The Best Films of 2006: The Year of Army of Shadows

And the First Annual L.A. Weekly Film Poll

Comments (0) By Scott Foundas Wednesday, Dec 27 2006

Better late than never: Army man Lino Ventura. (Courtesy Rialto Pictures)

Is nice to be one of the best movies of the year! (Twentieth Century Fox)

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(9) A Prairie Home Companion Some movies (Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, Huston’s The Dead) seem unusually prescient of their makers’ mortality, as if their directors had one foot in the grave while they were directing them. And so it was with Robert Altman’s elegiac, yet joyous, swan song — a spirited tribute to performers and performing and to all things past their time, but not their prime. As the movie nears its end, Altman keeps coming up with ways of postponing the inevitable — additional scenes, codas — as if, like Ionesco’s 400-year-old King Berenger, he were about to cry out, “Why was I born if it wasn’t forever?”

(10) Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Jackass Number Two As much as I admire the chutzpah of Sacha Baron Cohen and Borat, for me the year’s two highest achievements in American screen comedy were Adam McKay’s dadaist mock NASCAR biopic (with co-writer/star Will Ferrell in a performance of improvisational brilliance) and “director” Jeff Tremaine’s orgasmically funny cavalcade of stupid human tricks featuring Johnny Knoxville and company. Some will dismiss these movies as lowbrow juvenilia, but to do so is to miss the razor-sharp intelligence lurking behind every one of Ricky Bobby’s absurdist gestures, and the sheer hilarity of seeing Chris Pontius slip his sock-puppeted dick into a hungry snake’s lair.