The best movie I saw this past year was, far and away, Paul Greengrass' brilliant and compassionate film "United 93." The movie simply watches events as they unfold on the morning of September 11, 2001. It doesn't point fingers. It doesn't draw any conclusions. Greengrass' decision not to use mega-stars for this story was deliberate; as was the decision to keep away from the Hollywood formula of portraying the characters as people with histories and sappy backstories. And that is what makes the staggering horror of the final moments of this film so monumental. You are right there with these passengers as they fight the ultimate fight to overtake their hijackers. American Everymen emerging from the chaos of that unbelievable September morning with courage and heroism.
This film is masterful and heartbreaking...and it honors the memory of the passengers and crew...those wonderful, brave angels.
Worst movies of 2006: "Flyboys," a box office bomb about the American men who volunteered for the French as aviators in the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I. The movie's battle sequences are decent enough, but the story is rather empty headed.
And, "The Good Shepherd." The late movie critic Gene Siskel used to say that a movie was especially bad if you left the theatre saying "I will never get that time back." And "The Good Shepherd" was an abysmal 167 minutes of clumsy and tedious filmmaking that had me ready to scratch my eyes out.
Biggest disappointment of 2006: "Poseidon." Wolfgang Petersen, the director of the seafaring classics "Das Boot" and "The Perfect Storm," had a tremendous opportunity to update "The Poseidon Adventure," Paul Gallico's 1969 best selling tour de force, and he fell short.
The special effects were tremendous (the opening sequence of the film is nothing short of amazing - watch most of it here, and when you do remember that the ship is completely computer generated) and the set designs were tremendous, yet Mark Protosevitch's screenplay was absolutely rotten. Had Petersen and Warner Bros. simply translated Gallico's original human stories into the script, they would have had an excellent film. Instead, they took the book - and the 1972 film - and turned them into bare bones minimalist schlock.
My recent review of the '69 novel can be found here.
