2006 movies.
© 2006 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

For posterity, here are the movie reviews that I posted to my blog in 2006. This is most of the movies I saw last year, and (I think) all of the movies I saw in the theatre or on DVD. There's a bunch of late-night-tv crap I didn't bother reviewing. These are roughly in the order I saw them. (See also: 2005.)

Call of Cthulhu

I posted about this a while ago; it's a live-action version of the Lovecraft story of the same name, done in a silent movie style, with effects that also look "period". It was surprsingly well done! The lighting seemed a bit off in some scenes, especially near the beginning, but overall they did a really good job maintaining the look.

This is a sequel to Before Sunrise, the movie where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around Vienna all night having a slacker-angst conversation. I liked that movie (much to my surprise, since I normally find talking-head movies like that to be a waste of the medium; and also I've hated everything else by Linklater). Before Sunset is a good sequel to it. It takes place ten years later, and the two characters haven't seen each other since. The whole movie is a real-time coversation where their slacker-angst has been replaced with middle-aged what-the-hell-went-wrong angst.

Wow, I hated this movie. More specifically, I despised every character in it. It's a story set over a number of years in which two couples keep cheating on each other with members of the other couple. There's a whole lot of repeated "I need you, I can't live without you" dialog, which, every time, just left me thinking, "ok, why?" Which maybe was the point, but in the end it was just an exercise in watching hollow, untrustworthy people repeatedly betray each other, and really, who gives a shit.

This was great. The whole movie was Dave McKean's artwork come to life, and that alone is reason enough to see it. (You may remember him as the guy who did the covers of Sandman.) The plot was surreal and dream-like, and didn't always make a lot of sense, but that was totally ok for this kind of movie. It had a lot in common with Labyrinth (of which it is arguably a loose sequel) but fortunately that similarity ended well before "David Bowie in a Tina Turner fright-wig".

This is a little story about a Christian-school teacher who dumps her preacher-fiancé and runs off to join the circus with a lesbian acrobat she met in a laudromat. It's cute. In one of those weird coincidences, the travelling circus seems a lot like the one in Mirrormask.

Some guys with a startup company in their garage accidentally build a time machine (oh no, I gave away the big obvious secret!) The fictional science is pretty interesting, and some of the inter-personal tension and betrayal is well-handled, but the plot is needlessly confusing. In the commentary they claim that a lot of this was on purpose, but really, it was just sloppy-as-hell writing. There were parts that were confusing that were certainly not intentional "ambiguity".

They made this movie for approximately no money, so all the reviewers cut them a huge amount of slack for that -- and they did do a very good looking job technically -- but you can't blame "failing to actually express the plot" on budget.

This movie was incomprehensible and boring. It felt like I was watching The West Wing in Spanish without subtitles. Maybe there was a good movie in here tying to get out, but I couldn't tell. Individual scenes were good on their own, but I was left with little clue how it was all supposed to fit together, or even who half of the main characters were.

Also the electrocution-in-the-pool scene pissed me off, because electricity doesn't work that way.

I enjoyed this, though it felt like a much smaller story than I was expecting, and in the end it felt like what they accomplished was pretty trivial. If in fact it wasn't trivial, they didn't do a very good job of expressing why that was. Murrow's conflict with McCarthy felt like it was almost at the same scale as the sub-plot about the two secretly-married co-workers. The look of it was great, as was the acting, though I think I caught lung cancer from this movie.

I think The Insider told a better version of the "reporter versus corporate bosses" story.

Sucked. Everyone made a big fuss over the subtitles in this movie (which slide around and are colored and stuff) which is a neat trick, but really, so what. The movie starts off as, basically, good-vampire-cops versus bad-vampires, and then staggers through a few different disjoint subplots about an apocalypse prophecy, a "chosen one", etc. It was bleak and dark and grimy and very, very Russian -- which is to say, long, boring, and full of alcoholics. (And dirtbag men in 1980s Adidas track suits.)

The overriding theme of this movie was "you say you're the good guys but you're just as bad!" You can tell it's the theme because it's in the dialog over. And over. And over again. I get it already! Wow, it's so fucking deep I think I'm getting the bends. I'll be in the decompression chamber.

In a vampire movie, please stick to the core competency of kicking ass and drinking blood, ok? Thanks.

Also, I think that if I was the thousand year old leader of all vampires, I'd have a nicer office. It wouldn't look like the back room of a sweat-shop, even if I was Russian.

Another day, another shitty vampire movie. Now, I'm one of the few people who actually liked the first Underworld. I thought it looked great, especially for its miniscule budget, and I liked how they pulled off having a dense backstory while still essentially being a chase-and-ass-kicking movie. Also, hot chick in corset with sword. Dude.

This one, though, was awful. The plot was hard to follow, and I couldn't tell half of th characters apart: "Wait, is this the same guy, or his brother? Wait, didn't he die in the last movie? Wait, is this guy really the flying monkey from earlier? Ah, fuck it, who cares." It felt like a bad adaptation of a novel, where they tried to compress 800 pages of prose into 100 pages of script. Also, they somehow left out the essential Hotness.

Alan Moore disowned this movie because he couldn't get over his bad experiences with DC Comics and with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie. That's too bad, because this movie was really very faithful to his writing.

There were a number of places where it diverged from the comic where I thought that was a mistake, but the were also a number where it diverged and I was glad that it did: they excised a few sub-plots that didn't really advance the story. (For all its awesomeness, the V comic did bog down in the middle.)

It was a very good movie. Moore criticised it for changing the story's conflict from "Government versus Anarchy" to "American Neo-Consevatives versus American Liberals", but I don't know what he was talking about (perhaps an early draft of the script?) because the movie I saw was definitely the former.

I think the biggest mis-step the adaptation made was to make Evie basically lower-middle-class. The comic had a real Handmaid's Tale feel to it, where women were essentially property, and it opens with Evie's first night as a prostitute. By starting her off with a corporate job, they took a lot of the desperation out of her. Likewise, I thought they didn't really sell why the people were ready for revolution. All we ever see of the regular citizens is them complacently sitting in the pub or living room watching TV. What made them get up and march? The comic handled this with the destruction of the surveilance network, and the resultant crackdown with government thugs in the streets; the movie only barely hinted at that.

I thought it was a cheap shorthand to make the government actually use Nazi-esque imagery (uniforms, color schemes, etc.). That was silly; actual fascism will never look like that again.

I was disappointed that they didn't include This Vicious Cabaret, the song that comprised half of one issue of the comic (and recurs throughout). It was released as a single in the 80s (word by Alan Moore, music by David J of Love and Rockets / Bauhaus) and it's a fantastic song that perfectly captures the feel of the story.

The "V" single was later re-released on David J's album On Glass, which is also out of print, but due to be re-issued soon. Fortunately it's not hard to track down an MP3 online: Hidden City posted one here, and if that goes dead, you can at least hear a 30 second clip at Amazon. (I see that David is touring with The Dresden Dolls this year, and there couldn't be a more perfect match.)

Ok, I didn't really watch this; Tivo foisted it on me, and I fast-forwarded through it and watched about ten minutes throughout, but my god, how do movies like this get made? Are there people who think this is funny? These jokes are so old they have Alzheimers! A fetus could tell you the punchline from the setup. It's like it wrote itself (which is not a good property of comedy). I guess this movie demonstrates that it's not "blackface" if black people do it; but neither is it funny.

(I was flipping channels the other day and came across a stand-up comic making jokes about Asians having small dicks, and mixing up "L" and "R" sounds -- but oh the irony, he was Asian! Same thing.)

Anyway, this movie made me wonder a few things:

• Do you think Tom Arnold makes any money doing this kind of crap? I mean more than he would make doing something he'd be better at, like selling shoes?

• That actress who played his wife -- the uptight suburban helmet-hair woman with the too-far-apart eyes, who always plays exactly the same role -- what do you figure she's like in real life? I mean, she's a Holywood actress, so she must be an extroverted schmoozer, right? Does she wear her hair like that to the parties where her agent is doing coke off a hooker's ass?

• Likewise, those guys whose entire acting career has consisted of playing cops -- what's that like for them? Did they, at some point when they were in their drama school "movement" class, learning how to wave their arms and emote like a tree, really be the tree, did those guys ever have a moment of clarity where they realized "I'm going to spend my entire career playing cops from New Jersey"? These are not, after all, the kinds of people who become cops. These people were the A/V Nerds.

These are some of the questions I have. I have more.

This movie is awesome, go see it immediately! No, really. It's a classic monster movie, and has just the right mix of horror and comedy for that. (It's also full of subtle references to other horror movies. You know, for the fanboys.)

Surprisingly, it's not the first movie about space slug zombies: that would have been Night of the Creeps, which is also awesome, but I'd say Slither is better. (Among the trivia on the director's site is him claiming that he hadn't seen Night until after Slither.)

This is a film noir set in a present-day high school. It has the traditional banter, character types, and plot-style, but doesn't ape the visual look. The surprising thing is that it almost always works. There's only one scene where it seems forced, and that scene is really funny, so it's forgiven. Definitely worth seeing.

I got a kick out of this; the main character is the ship. The humans are just window-dressing, but not offensively so. It's better than Titanic. The effects are mostly pretty good, and they weren't afraid to deal out the "unfair" deaths (being "nice" didn't guarantee survival, as it usually does.)

This movie was hilarious. The characters (caricatures) are the reason to see it; the plot itself isn't as interesting as the gags about "art school types", but those are awesome.

Really great, and hilarious. Bitter and awesome. It's so awesome it had me rooting for a tobacco lobbyist.

Pretty much crap. I liked the first two, but this one is just a parade of stupid. Among its stupidities is that, halfway through the movie, several major characters "die". Which we all know, simply does not happen in these kinds of movies. So I spent the whole movie expecting them to pop back in at some point. Then the credits roll, and I think, "wait, they actually expected me to believe that?" That was possibly the most insulting thing about the movie. Well, no, the whole pointless "moving the Golden Gate Bridge" thing was even stupider. Yeah, "parade of stupid" sums it up.

Blows up real good. It is what it is, and it did it well. A zillion times better than X Men 3.

A poorly-socialized government finance flunky in his 50s meets a poorly-socialized girl in her 20s and invites her to go to the G8 conference with him in Iceland. The acting is really great; it's painful to watch how awkward they both are. There are lots of great bits like the faces he makes when he's silently talking to himself, rehearsing what he's going to say when he eventually talks himself into knocking on the door in front of him.

Half a movie about global warming and how we are fucked, and half a movie about Al Gore talking about global warming. It's entertaining and convincing, but mostly it makes me wonder where this literate, human-seeming person was during the presidential campaign. This guy might have had a chance.

Pretty good for a chick flick. A woman moves out of her house and leaves a note for the next tenant; he writes back and they eventually figure out that he's the previous tenant, and somehow they are exhanging mail backwards in time: he's two years into her past. The fact that they overlap so closely throws a new twist on the usual time-travel gimick. Keeping track of the two timelines is a little tricky, but it seems to hold together pretty well. (I predict most reviewers will find it "too confusing".) It took me a while to get used to one of the wierd narrative devices they used: they only communicate by writing letters, but the voice-overs don't talk like letters, they talk like low latency conversations. I guess we were supposed to take that part less-than-literally.

I spent a week at the Another Hole in the Head festival at the Roxie, like I did last year and the year before. Twenty one movies in six days...

To Kako

Decent by-the-numbers zombie movie, this one set in Greece. It's your typical "world goes crazy, handlfull of people take a while to figure it out, then run like hell" scenario. You've seen it lots of times before, but this isn't a bad version of that same story.

Complete crap. Imagine Zardoz without the plot. It starts off with some rather incompetent martial arts out in some field somewhere, with the actors making goofy faces. They are subtitled with names like "Lucifer" and "Asmodeus" so I guess that's supposed to mean something. Some cocks are chopped, and then it abrubtly turns into some kind of modern-day Mafia/Street Fighter story. I walked out after about twenty minutes. I almost never do that. It was that bad.

This is four short stories that were so weird I certainly can't remember them well enough to describe them. But the last one involves a guy playing with a dead body, and throughout the story you only see his weird hallucinogenic fairy-tale interpretation of what's going on, so it's actually kind of pretty, until the inevitable reveal.

Ed Helms from the Daily Show does a very Daily Show-like short about the kind of prejudice zombies have to face in today's world. Poor guy can't get a date, and nobody will shoot hoops with him. It's awesome.

This is, like, someone's halfassed home movie. I've seen funnier things posted by twelve-year-olds to YouTube. Is this movie what what people did before the Internet? If so, how did this get made in 2006?

A bunch of high school friends get together for a reunion, and one of them goes nuts and starts killing the others. It was too long, and by the time the killer was revealed, I didn't care any more.

The Scooby Gang gets hired to clean up an old house, and Unleash and Ancient Evil. The Ancient Evil has Boobies. It's campy and ironic and pretty funny. Most of the characters are cliches, but I still got a big kick out of it. There are some good bits like, "From now on, we all need to stick together! Ok, just as soon as I go check out the basement alone. Ok!" The effects are really low budget, but you can tell they did well with what they had to work with.

This was pretty cool: the gimick is that there's no dialog at all. A woman's family is killed over a real estate deal, and is eventually murdered, then comes back as a sorta-zombie for Crow-esque revenge. It's played pretty straight, not goofy, and it works well.

After a car accident, a woman tries to track down the nonexistent ghost-hospital that the evil ambulance took her boyfriend to. It kept my attention, but then the ending was cheap and stupid (and you've seen it done before in a much better movie).

This is pretty creepy and incoherent, but interesting. A guy wakes up in some horrible maze of torture, and every time he passes out, he's somewhere more awful. It's a bit like Cube, but way more tense and horrific, and with a resolution that I couldn't make sense of.

A pair of newlyweds try to figure out what they have to do to get some kind of vengeful ghost leave them alone. Turns out she thinks the husband is her long-lost. It's pretty good.

Tiny alien horseshoe-crabs clamp on to people and tentacle-pornify them into undead fighting Necro-Borgs that can grow power drills and mysterious weapons! Like Tetsuo The Iron Man if it that had a plot. It's good clean splattery fun.

This was awesome, and really disturbing. A woman is kidnapped and wakes up in the forest where some backwoods hick puts her through some gruesome tests, and then trains her to be his slave. Maybe he has her daughter captive somewhere else, maybe not. She plots escape. He's not as dumb as she thinks.

A family of siblings who have recently lost their parents tries to make it in their new community, and, oh yeah, they're also serial killers and there's some kind of monster in a box in the basement. Good twist at the end. I liked this one a lot.

A story about a young serial killer. It was mostly a character study about this completely twisted guy; he exudes confidence, but he walks with a limp because he's so insecure about his height -- and yet, so halfassed -- that he puts crushed beer cans in his boots. It's really well done, and the acting is great. The main character reminded me a bit of Rob Lowe in Bad Influence.

After a friend's funeral, three people attract the wrath of three evil ghosts, and recruit some paranormal researchers to try to fend them off. It's played pretty straight, but by the end it turns into a fusion of Evil Dead and Ghostbusters. It's pretty amusing.

I liked this one a lot. Couple loses their kid, and moves to a cabin in the woods; out come the ghosts, but at first, only the woman can only see them in the photographs she develops of empty rooms at the local abandoned prison.

This is a fantastic short. A woman sees her friend murdered, and then a few weeks later, finds herself trapped in a stalled elevator with the killer. Really well done.

This is The Wicker Man, basically, updated with new "Burning Man" styling on the evil pagans. Eh.

Oh man, this was incredibly disturbing. An Interpol investigator goes on the trail of a porn site where women who are too obese to get out of bed are fed and fed until the die. Extremely creepy, with a really well-played villain. It's great, but many scenes were very hard to watch.

(Ok, that's the end of the festival. Moving right along...)

Superman Returns

Superman Returns is even worse than X Men 3.

It has at least half a dozen instances of the most logic-defying intelligence-insulting movie-physics I've seen. Kevin Spacey doesn't even come close to saving it; there's only one 30 second scene that he's in that isn't a total snooze, and you saw that one in the preview. It's hard to decide who's the biggest whiner: the big blue boyscout, Lois, or Lex. Oh, and the plot is stupid and all the characters are boring and totally sleepwalking through their roles.

...And there is a precocious child.

I guess it's an adequate sequel to the others, given how much they sucked too, but ugh, I want those two hours back. Those of you who told me that this movie was ok are despicable.

If you're feeling tempted to see this piece of garbage, just rent the DVD of the modern Superman or Justice League cartoons; they were actually not bad. Clancy Brown is a thousand times the Luthor as the one in this movie.

A near-future french movie where an acrobat-criminal and a cop-on-the-edge have to work together to find the dingus and save the girl before it's too late. CAN THEY GET ALONG? Obviously you've seen this plot before, but that doesn't matter, what matters is the stunts, and they are mind-blowingly good: like Jackie Chan good. It's that "parkour" stuff you may have heard about.

Pirates 2

An adequately entertaining sequel. Not as good as the original, but exactly what I expected. It gives good tentacle.

A Scanner Darkly

This movie is made of drugs. The walls keep seething for at least half an hour after the movie ends, I swear. It's entertaining, and certainly the first movie based on PK Dick's work that actually captured the feel of his stories.

Clerks 2

Eh. It was OK. I enjoyed it while it was on, and I've forgotten it already.

Kinsey

Pretty creepy, but fascinating. This is one of those movies about sex that makes you never want to have sex again. It's a good movie, but: Molester guy: creepy. The world they lived in: creepy. Kinsey's father: creepy. Kinsey: creepy. Kinsey's wife: creepy. Their swinger research staff suburb: creepy.

Summary: creepy.

The Descent

A group of women go spelunking and get trapped. I'm not particularly claustrophobic, but this movie freaked me the fuck out. The first half of the movie is really just them-versus-the-caves, and that in itself was a terrifying movie -- and that's before the Bad Things happen. The way this group of friends let their inter-personal issues completely screw them all over is also handled really well. Highly recommended.

The Cave

I described The Descent to someone and they said "Oh, that sounds like The Cave." Um, no. Except that they're both set in caves. This movie is bullshit.

Velvet Goldmine

A pretty entertaining story about the meltdown of a couple of Bowie-like glam rockers. I liked it.

Pulse

It starts off as The Ring and then turns into Day of the Dead. It's not scary, it's just dumb.

Million Dollar Baby

I guess this, like, won an Oscar or something. It's actually really good.

The Illusionist

This was great. Though I wish there was more time spent on the stage magic itself, and showing how the tricks were done. The ending has a bit of a Usual Suspects feel to it, but I liked how they left it ambiguous.

Crank

This was exactly what I expected, so good for them: no plot, lots of ass-kicking. I really liked the editing style and the weird overlays they used for split-screen-ish effects. In a lot of ways, the editing was overdone like in Domino (which I hated), but I thought that worked really well here.

This movie is awesome. It's National Lampoon's Vacation if you replaced the poop jokes with existential angst and suicide. Very dark, very funny, great pacing. Go see it immediately.

Dark Water

God dammit, it was The Ring, The Grudge, and a dozen other American remakes of Japanese movies that all have the same plot, villain, and look! What the fuck! And how do I keep getting suckered into watching these?

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds

This movie is kind of hard to describe; there's a small village living on the edge of a toxic wasteland protected by these hundred-foot-tall semi-intelligent potato bugs. Our heroine has to fend off an invasion from a neighboring kingdom in order to prevent the giant bugs from wiping out both sides. It's deeply weird, but very cool.

IFC played all of Miyazaki's movies a couple months ago, so I've been slowly working my way through the ones I hadn't seen. Nausicaä is my favorite so far, but I've yet to see one of his that wasn't great. (For calibration purposes: I think that almost all of the anime that I've ever seen has been relentlessly terrible. It's very rare that I see one that I like.)

I loved the book, and I thought the movie did a good job of capturing it. It must have been tricky to adapt, since the book is, basically, two diaries, the first half of the book being the story from one guy's point of view, and the second half from the other's. The movie followed a more linear structure, and I think pulled it off pretty well without screwing up any of the revelations. But, if I hadn't read the book, I'm not sure I would have really understood what was going on: a lot of it seemed pretty glossed over.

I liked this a lot. It's weird in the way that 2001 is weird, and the effects are great in the way 2001's effects are great. There are 3 interleaved stories, some of which might not really have happened. It's a cool structure. I also liked that the connection between the "present" and "future" stories -- the part where the protagonist finishes his project and changes the world -- is left completely implied.

I only saw this because it was the only movie starting that day at 2pm. Even with my expectations wedged firmly down in the fifth sub-basement, this movie is complete crap. It's approximately as bad as Harry Potter, possibly even as bad as Dungeons and Dragons. Though at least Dungeons and Dragons had beholders. This has no beholders. And the dragon has feathers. Feathers!

Certainly the best Bond movie in recent memory, though it gets a little too talky and spends a little too much time psychoanalyzing him. I like that it is not smirky and stupid like most Bond movies, and that the violence is actually ugly. This Bond acts like the thug that he is.

The "parkour" stuff at the beginning was a pale shadow of District B13.

This is the one about the founding of the CIA. From this movie we can learn that: A) secret agents are emotionless bureaucrats, B) anyone who ever tells you the slightest fib is probably going to try and get you killed, C) LSD is not a good truth serum, D) senators and spies like playing homoerotic scat games. It's long, and didn't quite put me to sleep, but only just.