2006: 10 Great Moments and 5 Bad Ones

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2006: 10 Great Moments and 5 Bad Ones

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Anyone felt similar Good and Bad moments with our own Movies this year?
Every year critics try to bring order to howling chaos. Here's an example of what I mean by chaos: the list of movies released in '06. Try to make sense of this roster of some successes and many, many failures! What strikes me most about the year in cinema is the doubling effect of good ideas and poor ones.
Example: In a pink-tinted haze, Sophie Coppola tries to make a film about royalty, Marie Antoinette, and then releases it within months of The Queen. There, Stephen Frears and company depict the troubling duality of such a symbol, the power-struggles in a family where the most powerful member is the sovereign of a nation. Compare the two, it's like watching Reese Witherspoon's Elle Woods and Simone de Beauvoir having a debate.
And take the Reitmans: dad Ivan makes My Super Ex-Girlfriend, one of the worst movies of the year, and his son Jason makes one of the best, Thank You For Smoking. Woody Allen makes a featherweight comedy about magic; Christopher Nolan makes the art of the prestidigitator a dark and bloody art.

Since film reviewing is a matter of remembering a few images and trying to recreate them in prose, here goes:


1.The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Our movies aren't equipped with much breathing room. So the scene of the neighbors yacking on the stairwells, their compassion stirred but not awakened by their drunken neighbor's plight, were all just a small part of the breadth of this vast film. Despite the morbid title, this was a genuine human comedy.
2. Brick

While there's a lot of entire movies I'd trade for the scene of Rosario Dawson dancing on the roof in Clerks II, here's an image that really leaves an after-image: the dark-eyed Nora Zehetner in a crimson Chinese dress, reciting the lyrics to Yum-Yum's song "The Sun, Whose Rays Are All Ablaze" from The Mikado over some slow jazz piano; she's the entertainment at an Upper Crust party crashed by the baffled Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). This seductive taunting is the most essential film noir moment in Rian Johnson's extravagantly good homage to the genre. But I also loved Brendan's cat-like smile as he precipitated an attack from a football player halfway as big as The Rock. "Ya got heart, kid!" An anecdote to a year's worth of inspirational football movies.

3. Thank You For Smoking

Drinking with the boss is always fraught. Having a cocktail with the Luciferian tobacco titan known as The Captain (Robert Duvall), Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is informed of the proper way to make a mint julep. "You know the secret to a really good julep? Crush the mint down into the ice with your thumb and grind it in. Releases the menthol....You know who taught me that?," murmurs the Captain. "Fidel Castro." Slurping on his drink, the supine Naylor sempahores panic: trying to come up with the right facial expression ("A grand old gent! Salud, Fidel!" "That communist bastard" "...eh..oh dear..." )

4. Notes on a Scandal

Easy: Judi Dench tragically running her fingertips on Cate Blanchett's arm, trying to convince both of them that it's really all about some meeting of the minds between refined ladies.

5. The Prestige

In real life I'm not a conspiracy theorist. As in the well-known case of the Project for the New American Century, it's clear that conspirators make their plans public. Meglomaniacs love applause. But get me in a dark theater, and it's a different story. We are property. Covetous alien eyes watch our green earth. Somewhere in a stainless-steel bunker, there is a madman stroking a cat, and dreaming of the crime of the eon. There's a whole clinic of them out there, Dr. Mabuse, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, and Dr. No. Devils and Martians contend for our pitiful flesh. I love big villains and mad scientist speeches. It's a thrill when the single word "Tesla" turns up on a scrap of paper. And then Nolan teases us with the mad scientist's entrance, keeping the camera fixed so David Bowie can walk up to it. Magic.

6. Pan's Labyrnth

As above, about the villains. Sergi Lopez -- deathless for With A Friend Like Harry... --- grooming himself compulsively like a cockroach, polishing his boots as if one speck upon them would bring down the country. Little does he know that he and his fascists are dwarfed by the Goyaland realm underneath his feet.

7. Children of Men

Beware of policemen who have started referring to themselves in the second-person. Especially beware of them if they're starting to grow a sense of humor: "Show us the 'fugee face. What does a 'fugee look like?"

8. The Queen

It gets a laugh, Helen Mirren's slow turn to the audience during the title, a portrait Queen coming to life and putting her level gaze on her social inferiors. Which would include the entire population of Earth, by her lights. But there's another scene that popped out on the second viewing. Her Majesty has to take an emergency call from Tony Blair in the kitchen at Balmoral. The entire staff, a few dozen cooks, chiefs and bottle-washers, vanish noislessly, clearing out the room. Before departing, one of them, who we don't really see, deftly shoves a chair behind the queen. The action cuts to Blair's end of the telephone line, so we don't get the note of comedy disturbing the seriousness. The comedy, that is, of Elizabeth sitting down without looking, knowing that a chair would be behind her. You see, that's what they said about Queen Victoria: She always knew there would be a chair waiting behind her if she chose to sat down, because that's how they ran things at the court of England.

9. Dave Chapelle's Block Party

Too many great images in this movie, which was the easiest top-ten choice of the year. Loved the tour of the crazy hippie tower, and Mos Def can just stand around with his hands in his pockets and still look fascinating. What was sweeter than Erykah Badu singing "Back in the Day" while fighting the sportive breeze that wants to de-wig her?

10. An Inconvenient Truth

Maybe putting this film on the list is a political choice, but Al Gore conquering his inner reluctance to be a politician -- that formality and stiffness that everyone notices -- was as interesting as many big-name actors stewing in their own juices or pushing their own envelopes.

So these were all memorable moments, but what about those images you'd love to have out of your head for good?

1. A Prairie Home Companion

"The death of an old man is not a tragedy...forget his short-comings." That's Virginia Madsen, wandering around the set of this film as the Angel of Death. I'd love to take her advice and forget this short-coming, but the obsequeis for Altman are making some people put this lox on their best 10 list. It's a long seance of mawkishness combined with pants-dropping humor, and the worst moment was supposedly the highlight: Lindsay Lohan massacring "Frankie and Johnny."

2.Bobby

I know people who walked out during the giant psychedellic orange, which was like something from a Monkees episode. But the cringe-moment has to be Demi Moore in front of an orchestra, trying to emulate Catherine O'Hara's Lola Heatherton.

3. Crank

The Amy Smart sex scene, where she's so aroused she has to have Jason Statham right in front of the tourists. Watching Smart was like watching a live feed from a parallel universe where the women aren't sentient.

4. A Good Year

Russell Crowe doing the "look, my eyes are really tennis balls" gag with a pair of tennis balls as he flounders in a swimming pool full of mucky water. The line between A-list filmmaking and Jackass grows ever shorter...

5. RV

Speaking of which, the really worst moment of the year was this one's payload: a fountain of raw sewage. To be fair, Robin Williams had some inspired physical comedy in this movie, and there were more than a few sharp lines in it. But anyone who has had proximity to a movie set can imagine the joyless hard labor of setting up the props, cleaning the muck up between takes ... maybe Barry Sonnenfeld, who had worked on a few really good movies, was thinking, "this will be the crap joke that ends them all! We'll stop it here!" Guess again; it's only going to get worse.
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