The Ten Best Films of 2006 That I Saw

The Ten Best Films of 2006 That I Saw

2006 was a light year for good movies, with no Oscar front-runner at the end of the year and dwindling returns at the box office (if you don't count that Pirate movie). But that doesn't mean good films weren't to be found among tales set in alternate worlds, anachronistic noirs in modern settings, and more than one high-tech spectacle. These were the best films that I saw in 2006. –Scott Hardie

#10: V for Vendetta
The tenth slot on this list was a tug-of-war between this film and Steven Spielberg's Munich, the far more esteemed of the two. Ultimately, Munich makes an easy point (revenge sure makes you feel scummy!) with a convenient genre and the gift of hindsight, but Vendetta has it harder, scoring much subtler jabs at contemporary governments under the guise of truly awkward sci-fi premise, with a faceless, poetry-sprouting terrorist hero. If you doubt the film's success, replace its setting with America and its fascist villain with Bush: Suddenly liberals claiming to love America would root for its destruction, and conservatives claiming to hate moral relativity would either cheer or boo the protagonist just because of the flag he opposes. It's a challenging film that rewards deep thinkers, but it has plenty of pretty explosions (and Natalie Portman) for viewers merely after a good sci-fi flick, and I appreciated the high-wire balancing act it pulled off between the two. · (rent it)

#9: Casino Royale
As important a Bond reinvention for the 2000s as GoldenEye was for the 1990s, Casino Royale strips the legend of the Cold War antiquity and over-the-top cartoonish gimmickry of his past, suggesting not that the man is a hero, but that the hero is only a man. One of cinema's most influential and enduring characters is now as lean, guarded, and somber as the grim world he inhabits with us, where our political scions and religious terrorists have in common with his terrorism sponsors and African warlords that they're all, of course, just in it for the money. Daniel Craig is just right as the tough-as-nails Bond for whom bedding sheiks' gorgeous wives and practicing parkour stunts across an elaborate construction-site playground are anything but fun. Despite its hero's scowl, the film delivers a solid good time, with exciting stunts, frightening scares, and, for once, a glimpse of spycraft in practice. It's an ambitious, serious action film worthy of the storied cinematic history that precedes it. · (rent it)

#8: Final Fantasy VII:
Advent Children
I've heard people who have never played a Final Fantasy video game raving about this flick for its art direction and spectacular action, but I still remain skeptical that anyone who doesn't know chocobos from curaga would get very much into it. That said, for longtime fans this is a glorious dream, a 100-minute love letter to the fanboys who gape at physics-defying katana-duels in the clouds (no pun intended) from a company that clearly loves delivering the goods in style. Square has always been one of the most ambitious firms in the business, and the failure of their super-expensive The Spirits Within may have scaled back their release platform but not their creativity. In this dizzying sequel, they have whipped up a sci-fi spectacle worthy of the adoration of their legion of fans. It's anime meets video games on crack, or maybe just a phenomenal eye-candy sugar rush. · (rent it)

#7: Running Scared
Low expectations always help a movie seem better (I guess that Poseidon remake wasn't too horrible...), but how could a gritty, child-in-peril thriller with nobody's favorite movie star Paul Walker as a bottom-feeding mob bagman turn out to be this good? First, it has a method to its gruesome madness, revealed in full in the cleverly animated closing credits if you didn't catch on sooner: The movie is a gory adult fairy tale, where the babyfaced Cameron Bright (good actor for his age) encounters pimps, pedophiles, and pushers as the Brothers Grimm might have portrayed them. Second, it takes the grit into delirious, NC17-skirting excess, with graphic hedonistic sex and gunshot wounds so improbable they had to be created with CGI. An early shot of a victim-hurtling, point-blank shotgun blast shown from the gun's point of view sets the tone for a movie that's like the killer shark of Tarantino knockoffs, unable to stop swimming or it will die. If you can stomach it, it's one hell of a movie. · (rent it)

#6: C.S.A.: Confederate
States of America
The satire is wicked, unpredictable, and quite clever in the everyone-needs-to-see-this movie of 2006, C.S.A., a fake documentary of American history after the Confederacy won the Civil War. Though the film occasionally spends too long setting up its premise with names and dates, it's not really interested in alternative history, but in racial politics, suggesting that a modern-day America that still keeps slaves wouldn't be all that different from the real one that doesn't. Depending on your perspective, you might agree that the oppression of yesterday still dominates the culture of today, as wicked parodized by commercials for the Slave Shopping Network and a COPS-like series about runaways, but even if you (like me) think we've come a long way, it will serve as a funny and sometimes startling reminder of how much worse we could be. · (rent it)

#5: Bubble
Steven Soderbergh's explicit experiments with Bubble were whether a film released simultaneously in theaters, on cable tv, and on DVD could be successful (it was), and whether a film shot on real locations using only non-actors and no scripts could work (it did). However, his implicit experiment was even more interesting: Could a story told with the scarcest of details still manage to entertain? Yes, in the form of a pleasant hypnotic trance induced by watching these ordinary people go about their mundane lives with just enough dots connected for it to mean something. It's the unfulfilled promise of reality tv, the opportunity to watch the quiet milieu of everyday life, and you can't turn away from it. There is a plot, and some creepy imagery courtesy of the baby dolls in various stages of completion at the factory where the characters work, but the focus here is on the timbre of ordinary life and how it feels when something happens to you that's only supposed to happen in the movies. · (rent it)

#4: Brick
California high schools have been the setting for everything from time-traveling stoner comedies to alien-invader horror flicks, so why not a hard-boiled detective noir? Brick takes the concept and sprints with it, delivering line after line of brilliantly punchy, rapid-patter dialogue that springs from pulp gumshoe novels of the 1930s. It's a ticklish joy for viewers who enjoy sharp wit and actors who can keep up with the pace, and almost qualifies the movie as a comedy despite the dark neo-noir at the core of its complex plot. There's a smooth, efficient style to the film's look as well, with a harrowing foot-chase that ends with an unexpected abruptness, and a sparseness of detail in the environments that suggests they're unrealistic archetypes as much as the characters are. A premise this challenging and prone to self-serious camp can only succeed with total commitment from the cast and writer-director Rian Johnson, and it's a qualified and highly entertaining success. · (rent it)

#3: Battle in Heaven
The phrase "frequent graphic sex scenes" is rarely associated with a film this outright hostile to its audience, with minutes going by at a time with neither action nor dialogue, and a long trail of dissatisfied viewers. It's the least entertaining film I saw all year (and I saw Marebito), so I can't recommend it, but I can recognize what a complex, meaningful, and poignant film it is beneath the surface, a tale rich in tragedy for the right interpreter. It's a redemptive tale about a timid, obese man who suffers more humiliations than a Ben Stiller character, bullied by his wife into a moneymaking scheme that takes a life, and this transgression leads the man on a Christ-like quest for Heaven by putting himself through what he considers the ultimate embarassment. Through his journey, the film achieves a moving portrait of a suffering human heart. It also has the single most beautiful image of the year, as the hero stares at the Mexican countryside from atop a mountain and weeps at its splendor. · (rent it)

#2: The Three Burials
of Melquiades Estrada
Hell exists on Earth and Tommy Lee Jones evokes it perfectly in his first feature film, as his characters traverse a vast, scorching stretch of southern Texan wasteland with only enough water and shoes for one of them. The film is at times funny and quirky, but this epic journey into a desert inferno takes it to a whole different level, where a man careless towards others learns how careless the universe can be towards him. Depending on your outlook, that lesson might inspire you to laughs or to tears (or both), but either way the film can be deeply moving. It's a statement of personal values – namely, that a life has meaning when you give it one – by Jones, a star who has always exuded integrity and now invests his film with it. His unpredictable tale gives us funny characters, a harrowing journey over the Mexican border, and a hell of a lot to think about. · (rent it)

#1: Brokeback Mountain
After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I didn't think Ang Lee would be robbed of the Best Picture Oscar yet again, but there you have it: The best film of the year settled for trophies for Lee and his writers. Maybe that's due to a red-state backlash by people who won't even see the movie, because those who do see it know that it's not really about two cowboys in love: It's about how any two people denied their feelings by society will see their lives decay, the same potent message conveyed by Lee's other films. Here is his purest and most heartbreaking distillation of the theme to date, as two men discover feelings they didn't know were possible and learn how to appreciate life to its fullest, and then have to pretend they don't know how to feel that good. There's little intellectual argument here and no agenda save the one we project onto it; the film succeeds solely by striking at the heart with powerful force. It's a majestic and profoundly moving epic for anyone who knows how good it feels to love. · (rent it)

Honorable Mentions:

American Dreamz
Our nation's culture is a long way down the road of underachievement by now, so it's inevitable someone would see symmetry in the popularity of a president who defiantly avoids newspapers and the popularity of a tv talent contest that celebrates amateurs not good enough for real careers. Fortunately the someone who noticed is Paul Weitz, who previously used his stars Hugh Grant and Dennis Quaid to sharp effect, and here carves a wicked, timely satire. I wish it was sharper, but it still has plenty of laughs. · (rent it)

Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
The improvised mockumentary has become very much in vogue for would-be Christopher Guests, and who better to take a crack at it than one of the journalistic jokers from The Daily Show, which meets absurd characters with a straight face. Star Rob Corddry plays his character straight against a group of misfit paintball warriors and makes for a weak center, but his co-stars win big laughs with their bizarro commitment to the weekend-warrior sport. I wish it had a script, but funny is still funny. · (rent it)

District B13
James Bond wasn't the only one chasing a parkour superstar this year: Luc Besson filled his latest glossy, bargain-budget action flick with self-trained stuntmen practicing the exercise fad. The electrifying opening chase scene featuring parkour founder David Belle being chased through the windows and up the lattices of a twisting apartment complex is worth the rental all by itself. The rest of the film may be by-the-numbers action cheese, but Besson knows his discipline like a master cheese-smith. · (rent it)

Munich
Spielberg's latest effortless masterpiece has visual richness to spare and wears its noble intentions on its sleeve, but was still attacked by the faithful on both sides of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, warring critics whose mutually exclusive arguments canceled each other out. I appreciated its grace and its worthy ethical argument, even if I didn't buy every minute of the plot. It's a strong and important message that still matters in our time: Revenge yields revenge until we lose that which we seek to protect. · (rent it)

Silent Hill
Advent Children is made to excite and is likely only to excite video game fans. Silent Hill, on the other hand, is made to scare the bejeezus out of you, and is likely to have that effect on anyone. This year's valedictorian of the what-the-fuck-is-going-on school of horror moviemaking, the movie strands its heroine in a nightmare beyond reason or redemption, bringing her (and us) visions of things that cannot be. It's H.P. Lovecraft for the Playstation generation, and it's a gorgeously freakish vision to behold. · (rent it)

The Worst Film of 2006 That I Saw:
Bottoms Up
Jason Mewes: "De Niro who?"
Paris Hilton: "I think I'm going to cry."
Jason Mewes: "I have that effect on women."
Bad-movie junkies found a dream come true in this romantic comedy pairing the hotel-chain princess with the guy who plays Jay of Jay & Silent Bob. It's a perfect-storm of cinematic badness, full of homophobia and shit jokes, starring two people whose main facial expression is visible strain at trying to remember their Dick-and-Jane lines. Kevin Smith appears long enough for a loud fart joke, and it's his nepotism that has led to godawful productions like this and 2002's worst film Vulgar, since he leverages his success into starring vehicles for his talentless stoner buddies. Edited without breaks between scenes and featuring the "actors" wearing what looks like their own clothes, this is precisely the nuclear-grade disaster it seems. · (rent it)