Movies by year: 2006

2006. NASA sent New Horizons to Pluto, and later that year it was demoted to a dwarf planet. The baiji dolphin's deafening, blind existence ended as the species finally hits extinction. A little site called Twitter launched. And I saw a ton of movies.

Bond returned with a new face in Casino Royale. My heart pounded through The Descent. The Fountain was gorgeous and made us all scratch our heads. The Illusionist and The Prestige competed for saddest magician ever. Night Watch was a ridiculously stylish film.

And then there was...

Lucky Number Slevin

OK, first of all, let's just get this out of the way - it's a stupid title. Really. But it belies a really smart little film.

Slevin Kelevra is in New York to visit his friend Nick, and is having nothing but bad luck - he gets mugged and loses his luggage, gets to Nick's apartment and finds him missing, and is himself taken by two separate sets of goons to see two separate big-time bad guys - both assuming he is Nick, who happens to owe them both rather large sums of money. Will things get straightened out? What's the deal with Mr Goodkat? What happened to Nick?

Josh Hartnett is really great in this, as is everyone else. The plot writhes like a living thing. The dialogue is sharp and fast. And introducing my favourite fictional medical condition: ataraxia (which, while really a thing, is not so much a medical condition as simply a state of being: "freedom from worry or any other pre-occupation really").

Saw it on a whim, might not have if the trailer hadn't sucked me in. Have you seen it? What did you think?