Twilight Cinema 2006 - For Your Consideration (Day One: Jan. 19, 2007)
Welcome to Cosmo-club 2006. I’ll leave Jeff to introducing our Twilight Cinema of 2006 and instead get into the meat an’ potatoes of our cinema buffet…
On our spiritual kin, this year's Movie Club, Dana Stevens began by proposing that she doesn't like war movies. The subtext, in my mind, was that she didn't like (*cough* Eastwood *cough*) Oscar-bait. Or, I'd like to take the opportunity to extend her comment to that. I've received many notes "for my consideration" in the past three months and for the majority of those movies, I considered and passed. I think the rub for me is that a project like “Babel,” conceived almost strictly for award season, exhausts its own ambitions in the same logic that belittles this year’s genre movies - the difference is that the conventions aren’t built into the film itself but instead into how the movie is presented to the public.
And I don’t mean to bring this up as an antagonist or populist slant on the end-of-the-year list-making process, but instead as a prompt to understand what makes genre movies like "The Descent" or "Inside Man" get passed over for “L’Enfant” when compiling the year in film for 2006. I certainly had a hard time deciding where to place the Dardenne brothers’ provoca-cinema, and the result of that meant pushing the third installment of the “Fast and the Furious” to the sidelines. I know I’ll shed a tear alone for that sacrifice.
-Nate