This is very premature for me, as the size of my Unseen Movies list will indicate, but it's New Year's Eve and everyone else has written their Top Ten list, usually without bothering to note what they have and haven't seen anyway (there's even a section of the blogosphere that seems to have just discovered that Unseen movies should be an essential part of every movie list). So, I figure I might as well throw mine onto the pile. For the purposes of this post only, I'm including films from non-2006 years as listed by imdb, which assigns a film a year based on the first time the movie actually planned. For everything else, I use imdb because I don't believe a film only begins to exist when it plays at the theatre in the US, or even for provincially, when it happens to play in the city I live in. But since the whole reason is to get a list in when all the other lists come out, so some sort of comparison can be made, I figure I should include all the same films every other critic in America uses. Such films will be denoted by an *, and will not be included in 2006 on The Big List.
1. Three Times* 2. Miami Vice
3. The Departed
4. Borat
5. Curse Of The Golden Flower
6. My Dad Is 100 Years Old*
7. Princess Raccoon*
8. Dave Chappelle's Block Party*
9. Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
10. Tristram Shandy*
11. United 93
12. The Fountain
13. The Break-Up
14. Inside Man
15. Fearless
16. Brick*
17. Cars
18. Marie Antoinette
19. The Protector*
20. Clerks II
21. Snakes On A Plane
22. V For Vendetta*
23. Talladega Nights
24. The Prestige
25. Mission: Impossible III
26. Thank You For Smoking*
27. Nacho Libre
28. Friends With Money
29. X-Men: The Last Stand
30. The Black Dahlia
31. The DaVinci Code
And the Useen Movies:
Still Life The Banquet
Invisible Waves
Children Of Men
The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu
A Praire Home Companion
The Science Of Sleep
The Queen
Volver
Flags Of Our Fathers
Pan's Labyrinth
Letters From Iwo Jima
Inland Empire
The Last King Of Scotland
Black Book
Little Children
The Proposition*
Babel
An Inconvenient Truth
A Scanner Darkly
Slither
Superman Returns
Casino Royale
Little Miss Sunshine
Lady In The Water
The Devil Wears Prada
Poseidon
The Lake House
Rocky Balboa
World Trade Center
Crank
The Illusionist
Apocalypto
Find Me Guilty
Deja Vu
I've been browsing some of your posts and picked out a lot of movies that I'd like to see.
ReplyDeleteYour top pick of 2006 is very interesting. I've never heard of Zui hao de shi guang (Three Times) before.
Could you maybe go into more detail about why you liked this film so much?
I loved Brick. That's an easy choice to include.
Perhaps you could clarify, is this "tops" list your personal favorites of the year or the ones you thought were the best from a filmmaking point of view?
Thanks for reading, hope you're enjoying it.
ReplyDeleteI've a short review of Three Times here. Hou's a brilliant filmmaker, perhaps the best working in the world today (not an opinion unique tome), despite the fact that his films almost never get seen in the US. Perhaps his next film will have a better fate, seeing as how it stars Juliette Binoche.
As for the lists, the short answer is "yes". I keep it intentionally vague. I hate to draw distinctions between "art" and "entertainment", between personal enjoyment and technical facility. Thus the eclectic nature of some of my lists, where, say, Ghostbusters ranks alongside Stranger Than Paradise and Airplane! tops Raging Bull and Au Hasard Balthasar beats out The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. They are the Movies Of The Year, necessarily not the Best Movies or the Favorite Movies, just The Movies. Ranked in a way that makes sense to me at this particular moment in time. I'm afraid I'm allergic to systems.
Ideally, movie lists should serve as the beginning of a discussion, not the end. This format provides me a convenient way of writing about many of the movies I've seen, in a way that's hopefully entertaining and interesting for whatever audience I may attract.
Fantastic list. A bunch of my friends/critics and I put our lists up last Friday, and I'd love it if you'd check them out. You and I in particular have very similar lists.....(though I put Miami Vice at #1)...
ReplyDeleteHere's the link to my blog, Seen. There you'll find links to both Termite Art and Tativille---and man, if you're ranking the top films from every year, you've got to see what's going on at Tativille, it's practically absurd (and by that I mean fun).
Cheers!
Thanks. I've checked out both Termite Art and Tativille before, but I find the white on black almost impossible to read. Those Tativille folks have certainly seen a lot of films I haven't gotten around to yet, though.
ReplyDeleteMiami Vice is officially my #1 film of 2006 thus far, as Three Times was released in 2005.
Hi this is a very well written list
ReplyDeleteas for the 'Unseen' films i would very much recomend 'The Illusionist'
This is an incredible film that could earn itself a higher place on your list.