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John's HeadDoes Anyone Care What This Guy Thinks?
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Movies I Saw in 2005
This all seems rather fraudulent. I really didn’t see that many movies in theatres last year. Overall, I paid less attention to movies in 2005 than I had in prior years. I had other things going on (watching TV and writing In Bloom. Mostly watching TV.) I'm hardly qualified to speechify about what the best movies of 2005 are.
Looking over the listings posted by various critics for the best of last year, I think the list of movies I failed to see in theatres is probably more impressive than what I did see. These include: A History of Violence, Broken Flowers, Junebug, Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Jarhead, Millions, 2046, Shopgirl, Hustle and Flow, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Murderball, Grizzly Man, The Woodsman, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Ware-Rabbit, Oldboy, Primer, The Merchant of Venice, The New World, Match Point, and Crash. Match Point and The New World hadn’t opened in
So what did I see? Fifty seven movies, according to the list on my star ratings page. And yet, though I’ve given it a good deal of consideration, I can’t really muster up much enthusiasm for the lot of what I saw despite giving a good many pictures of 2005 some pretty high ratings (in some cases, generously so. Decide for yourself.)
If you twist my arm and force me to declare a top ten, here’s what I’d say, in alphabetical order:
Batman Begins
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
Even I’m frowning at that list. Really? That’s my top ten? Top ten of what? Answer: Those are, for various reasons, the ten movies I liked the most of what I saw. They’re not necessarily the “best” of what I saw, certainly not the “best movies of 2005.” but these are the ones I walked out of the theatre really liking or outright loving. It’s not the classiest crop of movies, but there it is.
So what’s the best movie of the year? How the hell should I know? I honestly don’t have a clue. Er,
I may be the only person not named Neil Gaiman or Dave McKean who really loved MirrorMask, and you might too if you spent your latter teen years reading The Sandman and imagining yourself as a shock-haired quasi-goth. If you also fit that description, give MirrorMask a shot because I thought it was a much more interesting, imaginative and heartfelt “comic book come to life” than the “cooler” but empty
On the flip side, I disagree with most everyone who loved Walk The Line. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were outstanding but I didn’t think the writing or directing were anything special, and I ran into a wall watching the movie when I realized I don’t really care for Johnny Cash’s music. It's a pretty tough slog to sit through a famous musician's biopic when the music makes your ears bleed.
Going by my increasingly unreliable star ratings, I gave the following movies four stars in 2005: Million Dollar Baby, Hotel Rwanda, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Batman Begins, and MirrorMask. Baby and
The three-and-a-half stars are a diverse group, many of which are arguably far better than my four stars. These include Cinderella Man, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Serenity, War of the Worlds, Good Night, And Good Luck, Pride and Prejudice, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, King Kong, Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha. I know I’m way too nice to Mr. and Mrs. Smith and War of the Worlds, but I thought Smith was a lot of fun and I really liked the first half of Worlds until Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning ended up in Tim Robbins's basement.
There are some other really good movies I liked: The Constant Gardener stands out in particular. Red Eye, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and In Her Shoes, too, all really solid, well-crafted entertainments. I thought The Wedding Crashers was actually funny for the most part and I don’t usually go to the movies for comedy. But there are no spaceships or superheroes in those movies so they don’t make my stupid top ten.
Now for the fun part. What are the worst movies of the year? I’ll fucking tell you:
Doom
The Dukes of Hazzard
Those are the worst I saw, the brown stains that streak the bowl after you flush away the turds. I also didn’t like Fantastic Four, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Just Like Heaven, Into the Blue, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Aeon Flux, although I think the latter two are interesting failures. Aeon Flux actually contains my favorite line of the year: “Whatever we are, we’re not anarchists.” It’s funny in context. (I also really dug Saladin’s response in Kingdom of Heaven about what
I am pleased that I saw relatively few pieces of shit in the theatre this year. I finally implemented a policy to avoid outright garbage unless Jessicas Alba,
And that’s about all I've got to say about the oh five. The first couple of months of 2006 look like a moviegoing dead zone. I'm not even sure there's anything new I'm willing to spend ten bucks at a theatre for after The New World opens. I'll probably use those weeks to get caught up on the list of movies I missed last year with the help of Netflix. I'd encourage you to do the same. I further encourage you to watch more TV. Watch Veronica Mars, watch Lost, watch Battlestar Galactica. Give Bones a try. For Gob's sake, watch Arrested Development while you still can. Watch Deadwood, Rome, The Wire, and Weeds if you've got premium channels. Rent or better yet buy Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me. Movies are swell and all, but if you ask me, TV is where it's at.
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