Films of the Year That Was

Happy New year! And you know what that means - Lists! There are some - Andy Horbal being one - who are inclined to worry about the role and uses of lists and list making. Me, not so much. I like making lists - sometimes spend a lot of time brooding over them (not as much as I used to, but still) - but try to keep them minimalist. Year end lists are guides, indexes - they draw attention to some films or other, to what people liked or thought in a given year, to the films people think are important. Kind of a sketch of what the writer likes, too, how they think. Which can be fun, might even be useful, but ought to be taken with a grain of salt.

So - what you get here are numbers, titles, maybe a pithy remark or two, maybe a link. For this list, I have rules: these are films released, for the first time, in some kind of commercial theater, in Boston, during calendar year 2006. No festival screenings, nothing that showed twice at the MFA or one night at Harvard, nothing that didn't make it to the city and I saw on DVD. This list, my literal end-of-the-year list, is the only time I care about when (or if) the film got released, commercially - after this list, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu goes back to its proper place among the 2005 films, Army of Shadows back to the 60s. (I should go back and revisit past years. The Ongoing Education of Steven Carlson does that - keeps a retroactive list of lists: you need to do that, to keep track of films as they trickle into the country.) Anyway - time to get to the movies. I give you - the best of 2006, per me.

1. Inland Empire - David Lynch upping the strangeness ante again. An exploration of the look of digital photography - light and shadow and depth of field. Rooms and doorways and lamps and hallways and faces. It's as much art as film. It's quite extraordinary.
2. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu - Christi Puiu's heartbreaking and exhilarating story of an old man lost in the hell of Romania's medical system.
3. Army of Shadows - Jean-Pierre Melville's matter of fact rendering of the French resistance though the eyes of a cell in Lyons.
4. Three Times - Hou Hsiao Hsien exploring love and movies (his own career) through three stories starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen - shifting between styles as he shifts between periods, creating a complex and beautiful work.
5. L'Enfant - The Dardennes' brothers second Cannes winner, the story of a petty thief selling his child, and then repenting of this sin and redeeming himself. They have mastered this kind of story and this kind of filmmaking, to the point of becoming a kind of genre to themselves, which they use to great effect.
6. The Science of Sleep - Charlie Kaufman films have become a bit of a genre unto themselves as well. Here is one without Charlie Kaufman's involvement. Michel Gondry directs Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourgh through dreams of love.
7. United 93 - Paul Greengrass uses his documentary inspired style to great effect in showing the events of 9/11, on the ground, and in one of the planes. What happens in the plane is more conventional than it might seem - with fairly carefully constructed plot point snad character arcs, but it is still extraordinary.
8. Children of Men - the last film I saw in 2006.... what V for Vendetta aspired to, a convincing SF dystopian action film; poignant, pointedly political, a believable world, physically and psychologically, well acted, beautifully shot and masterfully directed, with action sequences worthy of Johnny To. First rate - a fitting way to finish the year.
9. Cache - kind of a slow motion Old Boy, about vengeance and surveillance and families... these three films - United 93, Children of men, Cache, start to usher in the apocalypse, a theme rather common these days; death, madness, the collapse of civilization, of the individual - with or without hope of salvation - there's a lot of that going around.
10. Clean - Olivier Assayas directs Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte, both at the top of their game, in a film about a rock star's widow who is forced to stop fucking up.

Plus: another 15, say, that aren't far off. The miserablism starts to get thick, I notice...

Mutual Appreciation - Andrew Bujawski's minor classic about a minor rock star sinking into minor self-destruction....
Kairo (that's the Kurosawa Pulse) - a quiet apocalypse
A Scanner Darkly - personal apocalypse
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance - in which costs are tallied
La Moustache - what if the apocalypse comes and only one man knows?
Old Joy - apocalypse of a friendship
Volver - though sometimes, things turn and return
Tristram Shandy - birth
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles - reconciliation
Battle In Heaven - repentence
Breaking News - cranes
Half Nelson - dialectics
Prairie Home Companion - perhaps the world will end not with a bang or a whimper but with a song...
Little Miss Sunshine - ...by Rick James - that works
Temps Qui Reste - it's this or Borat, but this one fits the theme a bit better. (Borat was on the list, of course, until I saw Children of Men at the last minute and pushed things down and started writing comments. This is a lesson in the arbitrariness of lists: I want just 25 titles - no more! - and when I started writing comments - a theme emerged - death, apocalypse - perhaps alongside redemption, rebirth, cycles, etc. - a theme obviously suggested by Children of Men... And so the films on the edge of the 25 get included or omitted because they fit the theme more than whether they were better or worse - though that whole better/worse thing is a bit of a sham - at best, any order of merit is really arranged in chunks of 4-5 films, that could be listed in any order. Bubble? Ten Items or Less? Fast Food Nation? Talledega Nights? Stolen? All perfectly respectable choices too. Anyway, it's time to stop worrying about it.)

And finally - though it is way too early to really even attempt such a thing - a first cut at the best films made in 2006:

1. Inland Empire
2. Children of Men
3. Science of Sleep
4. United 93
5. A Scanner Darkly
6. The Scream of the Ants (might be the only film I saw at a festival this year - the only unreleased film I saw, at least at this level. Mohsen Makhmalbaf goes looking for something in India, probably destroying his career in Iran in the process.)
7. Old Joy
8. Volver
9. Prairie Home Companion
10. Borat (what? I told you this stuff was arbitrary. Leave me alone!)