Combing 2006 for the Best and Brightest
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
If a great movie is, as some have said, a collection of great moments, then it is more appropriate to remember a year’s worth of cinema not as a list of titles but as an assortment of memories — a gathering of the year’s best movie moments.
To that end, this top 10 list strives not to declare greatness, but to evoke some of those distinctive moments that made this year’s best films so great.
BEST OPENING SEQUENCE
“Shortbus”
John Cameron Mitchell’s “Shortbus” opens to a cityscape ripped from our imaginations — a New York City skyline that seems partially taken both from reality and the abstract colors, sounds, and shapes that form the idealized Big Apple of our dreams. As the camera floats from one color-coded high-rise to another, we meet the many sides of sexuality the movie will embrace and watch the construction of an artistic framework Mr. Mitchell will return to time and again, whether portraying the tranquility of a city-wide blackout or the euphoria of one lonely woman’s sexual self-discovery.
BEST CLOSING SEQUENCE
“The Science of Sleep”
Despite the tendency of Michel Gondry’s lively “Science of Sleep” to wander off course, the imaginative director still managed to find his way back by film’s end, returning to the same place of mystery, affection, and calm that he struck so brilliantly in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” As two would-be lovers bicker, their supposed romance stalling in a bit of immaturity, one of them drifts off to sleep and envisions them both — as well as a stop-motion horse — sailing off blissfully into the horizon on a sea of cellophane. Truly the stuff dreams are made of.
BEST USE OF NUDITY
“Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”
Some might be inclined to bestow this award to Kirsten Dunst, whose provocative opening pose in “Marie Antoinette,” as the young queen’s flesh clashed against mountains of cake, recalled Antoinette’s infamous declaration to the poor of France.
But by far the most memorable — some would say hilarious, others offensive, and nearly everyone would say revolting — nudity this year was found in “Borat,” first in the Kazhak’s sexually suggestive and sidesplitting bed fight with his fat producer, and seguing into his streaking through an awards dinner for the National Mortgage Brokers Association.
BEST USE OF YOUNGSTERS
“Unaccompanied Minors”
Despite its dismissal by the mainstream movie world, the moving “Pursuit of Happyness” earned a good deal of its sincerity from the affecting performance of Jaden Smith, Will Smith’s son both on and off screen. And even though “Little Miss Sunshine” stands as the most overrated film of the year, the final, suggestive dance sequence by young Abigail Breslin still rates as one of the year’s funniest scenes.
But the most peculiar and hilarious child performance of the year was to be found in the relatively idiotic “Unaccompanied Minors.” Three years after he first raised eyebrows with a perplexing performance in “Bad Santa,” 13-year-old Brett Kelly returned with a near wordless, physically awkward, stunningly off-kilter performance as a strange child abandoned at Christmas. Honestly, it’s hard not to laugh just looking at the kid.
BEST VISION OF A DARK FUTURE
“Automatons”
Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men,” a cryptic foretelling of a hopeless, childless future, was one of the year’s most searing futuristic nightmares. But something was even more unnerving and tantalizing in the cheap and memorable world crafted by James Felix McKenney.
Mr. McKenney’s “Automatons,” which is showing for two more nights at the Pioneer Theater, is a self-proclaimed “lowtech effects film about the horrors of war and robots,” and somewhere between its grainy black and white veneer, its overdubbed, ever so slightly out-of-synch sound, and the exaggerated battles between miniaturized robots dueling on a kitchen floor, it hits its stride as a film that’s deliciously fun even when it’s not entirely believable.
BEST VISION OF A DARK PAST
“Letters From Iwo Jima”
While “United 93” director Paul Greengrass arguably made the year’s bravest film about the past — a contemplative experience that avoided all the melodrama and insulting simplicities of Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” — it was Clint Eastwood’s gut-wrenching one-two anti-war punch, “Flags of our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima,” that stand as the year’s most powerful historical recreation. And between the two, it’s “Letters” that strikes a more unnerving chord of detached anger, thanks no doubt to a sense of objectivity Mr. Eastwood found easier to embrace when chronicling the battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective.
Together, his films form a towering testament to the futility and despair of the battlefield, and the way the war never ends for those who survive.
BEST USE OF BITTERSWEET NOSTALGIA
“Flannel Pajamas”
Even before the passing of the great Robert Altman, the final moments of “Prairie Home Companion” — the metaphorical ascent of the outdated radio personalities into heaven — were a fitting denouement to a stunning career. But when 2006 is recalled by those who saw the heartbreaking “Flannel Pajamas,” that film’s final sentiments of loss, loneliness, and uncertainty are what will resonate strongest, its last scene a startling upheaval of the clichés behind conventional romances.
BEST USE OF GRAPHICS
“An Inconvenient Truth”
And no, we’re not talking about special effects. Graphs played a prominent role in several films this year — notably in “Stranger Than Fiction,” which relied in part on geometric diagrams to elucidate nerdy Will Ferrell’s humdrum existence. But this year’s winner is none other than the sobering global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” in which Al Gore systematically clicked through one graph after another, educating us in how we’re destroying the world. Not since sophomore statistics has science seemed so imposing.
BEST USE OF UNSETTLING HUMOR
“Thank You for Smoking”
Jack Nicholson, as mob boss Frank Costello in Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” is an obvious finalist in the category for sadistically tossing prostitutes onto beds of cocaine and telling them to stay there until they are numb. But no moment this year elicited chuckle-laced groans more than the final scene of “Thank You for Smoking,” which offered an ominous link between the rhetoric of cigarettes and the fictional (well, hopefully fictional) rhetoric of cell phone companies learning how to apologize for their product’s unexpected side effects. Funny or scary? You tell me.
BEST SENSE OF CONFUSION (OR THE FILM THAT REQUIRED MULTIPLE VIEWINGS TO DECIPHER)
“The Fountain”
2006 was a year of complicated films, a parade of convoluted schemes, overlapping plots, and obscure conclusions. While many films used these complications to hide the fact that their stories were running out of steam — I’m looking your way, “The Departed,” “Babel,” and “The Good Shepherd” — one film found a bold and captivating way to share a story in an entirely new way. It was “The Fountain,” Darren Aronofsky’s cerebral, century-spanning tale of love and immortal life — the best film of 2006 and the one true cinematic breakthrough amid a year of far too many safe bets.