Movies of the Decade: 2006

Happy Boxing Day aka yearly avoid-the-heat, watch-a-blockbuster movie day. :)

I went to see Sherlock Holmes, which I enjoyed in a brain-dead, in love with RDJ and Jude Law and Rachel McAdams kind of way.

And so we continue into movies I have also enjoyed, from 2006:

Little Miss Sunshine (2006; d. Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris)

I know it's manipulative, but aren't all movies? It's a funny, bittersweet and very human tale, with some great characters, and it mostly manages to steer clear of mawkishness. Steve Carell is particularly good as the depressed, second most pre-eminent scholar of Proust. I watched the beauty pageant scene again recently, for a class on the sexualisation of pre-teens, and was struck again by how funny and uncomfortable little Olive's routine is, and how well that whole scene is constructed to make the audience laugh and squirm.


Look Both Ways (2006; d. Sarah Watts)

A lovely Australian movie about the difficult reconciliation of coping with death and loss while being alive. Over a summer weekend, a motley group of loosely related people - particularly Meryl, whose father has just died; and Nick, who's just learned he has cancer - deal with the emotions of losing lovers and parents, their own fear of death and loss, finding new people to care for, and so on. It sounds like a heavy mix, but it's actually quite a hopeful film, grounded in reality and well-rounded characters, that asks for some thought in processing the various relationships that are formed, held and broken. Also, the mood is broken up with some really beautiful animation work by the director, who illustrates Meryl's wild imaginative scenarios of death and shows Nick's own mirroring thoughts in photo collages.


Pan’s Labyrinth (2006; d. Guillermo del Toro)

I don't normally cry at the movies, but I was sobbing by the end of this movie. It's so wonderfully made and terrifyingly beautiful; the storytelling is excellent, and from the tears, you can guess that it had a great emotional impact on me. I came home and I could not stop talking about it with my family. But it's certainly not a movie for the fainthearted.


Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006; d. Michael Winterbottom)

I declared this movie the best of the year immediately after I watched it, and while the other three in this post are strong contenders I don't know if any of them match this in sheer ludicrous, free-wheeling enjoyment. It's meant to be a film adaptation of a rambling 18th century English novel that has been dubbed "unfilmable" but it is also a film about the film of an adaptation of a rambling 18th century novel and it is actually a film about the film of a... Whatever it actually ends up being, it is very very funny and clever and knows just how to send up its pretentious roots. At one point, Steve Coogan, playing an actor named Steve Coogan, pompously announces, though he hasn't read the novel the film is based on, "This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about."

And he's kind of right. You don't have to have read the novel either, and that's one of the running jokes of the film, that no one on set has actually read the 600+ pages of novel. While the set up is completely confusing, it makes complete sense on camera, and unfolds wonderfully on-screen as actors, directors, and actors playing directors, and actors playing themselves break the fourth wall to talk to the camera, while moving between scenes and sets and "real life", all with a funny, hyper-realistic script that flows naturally between all the different modes. This is a film for people who love film; there's plenty of inside jokes, I'm told there are even inside jokes inside inside jokes for those who are really obsessive about movies.

The cast is amazing. A veritable list of great British actors cross the screen doing good work no matter how big or small their part. In particular, Steve Coogan is great - he's such an vain, insecure man as 'the actor', but he also shows a softer side playing a new father, and it makes him endearingly human and thus likeable - plus he also has to play Tristram the narrator and Walter Shandy his father. But apart from the clever ideas, the great acting and the tamed chaos, there's also a lovely sense of the visual joke. See the picture I've posted? That's one of my favourite scenes of the movie.

As Steve Coogan is lowered head first, complete with his 18th century costume, into a big pink uterus model, he has an argument with the production assistant about how he is positioned.

"[Mark, the director] wants it to be as realistic as possible."

"He wants realism. Yeah. I'm a grown man, talking to the camera, in a womb."

Original post-movie reaction and review.


Movies of the Decade: 2004-2005
Movies of the Decade: 2003
Movies of the Decade: 2002
Movies of the Decade: 2000-2001