Tuesday, January 30, 2007

A very premature "best of 2006" list....

As I posted previously, I still have to see a lot of worthy movies of 2006, so it probably doesn't make much sense thinking about a "top 10" list at this point. But looking back from this point, I can still figure out some sort of grading among the movies that I HAVE seen till now. Not ranks, which don't mean much anyway, but grades. Notice that Pan's Labyrinth seems to be doing great! This might be due to the recency factor (as it is the last movie I saw) or, more likely, due to the great "aftertaste" of the movie. Some of the scenes of the movie have been running through my mind since writing the review and I must say that I probably undersold the movie in that review. Anyway.. here is what the list looks like, as of now...

A+: The Departed, Pan's Labyrinth

A : Lage Raho Munnabhai, The Prestige, United 93, *V for Vendetta

A- : Babel, Cars, Inside Man, Little Miss Sunshine, Omkara, The Queen, Rang De Basanti,

A-- : Dor, *Guru, Thank You For Smoking

The reason all of them are called A's is because all of them were pretty good and should probably not be missed. It was quite difficult, considering that I didn't want to spend too much time mulling over an essentially premature list, to rank movies within a given grade, so they are presented in alphabetical order.

One more thing - it is heartening to see so many Hindi movies in this list. 2006 was a great year for hindi movie industry both in terms of economics and quality of the movies. I tend to think that these things aren't as independent of each other as people seem to think.

* - V for Vendetta and Guru aren't 2006 movies strictly speaking. But V for Vendetta didn't really go into reasonably wide release till well into 2006 and Guru was only postponed to 2007 at the very last minute, so it is difficult to recondition my mind into thinking of it as a 2007 movie.

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