Always on Sunday: 2006 was a very good year

Sunday’s regular movie review.

I’m cheating. Sort of.

I discovered while researching Déjà Vu last week that I’d mentioned it in another post (dated July 7, 2007), in which I’d generally enthused over a fairly long list of movies that we (my wife and I) had then fairly recently watched.  I decided that it was incumbent on me to share the list with you and provide links to their Internet Movie Database (IMDb) pages.

You know the feeling you get upon reading a great novel or watching a great film. I know the feeling well, because I read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies and try to not to miss the good ones. Movies like the following (listed most recently watched first) just exhilarate me:

The Human Stain (2003: Robert Benton) [When a disgraced former college professor (Anthony Hopkins) has a romance with a mysterious younger woman haunted by her dark, twisted past (Nicole Kidman), he is forced to confront a shocking secret about his own life that he has kept secret for 50 years. Adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2000 novel.]

Breach (2007: Billy Ray) [Based on the true story, FBI upstart Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe) enters into a power game with his boss, Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), an agent who was put on trial for selling secrets to the Soviet Union.]

For Your Consideration (2006: Christopher Guest) [Hollywood send-up. No-name actors are making a low-budget period drama called “Home for Purim,” when an anonymous post on the Internet suggests that one performance is Oscar-worthy. Then, two more cast members get Oscar-related press....(Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy)]

Déjà Vu (2006: Tony Scott) [An ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms] agent (Denzel Washington) travels back in time to save a woman from being murdered, falling in love with her during the process.]

Blood Diamond (2006: Edward Zwick) [A fisherman (Djimon Hounsou), a smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio), and a syndicate of businessmen match wits over the possession of a priceless diamond.]

Hollywoodland (2006: Allen Coulter), [A detective (Adrien Brody) examines the mysterious death of George Reeves (Ben Affleck), TV’s Superman. [George Reeves was among the very first actors I became acquainted with, as a boy in the 1950s.]

Infamous (2006: Douglas McGrath) [While researching his book In Cold Blood, writer Truman Capote (Toby Jones) develops a close relationship with convicted murderers Perry Smith (Daniel Craig) and Dick Hickock (Lee Pace). I liked this adaptation of the true story at least as well as Capote (2005: Bennett Miller), in which Philip Seymour Hoffman played Capote, for which performance he won the Oscar.]

The Last King of Scotland (2006: KevinMacdonald) [Based on the events of the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker)’s regime as seen by his personal physician (James McAvoy) during the 1970s.]

The Good Shepherd (2006: Robert DeNiro) [The tumultuous early history of the Central Intelligence Agency is viewed through the prism of one man’s life. (Matt Damon & Robert DeNiro)]

Keeping Mum (2005: Niall Johnson) [A pastor (Rowan Atkinson) preoccupied with writing the perfect sermon fails to realize that his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) is having an affair and his children are up to no good. I “nearly split my sides” laughing.]

Running with Scissors (2006: Ryan Murphy) [Young Augusten Burroughs (Joseph Cross) absorbs experiences that could make for a shocking memoir: the son of an alcoholic father (Alec Baldwin) and an unstable mother (Annette Bening), he’s handed off to his mother’s therapist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), and spends his adolescent years as a member of Finch’s bizarre extended family. Black humor.]

The World’s Fastest Indian (2005: Roger Donaldson) [The life story of New Zealander Burt Munro (Anthony Hopkins), who spent years building a 1920 Indian motorcycle—a bike that helped him set the land-speed world record at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in 1967.]

The Devil Wears Prada (2006: David Frankel) [A naive young woman (Anne Hathaway) comes to New York and scores a job as the assistant to one of the city’s biggest magazine editors, the ruthless and cynical Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). Stanley Tucci is particularly enjoyable to watch as Nigel, Priestly’s “fashion assistant.”]

I tingle and shift into a higher gear of aliveness while watching movies like these. I clap my hands, I fidget, I make side remarks. (I’m glad that my wife usually tolerates this and, especially, that she mostly shares my taste in movies.)

But when we see two movies in a row of the caliber I’m talking about, wow! We actually saw Breach and The Human Stain back-to-back, then a few days later had that glorious experience again. The first movie was the taut, dramatic, perfectly plotted, utterly gripping tale, Notes on a Scandal (2006: Richard Eyre) and starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. I was struck by the remark of Zoe Heller, the author of the book on which the movie was based, that she deliberately concocted a “bait and switch” with the sophisticated narrative device of employing an apparently reliable narrator (the Judi Dench character) who later proves to be unreliable....

The second was a brilliant twist on the fictional device of having characters literally take on a life of their own and become unruly, which was exploited so well in novels by Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939, which James Joyce read and said delighted him) and Gilbert Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew, 1979). The movie was Stranger Than Fiction (2006: Marc Forster), starring Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, and Queen Latifa, with Tom Hulce (who played Mozart in Amadeus and, incidentally, is an alumnus of the UNC School of the Arts Drama School, Winston-Salem) in a delicious small part.

You might want to watch these films if you missed them. Or watch them again. I could watch a few of them again myself.