of smell in a sight-and-sound medium is the way it slowly shifts from reality into an epic, demented fairy tale.
2. Thank You for Smoking
On a good year, this would only make the bottom of my top 10 list, but any movie that scores laughs with Big Tobacco's spin doctor enthusiastically shaking hands with a cancer boy has earned a place on my list.
3. United 93
4. The Proposition
5. Apocalypto
6. An Inconvenient Truth
7. The Heart of the Game
8. The Departed
Again, on a good year this would only be an honorable mention. In fact, The Departed gleefully falls to pieces in its last 20 minutes with over-the-top performances and a needlessly convoluted plot, but it does so energetically. Through every contrived twist and implausibly clever insult, you'll never be bored.
Moments |
Bored of Borat It's sort of hard to believe that the 2006 equivalent of the Jerky Boys has become such a cultural phenomenon and a legitimate (if long-shot) Oscar contender. Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat character is neither a clever social commentator nor an original comedic creation; he's merely an annoyance pitched at the easiest and most obvious targets, a one-joke trickster whose moment in the popular consciousness can't fade soon enough. Josh Bell A moment of heart Dito Montiel is too green to pull off most of the meta trickery he attempts in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, but about halfway through he graciously allows his teenage characters to introduce themselves. One stands out: The blustering, parent-abused bully played by Channing Tatum, who swaggers up to the camera and says, "I'm Antonio, and I'm a piece of shit." It's a wrenching moment that lays this flawed movie's heart bare. Mark Holcomb A Blessing in Disguise Believe it or not, I didn't want to see Little Man. The latest Wayans brothers opus is one of numerous films this year that weren't screened in advance for critics, leading to many hand-wringing articles about what this practice might mean for the future of film criticism. But contrary to popular belief, most movie critics really want to like what they see and see what they like. So, major Hollywood studios, for sparing me from such cinematic masterpieces as The Benchwarmers, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, See No Evil and The Covenant, I thank you. Josh Bell Afraid in the Dark Fumbling around in the chaos of a pitch black cave, the spelunking protagonists of The Descent flip on their helmet lights and look around, illuminating a pale white creature standing directly behind one of them and breathing down their necks. Apparently the thing was sniffing them out in the darkness, but the light causes it to disappear before we can figure out what the heck it is. It looked like Murnau's Nosferatu crossed with that fluke-worm creature from The X-Files. It wasn't quite human, not quite animal, but definitely quite scary—a moment of shock and horror that I would compare with the unmasking of Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera. Benjamin Spacek |
9. Down in the Valley
10. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Jeffrey M. Anderson
1. Three Times
Hou Hsiao-hsien, one of the greatest film directors in the world, has been working steadily since 1980, making nearly a feature a year, and yet only two have received any kind of American distribution, both starring the lovely Shu Qi (from The Transporter). As a whole, this triptych is not one of Hou's stronger efforts, but the first section—about two lovers during the Vietnam era—is a little masterpiece all by itself.
2. The Bridesmaid
3. Inside Man
4. Free Zone
5. Art School Confidential
Co-written with Dan Clowes, Terry Zwigoff's new film was blacker and more difficult to swallow than his previous comedies (Ghost World and Bad Santa). Many viewers never really explored its depths, preferring instead to think of it as an Animal House knockoff or a simple academic satire. What it really suggests—that art is completely unknowable and unclassifiable—is far scarier.
6. The Black Dahlia
7. The Departed
8. Find Me Guilty
9. Lady Vengeance
10. Children of Men
Alfonso Cuaron, along with his friend and colleague, Guillermo Del Toro, is at the head of a kind of Mexican New Wave, jumping back and forth between energizing Hollywood genre pics (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, etc.) and personal pet projects (Y Tu Mama Tambien). Though this frightening, breathtaking film classifies as a Hollywood enterprise, a futuristic sci-fi chase story with big stars, Cuaron rips into it with a near-contempt for lazy, conventional storytelling. Stripped clean of anything resembling exposition or background detail, this film plunges us directly into the present moment, and then hits the gas.