Keep Track of All the Movies I Watch in 2006

Okay, I’m game.

Favorite FilmGood Night and Good Luck. I like a film with some weight. Also very much enjoyed Brick, Thank You for Smoking, Capote,and L’Auberge Espagnole.

Biggest SurprisesRocky Balboa. I liked it very much. I really didn’t expect to. Also liked The Matador and Inside Man a lot more than I expected to.

Biggest DisappointmentsHollywoodland I had hopes, even though I’d heard I shouldn’t. And The Prestige, which I found implausible.

Biggest “Discovery” The fabulous Joselph Gordon-Levitt, who of course I’d seen before, but now respect quite a bit. I saw him in 3 films this year, and he was terrific in all. Mysterious Skin, Brick, and Manic. Lou Taylor Pucci runs a close second in this category. Saw him in Empire Falls, The Chumscrubber, and Thumbsucker.

Favorite DocumentaryAmargosa.

Other Charming Films I’d Just Like to Mention AgainJuneBug, Akeela and the Bee, October Sky (a revisit), Moonlight Mile (a revisit), Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School, Hard Candy (though charming is hardly the word for it), Pizza

Okay, clearly, I like movies.

How about an end of the year wrap-up? Not just of films released in 2006, but of films you saw in 2006. Here’s mine.

Best movie was definitely City of God. Honorable mentions: American Splendor, Brick, The Departed, Good Night, and Good Luck, Inside Man, The Prestige, and Shaun of the Dead.

Worst movie was easily Elizabethtown. Legendary suck on that movie. It’s a pain which lingers. Runners up: Deep Blue, Match Point, Munich.

Surprise (in a good way)—Before Sunrise and especially Before Sunset. Had it not been for the discussion group I was in, I don’t think I would have seen them. And though neither makes my best-of-the-year list, they were both quite a bit better than I expected. Glad I watched them both (rather than just one or the other), also.

Disappointment—Crash. Really, I could have not seen it at all and not missed much.

Best recommendation of the year was a tie: M:I III and The Break-up. These beat out Brick and others only because they’re two movies I absolutely would not have seen without these recommendations, and I really enjoyed them both.

Performance of the year for me was Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick.

Best revisited movie was The Good Thief. We owned it, and I had seen it a few times, but over the past year I really, really got into it. Close second here is Barcelona, which I liked more than I thought I would from what I remembered of it.

Best genre flick was Shaun of the Dead. I had a whole list of winners & also-rans until I remembered this one. Easily the best.

Best documentary was Spellbound. Narrowly beating out An Inconvenient Truth.

Best kids’ movie was probably Duma, which tells you that this wasn’t a spectacular year for kids’ movies. Would love to say The Triplets of Belleville but really, that’s not a kids’ movie.

Okay, now this one impressed me. Great cast. I even liked Kent Douglass (aka Douglass Montgomery), who the TCM folks say was stiff. But I thought he did a great job in a few key scenes.

The story of a young soldier who unwittingly falls in love with a prostitute in World War I London. Mostly pretty natural acting, which is kind of rare in these old films.

A lot of credit goes to director James Whale. The pacing is notably far superior to that of many many films of the twenties and thirties. As much as I want to like them, they are often so many long shots of people doing not much of anything. I got all excited because when the couple first get to her apartment, and they are fixing tea, and there are shots like a close-up of the tea kettle being filled in between shots of the two of them at the sink. It gave so much more a sense of them scurrying around to get to the point where they could sit and talk. And they actually talked like they weren’t about to run out of script.

This movie also makes me a little angry for what censorship has done to our culture. At one point Mae Clarke’s Myra admits that her parents were drunks and that she left home to join the chorus because she was afraid they’d kill her one night when they were both liquored up. In no less than 2 other films I’ve seen lately from the 20s/30s (sampled Pandora’s Box on IFC the other day, but didn’t see the whole thing), there are references to young girls (14!) being pimped out by their fathers. Then for 30-40 years censors clamped down. I just… I can’t even express how much I think pretending that very painful things don’t happen to people, or only happen to “bad” people, has messed up our expectations of life.

I want to see more of James Whale’s direction. He’s most famous for Frankenstein, which maybe I should look at again. It’s been years. I also love his eerie and funny (campy even?) The Old Dark House which I thought had a creepy homoerotic moment in it even before I saw Gods and Monsters.

Another of Turner’s restored pre-code films. Not a real standout for me. A cautionary tale for the working girl.

Why on God’s green earth would I watch this, you might be asking yourself. Well, I have a teenaged daughter who is reading the series and I read the series when I was a teenager, and my darling daughter bought this on half.com, and I apparently have too much time on my hands today. I don’t remember the book that well, but I remember it well enough to know this film didn’t follow it very faithfully at all. And it was a real bore. 4 out of 10 – I am being generous because the makers had the good sense to make it only 93 minutes long!

Couldn’t get through Enduring Love , which is based on a novel by my latest literary fascination, Ian McEwan and stars Daniel Craig and Rhys Ifans. I suspect that this is not a bad film, we just weren’t in the mood for the disturbing nature of it. Rhys Ifans was actually a little too convincingly scary.

Also nodded off during Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest I just barely got through the first one, so I don’t know what I was thinking renting this one. Johnny Depp was a bit interesting in the first one, but in this one he was so obviously drunk it wasn’t interesting at all.

He’s made a lot of good and bad indy films, and I won’t begrudge him making some bucks to sustain his French countryside life. He will have to go a long way to lose my respect after seeing him in Lost in La Mancha (2002)

Will Ferrel’s equivalent to Jim Carey’s “The Truman Show”, but nowhere near as good as “The Truman Show”. I also read where someone compared this to “Punchdrunk Love”, but do not believe the hype! As you may have noticed, I really like Will Ferrel so any movie with him in it instantly appeals to me a bit. The story is somewhat interesting: Ferrel’s character finds he is the character in a novel and is about to be killed off. It has all the right elements (to me) for a good movie, but somehow it just doesn’t cut it. I was glad when it ended and I didn’t like the ending at all! :-) 6 out of 10

The directorial debut by the man who directed “The Exorcist”. A group of Marines and one astronaut who all went crazy either from the horrors of the Vietnam War or, in the case of the astronaut, inexplicably are put together in a castle in the Pacific Northwest for treatment. A new psychiatrist comes to help them and seems as crazy as they are. This film would probably be better viewed a second time as it does seem to possess “deeper meaning” and all that jazz, but I thought it was a bit boring and can’t imagine watching it again for a long, long time. Oh well, we own it so maybe it will be on my list of movies for 2012 or something! I didn’t really care for the astronaut character; I probably would have like the film better had I liked him. It does have some redeeming qualities though. A real thinker, and semi-interesting albeit slow-moving. 6 out of 10

62. The Prestige

The best word I can think of to describe this movie, and the ending especially, is “intense.” I had listened to a review of it some time ago, but it didn’t really prepare me for the intellectual grip of the film. Glad I got to see it in the theater, even if it was a dollar theater.

Being a movie about magicians, you know there’s going to be a twist at the end. I won’t say too much about that, but this: I knew pretty early on where the twist was going to come from (if that makes any sense), but I still couldn’t quite put my finger on the twist itself. When it did finally arrive, I realized I should have seen it a lot earlier, but I didn’t mind. There certainly is a lot to enjoy about this film beyond that question. This is one of the few films I can think of, for example, that manages to interweave three disparate timelines successfully. Sure, it was done for misdirection. But it also works really well.

Good acting, good writing, good directing, and visually engaging. I don’t remember the music, but other than that I think there’s not much more I could ask of a film.

61. The Devil Wears Prada

Why is anyone taking this movie seriously? OK, they managed to land some acting talent—Meryl Streep is about as interesting as she ever is (though I’m not saying much when I say that), and Stanley Tucci is always fun to watch. But neither of them has made a career of being picky about their movie choices. And beyond them, this movie is exactly what you think it is. Namely, derivative crap. If you are turned off by the presence of talent-void actors like Anne Hathaway and pretty-boy Adrian Grenier—as, of course, you should be—then don’t waste your time.

In case you’re wondering, I saw it because we usually watch a movie with the Mother-in-Law on Christmas. And it was either this or Rumor Has It. Not sure I made the right choice.