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2006 is here at last… and it's about time!
'05 was an odd year at the movies, and it found Hollywood specifically
listing, and perhaps losing confidence in big fat commercial product
as usual, if only for a moment. That moment lasted roughly three
months, and immediately followed the box-office failure of The Island.
Of course, then Harry Potter and King Kong arrived…
One big surprise this year was the number of films this year
that approached heavily violent content with uncommon intelligence
and daring. Robert Rodriguez' Sin City was a bold and splashy and
massively violent noir, put together with imagination and care,
with a memorable comeback performance by Mickey Rourke. David Cronenberg
was unflinching in his translation of the graphic novel, A History
of Violence. Viggo Mortensen gives an understated performance as
the patriarch who deals with an act of violence that threatens to
destroy his small town family life. Maria Bello is likewise great
as his wife, along with Ed Harris and William Hurt. And the great
documentaries of this year weren't all about penguins fighting a
questionable war in Iraq…wait…I meant to stick a conjunction in
there somewhere…
In the Realms of the Unreal explored the mystery of so-called
"outsider artist" Henry Darger and his 15,000 page stream of consciousness
fantasy epic, which he worked on, quietly, alone in his small apartment,
for decades. Winter Soldier took over thirty years to open in Hartford,
but the film arrived with all the ugly weight of the Vietnam War,
documenting the testimonies of soldiers who were ready to reveal
the realities of war which many tried to conceal with the waving
of their flags. Werner Herzog shared his view of the life of Timothy
Treadwell, self-styled and untrained nature activist, who gave his
life trying to interact with Alaskan grizzly bears. Mark Bittner
didn't put his life at quite such a risk, but he befriended and
cared for a flock of misplaced wild parrots in San Francisco in
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Murderball turned the "extreme
sports" documentary on its' ear with a remarkably in-depth look
at the athletes of the U.S.Quadriplegic Rugby Association. A number
of other documentaries provided a rare and well focused Western
eye into Eastern traditions, particularly director Gayle Ferraro's
Ganges: River to Heaven. Ferraro was allowed to spend time with
Indian families as they waited with dying relatives in a hospice,
and then as they bid farewell to loved ones in the revered river
Ganges. Peter Sarsgaard continued a stretch of memorable roles,
winding up this year with two very different turns in two very different
films: Craig Lucas' thriller The Dying Gaul, as a Gay screenwriter
in Hollywood in the mid-90's; and Sam Mendes' opus of the first
Gulf War, Jarhead, in a major supporting role as a Marine scout
sniper.
Christopher Nolan turned out the best Batman film in that
series, outstripping even Tim Burton's Batman, seriously restarting
the franchise with Batman Begins. Tim Burton was having quite a
good year himself, first with a wonderful and imaginative reengineering
of Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and then with
the witty, animated musical, Corpse Bride. Of course, Steve Box
and Nick Park had some fun with animation, bringing us the first
full-length feature with their biggest star characters, Wallace
& Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
There were some excellent Asian imports on the Hartford scene
last year: the Korean horror import Tale of Two Sisters displayed
rare style and subtlety to affect its' freak outs. Hayao Miyazaki's
Howl's Moving Castle was yet another imaginative fairytale with
interesting characters from an animation master. Balzac and the
Little Chinese Seamstress was a true story based on the memoir about
young love and friendship at a Maoist rehabilitation camp in early
'70's China. Steven Chow continued to bring the laughs and the action
with his period martial arts action parody, Kung-Fu Hustle. Kamikaze
Girls was a blast of quirky fashion, rock and roll and silliness
from Japan. The Wong Kar Wai film, Days of Being Wild, a gangster
romance with beautiful cinematography by Christopher Doyle, showed
up after fourteen years(!).
Dramas packed a lot of punch this year. Gregg Araki's disturbing
coming-of-age/ coming-to-terms drama, Mysterious Skin proved a tour-de-force
performance for the former star of TV's 3rd Rock from the Sun, Joseph
Gordon-Levitt. Ralph Fiennes showed vulnerability and determination
as a husband searching for the meaning of his political activist
wife's death in Fernando Meirelles' thriller, The Constant Gardener.
Todd Solondz drew a whole character from the performances of eight
actresses in a drama about teenage pregnancy and moral relativity,
Palindromes.
There were also a few films that took interesting visual
trips through some interesting minds. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean,
two veterans of the great DC Comics series, "The Sandman," collaborated
to head down a rabbit hole with a modern-day Alice named Helena
in Mirrormask. Director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Monster's
Ball) sent Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling and Naomi Watts down winding
paths of memory and fantasy surrounding an auto accident in Stay.
And Adrien Brody dealt with a mystery, a possible relationship with
Keira Knightley and a tendency to time travel against his will in
The Jacket.
Our favorite fourth year students of magic were well represented
in the fourth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of
Fire. A pair of British brothers deal with the consequences of finding
a sack of money and talking to Saints in Danny Boyle's Millions.
Terrence Howard brought us an enjoyable melodrama of a small
time rapper and pimp on the Memphis scene with an effective and
intelligent performance in Hustle and Flow. Jet Li brought back
some gravitas from his time working on Hero, to portray a gentle
man turned vicious martial artist dog in Louis Letterier's Unleashed.
Other directors that did well this year include:
John Singleton who pulled off an entertaining remake of The
Sons of Katie Elder in Four Brothers.
George A. Romero, who proved that he could still pull off
a zombie movie in his style that acknowledged such more recent films
as 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake, in his Land of
the Dead;
And Wes Craven, with his quite able airplane thriller, Red
Eye, with Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams.
Spain gave us two hilarious comedies this year. In Torremolinos
'73, a middle-aged married couple takes on a reluctant career as
porn actors and filmmakers. In El Crimen Ferpecto, an ambitious
salesman stumbles into murder and blackmail at the hands of a frump-turned-master
manipulator. Domestic comedy got pretty racy as well, with Owen
Wilson and Vince Vaughan as dishonest date trollers in Wedding Crashers.
Steve Carrell, formerly of The Daily Show, actually brought some
heart to the sex farce in The 40 Year Old Virgin. And The Aristocrats
was a documentary that deconstructed the telling of a historically
offensive joke.
And speaking of historically offensive jokes…Domino, Diary
of a Mad Black Woman, Goodbye Dragon Inn and Last Days. Pure cinematic
pain, the lot of them!
Look for much of the above in our best (and
worst) of 2005 lists in January on CULTURE DOGS every Sunday night,
your weekly video and movie news and review program from eight to
nine on U-H Radio, and also on culturedogs.com.
...and Click Now for our new Pod-cast
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See you on the radio!
WWUH: Program Guide 2006
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