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Best of 2006: Videos
January 2007
Well, if 2006 wasn’t all that much for movies, it was a very good year for me in terms of watching movies at home. Here’s the best and most memorable movies, of any year, that I watched during 2006. In no order.
You can also read Tolerable in 2006, my assessment of the year in movies.
Shampoo
I knew this 70s comedy was considered good. What I didn’t know is that it is total fucking genius, funny, introspective, warm, cold, deep and moving. Warren Beatty plays somewhat clueless narcissist hairdresser George. The movie follows him over the course of one day and night, as he runs between the many women he juggles and attempts to get money to open his own salon. Over the course of the evening a lot of lives will be rearranged and George will be forced into an uncomfortable new self-awareness. A tonal masterpiece, this thing remains light and funny while keeping its gathering sadness in the background, until it whips it out in a devastating reversal.
Body Double
This year had me continuing to watch a ton of De Palma, and of all of them that I hadn’t seen in years, this one was the biggest revelation. Seeming just sleazy and stupid when I first watched it years back, now it reveals itself as sleazy and brilliant. Having everything that makes De Palma De Palma—in spades—this film features a lot on the illusions of the movies, multiple identities, sexual obsession, powerlessness, voyeurism—the whole lot. As with De Palma’s best, you need to not watch this as a story [with, you know, a PLOT], but consider it purely as a film; the same way that when abstract expressionism came in, painting stopped being about the subject that was painted, and became about the act of painting itself.
Wicker Park and The Butterfly Effect 2
Two movies with very similar tones of slow, dreamy, romantic loss and longing, and two films that stayed in my head MUCH longer than they should have. Wicker Park especially; regardless of how I remind myself how the last third devolved into an overwrought silliness, I just can’t forget this film. I am eager to see the [apparently much better] original French version—in fact, I just now hauled off and bought it, having been unable to find it for rent anywhere. Wicker Park is the first film I know of that is ripping off De Palma directly [as opposed to Hitchcock], and is the film that made me understand that Josh Harnett is a very good actor, just a terribly understated one. Dreamy and suffused with loneliness, this film somehow manages to be more than the sum of its parts. Similarly, the straight-to-video Butterfly Effect 2 was intended to be a silly, laugh-at-it kind of rental, and surprised me by being a better-written, better-acted, better movie than the original. After Nick loses his pregnant girlfriend in a car crash, he keeps trying to change the past in order to fix the future. But wait a minute—this thing’s got a subtext [!] about the intrusions of corporate jobs, showing, in a way that remains fairly interesting, how more affluence can be accompanied by more emptiness. Furthermore, both leads are very good, and the whole thing scrapes away the juvenile silliness of the first [which still maintains its potent charms] and sustains an atmosphere of adult mourning and yearning that stays in your mind if you allow yourself to take it seriously.
The Incredible Melting Man
One of those movies I had seen ads for when I was but a child of nine, I had the pleasure of hunting down an out-of-print used VHS of this only to discover that IT WAS A BLAST. A shot of full-on 50s B-movie silliness processed through the ludicrousness of the 70s, this movie has that magical mixture of the cool and the absurd that is so pleasing, yet so hard to create. This astronaut sees the rings of Saturn and something or other returns him to Earth as a man who is slowly decomposing and overcome with murderous impulses. The addition of a number of deliciously loony peripheral characters like the fruit-obsessed Jewish grandparents, the REALLY curious fisherman, and our lazy-ass, shiftless hero with a low sperm count—not kidding—only send this one into the stratosphere.
Cool Breeze and Sugar Hill
Two barely-available blaxploitation gems that are both worth seeking out. Cool Breeze is a remake of The Asphalt Jungle, and comes on like a heist movie, but is actually a very sly and deadpan comedy, with hilarious characters and dialogue, and scenes that go on just a little longer in order to fit in tiny humorous vignettes. Sugar Hill is less intentionally funny, but combines the ridiculous amusement of a more out-there blaxploitation film with a zombie revenge film, a combination that can’t help but succeed.
Roll Bounce
Just one of the all-round best movies I watched this year, this sweet and not-cloying coming-of-age movie takes place during the 70s, as a local roller rink closes down, forcing a group of friends to move to the glitzier rink across town, ruled by its own band of skating superstars. Appealing, realistic characters acted with a straightforward and relaxed ease, hilarious and loosely-related scenes, a satisfying dose of great funk-disco, astonishing scenes of skating prowess and a scene that totally made me bawl my eyes out combine to make this a very fondly-remembered sentimental favorite.
Weird Science
A movie that aims to be a series of 80s teen comedy bits held together by a loose narrative and hits every note just right. Anthony Michael Hall and a very sweet Ilan-Mitchell Smith play teen losers who employ some weird [i.e nonsensical] science to create the perfect woman. She ends up being a sort of fairy godmother figure who teaches them self-confidence, etc., but the real action is in the way the movie throws out a bunch of painfully awkward teen situations, each of which is FUCKING HILARIOUS. Especially if you were a teenager anywhere near the 80s. Includes a notable performance by a young Bill Paxton as a bullying older brother.
In the Company of Men
A brilliant deconstruction of the ways in which the emasculating, inhibiting world of office life encourages men to lash out at those weaker than themselves, in many ways just to keep themselves occupied, this emotionally brutal film is also very canny and moving. Two guys decide to court an emotionally-vulnerable woman just in order to dump her, but there are surprises for everyone [including you] in store. The characters and the action are misgyonistic, but I think it’s quite clear that the point of view of the movie is not.
La Strada
One of those things that remind you that, guess what? classic art films are often classics because they’re absolutely brilliant. Fellini favorite Giulietta Masina plays a woman in a horrible kept marriage to roadside showman Anthony Quinn. She suffers at his hands, but makes the fateful decision to stay with him and be the best wife she can be. It seems meandering for a while, then, after an unexpected turn, all of the pathos it has built up comes collapsing in for a devastating finale.
Love is the Devil
A very intense and intelligent gay film, this movie examines the emotionally-manipulative relationship between famed British painter Francis Bacon and his burglar-turned-lover George [played by current James Bond Daniel Craig]. The gay relationship is handled with intelligence and intimacy, showing the tender side that co-exists with S&M, and the entire film has a showily stylistic directorial manner that is in your face, but consistently works.
Walkabout
Nicolas Roeg’s film about two kids lost in the Austrialian outback has the dreamy, hallucinatory quality of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and similarly imbues the landscape with a frightening spiritual power. But this one is more about a girl’s sexual awakening [a very good Jenny Agutter from Logan’s Run] as she and her brother are suddenly thrust on the mercy of nature and an aboriginal guide.
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