December 2006

Beatmag Film Editor Anna Wood chooses her flicks of 2006, in no particular order (can also be used as guide to what DVDs to spend your Christmas HMV tokens on)

Grizzly Man
“I am a warrior. I will be one of them. I will be the master.” Timothy Treadwell made friends with the bears he lived with for 13 summers in Alaska, but they did not make friends with him. This is another great film from Werner Herzog, and the most brilliant in a year of brilliant documentaries.

Brokeback Mountain
And yet ‘Crash’ won Best Picture, demonstrating that the Oscars are more about pretty frocks than great films. ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is as good as Citizen Kane. So there.

The Squid and the Whale
A marriage collapses, and two children are trapped beneath the rubble. Another in the long and noble line of bleak yet somehow life-affirming films (see also ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’, ‘United 93’, ‘New York Doll’).

United 93
Minute by minute account of what we know happened and what we can intelligently guess might have happened on the fourth plane – the one that that went down without hitting its target – on 11 September 2001. Made with the finest intentions and incredible skill, and with the help and support of dozens of those involved in the actual events.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Daniel Johnston, musician beloved of Thurston Moore, Kurt Cobain and Jason Pierce, is a man whose life has been so cool and so awful that this tender, smart documentary about him can’t help but destroy a little of that nasty myth about how madness is a bit, you know, rock’n’roll.

New York Doll
Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane was the bass player with The New York Dolls, and a particularly lovely man with a particularly strange life story. Another doc about a deeply loved, not-actually-that-well-known musician. This one has a happy ending though. Kind of.

Capote
Yes, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant, but so is everything else about this film. It looks cold and hard (but with great style and some fine looking cocktails) at the dark, selfish aspects of Capote during his investigation into the murder case that was the basis for his seminal book ‘In Cold Blood’.

The Death of Mr Lazarescu
A simple film, long and slow and inaction-packed, depicting the tedious death of Dante Remus Lazarescu, an old and not especially endearing man hitting the end of his days alone (but surrounded by doctors and nurses) in Romania. A wonderful film which (like our lives, I hope) is not done justice by the description of its parts.

The Departed
Martin Scorsese! Jack Nicholson! Ray Winstone! Martin Sheen! Matt Damon! (Don’t you love him too since Jason Bourne?) Violence! A good old-fashioned twisty gangster plot! Did we mention that this is Scorsese AND Nicholson, together? Maybe you can do justice to this film with a description of its parts. Great songs, too.

Shortbus
Yes, there’s real sex in it, and it makes you feel good about the world and life in general. That’s more than you can say for any porn you’ve ever watched, isn’t it? Maybe there’s something for us all to think about there. Meanwhile, watch this. It’s not just about the sex, you know.

Filed under: Culture, Reviews - Film/DVD/Blu-Ray by Flexmaster Nylon
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