2006 movies list
Movies I watched in full in 2006:
1. Crash (2005)
2. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
3. My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
4. Spirited Away (2001)
5. The Apartment (1960) - And to think I deprived myself of Billy Wilder movies for the 26 years before I saw this movie. Sheesh. Into the all-time Top 20 with you, my friend.
6. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
7. The Godfather (1972) (3rdish time)
8. The Godfather, Part Two (1974) (also, 3rdish time. They're always on AMC.)
9. Cinema Paradiso (1989)
10. Million Dollar Baby (2004)
11. Broken Flowers (2005) - Also known as The Movie Nobody Liked But Me.
12. The Deer Hunter (1978) - This was very beautiful and powerful and I NEVER WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN. I swear, I still have a touch of PTSD from watching it. I didn't even like having the DVD sitting around the house in the hours between finishing the movie and returning it to Netflix.
13. Network (1976) - Also added to my all-time favorites.
14. Before Sunrise (1995) (2nd time)
15. Batman Begins (2005)
16. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) (6th or 7th time) - Adam and I and some friends saw this with several thousand other people at Screen on the Green in Piedmont Park.
17. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - I'd love to see this on a big screen one day.
18. Tootsie (1982) - I used to always love hearing the theme song on the radio when I was a kid. I never knew what it was called. I just knew it as the song about "spending all my life watching trains go by." It made me think of New York.
19. Before Sunset (2004)
20. Fargo (1996) (2nd time)
21. The Squid and the Whale (2005) - I really wanted to like this. Before I'd even seen it, I rooted for Jeff Daniels to get an Oscar nomination, and for the script to win Best Original Screenplay. I even defended it to a friend who had found nothing to like about it. I popped the DVD in the player the same day I got it from Netflix. You know, I'm a big fan of fundamentally unlikeable characters -- why else would I like the Rabbit series so much? -- but these characters gave me so little to allow me to sympathize with them. Somebody on IMDB called the movie "funny and touching." There were only a few sad glimpses of that for me.
22. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)
23. The African Queen (1951)
24. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) - I was amazed at how ahead of its time this movie was. It reminded me of late '90s - early '00s indie flicks.
25. Some Like It Hot (1959)
26. The Bourne Identity (2002) (3rd time) - It pleases me immensely that Matt Damon has outshone Ben Affleck in the leading man department.
27. Shining Through (1992)
28. Sunset Boulevard (1950) - I wish William Holden had acted in a hundred movies. I would see them all.
29. Friends With Money (2006) - Unlike The Squid and the Whale, I wasn't expecting much from this one, and so I wasn't disappointed when it didn't do much for me. Mostly, I just like Catherine Keener.
30. M*A*S*H* (1970) - Did you know this was the first major motion picture that included the word "fuck"?
31. Strangers On a Train (1951)
32. The Fugitive (1993) (2nd time)
33. DiG! (2004)
34. Kill Bill, Volume 1 (2004) - I can't imagine seeing this in the theater. Highest non-war body count ever.
35. Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004) - Excellent movie with the most claustrophobia-inducing scene ever.
36. Y Tu Mama Tambien (2004) - Joins my personal Top 20. A couple weeks ago, I had a dream that was, like this movie, narrated in Spanish by a vaguely monotonous, deep-voiced narrator.
37. Stranger Than Fiction (2006) - If you missed this in the theater, please do rent it when it comes out on DVD.
38. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
39. Walk the Line (2005)
40. Rocky Balboa (2006)
41. Nashville (1975) - Two Robert Altman films later, and I feel a strange pull to see the rest of his movies, even though I feel like it'll take about as much energy as, say, finishing Ulysses. I was planning to have a movie marathon on the day after Christmas. I popped in Nashville at 11 in the morning. It's a three-hour movie and it takes a good hour to get all the characters straight and begin to care about what happens to them. Once you do care, though, they're fascinating, and you want a whole movie about each one. Watching Nashville was an exhausting experience, and so it was the only movie I watched on my "marathon" day. The ending loudly and brazenly cuts off the action at a very frustrating point (even for someone like me who doesn't mind some plot points being left unresolved. See: Broken Flowers).
42. GoodFellas (1991) - Here's how anal retentive I am about making lists: I watched GoodFellas on TV a couple weeks ago, but figured it didn't officially count as watched because it hadn't included all the violence and swearing. So I rented the DVD. I put it in on the 30th, when I was sick. After an hour, the camerawork was making me dizzy, so I had to turn it off. Technically, I still have two more hours to go, but I already know what happens in them, so... does this go on the list or not? I'll say yes, but it won't feel right until I finish the uncut version.
Movies I'm not counting for the year: the edited-for-TV version of Pulp Fiction, the last hour of The Sting, having It's a Wonderful Life on in the background while I baked banana bread for Christmas, and having A Christmas Story on in the background while Adam and I opened presents. But I've seen all those movies multiple times before, except The Sting.