So I didn't get a chance to see a few of the movies I really, really wanted to (for example, "Children of Men" and "Pan's Labyrinth") because the major theater chains suck in ways I can't describe. Also, I missed "The Departed" which was supposed to be really good, but I'm sure I'll catch as awards season continues on. In the same vein, there was some utter shit smeared across movie screens nationwide that I refused to partake in so, while they may have been worse than what I DID see, I can't count them. Also, I don't feel comfortable picking ten, so I'll choose the nine I actually deem worthy of recommendation and since I got dragged to some piss-poor cinema, I'll include six that really, really sucked.

That being said:

The Nine Best Films (I Actually Got To See) of 2006:

9. "Hostel"

Yeah, yeah, say what you want about this one. It squeaked into theaters in early January banking on Quentin Tarantino's name being on the poster to help sell tickets. Eli Roth is a guy who divides the horror underground. Some people love his sicko mentality and others think he's full of shit and way, way too talkative for his own good. I'm one of three people on earth who liked "Cabin Fever" and I'm in the group who appreciates "Hostel". It's one of the few movies I don't see myself regularly watching (torture is not something I feel the need to endure "for fun"), but the movie actually shows some staggering growth on Roth's part. He tantalizes us with gratuitous sex for the first freaking hour of the picture, then equates it all to the "gorno" extravangza we sit through for the rest of the running time. There's a perverse moral message underneath it all. Takashi Miike would be proud (well, he must be, he's got a cameo role). Bonus points for being the only film I've EVER seen that made my steel-stomached friend start to upchuck (when bunsen burner meets eyeballl, disgust often ensues).

8. "The Illusionist"

Two films about magicians came out this year and both were pretty damn good. This is the quieter, more subdued one starring a double whammy of Ed Norton and Paul Giamatti (both of whom are usually pretty good.. unless you count "Lady in the Water"...) along with Jessica Biel to keep the horny going. The film hinges on a "twist" that really isn't a twist (I saw it coming halfway through), but that doesn't matter. The performances, story, and set design, make it a really fun watch and I'm thrilled that this got half the chance it did at major theater chains this summer.

7. "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"

Sacha Baron Cohen has balls of steel. That's the only way I can figure this guy could butcher the National Anthem in front of a rowdy rodeo crowd of pissed off Texans and NOT take off running. This is in-your-face comedy at its best.

6. "Superman Returns"

The first "major disappointment" of the summer is a much better film than anyone gives it credit for. How do you humanize a guy who is virtually indestructible while paying homage to a back catalog of films starring an American icon? Well, this is how. Yeah, it moves slowly for a summer blockbuster. No, I didn't care. Brandon Routh won me over almost immediately and this is the first film with James Marsden in it that didn't make me hate him. I saw it twice -- once on the regular screen and once in IMAX. Kudos to Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey, too.

5. "The Prestige"

Here's the OTHER magician movie of 2006 and my (slightly) preferred of the two. Chris Nolan can do almost no wrong and in Christian Bale he has found an actor who can run with his sometimes super-dense material. Plus, this movie has both David Bowie and Scarlett Johansson (/drool). The twist is a bit more forced than the one from Nolan's breakthrough "Memento", but the film is plenty strong.

4. "Running Scared"

Did ANYONE else bother to see this one? Paul Walker is NOT a great actor (in fact, he's oftentimes so bad that I've started a collection of his films just BECAUSE...), but he works well in this bizarre, surreal, fucked up "fairy tale" of violence that doesn't know the meaning of the word "stop". Think of it and it's in here. The cinematographry is startling, the set design reminds me in places of "Natural Born Killers", and this will surface ten years from now as an underappreciated cult classic. Check it out. Now. And beware the phrase "looks like we need another ice cream cone, Papa Bear".

3. "The Descent"

If "Hostel" represents the "new breed" of horror cinema, contingent on forcing the audience to endure graphic depictions of wanton torture, then "the descent" harkens back to the good ol' "monsters in the dark cave/house/closet/whatever" idea . And it harkens back PERFECTLY. This is another one that didn't stick around terribly long. The tale of a group of female friends who go spleunking (huh huh.. spleunking) to bond and get away from their problems turns into a complete fucking nightmare when they are trapped below ground with a bunch of.. things. This one combines some great jump-out-at-you scares (which I usually don't go for.. but did here) with some of the most painfully claustrophobic images imaginable. This is easily one of the best horror movie I've seen in the 00's and it quite possibly trumps a lot of what came out during the 90's, too.

2. "Snakes On A Plane"

Hoo boy, here we go. Over "Superman Returns" this is qualified as THE disappointment of the summer. But, c'mon now. Did anyone expect a B-movie about killer snakes on a fucking airplane to really do that well? The fact that this hit #1 even its opening weekend is a testament to what an internet buzz can do for a picture and a huge high five to New Line for encouraging as opposed to suppressing the fan community. And the film itself is really freaking fun. The opening-night screening I went to was chock full of fanboys who were ready to act stupid and play along and it was 90 minutes of catcalling and rapturous applause that rivals the "Rocky Horror" phenomenon. David Ellis directed "Final Destination 2", a guilty pleasure of mine, and he hits SOAP out of the park. It's a smart movie acting really, really dumb and it delivers.

1. "Inland Empire"

This is David Lynch's overlong, self-referential, nonsenscial injoke, but it's also really fucking compelling. It's basically a three-hour Rorschach test that invites the audience to project their own emotions onto the hodge podge of sex, violence, and blatant weirdness that pervades the screen. Laura Dern goes all out in a thankless performance that no academy will ever nominate and the under-utilized Justin Theroux is as badass as ever. There's no real good way to describe what the fuck is happening here, but if you like woodcutting, monkeys, hookers, anthropomorphic rabbits, or Harry Dean Stanton, check it out.

This is where the fun begins.

And now the SIX WORST FILMS I SAW IN 2006!

6. "The Hills Have Eyes"

Oh Michael Bay. How I fucking loathe you. When you get behind the camera the very concept of Art itself is diminished. You change a fundamental concept of human creation, so massive is your failure. Apparently, though, you are not content to be a first-hand destroyer of all that is good, so while you march off to turn our precious Transformers into a laughing stock, you let a ragtag team of production guys shit all over horror classics. While not as odious as your systematic dismantling of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", "THHE" is still a blight on humanity. Wes Craven's original was by no means perfect. It was, however, the work of someone trying to tell us something, to look in horror at the world around him. The modern "update", however, is cheap window dressing, piling on the carnage in an attempt to compete with the "Saw" films of the world. And, please, for the love of all that is holy, STOP spending large amounts of money to make a major production feel "cheap". A lot of the classics are cheap-looking out of necessity. That this became a sort of mise-en-scene in and of itself shows how the films transcended their limitations. What you do is phony, contrived, and fucking obnoxious.

5. "Ultraviolet"

Kurt Wimmer directed "Equilibrium", a trite mashup of "1984" and "The Matrix" that proudly gave the world "Gun Fu", a martial arts style in whicih combatants fight with their fists WHILE HOLDING GUNS. This is completely moronic and my brain bleeds just pondering it. However, into this film's cast you somehow injected Christian Bale, a guy who can make almost anything cool. As such, I own the movie and love it, gaping flaws and all.

Not so, "Ultraviolet". Milla Jovovich is damn easy on the eyes, but by this point she's done so many souped up guns-a-blazin' plotless action vehicles that seeing her in tight pants blowing shit away is almost getting old. This film isn't helped by its complete lack of plot or sanity. This is a 90 minute (bloodless) action scene with rudimentary exposition to lightly scratch in the sand a reason for anything at all to be happening. The color palette is intentionally oversaturated, but the effect is more migraine-inducing than interesting. Milla, though they're awful, too, you should stick to the "Resident Evil" movies and Kurt, you should stick to not directing anything ever again.

4. "The DaVinci Code"

Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't get it. I read Dan Brown's potbolier in anticipation of the movie and, uh... WHY exactly are there fucking tomes written about the genius of his mystery? The characters were ill-conceived, the dialog was laughable, and the "mystery" was basically a misinterpreted summary of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail". I guess it made a lot of people feel smart, though, and that sells a shitload.

When you take an already sketchy backstory and OMIT FURTHER from it, you end up with movie adaptations like this. At the VERY least, Brown walked us through the puzzles that who's-he-what and what's-her-face had to solve to get the shit inside the cryptex and find the tomb or whatever the Christ it was they were attempting to do. The movie just... answers shit and says to itself "it's okay, they've read the book and know what it all means". L-A-Z-Y. And why is Magneto in a wheelchair? It's Professor X that's crippled, for fuck's sake.

3. "Just My Luck"

Yeah, I saw this. A Lindsay Lohan movioe. Yes, I PAID to see it. Yes, I also paid for a GIRL to see it WITH me. That's my defense. I am now declaring my asexuality in a desperate bid to ensure that no girl can ever inflict such pain on me again.

Lindsay Lohan should be hot. Oops. I originally wrote "should be shot", but realized my mistake and fixed it. Then I realized that "shot" is correct, too and decided to mention it again. But I digress. She should be bangalcious, but everytime she opens her mouth ("Hehe... I've been in AA for six months and I've been sober for a WEEK!") she makes me think of Estelle Getty naked and lubed up with butter. Like... total turn off.

This film? Yeah, she plays a spoiled brat who has really good luck. Then she somehow fucks it up (my brain is self-lesioning itself to eradicate accurate memories of the film) and gives it to this dorkus malorkus who's maanging some small time band (played by apparent UK supergroup McFly). Hijinks ensue and they falll in love. And McFly plays the SAME. FUCKING. SONG. about ten times. The whole thing, even over being a vehicle for Lohan to display her lack of talent, is a huge corporate shill for McFly. Did I mention McFly?

No, really. Did I?

McFly.

2. "BloodRayne"

Oh, Uwe. You're too easy a target. What kills me about you, though, is that in interviews you almost sound like you have a clue. You understand how the American and German film industries work, what the trends are, et cetera. But your fundamental intelligence apparently dies when it comes to realizing that the films you make are little balls of shit with undigested peanuts jammed into them. These peanuts are metaphors for the actors whose careers you abort mid-stream by giving them the worst roles they could ever hope to receive, mind you. And I guess you ate some almonds, too, since you somehow got a still respectable actor like Ben Kingsley to play the "heavy" in this one. How the FUCK did you do that?

Yes, you got Kristanna Lokken to show us her boobies and yes you got Billy Zane to wear the most ridiculous wig in the history of cinema. And apparently Meat Loaf needed some extra funds to finish recording "Bat Out Of Hell III", because you roped him into a day of shooting, but at least he got to share the scene with like fifty naked Bavarian hookers, so that's understandable. But no, the film is not good. No, the effects are amazing. No, the drama isn't compelling. And, no I fucking CAN'T believe you somehow roped together the funds to make a sequel. Set in the wild west.

God help us all.

1. "X-Men: The Last Stand"

I'm not an "X-Men" fanboy. I've read... five?... issues of the comic in my life. I was always a DC geek and preferred Batman most out of that particular roster. Bryan Singer's first "X-Men" was "eh, cool" in my book. It was a start. It nailed some things (Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, the obvious casting of Patrick Stewart , Magneto, making me feel weird for suddenly finding that little girl from "The Piano" hot) and it missed the boat in a few ways (overall pacing, Halle Berry should die in a fire, a general anticlimactic feeling). "X-Men 2: X-Men United" is up there with "Superman II" and "Batman Begins" as one of the greatest superhero movies ever. Almost all of the complaints (though Halle Berry was still alive) were addressed and it fleshed out the mutant roster in meaningful ways, without shortchanging the character development (hell, Nightcrawler felt more "real" than some of the guys we'd been with since the first one).

Of course, Fox honcho Tom Rothman has some peverse need to overcompensate and he decided that Bryan Singer sucked for making his studio millions and millions of dollars, hence there was a contract holdout and Singer finally said "fuck it" when Warner offered him "Superman Returns" (see the BEST OF list in my last post). Thus, we ended up with "X-Men: The Last Stand", a monumental buzzkill, and the utter fucking reversal of everything good that "X2" established. To fill Singer's shoes, Fox hired "Rush Hour" auteur (ha.. ha..?) Brett Ratner, who was put on a rush schedule and told to crank the thing out before Singer could finish HIS movie. The results are obvious, all over the screen.

Development? Who needs development? Let's just toss mutant after mutant out there and see what sticks. After all, we're going to need replacements for all those contracts we're not renewing. I mean, hoo boy, Angel! We'll see him as a kid trying to cut his wings off, then he'll be nonexistant for most of the movie, but come back for twenty seconds at the end to spread those same wings and celebrate his mutanthood! He's grown, see??

Except he hasn't, because he's never developed. Fucking Jar Jar Binks got more sreen time in "Revenge of the Sith" and he's a character people ACTIVELY HATE!

And Halle Berry! She's hot, right? And everyone LOVES her! We'll put her FRONT AND CENTER for the WHOLE MOVIE!

And Hugh Jackman is so SERIOUS all the time. Let's lighten Logan up and make him a little more comedic!

Uh... no.

Then the plot rushes us through the discovery of a "cure" for mutanthood that divides the X-Men (some like, say, Rogue really want it.. it's hard to get close to folks when phyiscal contact will, y'know, kill them...) and others are strongly opposed (loud and proud Ian "I'm not fucking Gandalf" McKellan, reprising his role as Magneto, and one of the few things that doesn't suck about the movie). To clear up those contracts, a few major dudes are offed, some with less fanfare than others (Rothman must've been PISSED at Marsden for jumping ship with Singer). Then we get the entire fucking Phoenix saga in about 35 minutes (again, I'm not really a Marvel fan, but didn't this take like forever to resolve in the official continuity?). For a DC analogy, "X-Men: The Last Stand" feels like it's the equivalent of cramming the "Death of Superman", "Hero For A Friend", and the rebirth storyline (including all four "fake" Supermen) into one film. Stuff gets cut and the effect is drastically diminshed.

Also, this is the third film IN THIS LIST that features Cameron Bright. He plays the kid who holds the "cure" in his blood or whatever the fuck it was. He was also the missing kid in "Running Scared" and some pivotal role in "Ultraviolet". It's getting distracting seeing him in everything. Last year you might've seen him as Aaron Eckhart's son in "Thank You For Smoking".

Lately the Marvel films in general are starting to feel crappy. "Elektra" sucked. "Fantastic Four" sucked. This sucked. "Ghost Rider" I'm cautiously optimistic about, but it'll probably suck. And, I'm sorry to say, while it's the biggest one of them all, "Spiderman 3" looks to me like it might be trying to jam too much into that one film, but we'll see. I have faith in Sam Raimi.

Oh, and if you KILL MAJOR CHARACTERS, please LEAVE THEM FUCKING DEAD. Having a cute little scene AFTER the credits roll showing that major plot changes aren't actually permanent is a fucking copout, further invalidating what we just spent the past two hours watching. It's like those shitty movies where everything goes wrong but then in the last three minutes the main character wakes up and (Gasp!) it was just a bad dream. Time and money wasted.

Well, I was finally able to see "Children of Men" this past weekend... my verdict? Knock everything on my "best of list" down one space (except for for "Inland...") and make "Children #2. There, now I have ten. I get to see "Pan's Labyrinth" this weekend ( I hope!) so maybe my list will be further amended.