Welcome to the sixth instalment of the Noughts Report. Each entry revisits a year in film from the 2000s, highlighting movies big and small and the careers and genres and trends that ignited or flamed out along the way. This attempted kaleidoscope is 100% subjective and AI-free, so if I bag or barely mention a film you love, or orate at length or heap praise upon a film you loathe, I apologise.
Read Part 1: 2001, Part 2: 2002, Part 3: 2003, Part 4: 2004, and Part 5: 2005.
In my continuing quest to produce pieces that would not be produced by GenAI, with whimsy and peculiar tangents and odd fixations and all the weird grace notes of a human author, I’ll kick off 2006 with six films of the “Not to be confused with” variety. I could also have done that with Crash from 2005, but that dead horse has already been well-flogged.
First, there’s The Host, not to be confused with the 2013 Saoirse Ronan-starring sci-fi movie from the author of Twilight, but rather Bong Joon-Ho’s entertaining Korean monster movie. Joon-Ho mixes comedy and action and scares and tension and pathos with considerable dexterity, with monster hijinks thrown in lest that balancing act be insufficiently challenging.
Secondly, there’s Slither, not to be confused with the icky, Phillip Noyce-directed, Joe Esterhaz-scripted, Sharon Stone-starring voyeuristic thriller (spelled Sliver) of 1993, but rather the icky (in a different way) James Gunn-steered horror-comedy. Gunn’s future as a blockbuster architect for Marvel and DC is not exactly self-evident in this little gem, his directorial debut after scripting Tromeo & Juliet, Scooby Doo, and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. However, the same irreverent spirit as his comic book movies and the earliest incarnation of his wonderful troupe of mutant character actors (Michael Rooker, Greg Henry, Nathan Fillion) can be found here.
Thirdly, there’s The Guardian, not to be confused with William Friedkin’s not-even-mentioned-in-his-autobiography 1990 return to horror, but rather Andrew Davis’s coastguard action-drama starring Ashton Kutcher as a hotshot rookie and Kevin Costner as his old guard mentor. It’s a formula we’ve seen before this decade (Ladder 49, The Recruit) and will see again, though we see it less nowadays with the dissolving of the star system. This was Davis’s final film, and while not in the top tier of that blue-collar action filmography (The Fugitive, Under Siege), the rescue set-pieces are effectively staged.
Ashton Kutcher’s filmography is largely a blind spot that no level of completist OCD will bring me to fill, so he’s not a figure I’m encountering much over this decade, admittedly his heyday. However, he’s okay here, and Costner is characteristically sturdy. In my defence, as I’ve gotten older, there are many other actors I’ve similarly peaced out on, including ones much better than Kutcher. I’m 44, have three more Noughts Reports to write, and don’t have time to learn the difference between Josh O’Connor and Jack O’Connell and George MacKay and Harris Dickinson. But I digress …
Fourth, there’s Fearless, not to be confused with Peter Weir’s remarkable 1993 film about Jeff Bridges experiencing a quasi-spiritual rebirth after a devastating experience, but rather Ronny Yu’s remarkable film about Jet Li’s martial arts master Huo Yuanjia—a real-life/folk hero figure in the Wong Fei-hung/Ip Man vein—experiencing spiritual rebirth and humbling after a devastating experience. Following Yu’s gimmicky Hollywood genre excursions with Bride of Chucky and Freddy vs. Jason and Li’s variable run of English-language action movies produced by Joel Silver and Luc Besson, this feels personal and revelatory and is a high point for both creatives, ranking alongside Once Upon a Time in China and Fist of Legend among Li’s finest works. In a neat bit of symmetry, Li plays an avenging pupil of Huo Yuanjia in Fist of Legend, as did Bruce Lee is Fists of Fury.
Fifth, Black Sheep: not the Chris Farley/David Spade comedy vehicle of 1996, but rather a New Zealand horror-comedy about sheep gone rogue. I’d rather watch Farley and Spade. And finally, Running Scared: not Peter Hyams’ very enjoyable 1986 buddy-cop action-comedy pairing Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines, but rather a gnarly Paul Walker-headlined, Wayne Kramer-directed thriller. I’d rather watch Crystal and Hines.
Thanks for indulging.
Also indulgent in 2006: Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, commencing a reunion tour six years after Gladiator that would span several films—American Gangster, Body of Lies, Robin Hood—beginning with A Good Year. The film is atypical among their collaborations, eschewing muscular action and period trappings in favour of pastoral hijinks as Crowe’s workaholic master of the universe type inherits his estranged father’s country estate and falls for Marion Cotillard. Neither Scott nor Crowe possess a light comedic touch, but the film has a shaggy charm.
De Ja Vu is brother Tony Scott’s only foray into science-fiction territory, but this time travel actioner is still very recognisably a Tony Scott film, executed with his trademark polish and thankfully less caffeinated and hyper-stylised than his previous Domino. As I suggested when writing about that film, Denzel Washington’s tempering presence helps anchor De Ja Vu and other late Scott productions.
Washington also leads Spike Lee’s Inside Man—alongside Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, and Chiwitel Ejiofor—as a hostage negotiator embroiled in a bank heist, one of three films this decade in which Washington would be embroiled in a hostage situation, either as negotiator (Talking of Pelham 123) or negotiatee (John Q). It’s a stab at commerce from Lee, and a successful one, with some of his own personality and New Yorker pride smuggled into the material.
The Scott Bros also produced Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan & Isolde, which casts James Franco and Sophie Myles as the titular medieval lovebirds. This errs closer to Reynolds’ The Count of Monte Cristo than to his earlier Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: it’s a straightforward Hollywood historical romp, well-made and paced, a little dry, and in need of some of the camp and dodgy accents and power ballads and questionable taste that make Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves such a hoot. Having said that, after the pugilistic production of Robin Hood and subsequent fraught making of Waterworld, I’m sure Reynolds much preferred a safe, chill set and smooth, non-combative production that didn’t almost land him in director jail, in much the same way John Landis emerged from Twilight Zone: The Movie’s tragedy a more conservative director.
1990’s abovementioned The Guardian was not one of William Friedkin’s finest, but this year’s Bug—the first of two Tracey Letts stage adaptations from Friedkin, followed by Killer Joe—is a terrific, punishing, frazzled piece of work, with Ashley Judd playing against increasingly chilly type as a woman who falls into the paranoid orbit of Michael Shannon (in a breakout performance thirteen years after scoring WrestleMania tickets in Groundhog Day). Both Friedkin and Tony Scott would make two more features apiece, and I feel a certain sadness creeping in as I chronicle these two disparate but tremendous careers counting down.
Other elder statesmen with 2006 releases were Michael Apted with the distinguished Amazing Grace; Milos Forman with a sadly rather inelegant, clumsy swansong in Goya’s Ghosts, not the finest cap on a filmography that includes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus; and Robert Altman with his final work A Prairie Home Companion, engaging and elegiac and buoyed by a strong ensemble cast.
To return to a common refrain throughout this series, Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood continued to efficiently crank out films at a pace triple directors half their age. Allen dispatched Scoop—like Match Point set in London, starring Scarlett Johansson, and preoccupied with murder, but more schticky and staid than that revitalising work—and Eastwood released Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, companion films presenting the Battle of Iwo Jima, its prelude, and its aftermath from American and Japanese perspectives. Both are very good, thoughtful films, though the former is a little sloppier in that twilight Eastwood way.
In addition to companion Iwo Jima movies, 2006 saw duelling period-set magician movies in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and Edward Berger’s The Illusionist. Unlike the competing volcano movies of 1997 and competing asteroid movies of 1998, this is a pair I equally like: both films are clever and handsome and impeccably made. The Prestige itself is about competing magicians, here rivals for the Victorian stage essayed by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman; this was the first time I clocked that Jackman, bless him, was a wild over-actor, and it’s fun to see that theatre kid energy bounce off Bale’s more measured, coiled performance. This was also the first time the gifted Rebecca Hall registered onscreen.
The Prestige was Nolan’s assignment between Batman films, but another DC hero returned to screens in Superman Returns. While Batman Begins was a hard circuit-breaker reboot of its IP, Superman Returns harkens back to Richard Donner’s Superman, repurposing its John Williams score and footage of Marlon Brando’s Jor-El while updating its cast. In this respect, it feels like a classic Bond film, rolling over some trappings while changing up cast members and quietly or not so quietly jettisoning other trappings.
As he did on X-Men and X2, director Bryan Singer—who, it should be stressed, is not a very nice guy—puts a very personal thematic imprint on the material while meeting corporate imperatives. The film is well-made and super-earnest in its (understandable) nostalgia for Donner’s Superman, but it’s not particularly enthralling; critic Drew McWeeny would accurately dub the film “Superman Lifts Things”. The next iteration of the character, under Zack Snyder, would alas veer too far in the other direction in terms of fisticuffs and onscreen devastation.
An intriguing companion piece to Superman Returns is Hollywoodland, a period noir about a detective (Adrien Brody) hired to investigate the death of TV Superman star George Reeves (Ben Affleck) and navigate shady showbusiness terrain. The film isn’t in the same league as LA noirs like Chinatown or LA Confidential, but holds its own comfortably alongside the second-tier likes of The Two Jakes and Mulholland Falls. There’s also an interesting meta dimension to seeing Affleck—a once (Daredevil) and future (Batman v. Superman) superhero star—playing a cheesy tall-glass-of-water actor struggling to be taken seriously in the thick of his own wobbly stardom. Another period noir, James Ellroy adaptation The Black Dahlia, was a good-looking disappointment from Brian De Palma, especially underwhelming given the source material and following the stellar Femme Fatale.
In addition to Superman, several other iconic film characters made returns in Rocky Balboa, The Pink Panther, and Casino Royale. I’ll also throw in Clerks II, iconic at least to a fraction of my generation and a likeable and affectionate check-in with the caustic characters that launched writer-director-star Kevin Smith’s career.
Like Hollywoodland, there’s a meta quality to Rocky Balboa, with Sylvester Stallone returning to his most famous creation after a doldrums patch in his own career and showing Balboa in similarly low spirits—following his wife’s death and estrangement from his son—but offered a chance for a comeback novelty fight against a controversial champion, in turn facilitating Stallone’s own desired comeback. It’s indisputably mercenary, but Stallone’s a savvy filmmaker—my appreciation is well-documented—and an astute steward of this beloved character, and he pulls off the hat trick remarkably well.
While Casino Royale carries over the iconic James Bond theme, Judi Dench’s M, and other trappings, this is as hard a reboot as the series has pulled off, and a necessary one after the bloated and silly Die Another Day, taking 007—a debuting Daniel Craig—to the start of his career and the first unadapted (canonically) Ian Fleming novel. Director Martin Campbell returns from Goldeneye and stylishly executes his second debut film for a new 007 actor and era.
While I have mixed feelings about where this run of films went and Daniel Craig’s continued portrayal of Bond as a sad, sourpuss bouncer type, Casino Royale and Craig’s performance in it are superb; the set-pieces are muscular and exciting, the credits song and sequence are bangers, and Mads Mikkelsen and Eva Green are in the pocket as villain and love interest. The film took a cue or two from Batman Begins, just as Batman Begins took a cue or two from the Bond series, and it’s interesting to track how these two series poach from one another over subsequent entries.
Finally, The Pink Panther is fine: very much commercial product, never matching the sublime heights of Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers’ best moments in the franchise, but landing enough gags well enough.
There was no new Harry Potter film in 2006; however, there was Miss Potter, featuring Renee Zelwegger as titular children’s author Beatrix; this sweet, benign film was Chris Noonan’s Babe follow-up and swansong, a sad turn of events for this capable director following Babe producer George Miller’s mercurial behaviour during production and wrestling of authorship away from Noonan.
Franchise entries filling Harry Potter’s void—all products of the 2000s, unlike Casino Royale, Superman Returns, and Rocky Balboa—included Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest, entertaining but lathering on too much business and busyness; X-Men: The Last Stand, in which Brett Ratner is the bull in the fine-china shop of Bryan Singer’s making, delivering a rock-em-sock-em instalment that ham-fistedly undoes much of the deliberate setup of the first two movies; and Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, an anomalous but solid entry in the franchise that brought into the fold director Justin Lin, who would fine-tune the series into a juggernaut over subsequent entries.
The year also saw Tom Cruise return to spy games with Mission: Impossible III, also J.J. Abram’s feature debut. Abrams was handpicked for the gig based on Cruise’s enthusiasm for his TV show Alias. Critics nitpick the film’s television aesthetic, but I think there’s plenty of energy and cinematic style—if a little unadventurous—on display. The film earned almost $400 million but was deemed a disappointment; this, in conjunction with Cruise’s couch-jumping antics the previous year—for the record, he did not jump on the couch; that’s some Mandela effect in action—saw Paramount end its contract with Cruise for a stretch. Those bridges would be restored and bigger profits plundered by later Mission: Impossible entries, culminating with the elephantine eighth instalment, dangerously high on its own perceived profundity, with two standout sequences and much boring bloat surrounding them. I’ll take Abrams’ zippy entry over that, hands down. Culturally speaking, Mission: Impossible III and Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift feel like placeholders, with the course of both series clicking into place with their follow-up instalments.
Another television property given the cinema treatment in 2006 was Miami Vice, from the show’s creator and Cruise’s collaborator on Collateral, Michael Mann. Miami Vice is very much a vibes movie, marching to its own peculiar rhythms, and I understand why some viewers find it alienating, especially after its marketing sold a false bill of goods. Personally, I find the film as engrossing as the film that trailer promises; I love its storytelling in media res, shorn of niceties; I love the economical character work and characterisation-through-action rather than dialogue; I love the mood of the film and how Miami is shot, with Mann and DP Dion Beebe continuing to push their digital aesthetic; I love the romance between Colin Farrell and a luminous Gong Li.
A film I don’t find remotely engrossing—and here concur with the populace—is The Da Vinci Code. While it’s a bit cringe in retrospect, I was engrossed by Dan Brown’s potboiling, page-turning, penny dreadful-with-a-dubious-PhD source material and was enthused for the propulsive, gripping movie I saw in my head, as opposed to the lifeless and lumbering movie that eventuated. Perhaps with more distance from the bestselling phenomenon and some creative infidelity, a film could have elevated the source ala The Silence of the Lambs or The Godfather or Jaws, but instead the powerhouse creative team of director Ron Howard, writer Akiva Goldsman, and star Tom Hanks laid an egg. It’s a wipeout from a director I consider a great populist, as well as a very capable director of thrillers, as evidenced by Backdraft and, especially, Ransom.
Basic Instinct was a cause celebre equivalent to The Da Vinci Code in the 1990s, and its two stars had new releases in 2006: Sharon Stone with Basic Instinct 2 and Michael Douglas with The Sentinel. As noted in my discussion of Catwoman, I take issue with anyone who jeers at Sharon Stone in that or Basic Instinct 2; she’s not unintentionally camp, but as fully attuned to those assignments as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Of course, Basic Instinct 2 is no Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and where that film and the original Basic Instinct have killer lead sparring partners, here Stone works opposite David Morrissey, a reliable actor with no charisma. Similarly, Michael Caton-Jones is a dependable director (This Boy’s Life, Rob Roy, The Jackal) with none of Paul Verhoeven’s special sauce. The end product is a rather procedural thriller with a great Stone performance, but little else to boast about.
The Sentinel, meanwhile, is just a solid middle-of-the-road actioner with a seasoned, sturdy leading man in Douglas; ditto Firewall with Harrison Ford and 16 Blocks—Richard Donner’s last movie—with Bruce Willis. Unspectacular and generic as they are, I miss these types of well-crafted, low-ambition programmer thrillers that nail their briefs. Sadly, as star salaries continued to rise, grosses for these types of films continued to fall and their days were numbered.
The Academy would, uncharacteristically, mint a thriller—a superior one that nonetheless satisfies its audience’s primal expectations—with The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s remake of Hong Kong original Infernal Affairs. The remake elevates its already-quite-good source material: it’s a textured, morbidly funny, highly quotable blast, evoking the spirit of Mean Streets and Goodfellas after the seriousness and epic canvases of Gangs of New York and The Aviator.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon are suitably slippery in their double agent roles, Jack Nicholson is towering fun in his penultimate screen role, and Mark Wahlberg delivers career-best work as the film’s trash-talking, unlikely moral centre. Wahlberg would thereafter be discerning in his choices, eschewing junky roles and only working with the very best collaborators. Just kidding. Scorsese was handed an overdue Best Director accolade; given it was presented by Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas, it would have been awkward if the gong went to Stephen Frears, with all due respect.
Among The Departed’s Oscar-winning or nominated ilk, Pan’s Labyrinth is arguably Guillermo Del Toro’s best work; The Queen—from the aforementioned Frears—and Last King of Scotland are quality films bolstered by awards-minted leads in Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker respectively, with very fine scripts written or co-written by Peter Morgan; Half Nelson and Venus feature accomplished work from actors of very different vintages in Ryan Gosling and Peter O’Toole; and Little Miss Sunshine and The Pursuit of Happiness are perfectly fine.
Blood Diamond is of a piece with Edward Zwick’s body of work: tackling stories of historical or geopolitical import, executed on large scales and headlined by big names; liberal humanist, but with more explosions than Stanley Kramer; very good, but ultimately a bit taxing.
While I’ve said before I don’t care for the term Oscar bait—films may be financed for their built-in awards potential, but that’s not why filmmakers make them—All the King’s Men nonetheless epitomises the bogeyman of Oscar bait in the popular consciousness: period-set, tackling serious subject matter, adapting a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel previously adapted into a Best Picture winner (of 1949), with Schindler’s List screenwriter Steven Zaillan helming and Sean Penn in the lead. The resulting film is rather ham-fisted.
On its surface, wartime romantic drama The Good German has the patina of Oscar bait with its cast and Casablanca-esque aesthetic, but Steven Soderergh, as was his wont in this period, presses into the obtuse and mannered. Take the Lead has some of the DNA of Dead Poets Society and Dangerous Minds, but charts a more crowd-pleasing route.
The Oscars machinery is parodied in For Your Consideration, Christopher Guest’s mockumentary about a film production chasing awards validation; it’s lesser work from Guest’s gang of improv-friendly character actors, but has its moments. A comedy with no moments whatsoever is My Super Ex-Girlfriend, an unmemorable last stab at high-concept effects-driven comedy from Ivan Reitman, also cashing in on the superhero movie boom. While aiming for a lower common denominator than Guest or Reitman, David Zucker at least lands gags in Scary Movie 4, including a terrific parody of Tom Cruise jumping the couch on Oprah (and again, just to be clear, he didn’t).
Other comedy releases included Frat Pack offerings of very different stripes, Talladega Nights and The Break-Up; acquired tastes Nacho Libre and Borat, the latter a genuine cultural phenomenon; Sandler productions Click and The Benchwarmers, the former effectively executing its high concept, the latter surprisingly sweet and watchable when Jon Heder isn’t onscreen; and Medea’s Family Reunion, with Tyler Perry taking the directorial reins here and forever after. There’s also Date Movie, collateral damage from the success of Scary Movie, which is gravely unfunny and I lament its existence.
Rom-coms of the year include Failure to Launch, one of those Matthew McConaughey vehicles that epitomises why the McConaissance was needed by decade’s end; a new Christmas staple from Nancy Meyers in The Holiday; and teen movie She’s the Man, riffing on Twelfth Night. Among more sombre romances, The Lake House reunites Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves twelve years after Speed but keeps them largely apart, falling in love via magical snail mail across different time periods. This was perhaps the last era in which this concept could play as a contemporary piece.
Similarly timestamped is The Devil Wears Prada, with its romanticism of serious print journalism and simultaneous side-eye and infatuation with fashion publishing. As someone who tossed out his considerable film magazine collection in the 2000s, deeming it disposable and somehow inferior to the ephemeral geek journalism I was reading online, the film drives home that unkindest cut. Neon Magazine forever!
The year in horror saw sequels Underworld: Evolution, Saw III, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, Final Destination 3, and Daywatch, the latter concluding that Russian vampire series and its very brief cultural hold; remakes The Hills Have Eyes and The Wicker Man, the latter much-lampooned and denting Nicolas Cage’s brand for some audiences while boosting it for others; Japanese live-action manga adaptation Death Note; video game adaptation Silent Hill; a grisly all-sorts assortment in Hatchet, The Dead Girl, The Woods, and Turistas, the latter tapping into some of the same evil foreigner anxiety of Hostel; and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, in which a bunch of boys are weirdly and homicidally fixated on Amber Heard, something that would never happen in real life. Not a horror film per se, Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation shines a horrifying blue light on the grosser elements of the fast-food industry; like Super-Size Me, it mainly preaches to the converted, but I’m sure converted a handful in the process.
It’s fascinating when non-horror directors, especially prestige ones, dabble in the genre, and curious what they get right and what they get terribly wrong: most notably Coppola, Branagh, and Mike Nichols in the 90s with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Wolf, but also this decade Walter Salles with Dark Water, Oliver Hirschbirgel with The Invasion, and most confoundingly, Roland Joffe with Captivity. There’s nothing quite in that league this year, but there’s nonetheless some curiosity factor to seeing comedy hand Jonathan Lyn on Mandy Lane, water-based action hand John Stockwell on Turistas, and misanthropic playwright Neil LaBute on The Wicker Man, particularly the peculiar collision of takes, tastes, and personality yielded between LaBute, Cage, and the 1973 source material.
Following Cursed and Red Eye in 2005, Wes Craven was one of many directors—including Gus Van Sant, Christopher Doyle, Tom Tykwer, and Oliver Assayas—contributing to anthology Paris Je T’aime. Craven’s segment, where Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer bicker in Père Lachaise Cemetery and Sewell gets some relationship advice from Oscar Wilde, is rather slight but befitting Craven the former academic (not so much Craven the guy who made Shocker). The best segment is courtesy of the Coen Bros, utilising their knack for timing and comedic cruelty as tourist Steve Buscemi is tormented by another bickering couple in the Paris Metro.
Elsewhere in horror, Lloyd Kaufman delivered one of Troma’s best in musical Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, while Charles Band delivered the memorably titled but otherwise forgettable Evil Bong. Also forgettable is Ultraviolet, the year’s Mila Jovovich-starring badass heroine flick, issued between the second and third Resident Evil instalments. More endearing were the heroines of anime titles The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Paprika, the latter the revered Satoshi Kon’s final work.
Animated movies targeted at young audiences included Monster House, Flushed Away, and Happy Feet, while the busy Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly—rotoscoping over Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jnr., and Winona Ryder—skewed older with its Phillip K. Dick adaptation. Based on my very limited exposure to Dick’s work, there’s more of its flavour here than the chase-oriented likes of Total Recall and Minority Report, but I’m not sure it makes for enticing cinema. As it hails from the great Australian director George Miller, I’m obligated to muster an extra comment on Happy Feet: dancing penguins tax my patience.
Two other international works from Australian directors were The Contract and Apocalypto. The former is a fairly anonymous low-frills thriller from Bruce Beresford; the director’s account of its production in his published diaries, Josh Hartnett definitely wants to do this, is much more interesting and colourful than the film itself.
Apocalypto, however, is compelling in that patented gnarly, muscular, full-bodied, Mel Gibson-directed historical epic way. Dean Semler’s digital photography is among the best of this era, giving additional kick and immediacy to Gibson’s propulsive Mayan-language actioner about a tribe’s capture and one warrior’s escape and perilous race home to save his endangered family. Between Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, Gibson had an intriguing directorial niche going in striking, violent, visceral dead-language dramas; I’m sorry I never got to see his mooted film on Judas the Maccabee, though I did hear the audio drama.
Meanwhile, Lords of Dogtown and future Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke’s The Nativity Story was a gentler adaptation of the Gospels than Gibson’s Passion, focusing on Christ’s birth and Mary and Joseph’s (Keisha Castle-Hughes and Oscar Isaac in an early role) perilous journey to Bethlehem.
On Australian turf, Rolf De Heer undertook his own, more benevolent variation on Apocalypto in Ten Canoes, the first film completely in an Indigenous Australian language, bar David Gulpilil’s friendly voiceover narration. Elsewhere, there were thrillers Irresistible and Restraint, tense high school tragedy 2:37, dark drama Book of Revelation, stage adaptation Last Train to Freo, Raymond Carver adaptation and transplant Jindabyne, war film Kokoda, black comedy in Suburban Mayhem, broad mockumentary in Kenny, and Heath Ledger returning home for addiction drama Candy alongside Abbie Cornish.
Candy really showcases Ledger and Cornish’s thwarted potential: the former by his tragic death, the latter by subsequent career opportunities—Cornish has had a successful career by most yardsticks, but Somersault and Candy remain very high early peaks. Both deserved better, evidenced by their excellent work here as two lost souls—albeit frequently unsympathetic ones—with Cornish in particular tapping into a raw nerve. Noni Hazlehurst in support continues her reign as onscreen avatar for Australian women contending with addicts in their midst: see also Little Fish and, a quarter century earlier, Monkey Grip.
To continue my mission to produce pieces that would not be produced by GenAI—with whimsy and peculiarities and all the weird preoccupations and grace notes of a human author—I’ll now devote a paragraph to BoyTown. This movie sees a former Australian boy band—comprising Glenn Robbins and Mick Molloy among others—reuniting in middle age with moderately amusing results. Much of the movie’s comedic mileage comes from the incongruity and juxtaposition between the blandly engineered pop music, the pandering and parodic lyrics, and the actors belting out said tunes, most of whom have cultivated recognisable comic personas over time. While any satire is surface level and the fruit hangs low, the ensemble is likeable and the film has fun with its pointed, if easy, jabs at the synthetic music and entertainment industry.
An Australian title I’m especially fond of this year was Macbeth, the first of two takes on Shakespeare’s tragedy from Australian directors in the span of a decade; Justin Kurzel’s lesser adaptation would follow in 2015. This 2006 stab from Romper Stomper provocateur Geoffrey Wright preserves the Bard’s plot and dialogue but transfers the action to the modern Melbourne underworld, where Macbeth (Sam Worthington) murders crime boss Duncan (Gary Sweet), is appointed head of his organised crime family, and downfall inevitably follows.
Except for Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which thoroughly transformed Shakespeare’s play into a new idiom both culturally and cinematically, most Macbeth films feel hamstrung as movies and unsatisfying as theatre, neither fish nor fowl (nor foul nor fair). Wright’s Macbeth looks, sounds, and moves like a movie, and it’s an absolute blast, its rough edges part of its skeezy charm. Much of the pleasure of the adaptation comes from the ingenious ways it adapts Shakespeare’s source to Melbourne’s criminal fraternity, and how it flagrantly presses into Scarface territory as the story unspools.
Worthington has been much maligned for his generic transatlantic hero roles, but here he’s lean and hungry, unafraid to go broad where needed and comfortable delivering Shakespeare’s lines in a thick Australian brogue. Victoria Hill, Wright’s co-writer, also delivers strong work as Lady Macbeth: deeply wounded and heavily anaesthetised at film’s start, newly re-energised after ambition invests her with the spark of life, and suitably raw and distraught at film’s end.
I’ll group American-born director John Curran with this assortment of Australian talent, as he moved to Australia in his mid-20s and helmed both Praise and Tracks locally. His film The Painted Veil is a modest but handsome undertaking. The antithetical phrase “chamber epic” springs to mind: it’s an intimate drama—at its core a two-hander—told against the larger sweep of a historical, multi-continent canvas, as married bacteriologists in China (Edward Norton and Naomi Watts) contend with a cholera outbreak and their own curdled relationship.
Guillermo Del Toro wasn’t the only Mexican filmmaker with a major feature debuting to acclaim; ditto Alfonso Cuaron with Children of Men and Alejandro Gonzalel-Iñárritu with Babel. Both are ambitious, thematically rich films, though the continent-spanning, multi-character network drama of Babel, like many a network film, varies from narrative thread to thread. The sci-fi survival thriller Children of Men—about the guardian of the last pregnant woman in a dying, sterile world—was less lauded but is a technical marvel and arguably made a deeper impression on film culture, not least on Iñárritu, who would borrow its continuous tracking shot aesthetic and apply it in Birdman and The Revenant.
One thing Children of Men didn’t do, alas, was make Clive Owen a star. Hollywood certainly tried throughout this decade, in efforts ranging from blockbuster epics (King Arthur) to old-school caper romance (Duplicity), though it’s unglamorous turns like this and support roles in Closer and Gosford Park and Sin City where the actor really shines.
Paul Verhoeven’s second of two films this decade—after 2000’s Hollow Man—saw him return to his native Holland with World War II drama Black Book, about a Jewish spy (Carice Van Houten in a striking debut) working for the Dutch resistance and infiltrating the Nazi higher echelon. It’s very much a Verhoeven film in its nonchalant depiction of sex and bodies and violence, albeit with a class and naturalism that distinguishes it from his glossy and arch American output. It’s also a great companion piece to his earlier Dutch war film Soldier of Orange.
There are post-911 preoccupations running through Children of Men and Babel, as well as other 2006 titles like The Host: the prospect of dystopia and planetary self-annihilation, culture clash and colonial comeuppance, chaos wrought by imperial interference both political and scientific, etc. Suffice to say, someone like Verhoeven’s abrasive approach to subjects as tender as 911, the Iraq War, the current administration, and the military-industrial complex would have been uncomfortable in this period. There was, however, some toothless satire courtesy of American Dreamz, from American Pie and About a Boy co-director Paul Weitz. The film’s swipes at American Idol—with Hugh Grant as a Simon Cowell-esque acerbic Limey—are tiresome, but there’s a germ of fun in the double act of Dennis Quaid as a stunted Bush-type President and Willem Dafoe as a conniving Dick Cheney type.
Oliver Stone would make a soft Bush biopic a few years later in W, but in the meantime tackled 911 itself in World Trade Centre, depicting events from the vantage point of two firefighters trapped beneath the rubble. Operating close to events—as he would in the subsequent W—Stone assumes the mantle of dramatist rather than historian-provocateur, delivering a film that is pious, respectful, well-made, but without the fire in the belly that characterises his finest work.
It’s a measure of the eclecticism of Nicolas Cage’s filmography in the 2000s—an eclecticism that would lose his mass audience but build a deeply devout cult—that he could appear in World Trade Centre playing utterly straight but also headline The Wicker Man in the same calendar year.
Discontent with the Bush administration is the engine powering documentary An Inconvenient Truth, with Al Gore drily making the case for climate change action. Dry and discontent with the American experiment also describe the Robert DeNiro-helmed period drama The Good Shepherd, charting two decades in the CIA through the titular avatar, played by Matt Damon. This plodding drama would not be the last time DeNiro expressed discontent with the state of American politics.
German director Werner Herzog would tackle the Vietnam War with some of the gonzo directorial style of his Klaus Kinski-starring historical misadventure films in Rescue Dawn, while Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others sticks to home turf and thoughtfully dramatizes voyeurism and surveillance before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In this piece I’ve touched on some great works from filmmakers who might be deemed auteurs: directors who are the definitive authors of their films, over any producers, stars, or source authors, and whose works recognisably bear their voice and imprint in themes, style, and casting. It’s a label that encapsulates everyone from Herzog, Verhoeven, Woody Allen, and Christopher Nolan through to Lloyd Kaufman and Charles Band.
A handful of auteurs were notably high on their own supply in 2006. Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim, his sequel to Henry Fool, spins copious plot and lore and business from that celebrated but largely unavailable mid-90s work, detracting from what Hartley’s best at, namely crafting finely-honed barbs for actors to snipe at one another in monotonous pitch. Richard Kelly’s odd duck Southland Tales, meanwhile, is a case against premature auteur canonisation, with this hyped and generously-budgeted & -cast sophomore effort fumbling the black cheque afforded by Donnie Darko, the culprit once again being myriad plot and lore and business.
M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water—the most derided at the time, befitting Shyamalan’s higher profile—at least maintains focus and somewhat comprehensible stakes, even as its director indulges some of his wobblier instincts, such as casting himself as a visionary writer and baiting pompous film critics. Similarly, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain mostly pulls off its story of doomed romance and quest for eternal life across historical, contemporary, and cosmic settings, and he should be applauded for steering this ambitious—but very indulgent—project through various creative and budgetary setbacks. Also, Hugh Jackman overacts.
A case could be made for David Lynch’s Inland Empire as auteurism high on its own supply, but knowing how this production unfolded as a DIY art project with Laura Dern, with Lynch chasing his unconscious as muse, it’s a quietly remarkable work. This is the second and final Lynch release of the decade, and sadly the final Lynch feature film full stop, with all due respect to the folks at Sight and Sound who crowned Twin Peaks: The Return one of the best films of all time.
A handful of biopics from 2006 also grappled with the creative process: Infamous, Factory Girl, and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. Infamous is a more two-dimensional take on the writing of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood than 2005’s Capote, with Toby Jones, Daniel Craig, and Sandra Bullock filling shoes previously filled by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Clifton Collins, and Catherine Keener.
Factory Girl is a biopic of Edie Sedgwick—well-portrayed by Sienna Miller—largely revolving around her friendship with Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce). This was, to the best of my recollection, the last in a series of high-profile films depicting facets of Warhol’s art scene—see also I Shot Andy Warhol, Basquiat etc.—the nostalgia and mystique seemingly (and perhaps healthily) ageing out generationally. Guy Pearce—with no disrespect to this actor I love—plays Andy Warhol pretty much as you’d imagine Guy Pearce playing Andy Warhol, though in fairness the same could be said for Jared Harris, David Bowie, Crispin Glover in The Doors, and so on.
Finally, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus was Steven Shainberg’s follow-up to Secretary and depicts its titular subject’s—Diane Arbus (not fur), as played by Nicole Kidman—origins as a photographer taking pictures of an excessively hirsute specimen (Robert Downey Jnr.). It’s a curiosity, though I can’t say I like it.
There’s nothing remotely esoteric about Snakes on a Plane, its production and release the very definition of a cinematic speculative bubble. That it didn’t live up to its disproportionate hustle, even with post-production tinkering and additional shooting to make the movie fit for purpose, isn’t surprising; that it’s just a big nothing twenty years later is particularly damning. Even in the late David R. Ellis’s over-too-soon filmography, I’d watch Cellular or Shark Night over this.
Among high-concept Samuel L. Jackson-starring movies of 2006 with ‘snake’ in the title, melodrama Black Snake Moan is more interesting, albeit not entirely successful in threading its needle. And among disaster movies set on commercial vessels of 2006, I’m more impressed by Wolfgang Peterson’s remake Poseidon, even though it’s ultimately just skilfully reheating ingredients.
In contrast to Snakes on a Plane, Crank—which snuck into multiplexes with a modicum of Snakes on a Plane’s heat—pulls off its mischievous high-concept: Jason Statham must maintain a high level of adrenaline or he’ll die. It’s also maintained its cult status, despite a lesser sequel and the speculative bubble around directorial duo Neveldine and Taylor similarly bursting. Joe Carnahan’s Smokin Aces also pulls off its high concept—an action film largely set around a single location—with polish and style. DOA: Dead or Alive is a deeply dopey video game adaptation, but Eric Roberts is the villain and I’ll take theatrical Eric Roberts where I can.
While Statham stock character and film types have calcified with time, Crank shows his personality and performances are more elastic and malleable than brethren Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson. Gerard Butler has also developed a type, but 300—Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s antiquity-set comic book—was something of a revelation, transforming the ostensibly-unimpressive specimen who headlined Dracula 2000 and Phantom of the Opera into a muscular screen presence. Though Snyder has made better films, this epitomises and enshrines everything he’s good at whilst—through virtue of fidelity to the source material—curbing his excesses and keeping him colouring between the lines.
Directors Sofia Coppola and Bill Condon also do what they do well in their third films, Marie Antoinette and Dreamgirls. The former—Coppola’s empathetic take on the titular Queen of France (played by Kirsten Dunst) —eschews the stuffiness and ornateness of most period biopics by focusing intently on Marie, her youthfulness, privilege, enjoyment & burdenment of said privilege, and obliviousness to the shifting tide of history outside Versailles. In this respect, it’s comfortably of a piece with Coppola’s prior and subsequent works.
Bill Condon, meanwhile, had previously directed two excellent biopics (Gods & Monsters, Kinsey) and dabbled in horror (Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh), but also scripted Chicago and would later co-write The Greatest Showman. That affinity for musicals—and, as evidenced with Chicago, knack for translating them from stage to screen—is evident in Dreamgirls. The film is slick and spirited and stylish, and boasts—among several great performances—Eddie Murphy’s best, most engaged work of the decade.
As I work my way through the depths of these yearly catalogues and scramble for connective tissue between the straggler films, I was struck by the use of voiceover in four titles—Stranger than Fiction, Notes on a Scandal, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and Little Children—and conversely lack of voiceover in films where one might expect to find it, such as Marie Antoinette, where silences and/or trivial dialogue are as meaningful as narration. The fourth wall-breaking joke of Stranger than Fiction, of course, is that Will Ferrell hears an omniscient voiceover narrating his life and tracks her down in the form of Emma Thompson. Notes on a Scandal, meanwhile, sees Judi Dench play a battle-axe senior school teacher who becomes infatuated with and then possessive of a newer staff member (Cate Blanchett). Dench narrates her character’s notebook/diaries with many a catty turn of phrase, courtesy of Closer scribe Patrick Marber.
John Hurt does not appear in the screen story of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, but rather narrates Tom Tykwer’s period thriller about a murderer—Ben Whishaw in an impactful debut—trying to recapture an elusive scent through murder. Hurt’s voiceover complements and competes with visuals, editing, score, and sound effects that vividly conjure time and place and fragrance, albeit at times a lot of sound and fury signifying little. Finally, the clinical narration of Todd Field’s Little Children wryly comments on the infidelities and perversions of its ensemble of characters, among them Patrick Wilson and Kate Winslet’s cheating partners and Jackie Earle Haley’s neighbourhood pederast.
I’ll close with two foreign-language melodramas: Volver, a family melodrama from master of the form Pedro Almodovar and a true Christmas gift for Penelope Cruz after a ropey run of English-language titles where often she was good and the film wasn’t or vice versa; and Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower, a slight pivot from his recent martial arts work (Hero, House of Flying Daggers) but equally sumptuous. The film combines the epic and the intimate in a tale of royal intrigue and family affairs, and features a tremendous turn from Gong Li.
For the record, I have not seen As You Like It, despite being a Kenneth Branagh completist and apologist, nor I’m a Cyborg, despite being gaga for Chan-Wook Park’s work during this decade. Neither film was released theatrically nor rolled out on home video/DVD in Australia, at the point in time where those were my main avenues for seeing new releases, and both are gaps I’m yet to fill. I’ve not seen Eragon, despite my fondness for seeing Jeremy Irons serve marinated ham for cash in mediocre fantasy fare (see also Dungeons & Dragons, The Time Machine, and Beautiful Creatures). I’ve also not seen Cars, High School Musical, Night at the Museum, History Boys, United 93, Away from Her, Idiocracy, or The Fall. United 93 is a particularly damning blind spot; I was clearly too busy watching Scary Movie 4 and Date Movie and My Super Ex-Girlfriend ...
Thanks for reading. We’ll be back for 2007, when there will be blood. Til then …