Lists. SFBG.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's annual end of the year film issue "gives ideas and opinions precedence over bogus math," writes Johnny Ray Huston. "Antiauthoritarian up through the last second of every December, we've discovered that if you collect commentary from a varied group of imaginative people, certain patterns of creative resistance emerge that are a lot more revealing than any number one spot."

This is most immediately visible in "Cinema 2006," a monster list of lists featuring titles and/or commentary from Craig Baldwin, Bong Joon-ho, Bryan Boyce, Michelle Devereaux, Sarah Enid Hagey, Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, Sam Green, Dennis Harvey, Rian Johnson, Jonathan L Knapp, João Pedro Rodrigues, Joel Shepard, Sean Uyehara, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pinky and D Eric Beckles of TV Carnage.

"Mamma mia, was there ever a year crammed with more bad mothering run stealthily amok, far from most of the multiplexes and the real-life broodies dragging their spawn to the latest animated feature?" asks Kimberly Chun. Topping her "Lady Feast 11": "Ivana Baquero in Pan's Labyrinth and Ko Ah-sung Ko in The Host.

"If the movies generally reflect how the public wants to see itself, then 2006 suggested to a large extent that few viewers see the point of happy traditional-family portraiture, even as fantasy material," proposes Dennis Harvey. "Thus it shouldn't have been such a surprise, maybe, that the year's big sleeper was Little Miss Sunshine - a family road trip movie in which everybody who's old enough to have an opinion loathes everyone else, mostly for good reason. Saddling each relationship with maximum dysfunction, winking at attempted suicide and the appearance of pederasty, the smugly clever script allowed audiences to feel superior to the hapless Hoover clan even as they bought into caring about them." His #1: Quinceañera.

Chuck Stephens cuts straight to the list, annotated and entitled "Eleven patriot acts," and topped by Syndromes and a Century.

"In my seven months in Mexico, I went to a grand total of one museum, one cathedral, and zero ancient pyramids. Mostly, I just watched movies," writes Jason Shimai. His fitting #1: Battle in Heaven.

More from Sergio de la Mora: "In 2006 the global media blitz continued to focus on the three Mexican directors - Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu - who've been lured by Hollywood. But a new generation of auteurs, whose approaches to filmmaking range from minimalistic to baroque, are redefining and reinvigorating film and generating debate about a genuinely new Mexican cinema." Besides Battle, seven more Mexican features are highlighted.

Criticine editor Alexis A Tioseco looks back on the year in Philippine cinema: "Today independent - and its many synonyms - has become a hot buzzword in the Philippines. Young filmmakers, students, festivals, even commercial studios are beginning to use the word, defiling the purity that was once associated with it." Somewhat related are Raya Martin's "twin cinema peaks of 2006," but only because they're Raya Martin's. Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth "felt like a rebirth of new cinema," while "(Re)Discovering" Philippe Garrel is the other.

Max Goldberg vs Cheryl Eddy! Goldberg argues that it was "a good year for boy-men at the movies"; not at all, counters Eddy. Max Goldberg's #1: Old Joy; Cheryl Eddy's: Borat.

Posted by dwhudson at December 27, 2006 8:13 AM