*3172 in the Discordian calendar was 2006 in the Gregorian calendar.
In 2006,
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first female elected head of state of an African nation;
NASA launched the New Horizons spacecraft;
The Winter Olympics were held in Turin, Italy;
Twitter launched;
The Human Genome Project published the last chromosome sequence;
Montenegro became an independent nation;
Paul McCartney, who wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four” when was sixteen years old, turned sixty-four;
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet;
Ban Ki-moon was elected as the 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations;
The United States population passed 300 million people;
No. 5, 1948 by Jackson Pollock was sold for $140 million, becoming the most expensive painting at the time;
Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death and executed;
Al Jazeera launched an English language version of its news channel;
Monday Night Football moved to ESPN after 35 season on ABC;
Big Love, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Hannah Montana, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, The Hills, Celebrity Deathmatch, Psych, Rachel Ray; Heroes, Ugly Betty, Dexter, Friday Night Lights, and 30 Rock debuted on American television;
Malcolm in the Middle, The West Wing, That 70s Show, Will & Grace, Charmed, and Alias aired their final episodes;
While Lou Rawls, Shelley Winters, Wilson Pickett, Chris Penn, Coretta Scott King, Betty Friedan, Don Knotts, Darren McGavin, Kirby Puckett, Maureen Stapleton, Buck Owens, Caspar Weinberger, Stanislaw Lem, Earl Woods, Floyd Patterson, Lloyd Bentsen, Billy Preston, Aaron Spelling, Kenneth Lay, Syd Barrett, Red Buttons, Mickey Spillane, Jack Warden, Mike Douglas, Steve Irwin, Byron Nelson, Jane Wyatt, Red Auerbach, William Styron, Adrienne Shelly, Jack Palance, Milton Friedman, Bo Schembechler, Robert Altman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Augusto Pinochet, Peter Boyle, Joseph Barbera, James Brown, and Gerald Ford died.
The following is a list of my ten favorite films released in 2006:
10) The Fall
In 1915, stuntman Roy Walker is injured during a fall. While recuperating, he meets a young Romanian girl, Alexandria. To pass the time, Roy tells Alexandria a fantastic story about five heroes: an Indian warrior, a swashbukling bandit, ex-slave Ota Benga, explosives expert Luigi, and Charles Darwin, who must band together to fight evil Governor Odius. Eventually, the line between reality and fiction blurs as Roy and Alexandria become characters in the story.
This is a chaotic, poetic, whimiscal, magical film, full of energy and sparkling with vitality. It’s a beautiful ode to creativity, collaboration, and the healing power of storytelling. There’s a poweful scene towards the end, as Roy watches the film featuring the stunt which caused his injury and realizes his performance was cut and replaced with another stuntman’s work. So much of what we do is misplaced effort and worry.
9) Scoop
After British journalist Joe Strombel (Ian McShane) dies, he befriends a recently murdered woman on the ferry to the afterlife. During their conversation, he discovers she was murdered by Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), a wealthy London aristocrat.
Strombel deduces Lyman is a notorious serial killer and contacts young journalism student Sondra Pranksy (Scarlet Johansson) from beyond the grave during a magic show by Sid Waterman (Woody Allen).
Waterman becomes a father figure / mentor to Pransky as they work to expose Lyman.
Allen and Johansson have incredible chemistry and their burgeoning familial relationship is delightful, with Johansson channeling the great comediennes of yesteryear like Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, and Carole Lombard.
Jackman is not normally cast as the villain, but does an admirable job being smarmy and smug while maintaining an easygoing charm. It’s easy to see why Pransky falls in love with the rich, debonair Lyman, but it’s also easy to see why Waterman is suspicious.
I enjoyed this film more than I anticipated. It’s not deep or important, and it’s certainly not Allen’s best, but it makes me smile and serves as a perfect companion piece to his underrated classic Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).
8) The Island
When Nazi forces capture a Russian ship, they give Anatoly a choice: kill his captain, Tikhon, or they’ll kill him.
A reluctant Anatoly shoots Tikhon, who falls overboard from the blast. After swimming to shore, a shaken Anatoly is found by Russian monks.
Thirty years later, Anatoly has gained fame for his ability to heal and prophesy. To outsiders, he appears blessed with spiritual powers and gifts, to his fellow monks, he seems insane. In reality, he’s still wracked with guilt for the murder of Tikhon. Trapped by his own helplessness to right a terrible wrong, he perpetually pleads with God for forgiveness.
This is a beautiful film about the pain of guilt and the healing power of forgiveness.
7) The Queen
Queen Elizabeth II is the only British monarch most of us have known. In December 2007, she became the oldest British monarch and in September 2015, she became the longest reigning British monarch.
While Diana’s tragic death is well understood, less explored is the effect it had on the monarchy and the queen. After watching her uncle, Edward VII, abdicate the throne because of his scandalous relationship with a divorced woman, the Queen’s personal distaste for divorce caused a considerable deterioration in the relationship between Diana and the royal family following the end of her marriage to Prince Charles.
Elizabeth, born before television existed, was slow to understand changing moral views and, since she was not a career politician, didn’t see the need to react to shifting public opinion. What she failed to understand: a large number of British citizens viewed her a fundamentally political figure and expected her to behave like one.
Helen Mirren deserved the accolades she received for her nuanced performance. In her hands, the Queen was more than a semi-mythical public figure; she was a luddite grandmother, a protective mother, and a fiercely proud woman.
Lost in the brilliance of Mirren’s work, Michael Sheen’s performance as Tony Blair is under appreciated. Because of his natural and strong political instincts, he understood what Diana’s death represented and the challenges it brought. While his advisers (including his wife) saw an opportunity to weaken the monarchy, Blair understood he had more to gain forming an alliance with the embattled Queen.
To say he saved the monarchy may be hyperbole, but he certainly helped shape what a 21st century British monarchy would look like, and the Queen’s current popularity as a national institution is due, in part, to Blair’s advice.
This lovely film about politics, public opinion, dignity, and the 21st century tendency to erase the line between the public and private sphere is a warm and lovely portrait of one of the most prominent women of the last century.
When a low budget film about a Jewish daughter coming out as a lesbian to her dying mother during Purim is labeled as Oscar worthy, the mediocre talent involved in the film start to believe the hype.
Christopher Guest’s regular troop of actors, including Fred Willard, Eugene Levy, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, Jane Lynch, and Jennifer Coolidge are uniformly excellent, but Catherine O’Hara’s outstanding performance as Marilyn Hack (the actress playing the dying mother) deserves special commendation. In an ironic twist, her performance generated the kind of Oscar buzz the movie parodies.
This movie brilliantly skewers the formation of critical opinion and the industries built around cultural gatekeeping, arrogantly deciding what’s a good film or an Oscar worthy performance.
A Prairie Home Companion is a live radio variety show hosted by Garrison Keilor and broadcast from Minnesota every Saturday since 1974.
As the titular show takes place in the background, the cast and crew worry about the same mundane things as everyone else, romantic entanglements, getting older, mortality.
Concerned about the profitability of a program with a cadre of loyal, but older listeners, the new owners of the program’s flagship radio station send a representative (Tommy Lee Jones) to determine whether the show should be cancelled. Meanwhile, an angel, Asphodel (Virginia Madsen) arrives to escort one of the cast members to the afterlife.
Many of the variety bits are delightful, especially the duet between Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, and the work of Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly. The backstage stuff, the bickering and petty jealousies, rings true for anyone who’s been involved in a theatrical production. The rhythm of the film captures the energy and rawness of live theater.
This beautiful film about creativity explores humanity’s imperfect mimicry of the divine through artistic creativity. The octogenarian Altman’s last film is an apology for his craft, an impassioned defense of the capability of art as conduit of transcendence and an insistence that whatever faults and failures this process entails, it’s worth the effort.
When dull IRS agent Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) hears a voice narrating his mundane life, literature professor Jules Hibbert (Dustin Hoffman) helps him recognize it as famed author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Crick realizes he is the protagonist of Eiffel’s latest work.
Unfortunately for Crick, all of Eiffel’s novels end with the death of her main character. As he struggles with this foreknowledge of his fate, she ponders the morality of killing him to preserve her artistic integrity.
Ferrell gives a career best performance, refusing to rely on his knack for physical comedy and improvisation, instead creating a fully formed character. This film deftly uses preconceived notions of him as an overzealous man-child to enhance Crick’s goofy charm. Ferrell’s chemistry with Maggie Gyllenhaal is electric and the scene where Crick awkwardly serenades Gyllenhaal’s Annie with “Whole Wide World” is beautiful.
Asking the age-old question: is life inherently tragic because everyone dies or is it comedic because everyone vainly struggles to prevent their death, this is a delightful film about free will and our ability to shape our own fate.
3) Children of Men (2006)
It’s 2027, and, for unexplained reasons, mankind has been infertile for almost twenty years. Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is an activist turned bureaucrat whose marriage disintegrated after his son died in a flu pandemic. His ex-wife, Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore), is a leader of The Fishes, a militant group fighting for the rights of immigrants.
Julian convinces Theo to help escort Kee, an immigrant refugee, out of the country to the “Human Project,” a possibly mythical group dedicated to curing infertility.
Along the way, Theo discovers Kee is pregnant, the first pregnancy on earth in almost twenty years. Because her status as a pregnant refugee could be very valuable to those opposed to government treatment of immigrants and dangerous to supporters of the current regime, Kee and Theo are hunted by factions from both sides as they attempt to rendezvous with the Human Project.
Clive Owen gives one of my favorite performances as Theo Faron, I’m not a fan of Julianne Moore, but she’s excellent as Julian, and Michael Caine is delightful as Theo’s hippy mentor / drug dealer, Jasper Palmer. Thankfully, Caine has extended his legendary career by morphing into a character actor with supporting roles in film like this. Long before his work in 12 Years a Slave (2013) brought him greater recognition, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s turn as overzealous activist Luke is riveting.
Alfonso Cuaron is one of the most exciting directors. Y tu Mama Tambien (2001) is an fascinating interpretation of the coming of age narrative, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) is often cited as the best in the series, and Gravity (2013) won him a well deserved Academy Award, but this may be his masterpiece.
Loosely based on the novel by P.D. James, this spellbinding film somehow manages to find hope and beauty in the bleakest vision of a dystopian future.
When Fiona (Julie Christie) is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, it places a strain on her relationship with her husband Grant. She checks herself into a nursing home which specializes in care for dementia patients which forbids visitors for the first 30 days as patients adjust to their new environment.
After the waiting period, Grant visits his wife to find she no longer recognizes him and has begun a relationship with Aubrey, another resident at the facility.
Grant struggles with guilt over his past infidelities and his growing acceptance Fiona will not recover from her condition. When Aubrey’s wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis) removes him from the facility because of financial difficulties, Fiona’s subsequent depression and deterioration force Grant to take action.
Sarah Polley’s directorial debut is a brilliant adaptation of Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” This poignant film about love, commitment, and faithfulness is an affirmation of the special place marriage holds in our society and a reminder what a lasting, permanent and beautiful thing a shared life with someone you love can be.
Gerd Wiesler is tasked to spy on playwright Georg Dreyman, who the Minister of Culture is convinced is a security threat despite his communist sympathies. However, the Minister has a hidden agenda: he fancies Dreyman’s girlfriend, actress Christa-Marie Sieland, and uses the information supplied by Wiesler to blackmail her into a sexual relationship.
During his surveillance, Wiesler grows sympathetic to Dreyman and must choose between the country he loves and the friends who are unaware he exists.
The final, beautiful scenes illustrate how powerful the actions of an individual can be, even against the full apparatus of the state.
In a sublime scene, after Stasi workers assigned to intercept mail learn the Berlin Wall has fallen, they silently stop their work and leave their cramped office. We think of history as a slow march towards progress, but it often leaps forward. One day you’re spying for the East German communists, the next you’re living in a democratic, unified Germany.
The debut film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has been hailed as a conservative masterpiece, but the movie transcends politics. Ideologies only become evil when corrupted by an insatiable desire for power.
A German language film about the oppressive tactics of East German intelligence during the Cold War doesn’t sound like a celebratory movie, but this hopeful film not only explores mankind’s capacity for evil, it shows how it can be defeated.
Gerd Wiesler was a part of the apparatus of evil, but in the film’s final act, he transcends and atones for his mistakes. If the last ten minutes don’t stir something inside you, there’s little chance any film will.
