2006 Kaedrin Movie Awards: Best Sequel & Biggest Disappointment

The nominations for the 2006 Kaedrin Movie Awards were announced last week. This week, I’ll be announcing two winners every day, culminating in a post with my top 10 movies of the year and possibly some other wrap-up posts. Here are the awards for Best Sequel and Biggest Disappointment:

Best Sequel: Casino Royale

This was a pretty easy decision. In the nominations, I mentioned that people like to return to characters they love, but that sequels aren’t often very good. In this case, I’ve never been much of a fan of James Bond, but after seeing Casino Royale, I am, and I’m greatly looking forward to the next film. I’m still making my way through all of the previous Bond films, but I honestly think this ranks somewhere in the upper echelon, if not number one (there are some mitigating factors here, but I will save for a later post). MI III was great fun, but completely overshadowed by Bond. Clerks II was a genuine surprise and one of my favorite movies of the year, but Bond still wins out.

Biggest Disappointment: The Fountain

This is actually quite a hard category. In theory, I can measure my dissapointment by taking the difference of my expectations and the actual quality of the film. Of course, both are subjective measures, so it’s still quite difficult. I think the reason The Fountain “wins” this award is not that it’s such a bad movie, but that my expectations were so very high. I remember reading about this “Untitled Aronofsky Sci-Fi Project” several years ago, and have been waiting patiently for it. I’ve come to expect a lot from Aronofsky, and while I think he produced one of the most beautiful looking movies in recent memory, I also think it’s missing something important. It’s an interesting and ambitious failure, which isn’t all that bad of a category to be put in. I certainly don’t think this movie is any worse than the other nominees (which were at least mildy entertaining or fun, The Da Vinci Code being the notable exception). Again, the big difference is that my expectations for the other nominees were relatively low. I wanted to see them all, and was excited to go to the theater, but for the most part, I felt the movies were mediocre.

On deck: Best Action Sequences and Best Plot Twist/Surprise