February 11, 2007

My choices for best movies of 2006

American Film Renaissance asked for my choices in the following categories:

Best Time at the Movies in 2006: "The Science of Sleep"

Best Hero: Mark Wahlberg's cop in "The Departed"

Best Narrative Film: "Something New" (okay, it's a stretch to call it "the best," but it was a good picture that was undeservedly overlooked)

Best Documentary: "Idiocracy"


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's true. ;-)

Anonymous said...

I have given up on hollywood and almost exclusively watch Bollywood films these days

dobeln said...

"Idiocracy" is currently the 5:th most downloaded item on the world's largest torrent piracy site: (3835 people downloading it right now...)

Internet appears to have made burying entertaining stuff a tad harder.

http://thepiratebay.org/top/all

Anonymous said...

Can someone check the credits at the end of Idiocracy to see if Steve gets a mention.

Steve Sailer said...

I get mentioned for making cupcakes.


[Reference explained here:
http://www.isteve.com/Film_All_The_Kings_Men.htm
]

Anonymous said...

It's a great film, but hardly a documentary. Steve needs to watch more of those.

I saw "Mr. Death" last night. Great film except for one thing: we are not told (well, at that time it wasn't absolutely known, but there were reasons to think it would come out, and now has) Leuchter was vindicated. Recently the "custodians" of the site admitted the area Leuchter sampled was rebuilt in 1946/47. So there would never have been cyanide there. A detail the rebuilders could have fixed easily, but fortunately for history, didn't.

I've used sodium and potassium cyanide and acid to kill gophers and voles. It leaves a blue tinge to the soil. In fact, "cyanide" (the carbon-nitrogen radical" comes from "cyan", the bluish color that with magenta and yellow make the subtractive primaries. If you vapor lock your fingernails will turn "cyanotic", or bluish.

An aside: you want to know why they call me Nerd? when I was in grade school they told me that red,blue and yellow were the primary colors. Well I had been repairing color TV's by then-I had a real Tektronix scope, a HV probe, could read scnematics, and knew my power pentodes from my pentagrid oscillators. I told them they were wrong, everyone knew it was red, blue and green. Before long, I was at the principal's office. (Of course, RGB are the additive primaries,CMY(K) the subtractives.) I wound up narrowly escaping a school year on the short bus over that.

Anonymous said...

The reconstructed alleged gas chamber in Auschwitz still has its original walls, so unless Leuchter's samples came from outside the original mortuary area, i.e. the washroom, your argument fails.

And Leuchter also took samples from the alleged gas chamber in Birkenau which hasn't been reconstructed.

Anonymous said...

Abandoning Hollywood films for Bollywood is like giving up a Hyundai for a Trabant. Although mainstream American films are usually terrible, Indian films universally are.

The acting styles, dialogue, props, costumes, and everything else about Indian film is like watching a remake of Muppets Movies (tm) with exclusively real actors.

Hollywood's dreary output of sequels, remakes, sequels of remakes, and racially, feministically and politically correct trash occasionally gets it right. About two movies per year made today catches my attention as a standout of quality and value, mostly independent films but sometimes mainstream. That's dismal, but I have never seen an Indian film I could watch more than ten minutes of.

That means on average the best B-wood has to offer-the ones that even make it here-are worse than "Speedway" with Elvis and Nancy Sinatra. I got at least to the 20-minute mark on that one. And for all their opprobrium, I watched both "Showgirls" and "Hardbodies" all the way through.

Anonymous said...

There's so much regional variation in language and culture in India that a friend of mine from India informs me that she can't tell what's going on in many Indian movies either.

I owe a debt to Bollywood for helping me lose my virginity, and that's all I'll say about that.

BTW, Idiocracy was a crappy movie with a great idea. I quote from it all the time while watching TV with my roomies. A commercial for the director's cut of "School for Scoundrels" featuring nothing but clips of people getting injured in their balls comes to mind.

Anonymous said...

Steve-
I finally watched 'Idiocracy'. I have mixed feelings about the film. The humor was on the level of 'Attack of the Killer Tomatoes' -- cute, but not hilarious. I found the movie better watched when approached as drama -- like 'Soylent Green' or 'Planet of the Apes' -- with a few laughs. Compared with most other films which claim to have a vision of a dystopian future, much of Judge's vision is actually plausible.