That's Not Entertainment!

[December 27th, 2006] Whenever Hollywood senses its box-office revenues slipping, it likes to trot out a slogan to lure audiences back into the multiplexes. If the marketers are contemplating a catchphrase for this year's Oscars, perhaps they should try this: "For a bad time, call Fandango." Or maybe this: "The movies—they'll make your real life seem so much more amusing!"

In 2006, movies began displaying the classic traits of a sociopathic dictator: They were sentimental and cruel. On the one extreme, there was a surge of "political awareness," which translated into directors offering the original insights that George W. Bush is kinda dumb and corrupt, and the America he leads tends to exploit poor and dark-skinned people. Well, that was good to know—the first dozen times. Meanwhile, each Friday brought a new example of studio cynicism: laugh-free comedies like School for Scoundrels and limb-rippers like Saw III, made on the cheap to siphon dollars from adolescents. So what're you in the mood for tonight, honey? Self-indulgence or crass pandering? (Sometimes, as with World Trade Center and Blood Diamond, you could have your cake and choke on it, too.)

What was manifestly absent from the year's cinema was the sensation of pleasure, the feeling that writers were enjoying creating characters and actors were having fun inhabiting them. So it somehow makes sense that the best film of 2006—the most profound, and the most likely to endure—is all but impossible to watch. United 93 is a stone-cold masterwork, an understated re-creation of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as seen from inside Federal Aviation Administration headquarters and one of the doomed planes. Director Paul Greengrass chose unknown actors to play the passengers, so when we watch the victims realize their fate, and recite the Lord's Prayer, and call their families, and say "I love you," it's simply unbearable. United 93 distills 44 deaths into 111 minutes, and does it with such clarity and empathy that it earns the overused adjective "shattering." It tears everything apart.

After that experience, the most basic entertainment comes as a relief. Martin Scorsese's The Departed (second on my Top 10 list) is just that kind of exercise: a crime-genre picture that relishes its clichÉs and twists, and benefits from a gleefully vulgar turn from Mark Wahlberg—who is clearly having more fun than most of his acting colleagues combined. The same exuberance lifts The History Boys (No. 4) and Dave Chappelle's Block Party (No. 5)—and especially Borat (No. 3), which may have picked some easy satirical targets but savaged them with a schoolboy's giddiness.

Speaking of excitement, I can't talk about the year's best movies without giving a shout-out to James Gunn's Slither (No. 7), a Troma tribute that features the most original conceit seen in horror for some time—extraterrestrial slugs with the single goal of crawling into the nearest human mouth. In a year that offered unblunted death, bitter sermonizing and crude toadying to teenagers, I'll cast my lot with the mouth-penetrating blood slugs from space. Now there's a slogan.