Week of December 28, 2006, Issue #584
FILM
The Moviegoer
Paul Matwychuk / moviegoer@vueweekly.com
One of my big regrets about my decision to move from Edmonton to Key West is the drastic transformation my change in locale has caused in my moviegoing habits. When I was in Edmonton, working for Vue Weekly, going to movies was pretty much my main occupation. And despite the comparatively low pay and the occasionally frustrating struggles with the demands of advertisers, it was a dream job. I spoiled myself, spending hours each day absorbing the culture—luxuriating in it, really—and deriving much more pleasure from what I was seeing than pain. If the pace was hectic, it was the pace of someone rushing to get to the whirlpool bath right after their massage was finished.Now, however, I have a more than full-time job editing a slick monthly magazine, and moviegoing has become a much more furtive activity for me, a treat I squeeze in guiltily between my prime responsibilities. I no longer feel as though I’m on top of the cinema world; a lot of important smaller films never play Key West (for that matter, neither do a lot of big-budget mainstream releases—The Fountain, for instance), and the ones that do arrive here play for such a brief stretch of time—a week at most—that it’s easy to miss them. There’s not even a decent video store near where I live. Movies are increasingly becoming literally a stolen pleasure for me: of the 13 movies on my 2006 Top 10 List (there were a few ties), I had to download eight of them through Bittorrent just to be able to see them.
For what it’s worth, my Top 10 list for the year is as follows:
1 CSA: The Confederate States of America/When the Levees Broke/Inside Man: a fake documentary, a real documentary and a Hollywood genre crowd-pleaser, all either directed or “presented” by Spike Lee, who re-emerged this year as the most confident and socially engaged filmmaker in America
2 A Prairie Home Companion: Robert Altman’s farewell film, a graceful, tart-sweet tribute, directed with deceptive effortlessness, to Altman’s favourite type of people: performers
3 Half Nelson: Ryan Gosling delivers one of the most exciting and original male performances since Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront
4 Neil Young: Heart of Gold/Dave Chappelle’s Block Party: Two galvanizing, joyous concert films, as much in love with their audiences as with the performers onstage
5 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: Tommy Lee Jones’s fascinatingly unpredictable post-Peckinpah Western, with a tone-shifting script by Guillermo Arriaga that finds room for the humour he left out of Babel and 21 Grams
6 The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: Virtuoso readings of Hitchcock, Lynch, Wachowski and Tarkovsky courtesy of shaggy Slavic-accented cinephile Slavoj Zizek
7 The Queen: Overrated performance by Helen Mirren, but hugely underrated script by Peter Morgan
8 The Prestige: The final twist is absurd yet strangely convincing, the plot is labyrinthine yet always lucid, the performances deliberately opaque yet ultimately moving ... this crackerjack entertainment by Christopher Nolan was a box-office disappointment but awaits discovery on DVD
9 Bubble: Steven Soderbergh’s numbed-out neorealist experiment about romance and murder in a doll factory—it sure doesn’t take much to throw the theatre chains into a tizzy, does it?
10 Little Miss Sunshine: The tougher-minded members of the film-critic academy don’t have much respect for this one, but this exercise in sad-but-soulful indie screwball sure did make me laugh.
No year in which I saw these 13 films could be called a disappointment, and yet I think 2006 will go down in my memory not a year of cinematic discoveries but one in which I could feel film after film slipping through my fingers. As I looked over Indiewire’s 2006 Critics’ Poll (essentially the same survey that used to appear every year in the Village Voice and which tends to favour hardcore arthouse pics like The Death of Mr Lazarescu over mainstream successes like The Queen), I felt like a 12-year-old at a grownups’ dinner party, trying without much success to follow a conversation pitched high above my level of experience.
It almost seems like a truer reflection of my moviegoing year would be to create an alternative Top 10 List, consisting not of my favourite films of the year but the films that I hadn’t been able to see, but which I had formulated such a clear notion of inside my head that I could imagine myself loving them all the same.
David Lynch’s Inland Empire would definitely be on that list. And Army of Shadows and Old Joy and Duck Season and Children of Men. Maybe a few “difficult” movies would be on there, too: Battle in Heaven, L’Enfant and Iraq in Fragments. It would be nice to include a few obscurities, like The Aura and The Puffy Chair and Days of Glory and 51 Birch Street, and maybe a contrarian choice like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy as well to round things out.
In a way, these, not the movies I actually saw, are the movies that define 2006 to me. The movies on the high shelf, behind the locked door, in the faraway town. I hope I can steal the time to watch them in 2007. V