Tell me a little something about your moviegoing self:
a) How many new movies
do you estimate that you watched in 2005?
b) How many older
movies do you estimate that you watched in 2005?
c) Of the new movies
you watched, how many do you estimate that you watched in a movie theater?
d) How many do you
estimate that you watched on video or DVD?
e) How many, if any,
did you watch more than once? (And what were they?)
f) Do you most often go
to the movies by yourself or with someone else? Do you have a preference?
g) If you see movies with other people, do you tend to talk at length afterward about what you've just seen?
a) I've made a list and count 32, including a couple of late 2004 releases and three more that came out last year but got their first screenings in Toronto in 2005.
b) That's something I don't do nearly as much as I used to, primarily because the Festival rep-houses in Toronto have more or less stopped screening anything older than six months. I saw maybe 10-15 at the Cinematheque.
c) Except for No Direction Home on PBS, all of them.
d) None.
e) Mad Hot Ballroom was the only one--once on my own, once with my grade 7 class. (So technically the answer to the previous question is one, although the first time I saw Mad Hot Ballroom was in a theatre.)
f) Now you're getting into my Travis Bickle-like shadow existence...I probably saw about half of the 30 with other people, half without; my friends who have wives and girlfriends (wives or girlfriends--I don't think any of them have both) still put up with my movie invitations, and I count three movie dates off the list. Okay, two--Wedding Crashers I saw with my mom. My preference by a wide margin nowadays is to see a film with someone else; through my 20s, seeing a film alone wasn't such a big deal, but at 44 it feels very, very wrong.
g) Yes--talking about a
film over coffee afterwards is as much a part of the night as the film itself.
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Provide a list of your 10 favourite movies of 2005, with comments:
1. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room: Obviously indebted to Michael Moore, especially Roger and Me, but I don't think Moore's muckraking has uncovered anyone as blandly creepy as Ken Lay or Jeff Skilling. I only knew the Enron story in very broad outline going in--the workings of corporate finance are a foreign language to me--so I found the nuts and bolts of Lay's and Skilling's machinations quite compelling and reasonably accessible. I will watch their trial with interest when it begins. I hope they get sent away for a long, long time. (My friend and I were killing ourselves over the one lower-level executive who had a fondness for strippers, met one and married her, and got out of town just before the big fall.)
2. The Squid and the Whale: I felt like I'd seen something unique leaving the theatre, and it continues to stay on my mind. Something odd I related to: the nasty competitiveness between Jeff Daniels and his oldest son when they play ping-pong. My family used to own a ping-pong table, and I remember a time in high school when I'd play my dad and, because I thought I was pretty good, get infuriated if he beat me; I vaguely recall hurling a racket at the wall after one game, much as Daniels does in the movie. There's one music-related point that stretches credulity: that a high-school kid could play a well-known song from Pink Floyd's The Wall at a school talent show in 1986, claim it as his own, and not have a single student call him on it. The film's good enough that it's a minor conceit.
3. New York Doll: I liked this just slightly less than the Ramones documentary from last year, but it was really good in ways I didn't expect; I'm going to place it behind two films I was less predisposed to like, but this could just as easily occupy the #1 spot. I'll again bring up Michael Moore (enough already, Phil!) in connection to director Greg Whiteley's treatment of Arthur Kane's Mormon co-workers. They all come across as sane and articulate, and even with the two older ladies who generate some laughs, one of them has a beautifully dignified moment when Arthur dies. I think they would have been caricatured in the hands of Moore; not necessarily cruelly, but I think he would have handled them condescendingly, and would have treated their religion as a joke. (It's true that Whiteley's a Mormon himself, but, based in part on a Q&A he did after the screening I saw, I think his balance is more a matter of temperament.) The scene that will stay with me the longest from New York Doll is when David Johansen arrives for the first time during the Dolls' practice sessions for their London reunion show. First of all, it's hard to find words that adequately convey the depths of Johansen's cragginess--I even had to consult the dictionary to check "cragginess." And the way he saunters into the room as the band plays "Out in the Street" and slowly starts to join in--still the star of the show, the guy who knows that all eyes are on him (especially Arthur's, having waited a couple of decades for this moment) but kind of half-pretends to be just one of the guys--is brilliant; possibly staged to one degree or another, but brilliant anyway.
4. Mad Hot Ballroom: It's amazing how much this is conceived and structured in the shadow of Spellbound, right down to the introduction of a wild-card contender for the crown at the last possible moment. It's not as good as Spellbound--the kids aren't as indelible, and obviously dancing just isn't as kinesthetically exciting as spelling--but I liked it a lot, and so did my class. Favourite character: the young teacher who's like an Oprah/Dr. Phil self-parody, all choked up because her boys and girls are turning into "little men and women" before her very eyes. When her dancers are eliminated in one of the qualifying rounds, they start blubbering uncontrollably. It comes as a real shock.
5. Inside Deep Throat: Boogie Nights was a recreation of the '70s pornography industry, and this is a recreation of Boogie Nights; if life imitates fiction, then it stands to reason that a documentary might do the same. Lenny Camp, Deep Throat's "location manager" ("Okay, Lenny, listen up--for scene #7 we need an unnaturally barren room with beige walls and a couch"), is something to see: in a narrative film you'd accuse him of chewing up scenery shamelessly, but he's not, he's just a helpless nutcase. I wonder if Mark Felt got a chance to see this.
6. The Last Mogul: The Life and Times of Lew Wasserman: This look at the former head of MCA is the mirror image of that creepy Robert Evans vanity project from a couple of years back (which looked much worse when I watched some of it for a second time on TV). It was Evans who had a hand in The Godfather, but it was Wasserman's life that could have served as the blueprint for Puzo and Coppola's invisible-hand conception of Mafioso power: so circumspect that there was virtually no existing file footage of Wasserman, but reputedly powerful enough that even after Wasserman's retirement, director Barry Avrich still had a hard time finding anyone willing to be interviewed for his film. (Evans is more like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and Casino, a free-wheeling showman with the self-destruct switch permanently turned on.) I was especially interested in the big scandal concerning MCA cutouts that Wasserman was implicated in during the late '80s; I bought a number of John Coltrane LPs on MCA/Impulse for three and four dollars around that time which must have filtered down from that.
7. March of the Penguins: A friend told me this wasn't anything special if you spend any time watching the Discovery channel; I don't, so I found it thoroughly absorbing. I used to be afraid of penguins thanks to Burgess Meredith and Danny DeVito, but now I'm a big fan.
8. Crash: This got a lot of great reviews early on, and then a backlash seemed to set in; when you turn on the TV and see Oprah Winfrey devoting a think piece-type show to it, that can't help. I feel like I've got a "politically naïve" sign hanging around my neck for saying so, but I thought at least two scenes--Terrance Howard and Thandie Newton's confrontation with the cops, and Newton's admittedly trumped-up rescue from her car wreck--were harrowing and moving. It all falls apart about three-quarters of the way through--Ryan Phillippe's sudden meltdown is especially implausible.
9. No Direction Home: I taped this, and I need to watch it a second time; I was really tired the first night and drifted in and out of sleep for about an hour. You quickly realize it's Dylan's film and not really Scorsese's, which is just fine, it's a grand enough story that it's got its own momentum.
10. Los Angeles Plays
Itself: I'm listing this for all the great film clips, but I didn't think
it was nearly as good as its first-place finish in last year's Voice
documentary poll had me anticipating. The biggest problem for me was the
director's narration, which I found oppressive--he seemed to complain about
every last misrepresentation (according to him) of L.A. in the movies, no
matter how trivial. Admirable, in a
way--I can get pretty nitpicky too about certain subjects--but I've discovered
that the signage at some L.A. intersection in 1953 isn't one of them. The Speed
network was showing the original Gone in 60 Seconds (1972) the other
night, which gets a lot of attention in Los Angeles Plays Itself; I was
kicking myself for not finding out until well after it had started.
-------------------
What were the two or three worst new movies you saw in 2005?
To call them te worst would be misleading, meaning they obviously weren't inept or anything--I see so relatively few films, it's rare that I see anything that actually strikes me as inept--but the two that annoyed me the most were A History of Violence and Last Days, while the biggest letdown was Broken Flowers. I was a big David Cronenberg fan through most of the '80s. I think The Dead Zone is one of the most underappreciated films of the past 25 years (considered, I believe, to be a regrettable bid for commercial success by many of his admirers), and The Fly was great as allegory, as romance, and as science-fiction. Dead Ringers was masterful too, but something deadening started to creep into his films at that point (non-fans would say it was there from day one), and they all seem to be such joyless affairs now--not his choice of subject matter, which has always been grim, but in their delivery. And then there's William Hurt...Last Days is another variation on Truffaut's famous remark that cinema should be about either the joy of making movies or the agony of making movies: Gus Van Sant, like Todd Solondz and Todd Haynes, makes films that are about the agony of watching movies. Whatever you think of Kurt Cobain, and I don't think I harbor especially protective feelings about him myself, it's sad to see his story hijacked for somebody's obscure art purposes. (For a much smarter, more nuanced, and, god knows, much more lively meditation on Cobain, I'd recommend Imperial Teen's "You're One" from their first LP. There are similarities to Van Sant's movie--Cobain is never explicitly named; it's written from a gay perspective--but the Imperial Teen song feels like a work of empathy, of understanding. Last Days feels like a sterile film-school thesis, and it goes on for several lifetimes longer.) Finally, Broken Flowers was disappointing for exactly the reason I'd expect from Jim Jarmusch: he takes what was modulated just perfectly in Bill Murray's performances in Rushmore and Lost in Translation, adds another two or three layers of anomie, and nullifies Murray right off the screen.
-------------------
What were some of your favourite performances in 2005 (either by a main or supporting actor)?
Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale really stands out--very unusual performance--and I also liked his two kids in the same film. Terrance Howard is good in Crash, but I thought his character in Hustle and Flow was a real drag. Vince Vaughn is on auto-pilot through Wedding Crashers and Thumbsucker, but somewhat reluctantly I'm a fan. Naomi Watts hadn't made much of an impression on me before, but she gives the one good performance in King Kong. (Actually there are two, and I'm sure I don't need to name the other.) David Straitharn in Good Night, and Good Luck is dead-on from the clips I've seen of Edward R. Murrow; precise mimicry is not my favourite kind of performance, but if he wins any awards in the next few months, that'll be OK. One more: the scarecrow villain in Batman Begins is terrifying. I'm not sure there's a whole lot of acting prowess on display, though; basically he's the Unknown Comic plus special effects. I still need to see Capote.
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What were the two or three best uses of music in the movies in 2005?
New York Doll, not
surprisingly, has two or three, especially the Shangri-Las' "Out in the
Street" to signify that Arthur don't hang around with the gang no more, he
now prefers the company of elderly Mormon women. I don't recall specific songs
from Inside Deep Throat, just that I thought the soundtrack was
effective. There's folky stuff by Bert Jansch in The Squid and the Whale
that's nice--I had to check the credits to see who it was.
-------------------
What was your favourite movie trailer of 2005, and what was so good about it? (Also, did you end up seeing the movie, and did it live up to the trailer?)
A few years ago, I was
seeing a lot of good trailers--I wrote about them on my homepage--but nothing
comes to mind recently. I'd be interested in seeing the trailer for The
Squid & the Whale; the best joke in the film is where the older son
tries to impress a girl by calling "The Metamorphosis" Kafkaesque,
and I'm thinking that might not play so well in a trailer.
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How did the movies of 2005 compare to the movies of 2004? (i.e., Was there any discernible difference in quality? Were you compelled any more or any less to see new movies in 2005 than you were in 2004?)
Pretty comparable, I'd say--maybe a slight edge to last year. I tend to evaluate a year by how much I care about the films at the top of my list--give me one Rushmore or Crumb and it's a great year--so to that end, last year was a little better: I liked The Mayor of the Sunset Strip and the John Kerry documentary better than Enron, and I liked Sideways better than The Squid and the Whale.
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What was the best older movie discovery you had in 2005?
I'll mention Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma here, which I saw over three nights at the Cinematheque. Typically, much of it was a struggle--not boring in the way that most of his films have bored me, there are too many film clips cascading by to ever feel bored, but a struggle to make sense of, to connect all the elliptical narration to what you're seeing. (Another ongoing source of frustration is that, big surprise, clips aren't identified; that's one thing I appreciated about Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen's stodgy insistence on identifying everything.) So you're looking at 265 minutes of a very obscure rumination on something or other, with the director making sure that you're not allowed to give in and revel in all the images the way you might in some other context; it's like an austere counter to those now tiresome collages you get during the Academy Awards broadcast. At the end, you feel as old as the movies themselves. But you know you've seen something, and I was more genuinely moved by the way a couple of the segments ended than by anything else I saw this year: first, when Godard's only comment on his closest contemporaries (Truffaut, Chabrol, etc.--seems like you spend the first half of the film waiting for some acknowledgement of Truffaut) is "These men, they were my friends," and then, right at the end, by the parable about waking from the dream, the perfect grace note to everything that has come before.
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Which movie critic (or critics) did you most enjoy reading in 2005, and why?
I keep up only
sporadically now. I read Hoberman most every week in the Voice, and I
check Sarris fairly regularly in the New York Observer, where his
reviews are posted each Wednesday; there's no set timetable that I can figure
out anymore as to when Kauffmann's reviews go up on the New Republic site,
so I only remember to check him periodically. I usually don't see Edelstein's
reviews in Slate until a few weeks after they run--it's just not a site
I look at--but I enjoy reading him. Simon's disappeared. Kael's dead. Clyde
Gilmour, the Toronto Star's film critic through the '70s and the first I
ever read, is very dead.
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Politics came into last year's discussion a fair bit (mainly in reference to Fahrenheit 9/11). Do you believe there's a strong co-relation presently between politics and movies? Did movies in 2005 reflect or portray or allude to political events in a way that was both aesthetically and historically satisfying? (Is such a thing even important to you?) Any other thoughts on this admittedly broad subject (particularly as it relates to the present day)?
From my Top 10, my number-one film is explicitly political, three others are tangentially so (Inside Deep Throat, Mad Hot Ballroom, and Crash), and there's a case to be made--and has been made, many times--that politics can be read into just about film this side of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (which I haven't seen, so maybe that's a cleverly disguised allegory about Iran-Contra). But generally speaking, it's the last thing on my mind when I sit down to watch a movie.
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In "Take 7," the 7th annual film critics poll conducted by the Village Voice, the Top 10 movies of the year, as chosen by 103 movie critics are:
How many of these movies did you see? How do your own tastes match up overall to the critics? Also, feel free to say anything you care to about the poll itself.
I saw #1, #7, and #10, and
I very much want to see Grizzly Man. Truthfully, I'm drawing a blank on
#3, #5, #6, and #8. Some years my favourites do very well in the Voice
poll--The Straight Story, Lost in Translation, Ghost World--other
years they've had #1s (Far from Heaven, A History of Violence)
that baffle me. With A History of Violence and Last Days
bookending this year's Top 10, a lot of films I don't know on there, and only
one from my own list, I don't feel much kinship with the poll this year.
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As of December 27, the following ten movies were ranked by Box Office Mojo as the most popular movies of the year:
How many of these movies did you see? How do your own tastes match up overall to other moviegoers? (Feel free to answer this question bearing in mind other more recent blockbusters such as King Kong.)
I saw #3, #4, and #6, plus
King Kong over the holidays. (My answer to this question, therefore, is
virtually identical to my previous answer. I've decided I'm the ultimate
middlebrow.) That's about normal for me; there are four or five films a year
where my own interests intersect with the box-office leaders. I'm pretty sure I
don't go or not-go to a film based on whether or not it's expected to make a
lot of money, and there are sometimes cases (I think Sideways would have
been one) where you see what starts out as a relatively small film, and then it
starts making money when it gets nominated for and/or wins some awards.
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Anything else relating to movies in 2005 you feel like mentioning that didn't get covered here?
Yes: if you're a member of
Toronto's Cinematheque and you're reading this, cancel your membership and
don't renew until they acknowledge Brent Sclisizzi's death in an upcoming
program. Like Albert Brooks says in Lost in America: "Quit your
job--I did!"
(Originally published in rockcritics.com)
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