Film Reviews: Top 10 films of 2006
With the Golden Globes airing last week and the Oscar nominations announced today, we’ve entered that strange time of year known as award season, when celebrities are given trophies they don’t deserve and mediocrity seems to triumph over greatness. Yet it’s impossible to extinguish the faint hope that this will be the year for a deserving movie to be recognized. With that in mind, I would like to take this opportunity to throw in my two cents on the cinema of 2006 in that classic critical format: the top 10 list.
10. Idiocracy
If it had been given a chance with mainstream audiences, Mike Judge’s satire of modern America has enough belly laughs that it could have been a box office success. Luke Wilson plays a thoroughly average soldier who is frozen in a military experiment and forgotten about for 500 years. He wakes
up in an America so stupefied by fast food and Nascar culture that the most popular movie is a static shot of a naked ass farting, and the entire world shops at a city-sized Costco. Judge is one of America’s premiere humorists and Idiocracy brilliantly satirizes a problem within his country that desperately needs addressing.
9. Stranger Than Fiction
Like Big or Groundhog Day, Stranger Than Fiction is a highconcept comedy that could easily crumble under the weight of its self-conscious intelligence. Yet thanks to exemplary work from the creenwriter, director and cast, Stranger Than Fiction maintains a careful balance between the touching and the clever. Will Ferrell gives a surprisingly convincing dramatic performance as an office drone who suddenly hears an author narrating his life. Director Marc Forester (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) proves capable of investing any genre with his sensitive, dramatic storytelling and a subtle yet kinetic visual style.
8. The Prestige
Christopher Nolan and his screenwriting brother Jonathan teamed up to create one of the most complicated and twisted American thrillers since their previous collaboration, Memento. While The Prestige isn’t as daringly original, the Nolan brothers’ tale of competing magicians in a turnof-the-century London is a brilliant example of mind-fuckery. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman spend the film playing elaborate tricks on each other while the Nolans carefully orchestrate their own trick on the audience.
7. The Science of Sleep
The Science of Sleep marks the first film that director Michel Gondry has made without screenwriter Charlie Kauffman, whose absence is obvious. The plot is a confusing, loosely scripted love story that floats the narrative doesn’t always hold together, Gondry’s visual storytelling captures the audience’s attention on its own.
6. Manderlay
Manderlay is a sequel to Danish auteur Lars Von Trier’s 2003 collaboration with Nicole Kidman, Dogville, but boasts none of the original cast. Normally this is the sign of a low-budget cash in, but for Von Trier, it’s just another cinematic experiment. Shot on a sound stage without any sets—just chalk lines on the floor to indicate where buildings would be—Manderlay is an unconventional cinematic experience. Throw in a satiric plot about slavery and you hardly have the feel-good movie of the year. However, Von Trier has managed to create his third thought-provoking commentary on America, with some amazing performances from an American cast including Bryce Dallas Howard, William Dafoe and Danny Glover.
5. Babel
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel is an ambitious cross-continental character study that falls just short of perfection. Interweaving the lives of four sets of characters in different areas of the world, the film tries to make some grand statements about the emotional disconnect between people of different cultures, as well as the limitations of language. For the first two hours, Iñárritu pulls it off, capturing raw emotion in a realist style by using handheld cameras while still working his lofty themes into the film.
4. The Departed
Instead of creating another anthropological study of organized crime, as in Goodfellas and Mean Streets, here Martin Scorsese aims for pure entertainment and succeeds admirably. This is full-on cops ’n’ robbers shoot em’ up, with a carefully constructed plot (lifted from the 2002 Hong Kong action movie Infernal Affairs), a cast of stars firing on all cylinders and a talented director relentlessly manipulating his audience until the final frames.
3. Pan’s Labyrinth
A gothic horror-fairytale for adults, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is the finest foreign language film of 2006. Like Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone before it, this movie is set during the Spanish civil war, contrasting traditional horror elements with moments of genuine human depravity. Occasional gore and lurid imagery will drive many people away from this film, which is unfortunate since Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the most beautiful and intriguing movies of the year.
2. Children of Men
An action-adventure-science-fiction-art-film, Children of Men defies easy classification except as a piece of truly exhilarating cinema. Set in a dystopic Britain of 2027, the movie wraps difficult subject matter such as terrorism, immigration, activism, and totalitarian governments around the narrative thrust of a thriller. Shooting in his customary long-take style, Alfonso Cuaron’s movie is technically breathtaking—with some entire action sequences captured in a single shot—and emotionally riveting.
1. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
I spent a great deal of time debating which of my top two choices would crown the list, but in the end it had to be Borat. Easily the most subversive and original comedy to come out of Hollywood since 2000, Sacha Baron Cohen’s shockumentary is a true comedic masterpiece. Although many have criticized the movie for its unethical filming techniques and reliance on gross-out humour, Borat will undoubtedly be a staple in smoke-filled dorm rooms for decades. The cult starts here … and it is niiiice.
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