I have to start somewhere, and I want to be efficient since I’m the last one out the gate, and you’re no doubt worn out by all this end of the year nonsense by now, so without further ado, here are my ten runners-up, the ten films that I genuinely loved that simply don’t have a place on my top ten list. If this was my top ten list for the year, I’d be content and happy, and I’d walk away thinking it had been one heck of a good year of film overall.
NUMBER TWENTY: TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY (dir. Adam McKay; scr. Will Ferrell & Adam McKay)
I don’t think there was a better film made this year about the American id.
BORAT and CARS both made some big statements about our national identity, but for my money, here’s the film that got it most right. I was a big fan of ANCHORMAN, but Adam McKay makes a huge jump as a director from that film to this one, and I think what makes it really worthwhile is the way it manages to mock the fundamental things that make these characters American, but also celebrates them at the same time. This is affectionate in a way that BORAT isn’t, and it’s outrageous in a way that CARS can’t be. It reveals some of our worst tendencies, and it underlines the things that make us great.
And it is funny as shit.
Let me confess something: I have a soft spot for the original SMOKEY & THE BANDIT. I think it’s a pretty great commercial entertainment, and I don’t mean that in some post-modern hipster ironic sort of way, either. I just plain enjoy the film, and it makes me laugh even today when I revisit the film. Part of what makes that film so funny is how Burt Reynolds is playing a completely clueless douchebag. Oh, sure, he’s charming and funny, but he’s pretty much a public menace and a giant bag of ego. I love watching Evel Knievel for the same reasons, especially VIVA KNIEVEL!, the film he starred in the same year that SMOKEY & THE BANDIT came out. There’s a lot of both of them in Ricky Bobby. He is unfettered ego backed up by just enough talent to make him dangerous, and there’s nothing more American than that.
I’ve heard fans of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE talk about how they love the 12-minute dinner table sequence in the film, and it’s nicely written. It’s all exposition, and it has to do all the heavy lifting for the entire rest of the movie... setting up Steve Carrell’s backstory, establishing that Paul Dano isn’t talking, demonstrating the active friction between Greg Kinnear and Alan Arkin, explaining Abagail Breslin’s pageant history and positioning Toni Collette right there in the middle... and the miracle of it is that it plays at all. For my money, I’ll put the dinner table scene in TALLADEGA NIGHTS up against it. “I will come at you like a spider monkey, Chip!” Ricky Bobby’s insistence on praying to the Baby Jesus. “I’m all jacked up on Mountain Dew!” Cal Naughton’s constant hero worship, and his offer to hold Carley’s hair. The scene makes me cry laughing because it is random and loud and stinks of crazy, and it somehow strikes me as hilariously real in a way that something as meticulously scripted as LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE can’t quite get at. The dinner table scene in TALLADEGA is probably just as long as the one in LMS, but it’s not in service of exposition. It’s all just behavior.
There’s a lot of that in the film. Molly Shannon does her best work in any film so far in her brief moments onscreen. I actually watched one of her scenes twice, laughing out loud both times. I was already completely in love with this film before they even introduced Sacha Baron Cohen as Jean Girard, but he pushed it from being a comedy I really enjoyed to being a film that made my runners-up list. Everyone freaking out about Borat this year strikes me as a little late to the party. I agree that Borat is very, very funny. And I thought he was funny when I saw him originally about three years ago. And that was me showing up late to the party as far as the original UK fans are concerned, I know. My point being, Sacha’s been playing Borat for a while. And I think the film put an punctuation mark at the end of a sentence he’s been working on for a while. People saying, “Can he create another character now?” miss the point; he did. Jean Girard is all new, something we haven’t seen him do before, and it’s another great original characterization. His French accent may be one of the least convincing and most blatantly fake accents in the history of movies. And that’s why it makes me laugh so hard. I’ve said before that I think Sacha Baron Cohen is the new Peter Sellers, and I think this is the performance that confirms it. He throws himself into the role with an impressive abandon, and delivers.
Gary Cole is fantastically sleazy as Ricky’s father, and Jane Lynch continues to prove that she is willing to be as big a freak as possible for the sake of laughs. Michael Clarke Duncan gets at least one of the film’s best lines (“DON’T YOU PUT THAT VOODOO ON ME, RICKY BOBBY!”) and Amy Adams, one of last year’s Oscar darlings, gives a surprisingly dedicated performance and has never been more adorable than she is near the end of the film. Lots of real NASCAR stalwarts show up in the film as themselves, and they deserve credit for taking part in something that could have easily turned into a mean-spirited roasting of the culture of NASCAR. I may not be a fan of NASCAR myself, but I recognize how much Ferrell and McKay obviously care about the characters they’ve created. That affection is a big part of why I included this film on the list, and it’s why this will be one of the first films from this entire list that I look forward to revisiting.
NUMBER NINETEEN: STREET FIGHT (dir. Marshall Curry)
This is the second highest-ranking documentary on my list this year, and it’s one of the last films I watched as I was putting my list together. I had no real expectations for it, and I am surprised by what a powerful study of modern race, media, and politics it turns out to be. This is a great film about where we are right now, and one that people should see if they want to understand how the system works, and how it doesn’t.
The documentary tells the story of the 2002 mayoral race in Newark, New Jersey. But more than that, it tells the story of what happens to anyone who chooses to be part of the political process in America. If you want to run for office, even if you have the best possible intentions, even if you genuinely want to change your community for the better, I believe that you will, by definition, get dirty. No matter how well you behave, no matter how you conduct yourself, the system will grind you up somehow, and you will get dirty. That may sound cynical, but I guess growing up as part of the generation that came of age with Watergate will do that to you. Even the politicians I like and respect... and they are few and far between... I approach with a fair amount of skepticism because I know that they have successfully navigated a system that rewards bullying and manipulation, and that worries me.
The mayoral race was between newcomer Cory Booker and incumbent Sharpe James. Director Marshall Curry is given full access by Booker’s campaign, and there’s no doubt that Curry likes Booker. Even so, I think Curry approaches the campaign without predjudice at the start. Sharpe James turns out to be a great movie bad guy, an almost cartoonishly corrupt career politician who is practically an institution in Newark at the start of the film. Booker comes after James without hesitation, but I don’t think he really knows what he’s doing at the start of the film. I think Booker is an idealist, a young man with young man’s ideas. He recognizes the fundamental rot at the heart of the James administration, but I don’t think he counts on just how rough James is willing to play.
The situation is made even more complicated by virtue of the fact that both Booker and James are black men, but race becomes an issue because Booker has light skin and James exploits that. The notion that James would actually attack Booker for being “too white” or that he’d slur him by suggesting that he might be Jewish is ridiculous... but that’s exactly what happens. And that’s just the start. You have to see the film to appreciate how blatant and out of control every step of this contest is, but what makes me maddest is the nonsense we see occur on the actual election day. There is no way you can watch the film and tell me that this was a fair election. Every crooked tactic in the world gets trotted out in an effort to control who has access to the ballot boxes and how they vote. My father has started to volunteer to co-ordinate elections in his local area because he has such strong concerns about election fraud and mismanagement. Seeing this film, and realizing that this happened in a major city in this media age and nothing was done about it, I find myself unconvinced that there’s any way I will ever trust an election in my lifetime again. This film may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s a film you owe it to yourself as an informed citizen to see.
NUMBER EIGHTEEN: THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP (dir./scr. Michel Gondry)
You can read my original review of this film right here.
The second-best film this year at creating a dream state.
Once I’ve seen a movie the first time, the only reason to rewatch it is to try and recapture the particular feeling you get from watching it. The films I see that don’t have any particular identity, the ones that just blur together into a big blur of Hollywood mush at the end of the year, those are the movies I’m never going to rewatch because there’s nothing that makes them any different from the Hollywood mush the year before or the year after. The films I know I’m going to watch again are the movies that caused a genuine reaction in me. THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP is a movie that, much like Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, makes you want to be in love. Or maybe more specifically, it makes you want to have the dreams you have when you’re in love. If you’re a romantic and you find yourself in those first dizzy days of knowing someone, in a situation ripe with possibility, your dreams become more candy-coated, more playful, more inviting. You can’t wait for the next night. Part of it is because the pleasure of falling in love is thinking about what might be, and Gondry’s film is like tapping directly into that feeling, mainlining it for a few hours. It’s a fizzy drink that tickles going down, and further proof that Gondry is a filmmaker who should not be underestimated.
NUMBER SEVENTEEN: BREAKING AND ENTERING (dir./scr. Anthony Minghella)
Would you like to know why I don’t like CRASH?
Check out Anthony Minghella’s delicate human comedy if you’d like to see a more complete and persuasive argument than I can mount here. I know what Paul Haggis was trying to do with his (shudder) Oscar-winning film... he wanted to take inventory of Los Angeles as it exists right now. But Haggis ladled on the obvious metaphor and the “surprise twists,” and the end result just chaps my ass. Minghella seems to have approached his first original screenplay since TRULY MADLY DEEPLY with much the same intent. He seems to be taking stock of the world around him. In his case, London. Or, more specifically, North London, around King’s Cross. It’s a rough area, but Jude Law’s character is part of a design team working on a way to rehab the entire area, a major urban development project. Wanna bet he’s going to meet some of the inhabitants of King’s Cross, and that they’re going to affect the way he looks at the world and his life?
And wanna bet Minghella’s got a feather touch that proves once again why we started paying attention to him in the first place?
Will (Law) is partnered with Sandy (Martin Freeman) on the project, and the two of them open a new office for their architecture design firm. Almost as soon as they open the office, someone burgles them. Then, as soon as they report it and replace their things, someone burgles them again. What happens to Will when he tries to catch the thief will affect everyone around him: his girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn), her daughter Bea (Poppy Rogers), a Bosnian refugee named Amira (Juliette Binoche), her son Miro (Rafi Gavron), and even the cleaning crew at the offices. Even so, the way Minghella chooses to spin his narrative threads, it never feels forced, and there are no easy epiphanies. It’s a film of quiet revelation, and it really comes down to the chemistry between Binoche and Law for me. It’s one of the unlikeliest pairings in a recent film, and the film takes its time putting them anywhere near each other, much less together. This certainly isn’t some cookie-cutter love story, and I’m not even sure I’d tell someone that this film is romantic. I think it is about people dealing with some of the more difficult responsibilities that come with caring about other people, and maybe that’s the point. Some of these characters are strange, prickly, difficult. They act in confounding or irritating ways. They seem inscrutable in a few places in the film. I contend that Minghella knows exactly what he’s doing in writing these characters, and that is part of the point of the film. Instead of wrapping up all the ideas he introduces in nice neat little bows, Minghella gives us something more like life, something that dares you to invest in it. And once you do settle into the groove with this film, it offers up some rich rewards. The film may not work completely, but so much of it is so good that I find myself eager to see it again, almost like a novel that I read too fast the first time. I want to linger with it, and I hope Minghella doesn’t make us wait another fourteen years for his next original script.
NUMBER SIXTEEN: CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER (dir./scr. Zhang Yimou)
You can read my original review of this film right here.
It doesn’t surprise me that this was based on a play by Cao Yu. The film plays more like one of Kurosawa’s Shakesperean adaptations than it plays like a typical martial arts action epic. Then again, this is anything but typical. For fans of director Zhang Yimou or lead actress Gong Li, this is a major event because it reteams them for the first time since SHANGHAI TRIAD. The two of them were synonymous from the very beginning of their careers. She made her first onscreen appearance in RED SORGHUM, his first film. She served as his muse, both onscreen and off, and then... seemingly overnight... their relationship ended, and both of them ended up adrift artistically for a while. She flirted with Chen Kaige, while he gave Zhang Ziyi her start in film with THE ROAD HOME. It wasn’t until HERO that Zhang Yimou really returned to prominence as a filmmaker, though, and it feels like he has finally brought things full-circle with this reunion with the actress who defined so much of his best work.
I’ve read reactions from people who feel like this movie is an excuse for Yimou to torture Gong Li on film, but I think they’re missing the point entirely. There’s really only one character who we are asked to empathize with in this film, and that is Empress Phoenix. Gong Li invests this long-suffering character with a bruised dignity that I found incredibly moving. Chow Yun-Fat digs into his role as Emperor Ping with a gusto I haven’t seen in his work in quite a while, and watching these two movie stars together, I am reminded of the golden days of Hollywood, where stars weren’t just actors with a great perks package, but were larger than life.
I love the way this film swings between family melodrama and sweeping action. I love the fact that even as Gong Li returns to Zhang Yimou’s side, he discovers a new actress (Li Man) who should set any heterosexual man’s pulse racing. I love the way Yimou has approached each of his recent martial arts films completely differently, expressing the enormous dramatic elasticity of the genre in a way that no amount of conversation or film theory could accomplish. And mainly, I love the way a film like this transports me completely to another time and place, and when it ended, I found myself disappointed, eager for more. That’s not something I can say about many films these days, and I’m impressed at just how powerful the experience was.
NUMBER FIFTEEN: THE DEPARTED (dir. Martin Scorsese; scr. William Monahan)
You can read my original review of this film right here.
Pure pulp pleasure. This is not the most important film that Martin Scorsese has ever made, and it’s not the best. Not by a long shot. But there’s a reason that this one seems to resonate with audiences more than anything else he’s ever done, and there’s a reason he’s probably going to pick up his first Academy Award for Best Director finally. And that is because of the sheer pleasure that the film delivers for fans of the genre.
Scorsese is one of those directors who actors will crawl through broken glass to please, and it’s especially true when you give them a piece of material as juicy as William Monahan’s adaptation of INFERNAL AFFAIRS. How many movies this year were as tense as this one, yet as laugh-out-loud funny in places as well? How many movies had strong roles for not just one or two but as many as four or five supporting actors in addition to two equally strong leads? This is a guy’s film, no doubt about it. You can practically smell testosterone in every scene. Normally, I find my patience wears thin with Jack Nicholson doing his “Crazy Jack” act, but here, it’s completely appropriate, and I think Scorsese kept a tight leash on it. Even better, Matt Damon’s work here is, I think, the most important in the film. There’s a subtext to everything he does that could change the meaning of much of the movie, and I think it’s provocative to consider the clues that Monahan dropped in the script. Is this movie anti-Catholic? Is there the whiff of closeted homosexuality and survivor’s shame? Pay attention to Nicholson’s attitudes towards priests and nuns in public. Listen closely to what happens between Damon and Vera Farmiga. It’s fascinating stuff.
Overall, the thing that made me go back to see this a few times before I wrote about it the first time was the electric charge of just seeing good actors rip it up, enjoying each other, challenging each other. This isn’t a film you are meant to take seriously, and Scorsese winks at you with the closing image in a way that tells you that he’s had just as much fun as you have. Sometimes, that makes all the difference in the world.
NUMBER FOURTEEN: THE HOST (dir. Joon-ho Bong; scr. Chul-hyun Baek, Joon-ho Bong, and Jun-won Ha)
You can read my original review of this film right here.
Every year, there are films that we adopt here at AICN. And inevitably, we’ll hear from people that we overhyped the films, or that we built up their expectations too much, and they end up holding our enthusiasm against the film.
I hope that doesn’t happen with THE HOST. I love the film. I know Harry loved the film. We’ve run a number of very positive reactions to the film. And here it is on my runners-up list. And despite all that, I’m going to say to put all that aside when you sit down to see it when Magnolia finally rolls it out later this spring. Don’t let yourself by hyped up for it because of comparisons to JAWS. This is a unique and special film, part monster movie, part family drama, part metaphor about the generation gap in Korea. It’s a great monster movie, and the monster is a true original. I’m still not even sure what the hell it is, but that’s part of the fun of the thing. Every time it shows up, you just want to take a long look at it and try to make sense of all the details. When was the last time you were truly fascinated by a movie monster? It’s not because of the special effects, either. It’s because of the heart and soul that’s obviously been put into giving this thing a personality.
Joon-ho Bong is a major talent, a genuinely important filmmaker, and THE HOST is going to be just one of many high points in his career, I’m sure. I hope it turns into his arrival in pop culture, but no matter what, it’s a film I’m going to savor when I get a chance to see it again.
NUMBER THIRTEEN: HAPPY FEET (dir. George Miller; scr. Warren Coleman and John Collee and George Miller and Judy Morriss)
You can read my original review of this film right here.
It’s interesting to see what my eighteen-month-old son responds to and what he doesn’t.
I haven’t taken him to see many things. The first time we tried going to a theater with him was about three weeks after THE CORPSE BRIDE opened. We went to the first show in the middle of the week. We were literally the only three people in the big house of the Chinese Theater, so even if Toshi had screamed from one end of the film to the other, no one would have cared. In the weeks leading up to the HAPPY FEET press screening, I showed Toshi the trailers on my computer. So far, the only things he’s interested in watching are things that involve a lot of music, and the trailers for HAPPY FEET got him up and dancing in my office every single time. My wife and I took him to the screening on the Warner lot, which was in a fairly small screening room. He spent the twenty minutes before the movie literally running from us, around and around the theater, and I was starting to think it was a mistake to bring him.
Then the film began. And as much as I enjoyed it from the very start, it was absolutely magic to see how Toshi reacted to it. He went with it. The entire time. It worked on him on the most direct level possible. And at the same time, I think there are some really sophisticated ideas at play here. When Massawyrm freaked out about the film, it was funny more than anything because as much as he wanted to act indignant and insulted, he was just underlining exactly what the film set out to do. It’s not an anti-Christian film. It’s an anti-herd film. And when you get puffed up and protective over your right to be part of the herd... when you act threatened over the mere suggestion that individual thought and healthy skepticism are a vital part of society... it’s obvious that you’re hung up on the wrong part of the role faith can play in our lives. HAPPY FEET strongly believes in faith. It just doesn’t believe in blind faith. HAPPY FEET believes in a higher power. It just doesn’t believe there’s only one name for it. The main reason I am proud that this is my son’s first favorite movie (and there’s no doubt it is... he still gets excited when he sees banner ads for the film while I’m online or when we turn on the dancing Mumbles he has in the living room) is because it is a film that celebrates the basic tenets of love and community and individual expression, ideas that I hope my son grows up respecting. For a film to entertain him as much as it intellectually and emotionally engaged me, it must be something special.
NUMBER TWELVE: CASINO ROYALE (dir. Martin Campbell; scr. Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Paul Haggis)
You can read my original review of this film right here.
Color me shocked.
At the start of 2006, I can’t even honestly say I was looking forward to this movie.
Now I consider it a key moment in the history of the Bond franchise, and one of the defining representations of the character. In terms of having the right presence, I thought Daniel Craig stepped up as a movie star when he took the lead in LAYER CAKE, but it’s finally here, as James Bond, that I think he’s been given the sort of role that turns a great actor into an icon. If he does a series of these that are all as good as this one (and, man, are my fingers crossed), then I think we’re looking at one of the great action stars. Period.
But even if that doesn’t happen, we’ll always have CASINO ROYALE, as smooth and sleek a Bond film as I’ve seen released in my lifetime. For a while, it looked like Bond was obsolete. Jason Bourne had become the new standard for spy movies, and there was a lot of speculation about whether Bond could ever be relevant again. By following the lead of last year’s BATMAN BEGINS and giving us a Bond still learning how to be a double-o-carrying killer, they’ve humanized him. They’ve finally made him a character again instead of a cartoon. But they didn’t make the mistake of demystifying him. They didn’t show us Bond’s childhood. They didn’t try to give him some family trauma to deal with. They didn’t make the mistake that the makers of the TEXAS CHAINSAW and HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13th remakes or the HANNIBAL prequel are all making. I don’t want to know why James Bond decided to become a spy, and I don’t really need to know what boyhood influences led to him picking up that gun for the first time. When you work too hard at humanizing certain characters, you rob them of their power. Hats off, then, to Purvis & Wade and special guest star Paul Haggis for sticking close enough to Ian Fleming’s book to please a disgruntled nitpicker like myself, but for knowing the difference between reinvention and subtle expansion.
Now hurry up and make the sequel great.
NUMBER ELEVEN: THE PRESTIGE (dir. Christopher Nolan; scr. Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan)
You can read my original review of this film right here.
Even after watching this one a few times, I’m still just as impressed by the sleight-of-hand that Chris Nolan pulled off. I think I have a much better handle on it now, but studying it closely only increases my appreciation of just how meticulous the film is. Often, when you look closely at a magic trick, you start to see the way it works. You see through it. You see the misdirection, and it takes away the fun of the thing. Sometimes, what you thought was quite wonderful the first time you see it turns out to be a simple mechanical move, nothing special at all. Not so with Nolan’s film, which has my single favorite opening shot of the year. The second and third time through the film, the detail of the thing actually proves to be richer than you notice the first time. Thematically, Nolan’s on his game all the way through, but more than that, he has fun by hiding some of his film’s big “secrets” right in front of your face. It’s bold. No... wrong word. It’s cheeky. The Nolan brothers are obviously very smart guys, but it’s possible for these filmmaking brother acts to be too smart for the room, too chilly, too inside, more clever than sincere. It’s a familiar accusation against the Coens, the Polish Brothers, the Wachowskis. But what I see in the collaboration of the Nolans is a sense of trying to entertain each other. They’re playing a game with each other as much as they are with the audience, and that’s why I think it’s so much fun.
I mentioned the other day that I just saw THE ILLUSIONIST, a very good film by the very talented Neil Burger. I still prefer THE PRESTIGE, but I’m sure many people feel the opposite. I can explain why by comparing the two films to the characters in THE PRESTIGE. Nolan’s film is Christian Bale. Technically gifted. Dedicated. Brilliant. And sad. Oh, so very sad. Burger’s film is Hugh Jackman. The better showman, no question about it. Entertaining. And right down the middle in terms of how it plays the crowd. People walk away happy. I think THE PRESTIGE is working class, a peek behind the curtain, while THE ILLUSIONIST is a romantic fable. Which one you prefer probably says something about you.
I don’t automatically prefer sad to happy... and in fact, this year in particular, I thought there were a lot of obligatory sad endings that weren’t very good. But in the case of THE PRESTIGE, there’s so much integrity to the way the film plays my heart that I don’t mind being tricked at all.
I’ll be back ASAP with my top ten, and then I’ll do one final article to tackle the year’s worst films and hand out some individual accomplishment awards, because I know there is nothing that the world needs more right now than more awards.
I’m just doing my part.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
