FILMS OF THE DECADE: THE YEAR 2006

WITH HINDSIGHT. . .

HOODWINKED was one of the smaller animations of late to sneak under the radar but was no less enjoyable for that.

Director Cory Edwards even came to Cineworld Broad St to run a little masterclass in drawing for local school children.

He has written the sequel, Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs Evil which is set for release here on January 29, 2010.

Hayden Panettiere replaces Anne Hathaway as the voice of Red, with Glenn Close as Granny and Bill Murray as Mr Alligator.

Thanks to seeing Hoodwinked (twice) in 2006, the arrival of a sequel means I'm already looking forward to January's slate in 2010.

The Top Ten for 2006 was certainly one of the strongest of the decade.

In retrospect, maybe I should have include future Oscar-winner The Departed in my list of top choices.

But I remember feeling, not for the first time, that Martin Scorsese had failed to improve on an original film (Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs here, Cape Fear previously).

Maybe I should take another look without seeing the Far East's original classic too near it first.

I tried to buy Infernal Affairs as a birthday present for a nephew at the Bullring's HMV store on Boxing Day only to be told it was 'sold out' across the country. Interesting.

But I think he'll be pleased with my second choice present for him all the same. . . the Sean Penn thriller State of Grace (I can't believe it was released here on June 14, 1991 when my nephew would have been just three years old).

Meanwhile, you'd have thought that a decent performance in a decent film like Superman Returns would have given Brandon Routh a solid platform for the 21st century.

But Zack and Miri Make A Porno, Lie to Me (aka Fling) and future releases Life is Hot in Cracktown, Stuntmen, Unthinkable and Miss Nobody do not suggest he's got the 'A' list in his sights just yet.

Maybe next year's Scott Pilgrim vs The World, directed by Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright (he of the Solihull relatives who came to see him at the regional, Cineworld Broad St premiere for Hot Fuzz) will connect some jump leads back on to Routh's battery pack.

Meanwhile, Julie Walters was very funny in Driving Lessons, but the distributors scarcely gave this film a cinema release. It was then on TV almost before you could blink.

Shame, really, and proof that no matter how hard you study the film industry sometimes it's just impossible to understand.

THE YEAR 2006 IN MOVIES

Mail Film Editor GRAHAM YOUNG looks back at the year 2006 in pictures.

SQUIRRELS, penguins, goats or rats - what's your favourite?

If you haven't got one, you'll have missed a substantial number of releases this year when animations flooded the marketplace like never before.

Thanks to computer technology, Disney is no longer the king of this particular castle.

Even its decision to jump in to bed with Pixar didn't deliver the best animation of the year.

Cars looked sensational with some scenes taking 100 hours' work to produce one second of footage.

But the film was overlong at 121 minutes and lacked more 'emotive' technology.

Back to the drawing board, then, for Toy Story creator John Lasseter!

Cory Edwards' low budget Hoodwinked - featuring an unforgettable yodelling goat - was much more fun. As were Ice Age 2 and Happy Feet.

The year started with Heath Ledger starring in Brokeback Mountain, a 'gay shepherd' western set against a fabulous landscape which earned Ang Lee the best director Oscar.

Sadly, there hasn't been such an intimate yet broad-canvas movie to match it since.

Little Miss Sunshine was a fabulous black comedy road movie with an extraordinary climax while Pan's Labyrinth featured many of the year's most memorable scenes in one movie.

United 93 unforgettably brought home the terror of 9/11 and Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers had still-relevant echoes about the sacrifices made in war.

The Queen was insightful, amusing and showcased Helen Mirren at her best, while James Bond was spectacularly reinvented with Daniel Craig starring in Casino Royale.

The peerless Meryl Streep helped to make The Devil Wears Prada the year's best mainstream comedy, Anthony Hopkins gave a wonderful character study in The World's Fastest Indian and Thank You For Smoking was a razor-sharp satire.

Reese Witherspoon won best actress for Walk The Line and, while Philip Seymour Hoffman fully deserved his Oscar for Capote, he could have been better utilised in Mission: Impossible III which so underperformed that Tom Cruise lost his lucrative studio deal.

Meanwhile, the success of low-budget wedding magazine comedy Confetti propelled Birmingham-born, Coventry-based director Debbie Isitt into the spotlight (leading her on to Nativity! in 2009).

Stars on the wane in 2006 included Harrison Ford (Firewall), Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct 2), Russell Crowe / Ridley Scott (A Good Year), Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible III), Colin Farrell (The New World), Sean Bean (The Dark), Jennifer Aniston (The Break-Up), Jim Carrey (Fun with Dick and Jane) and The Sixth Sense director, M Night Shyamalan (Lady in the Water).

Better than expected were Kevin Costner (The Guardian) and Ben Affleck (Hollywoodland) while the star being given the most work per ounce of available talent remained Coventry-born Clive Owen (Derailed / Inside Man / Children of Men).

Many recent Academy Award winners found their films underperformed - Charlize Theron (Aeon Flux), Nicolas Cage (The Weather Man / World Trade Center), Jamie Foxx (Miami Vice), Cate Blanchett (Little Fish) and director Sam Mendes (Jarhead).

Making three attempts to join the A-list was Ray Winstone (The Departed / Breaking and Entering / The Proposition).

Flavour-of-the-month Scarlett Johansson also hardly set the box office on fire with either Match Point or Brian De Palma's Black Dahlia while, Bill Nighy excepted, the overlong 144-minute sequel Pirates of the Caribbean 2 barely did enough to justify taking home lots of box office loot.

Hanging on valiantly to stardom were the now 91-year-old Eli Wallach (The Holiday), Clint Eastwood, 76 (Flags of Our Fathers), Michael Caine, 73 (Children of Men / The Prestige), director Woody Allen, 71 (Match Point) and fellow veterans Michael Douglas, 62 (The Sentinel / You Me and Dupree), Robert Redford, 70 and Morgan Freeman, 69 (both from An Unfinished Life).

Definitely on the up were Daniel Craig (Casino Royale), Meryl Streep (The Devil Wears Prada / Proof), Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line), Brandon Routh (Superman Returns), Aaron Eckhart (Thank You For Smoking), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote / Mission: Impossible III), Christian Bale (Harsh Times) director Paul Greengrass (United 93) and Steven Spielberg's latest protege, London-born 29-year-old UCLA graduate turned debut director Gil Kenan (Monster House).

But the real - yet still relatively unsung - talent whose star is still rising is Paul Haggis.

He wrote and directed Crash, my top film of 2005 on this page last December.

When Haggis then won the Best Picture at the Oscars, he became the first person in Oscar history to have written two successive winners of the most prized Academy Award of all, following Million Dollar Baby in 2005.

But the 53-year-old Canadian hasn't stopped there.

Haggis wrote this autumn's enjoyable romantic comedy The Last Kiss and tightened up the Casino Royale script to brilliant effect.

He also penned Clint Eastwood's current war epic, Flags of Our Fathers, as well as working on the story for next February's sister movie Letters from Iwo Jima.

Eastwood explores the WWII events from the Japanese perspective and could win Oscar nominations for best director and foreign language film for two separate movies!

Haggis is set to direct his next self-written project.

In the Valley of Elah is about an Iraq soldier who goes AWOL, with Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon set to star.

(2009 Update: Haggis is now remaking French hit Pour Elle (Anything For Her) - now retitled as The Next Three Days and set to star Russell Crowe and Liam Neeson for 2011 release).

GRAHAM YOUNG'S TOP TEN FOR 2006
1. Brokeback Mountain
2. Little Miss Sunshine
3. Pan's Labyrinth
4. United 93
5. Flags of Our Fathers
6. The Queen
7. Casino Royale
8. The Devil Wears Prada
9. The World's Fastest Indian
10. Thank You for Smoking

BLOCKBUSTERS
1. Casino Royale
2. Superman Returns
3. Ice Age 2
4. The Departed
5. The Devil Wears Prada
6. Munich
7. The Da Vinci Code
8. Children of Men
9. Mission: Impossible III
10. Night At the Museum

FOREIGN
1. Pan's Labyrinth
2. Hidden
3. Volver
4. Romanzo Criminale
5. District 13
6. Paradise Now
7. 36 Quai des Orfevres
8. Tsotsi
9. The Cave of the Yellow Dog
10. Beat That My Heart Skipped
Bubbling under:
Angel-A
Warrior King
El Lobo
U-Carmen Khayelitsha
Secuestro Express
Tzameti

FOR MEN
1. Casino Royale
2. The Departed
3. District 13
4. 16 Blocks
5. Munich
6. Flags of Our Fathers
7. New Police Story
8. Syriana
9. The Hills Have Eyes
10. Hostel

FOR WOMEN
1. The Devil Wears Prada
2. Confetti
3. The Queen
4. Little Manhattan
5. Driving Lessons
6. Friends With Money
7. The Holiday
8. The Weather Man
9. North Country
10. An Unfinished Life
Bubbling under:
Failure to Launch
Casanova
Shopgirl
Memoirs of a Geisha

FAMILIES
1. Happy Feet
2. Ice Age 2
3. Hoodwinked
4. Eight Below
5. Monster House
6. Over the Hedge
7. Superman Returns
8. An Inconvenient Truth
9. Night at the Museum
10. Cars
Bubbling Under:
Curious George
Zathura

COMEDIES
1. The Devil Wears Prada
2. Little Miss Sunshine
3. Happy Feet
4. Confetti
5. Transamerica
6. Driving Lessons
7. Borat
8. She's The Man
9. The Big White
10. The Holiday
Bubling Under:
Over the Hedge
RV - Runaway Vacation

PICK & MIX
1. Hard Candy
2. Brick
3. Walk the Line
4. Stranger than Fiction
5. The US vs John Lennon
6. Once In A Lifetime
7. Inside Man
8. The Guardian
9. The King
10. Murderball
Bubbling under:
Shooting Dogs
Transamerica
Right At Your Door
Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room
Syriana

TURKEYS
1. Dirty Sanchez
2. Lady in the Water
3. Tristan + Isolde
4. Breakfast on Pluto
5. Miami Vice
6. An American Haunting
7. The Santa Clause 3
8. Joy Division
9. Little Fish
10. Just My Luck
Bubbling under:
The Lake House
Black Christmas
Rabit Fever

THE YEAR 2006 ROLL OF HONOUR

Script: Little Miss Sunshine.
Director: Paul Greengrass, United 93; Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain; Guillermo Del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth; Clint Eastwood, Flags of Our Fathers; Martin Campbell, Casino Royale; Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine; Gil Kenan, Monster House.
Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote; Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth; Timothy Spall, Pierrepoint; Anthony Hopkins, The World's Fastest Indian; Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain; Christian Bale, Harsh Times; Paul Newman, Cars; Steve Buscemi, Monster House.

Actress: Kate Winslet, Little Children; Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada; Julie Walters, Driving Lessons; Juliette Binoche, Breaking and Entering / Hidden; Felicity Huffman, Transamerica; Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line; Catherine Keener, Capote; Amy Adams, Junebug and Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain.

Cinematography: Brokeback Mountain, The New World, Perfume, Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, Memoirs of a Geisha, The World's Fastest Indian; North Country; Flags of our Fathers.

Effects: Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, Casino Royale, The Host, The Guardian, United 93.

Themes: Brokeback Mountain, Casino Royale

Scores: Brokeback Mountain, Superman Returns, Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha.

Soundtracks: Happy Feet, Romanzo Criminale, Walk the Line, Glastonbury.

Openings: Romanzo Criminale, Pan's Labyrinth, United 93.

Endings: United 93, Little Miss Sunshine

Comebacks: James Bond, Casino Royale; Eli Wallach, The Holiday; Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada; Johnny Cash, Walk the Line.
Scene: Take your pick from Pan's Labyrinth; long hair falling down the back of a horse rider in Perfume.

All-rounder: George Clooney - won best supporting actor Oscar for Syriana and was also twice nominated for Good Night, And Good Luck (best director, original screenplay).

Crowd pleasing moments: The Martini joke and the line 'Bond, James Bond' in Casino Royale.

Landscapes: Brokeback Mountain, Perfume, Flags of Our Fathers, Cars, Happy Feet, An Inconvenient Truth, Eight Below, The World's Fastest Indian, The Proposition, North Country, Down in the Valley.

Cityscapes: District 13, Children of Men, Secuestro Express, New Police Story.

Seascapes: The Guardian, Happy Feet

Chases: District 13, New Police Story, Casino Royale.

Sound: Casino Royale, Perfume, United 93, Ice Age 2, Memoirs of a Geisha.

Stunts: Warrior King, District 13, Casino Royale, New Police Story, Flags of our Fathers.

Most chair-gripping moments: the end of United 93; the face-stitching scene, the appearance of creature with eyes in hands and the girl's fate - all Pan's Labyrinth.

Devastation: Children of Men, Flags of our Fathers.

Ice scene: Happy Feet

Battles: Flags of our Fathers, The Departed, District 13, Romanzo Criminale, Murderball.

Animations: Hoodwinked, Ice Age 2, Happy Feet, Monster House.
Sweetest movie: Little Manhattan

Shocks: Syriana (Range Rover); Casino Royale (end shooting); a 14-year-old traps a paedophile (Hard Candy); Everything in Dirty Sanchez; sound of gunshots in The U.S. vs John Lennon; aftermath of World Trade Center attack; New York Cosmos' goalkeeper turns to soft porn (Once in A Lifetime); injuries in Flags of Our Fathers.

Remakes: The Departed, The Hills Have Eyes.

Most pointless remake: The Wicker Man.

Rereleases: The Wizard of Oz, Taxi Driver.

Shootouts: 16 Blocks, Casino Royale, 36 Quai Des Orfevres, Flags of Our Fathers, Romanzo Criminale, District 13.

CGI: Pan's Labyrinth.

Funniest performances: Julie Walters, Driving Lessons; Vincent Franklin and Jason Watkins, Confetti; Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada; Abigail Breslin, the girl in Little Miss Sunshine.

Funniest moments: Pierce Brosnan in boots, The Matador; yodelling rollercoaster goat, Hoodwinked; 'Watch the beak' and 'If she leaves him now' scenes, Happy Feet; The Queen putting Tony Blair in his place, The Queen; nude hotel bedroom wrestling, Borat; climax of Little Miss Sunshine; nude cycling, Confetti.

Films so painful they should be destroyed: Breakfast on Pluto, Get Rich or Die Tryin'; Big Momma's House 2; Things to Do Before You're 30, Ultraviolet, Dirty Sanchez, Brothers of the Head, Lady in the Water, The Santa Clause 3 and Benchwarmers.