What I Thought Was The Best Film of 2006

Tonight, I saw Babel with certain individuals, and in my mind it was fairly mediocre. The movie consists of four tenuously connected plot arcs filmed with dialogue in 5 distinct languages (I include the signing as one of the languages). The movie was 2+ hours long, haphazardly lurching from one storyline to the next, leaving me intermittently bored and peeved. The camerawork suffers from the faux-verite style in vogue for the past several years, making liberal use of jump cuts, handheld camera shake, and unnecessary zooms to replicate the urban-documentary feel that other films, such as City of God, have used to better effect.

Despite being a "foreign" film, it was also infected with the Hollywood obsession with close-up. At least 80% of the shots were close-ups, with the average shot length probably less than 3 seconds. Occasionally there would be a painterly establishing shot of either Mexican or Moroccan desert, or some clouds to mix it up a bit, but more often than not the film consisted of silent heads staring mutely into the camera, occasionally emoting via a grimace or a lone tear trickling down a cheek, and uttering a quiet moan of despair. There was hardly ever a medium shot of people interacting with each other or their environment, allowing the viewer the time to look around and focus on something he would want to focus on, rather than having the director immediately cut to a close-up and compel the viewer to focus on what he wanted to focus on.

To sum it up, the film was extremely didactic. First, its preaching about the unfairness of the current immigration regime or America's morbid obsession over terrorism and foreigners was cliche. The issues were already decided by the director (e.g. border guards and American tourists are jerks) without presenting any countervailing facts or ideas to allow viewer to decide the question for himself. Moreover, despite its "gritty" "verite" cinetamatography, the editing's reliance on montage was pure varnished Hollywood, leading the viewer along so nothing was shown besides the particular object or facial expression the director wanted us to see, and therefore ineluctably imposing on the viewer specific conclusions about the characters and issues that the film raises.

Don't get me wrong, I love montage as much as the next person, when used correctly. (e.g. Passion of Joan of Arc, Battleship Potemkin, Godfather), but it shouldn't be used in such a didactic manner.

Anyway, for Best Films of 2006, I would go with Cache (even though it was made in 2005), which spoke far more persuasively about issues of both race and immigration than Babel. However, since it technically is a 2005 film (though not released "widely" in American until 2006), and considering how dreary the film landscape was this year, I would say the best film of 2006 that I have seen so far is:

Casino Royale. (as pure a film as a good kung-fu flick).