The Best Films of 2006

Why is Clean called Clean? The most obvious reason is that the narrative centers around the attempted detoxing of Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung), the volatile, irresponsible, casually abrasive Mrs. of a rock star named Lee Hauser. Lee lives to see the other side of his prime but dies before truly acute embarrassment sets in: Emily procures some heroin one night in Hamilton, Ontario, they quarrel, they both take hits while spending the night separately but alone, he dies, and she doesn't. She does, however, serve six months in prison, loses her home-base apartment in London, and bears the perfectly apt decision of a Canadian court to award custody of her young son to Lee's parents, the bashful but magnanimous Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and the dying but hard-willed Rosemary (Martha Henry). In story terms, Emily's renunciation of drugs is most obviously a prerequisite for securing at least some visiting rights, if not full custody, of her child—and yet, neither in plot nor in style does Clean ever take shape as the maternity melodrama that writer-director Olivier Assayas leads us to expect. Neither a Sirkian bath in rich colors and expressionist worldviews nor a visually ascetic character drama in the Cassavetes mold (such as this year's fleetingly similar Sherrybaby), Clean refuses either to fetishize or to undercut Emily's bond with her son, and it breaks profoundly with its generic templates by emphasizing narrative momentum without leading Emily toward a plane of maternal competence or demonstrating definitively that she isn't cut out for the job. Clean takes the drugs out of Emily's hands, at least kinda sorta—there are hints of back-sliding all over the dialogue, and occasionally in the images—but has the gumption to withhold any clear, compensatory object of transference, for her or for us. "Clean" Emily is a listless but not quite lost Emily: inspired to write and sing music that is neither good nor terrible, guaranteed neither success nor failure in the pursuit of her own recording career, both in love with her son and impatient with her mothering role, both humbly responsive to Albrecht's benevolence and unable to be fully straight with him, Emily doesn't come into focus—a testament not to disarray but to uncommon discipline in Assayas' film.

If the cinematography weren't so precisely choreographed and gorgeously detailed, and the editing weren't so polished and rhythmically sound, Clean might come across as a shamble instead of a film that insists on Emily's plausible existence, and the humane, unheroic poetry of her personal and professional dilettantism. Colors, angles, camera movements: they are all exerted with consummate control in Clean's diverse sequences, from the enervated hustle of a greasy waitressing job to the endorphin rush of an amped-up club gig to the fragile politeness of offering shelter to a catastrophic friend to Nolte's frightened, dignified, and subtly rebellious reactions to his wife's mortality (and, by extension, his own) to a bit of comic skullduggery surrounding a lipstick-lesbian record producer and her captive ex-lover (which teases more quickly and playfully at retrograde crazy-dyke stereotypes than do the turgid excesses of Notes on a Scandal). Few films in 2006 so comfortably wedded visual finesse and savvy editing to such a pronouncedly story-driven endeavor, and if Clean doesn't always have a strong sense of where it's going, and if the indie-rock idiom occasionally outs itself as a naïve outsider's projection, one shouldn't overlook how brave the movie is to buck the trends not just of bad-mommy morality plays but of standard drug-recovery dramas and of Maggie Cheung's high-glamour iconography and of Assayas' own recent filmography. Clean follows, incongruously, the baroque paranoias and Lynchian short-circuitries of the estimable demonlover, though in its quiet way, Clean shares with its predecessor (and with Irma Vep) an interest in the tribulations and machinations of complex women in creative industries, as well as a polyglot sensibility that presumes the smallness of the world. Clean moves in and out of Canada, England, France, and the United States with the same understated fluency of its swerves in and out of redemptive drama, tacit comedy, and voyeuristic showbiz-fantasy. A second viewing is, in my experience, a shaky proposition: the film's refusal to settle questions and the concerted affectlessness of Cheung's performance, occasionally flirting with blandness, are not as refreshing the second time around. Too, the nascent Americanization of Emily in the final scenes feels like a rhetorical move with too little warrant in emotional substance or dramatic satisfaction. Still, Clean deploys its humanistic style in the service of legitimately interesting humans, who relate to each other in plausible, demanding, and affecting ways when they aren't name-dropping Tricky. Its sense of space and of place are beyond reproach, and without a Babel-like bone in its body, it captures the essence of a contemporary life lived across the outmoded borders of nation, region, genre, or conventionally defined gender roles—a life riven with self-destructive impulses but beginning to sound the first, tentative notes of stability.

The Best Films of 2006

One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more, Death, thou shalt die.

No one is about to confuse Darren Aronofsky with John Donne. Nevertheless, just as clearly, The Fountain represents this outrageously precocious third-time filmmaker's gambit at metaphysical poetry—and also at pre-Columbian mythmaking, science-fictional mindwarp, and Buddhist parable. As I indicated below, Matthew Barney's deliberately rarefied Drawing Restraint 9 makes something of a matching set with The Fountain, the year's most conceptually ambitious (if not commercially incongruous) mainstream release. But while Barney's lovers have the mad, fervent, forlorn passion of certain figures in Andrew Marvell, literalizing the notorious injunction to "tear our pleasures with rough strife/ Through the iron gates of life," The Fountain is contemplative, numinous, elusive, in the structure it elaborates as well as the shape of love that it traces. One of the movie's glorious surprises, then, is how broadly it differentiates itself, despite the trademark mannerisms of the colors and camerawork, from the blunt, confrontational, and harshly prescriptive style of Aronofsky's earlier films. The Fountain opts for a certain fragility and porousness between shots and subplots, laying sheets of emotion and implication over top of one another rather than slamming scenes together with the arrogant, thunderclap virtuosity of Requiem for a Dream, and without extending ambiguity all the way to paranoiac ends, as in π. The cuts here are strongly but enigmatically felt. As the protagonist of Margaret Edson's Wit suffers to learn, what separates life and death at the end of Donne's most celebrated Holy Sonnet is not a period nor an exclamation mark nor even a semi-colon, but a comma. The edits in The Fountain are almost all commas, for all that they mark expansive transitions of epoch and spirit. The film accumulates and expands, growing outward and nesting inward rather than, like most movies, simply barreling forward.

In a film replete with runes and metaphors, and concerned as much as anything with the enigmatic act of writing and its powers to distract, create, mislead, and immortalize, it's hard to verbalize why the movie works so well and exactly how it operates—both despite and because of its evident limitations. To be sure, there's much in The Fountain one can't help wanting to fix: the dingy under-lighting of the laboratory sequences, the truncated narrative and graphic-novel visual conceits of the Inquisition plot, the sentimental patina surrounding the dying Rachel Weisz, and the sour imperialist aftertaste of a conquistador's utterly sympathetic, almost beatific vanquishing of a Mayan priest. And yet, The Fountain resolves and redeems itself as a movie of ripples, radiating generously outward from what is sometimes cheap or unsatisfying in a given image and accruing spectacular emotional potency along the way. Ingenuities in the editing and the script encourage us to read the ancient fable of conquest and the prismatic, shimmering future-tale as two versions, hers and his, of evading death by imagining life. The scientific plotline avoids any dunder-headed impulse to act as a foil against such ardor and creativity, but the stakes of the researcher's failure and the harsh caprices of laboratory timing lend the film its mournful sobriety and furnish an important idea of human limits, if not an insistence upon them.

All of these storylines and motifs, laced together at times by something as simple as a reiterated camera move, allow everything in The Fountain to rhyme internally with everything else. Even the tangible factors of the film's own making—the shrinking budget, the abortive plots, the simply rendered visual effects—are absorbed into this echo chamber, such that The Fountain, at every level, keens and howls with the desperate wish to beat the clock and defy the ledger, to do more with less, to defy the Fates. It's an easy movie to explode with an ounce of cynical response, notwithstanding the unqualified triumphs of its music, its lead performance, and its golden backdrops of cellular life as a galactic frontier. But for a filmmaker who's had trouble breathing life into characters beneath all the fancy plumbing of well-honed technique, The Fountain holds life in impressively high regard, honoring its mysteries by enunciating some of its own.

The Best Films of 2006

Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 was one of two exciting, fiercely idiosyncratic films in 2006 in which carnal, compulsive love spanned wide dimensions of time and place, etching itself into lavishly syncretized idioms of east, west, and south, and casting the director's own real-life lover as the muse of erotic, ironically ambivalent abandon. Not content as Darren Aronofsky was with indirect (albeit insistent) authorial signatures, Barney plasters himself into his own images, characteristically using his own body as a canvas for graphic, cosmetic, and cultural bricolage, but injecting a level of self-conscious ardor and outside-observerism that the Cremaster films, greater pieces though they are, didn't often attempt. This movie is a sort of spiritual and artistic heir to Greenaway's Pillow Book, not just reflecting an Anglo fascination with Asian tropes and cultural currents, but critiquing that fascination through its own peculiar codes and complicated figures, which are just as often repellent (Greenaway's guttings and obese bodies, Barney's floating log of whale detritus) as they are sensuous (calligraphy, ceremony, costume). By adopting the central and controversial motif of whaling, Barney installs bright, cutting questions into his movie about which of these tropes and artifacts are properly Japan's, which belong more properly to nature or the world or prehistory, and which arise from that deep, aquatic, associative imagination of Barney's—a metaphorical ocean, which he trawls and patrols for inspiration in ways that are not themselves immune from critique. After all, who does this spectacularist think he is? What are the boundaries of what he can recruit as "art," or spend in the name of frequently obscure expression, or expect an audience to tolerate, particularly in the long, guignol climax?

I credit Barney enormously for planting these questions in his art, for cultivating a form of art that is premised on self-reflexive questions instead of just prompting them from a rightfully skeptical audience (like so many movies do), and for working at the scale and at the extremities that are necessary to make his artistry salient. Drawing Restraint 9 certainly has the courage of its strange, unique convictions, and if, like The Pillow Book, the movie extends itself a little too long, allowing too many of its conceits to grow overripe, the movie furnishes more than its fair share of images and sounds and ideas and juxtapositions for us to ponder. Best of all, in a way that Barney rarely gets credit for, he is shaping up terrifically as a filmmaker, not just a sculptor or gallery artist with a camera in one hand while the other is stuffed into Barbara Gladstone's big, fat purse. In the very way it is shot and edited, Drawing Restraint 9 echoes its own thematic and visual investments in tension, duration, and detail, and the film does an elegant job of showcasing its center-ring event—the molding and then the crumbling of a 45,000-pound mold of petroleum jelly—such that the movie conveys Barney's own enthusiasm for this sight, and even better, his own styles of seeing and feeling.

The Best Films of 2006

To a degree that muffles my enthusiasm for the film, James Longley's aesthetic plan for Iraq in Fragments is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: that is, if you splinter your movie into discontinuous shards, you will certainly achieve an effective mimesis of splintering, although you pay a certain price in sequence-level rigor and coherence. Portions of Iraq in Fragments seem arbitrarily assembled in their montage; at other moments, the robust, aesthetically powerful cinematography poses an equal risk of distracting us away from Iraq's contemporary agon and onto the facility, skill, and conceptual conceits of the filmmaker. However, with those caveats supplied, I think Iraq in Fragments is a stirringly wrought documentary incorporating footage that I can hardly believe anyone, especially a Western man with a movie camera, was able even to record, much less to safeguard through the various trials of local unease, possible censor reviews, and what was almost certainly a bear of an editing job. Iraq in Fragments looks as immediate and pressing in its sensual life on-screen as in its political and historical convictions—witness its heightened rendering of colors, of textures, of skylines, of a city that is decimated without being the rubble-pile that American news sometimes suggests, of facial close-ups at every juncture of the affective spectrum. The movie's full-scale immersion in the catastrophe it documents is a world away from the articulate but critically distant finger-wagging that characterizes so much modern documentary, and modern reportage in general. Longley was able to "see" the artistic possibilities of Iraq in Fragments while serving as his own cinematographer, camera operator, sound technician, composer, and editor because he insinuated himself so intimately with the quotidian life of a fractured country and allowed people, not just images or ideas, to speak eloquently and emotionally on their own behalf—especially in the first and third segments. The politics of characterizing an imperiled Sunni population (largely through the sentimentalized figure of a chastised, laboring child), a martial and resurgent Shia army of true believers, and a tremulous Kurdish north will be debated for years to come by the informed audiences the film draws to itself, but the especially salient point here seems to be that Longley has crafted a documentary that is guaranteed an afterlife as both a global-political time capsule and a benchmark of cinematic expression, blending the styles of the objective, anthropological survey and the personal essay-film with uncommon and topically appropriate finesse. Iraq in Fragments arrives on screen replete with indelible images, and with its finger credibly on the pulses of a country that is simultaneously passing away and convulsing into some new, volatile iteration of life.

Honorable Mention to When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's sprawling, humane record of the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, an emphatic result of political neglect—if not, as many interviewees feel, a socially eugenic and tyrannical will. In the understandable interest of quickly accruing massive amounts of footage and reflecting those impressions back to a nation in denial, Lee hasn't imparted to this film the argumentative consistency or rhetorical polish that he might have, or the refined, artistic technique that is more typical of Iraq in Fragments. Still, the film is prodigious in scope and deeply moving. Both portraits of concurrent catastrophes, serving as mirrors in some fashions and as direct contrasts in others, will endure as indispensable artifacts of the places and moments they describe, and, in Lee's case, as a crucial node within an already broad and accomplished filmography.

Best of 2006: Cinematography

If I had any knack for achieving the artistry of filmmaking, instead of just observing it as well and as often as I can, I would love nothing better than to be a gifted cinematographer (or at least a stunning, keenly observant photographer, like Dr. S.). Such is my lot, however, that I can barely take a digital photo without scalping somebody at the top of the frame or planting my fingertip right on the lens. From the abject inadequacy of my own image-making, I absolutely revere the kinds of talent on display for us all in the best-photographed movies of 2006.

And now, only one more category to go... and you know which one that is!

Best of 2006: Film Editing

Timing is everything, in movies as in life, which is why film editing is one of the most important arts in cinema—perhaps the most important art—and yet, editors get precious little respect. The scriptwriters for the Oscars always foist upon the presenters some twee little quip about how a good editor would make the telecast shorter, just as the Cinematography presenters are perennially obligated to make a dumb joke about how the principal job of a director of photography is to make the actors look pretty. In reality, good editors are like ideal gallery docents, smoothly directing you to look at just the right images for just the right amount of time, and in the most suggestive, interesting order.

They are also brilliant trainers, regulating the pace and energy of the film, and they are shrewd, observant psychologists. I'm sure I've mentioned it on this site before, but Tim Squyres, the usual editor of Ang Lee's movies (though not, for whatever reason, on Brokeback) once told a Cornell audience that his first Oscar nomination came, inevitably, for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was by far the easiest of Lee's films to cut: all the transitions between action and dialogue were right there in the screenplay, and most of the conversations were two-handers... whereas, in something like The Ice Storm or Sense and Sensibility, you've often got four or six or eight actors in a scene, all of them experiencing tremors and doubts and suppressed excitements, or harboring valuable knowledges that other characters don't have. To whom do you cut? Should the excitement of secrecy or the force of repression dominate the scene?

Editors are also poets: they cut expression down to its barest essentials, coordinating the meter of a film to its content and imagery, and hopefully furnishing us with something illuminating and special. These five definitely provided those kinds of experiences for me, but as you'll see from the copious runners-up, there was lots of great editing going around in 2006.

Best of 2006: Lead Actress

Predictably enough, I had even more than usual to say about my five Best Actress candidates. Amazingly, the only one of them who got any real awards-season play was Luminita Gheorghiu, whom the LAFC crowned as their Best Supporting Actress, earning my love but also stealing my damn thunder. It's a tremendous performance, but I feel sure that it's a lead. Agree or disagree, Lazarescu fans? And who's shocked (or pleased, or not, or indifferent) that, after a year of me flapping my mouth about Clean, Cheung didn't make the final five? I must admit, the picture wasn't everything I remembered it to be when I returned to it last week, though it's still mighty good.

Best of 2006: Lead Actor

For once, I came up with a list that, in some plausible version of reality, could have been Oscar's as well: two of my nominees are shared with AMPAS, two others have a People's Choice pedigree that Oscar might have noticed if he weren't so snobby, and the fifth was hamstrung by an overshadowing castmate and a ridiculous, cynical mismarketing as a "supporting" performer. (Did Jodie Foster "support" Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, and I missed it?)

If you don't believe the merits of my list, check out Nathaniel's (as you no doubt already have), and ask yourself: could we both be so wrong?

Best of 2006: The Directors

Many, but not all, of these five artists will have their praises sung again when I post my Best Picture lineup in the next few days. But first, there will be stops along the way for Best Actor and my three favorite categories every year, Best Actress, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing.

Meanwhile, though it may be immodest of me, I can't resist the temptation to link to this article at the Reverse Shot Blog. Some portion of the web-writing I do feeds back into my professional life, but mostly, I do all of this for the fun, the conversation, and the challenge of practicing my writing and my thinking, especially about movies. It's enormously gratifying when people notice, and even better when they appreciate what they find here. Thanks to all of you who read and comment, and a particularly huge thanks today to the writers at Reverse Shot!

Best of 2006: Non-English Language Films

To answer the obvious question, which only recently became a question, there are no American movies here... not just on principle, but because I think all five of these movies, as well as L'Enfant, the unnamed first runner-up, beat Letters from Iwo Jima on any day of the week, in any language.

Here, then, are my picks for the five best films I saw last year that weren't in the English language. Incidentally, there's no Almodóvar here, either, but if you were a fan of Law of Desire, I can highly recommend the fifth film on this list. Old Joy fans (oh, you zillions!) will groove on Syndromes, if it's ever actually released in the States, and Requiem is probably the great under-exploited import of the year. There's got to be a bigger American audience for this movie, and hopefully for all of these movies. I hope that audience is readying their Netflix queue even as we speak, but I also hope we'll all keep throwing money at these movies when they're actually in theaters, or soon enough our cinemas won't speak any more languages than our current president does. And we know how many that is.

Best of 2006: Best Supporting Actress

Dig in, StinkyLulu, and all the rest of you, too. I've already gabbed so much about three of these five women that there's less surprise in this announcement, but I hope you'll still find something to say in response. Next up: Best Director and Best Foreign-Language Film.

Meanwhile, Goatdog makes a great case for Amy Smart in Crank as his own pick for this year's Best Supporting Actress. If you've seen the film, you'll know exactly what it means, even if none of us would have phrased it this well; if you haven't seen the film... well, why haven't you?

Best of 2006: Best Supporting Actor

Why beat around the bush? Here they are, along with seven worthy runners-up.

Best of 2006: Art Direction & Costumes

The Visuals & Editing division of my Best of 2006 feature expands with the new citations for Best Art Direction/Production Design and Best Costume Design. From hungry houses to sinking ships, shimmy-shimmy dresses to expensive faux-hipsterism, these spreads were splendid and these duds weren't duds.

Best of 2006: Visual Effects and Makeup

Categories #8 and #9 out of 20 join the ranks, and as in the Academy, the fields are narrowed: Best Visual Effects, where elaborate CGI shares the stage with a thrilling and cost-effective fantasy, and Best Makeup, where an ounce of careful, informative, and imaginative character work is worth a pound of scenery-chewing latex.

Best of 2006: Screenplay Awards

The hits keep on coming with the year's best Original Screenplays and, if you scroll down a little, the Adapted Screenplays. Overlap with the Oscar lists amounts to exactly one shared honoree—William Monahan's expert script for The Departed. Then again, none of my Score, Sound, or Sound Effects nominees matched with Oscar's, either, even where you might have expected some common enthusiasms, as with Children of Men. Who's right? Who's wrong? Spill it in the comments. Amended at 11:08pm with runner-up citations in Original Screenplay.

Best of 2006: Doc's, Sound, and Music

And we have liftoff! The curtain of the 2006 Nick's Flick Picks Honorees starts rising on the Best Documentary category and the four Sound & Music rosters, for Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Song Score/Adaptation Score (since I thought the Original Songs were pretty bunk this year), and Best Sound Effects. Rationales all around and, wherever the competition was close, some runners-up. Comment away, and keep checking back for more updates!

Eleventh, But Not Forgotten

After much hemming and hawing, and a great deal of Mountain Dew, I've managed to hack out a Top Ten List that I'm happy with. I'll unveil it on Tuesday along with the Best of 2006 awards, but between now and then, reserve a fond thought for the four movies that were hardest to leave off the list. Not in the sense that I adore them; in a better year, there would have been little question of their inclusion. But I adore a great deal about them, and in a different moment, or after another Dew, I might have swapped them up. The graphics were ready to go. In fact, if I didn't have a little projected version of Nathaniel perched on my shoulder, admonishing me, "No ties! No ties!" I might have done some creative math to squeak these under the wire.

(P.S. to Clive Owen: So sorry to vote you out twice in the final round. Don't take it personally. But if you are taking it personally, call me, and we'll get to the bottom of this. Which is to say, please take it personally, so that you have a reason to call me. Clive? Clive??)

(Images © 2006 Universal Pictures; © 2006 Universal Pictures; © 2006 Lions Gates Films/Lakeshore Entertainment; and © 2006 Kino International)

Best Unsung Performances of 2006

Why this tribute? Because none of these turns quite made the cut for my year-end honors, but I want to give them some public props anyway. Because in an era where Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain are considered "supporting" actors, it's important to recognize true-blue and top-flight support when it happens. Because some of the best-reviewed movies of 2006 hit some rough patches in their scripts that required a strong, smart, inevitably under-appreciated actor in a second- or third-tier part to smooth the path and keep things interesting. Because it's hard to create a person when some roles or films only want a silhouette, a stereotype, or a warm body to wear a fabulous outfit; we all know Vera Farmiga made the best of a mechanistic character this year in The Departed, but she wasn't the only one who spun a lot out of a little. And speaking of The Departed, that movie may well have boasted the year's most exciting ensemble, but at least four smaller movies worked comparable magic with their large, stellar casts.

Nick Davis' Block Party 2006

I think because I write such long, academic reviews, and because I put so much emotional and intellectual pressure on movies to be so many things in my life, I am often asked why I can't, or won't, "just sit back and enjoy" what I'm watching. My most sincere answer to this, as my students know, is that I actually think that objects of love—which for me include bad movies as well as good ones—prompt us to want to know more rather than less about how they work, who they are. My friends who like sports never tire of statistics and minutiae and possible trades and fantasy playbooks, and these knowledges seem to draw them into the excitement of the game rather than chuting them out of it. My friends who know (and love) cars or cooking or math or travel or clothes or landscapes or medicine or music feel the same way.

For me, it's movies. I don't want to "turn my brain off," whatever that means. However, I do know a pleasure cruise when I'm on one, and if you're ever haunting the video stores, wondering what to rent when you're looking for an effusive, energizing good time, these are the titles I'd recommend from 2006...

(Images © 2006 Lions Gate Films/Starbucks Entertainment; © 2006 MGM/Sony Entertainment; and © 2006 Lions Gate Films/Lakeshore Entertainment)

Supporting Actress Blog-a-Thon, Served Up with a Smile

One especially frustrating confluence of being away from the internet and having my blog infested by a code-devouring succubus was that I missed out on celebrating the 1975 Supporting Actress Smackdown alongside my comrades in arms. This Smackdown was exceptional for all sorts of reasons: a clipreel from Nathaniel that was even sassier and more illustrative of the nommed performances than usual; a new and very welcome participant in all the smacking; two exquisite nominees from the same legendary film; better-than-expected work from the two nominees I hadn't seen before, even though their films were horrendous; and the announcement of a hiatus in Supporting Actress Sundays for a few months while our fearless leader StinkyLulu recharges his batteries and considers some tweaks to the format.

But Stinky's just a little tired, y'all; he's not neurasthenic. Besides, the committed actressexual doesn't just plunge into celibacy at a moment's notice, so today's Supporting Actress Blog-a-Thon is more than adequate recompense for the January Smackdown that isn't to be. It's a glorious smorgasbord in and of itself, with movie bloggers all over the web stumping for one supporting actress performance from 2006 that they'd like to include in our collective, glittering time capsule. I haven't had time to read the other entries yet, but I'm already excited to hear praise for some overlooked gems, such as ModFab's ode to the very fine Kerry Washington in The Last King of Scotland, Nathaniel's gorgeous enthusiasm for the delicious Meryl Streep in A Prairie Home Companion (her best perf in 2006!), or Radio Allegro's praise for the superb Mia Kirshner in The Black Dahlia. I'm also ready to be convinced by some arguments for performances that I didn't quite love: for example, here's our resplendent host's commentary on Lindsay Beamish, the dyspeptic dominatrix in Shortbus.

For my own part, not just to avoid more consensus choices but because I think she's every bit their equal, I'd like to sing the praises of Ashley Johnson, a 23-year-old actress previously unknown to me, who contributed such an exemplary, unfussy, and wondrously humane performance as Amber in Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation. I am still recovering from my astonishment at the public and even the critical indifference to Fast Food Nation, which has yet to eke out even $1 million after seven weeks of release, a sharp and witty trailer, an interesting and generally favorable reception at Cannes, and two years of hype about the resurgence of liberal politics in Hollywood cinema, often in films much inferior to this one—an admittedly flawed and occasionally clumsy but smart, eloquent, detailed, and vividly acted panorama. Yes, in some passages, Eric Schlosser's nonfiction investigation has not translated sublimely into mellifluous dialogue or satisfying dramatic structures, but increasingly, the film manages the clever and principled trick of eliciting deep emotion and educated ire without compromising on its subdued, almost creepily mundane tone, sound, and look.

Johnson's performance is fundamental to the film's grand success in this regard. Cast as a fetching, agreeable, and breathtakingly self-assured teenager—a type we rarely see in movies, who makes even Rory Gilmore seem mush-mouthed and unappealing—Johnson already achieves quite a bit by communicating decency, intelligence, and lively affection for her single mom (Patricia Arquette), her gadabout uncle (Ethan Hawke), her friends, her dreams of college, her co-workers, even her alienating job at Mickey's, where she's surrounded by plastic furniture, felonious uniforms, chemical smells, and dead air, to say nothing of the shit-stained burgers and carbonated sugar-water. Amber persists, because Johnson does, in being game without being a dupe, responsible without being officious, jovial without being silly, equally at ease with adults and peers, and quite obviously liked even by her disaffected, criminally tempted cohorts at Mickey's, especially the character played by Paul Dano. Essential goodness, as the Smackdowners agreed in the comparable case of Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies, is a deceptively difficult thing to conjure on screen, especially within the mandates of narrative film to complicate or "dramatize" that goodness through unexpected actions, accelerated evolutions, or contrived scenarios.

Kudos, then, to Linklater's direction and to his and Schlosser's script for clearing some space and defying some clichés so that Johnson can assemble the credible, layered, and intriguingly optimistic person that she does. Which isn't to say that Amber doesn't evolve over the course of the film. After involving herself with a student-activist group at a nearby college, Amber carries herself to the brink of a massive and dismaying realization, not just about her job at Mickey's but about the enormous social and political structures in which it participates. Amber soon finds herself engaging in anti-corporate guerrilla efforts that seriously jeopardize the ubiquitous approval and promised upward mobility that have surrounded her through the film. It's a tribute to Johnson that she has evoked Amber's potential and her soundness of character so strongly and uncloyingly that we shudder for Amber in these moments, even if we are politically sympathetic to her new intents; it's a further tribute that she doesn't jettison Amber's earlier personality in the throes of this epiphany, but expresses Amber's reluctance, panic, and mystification even as she sticks to her cadre's dangerous plan of action after several of her older, more experienced comrades have already fled the scene. The connecting thread is Amber's solid but complicated idealism: the very trait that once may have conditioned her blindness now forces her toward precarious action.

Amber teeters on a precipice between innocence and experience, helplessness and enlightenment, optimism and agitation at the end of Fast Food Nation, in a way that makes her both an audience surrogate and a gleaming projection of how we may wish to see ourselves. Few people in Fast Food Nation's audience are as legitimately green as Amber, even if we, like her, are allowing ourselves our very first frank look at the social and political enormities innate to corporatized food and abattoir economics. Johnson's performance poses germane and important questions: will political awareness require the tarnishing of Amber's happiness, even her goodness? By the same token, are her confidence and maturity fundamentally premised on naïveté and unknowing complicity? Where is the balance between communal responsibility and shallow self-interest within Amber's political enlightenment? We can see that her activism rewards, at least in part, her high-school dreams of sharper, more enriching friends, better invitations, more promising crushes on more interesting boys. She even suggests a nervous but powerful attraction for her uncle, or at least for his life of travel and thought and tale-spinning, so the connections between domestic influences and public conduct remain lucid and compelling in Johnson's delineation of Amber.

To ask more acting-specific questions, who besides Johnson could draw out the warmth and spontaneity in Patricia Arquette, who hasn't looked this comfortable or relaxed on screen since Flirting with Disaster? Who, short of Julie Delpy, has not only indulged Ethan Hawke in his freewheeling, coffee-shop improvisations but has actually sustained and improved them with her own bright-eyed, attentive, exquisitely pitched responses? How many actresses this young, and this new to cinema, can hold the screen so compellingly in shots of active listening, fond onlooking, genial small-talk, and the nearer and nearer tremors of a shifting inner life? Johnson is a terrific, fresh screen partner and a shrewd, disciplined actress, and she manages all of this with the ease of prime Kirsten Dunst, but without the aloofness or the heavy lids. She acts terrifically without ever seeming like she's auditioning for other roles, or straining to demonstrate her gravitas. In other words, she proves her superiority to most actors her age (at least when she's cast in the right part) without signalling that this, in fact, is her primary objective—a lesson from which the talented but sternly self-conscious Natalie Portman might take some notes.

Johnson's is the smile with which Fast Food Nation serves up its terrible news. The movie wouldn't work if the smile weren't so sparkling, and so real, or if the gathering storm of fear and knowledge weren't palpable beneath that smile.

(Images © 2006 Participant Productions/20th Century Fox)

The Fifties: A Midterm Progress Report

The Oscars. The Emmys. The Tonys. The Obies. The Césars. The Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards. Employee of the Month. National Junior Honor Society. And now: The Fifties.

With the awards-baity fall movie season about to bow, 'tis the season for assessing the goods that have been on offer thus far in the year. Most prognosticators agree that United 93, World Trade Center, The Devil Wears Prada (care of Meryl Streep), and Half Nelson (care of Ryan Gosling) are the only January-August releases likely to have any impact on the top categories of next year's Oscars. Of course, we've already seen plenty of potential action in places like Animated Feature, Documentary Feature (especially with An Inconvenient Truth and Why We Fight), and Visual Effects. Maybe a screenplay nod for Little Miss Sunshine, too, but that's about it.

Still—and you had to know this was coming—I'm less interested in psyching out the Academy than in looking back at my own favorites from the winter, spring, and summer seasons of 2006. I'm not the first to hop this train, but now that I've officially seen 50 of this year's stateside releases, it seems like an opportune moment for a progress report. Plus, since no awards slate, real or imaginary, is complete without a Mrs. Harris controversy, you'll just have to accept the fact that I'm considering that film, which was intended for theatrical distribution but somehow got sold last fall to HBO, as a 2006 release. Grin and bear it. Be happy for Annette.

And with that—we're off!

Best Picture
Clean
Dave Chappelle's Block Party
Drawing Restraint 9
Inside Man
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Runners-Up: L'Enfant, The Descent, Three Times
I'm still waiting for a real gobsmacker to roll down the pike. For now, Olivier Assayas' patient, subdued, but visually specific melodrama about a recovering drug addict ambivalently re-fitting herself for motherhood stands handily above the rest of the pack.

Best Director
Olivier Assayas, Clean
Michel Gondry, Dave Chappelle's Block Party
Spike Lee, Inside Man
Neil Marshall, The Descent
Michael Winterbottom, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Runners-Up: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, L'Enfant; João Pedro Rodrigues, Two Drifters
Again, Clean is so carefully and unpretentiously observant, gathering force as it continues without any histrionics, that I can't vote against Assayas. Still, Spike Lee makes a strong bid here, letting loose with an energetic, suspenseful, but deftly comic approach to a sturdy screenplay that needn't have been as witty and memorable as Lee made it. He expands his repertoire considerably, as well as his commercial prospects, but also makes Inside Man tonally and formally consistent within his body of work.

Best Actress
Annette Bening, Mrs. Harris
Maggie Cheung, Clean
Ana Cristina De Oliveira, Two Drifters
Gretchen Mol, The Notorious Bettie Page
Keke Palmer, Akeelah and the Bee

Runners-Up: None
Mol is the whole show in Bettie Page, fabricating personality, depth, and variation despite a weirdly tentative and direction-less script. Still, Cheung takes the cake with her deft underplaying, the way she listens to fellow actors and visibly reflects on what is happening rather than recycling clichés of zoned-out addiction or listless, weary recovery. Plus, she isn't unaccountably dull, like Cate Blanchett is in Little Fish.

Best Actor
Chang Chen, Three Times
Steve Coogan, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Jérémie Renier, L'Enfant
Denzel Washington, Inside Man
Ray Winstone, The Proposition

Runners-Up: None
The ever-reliable Chang is something of a space-filler here. Renier, Washington, and Winstone rise more than admirably to their occasions, each of them responsible for some truly special moments in their films. Edward Norton (Down in the Valley) and Aaron Eckhart (Thank You for Smoking) won admiring reviews, but I found them both too smug by half, too transparent in assembling their performances. I'm clapping most loudly for Coogan, who plays "himself" as an even pettier, funnier, more feather-fluffing hedonist than he did in Coffee and Cigarettes, but I'll still be surprised (and dismayed) if any of these fellas winds up on my year-end list.

Best Supporting Actress
Seema Biswas, Water
Emily Blunt, The Devil Wears Prada
Charlotte Rampling, Lemming
Meryl Streep, A Prairie Home Companion
Emily Watson, The Proposition

Runners-Up: Jeanne Balibar, Clean; Joan Cusack, Friends with Money; Edie Falco, Freedomland; Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
Amidst the shimmering decorousness and obvious scripting in Water, Seema Biswas plays the single persuasive human, and she's fascinating. I'm not sure the movie means to be about her by the end, but she's so conflicted and captivating that she carries the whole film everywhere she moves. All of that being said, I'd be nearly as happy recognizing the other terrific nominees. Your whole heart goes out to Watson in The Proposition, even when she's technically on the side of wrong. Rampling is as deeply unnerving in Lemming as Emily Blunt is enchanting in her third-tier role in Prada. As for Streep, she's very funny in Prada, but the whole movie's being handed to her without quite challenging her, and she has a few more facets and less predictable timing in Prairie.

Best Supporting Actor
Rob Brydon, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Woody Harrelson, A Prairie Home Companion
David Morse, Down in the Valley
Nick Nolte, Clean
Jérémie Segard, L'Enfant

Runners-Up: Jim Broadbent, Art School Confidential; Rory Culkin, Down in the Valley; Robert Downey, Jr., A Scanner Darkly; Jason Isaacs, Friends with Money; Clive Owen, Inside Man
Brydon is a hoot, and also very touching; Harrelson catches the light in his jaunty routines with John C. Reilly; David Morse keeps a stellar balance of the autocratic and the affectionate as Evan Rachel Wood's father in Down in the Valley, worried into bullishness. Still, Nolte's restraint and honest sentimentality as a grieving father in Clean, befriending his unreliable daughter-in-law against the wishes of his dying wife, make the very, very most of a trickily written role.

Screenplay
Clean, Olivier Assayas
Inside Man, Russell Gewirtz
Mrs. Harris, Phyllis Nagy
A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Frank Cottrell Boyce

Runner-Up: Lemming, Dominik Moll and Gilles Marchand
The writing has been the most consistently inconsistent element in most of the good movies I've seen this year; there haven't even been enough strong showings to warrant separate races for Original and Adaptation. If Clean and Inside Man weren't so well directed, the scripts might not seem very special. By contrast, Mrs. Harris and A Scanner Darkly are more arresting as pieces of writing than the interesting but not particularly urgent films manage to let on. Tristram Shandy is the cleverest by far, both at rhyming so well with the source novel's entropic ribaldry and at finding jokes as well as honest emotion inside so many corners of the filmmaking process.

Best Cinematography
Clean, Eric Gautier
The Descent, Sam McCurdy
L'Enfant, Alain Marcoen
The Road to Guantánamo, Marcel Zyskind
Three Times, Mark Ping-bin Lee

Runners-Up: Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Ellen Kuras; The Hills Have Eyes, Maxime Alexandre; Poseidon, John Seale
All five of these films make superb choices about what to shoot, and though only Three Times is self-consciously beautiful, they all furnish their viewers with intensely hypnotic visual experiences. L'Enfant narrowly surpasses Clean in its precise choreography of camera movements, and in the subtle, seemingly on-the-fly framings that nonetheless impart to the proceedings, as does Gautier's work in Clean, an almost novelistic wealth of detail.

Best Film Editing
Clean, Luc Barnier
Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Jeff Buchanan, Sarah Flack, and Jamie Kirkpatrick
Inside Man, Barry Alexander Brown
Police Beat, Joe Shapiro and Mark Winitsky
United 93, Clare Douglas, Richard Pearson, and Christopher Rouse

Runners-Up: Brick, Rian Johnson; The Descent, Jon Harris; Mission: Impossible III, Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey; Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Peter Christelis
A race that would hold up just as well at year's end, though only United 93 stands any chance at being so recognized. Among distinguished company, Dave Chappelle's Block Party not only finds the buried jewels in what I expect were mounds of footage, but each embedded performance has a distinctive shape and cadence, and the whole film follows a lovely arc from straightforward concert doc to a more resonant urban collage.

Best Art Direction
Art School Confidential, Howard Cummings
The Descent, Simon Bowles
Monster House, Ed Verreaux
Poseidon, William Sandell
Three Times, Huang Wen-ying

Runners-Up: Drawing Restraint 9, Matthew D. Ryle and Matthew Barney; Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, John Paul Kelly
It started the summer as the bête noire among blockbusters, but I found Poseidon to be a craftily made and mounted picture, nowhere more so than in its pristine design by Sandell, who knows his way around watery wreckage (see The Perfect Storm and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World). The ornate gorgeousness of Three Times also begs to be considered, but in the end, the deliciously macabre Monster House is my favorite, getting everything right from the omnivorous house of the title to the three appealingly drawn protagonists to the laugh-out-loud graphics of an arcade game called "Thou Art Dead."

Best Costume Design
The Devil Wears Prada, Patricia Field
Drawing Restraint 9, Matthew Barney
Friends with Money, Michael Wilkinson
Little Miss Sunshine, Nancy Steiner
The Notorious Bettie Page, John A. Dunn

Runners-Up: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Penny Rose; A Prairie Home Companion, Catherine Marie Thomas; The Proposition, Margot Wilson
I'm tempted to place the star next to Prada's colorful and off-the-wall ensembles, which parody couture without being contemptuous of it, or else next to the aptly chosen daywear of Friends with Money, so attuned to how the abashedly rich keep dressing down as normal folks, while Jennifer Aniston's Olivia keeps popping up in duds that her gal-pals have probably bought for her. Still, there's no getting around the rococo parade outfits, the scrumptious textures, and the wild, weird meditations on Japanese culture that Matthew Barney built into his almost sculptural clothes for Drawing Restraint 9.

Best Sound
Dave Chappelle's Block Party
Inside Man
Miami Vice
Mission: Impossible III
United 93

Runners-Up: Clean; The Hills Have Eyes; A Prairie Home Companion; Tsotsi
Miami Vice may get an awful lot of things wrong, but the sound design isn't one of them. Note the expertly chosen and smartly incorporated songs, a score by John Murphy that detours away from the more obvious residues of the TV show, and some truly horrifying foley work for the shoot-outs and trailer-park explosions. The overlaid dialogue and sound elements of United 93 are nearly as crucial to the effectiveness of that film, and Block Party is one of the better-sounding concert docs, without losing its necessarily ragged edge. Already a sterling field, then... hopefully with still more glories to come between now and New Year's Eve!

Meanwhile, my Dishonor Roll of 2006 so far would run like this:
Worst Picture: Ask the Dust
Worst Director: Michael Caton-Jones, Basic Instinct 2
Worst Actress: Natalie Portman, V for Vendetta
Worst Actor: Kevin Kline, A Prairie Home Companion
Worst Supporting Actress: Idina Menzel, Ask the Dust
Worst Supporting Actor: Simon Baker, The Devil Wears Prada
Worst Screenplay: Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan
Worst Cinematography: Thank You for Smoking, James Whitaker
Worst Film Editing: Why We Fight, Nancy Kennedy

Mann Down

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a magazine ad for Ray-Ban sunglasses, featuring Tyrese and Josh Wald! (Mmmmm... Josh Wald...)

No, it's the poster for Michael Mann's Miami Vice, which is as inert and personality-flattening as the photo suggests, but not in any typical way. There isn't anything average about Miami Vice except its ultimate mediocrity: otherwise, this movie can't make up its mind whether it wants to be an action thriller, a film-school project, or a deconstructionist essay. That's the kind of summer carnival ride you don't see every day, certainly not in scrunchy, frizzy DV. Farrell and Foxx, both of whom look like they thought they'd signed up for something else, quickly fall by the wayside as Mann and cinematographer Dion Beebe put their own muscles and cutting-edge aspirations front and center. Bully for them, manifestly talented as they are, but I wasn't convinced that any of Miami Vice really worked after the first five minutes. You can read my full review here. And then you can switch back to Josh.

(Image © 2006 Universal Pictures)