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The Best and Worst Movies of 2006
This was my first full year as a critic screening 10 or more movies a month. You learn a few things from having to see so many moving pictures. One, it’s discouraging to see so many bad and mediocre movies. When they say they don’t make ‘em like they used to, they’re right. If you look at a list of all the movies made in 1939 in Hollywood, a quarter to a third are good to excellent films. Today, you’re lucky if five percent released are any good.

Two, it’s also true that critics get jaded and look for movies that are bizarre and depraved to excite them. My fellow critics often fell into that trap, I noticed. What I yearned for, instead, were movies that celebrated and illustrated goodness, truth, and beauty in brilliant ways. Those are few and far between, but sometimes a film with only a slight hint of divine qualities won my approval.

Three, the more awful movies you see, the less interested you are in screening any movie of the same ilk. Sometimes I saw movies that I should have passed on because the PR said it was something it was not. But I’m getting better at skipping films I know I’ll hate, like Borat, and don’t feel as compelled to report on them as warnings to others.

People have a pretty good idea what to expect from certain genres. I don’t do slasher flicks. I just won’t. I won’t. I don’t like hard “R” movies but one can get fooled, and thus I saw Running Scared which was extremely disgusting.

I go to some movies in dread or with low expectations and am pleasantly surprised on occasion. Miss Potter, Talledega Nights, Rocky Balboa were all nice surprises. Stranger than Fiction, too.

Some movies are extremely disappointing in that you can’t understand why some would want to trash worthy beliefs, people, or a nation. Flags of our Fathers gets World War Two and America wrong, badly wrong; and it is hard to believe that Eastwood would be that obtuse and dumb. The Departed is a nihilistic piece of garbage from Scorsese and you wonder if these men have any real sense. It’s one thing for adolescent morons like Bryan Singer to blow Superman Returns, but the older directors ought to know something about life and being by now, you would think.

The most overlooked movie of the year was The World’s Fastest Indian. Anthony Hopkins was brilliant in it, the story is picaresque and delightful celebrating an eccentric mechanical tinkerer and the American West. The audience I saw it with adored this film and yet it went nowhere. Word of mouth which has propelled a number of enjoyable movies such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding did nothing for this.

I was disappointed that the film didn’t do as well as it should, and I hope it will be rescued from obscurity someday. If positive movies like this, made by adults for adults fail time and again, we will see far fewer of them (as if they aren’t few and far between now). In today’s climate, I wonder if a Forrest Gump would come close to doing as well. I sincerely doubt it would.

For example, look at all the films that have Photoshopped themselves into monochromatic, de-saturated grittiness with emphasis on metallic tints of blue, green, dark gray, or sulfur yellow. This year we saw The Nativity Story, Children of Men, Flags of our Fathers, Eragon, and The Fountain. But that doesn’t begin to cover the number of movies with overall somber tones and dark textures. There are no great Technicolor movies with gorgeous, bright colors apart from a number of Chinese films with their flying silk banners and shimmering costumes.

We see this on TV shows also with dimly lit and colorless dramas becoming the norm. This is not an accident although there is no conspiracy. A stylistic mood, a fashion of dullness, dimness, of the ugly, gritty, and dirty has overtaken us. The colors of the sewer have erupted and coated the world in so much of our entertainment from films to video games.

The writers, directors, actors and producers in Hollywood have lost their confidence in life and America. Movies like Flags of our Fathers, The Departed, The Good Shepherd, and Children of Men demonstrate a sick cynicism and nihilism which seems to grow stronger with every passing year of the new century.

What is wrong with these people’s lives that they have to try and depress the nation and world with their miserable self-pity and adolescent angst? The answer is obvious, really. They are lost people who either gave up searching, or never even tried looking for good answers to life’s hard problems. How utterly joyless Hollywood has become. Even the humor is that of idiots and losers -- the comedic men are all immature boys and the jokes are all bathroom and perverted sex humor. It is as if the Three Stooges crossed with Hustler were the model for comedy now.

A number of movies got on my Worst list not because they were so poorly made but because they were well crafted but told the worst story such as The Departed, as meaningless a movie as you will ever see. It has nothing to say, but it says nothing very well. Most critics, even conservative and Christian ones, classify such a movie as good to excellent based on the quality of cinematic elements even though they admit that the story adds up to nothing and teaches despair, submission to banality and evil.

It is usually your freshman student in creative writing who decides to kill all their characters in their first stories, thinking it profound, and a nice way to wipe the board clean and illustrate that everyone ends up on the scrapheap anyway, so what does anything matter. Yet here we have the elderly Scorsese making useless dramas that tell us nothing about the way we live now, nor how we can live if we had half a heart.

I don’t see why we should grant an ounce of praise to someone who misuses their skills in art. Should we praise the marksmanship of Lee Harvey Oswald? Why the heck not? His shooting skills on that day were extraordinary. How about a movie extolling Hitler’s evil genius? Such a brilliant mind. What a shame he came to such a bad end. But he was somethin’ while he lasted, though, wasn’t he?

Well, that’s what so many of our movies are like today by our supposedly serious and great directors; travesties like Spielberg’s Munich last year, and Eastwood’s two films this year.

Yet, M. Night Shyamalan’s, Lady in the Water, a beautiful fairy tale that works for both children and adults got trashed while Pan’s Labyrinth, as foul and vicious as a film can be masquerading as a fractured fairy tale, was praised to the skies.

We have a very sick elite operating at large calling evil good. Fortunately, most of these movies attract a small audience, but the general effects are pernicious and seep into the culture regardless of their success. The success is that such movies get made and more of them every year.

With no further adieu, I give you:

The Worst Ten Movies

1.  The Wicker Man
2.  The Good Shepherd
3.  The Da Vinci Code
4.  The Fountain
5.  V for Vendetta
6.   All the King’s Men
7.   Superman Returns
8.   The Departed
9.   Pan’s Labyrinth
10. Fast Food Nation

The Best Ten Movies

1.   Thank You For Smoking
2.   United 93
3.   Lady in the Water
4.   The World’s Fastest Indian
5.   Night Watch
6.   The Last King of Scotland
7.   Over The Hedge
8.   Rocky Balboa
9.   Miss Potter
10. Talladega Nights - The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

Honorable Mentions

1.   Apocalypto
2.   Casino Royale
3.   Stranger Than Fiction
4.  The Devil Wears Prada
5.  The End of the Spear
6.  The Break-Up
7.   Volver
8.   Running with Scissors
9.   The Nativity Story
10. Gridiron Gang

Bad Children’s Movies

Monster House
Hoot
How to Eat Fried Worms
Flushed Away
The Ant Bully
Happy Feet
Everyone’s Hero
Flicka

Bad Indy Arty Films

The Notorious Bettie Page
Little Miss Sunshine
Pan’s Labyrinth
Fast Food Nation
Bobby
Ask The Dust

Bad Comic Book Movies

Superman Returns
V for Vendetta
Dead Man’s Chest - Pirates of the Caribbean 2
X-Men - The Last Stand

Terrible Comedies

American Dreamz
Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny
Nacho Libre
School for Scoundrels
My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Lousy Drama Films

Flags of our Fathers
The Departed
The Good Shepherd
All the King’s Men
Freedomland
The Da Vinci Code

Terrible Crime Action Flicks

Running Scared
Lucky Number Slevin
Miami Vice

Misc.

World Trade Center
The Fountain
Children of Men
The Wicker Man
Step Up
Crossover
Idlewild