As I’ve been working on reviews for the
movies I’ve seen
over the past couple of months, I noticed that I haven’t had much good
to say
about most of them. It may be that I’m
cranky – in fact, that’s quite probable – but I think it’s also that
nothing is
standing out for me this year. In fact,
I can only come up with five movies I can unreservedly put on a “best
of the
year” list. Roughly in order of
preference, they
are:
One of the tests I use is, would I want to
own this movie on DVD and watch it more than once? For the first
three, the answer is definitely yes. I can come up with another
few films that I liked but that don’t
quite make the cut: Batman
Begins, The
Brothers
Grimm, The
Constant Gardener, War
of the Worlds. And some great performances in no
particular order: Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the
Line, Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale, Val
Kilmer and Robert Downey, Jr., in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Johnny
Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, Ralph Fiennes in The
Constant Gardener, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, Matt Damon and Heath Ledger
in The Brothers Grimm, and
Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback
Mountain.
[As I’ve been catching up on some movies I’ve
been wanting to
see for a while, I’ve also been reminding myself why I stopped going to
movie
theaters – for a change, few problems with talkers, but two movies I
saw in the
same day were each in theaters that had about 6 rows of seats: two
stadium-style in the back and four level ones right up front against
the
screen. Naturally, no one wanted to sit
in the front four rows if they could help it, so although only about 30
people
were in the first movie I saw, they were all in the back two rows, so
it felt
packed and uncomfortable (the second movie was almost completely sold
out). I mean, it seems like theaters are
actively trying to make people stay home.
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