ENTERTAINMENT
FLICK PICKS FOR 2006
by Manny Gomez
The Palmetto Patriot
2006 hasn’t been a great year for film. I’ve been racking my head for the last few days to find ten films I thought were amazing, but for now I could only come up with a mere five. Please feel free to respond with your own lists, or maybe amend this one if you come up with something I haven’t seen, or perhaps forgot.
In some what of an order (but really what’s in a number?):
1. The Departed- Martin Scorsese returns to what he does best, being mean on the streets (pardon the pun). In what is perhaps his best film in years, Scorsese brings back the frantic pace, catholic guilt, brilliant use of music, character duality and explosive violence that marked his best films. It also features what maybe be Leonardo DeCaprio’s finest performance. Based on Hong Kong potboiler Infernal Affairs, The Departed elevates the street cop drama into a pathos driven story of two men who are living each other’s lives, hunting for each other, and in the end hunting for themselves. No one is spared in the film, and violence serves as a catharsis. The pacing is so tight that your jaw will drop open several times, right up to the bullet-in-the-heads-filled climax. The cast includes Martin Sheen, Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin, Mark Walhberg, and of course in a much talked about role, Jack Nicholson. Let’s hope that this one earns Marty the little gold man he’s been robbed over and over again.
2. United 93- Peter Greengrass serves up what might be the most emotional movie of the year. In this mostly improvised documentary style film, Greengrass puts us right in the cabin of that plane. The terrorists words are not subtitled, yet their reluctant moves and wide eyes talk more about uncertain feelings and fear, and paint them less as vile villains and more as men perhaps corrupted and manipulated into embracing an ideal they see as both heroic and worth dying for. The tension builds, and even though we all know how this sad story ended on September 11, we can help but gasp and shed tears as the plane goes down in the end. Short, tight, simple and beautiful, United 93 will perhaps go down as the defining movie of one of our country’s most tragic events.
3.Brick- ever since the much talked about year of the Independents, film fans always wait for the one small movie to come out that some how reinvents a genre or perhaps creates a new one. Brick takes the clichés and archetypes of pulp novels and film noir and flips them around by setting the whole damn thing in what appears to be a Southern California high school. This is 90210 by way of Phillip Marlowe and Dashiel Hammett. Essentially a re-working of The Maltese Falcon, the film is driven by sharp dialog (“Keep your specs on,” “It was you Angel,” “You ever read Tolkien?”) and characters that you will never forget, from the Rubik’s cube solving sidekick, The Brain. To the crippled, villainous and mysterious The Pin ( a gothed-up cane-wielding drug kingpin who orchestrates his drug deals and hits over snacks in his moms kitchen. Joseph Gordon Levitt, continuing from his brilliant work in Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, skids, gets punched, talks back and investigates his way through a story that ultimately leaves him alone, wounded, and just a bit more jaded. This is film noir plain and simple.
4. The Three Burials Of Melquades Estrada- Tommy Lee Jones writes and directs this bloody tale of morality, male bonding, and what it means to keep a promise. A ranch owner agrees to carry the murdered corpse of his ranch hand to Mexico, dragging along the thuggish border patrol man who needlessly shot him. Like the film’s Peckinpah, (and obvious inspiration) Burial’s deals with men who are perhaps driven by codes and ideals from another time. Brutal in it’s justice and morality, the film isn’t one for the faint of heart no for some one seeking an easy answer to good and evil and the nature of man. Redemption isn’t easy in this world. It comes with blood, tears, and bullets. Barry Pepper pulls in an amazing performance, and Tommy Lee Jones shows us that perhaps he should step behind the camera more often.
5. Little Miss Sunshine- The indie darling of the tear, Little Miss Sunshine turns the family road movie on it’s head and raises it from the slums of Chevy Chase antic filled movies. Here we have a truly dysfunctional family who find out that they truly have no one but each other. It’s a lesson we all learn in life, that family be difficult, that maybe we don’t like them all the time, but we always love them and most certainly always need them. Steve Carrel gives and understated and subtle performance that shows you he has more in him that his equally funny over the top antics in his bigger roles (Anchorman and The 40 Year Old Virgin). This is a family movie of a new kind, and you’ll find yourself, laughing, cringing, smiling, and feeling satisfied as you would after any true family outing.
That’s the best of what I can remember. Some battery films where plain fun: Mission Impossible 3 turned out to be the best in the series, featuring a magnificent scene-chewing villain by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and the best use of a McGuffin since old Hitchcock coined the term. Superman Returns was also very good, filled with an elegance and beauty rarely found in superhero movies. X-Men 3: The Last Stand was just that; the last stand for most fans.
I would like to add Volver to my favorite films of the year. This is Almodovar at his best. No one makes films about women like he does and the women in this film are quite unlike anything in any film period. Penelope Cruz is both breathtakingly beautiful and just plain amazing. Like the rest of his cinematic output, Almodovar fills the story with eccentrics and family, which as anyone can attest, the two go hand in hand. The film is about many things, but most importantly about returning (hence the title). Returning to a moment in your past, to your home, to your family and in a sense accepting what role you play in the lives of those you love. Haunting, giddy, beautiful and perfectly entertaining, Volver is the the type of foreign film that should achieve success not only in it’s homeland, but at US box offices as well.
Let’s hope 2007 knocks them out like last year.
