The Movies of 2005

The star ratings (zero to **** , with no half-stars) indicate my personal assessment of the film.

The bracketed comments indicate my level of recommendation for it, which is relatively independent of the rating.

Wow. With 2046, Wong Kar-Wai delivers not only the best film of the year, but what may well be his best film. It is a grand summation and a critical self-analysis of his career: events, images, characters and themes from his previous works are prismatically reflected here, intersecting, interacting, and forming a tapestry of emotional disconnection, longing, romanticism and despair that seems entirely familiar in its humanity yet beguiling in its complexity. And at its core, it's also a moving curtain call, with Kar-Wai finally deciding to put the rest the obsessions that have suffused nearly all of his work so far.

On a different note, being a Wong Kar-Wai film, 2046 is also a ravishing aesthetic accomplishment. Less ostentatious than his previous works, 2046 achieves arguably greater heights. Christopher Doyle's visuals are not only beautiful, but suffused with enormous emotion. The music, by Shigeru Umebayashi and Peer Raben, is alternately tumultuous and transcendent. In successfully creating a world both futuristic and nostalgic, the production design is extraordinary. And William Chang's editing weaves what is Kar-Wai's most ambitious narrative to date narrative into an elliptic, organic, yet beautifully structured film that stands as his most complete and satisfying work

Some will talk of 2046's faults; some will call it self-indulgent, or worse yet, maudlin. They are wrong. This is cinema of the very highest level: it is an intensely personal, introspective work, and yet it tells of all-too-human truths; it is aesthetically dazzling; and in eschewing the conventions of "safe" cinema, it expands the boundary of the art form. It's easily a masterpiece.

Kim Ki-Duk is best when his obsession with formalism connects with the film's subject matter (as in Spring, Summer...). Here, he creates a beautiful piece with few, if any, concerns. That the threadbare plot functions outside of logic or believability I can forgive; the film does take a leap into the surreal by the end. What I cannot ignore are the airy characters, devoid of any semblance of humanity and subservient to arbitrary and increasingly abstract twists. The film ends on a philosophical quotation both pretentious and unearned. I imagine that Kim envisioned and shot the film as a formal exercise first and foremost, and as such, it's formidable; in fact, the last twenty minutes are a master class in mise-en-scène. But it feels cold and calculated, and given what it could --and should-- have been, it can't help feeling like a waste of time.

Neither as funny a compendium of obscenity nor as enlightening a look into chuckle-mechanics as it could have been. What shines is the interplay between interviewer and -viewee, the anecdotes and the priceless moments in which the comedians build upon both the joke and Provenza's questioning to get laughs.

The operative word here is strong: strong acting courtesy of a dream cast, a strong story drawing inspiration from famous sources (including a fellow named Frank Miller), and strong drama from the hand of a confident director. But strength (and the realism Nolan demanded) douses the sparks of inspiration: the overall tone is too mundane by a half, and the film lacks the truly iconic sights, sounds, and scenes that any great pop epic requires.

That being said, the strengths listed above are the ideal starting point for a franchise. The next come-around (with the same production team and cast signed on) is set for greatness.

Less a survivor of studio interference (as rumored), and more of a product of studio mind-set -- it's Van Helsing for the Germanic folklore crowd. What sets it apart is the fringe craziness: Terry Gilliam packs the edges of the frame with innumerable sight gags, references, and visual witticisms, which end up as the film's best bits. As it stands now, Grimm's at best recommendable; but ditch the main storyline and focus on the gags, and you've got the spiritual successor to The Holy Grail.

Ron Howard beatificates James J. Braddock, portrayed as a man whose only faults were decency and love for his family, in what amounts to one of the better films of the year. Surprising me most of all, Cinderella Man avoids Howard's penchant for melodrama and starry-eyed belief in the American Hero, and delivers its blows with honesty and a sensitive, realist eye. Meanwhile, Crowe, who seems to improve with every major performance, overwhelms minor problems such as Zelwegger's casting and an oddly-shaped script. Bravo.

The good: Tilda Swinton stealing scenes as androgynous archangel Gabriel, Peter Stormare as a white-suited Satan, Keanu understated and world-weary. The bad: a scattershot script with too much happening and a lack of emphasis on the main storyline. The ugly: how a potentially great film fails to connect because it gets lost in superfluous details. The bottom line: a miss, but there's potential in its wake. Let's hope for a better sequel.

In the opening minutes, threatens to veer off into insufferable contrivance and liberal smugness, but as each shard of the story, as each well-acted character develops provocatively and eloquently, apprehension turns into emotional involvement. Particularly enlightening it is not, but drama this percussive isn't easy to find.

It starts off with an Antonioni stinker, drab Euro-drivel with nothing to say. It then moves on to cryptic Soderbergh, a dramedy with winning performances but an unsatisfying conclusion. It finishes with a phoned-in Wong that's still the only praiseworthy piece. With his two excellent actors (Chang Chen and Gong Li), he weaves an romantic story, and tells it with artistry, but it's a minor work, and he has better things to do. "Eros" as a whole I cannot recommend -- but Wong's piece is worth a look.

Puts the "fun" back in "superhero movie", because it actively avoids taking itself seriously; coupled with a colorful look and actors that are obviously taking it easy, it emerges as refreshing popcorn entertainment.

The books are amiable nonsense, with non-sequiturs backed by a humble humanity. This high-budget adaptation is not: while well-visualized, the wackiness is mostly empty, and consequently irrelevant. It's also too slight: the screenplay dulls the edges and weakly tries to give a linear trajectory to a story that's anything but. In this context, a good cast does its best, but misses the notes; even usually-bulletproof Alan Rickman fails to register fan favorite Marvin, the paranoid android. Some might argue that good intentions on everyone's part count for something, and they do -- that something, however, is just not enough. This is a not a good film.

An oddly lumpy narrative, over-complicated side plots and an abrupt ending versus glorious visuals and the director's trademark, exquisite tone.

The latter suffer some losses (namely the fluidity and clear grace of Spirited Away), but come away victorious. Miyazaki's latest may not be his best, but it's heads and tails above recent animation, and has moments as good as anything on screens this year.

The high-point is Kidman, who does convincing and --yes-- sporadically moving work as a woman caught between idealism and personal tragedy; while Penn's character isn't nearly as interesting, he's not far behind acting-wise. The rest is a mixed bag: the first half, mostly by-the-numbers set-up, is competently dull, but the second half is significantly more gripping and assured. Bottom line: since it lacks the spark of great works, the total is exactly equal to the sum of its parts, and lands squarely on the average.

Desperate, grimy, and introverted: think Twelve Monkeys meets Lost Highway. Given the time-travel premise, the material is inherently murky, but the attraction isn't the plot: it's the willingness to focus on characters instead of paradoxes, and the effective performances by Adrien Brody, Kiera Knightley, and a well-chosen supporting cast. The conclusions may not be groundbreaking, but they strike a genuine and surprisingly moving chord.

Shapeless and off-key: the ostensibly provocative first act lacks insight, and the combustible mayhem that fills the second hour lacks the white-knuckle (amoral) inventiveness of Bad Boys 2, The Rock, or Armageddon. The first Michael Bay movie to leave me unsatisfied on a visceral level.

Kenneth Turan of the LA Times called it "a film of our times", and that's one of two major problems: Kingdom of Heaven tries to explore, using a clear eye and moderate world-view, a period of history devoid of both -- and in stripping the main characters of the religious and racial extremes of the times, it scuttles its own drama. The most potent moments are those which do deal with these impassioned dilemmas of faith (such as Balian's refusal to marry Sybilla), but they're few and far between.

The second crucial issue is far too short a running time. Events pile up with little room to breathe, and the temporal (and even geographical) scale of the film suffers. Even individual scenes can be noticeably choppy, evidence of a vision cut short. Scott's preferred version is rumored to clock in at over three hours, and it's understandable; here's hoping the DVD will help.

So what's left? A thoroughly competent, often beautifully crafted film. The acting ranges from serviceable (Bloom) to impressive (Neeson, Irons, Green, Norton). The production is spectacular and believable, the visuals as exceptional as one would expect, and the direction replete with moments of magnificence (the death of a King, set to a surprising piece from the Hannibal soundtrack, stands out).

My experience with the theatrical Kingdom of Heaven feels incomplete, and the rating below is a provisory one. Whether a promised Director's Cut will improve the film significantly or superficially remains to be seen.

Inspired lunacy, courtesy of Asia's most gleeful entertainer. To talk of story is folly: the film is but a succession of action scenes, each more cartoonish than the last. And while the shtick does get old before the end (and Stephen Chow himself is sorely under-used), there's enough wackiness to warrant a look.

Leave it to Papa George to deliver a near-perfect mix of satire and genre coolness. Using his zombies as stand-ins for the disenfranchised and a lean screenplay as a springboard, Romero unleashes 92 minutes of laughs, groans and blood, spiked with just the right amount of thought. His production is razor-sharp, his actors well-cast, and his directorial touch as lively as it's ever been. Bravo.

Slick and funny. Guy Ritchie detractors fear not: Vaughn eschews the ADD sensibilities of Snatch and Lock Stock for a style softer and well-oiled; in fact, the film's greatest strength is that it goes down easy. Its second-greatest is Daniel Craig, channeling James Bond as a charismatic low-level moneymaker for the mob. Granted, the whole thing is rather inconsequential (only the ending feeds the thought), but it's hard to argue against well-made entertainment.

Ten Little Indians with every Indian an FBI profiler, and pretty much exactly what you'd expect: a competently made thriller with little on its mind other than plot and violence. And in all honesty, there's enough of both to please: the twists come often enough to ignore their individual lunacy, and some good gore is on display (one in particular is both inventive and hilarious). So, bad movie? Yeah. But if you're in the mood, you could do worse.

Ultra-violent revenge story that crackles with narrative momentum and aesthetic style. The first act, which follows a man's psychological deterioration over the course of a mysterious fifteen-year imprisonment, is dynamite, and the rest of the film has the grace to follow through, though perhaps not in the ways one might expect. The labyrinthine screenplay offers constant surprises and Park's direction consciously sacrifices psychological and moral depth for a lightning-quick pace and dynamite action sequences. Not unlike last year's "Spartan" (which I also loved), Park's film might not be great, but it's a great time at the movies.

Very little to comment on here, actually. The story is disposable and unimportant - you'll watch this one is for the amazing action sequences, in which a ridiculously gifted athlete performs the most insane physical maneuvers I've ever seen on film -- all done without CG or wirework. My basic message: skip the talk, watch the fights.

Resolutely minor, but determined to work: it's in motion from the get-go, and its biggest strength is a refusal to give audiences time to breathe. Craven fills every one of the eighty-odd minutes with familiar tricks, and makes a mundane but effective little thriller.

To paraphrase the great Dave Chappelle: "What can be said about this movie that hasn't already been said about Afghanistan? It's depleted and bombed-out." This is a pointless, worthless, artless piece of garbage. The screenplay is ridiculous, the direction sloppy, and the payoff downright laughable. If it has one thing going for it, it's Naomi Watts, who manages to deliver a decent performance, but even she (and her tight blue jeans, often emphasized) can't salvage this mess. Someone should kill this movie and throw it down a well.

Less of a comic book adaptation than a bona-fide comic book in motion: from omnipresent narration to shots that evoke Frank Miller's panels, the vision working here is intensely focused. This uncompromising quality also extends to the content: the film is extremely gruesome, foraying into subjects like cannibalism, torture, and child molestation. It is not, however, devoid of meaning: behind the stylized surfaces and extreme violence, Robert Rodriguez and his cohorts have woven bleak mirrors of our times.

Final verdict? The many lows are a high price to pay for the few moments of grandeur, but the transaction isn't a total waste.

Think Magnolia filtered through alternately bubble-gum and blood-red sensibilities: five loosely related stories about dealing with loss in the oddest of ways. There's the man haunted by the ghost of his wife in a house seemingly designed by Dali; fantastic Tadanobu Asano (Kakihara in Ichi) and beautiful Reika Hashimoto make it the best segment. There's also the man left to live life as a bird, when his hypnotist dies on-stage during a show; it has the familiarity and poignancy of a fable. Then there's the story of the man who killed the hypnotist (hilarious Vinnie Jones as a manic philosophical assassin), and of the woman who hired him (a neurotic ad executive with a wild imagination and a great scene opposite Sonny Chiba). Finally, there's the tale of three thieves, and of the surprising conclusions they come to (you'll get it).

The film is schizophrenic, but in a good way. The fast juxtaposition of broad humor and focused visual formalism may be unsettling at first, but eventually becomes exhilarating. And while individual scenes can alternate between a family in despair and zombie kung fu (among others), the characters have genuine humanity, and the emotional charge of the ending is earned. This is madcap visionary cinema, well worth a look.

To find an omnibus film with strong individual pieces is rare, even in the presence of great directors; to find one that transcends a sum of strong parts to form a superior whole even more so.

“Three… Extremes”, a pan-Asian collection of films by Takashi Miike (Japan), Fruit Chan (Hong Kong) and Chan-Wook Park (South Korea) succeeds to this fullest extent: each short is individually accomplished, but the compendium offers a fascinating cinematic and social tapestry of styles and ideas.

Box

“Three… Extremes” opens with Japan’s “Box”, an atypical entry from the madcap, industrially prolific Takashi Miike. Atypical in that it’s quiet and metaphysical, and a far cry from the guts and sex that drip from his filmography.

A writer, female and attractive, tells of a recurring dream in which she’s buried alive. Through flashbacks, we learn of her twin sister, and of their childhood as contortionists in a lonely circus. Eventually, the storyline folds into itself, and as events are replayed and shifted, more is revealed of the central mystery of the film.

“Box” is conceptually dazzling: the core idea, revealed late in the story, comes as a surprise but lingers; in light of it, the narrative structure and seemingly supernatural concerns of the plot gain thematic and emotional weight. The formidable execution also helps: shot in long takes, with cool colors and little music, “Box” builds an eerie mood. In terms of general style, Miike’s entry is perhaps closest to the J-horrors that populate video shelves; in terms of quality, it’s miles above them.

Dumplings

The second short, “Dumplings”, comes courtesy of Hong Kong. The title refers to tasty morsels of meat-stuffed dough; it does little to presage the grotesque depths director Fruit Chan dives into.

In a non-descript apartment, the youthful Aunt Mei prepares “the best dumplings money can buy” for those able to afford them; a retired actress, Ching, enjoys them regularly for their rejuvenating qualities. To say more would be criminal – suffice to warn those with weak stomachs, and to praise the screenwriters for hatching a plot that, while sure to offend a majority of the audience, also disturbs with social relevance.

Fruit Chan, relatively unknown, vaults onto the international stage: with a strong cast and crew (including visuals by Chris Doyle), he hits stomach-churning depths with macabre humor all while remaining formally beautiful.

“Dumplings” is arguably the strongest of the three shorts (an expanded cut exists as a feature film), and the most inventive; that is straddles “Three… Extremes” just as it straddles genres and the limits of good taste is appropriate.

Cut

“Cut”, by “Oldboy” helmer Chan-Woork Park, ends the film on a vicious note.

A disgruntled extra holds a famous film director and his wife prisoner in their baroque, ornate mansion. The former is attached to the wall, limiting his mobility; his wife sits at the piano, sharp wires cutting into the flesh of her fingers and stringing her up like a marionette. The agressor plays a moral and mental game with the victims – and as the stakes get higher and consequences bloodier, the veneer of sanity in the room begins to fray.

The least ambitious of the three, “Cut” nevertheless makes up for it with cinematic flash and fast-paced plot twists: Park, using every camera and editing tool available, presents the situation as a game, with each player trying to outwit and outlast his opponents. He also gives it a wickedly humorous edge, inserting witty side comments on fame, wealth, and the Korean film industry.

Three… Extremes

As impressive as each individual short is how effectively they combine. The unsettling ending of “Box” sets the scene for the quasy “Dumplings”. The nasty humor of “Dumplings’” last moments presages the tone of “Cut”, and the psychological breakdowns of “Cut” bring the audience back to the beginning.

The three also synthesize the current state of the horror genre. Miike, quiet and confident, evokes the resurgence of psychological horror, and of works like “A Tale of Two Sisters”. Fruit Chan’s brings forth the extreme ideas, topical social commentary, and decaying aesthetics of the best underground horror films. And Chan-Wook Park, with baroque style and grand-guignol violence, lays claim on the giallo throne.

“Three… Extremes” is more than just a compendium of cheap thrills – it’s fascinating, thematically relevant, and genuinely unsettling, and one of the best films of the year.

****
^{(A must-see)}

Polished genre film modeled after the greats: the action is fast, vicious, and varied; the esoteric story is made palatable by simple and affecting characters; the eclectic actors deliver broad, memorable performances (Hoskins stands out). While not particularly ambitious or successful, it emerges as Jet Li's best American film.

Minor, unambitious, forgettable, significantly weak in both concept and execution. An inexplicable misfire in a formidable recent filmography.