As the 79th annual Academy Awards ceremony approaches (Sunday, February 25th), VanRamblings will set about to offer you our take on the various 2006 films up for Oscar consideration.
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First up, there’s Babel, the pick o’ the bunch here, a powerful, melancholy, wholly transcendent film and, often, very difficult film to watch. Just when the conditions of a characters’ life becomes almost too unbearable to endure, the narrative switches — to the Moroccan desert, Los Angeles, Tijuana or Tokyo — to another one of the four interwoven stories. Heartbreaking, humane and devastatingly brilliant, Babel is the odds on favourite for Best Picture.
Absolutely one of the best films to come out of Hollywood in 2006, who knows why the members of the Academy slighted Dreamgirls? Conjecture runs from the supposition that producer David Geffen is hated in Hollywood, to allegations of racism and homophobia, but whatever the politics behind the snub, Dreamgirls remains one of the most important films of 2006, an entertaining and always involving celebration of the movie musical at its very best.
Delicious. Brilliantly adapted by playwright Patrick Marber from Zoë Heller’s acclaimed novel, Notes on a Scandal is elegant, pitch-black filmmaking at its very best, with a marvelous and stunningly gorgeous Cate Blanchett, and a scarily effective, misanthropic and unrelenting Dame Judi Dench, at its centre. Gothic, gripping filmmaking of the first order (à la Fatal Attraction, but with a great deal more wit), Notes on a Scandal offers a refreshingly literate battle royale involving colleagues undone by sexual desire, and another cineplex must-see Oscar contender.
Pedestrian, conventional filmmaking, The Pursuit of Happyness is a modest Tinseltown success at best, a quasi-inspirational, feel-good fairy tale that holds the accumulation of material wealth as the raison d’être of life. At least it’s not sappy, though. We’ve all been through tough times, but this film is so unrelentingly bleak at times it verges on unreality. If a slick and gleaming pull yourself up by your own bootstraps flick is your cup o’ tea, then this is likely the film for you.
