THIS WASN’T EASY

The time has come to list my favorite films of 2005. To qualify my list, I must say that I have not seen everything released in these twelve months, and so this is not a list of the best films, but rather just the ones I liked the most. It’s completely subjective, and films may appear based on technical qualities, performances, or the mood I was in when I saw them. It was difficult to winnow the list down to the arbitrary ten, so instead I present to you this list of 13.

Of all the movies released in 2005, I saw 48 of them, according to my quick count.

Here, first, are the films that I saw this year, minus the list-makers:

Rory O’Shea Was Here; Inside Deep Throat; The Jacket; Sin City; Fever Pitch; Sahara; The Amityville Horror; The Interpreter; Family Guy Presents: Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story; A Lot Like Love; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; House of Wax; Kingdom of Heaven; Mysterious Skin; Mr. & Mrs. Smith; Batman Begins; Heights; War of the Worlds; Wedding Crashers; 9 Songs; The Bad News Bears; Happy Endings; The Island; The Aristocrats; Red Eye; The Exorcism of Emily Rose; Proof; A History of Violence; The Squid & the Whale; Kissing on the Mouth*; Brick*; Havoc; Feast*; Jarhead; Derailed; King Kong.

* indicates that I saw this at the 2005 Chicago Film Festival, but that these films are not scheduled for release until 2006

And now for the list:

13. The Boys and Girl of County Clare – An Irish movie from March that chronicles a ciele music contest in Western Ireland, showcasing the rivalry between two groups of favorites. It made me wistful for the place; I miss Galway.

12. Hustle & Flow – A captivating story about a Memphis pimp who wants to break out into the music world. He has the chops, but can he “pimp” himself into a breakthrough? Great performance by Terrence Howard.

11. Melinda & Melinda – Woody Allen’s first 2005 entry, this was panned when it came out in March. The unusual storytelling device – telling the same basic story two different ways, with different groups of actors – takes some getting used to, but once you are acclimated, it is an enjoyable experiment. Except for Chloe Sevigny’s wooden and put-upon performance, the rest are great, especially Brooke Smith from “Series 7,” and Will Ferrell.

10. Millions – A great, and atypical, film from Danny Boyle. It’s primarily a family movie, about two brothers in England who just lost their mum. The younger brother escapes to a cardboard box fort in the field near their house and finds a bag of money. It’s currency on its way to being devalued before the turnover to the Euro (but what’s odd is that Britain didn’t change to the Euro, so I guess it requires a little blurring of reality). He thinks its from God. It’s hilarious in the way kids are funny, but it’s not exactly a comedy. It’s more bittersweet dramedy. And I just realized that one of the actors in it is Daisy from that new TBS show, “Daisy Does America.”

9. Imaginary Heroes – This technically had it’s qualifying awards run for a week at the end of 2004, but wasn’t released in earnest until February of this year. I saw it at the 2004 Chicago Film Festival, so this one is kind of hard to classify. I recently rewatched it on DVD. This is one of those suburban black comedies that sometimes hides behind its heavy (and many) themes. There’s some really funny stuff here, especially the “some will eat pudding” song. Sigourney Weaver and Emile Hirsch are great in this and it’s even more impressive when you find out that the writer-director, Dan Harris, who worked on X-Men and wrote the upcoming Superman, was 24 when he did this. I’m six months shy of that, and it floors me every time I think of it.

8. Capote – I have only one frame of reference of the real Truman Capote: the 1976 Neil Simon-penned spoof “Murder By Death.” In it, you get the feeling that he’s not exactly acting, but hamming it up as himself. He is very obnoxious. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is so good as Capote it’s eerie. His voice, his mannerisms, everything, are just like the real Truman from the film I saw. I read In Cold Blood in September, so that story was fresh in my head, and this film chronicles the writing of that book. (There is another Capote movie coming out next fall, currently called “Infamous” that tells almost the same story, but with a more accessible and recognizable cast: Bullock, Paltrow, the new Bond, etc.) The construct of this story is really airtight; the most important parts remain and all the detritus is lost.

7. The 40-Year-Old-Virgin – So many comedies are so unfunny anymore that this could have been half as good, and still been as successful. This was surprisingly a studio film, and the talent is uncommonly good. Judd Apatow honed his skills as a Ben Stiller acolyte, and made the great “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared.” Both were short-lived TV shows, but here he’s used those skills and his subversive sense of humor and achieved monster success. Seth Rogen, who was in both his TV shows, co-wrote, -stars and –produces this film, and he’s hilarious. The perfect Jane Lynch gets me with her simple head-tilts and slightly odd pronunciations. Everything in this film was great, and they balanced the raunch with the heart quite nicely. I’m really looking forward to the upcoming project Apatow, Rogen and Paul Rudd are working on.

6. Me & You & Everyone We Know – From performance artist Miranda July comes this odd, atypical and beautiful story of how people meet and connect, and lead their own weird-ass lives. There are many inter-connected storylines here, which is the type of film that I usually love (“Magnolia,” “The Player,” “Cookie’s Fortune,” this year’s #1) and all the actors do a great job. The sense of humor here is razor-sharp, and the jokes are ones you never thought you’d hear. The little kid is excellent and the main story between July and John Hawkes is really well-done.

5. The Weather Man – Nicolas Cage, I think, is one of the best actors working today. I almost always like his performance, and have come to trust his judgment in film. The vehicles he picks for himself, usually, I will find entertaining or great. Here, he is paired with the always excellent Michael Caine, and the story is something you don’t often see in mainstream movies: a man struggling to be a better person, husband, father and son. He doesn’t have the life he was promised as a child, and he desperately wants to attain just a semblance of that. His daughter has problems, his dad is dying, his wife left him. These are not things he thinks will be easy to solve, yet he dives in headfirst to try to fix them. The cinematography is incredible and Chicago never looked so beautiful to me (in an overcast, gray-steel, kind of way). The humor, also, is biting. Gore Verbinski, despite the forgotten “Mousehunt” and the big-budget “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, is a director with a keen eye and makes regularly intelligent and enjoyable films. “The Mexican” and “The Ring” may have been weak in some aspects, but really looked sharp and beautiful.

4. Dear Frankie – Like “Imaginary Heroes,” this was at the Chicago Film Festival in ‘04, but released in America in March of ’05. This is a Scottish film with Emily Mortimer and Gerard Butler, and it’s female director, Shona Auerbach, I think, is destined for great things. There are a sad lack of female directors, and maybe with this film, she can expand her resume and make more gems. The last Scottish female director that I investigated was Lynne Ramsay, who was wildly acclaimed by critics, but made the horrible “Ratcatcher” and “Morvern Callar,” two films I hated so much I couldn’t finish. So imagine my surprise when Auerbach, who was compared to Ramsay, made a film I loved. The story sounds a bit tragicomic, but is balanced very well: A mother tells her deaf son that his father is a sailor on the HMS Accra, and is always at sea. The son charts the Accra around the world and discovers that the very real ship is docking nearby the next month. Since his father is actually not what she said he was, the mom hires a man to portray the father and spend half a day with the kid. Predictably, she gets more than she bargained for when the man becomes interested in the mom. The whole thing is better than I’m making it sound, and the acting is superb. But the real achievement here is the best cinematography I’ve seen in a long time; Scotland looks like heaven.

3. Walk the Line – Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon are incredible as the Cashes. They use their own vocals and they are both surprisingly great. Phoenix is creepy as Johnny Cash, sounding so much like him. I suppose that if you heard him singing and then heard Johnny Cash sing, they’d be very different, but Phoenix captures the accent, the guttural singing voice and the cadences really well. Witherspoon is perfect in this movie. I’ve only ever liked her, but here she proves herself to be worth all the hype. She should win the Oscar; she is gorgeous with brown hair and a tan, and her singing voice is really enjoyable. The story follows the predictable musician biopic format, in that Cash is a poor nothing, then gets a chance, makes it big, falls into drugs, cheats on his wife, etc. But like “Ray,” it adds to that formula a lot of heart, and the characters are really developed.

2. Murderball – The only documentary on this list. It amazes me the things I don’t know about. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, I read the papers, I pay attention, I watch a lot of TV and surf a lot of the net, and there are whole worlds out there that I have never heard about. Like the world of wheelchair rugby. It’s played by quadriplegics and it’s brutal. The goal is to get the ball across two lines to get a point. That’s the only rule. It’s like bumper cars where players ram into each other and knock people out of their chairs just to stop them from rolling across the lines. The film profiles the US Paralympic Wheelchair Rugby team up through the 2004 Athens games. We learn about the players and what caused them to become quads. A former player and controversial turncoat is profiled as well, as is a newly paralyzed 24-year-old who becomes interested in the sport. The players are really well showcased here; the things they say are blunt, tragic, hilarious. Mark Zupan is the most gregarious and memorable “character” in any film this year. They don’t want your pity or your stares; they want your respect for what they have achieved as Olympians.

1. Crash – My favorite film of the year was one I didn’t expect to like. The ads affected me negatively. My impression of the film was that it had recognizable names but was essentially a glorified TV movie. I saw it because I wanted to see a movie and not much else was out. I couldn’t have been more wrong. A film with intersecting storylines and characters, about one night in LA and the racism that percolates among everyone, just below the surface. The acting is unbelievable, especially Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Michael Pena and Ludacris(!). The writing is sharp, the stories are totally believable. The message may not itself be politically correct, that is if you can find just one. The gloves were really off and it was such an honest discussion of race in America. Sometimes political correctness devalues individual races by eliminating any distinguishing characteristics. Here, the “wrong” words and themes were the main story, and that was in a weird way, refreshing. But this film succeeds because while it deconstructs the race issues in this country, every character is assigned real and complex situations; every character is a deep person, one who is largely not defined, or rather inhibited, by his or her skin color. I think this film will live on for a long time.

There are many films I have yet to see that may very well replace one or more of these, or the order of this list. These include: The New World; Brokeback Mountain; Munich; Syriana; Good Night & Good Luck; Memoirs of a Geisha; Match Point; Harry Potter; Bee Season; Cinderella Man; March of the Penguins; Jesus is Magic; Breakfast on Pluto; Narnia; The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; Cache.

I won’t see all of these, but these are films that have gotten either great reviews or a lot of press, and are thus the “important films.” I’m most excited to see The New World; Match Point; Jesus is Magic; and Syriana.

At some point I’ll do a list of my 5 worst films of the year. But not today.