Top 10 of 2006: #6-#5

6. Crank. One of the most unjustly ignored films of the year, Crank is a joyful, witty celebration of excess from former commercial directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. It's an R-rated Looney Tunes cartoon, starring a hilariously deadpan Jason Statham and featuring the best female performance of the year from Amy Smart, whose skewering of the "dumb blonde" role I've already praised. It functions as an over-the-top action movie while simultaneously taking the genre down: Statham apparently destroys half of Los Angeles in his quest to get even, a cranked-up-to-eleven commentary on the sociopathic mayhem endorsed by most action films. Neveldine and Taylor's scenario gives them a reason to throw in every visual and audio trick they've learned; unlike films of the Tony Scott School, where it's all a masquerade for a bankruptcy of ideas, here all the slice-and-dice editing, spaced-out color palettes, and soundtrack jiggering flow from the story.

5. The Departed. Martin Scorsese's remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs is a free-wheeling, happily profane examination of honor and loyalty. The centerpiece is the giddily edited (thanks again to Thelma Schoonmaker and the sound design team) extended sequence detailing the rise of both the real cop/fake gangster (Leonardo DiCaprio, giving the best performance of his career) and the real gangster/fake cop (Matt Damon, remind us exactly how good he is). There's a plethora of great supporting turns, especially Mark Wahlberg's Mametian (near Shakespearean) cursing and Alec Baldwin's running stand-up routine. It's too bad the film is marred by yet another sloppy "crazy Jack" performance by Jack Nicholson and the script's inability to make Vera Farmiga's character seem like a person (although Farmiga does wonders with it). Posted by mike, March 28, 2007 9:27 PM