Films 2006
So anyway, what better way to spend the remaining days of the year than arguing about the films we’ve seen in 2006: the ones we loved, the ones we hated, the ones that made us go WTF?
Hidden (Caché)
Firmly in the ‘WTF was that?’ category this year, pour moi, was Caché
(Hidden), directed and barely written by Michael Haneke. Everyone raved about it but for me it was one of those moments when the end credits start rolling and you want to shout out ‘Are you having a laff, mate?!’ Daniel Auteuil wanders around Paris being paranoid, Juliet Binoche wears a sack and is generically petulant, and it’s probably an allegory about Algeria. What it isn’t is a story. Two hours of my life I will never get back, although, to be fair, those two hours did feel like five, so it’s swings and roundabouts (There, I’ve said it).
A Cock and Bull Story
Faring much better in the art house stakes was A Cock and Bull Story, skilfully adapted by Frank Cottrell Boyce from Laurence Sterne’s anti-novel, Tristram Shandy. A film about how to film an unfilmable novel that was laugh out loud funny and played with cinematic conventions in a celebratory way without being look-at-me-clever.
V for Vendetta
Easily for me the biggest disappointment of 2006 was V for Vendetta (screenplay by the Warchowski brothers), but I’m firmly in that fanboy of the graphic novel camp that regards it as one of the great C20th novels, graphic or otherwise. No film was ever going to do it justice, but they could at least have tried. The gasp out loud low point was V in a pinny frying eggs at the cooker. I’m all for camp undermining of superhero status, but come on.
Casino Royale
On a similar theme they got it so bang on right with Casino Royale that I’m still buzzing from it and dying to go see it a second a time. The Bond franchise had been so easily overtaken in the fast lane by those other two JBs on the block (Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer) that radical action was needed. Writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis went right back to basics and gave us a Bond you actually cared about. Shaken and very, very stirred.
24 season 5
Screenwriters don’t talk enough about TV writing, even though it provides us with most of our paid work and is a mass media that cinema can now only dream of being. My appointment TV in 2006 was provided by three drama series.
24: season 5 hit the ground running by killing off several favourite characters (Dessler is no more – how could you?) and had the guts to replace the president America would like to have with one closer to what they’ve got: a duplicitous weakling sponsoring terrorism to increase his hold on power.
Entourage
On a completely different tack, Entourage was that magical thing: a drama about masculinity that didn’t apologise for itself and provided me with a bunch of great characters I enjoy hanging out with.
Life on Mars
Here in the UK we didn’t do much of note, but Life on Mars at least made us proud of what we can do when we put our minds to it. Writers Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah touted this series around the commissioning editors for seven years and 36 pilot drafts in the face of mass indifference until someone finally had the guts to make it, and bag the runaway TV drama success of the year.
Lucky Number Slevin / Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Two movies I’d willingly have sacrificed a body part to have written (a little toe, maybe) this year were Jason Smilovic’s Lucky Number Slevin and Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Both films had me slapping my thighs and laughing out loud at their wit and cleverness and willingness to play games with narrative. Okay, here’s my foot… make it quick and clean, please (closes eyes).
Inside Man / When the Levees Broke
Special mention this year goes to Spike Lee, a much underrated talent in my view, who this year directed not only the brilliant Inside Man, a clever heist movie with a cracking script by Russell Gewirtz, but also gave us the stunning four-hour documentary, When the Levees Broke: a moving account of Hurricane Katrina’s cataclysmic effect on the city of New Orleans, and how the Bush government not only contributed to the devastation but also left the region for dead in what has to be one of the greatest political outrages in American history.
Lee’s documentary acted to educate us to the very special cultural diversity that existed in New Orleans and is now under threat, and also, through a diverse selection of witnesses and contributors, illuminated the bewildering political machinations at work whilst never losing sight of the profound and heart rending human tragedy at the core of this disaster.
Four hours is a long time to devote to any film, but you owe it to yourself as a human being to see this film.
Hostel / Severance
So anyway, possibly like most of you, I have gorged so much these last two days that I know with absolute certainty that if I were in a horror film now, I’d be the fat guy who gets murdered really early on in the film… whilst eating. Which reminds me of two horror films I really enjoyed this year… and horror isn’t really one of my favourite genres.
But both Hostel and Severance played with horror conventions, political allegory and humour, kept me guessing throughout, and should be in anyone’s top films of 2006.
Hang on, what was that noise? Is someone in the house? Hmmm, is it too late for another turkey sandwich…
Match Point
Another big disappointment this year was Woody Allen’s Match Point. I’ve blotted most of it from my memory, but I remember almost chewing my arm off with boredom that even the incandescent Scarlett Johannsen couldn’t alleviate. I love Woody Allen and I don’t want to believe the naysayers that dismiss his output over the last decade as risible, but this one certainly didn’t do much for his case.
The Queen
On a brighter note, movies that did it for me were, much to my surprise, The Queen. I’ve written about that before and pointed you all to the great Q&A sesh with writer Peter Morgan. Likewise with Pan's Labyrinth.
I also loved the neglected Serenity (Joss Wheedon’s western in space) and the maligned Munich (written by Tony Kuchner and Eric Roth).
But in my view it’s the movies that have you staggering out of the cinema feeling utterly shattered with unexpected emotion that really do the business, and in 2006 those films were :
Children of Men
I've written about this already in my 'is it a Brit movie or not' piece. A low budget dystopia with some stunning long-take set-pieces (just how did they shoot that sequence in the car?), Children of Men (written by Sexton, Arata, Fergus and Ostby) was a surprise hit and strangely moving... I say 'strangely' because sci-fi future dystopias are often intriguing and thought-provoking but rarely, if ever, moving.
The Prestige
I'm losing count of the people I know who didn't bother seeing this when it first hit the cinemas (me included) but have discovered it since as this film about Victorian magicians turns rapidly into a cult movie. The Nolan brothers have done it again and The Prestige is going to be around for a long time. How it wasn't even nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, let alone any of the other major awards is a total fucking mystery (listen to an interview with writer Jonathan Nolan here).
United 93
Too soon? Too tasteless? Too insensitive? Well, anyone who caught the TV movie Flight 93 already knew that a dramatisation of this moment in history could be both tense and moving. United 93 (written and directed by Paul Greengrass) delivered the whole thing doco style and managed to recapture the confused terror of that day despite us having seen it countless times on TV in the intervening five years. The moment when air traffic controllers in New York try to track the incoming second plane only to look out of the window and see it glide into the south tower has to be the cinematic moment of 2006. After that it's a grim journey to the terrifying denouement. (Oh, and all you Loose Change conspiracy mongers. Please go to the Loose Change Guide, do a bit of reading for a change and shut the fuck up).
