Film Freak Central's Top 10 of 2006

I think the start of 2006 held so much promise mainly because it heralded the end of 2005. Not a doomsayer by any stretch, I find myself, at least in my own head, defending the state of film against facile diagnoses. "Books are always better than the movies based on them" and "They don't make good movies anymore" are the common phrases trotted out to simulate critical thought–better yet is the carrying around of the cross of "You just don't like anything." The truth is that books are only superior to the movies made from them about half the time (consider that almost all of Hitchcock's films are based on shitty literature); that good movies are no rarer than usual; and that disliking Blood Diamond, Dreamgirls, and The Holiday doesn't mean I don't like anything. Still, I admit to taking short rides with those facile phrases over the years, trying them on for size, seeing if and how far they will fly.

I don't think it's that I'm getting old in this profession after only five or six years (and isn't there some sadness that the most respected voices in our field have, for the most part, decided that life is too short to bother to criticize a medium that suffers so much insult) inasmuch as we've gotten too good at making movies. A century of cinematic education has made everyone a director–and a critic. Technology has rendered the machineries of fantasy not only portable, but also affordable and readily available. GOOGLE paying 1.5 billion dollars for a service that officially democratizes the filmmaking process and a TIME "Person of the Year" cover sporting a mirror are just more symptoms of the savaging of the privilege of this art. When movie trailers are dissected and reconstructed with withering precision by Internet amateurs equipped with shareware and a broadband connection (and used as a key narrative framework in a major Christmas release, The Holiday), Hollywood has something more pressing to fear than the phantom WMD of piracy. The result, perhaps unexpected, isn't a sudden outpouring of sideshow Ed Woods like Uwe Boll, dutifully cranking out films awful enough to actually merit conversation. Instead, we have a glut of workmanlike pictures nigh indistinguishable from one another, rinsed clean of individuality, vision, risk…anything that would identify them as something besides a pure capital investment.

***

The best of 2006 are a little desperate, a little resigned, a little nihilistic. They're films that by the fact of them refute drippy bits of parasitic sentimentality like World Trade Center along with self-important chunks of patronizing, liberal jingoism like The Last King of Scotland and Richard Linklater's dreadful, misanthropic, exploitative Fast Food Nation. I saw fewer and wrote less this year than last, which was already a low watermark. I missed films like Idiocracy because they weren't released in my market and films like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu because I was too lazy to seek it out independent of much studio interest in my interest. I've become closer to the non-professional this year than I have been at any time since starting out–a significant recoil and possibly a natural evolution that you have to push away, eventually, from too long at even so frugal a repast. I miss the fatigue of overfeeding sometimes, but in the wake of the soul-destroying The Devil Wears Prada (likewise The DaVinci Code, likewise X-Men: The Last Stand, likewise Glory Road/Invincible/We Are Marshall, likewise Mission: Impossible III, likewise, likewise, likewise), I remember why I don't miss it more.–Walter Chaw

WALTER CHAW'S TOP 10

TRAVIS M. HOOVER'S TOP 10

10. Shortbus (d. John Cameron Mitchell)
Most critics were limited in their praise for this film, and perhaps in a stronger year it might not have made my list. But its bold rewriting of the sexual program–one that included fatigue and burnout–made it one of the few essential American films of the year. Mitchell may only be groping in the dark for his ideas, but at least he's out there looking.

9. Requiem (d. Hans-Christian Schmid)
The travesty known as The Exorcism of Emily Rose gets karmic payback through this sensitive reversal of its more loathsome themes. Without seeming anti-religious, Requiem demolishes the pop religiosity that led its based-on-fact heroine to her untimely end.

8. The Proposition (d. John Hillcoat)
A lovely, blood-and-thunder revisionist western, with all the sadness and torment that implies. Supremely unimpressed with the American rev-west loss of innocence, Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave wind up breathing new life into a lost genre by envisioning an Australia where nobody has innocence to lose. (capsule review)

7. Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo) (d. Carlos Reygadas)
"We've got one a heavyset chauffeur in love, a rich young client who turns him on, a whorehouse staffed by wealthy teenagers, a botched kidnapping complete with dead baby, a weird climax in a church, fat-people sex, thin-people sex, fat and thin people sex, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." "Hit it."

6. Six Figures (d. David Christensen)
5. Monkey Warfare (d. Reginald Harkema)
Readers of THE FILM FREAK CENTRAL BLOG know my frustration with Canadian cinema, so it's my pleasure to announce two films that do my country proud. The first is a delicate, Haneke-esque essay in suburban anomie and uncertain motives, the second a blunt and furious wail for the twilight of the Left and the perversion of its goals. Both are sharp, funny, and more forceful than ten other films I could name.

4. Old Joy (d. Kelly Reichardt)
Another Left-twilight film sketched in the subtlest possible manner: it's the reunion of two college friends, one of whom has chosen to join the capitalist grind while the other has fallen off the map completely. It's more than that, of course, and Reichardt captures their new ambivalence towards each other with immense respect and sensitivity.

3. The Sun (Solntse) (d. Aleksandr Sokurov)
This has to be the most entertaining film ever made about Emperor Hirohito, but it somehow never got an American release–thank God for Films We Like north of the border. The Sun manages to be funny and sad as the Emperor faces up to his non-godhead status and must end a war for which he was never that enthusiastic; a performance by Issey Ogata crowns an already high achievement.

2. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Moartea domnului Lazarescu) (d. Cristi Puiu)
They say that Romania is the new world-film hotspot, and if Cristi Puiu's Cannes-winner is any evidence then the rumours would appear to be true. This is a trip down the slippery slope from a slight pain to certain doom in the Kafka hell of arrogant doctors and red tape. Though it starts unassumingly, it eventually weighs on you like few movies this year.

1. The Child (L'Enfant) (ds. Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne)
The appeal of the Dardenne brothers had eluded me until I saw this devastating essay in irresponsibility and redemption; it was the highlight of last year's TIFF and now it's the highlight of this year's release crop. Jeremie Renier leaves an indelible impression as the feckless hustler who sells his baby only to have to deal with the consequences of getting him back. The incident-packed film doesn't let him down.

Honourable Mentions: Deliver Us from Evil; Into Great Silence; The Queen; V for Vendetta

Enjoyed Despite My Better Judgment: Crank; Brick; District 13

Overrated: Pan's Labyrinth; Babel; Half Nelson; Three Times

Instant Camp Classics: Lady in the Water; Little Children; The Nativity Story

2005 Films I Wish I'd Seen In Time For Last Year's Top 10: Caché; Keane; The New World

BILL CHAMBERS'S TOP 10

10. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Moartea domnului Lazarescu) (d. Cristi Puiu)
Form serves function in this overlong, sickly-looking film, a triumph of verisimilitude that makes you fear not the Reaper, but rather sanctimony from within the medical community. Cumulatively devastating; I just wish it hadn't laid on the allusions to The Divine Comedy so thick.

9. Heading South (Vers le sud) (d. Laurent Cantet)
Unfolding towards the end of "Baby Doc"'s reign of terror, Heading South relies a little too much on a working knowledge of Haiti's political history to sort out its narrative ambiguities, but Cantet miraculously manages to exploit Haiti's mystique without falling back on Serpent and the Rainbow-isms.

8. Clean (d. Olivier Assayas)
This is the first time an Assayas film has made me look forward to the next one. It's a return to the humanism of his early pictures, which seemed to bother highbrow filmgoers, maybe because it deromanticizes their ice-queen centrefold Maggie Cheung.

7. Manderlay (d. Lars von Trier)
Not as good as Dogville, though I suspect Nicole Kidman would've helped turn on the afterburners. The relish with which narrator John Hurt says the n-word, it's so wrong, yet unlike the public implosions of Mel Gibson and Michael Richards, Manderlay is articulate enough to pre-empt a knee-jerk dismissal.

6. Idiocracy (d. Mike Judge)
When Luke Wilson's army guinea pig awakens from cryo-sleep 500 years into a future where stupidity reigns, the first person he encounters is literally suckling a nipple attached to his television; Idiocracy, however funny (and it's very, very funny), is an angry, terrifying conjecture of a world in which the culture war was definitively lost. It could just as easily have been called An Inconvenient Truth.

5. Miami Vice (d. Michael Mann)
Contrary to Walter, I feel the so-called Director's Edition dumbs down the theatrical version, to say nothing of its careless deletion of the opening smash cut–the movie moment of the year, albeit an abstract one.

4. Children of Men (d. Alfonso Cuarón)
War journalism as a master class in visceral filmmaking.

3. United 93 (d. Paul Greengrass)
2. Pan's Labyrinth (d. Guillermo del Toro)
1. The Departed (d. Martin Scorsese)
Narratively and aesthetically, United 93, Pan's Labyrinth, and The Departed couldn't be more different, but they suggest a trilogy to me, together forming a snapshot of our misanthropic zeitgeist that is as existentially disquieting as it is cinematically galvanizing. (Children of Men is actually the most timely allegory on this list, but unlike my Top 3 films, it finally succumbs to something resembling hope.) All three directors go on a kamikaze mission–both onscreen and off–and they've rarely seemed so alive; if the best movies of 2006 had you feeling like a rubberneck (see also: Tideland and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), at least they left you, to paraphrase Scorsese's film, comfortably numb.

Honourable Mentions: Superman Returns; Neil Young: Heart of Gold; A Scanner Darkly; Dave Chappelle's Block Party; Tideland

Dishonourable Mentions: Lady in the Water; Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest; Hard Candy; Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World; The Illusionist

Ridiculous Yet Unshakable: The King; Don't Come Knocking; Running Scared; London; Wassup Rockers

Notably Missed: Inland Empire; Old Joy; The Fountain; Letters from Iwo Jima; Marie Antoinette

2005 Film I Wish I'd Seen In Time For Last Year's Top 10: The New World

Honourable Mentions: Apocalypto; Stranger Than Fiction; Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby; Water; A Scanner Darkly; Heading South; House of Sand; Silent Hill

Notably Missed: Inland Empire; Omkara; Curse of the Golden Flower

10. The Descent (d. Neil Marshall)
I choose to take the domestic and international versions of The Descent–released in the U.K. with a different ending (now restored for Region 1 DVD) that has a kind of animal-logical emotional impact veering towards the Kill Bill maternal–as Kali-complementary. This is far and away the best horror film of the year, its cave setting utilized with devastating, visceral intelligence and its structure as a series of three births brilliant and pop-prickly. The first of several 2006 pictures that treat physical toil and the toll of violence on the meat of the body politic with intimate, suffocating weight, it's also the first of several that re-introduce humans into the wild only to turn them, unsurprisingly, into something bestial. Impossible in our current context not to view it on at least some level as a commentary about unfriendly incursions in foreign places (it's our Deliverance, just as Iraq is staking a claim as our Vietnam), but let's not discount the fact that it's home to one of the most satisfying jump scares in movie history.

9. Tideland (d. Terry Gilliam)
If the sickening thud of flesh and earth and blood is one theme unifying the best of 2006, another is the firmness of those elements as verities in our fundamental substance. Yet another is family: legacy through procreation and, through that, the potential and grail represented by little girls lost in the wilderness. Terry Gilliam's Tideland is very possibly the first honest film of his career: His "cleanest" picture, it's scrubbed of much of the rubbish sale floss that reached its apex (nadir?) in The Brothers Grimm, revealing itself to be a Lewis Carroll version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: no less fantastical, but starring a child looking for a family's approval in an Andrew Wyeth landscape. Tideland is unabashedly single-minded in its vision (arrogant, even) and representative of what's missing in our culture of technical perfection at the expense of emotional vacuity. Though it's oft described as discursive, I'm more comfortable calling it difficult; and unlike a lot of puzzles unravelled, its surface grotesquerie houses the disturbance of being human and the perversity of love.

8. Miami Vice (Unrated Director's Edition) (d. Michael Mann)
With Miami Vice, Michael Mann asserts himself as a poet laureate of the post-9/11 Wasteland, now finding its full flower of expression five years hence. A full-grown masculine fantasy of speed, technology, bullets, response-wetness (its villain even lives on a waterfall), and the cool balm of pyrrhic revolt, the picture is digital expressionism–a triumph in form and function. Re-edited for an unrated DVD, it's that version that reaches this list, as Mann trims the already lean vehicle of all its fat, inserts Nonpoint's cover of the series-iconic "In the Air Tonight" into a key sequence, and augments the piece's doomed romanticism. It recasts our idealism as the Byronic hero perched on the ruins of a great civilization: chest full of braggadocio, head full of the lulls between calamities where we try to tend to our gardens.

7. The Departed (d. Martin Scorsese)
Martin Scorsese's giant fuck-you to mankind, The Departed's extended epilogue of ebullient carnage is a little like the interminable denouement of The Return of the King with more brain tissue and arterial splatter. The rest of it is no less discontent with the state of masculine relationships, matching itself with Mad Mel's Apocalypto in that sense but more savage in its fashion, as it doesn't have the consolation of birth to soothe its annihilation of father-son bonds. Its parting shot a rat in a city (Boston) described as filthy with the creatures, Scorsese's version of an underwater nativity for all mankind is that there are so freakin' many of us to shoot in the face that we're going to be doing it for a long time. That it boasts as many charms as it does speaks to the seductive quality of misanthropy when clothed in the brimstone of Milton's Satan. It doesn't hurt that Scorsese shoots films that almost literally drip with testosterone.

6. Superman Returns (d. Bryan Singer)
With Richard Donner's deeply flawed cut of Superman II hitting shelves in 2006 as well, there is in that film the literalization of this film's themes of the son becoming the father. Poignancy, too, in the fact that Donner's picture is a resurrection in a way while Singer's opens with the revelation that our favourite man-in-tights has started a buried-memorial for his exploded planet. Also discover in Singer's the year's most affecting scene between a parent and child: Superman tells his maybe-son that no matter the incarnation, there is always a father to compare against in a boy's life. This after another virtuoso moment in which Superman floats above the world and informs (boasts to?) his love that the world is crying out for a saviour–and that saviour is him. The burden of the film, though, isn't mankind's on this alien's shoulders, but rather the impossible hopes of a father's and the insurmountable inadequacies of his son.

5. Children of Men (d. Alfonso Cuarón)
While the bottom of the top 10 is littered with polarized films describing the extraterrestrial landscapes of men versus women, the top (with one notable exception) is populated with pictures that walk a more evenly-weighted line separating the seeker and the sought–the conqueror and the protector. Begin with Alfonso Cuarón's remarkable, lilting Children of Men, which appropriates key images from modern art (including the album cover of Pink Floyd's "Animals") in its tale of terrorism and infertility in one of the most poetically-realized futures since Ridley Scott's Blade Runner set the benchmark for such things. Clive Owen goes on the lam with the last pregnant woman on a planet that's running down–and discovers in the end the only possible way to honour his own dead son. Littered with canny cameos and scenes of virtuoso, fairytale power, it's parable of the finest sense in that although it's indisputably about 2006, it's also about every period of strife in our past and, one presumes, every stretch of despair to come.

4. United 93 (d. Paul Greengrass)
Subtly politicized and sharp as a tack, Paul Greengrass's updating of his own Bloody Sunday does what one thought impossible in treating the subject of 9/11 with a total lack of sentimentality (unlike, it goes without saying, the Oprah-sanctioned World Trade Center). It's fair, amazingly so, in presenting both sides of this impenetrable religious sickness, and it does so by humanizing the desire to die, if one must die, for a greater purpose.

3. Letters from Iwo Jima (d. Clint Eastwood)
Clint Eastwood divorces Paul Haggis, his own personal Chad Lowe, and produces his best picture since A Perfect World. Letters from Iwo Jima is a doom diary of a proud-standing army on the verge of being decimated by a much smaller ground force because of an almost complete lack of air support, munitions, food, medicine, and hope. Of Chinese heritage, I'm particularly resistant to the idea of humanizing the Japanese during WWII, but between this and the great anime Grave of the Fireflies, we have two movies that dramatize the Japanese perspective without glorifying it. Eastwood deals with ideas of a shrinking world in the character of a celebrity Japanese officer who recounts to an American soldier the dinner he once had with Douglas Fairbanks ("Why sure, everyone knows him!") while death and disgrace hover all around them. It's as cruel a dissection of violence's toll on men (and, the film's framing story suggests, the legacy of men) as Unforgiven. Another withering excoriation of war in 2006 and the rites that boys endure to satisfy the image that their culture promotes as heroic.

2. The Fountain (d. Darren Aronofsky)
Darren Aronofsky's maddening, perfectly imperfect impressionist riff on love and eternity–on the importance of asking the right questions and the privilege of dying for, again, something greater than yourself–grew from his own career-threatening obsession with this story. He suffered massive setbacks and the loss of his A-list star (Brad Pitt, replaced by freshly-minted A-lister Hugh Jackman) in order to realize the story of three time periods and three explorers (or maybe just two) searching for the reason, I guess, why we ever fall in love with people and things that are temporary. The ideas in The Fountain are huge and the film is so smart that it doesn't endeavour to answer any of them. It's a lovely picture with a performance by Jackman so committed it approaches maniacal. Devastating from about thirty minutes in, it fits as comfortably into a festival bill with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as does Steven Soderbergh's Solaris. A singular vision that attempts to marry religious imagery with science, The Fountain is alive in ways that too few films are anymore.

1. Pan's Labyrinth (d. Guillermo del Toro)
Brutal and dulcet, often in the same breath, Guillermo del Toro's extraordinary Pan's Labyrinth is about another girl hero in another fairytale wood, tasked with discovering her morality in a morally-bankrupt time and place. Del Toro unearths beauty in his atrocities here, painting his pictures with a sort of indefinable exquisiteness that takes as much care with a boy's face smashed, repeatedly, by a bottle as with the flight of a fairy through a war-clouded sky. Man's desire for progeny and the cruelty of that denial of personal mythology reveals the piece's real concern: that storytelling is the vital thread that gives weight and value to everything in an individual's existence. The characters (arrayed against one another as archetypes of scientist, soldier, mother, child, monster, guide) each understand the importance of their stories–the most jealously guarded commodity in the film is The Word. For del Toro, there is also the eloquence of the immaculately-conceived image; I can't imagine the way that he imagines. Pan's Labyrinth is the best film of 2006.