For most of 2006 I didn’t watch many films: the usual suspects like Superman and Pirates and a few goodies at the Festival – but since September I’ve seen everything. Too many, one might say. Anyway, I’m not qualified to do a review of 2006 (and I’ve never been much of a one for looking back when forwards is much more interesting) so here is a guide to some of the anticipated highlights of 2007. These are a few that I’m looking forward to.
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett kick-off with Babel early in January with Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto soon after. The entire female cast of Almodóvar’s Volver won the best actress prize at Cannes in 2006 – also January.
Shortbus won’t be up for any awards but I missed it during the Festival and heard great things. Will Smith bookends the year with The Pursuit of Happyness in January and I Am Legend in December. Stallone brings Rocky Balboa out of retirement one last time in February, Robert De Niro directs, and stars with Matt Damon, in the story of the CIA, The Good Shepherd. The Oscar front-runner already is Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, companion piece to this year’s Flags of our Fathers but from the Japanese perspective. Cate Blanchett will be battling Judi Dench for best actress, both are in Notes on a Scandal.
March sees the kiwi comedy horror Black Sheep arrive alongside the new film from the Shaun of the Dead creators: Hot Fuzz. George Clooney and, yes, Cate Blanchett AGAIN go noir in The Good German. First Fest of the year, the World Cinema Showcase starts on March 29.
Taika Cohen’s Eagle Vs Shark is due in April, as is the Latin American Film Festival. May is sequel month with Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and 28 Weeks Later all taking up screen space. Also in May you get a chance to make a film of your own: 48HR Film Comp shoot weekend is 18-19 May.
Will Ferrell’s latest sport is speed-skating in Blades of Glory (June) followed by more sequels: Oceans 13 and Shrek 3. In July Michael Bay blows stuff up in Transformers, Bruce Willis finally returns as John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard, The Simpsons hit the big screen and Wellington enjoys the 36th International Film Festival.
The Coen Brothers adapt Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men (August) and Matt Damon returns in The Bourne Ultimatum. 
There’s another Harry Potter due in September and Kiwi-Samoan horror The Tattooist is also pencilled in for September along with the next Pixar animation Ratatouille.
Viggo Mortensen teams up with Naomi Watts and director David Cronenberg for Eastern Promises, a thriller about the Russian mafia in London (September). Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers in The Invasion, due in November. Jerry Seinfeld’s animated comedy Bee Movie hits screens in December along with The Waterhorse (shot in Wellington last year and starring Ben Chaplin and Emily Watson) but my Christmas pick for next year is His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass, the first of a trilogy I really can’t wait to see. Luckily, there’s plenty to keep me going until then.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday December 27, 2006.
Since I took this gig back in September I have seen every film commercially released in Wellington (except for a few Bollywood efforts) and there have been some clunkers, but this week is so bereft of quality that I fear I may need to develop eyes of leather to get through next week.
The perfectly named Duff sisters (Hilary and, you know, the other one) get a showcase for their meagre talents in Material Girls, a sub-teen morality tale about two rich sisters who lose all their money when their family cosmetics empire collapses due to greedy, cheating adults.
Material Girls aims so low that it’s hard to hate – unlike Nancy Meyer’s The Holiday which I felt personally insulted by. In this “romantic†“comedyâ€, Cameron Diaz plays a Los Angeles movie trailer editor who swaps houses with depressed English journalist Kate Winslet for a Christmas holiday mutually distant from the men who have broken their hearts. Diaz finds herself in picture postcard snowy Surrey and Winslet gets the run of Diaz’s Hollywood mansion. Within 12 hours both women meet their perfect man and faith in love and romance is, of course, restored.
It’s said that each generation gets the Bond that they deserve. If that’s the case, then the class of 1979 who got Moonraker must have been very naughty indeed, while the gods of karma have delivered us a Bond for the ages in Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale. Outrageously blue-eyed Daniel Craig is the new Bond and, like last year’s Batman Begins, Casino Royale is a genesis story – the birth of a Bond.
This reviewer was slightly disappointed to find that China Blue wasn’t the example of adult entertainment from the People’s Republic that I had been expecting but a documentary about sweatshop seamstresses slaving in factories so that we can buy cheap jeans. The villains are not the factory owners, who we see bullied by the international buyers to keep prices down, but the forces of international capitalism that exploit the weak for no better reason than that is what they do.
2006 has been the year of toilets in film: from the delightful (Kenny) to the repulsive (Jackass 2) via the unnecessary (Borat) we have spent a lot of time in cinemas being confronted by number ones and twos. It’s back to the bathroom in Aardman’s computer-animated Flushed Away but there’s nothing in it to offend anyone. In fact, it’s one of the most entertaining films of the year — a great delight.
All the voice-work is brilliant, including a hilarious Ian McKellen and droll Bill Nighy but the film is stolen for me by Jean Reno as Le Frog. In fact there’s almost no film that couldn’t be improved by the addition of Jean Reno, a fact that Roberto Benigni uses to his advantage in The Tiger and the Snow. Reno plays Iraqi poet Fuad who is compelled to return to Baghdad at the start of Gulf War II. Benigni himself plays love-lorn Italian poet Attilio who rushes to Iraq when he hears that the woman he loves has been injured and is dying. He and Fuad try and save her despite the war and insurgency all around. Your appreciation of this film will entirely depend on whether you think of Benigni as an irritating self-indulgent ass or not. I thought it was sweet.
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