2006: The Year in Review

(from February 2007.)




It is a telling sign when a sizeable amount of critics in the United States chose a movie made in 1969 as one of the best of 2006; I’m referring, of course, to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows. A vote of no-confidence seems to have been cast about the state of cinema seven years into the new millennium. In the year of YouTube and the video iPod, the very notion of sitting in a dark room full of strangers and watching a virulently archaic technology enrapture us seems positively reactionary. But at the end of 2006—a year in which I found myself not necessarily finding less movies about which to rave, but rather feeling less passionate about the ones I did love— Film Comment editor Gavin Smith’s prophecy may be ready to come true. In one of his bi-monthly editor’s columns this past year, he compared his magazine to technology which, while technically obsolete, would never become extinct; rather, it would become a marker of refined, sophisticated taste. Smith might not have wanted to create such an elitist tone in his proclamation, but what else was he to do? We cineastes are losing the war; we may have already lost it. There is no point in decrying the bygone days of 1960’s & 70’s cinephilia (which, by the way, were losing games in and of themselves. Nostalgia has done its part well in revising history). It is time to rethink how we understand our love of movies, and what movies ultimately mean to us. Does that mean giving up on spreading our message of salvation? Not necessarily; NetFlix (and its grungier indie superior, GreenCine) has gone a long way toward giving access to all peoples the works which we take for granted. Yes, they are on DVD and not in the theaters, but as we lose the war, is it perhaps not wise to make at least one small concession (especially since the Criterion Collection exists)? Perhaps, in time, we will learn that modes of exhibition are a small price to pay for keeping films that matter in existence (despite what the doom-prophets would have you believe, great art of the moving image will never disappear; that art just might be harder to find).
And now, on with the show!

THE BEST MOVIE OF 2006



MY DAD IS 100 YEARS OLD (Guy Maddin/Isabella Rossellini)

Shown first at the Toronto and (I believe) Chicago Film Festivals last fall, then at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, and officially in December (opening for a documentary on [whoops] Ingmar Bergman), every minute of Isabella Rossellini’s 16-minute tribute to her father has more ideas, soul, and heart than any other movie released in 2006. Born out of dreams Rossellini had about her father, Roberto Rossellini–one of the founders of neorealism, and one of the most difficult artists to pin down–it is not only a tribute but also the most enjoyable debate about what the cinema actually is and should be. Rossellini voices her father, and plays herself, David O. Selznick, Federico Fellini, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, and her mother. Rossellini uses what her father did to help show not only the way the cinema works, but also how cinema is a manner in which we look at life and the world.


THE OTHER 14 BEST MOVIES OF 2006




4 (Ilya Khrzanovsky)

While some deemed Khrzanovsky’s debut feature less than the sum of its influences–sound design from Bela Tarr, Russian otherworldly muck from Andrei Tarkovsky–4 actually used those influences for its own darkly absurd purposes. There is a sharp clash of putrid viscera and the surreal unknown in Khrzanovsky’s Russia. We are left with more questions than answers, forcing us to establish connections between elements that are just as faulty as the bar stories of the three central characters. This acid tone imbues the film with more whacky sarcasm than either Tarr or Tarkovsky could ever hope to create. Thus, what appears as technical sloppiness emerges as devilish, mysterious chaos in a universe which loves to make one believe that all events are intertwined.



BATTLE IN HEAVEN (Carlos Reygadas)

Marcos, a chauffeur driver to a Mexican general’s spoiled daughter, is a man of such repressed emotional violence that the only way he knows how to express his anguish is through meaningless death. Because we are never privileged to know this inner world of his directly, we only come to discover it slowly, piece by piece. And the camera, drifting aimlessly toward and away from Marcos, only serves to illuminate that inability to know this very lonely man. Even his sexual fantasies, to which he retreats after a masochistic religious fervor, don’t allow him to recover from this pain. Everywhere he looks, his desires and fears cannot be articulated. And so he and those he loves die, while his wife, the only person with whom he can express tenderness, is left terrified by this wall of man. Reygadas refuses easy identification with Marcos, because the system under which he operates won’t let him identify with himself. And we are left adrift, in a sexual, violent state of fervent madness.



BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (Larry Charles/Sacha Baron Cohen)

Is America full of overly polite, but inherently decent people, or cruel, poisonous bigots who will never understand those different from themselves? As it turns out, Sacha Baron Cohen finds the state of the American people somewhere in the middle. Often, people merely try to accommodate this alien of a man as best they can while he pratfalls about their place of work. Other times, for the very reason that he is alien to them–and thus, an innocent–they allow their prejudices to be self-evident. Through a loaded form of performance art, Baron Cohen proves that Americans–even those who are merely polite–are complacent in allowing difference to be repudiated. Nobody knows anything about Kazakhstan; nobody knows that he isn’t speaking Kazakh, but Russian-inflected Hebrew while spewing anti-Semitic venom. Borat is a tool which Baron Cohen uses to cry out in anguish, that America may never allow anyone but straight white men to feel truly equal.



CHILDREN OF MEN (Alfonso Cuaron)

It may be a deeply ironic joke–the world will most likely enter the apocalypse due to too much reproduction, rather than too little–but the crisis of Children of Men is one which resonates all too terrifyingly. Cuaron and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, have created a future which is merely a logical extension of the one in which we currently live. They never bother to sermonize about a dystopian dictatorship in which even the “freedom fighters” are terrorist saboteurs, because the simple fact of this society’s existence is terrifying enough. It is genuinely moving when all war ceases to hear a baby’s cry again, and equally disheartening that the fighting begins afresh immediately afterward. Although Cuaron gives us a glimmer of hope at the end, it is undercut by a deep sense of foreboding, that even the benevolence of non-ideological science could sacrifice the human for the abstract.



THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (Cristi Puiu)

Naturally, death permeates the Bucharest of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. But more importantly, it is a film desperately in search of life. Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) himself certainly doesn’t conjure any immediate feelings of sympathy–he is a drunk, smelly, curmudgeonly old spinster with nasty varicose veins. But the body, so easily put on display by the doctors claiming to treat him, is slowly seen as more than a piece of meat by the ambulance driver (Luminita Gheorghiu) forced to care for him on his last night alive. She cares because she sees the intellectual and the sensual intertwined, whereas the doctors only understand Lazarescu as an abstract object, a thing to be examined curiously, but not compassionately. She discovers this almost begrudgingly, with a great deal of humor which makes the film even more honestly earthy. It is with great sadness and dejectedness that the film ends with Lazarescu on a slab, his last breaths in him, left as nothing more than a body, to die.



THE DEPARTED (Martin Scorsese)

While it isn’t (like many have said) Scorsese’s best work since Goodfellas (that honor goes to Kundun), it may be the most nihilistic film he’s ever made. It’s inferior to its source material (the masterfully taut Infernal Affairs), but it comes close to achieving its predecessor’s successes on almost completely inverted terms. Living in a kinetic, explosive world of dirt where everyone is a rat on some level, the Boston of The Departed serves as a suffocating trap, exploding with violent energy, but in fact imploding in on itself. Identity means nothing, because you’re going to be killed anyway. There is no future in The Departed, even if you believe that you can reclaim who you are.



L'ENFANT (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

The Dardennes may be deeply catholic filmmakers, but they are not dogmatically religious. They care about the physical element of humanity too much. Their raw, verite style lend a visceral immediacy to their images, and a massive intensity to the experience of a man committing what may the greatest sin of all: giving up a child to potential doom for petty gain. Only piece by piece is the (real) child allowed to discover the cataclysm of his choices, and only through this anguish can he shed the selfishness of innocence. His pure tears, in prison, are the naked catharsis of someone finally emerging into maturity. He has evolved, but tragically, only by almost giving away his soul. He transcends by confronting the ugliness of the real.



HALF NELSON (Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden)

Was there a more desperate cry of helplessness in the films of 2006 than when Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) realizes how empty his confrontation with Frank (Anthony Mackie) the drug dealer actually is? He is addicted to drugs, and is slowly becoming unstable, but believes that he, not Frank, should be responsible for Drey’s (Shareeka Epps) well-being. “I’m supposed to do something,” he says. “What am I supposed to do?” He doesn’t know. The dialectical motion of history he champions in the classroom falls apart in the battle in his own soul, and in his battle with Frank for Drey’s soul. Human beings aren’t composed of two clashing opposites. They are a throng of forces, all supporting and conflicting with each other. And be it one’s own demons, one’s own politics, or one’s ideals, the collapse of dialectics in reality leaves one feeling helpless. Drey realizes that these contradictory father figures will never help her, because until they acknowledge the ambiguities within themselves, they can’t support her. Dan and Drey are the souls of contemporary humanity’s crisis with itself, and its attempts to find ways of coping with the world.



LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (Clint Eastwood)

In ways, the very fact that this movie exists qualifies it to be one of the greatest of the year. Purportedly conceived during the filming of “that other Iwo Jima movie,” Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood applied his intangible “touch” to breaking down what war is and what it signifies. Unlike Flags, Letters from Iwo Jima is self-contained, following the Japanese soldiers stationed on Iwo Jima from pre-planning for the battle through its bloody aftermath. Resentment toward a government that demands total sacrifice from its soldiers is soaked in moral confusion, for both the grunts and their weary leader, Gen. Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe). War is about people, not abstract principles, and for those people, Kuribayashi is willing to embrace what he believes to be the Japanese notion of honor. He dies for his country, but that doesn’t stop us from feeling the sting of the lack of humanity in those actions.



MUTUAL APPRECIATION (Andrew Bujalski)

Andrew Bujalski doesn’t care if you believe there is a deeper “message” to his movies. He’s way too preoccupied peering into the lives of the characters he’s created. His work evokes John Cassavetes, Eric Rohmer, and verite documentarians, but I think his closest analogue would be Jacques Rivette. Mutual Appreciation, along with Bujalski’s first masterpiece, Funny Ha Ha, uses non-actors with dialogue built around their natural speech patterns. Bujalski’s cinema is one of organic purity; the camera intrudes on a series of events already taking place, and leaves when it feels it should. Like what Andre Bazin once said of Jean Renoir’s films, the action passes through the frame with little regard to the device attempting to capture it. And all of this does mean something: the impotence of human interaction. But Bujalski would rather you just watch what happens to these people, rather than speculate on any abstract, “deeper” meanings. Mutual Appreciation is life on celluloid, and if you’re under 30, it’s painfully close to your life.



PAN'S LABYRINTH (Guillermo del Toro)

Ivana Baquero, as a young girl in Franco’s Spain at the end of World War II, delivers the best female performance of 2006. She and Del Toro capture the way in which innocence, when faced with monstrosity, can collapse into madness, a madness that offers no comfort, but only the potential for comfort. Ofelia’s imagined fantasy world is harsh and unforgiving, much like Capitan Vidal’s war on the last remnants of the republican resistance. Del Toro seamlessly blends these two narratives, the horrors of one echoing the other as Ofelia continues to retreat further and further into her own mind. A final glimmer of “justice” is undercut by the Capitan’s deeply felt sense of family, and the knowledge that Ofelia lies dead, betrayed by both her insanity and the cruel reality of fascism.



A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (Robert Altman/Garrison Keillor)

It is fitting that Robert Altman’s last film would be about death. Indeed, his re-imagining of modern entertainment’s greatest antique–the radio variety show–offers an incredible way to confront death. Death must first be filled with the joy of life. And on the last night of this fictional version of Keillor’s great behemoth, the joys of sharing in the creative process are more than self-evident. And at the center of it all, Keillor stands, quietly controlling everything while also letting it spin gloriously out of control. When Death finally comes for the cast, they are scared, but also quietly accepting; after all, they don’t want anyone to be told to remember them.



THE PROPOSITION (John Hillcoat/Nick Cave)

The brutality of the human race can be quite terrifying. Charlie Burns begins to see that civilization isn’t all that civil, and even his brother Arthur, a sort of avenging angel against that hypocrisy, cares not for humanity either. Hillcoat, Cave, and their cinematographer, Benoit Delhomme, paint a harsh and unforgiving landscape where the life of the civilized and that of the outlaw only seek to destroy, rather than create. Only by attempting to halt that cycle of violence–tragically, through violent means–can Charlie hope to acknowledge the human, and cast off the abstractions of Human Beings.



UNITED 93 (Paul Greengrass)

Is this film exploitation? Is it pornography? Does it not allow any perspective outside of the immediate tragedy, and does it potentially cross ethical boundaries in depicting what “happened” on that plane as it was ready to go down? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. But Greengrass is also smart enough to know that to have made this film any differently would have been even more dishonest and exploitative. This is easily the most immediate and terrifying film of the year, and never once does it let you come up for air. It is filled with sadness, because we know the outcome. But it is also perhaps the only way to make a work of art about that story, revealing the confusion and lack of “heroism” that went into what happened. All we can do is watch, and continue to struggle onward.


THE REST OF THE BEST



Casino Royale (Martin Campbell)
Fateless (Lajos Koltai)
The Illusionist (Neil Burger)
The Queen (Stephen Frears)
A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom)
Volver (Pedro Almodovar)


PROVOCATIVE, BUT FRUSTRATING



IDIOCRACY (MIKE JUDGE)

Mike Judge indicts corporate capitalism and reverse Darwinism as the portents of things to come, but too often indulges in the very low-brow comedy which he is attempting to use to eviscerate that very low-brow comedy.



LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris)

Despite fine performances and one or two genuinely moving moments, it rarely manages to rise above the level of a TV movie, with limited narrative and psychological perspective generated from an uneven script.



THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP (Michel Gondry)

Gondry’s third film is all whimsy and no meat, all heart and no head, all cool effects with no use for them.



TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY (Adam McKay/Will Ferrell)

Sacha Baron Cohen is hilarious, but the Ferrell/McKay machine’s second effort lacks the manic absurdity of Anchorman and relies on the traditional frat humor of the major comedies of recent years.



THREE TIMES (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Moving in one segment, formally fascinating in another, annoyingly solipsistic in a third, Hou’s ideas get away from him as the film explores love across time.



That's the ballgame. See you in 2007!