Here and There

At the end of a year, it’s really tough for my feeble memory to keep track of the movies I saw that year. Not that I see a lot of movies. More like I just have a really bad memory.

But here’s my best stab at 2006’s list, with brief reactions:

Letters from Iwo Jima. Excellent. Suffered only for a few recognizable faces. Hardly a flaw.
Casino Royale. Great new Bond actor. Good story. Good action.
Jesus Camp. Great in that it showed me something I otherwise wouldn’t see. Scary.
Little Miss Sunshine. Easily the most overrated film of the year. Good at times, but overall cheesy.
The Science of Sleep. As close to Being John Malkovich-perfect as this year came.
Superman Returns. What a waste.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston. A close-up look at a far-out guy. Pretty damn compelling.
Babel. Brad Pitt couldn’t bring this movie down. Some flaws, but overall really good.
The Departed. As I tell people, 99 percent perfect. One percent absolute shit. Tie for best of the year, with …
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. He makes fun of those who need to be made fun of. And he does it well.
Volver. I’m an Almodóvar fan, but this was too sentimental. Too long, also.
The Good Shephard. Good, but overly ambitious. Slightly above average.
An Inconvenient Truth. Good, though I dozed a few times. Saw it late, so there’s that.
Marie Antoinette. I’m not opposed to camp. Just do it well. Coppola did not do it well. And Kirsten Dunst was god-awful.

Sorry to end on such a sour note, but I made this list in the order I remembered the movies. Hope this does something for someone out there.

I saw a horror movie Friday night.

A few weeks ago, during the previews before Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep, a trailer caught my attention. In it, various kids were shown spewing epithets and cliches, “Jesus” this and “the lord” that. It was startling, especially when the kids were shown in face paint doing some sort of performance in which they twirled sticks and proclaimed their love of Christ.

But what really got me were scenes shown later in the trailer, scenes of children, their arms raised up, crying and muttering about being saved.

The film, of course, was Jesus Camp, a new documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady about Evangelical Christian kids. The movie is about so much more, naturally, but it is told through the prism of Christian youth camps in the U.S.

Jesus Camp isn’t necessarily worth rushing out to see in the theaters. And like many movies that have touched me over the last six years or so, I’m not sure it will reach the audience it needs to reach, the audience it challenges, more or less.

That said, it does a good job of expository documentary filmmaking. It satisfies one of my criteria for a good documentary, which is to show us something that’s been going on under our noses, but which we either weren’t aware of, or were too repulsed by to dig into and learn about any further than a headline would teach us.

This movie isn’t nearly as important as its topic. The rise of fundamentalist Christianity has been well-documented. Now, we see one way by which these so-called Christians perpetuate themselves, namely by indoctrinating their children to be mindless proponents of empty religion. Scary.