Cinema Paradiso

Lou Lumenick and Kyle Smith talk about 2006 films in the New York Post. Great back and forth, and very long!

Lou: 2006’s movies were notably better than last year’s dismal crop. I had seven or eight titles left over that would have made last year’s 10-best list.

Kyle: I agree. But it’s too bad the Oscar cart is pulling the pony. Many of the best films are being released at
the end of the year so they’ll stick in the minds of awards voters, but some are going to get lost in the pile.
I can see that happening with “The Painted Veil,” (opens Dec. 20) an elegant, oldfashioned love story set during a cholera epidemic in 1920s China. Ed Norton and Naomi Watts are a feuding husband and wife who get to know each other after marriage - just as we get to know them both.

Lou: Same for “Pan’s Labyrinth” (Dec. 24), the year’s true masterpiece. I’m afraid it might get hurt by all the competition. It’s a tough sell already - it’s a fairy tale, it has a 12-year-old protagonist and there’s R-rated
violence that limits the audience to adults.
But nothing moved me as much as director Guillermo del Toro’s stunning vision of two contrasting worlds, one of fantasy and the other with World War II fascists. It’s
unforgettable.

Kyle: To me, the Matt Damon movies “The Departed” and “The Good Shepherd” (Dec. 22) are masterpieces. “The Departed” is such a fast-paced demon of a movie, with its hilariously nasty dialogue and tough, smart performances, that I kept checking my watch because I didn’t want it to ever end. And the Robert De Niro-directed “The Good Shepherd” is “The Godfather” of CIA movies, a tense epic of business and family. It sets a new standard for cloak and dagger.
But the film of the year, if not the decade,
is “United 93.” Every American should see it. It was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had in a theater, and it’s a lasting monument to American courage.

Lou: I loved “The Departed,” but I’d stop short of calling it a masterpiece, not when you have Jack Nicholson breaking character in the middle of the movie. “The Good Shepherd” was too slow-moving, coolly cerebral and décor-obsessed to get my juices going. As far as period thrillers go, I got much more into Steven Soderbergh’s Golden Age of Hollywood homage “The Good German” (Friday) which landed just outside my 10-best list.
I was even more swept up by the evocation of the 1940s in Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” and his deeply moving Japanese-language companion film, “Letters From Iwo Jima” (Dec. 20). I totally agree with you on “United 93” - it’s devastating stuff. But when it came to reconstructing recent history, I think Stephen Frears’ “The Queen” was the top-of-thelist with its battle of wits between Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair.

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