why i don't have a best of 2006 list

Every now and then an already boring awards show is brought to a grinding halt, so that some Silver Age fossil like Jack Valenti can guilt us about abandoning theatres for the comfort of home viewing. In theory, I agree that the ritual of sitting in a darkened theatre and surrendering your senses to the movie experience is the ‘way motion pictures were meant to be seen’, but the reality is a little more difficult. The same industry that laments our absence is the one that has doubled ticket prices over the last decade, an increase far above the inflation level. Since rising ticket cost isn’t simply a reflection of the dollar’s shrinkage, it can only be a result of the industry’s lousy and short-sighted practices.

The problem with would-be blockbusters like last year’s Poseidon Adventure and The Wicker Man isn’t just that they’re hideous, unnecessary remakes of well-loved classics; it’s that their atrociousness has a lofty price tag. Both of these abominable travesties ‘opened wide’, which means after a month of multi-million dollar advertising blitzes, weekend premiers on four thousand screens simultaneously. That those four thousand screens (six times a day) were playing before mostly empty seats costs an awful lot of money, money which needs to be recouped somewhere else. If this reads like the bitter ranting of another anti-blockbuster spoilsport, consider the following; the current suggested retail price of a compact disc is $17.99, compared to the $14.99 cost ten years ago (this is only at major chains…if you’re paying this much for a cd you might want to explore the world beyond big-box stores and shopping malls). This seems a modest increase when compared to the rising cost of a single movie ticket; according to the IMDB, the median cost of a move ticket in 1997 averaged out to $4.59. Accepting that this number is so low because of matinées, discounted children’s admissions and the few remaining independent and second-run theatres being factored in, it’s still pretty unsettling to think about as one shells out just short of ten dollars to suffer through yet another remake or Saturday Night Live spin-off. The Hollywood rationale that their hands are tied, that it’s really our fault, because illegal downloading costs the industry so much lost revenue that they have to constantly raise ticket prices to survive, seems a particularly weak and cynical lie when considering the damage file-sharing has wrought on the music industry- which has managed to survive with only a 16% price increase over the last decade.

To be able to post a year-end “Best of 2006” I would have had to have seen quite a lot of movies…far more than I actually saw. Aside from the fact that for my girlfriend and I to have seen even fifty to choose from would have cost about $1,000, movie-going isn’t what it used to be. Movie theatres have become unsupervised daycare centers, over-run with roaming packs of restless teenagers seeking sanctuary for heavy petting and to plot their next crime spree. And as unsettling as the sullen stare of juvenile delinquents is, they are less disruptive than the increasing number of toddlers running wild through R-rated shows. The one upside of being seemingly alone in the belief that Mystic River (2003; Eastwood) was an over-wrought, over-acted mess was that I wasn’t too upset by the non-stop crying of the baby that had been brought to the 9:40 PM screening we attended. It was, however, a little distracting when we went to see Wolf Creek (2005; Mclean) -the most brutal, upsetting horror film made in at least half a decade- only to have a set of terrified, screaming preschoolers in the row ahead of us. I fully concede that as a non-parent I’m disqualified from determining what is appropriate for small children, but I have to think unrelenting sexual torture might not be ideal subject matter for children under the age of six.

The fact of the matter is, my love of movie-going is passionate enough that I could suffer through the spectacle of America’s Youth being unable to find jeans that fit (in the 90’s they were too big, now they’re too small), I could suffer through the evidence that procreation should be treated as a privilege and not a right, I could even suffer through the presence of the subhuman garbage that thinks it okay to chat away on their cell phones (or, more recently, illuminate the theatre with tiny green screens as they text message). But what I can’t suffer through is what’s playing on the screen. There certainly were good movies released last year, enough to comfortably fill a list of ten. The problem is, because of the over-valuing of awards, the studios sit on their ‘prestige’ releases until close to the year’s end. While this is great for keeping the memory of the movie fresh in jury’s minds, it also makes it nearly impossible for those of us outside the industry to see all these movies as they come out. Pan’s Labyrinth (del Torro), Deliver Us from Evil (Berg), Children of Men (Cuaron), The Queen (Frears), Iraq in Fragments (Longley), Babel (Inarritu), Blood Diamond (Zwick), Notes on a Scandal (Eyre), Perfume (Tykwer), Volver (Almodovar), Curse of the Golden Flower (Zhang) and The Last King of Scotland (MacDonald) have all dominated critics’ “Best of” lists, but have all also been released in the final three months of 2006. Not having access to either preview screenings or complimentary tickets (or the amount of time needed to attend that many screenings), it will take me quite a while to ingest what 2006 meant for film.

So since none of the twenty or so movies from 2006 I did see struck me as particularly note-worthy (Marie Antoinette indeed), I’ve decided to offer instead a list of the most interesting, over-looked gems I discovered last year.