Top Ten of 2005
December 29, 2005
Let’s get it out of the way right now, 2005 was one of the weirdest movie years in recent memory, and if it weren’t for a fall stuffed with great pictures, it would have been one of the worst as well. If you read the seasons right, it went from a lackluster spring, to a dreadful summer, and finished, quite unexpectedly, with a flourish of memorable fall Oscar-bait releases that helped us forget how weak three-fourths of the year really was, and how audiences, finally, said they’d had enough of unoriginality, high ticket prices, and the never ending commercialization of a single movie going experience. If spring will be remembered as the season of “Guess Who”, “Hitch”, and “The Interpreter”, and summer, heaven help us, as the season of “Robots”, “The Island”, “Bewitched” and “Fantastic Four”, than the glories of fall will be remembered vividly as having saved the year with “King Kong”, “Good Night and Good Luck”, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, “Munich”, “Walk the Line”, and “Brokeback Mountain”. Any year-end wrap-up worth its salt would have to mention the box office slump, and how for months during the summer even prestige pictures like “Cinderella Man” couldn’t find a niche in the annoyed film going audience, who would just as soon wait the four months to see it on DVD for four bucks, in the comfort of their homes, than in a theater, with commercials and previews for nine (in my view, that’s the lazy man’s option), but dwelling on the negative is no fun, especially when there were a good 30-40 films this year that actually warrant mention, so we’ll leave the slump for the cynics, and focus not on “Chicken Little”, “Stealth”, and “Monster-in-Law” (oh Jane, what were you thinking), but on the good (“Jarhead”), the grand (“War of the Worlds”), and the great (see list below).
This year, minus anything new from Pixar, there was no surefire great computer animated picture, but the stop motion likes of “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” and “Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”, as well as the beautiful hand drawn animation of Hayao Miyazaki’s air born “Howl’s Moving Castle” made it a somewhat successful year for animation. In a similar vein, the best pure computer film to feature human acting besides “King Kong” was Robert Rodriguez’s whacked out comic book noir “Sin City”, a violent, sexy, bloody, and giddy Tarantino-esque visual treat that reintroduced a long forgotten Mickey Rourke back to the scene, and helped establish Rodriguez as the coolest maverick in Hollywood, before “Shark Boy and Lava Girl” quickly destroyed that. Memorable popcorn films this year that actually survived the dreaded slump were Tim Burton’s nutball Johnny Depp adaptation of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, Steven Spielberg’s effects nightmare “War of the Worlds”, with Tom Cruise’s best non-tabloid performance of the year, “Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith”, the best of George Lucas’ wooden and cartoonish ‘Star Wars’ prequels, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, a thinly veiled religious parable children’s fantasy that is still raking in the bucks, and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”, a ludicrous and superficial action comedy that nonetheless was one of the year’s best looking action films, simply because of the considerable chemistry between smoking hot Angelina Jolie and her playmate Brad Pitt. Regrettable cuts to the following Top Ten list include George Clooney’s “Good Night and Good Luck”, Hirokazu Koreeda’s “Nobody Knows”, Kim Ki-Duk’s “3-Iron”, Miranda July’s wonderful “Me and You and Everybody We Know”, Noah Baumbach’s aching “The Squid and the Whale”, and Danny Boyle’s lovely British kid-centered drama “Millions”, but in a year that looked as bad as 2005 originally did, to have cuts of such luminous depth is a miracle, and renders the final ten all the more special.
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10. The Beat That Skipped My Heart: A little seen French remake of James Toback’s 1978 “Fingers”, ‘Beat’ is director Jacques Audiard’s second film in three years to make my list of the year’s best, following 2003’s “Read My Lips”, positioning himself alongside Laurent Cantet, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Patrice Leconte as France’s best visually sophisticated director. This film takes place in two worlds, the world of petty thugs and crooked real estate deals, and the world of concert pianists, as a former prodigy (Romain Duris) splits his time working as a hired goon to study classical piano, possibly as an escape out of his dreary underworld employment. This slow burning study in music and personal conflict is now out on DVD and would make a good rental for anybody interested in classical piano, French accents, and finely crafted human drama.
9. The Upside of Anger: Joan Allen gives the female performance of the year as Terry Ann Wolfmeyer, a rich suburban housewife who jumps into the bottle after her husband runs off with his secretary, leaving her alone with their four grown daughters. Kevin Costner plays the ex-ballplayer turned sports radio DJ who reluctantly, possibly out of pity for his own slightly alcoholic ways, seduces her on the rebound and soon finds himself drawn into her harried life. Costner is fine as the love interest (his best role in years), and the four actresses playing the daughters (Erika Christensen, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt, and Evan Rachel Wood) are all equally awarded big moments, but this sweet and funny middle aged comedy drama from Mike Binder belongs to Allen, and if it weren’t so old already, I would have pegged her as the Oscar favorite. As it stands, her competition from more recent performances by Felicity Huffman (“Transamerica”) and Reese Witherspoon (“Walk the Line”) might be insurmountable, but if voters give “The Upside of Anger” another go, they’ll see an actress at the top of her game, and a movie that hits all the right marks; bitter, and bittersweet.
8. Crash: The first flat out great film of 2005, Paul Haggis’ revelatory jumble of Los Angeles intolerance and racial profiling features no less than a dozen breakthrough performances from a script destined for a lock Oscar nod. The great turns comes from Matt Dillon as a racist cop, and Thandie Newton as the rich black woman he harasses (and later saves from a burning car), but work from Terrence Howard, Sandra Bullock, Michael Pena, Don Cheadle, Ryan Phillipe, Ludacris, Lorenz Tate, and Brendan Fraser make this the best large ensemble cast of the year. Intolerance isn’t exactly a new topic, but Haggis handles it with precision, weaving from story to story without ever losing focus of the set goal, and when he reaches that goal, somewhere around the time Dillon is saving Newton from the car wreck, “Crash” has transcended it’s formula and preaching to become a profound statement on human interaction, and the ridiculousness of bigotry.
7. Old Boy: The best foreign film I saw this year was technically make in 2003, but his violent and modernistic S. Korean thriller from Chan-Wook Park, second only to Kim Ki-Duk as South Korea’s best young director, was released stateside in ’05, so it’s fair game. Korean superstar Choi Min-Sik gives a heartbreaking performance as Oh Dae-Su, a man held prisoner and drugged for 15 years then suddenly freed by his captor and given instructions on how to get revenge, leading to a cat and mouse game that features everything from incest and teeth pulling, to tongue amputation and live octopus eating. Not for the faint of heart, but not to be ignored either, Park’s masterly film, the second in a vengeance themed trilogy that will conclude later next year, shocks you only as a means to the story’s emotional end, not for the sake of sensation, and for that, it’s light years ahead of tripe like “Wolf Creek” and “Saw II”, movies that wouldn’t know tasteful horror if it came up and bit off their tongues. Nobody does psychological torture like the Koreans, and “Old Boy” is one of the best in recent years.
6. Capote: “Ever since I was a child, folks thought they had me pegged,” says Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s cold and stunning biopic, “because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they’re always wrong.” This sentence is at the heart of Hoffman’s brilliant performance as the author of “In Cold Blood”, researching the brutal murder of a farm family for his true crime novel, because once you think you have the character pegged, from high-society entertainer, to vitriolic and obsessed journalist, Hoffman’s characterization takes you in another direction entirely. As Capote’s fellow investigator, friend, and soon to be world famous author Harper Lee, Catherine Keener is exceptional, warm, and understanding to her tortured friend’s selfish obsessions, and the film does a good job of highlighting their relationship as Capote’s behavior becomes ever more alienating as his book draws to an inevitable, long awaited conclusion, but as good as Keener is, Hoffman steals the film with his brooding, inebriated melancholy and jovial impersonation of the famous American author. As a whole, “Capote” can stand on its own as a fascinating study of devotion and literary obsession, but without Hoffman’s uncanny performance it wouldn’t be nearly as good, propelling it from mere biography to rivaling the likes of Richard Brooks’ original, masterful “In Cold Blood”. Hoffman may ultimately lose the Oscar to Heath Ledger, but if he does, it’ll only be by a handful of votes.
5. Murderball: What a year it was for documentary films, what with “March of the Penguins” surprising the summer box office, “Mad Hot Ballroom” charming audiences with its precocious grade school dancers, “Grizzly Man’s” stunning examination of nature and its unforgiving beasts, and “Murderball”, a profoundly moving and triumphant chronicle of paraplegic men competing for an Olympic gold in wheelchair rugby, a ruthless team sport that incorporates soccer, football, basketball, and rugby to the confines of modified wheel chairs. As the U.S. team’s best player, Mark Zupan became a pseudo celebrity because of his bulldog persona in the film, but all of the guys, especially former coach Joe Soares, gets equal screen time, and their stories are courageous and amazing, filled with the kind of spirit and resolve usually reserved for melodramatic tales of war and heroics. The thought of watching handicapped individuals on screen for an entire film might have been too much for moviegoers, who generally stayed away from this great film when it was out in theaters, but it’s now on DVD, so don’t miss it again, it’s one of the most satisfying films you’ll see this, or any, year.
4. Brokeback Mountain: Film critics by nature are liberal, and in this state of repression the country is currently mired in, it’s no wonder this gay themed western was the most acclaimed film of the year, but the acclaim is warranted; Ang Lee’s tender love story is a masterpiece, and no matter what the political climate, nothing could suggest otherwise. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall star as two desperate cowboys in 1963 Wyoming who land a summer job on the titular picturesque mountain herding sheep, and form a bond, both sexual and loving, that lasts for the next two and a half decades. It’s a forbidden love, given the time and the place, and the two forge empty marriages as covers, but weekend fishing trips keeps them together, albeit sporadically, and threatens to destroy them, mentally, and if anybody finds out, physically. The two leads are outstanding (Ledger has never been better, in a performance of heartbreaking mood and emotion), but the film benefits from Lee’s skillful direction, handling the hot button topic with tenderness and sophistication. It’s his best English language film, and a groundbreaking achievement. “Brokeback Mountain” opens Friday in Buffalo.
3. A History of Violence: David Cronenberg’s shocking small town drama about a former gangster who hides his past from his family, until he’s exposed one night after a heroic rescue, does what most action films only wish they could do, blend violence and reality with such grace and psychological terror that the very definition of screen violence is altered. Viggo Mortensen plays family man Tom Stall, and Maria Bello is his wife; an innocuous and loving mid-western couple whose lives are shattered when Tom’s diner is knocked over by murderers and the resulting press leads to the revelation of his past life as a gangster, a gangster on the run from the Philadelphia mob, run by his unforgiving brother, played by William Hurt. Hurt, Bello, and Ed Harris as a facially scared hit man, are receiving the most Oscar consideration, but Mortensen deserves credit as well for neatly fitting into Cronenberg’s world of leading men and their split personalities that brings them to the brink of destruction. There’s some play between eroticism and violence in at least two explicit sex scenes, but “A History of Violence” is at its best when dealing with the family’s reactions to Tom’s behavioral shift, suggesting that even in the quaintest of settings, man’s dark side is never inescapable, and the mistakes of a rotten past will always come back to haunt you.
2. King Kong: To say this Peter Jackson directed epic is the best remake in the past ten years is an under statement, it may be the best remake of a classic in American cinematic history. The dinosaurs are vicious, the bugs are squirm inducing, the New York settings are glorious, the acting is brilliant, the music is rousing, the effects are eye-popping, and Kong himself is the most realistic CGI creation since Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings”, a creature like Kong, both sympathetic and tragic. I loved every 185 minutes of this grand entertainment, from Naomi Watts’ touching sunset scene with the ape that saved her life, to the big guy’s ultimate swan dive off of the Empire State Building, it’s filled with one dazzling set piece after another, paying homage to the 1933 original while expanding on the old story with state-of-the-art special effects and a script that fleshes out both the human characters and the great ape. It seems natural now, but who would have thought, at the beginning of the year, that the two best love stories of the year would be between two cowboys, and a gorilla and a starlet? That’s diversity for ya, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
1. Hustle & Flow: On the night I first saw this hip-hop masterpiece I was originally slated to see a preview screening of “The 40 Year-Old Virgin”, but for one reason or another I got diverted and ended up in a virtually empty theater seeing Terrence Howard’s breakout performance as a middle-aged pimp with a dream of becoming a rap star, and it’s been with me ever since. Craig Brewer’s Memphis-set story centers around Djay, a depressed pimp and drug dealer who can’t seem to muster up much excitement for his line of work anymore; all he really wants to do is write lyrics and express his feelings in song, if only he could catch a break. In true underground fashion, he recruits a producer and a technician (Anthony Anderson and DJ Qualls, respectively) from a local church, sets up a studio in his back room, uses his two primary working girls as back-up vocalists, and produces thumping and entirely catchy crunk tracks with titles like “Whoop That Trick” and “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp”, and sets out to get his songs heard, even if it means sucking up to sell-out Memphis born rapper Skinny Black (Ludicris), and potentially landing himself in jail.
The performances in “Hustle & Flow” are all superb, from the harmonious Taraji P. Henson as Djay’s pregnant top earner, and standout back-up vocalist, to Anderson’s staid church going straight man Key, who gives one memorable monologue about those who talk the talk, and those who walk the walk (“Now, people who talk the talk, when it comes time for them to walk the walk, you know what they do? They talk people like me into walkin' for them.”), but it’s Howard’s mesmerizing turn as the pimp turned rap poet that propels this urban Indy into rarified air, as Djay transforms his bored criminal existence into musical art. Hardly has rap sounded this good on film, and hardly has a seemingly gritty southern drama turned out so gloriously uplifting, part “Rocky”, part “8 Mile”, and part “Boyz N the Hood”, but something entirely original, like the Memphis-based Sun Records studio in the ‘50’s, a hotbed of infectious grooves and larger than life personalities. I’m not much of a hip-hop connoisseur, but when the words and rhymes are spewing out of Terrence Howard during the brilliant “Hustle & Flow”, I become mesmerized by a certain kind of lyrical power, and no film this year got that mixture of literary rawness and storytelling triumph quite as right as Howard and Brewer’s musical wonder.
by Adam Suraf