A year of many high-quality reflections on violence with many outstanding ensembles
May 22 '06 (Updated Nov 27 '09)
The Bottom Line See 'em! (and the DVD extras on many of them, too)
What is a 2005 movie? I saw seven of the eleven on my list in 2006, while Bad Education and House of Flying Daggers did not open here and in many other cities until 2006 (though I had a Chinese DVD of the latter earlier).
Most of what I consider the best 2005 movies (along with many of the most prominent also-ran ones) reflected on violence, including psychic violence (Mysterious Skin, Breakfast on Pluto, The Squid and the Whale, The Interpreter, Jarhead, Brokeback Mountain, A History of Violence, Walk on Water, Munich, Capote, Crash, Enron, The Power of Nightmares, 2046, The Merchant of Venice, Tropical Malady, The White Countess), murder/assassination (The Constant Gardener, Breakfast on Pluto, The Interpreter, (arguably) Brokeback Mountain, A History of Violence, Walk on Water, Munich, Capote, Crash, (arguably) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Batman Begins, The Dying Gaul), child molestation (Mysterious Skin, The Woodsman), and violent death across species (March of the Penguins, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Grizzly Man). None of the films on my list have romances that end with living happily ever after, or even with couples together (with the partial exception of "March of the Penguins").
Many examined "political violence" (The Lord of War, The Power of Nightmares, The Constant Gardener, Breakfast on Pluto, The Interpreter, Walk on Water, Munich, Crash, Paradise Now,The White Countess, and, to a degree "Tsotsi" (though it was more about class). There were many outstanding performance by young men (Jarhead, Brokeback Mountain, Breakfast on Pluto, Walk on Water, Tsotsi, Paradise Now, Crash, The Squid and the Whale, Mysterious Skin, Batman Begins) and by boys (The Squid and the Whale, Mysterious Skin, Tropical Malady).
The only movie on my list with a female protagonist is "The Interpreter" although there were some excellent female supporting performances in others (Laura Linney has much less screen time than Jeff Daniels or their sons in "The Squid and the Whale"; Rachel Weisz is the female lead in "The Constant Gardener" but won a supporting actress Oscar), "The New World" did not make my list;, and and I have not seen any of the movies that earned Oscar best actress nominations. I was, however, very impressed by Natasha Richardson's turn as a Russian couness trying to support an extended family in 1930s Shanghai in "The White Countess" (and by Ralph Fiennes impersonating an American! and by Lynn Redgrave's vicious mother-in-law or motherof Richradson's character in "The White Countess").
Other movies with memorable supporting female characters include Brokeback Mountain, Breakfast on Pluto, Tsotsi, Paradise Now, A History of Violence, Capote, Walk on Water)
Even though there are many 2005 films I have yet to see, I could not cut my list down to 10... but came close! I may add more and may shift the rankings, but as of today these are my picks and ranking of them:
(10-tie) March of the Penguins, directed by Luc Jacquet (see the review of Ifif1938 and other epinionators')
Despite the ponderous, pompous, overwritten narration delivered overdramatically by Morgan Freeman, Jr., I thought this was a fascinating documentary about Emperor penguins waddling to their breeding grounds in Antarctica (and the males then making a perilous round trip to feed the young). I liked the DVD bonus "making of" feature even more than the movie. It shows some of the difficulties of shooting in Antarctica in its winter (our summer and has more matter-of-fact narration.
(10-tie) The Interpreter (directed by Sydney Pollack)
Perhaps partly because this movie is fresh in my mind, and partly because it provides a warning of a tactic that I would not have thought of (but that I believe Karl Rove is capable of attempting), and partly in annoyance at those who think that every movie has to center on romance, I included this tense revival of the 1970s "paranoid" political thriller (in which what was dismissed as paranoid usually turned out to be accurate—consider the recently revealed collection of phone records of all customers...)
Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn play intelligent adults coping not very well with great grief. Neither of these movie stars has a history of much sexual chemistry (with the exception of Kidman with Ewan MacGregor in "Moulin Rouge"), but the movie is much more about them doing their jobs and trying to figure out the apparent planning of an assassination in the UN General Assembly than about those wounded souls finding love.
Catherine Keener was sadly wasted, but Earl Cameron is very interesting as Robert Mugabe (his character is named Zuwanie, but the only country that fits is Zimbabwe).
(9) Jarhead directed by Sam Mendes (see Bilavideo's review)
I think that this is an excellent military movie—in the tradition of From Here to Eternity—that is not a war movie. Most of it takes place with the Marine company that included author Anthony Swofford waiting in the Saudi Arabian desert for Operation Desert Storm to drive Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard out of Kuwait. There are more than a few tensions among the men, including tormented concerns about what the womenfolk are up to at home. Jake Gyllenhaal plays "Swoff," a lance corporal who is trained as a sniper (after surviving basic training and advanced training). He and his level-headed partner, Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), are eager to do what they were trained to do, but do not fire their rifles until there is a celebration that they have received orders to return home. They see some eerie sights, including incinerated retreating Republican Guards and the oil wells the Republic Guard torched, and "Swoff" is held responsible for a major fireworks display (for which he receives memorable latrine duty). I think the film is a bit too long (like most of the most acclaimed films of 2005), but that Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard, Evan Jones (playing a menacing sadist in the tradition of the one Ernest Borgnine portrayed in "From Here to Eternity"), and Jamie Foxx (playing the coolly competent lifer noncom, Staff Sgt. Sykes, in the tradition of Burt Lancaster in "From Here to Eternity") are outstanding. Roger Deakins cinematography is also impressive (he also shot "Courage Under Fire," an under-rated film with scenes of combat in the first Gulf War intercut with a court martial inquiry). Perhaps my appreciation of the film was enhanced by the DVD commentary of Swofford and screenwriter William Broyles Jr.(Apollo 13, Castaway). The latter is a Vietnam veteran, and their comparison of memories is especially interesting. (I have yet to listen to director Mendes's commentary track.)
(8) Breakfast on Pluto (directed by Neil Jordan, adapting another novel by Pat McCabe; Butcher Boy was the first; another movie based on McCabe appropriation of another line from the same song is "Journey to Mars"), so far unreviewed
I thought that Cillian Murphy was impressively sinister in "Batman Begins." (I have not seen "ed Eye" in which I'm told he was also very intense.) He was not at all sinister in "Breakfast on Pluto," but stubbornly romantic (not unlike the child in "La vie en rose" who insists on his own transgendered reality) and a remarkably sweet survivor of intolerance and IRA violence.
There is a whole lot going on (too much, I think), the search for "Kitten"'s mother being the primary thread (though the primary theme is "Kitten" doing what she feels she has to do). Jordan seems as fascinated by transvestites (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game) as by Irish "Republican" violence (The Crying Game, Michael Collins). Murphy's ddep bass voice is never heard. Except on the "making of" featurette, he speaks in whispery falsetto. And he does not seem to have an Adam's apple, and is more credible passing as a woman as most screen transvestite performances (including Hilary Swank's FTM in "Boys Don't Cry": I didn't believe for a moment that she could pass as a boy, and Jaye Davidson's prominent Adam's apple made his natal sex obvious to me...though I am perhaps slower to assume that people are what they present themselves as being—an urban survival skill, I believe.)
Although the dialogue was more comprehensible than in "Butcher Boy," I'm glad that I saw this on DVD and could turn on subtitles. (I haven't listened to Jordan's commentary track yet.)
I thought that Ruth Negga was very good as Kitten's pal. Stephen Rea appears in all Jordan films and got second billing for a rather small part (with a self-conscious variation on one of the "The Crying Game" "surprises"). I thought that Liam Neeson phoned in a performance as an anguished priest. Declan Quinn's neo-noir cinematography was outstanding (as in "Leaving Las Vegas; his cinematography was certainly the best thing in "Kama Sutra"!).
(7) Walk on Water, directed by Eytan Fox (see Eplovejoy's review)
It seems to me that Israeli film-maker Eytan Fox (whose even more minuscule-budget Yossi and Jagger is one of my favorite films) does better what Stephen Speilberg tried to do in his vastly larger-budget "Munich," that is, show the psychic costs of being an Israeli assassin. The Israeli avenger, a macho Mossad agent named Eyal, is brilliantly played by Lior Ashkenazi. He has a complex (nonsexual) relationship with a gay German tourist Knut Berger (also compellingly played, by Axel Himmelman), whose grandfather is an aged war criminal—and Eyal's quarry. There is none of the intercutting of flashbacks (that mar "Munich," and IMO should have been gathered at the beginning rather than spread through the long movie). Characters develop and lives change—and locales change—and it is done in 103 minutes (cf. "Munich"). The music comes close to being a character. The differing tastes in music of the two men helps define them, and the use of folk music, rock, and mood-setting movie score work together very well.
(6) Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog) shows some very striking footage of grizzly bears shot by Timothy Treadwell before a grizzly bear ate him at the end of his 13th summer living among them. John Stone had already explained why the movie is great. I join him in endorsing Herzog's view that the bears had no interest in Treadwell (though the foxes seemed to), and the Aleutian who says Treadwell did the bears more harm than good sounds plauislbe to me. Herzog has more than a little familiarity with extreme situations and psychotics (Klaus Kinski) and IMO has made a great documentary of a a foolhardy and disturbed sentimentalist.
(6) The Squid and the Whale written and directed by Noah Baumbach (see the review by trust1234, among other discerning epinions about this small-budget, independent film)
More than a little autobiographical, this film recalls the break-up of Noah Baumbach's parents (played compellingly by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney), ca. 1986 in Brooklyn. One of the boys sides with each of the parents... and then is disillusions by the chosen parent's sexual choices (Billy Baldwin and Anna Paquin). The boys (Jesse Eisenberg playing the future director at age 16 (more pretentious than precocious, but this seems mostly due to aping his pompous father; Owen Kline the 12-year-old. Some have complained that this movie (which runs only 88 minutes) has an unsatisfactory, unresolved ending. My view is that it is a slice of unfinished lives and that the wrap-up of the title sea creatures is too neat rather than too messy.
(4-tie) Tsotsi (directed by Gavin Hood, who adapted it from a novel by Athol Fugard)
This riveting very low-budget film from South Africa snagged an Oscar, which increased its visibility, though not as much as it deserved. The title means "thug" and is a chilling killer who is altered by finding a baby in a car he jacked (shooting the mother). Presley Chweneyagae delivers a stunning performance as a ruthless leader of a small gang of thieves (including one boy who loves to knife people and one who wants to minimize the lethal violence).
(4-tie) Paradise Now (written and directed by Hany Abu-Assad)
Like "Tsotsi," "Paradise Now" has a documentary look, being shot in Palestinian territories (and Tel Aviv) and telling a story of two young men's preparations to become "suicide bombers" that has much absurdist, dark humor (and like "Tsotsi" and "Walk on Water," some semblance of redemption).
(3) Mysterious Skin directed by Greg Araki (see the review by macresarf1)
I hope that Scott Heims's novel (which I admired and the became a play that I saw and admired and then a movie I saw on DVD and admired) is not autobiographical (though he did grow up in Kansas). Unlike "The Woodsman" in focusing on a child molester (played brilliantly by Kevin Bacon), "Mysterious Skin" focuses on the post-traumatic stress of two boys, one of whom continued to be grateful for the attentions of his Little League coach and the other of whom repressed memory of it, but believed he had had an encounter with aliens from outer space. (The movie reduces the attention the book and play paid to Avalyn Friesen, a young woman who encourages this belief and is certain both of them has close encounters of the third kind. There are chapters in her voice in the novel.) Both boys at both ages (8 and 18) are phenomenally good (Joseph Gordon-Levitt has the biggest part and should have received award consideration). It was also good to have Elizabeth Shue back in a complex part (seemingly having disappeared after her great performance in "Leaving Las Vegas," that I thought superior to her costar's Oscar-winning one). The DVD extras are also very interesting (not least in explaining how the young boys were kept in the dark about what happened to their characters).
(2) Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee
Annie Proulx's powerful short story was expanded by Diana Osanna and Larry McMurtry. The story of the two undereducated, underemployed Montana youth resisting love which they believed impossible (and therefore making it impossible) is all there, but in some ways diluted by the larger canvas (of other characters) as in a premodernist/preminimalist novel. As excellent as the performances by the wives (Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway) are, and as important as showing the "collateral damage" of the view that homosexuality is a choice and that sexual orientation can be "cured" by marrying and having children (a doctrine still very much being pushed and failing and devastating wives and children) the movie seemed to me to sag a bit in the middle. Still, Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography (of Alberta playing Wyoming) is gorgeous (more spectacular even than that in "The New World," which also has gorgeous photography of other kinds of scenery) and the performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as the star-crossed lovers are exceptional. (On its overlapping but interesting DVD extras, see Jiahong's review, and I have written about the story-to-screenplay book.)
"Brokeback Mountain" is the 2005 movie that most became a cultural referent (not least from being attacked by those complicit with f*agbashing and actively promoting the quackery that produces the kind of collateral damage portrayed in the movie). IMO, "Brokeback Mountain" is far superior to the atrociously badly-written "Crash"—and the original screenplay that went to the latter is even worse than adding it to the illustrious list of "upsets" that look foolish in retrospect such as "The Greatest Show on Earth" (see my list of the worst movies to receive Academy Awards as "best picture" by decades, in which "Crash" is the 2000s' so far).
My review explains why "Brokeback Mountain" is not a "gay cowboy" movie (both terms being misapplied). I want to add that films involving male homosexuality that "cross over" are either minstrel travesties (La Cage aux Folle, Priscilla-Queen of the Desert, Will and Grace) or show thwarted lives ending in early death (Brokeback, Philadelphia) and that gay fantasies run along different lines to different (happy) endings. (A partial exception that had some crossover audience was Stephen Frears's "My Beautiful Launderette" in which the characters navigate class and ethnic minefields en route.)
(1) A History of Violence, directed by David Cronenberg
I have not been a member of the David Cronenberg cult, but was very impressed by "A History of Violence" with Viggo Mortensen heading an ensemble cast that seemed to me all to perform compellingly (unlike the mixture of hit and miss performance—or characters—in "Crash"). There is hardly anything that is dispensable or false in the movie (one of the few of the best 2005 films that does not run on too long). (The violence is very graphic, not all the cartoonish kind of, say, John Woo.) (And Cronenberg's regular cinematographer, Peter Suschitzky, does more fine work herein.)
Looking over my list, I would say that all hold out some hope for the characters who survive to the end (and this is quite a few of the leading characters), though there is no suggestion that life is going to be simple or easy for these people beyond the movies' ends.
************
Other contenders:
I have not seen: Cache, Cinderella Man, Enron, Good Night and Good Luck, Junebug, The Lord of War, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Millions, Nine Lives, Nobody Knows, North Country, The Power of Nightmares, Pride & Prejudice, The Promise (Wu Ji),Serenity, Transamerica, Walk the Line
Movies that have appeared on 2005 ten-best lists that I saw and liked (to some degree) and/or admired much about: Batman Begins, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Hustle & Flow, The Merchant of Venice, Mrs. Henderson Presents, Munich, Proof, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, The Woodsman.
Movies that I was disappointed by to some degree (though containing some excellent work of one sort or another): 2046, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Constant Gardener, Munich, The New World, Sin City, Syriana, Tropical Malady.
Movies that I was more than disappointed by: The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Capote, Crash, The Dying Gaul, Head-On, Kung-Fu Hustle (though I loved Stephen Chow's "Shaolin Soccer," which played in some theaters in 2005), The Producers
-----------
©2006, Stephen O. Murray
-----------
the greatest films ever.
my favorite films,
best non-English-language movies by country,
best noirs,
best French organized crime movies,
best English organized crime movies,
best westerns not set in the American west,
best romantic movies with happy endings,
best romantic movies in which the lovers do not end up together for reasons other than the death of one or both of them,
best romantic movies including the death of a lover,
best religious movies celebrating a religious figure,
best movies portraying the dark side of religion,
best holidaze (Christmas and Thanksgiving) movies,
best rock-n-roll movies,
best gay feature film,
best gay documentary film,
best cult movies,
best black comedies,
best World War II movies,
best post-WWII German films,
best epics,
and best anti-epics,
best movies of the 1940s, the 1980s,
1939, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
