Lots of movies to catch up with here.

Andrei Rublev – Long, slow and depressing, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Not as famous as Solaris, but this is a much better Tarkovsky film. Not nearly as solipsistic or pessimistic as that one, there’s actually some hope for humanity and society by the end of this film, though the three hours leading up to that point aren’t exactly fun.

Floating Weeds – I haven’t seen his silent film that this is a remake of, but I plan to eventually. The Criterion version comes with both versions. This is the third Ozu I’ve seen, and all of them are great. Late Spring’s my favorite, and that’s coming out later this year. Tokyo Story’s the most famous, the first I saw and the one I enjoyed the least. I probably should watch it again.

Hiroshima Mon Amour – A pretty perfect little movie. The lead actress, Emmanuelle Riva, played Juliette Binoche’s mom in Three Colors: Blue and gives an outstanding performance here. My first Alain Resnais movie, I really want to see Last Year At Marienbad though.

Band Of Outsiders – Totally charming. It’s easy to forget just how fun Godard can be. Anna Karina was, predictably, adorable and Michel Legrand’s score was terrific. I think it’s now my second favorite Godard, after Pierrot Le Fou.

Fitzcarraldo – My new #1 film from 1982 is this Werner Herzog movie about a crazy guy who wants to move a boat over a mountain so he can bring opera to the jungle. Stars Klaus Kinski (also crazy) and Claudia Cardinale (from Once Upon A Time In The West).

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party – Really just a pretty good concert film. The Fugees reunion at the end of the show was pretty cool, but the highlight was an amazing performance by The Roots with Jill Scott and Erikah Badu. Not a ground-breaking film by any means, but I certainly liked it more than the only other Michel Gondry film I’ve seen, the drastically overrated Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. Now my #22 rated film of 2005.

Week End – Another wacky Godard film, this one is like Pierrot Le Fou, but mixed with cynicism and Maoist politics. There’s so much to love about it, though, that I can overlook the long anti-colonialist speeches (which are nothing but simple-minded justifications of terrorism). Someday, when I have my own movie theatre, I’m going to name it the End Of Cinemas.

Tristram Shandy – Very funny. It’s in a close race with The 40 Year Old Virgin as the Best Comedy of 2005 (I ended up rating it 9th, two spots behind Virgin). Right up there with the best movies about making movies (Living In Oblivion, The Stunt Man, Day for Night, etc.)

Burden Of Dreams – Les Blank’s documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo is alright, but the only really great parts are a pair of rants by Herzog (The birds are not singing, they are screaming in pain!”). The second best movie about crazy people making a movie in a jungle. The #11 film of 1982.

George Washington – Indie film overrated for it’s admittedly very cool visual style (very Ozu influenced, naturally), while overlooking the fundamental silliness of its plot. There are some attempts at poetry, in the narration and the ending that mostly just don’t work. Still, a fine first film for director David Gordon Green. The #7 film of 2000.

The World – A stunningly beautiful film about workers at a Beijing amusement park that recreates the whole world, or at least the famous parts: Manhattan, the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge, the Pyramids. It’s magic realist Ozu, with text messaging. The film revolves around the two of the workers, with a little bit of every type of post-communist social issue thrown in: foreign workers forced into prostitution, country folk moving to the big city to try to make their fortune and failing, organized crime, overworked workers in unsafe conditions, plus your typical romantic issues. Interspersed are chapter breaks (one chapter’s even called “Tokyo Story”) and some clever animated sequences. A great first big-budget film by director Jia Khang-ze. I wish I had grabbed the poster when I had the chance last year, but I forgot. The #4 film of 2004.

Kill! – Adapted from the same source novel as Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, I have a feeling that this is closer to thee novel than that one, the sequel to Yojimbo. This is a darker, less satirical, more densely plotted film than that one, but it’s still a very fine film. Tatsuya Nakadai’s performance in the lead role, while it can’t match the comic intensity of Toshiro Mifune’s in Sanjuro, is still quite good. The film is very nice looking: crowded frames, at times shockingly graphic violence, and New Wavy editing. Director Kihachi Okamoto also did Sword Of Doom, which stars Mifune and Nakadai and which I’ll be seeing very soon.

Samurai Spy – Another part of Criterion’s Rebel Samurai boxset (along with Kill!, Sword Of The Beast and Samurai Rebellion, which I saw years ago). Directed by Masahiro Shinoda, this is a remarkably beautiful film about, well, samurai spies (they actually seem more like ninjas, but I don’t know if there’s a difference). The plot’s ridiculously complex, but that’s OK because the movie’s just so damn cool. And there’s even a nice supporting role for the guy who played the Master Swordsman in The Seven Samurai.

Oldboy – If Danny Boyle made a Takeshi Miike film, this is what would result. It’s not nearly as original or interesting visually as Boyle’s films, though it does have some nice flourishes. And it’s not nearly as gross or disturbing as Miike’s (the the end comes pretty close), which in my opinion is a good thing. There’s one long fight that’s pretty cool looking, but this film has more in common with Japanese horror than Hong Kong action. Still, a pretty good revenge movie. The #8 film of 2003.

Louis Menand, writing about some guy’s book in The New Yorker a couple months ago:

‘When you have prizes for art, you will always have people complaining that prizes are just politics, or that they reward in-group popularity or commercial success, or that they are pointless and offensive because art is not a competition. English believes that contempt for prizes is not harmful to the prize system; that, on the contrary, contempt for prizes is what the system is all about. ‘The threat of scandal,’ as he puts it, ‘is constitutive of the cultural prize.’ His theory is that when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as to the right one, No one thinks that Tolstoy was less than a great writer because he failed to win a Nobel. The failure to win the Nobel has become, in the end, a mark of his greatness.”

And so, my Oscar Picks:

Best Picture

Will Win: Brokeback Mountain
Should Win: Munich

Best Director

Will Win: Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
Should Win: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino, Sin City

Best Actor

Will: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Should: Hoffman

Best Actress

Will: Reese Witherspoon, Walk The Line
Should: Q’Orianka Kilcher, The New World

Supporting Actor

Will: George Clooney, Syriana
Should: Mickey Rourke, Sin City

Supporting Actress

Will: Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener
Should: Maria Bello, A History Of Violence

Original Screenplay

Will: Crash
Should: Good Night And Good Luck

Adapted Screeenplay

Will: Brokeback Mountain
Should: Munich

Film Editing

Will: Crash
Should: Sin City

Cinematography

Will: Brokeback Mountain
Should: Sin City

Foreign Language Film

Will: Tsotsi
Should: Caché

Documentary Feature

Will: March Of The Penguins
Should: No Direction Home

Documentary Short

Will: the Rwanda one
Should: NA

Animated Feature

Will: Wallace & Gromit
Should: NA

Animated Short
Will: the long one with “Jasper” in the title
Should: NA

Live Action Short
Will: Six Shooter
Should: NA

Art Direction
Will: Memoirs Of A Geisha
Should: Memoirs Of A Geisha

Make-Up
Will: Chronicles Of Narnia
Should: Sin City

Costume Design
Will: Memoirs Of A Geisha
Should: Memoirs Of A Geisha

Original Score
Will: Brokeback Mountain
Should: Brokeback Mountain

Original Song
Will: Crash
Should: NA

Sound Editing
Will: King Kong
Should: Revenge Of The Sith

Sound Mixing
Will: Walk The Line
Should: Walk The Line

Visual Effects
Will: King Kong
Should: Revenge Of The Sith

Yet another terrific early 70s movie year, especially for foreign films, with some of the definitive films of world cinema in the decade released this year.

13. Shaft’s Big Score – Another Shaft sequel, not quite as silly as Shaft In Africa, but still not particularly good.

12. Pink Flamingos – I’m shocked this movie is as old as it is. When I saw it years ago, I thought it was an indie movie from the early 80s. Anyway, it’s John Waters’s breakthrough film, a satire about, well, pretty much everything.

11. Snoopy Come Home – Another Peanuts film. Better than the Thanksgiving one, if only because they don’t make kid’s movies this depressing anymore.

10. The Man Of La Mancha – Musical version of Don Quixote starring Peter O’Toole. It’s pretty good. Maybe significant for being one of the very last big Hollywood musicals. O’Toole didn’t do his own singing, but Sophia Loren did. Director Arthur Hiller also did Love Story, Silver Streak and Taking Care Of Business.

9. Cabaret – Bob Fosse’s surprisingly depressing film about a night club in Weimar Germany. It’s kind of like Breakfast At Tiffany’s, with Nazis. Liza Minelli and Joel Grey are excellent, but I don’t recall much about Michael York’s performance.

8. Sleuth – Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine are the only stars of this battle of wits as Olivier tries to get revenge on Caine for having an affair with his wife. It’s the last film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed All About Eve, Julius Caesar, Guys And Dolls and Cleopatra. The writer, Anthony Shaffer also wrote Frenzy, The Wicker Man, the two big Agatha Christie movies and, uh, Sommersby.

7. Deliverence – Most famous for Dueling Banjos and “Squeal like a pig!”, this is nonethelesss a remarkably effective thriller. John Boorman (Point Blank, Excalibur) directs an outstanding cast, which includes Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty. The story’s pretty simple: a quartet of guys goes on a trip down a river, and humanity (in the loosest sense) and nature conspire to make it the worst vacation ever.

6. Play It Again, Sam – Woody Allen wrote and stars in this comedy about a Woody Allen character who falls in love =with his best friend’s wife. To help him deal with this complex situation, Woody enlists the help of a hallucination of Humphrey Bogart from Casablanca. Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts costar, and Herbert Ross directed. Herbert Ross had quite a career: The Goodbye Girl, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Pennies From Heaven, Footloose, The Secret Of My Success, Steel Magnolias, My Blue Heaven and Boys On The Side.

5. Cries And Whispers – The first Ingmar Bergman film to appear on any of my lists (I’ve only seen a couple others). This might be the most depressing movie I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly in the top 10. It’s a family drama about two sisters gathered together to watch over their dying third sister. There’s a bunch of flashbacks wherein everyone is basically evil to everyone else. Liv Ullman, Harriet Anderson and Ingrid Thulin star. Great use of color.

4. Solaris – I called it an ode to solipsism and I’m sticking with that. It’s still a great film though. I especially like the trick where the camera slowly pans in a circle and the people on screen move around behind it and show up in unexpected places. It surprises me every time he does it.

3. The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie – Luis Buñuel once made a movie about a group of people who are unable to leave the dinner table (The Exterminating Angel). This time, a group of Bourgeois are unable to actually eat a meal as they keep getting together and keep getting interrupted for various increasingly bizarre reasons. It feels like a summation of Buñuel’s career, as he attempts to say everything he’s been trying to say for years all at once. The great thing is that it’s still pretty funny. He doesn’t seem to have become as pessimistic as Kurosawa did with Ran (#1, 1985), so maybe it has more in common with Dreams (#3, 1990).

2. Aguire: The Wrath Of God – I finally got around to watching Fitzcarraldo a couple nights ago and I liked it a lot. In fact, it’s now my #1 movie for 1982. As much as I liked it though, I like Aguirre better. Which is very strange for me. I generally don’t prefer the darker, more depressing movie, and Aguirre is incredibly depressing. But it’s just so damn weird that I don’t get depressed, I just think it’s really cool. Anyway, Klaus Kinski plays Aguirre, a 16th Century conquistador on a quest down a river for El Dorado. Aguirre, of course, is insane, and gradually everyone on the quest with him dies one way or another. Kinski is, as always, terrifying. And I can now say definitively that he absolutely did NOT play the villain in Ghostbusters II.

1. The Godfather – Yeah yeah. What did you expect? I have no fear of the obvious. It’s overrated, in that it’s most definitely not one of the 5 greatest movies ever made. But it’s still ridiculously good. This and it’s first sequel are, along with Marcel Carne’s Children Of Paradise the best novelistic films I’ve ever seen. Massive films that create and immerse you in an entire world. Interesting fact: cabaret won more Oscars for 1972 than The Godfather did. Coppola lost best Director to Bob Fosse, and his film ended up only winning three awards: Best Actor (Brando), Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. Cabaret won 8, including Joel Grey’s Supporting Actor win over three (!) from The Godfather (Pacino, Duvall, and Caan).

Plenty of Unseen movies this year, including some pretty big ones. I started watching Last Tango In Paris once about 10 years ago, but I was really bored and turned it off.

Frenzy
Last Tango In Paris
Superfly
Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii
The Ruling Class
Roma
The Candidate
The Chinese Connection
Jeremiah Johnson
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask
The Poseidon Adventure
Chloe In The Afternoon
Blacula
Lady Sings The Blues
The King Of Marvin Gardens
The Canterbury Tales
Boxcar Bertha
The Cowboys
Joe Kidd
The Life And Times Of Judge Roy Bean
Deep Throat
What’s Up Doc?
The Getaway
Sounder

Another pretty good year is 1973, but not nearly in the same class as 74. For some reason I’ve seen almost as many movies from this year as from the next two years combined.

16. Shaft In Africa – I think the title pretty much covers it.

15. Save The Tiger – Jack Lemmon won the best actor Oscar for his pretty good performance in this otherwise totally unremarkable film. Businessman has a midlife crises in the 70s, yipee. Dirceted by John Avildson, who did Rocky I and V, The Karate Kid I, II and III, and 8 Seconds, which I haven;t seen, but made one of my friends cry.

14. A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving – Another revelatory title.

13. Live And Let Die – Roger Moore’s first is also his best Bond movie, and one of the best in the series. There’s a spooky voodoo vibe as Moore teams up with Jane Seymour’s psychic tarot-reader to defeat Yaphet Kotto’s heroin-dealing Mr. Big. And the title song is by Wings!

12. The Paper Chase – Decent coming-of-age type movie about first year law students at Harvard Law School. John Houseman gives an iconic performance as a professor, a character he would further develop in the classic TV series Silver Spoons.

11. The Exorcist – Ridiculously overrated horror film from self-promoting doofus/fascist William Friedkin. It’s hurt by the mediocre (at best) performance of Jason Miller as Father Damien. Miller would go on to star in a whole bunch of movies you’ve never heard of. But he eventually played the coach in Rudy 20 years later, so that’s nice.

10. The Sting – Newman and Redford, the “Brangelina” of the early 70s reunited for this entertaining period caper film about Depression Era con-men. Not as complex or insightful as the similarly set The Cincinnati Kid from 1965, but then, it certainly isn’t meant to be. Inexplicably won the best picture Oscar for 1973.

9. The Last Detail – Prototypical road trip movie in which Jack Nicholson and Otis Young are Navy guys who decide to show convict Randy Quaid a good time while transporting him to prison. Directed by Hal Ashby, one of the fine directors of the 70s, and written by Robert Towne (Chinatown). One of Nicholson’s defining roles, despite the porn star mustache (it was the 70s, after all.)

8. High Plains Drifter – Clint Eastwood directed and stars in this twisted take on the Red Harvest/Yojimbo/Fistful Of Dollars story in which a Stranger (Eastwood) rolls into town, gets attacked by outlaws, is insulted and the hired by the townspeople, and exacts his fiery revenge on all of them. A terrifically dark film, though not nearly as serious as Eastwood’s Unforgiven (#1, 1992), the darkest (and perhaps best) Western of them all.

7. Day For Night – I can’t really give this a fair rating, since I’ve only seen it in a old, dubbed, VHS version. Regardless, it’s a fine, if somewhat generic, movie about the making of a movie. I can’t say if this was the first of that particular genre, but off the top of my head, I can’t think of any earlier ones.

6. Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid – Director Sam Peckinpah’s version of the Billy The Kid story is the best I’ve seen, and a fine counterpart to Arthur Penn’s 1958 The Left-Handed Gun, which starred Paul Newman. This one stars Kris Kristofferson as Billy, James Coburn as Garret and, quite strangely, Bob Dylan as Alias, a quiet guy who just shows up at verious times throughout the film and doesn’t say anything. Dylan also did the score for the film, you know the song Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door? That’s from this movie. It isn’t nearly as nihilistic as Peckinpah’s earlier The Wild Bunch, but it’s still quite entertaining.

5. Enter The Dragon – Bruce Lee’s greatest film takes a little while to get going, but once the fighting starts, you’ll know what all the hubbub is about. The plot is essentially that of every fighting video game ever made: an evil rich madman holds a fighting competition, and if you lose, you die! Mmwahahaha! Bruce Lee’s good guy is there investigating as a cop or trying to avenege his brother’s death or earn money for his sick grandma or soemthing. The dubbing and cheesy sound effects haven’t aged well at all, but they do have their nostalgia value. What makes the film work, however, is Lee’s performance. There simply has never been an action star with his combination of intensity and believability. Watch quickly to see Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung in very small roles.

4. American Graffiti – If you had only seen George Lucas’s last three movies, you’d be amazed to watch this one and see that not only can he actually make movies about humans, he can even write convincing dialogue for them to speak (he did have help with the screenplay, but that didn’t help in Episodes 2 and 3). It’s a night in the life of high school kids, a familiar genre (though again, I’m not sure how familiar it was at the time), this time it’s set in the early 60s small town California childhood that Lucas experienced. It’s closest analogue is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, which is essentially the same film set 15 years later, right down to the cast of soon-to-be-famous people and immense soundtrack of period pop hits. The future stars here: Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Cindy Williams, Suzanne Somers and Harrison Ford.

3. Sleeper – In this, the greatest of Woody Allen’s pure comedies, he gets himself unfrozen at some point in the future, impersonates a robot, woos Diane Keaton and attempts to overthrow the 1984-esque dictatorship. It’s the same as his other early comedies in that the plot is but a series of setups for his one-liners and some minor slapstick. It’s the consistently high quality of those jokes that distinguishes this film from the others.

2. Badlands – Terrance Malick’s first film is, like his others, a typical genre picture that’s made transcendent by his unusual storytelling style: voiceover monologues; long, beautiful shots of nature; and slow, meditative pace. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek are terrific as the Bonnie and Clyde-esque criminal couple on the run (the story is based on the real-life exploits of Charles Starkweather). If the plot seems somewhat familiar, that because Quentin Tarantino used it as the foundation for his original screenplay of Natural Born Killers (before Oliver Stone took it over). You’ll also recognize the theme song from another film Tarantino wrote, True Romance.

1. Mean Streets – Martin Scorsese’s first big film is also my favorite of all his films. And it’s also the only one of his films to rank #1 in any year on my lists, a fact which I can’t quite believe, though I’ve checked a couple of times. It’s also the last film he co-wrote until Goodfellas in 1990, another surprising fact given how consistent Scorsese seems in examing themes of violence, guilt and redemption. Anyway, Harvey Keitel stars here as a small time hood with a crazy cousin, Robert DeNiro. The dynamic is much the same as the Liotta-Pesci and DeNiro/Pesci relationships of Goodfellas and Casino, but for the fact that DeNiro’s 100 times the actor that Joe Pesci is. Screech as he might, Pesci could never capture the laziness, the fun, the attractiveness of psychotic nihilism the way DeNiro did. Larenz Tate’s O-Dogg from Menace II Society (#7, 1993) comes pretty close though. Anyway, my favorite scene in the film, perhaps in all of Scorsese, is the scene in the pool hall. All of Tarantino can be found in that one scene, from the anarchic play of violence to the classic “What’s a mook?” self-consciously ironic dialogue.

Not so many Unseen movies this year, but still there’s some I definitely need to watch.

Scenes From A Marriage
La Maman Et La Putain
Amarcord
Papillon
The Day Of The Jackal
Serpico
Paper Moon
The Long Goodbye
The Wicker Man
Don’t Look Now
The Way We Were
Soylent Green
Westworld
Scarecrow
Bang The Drum Slowly
Flesh For Frankenstein
Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars

Lotsa movie-watching, not much blogging, not that anyone reads it anyway.

Good Night And Good Luck – A very good little film that has a very specific point to make about the state of today’s media and very little else. It’s directed with a very neat, elegant style by George Clooney. It’s going in at #8 on my 2005 Movies Of The Year list.

Why We Fight – On the other hand is the lefty polemic documentary that doesn’t so much inform as it argues, ineffectively at that. It’s better than the other recent lefty docs, excluding Michael Moore’s films, including director Jarecki’s own The Trials Of Henry Kissinger, but it’s still an exercise in preaching to the choir.

Au Hasard Balthasar – A great movie that somehow manages to convey the whole of human experience through a very simple story about a girl and her donkey. It sounds absurd, but it totally works. The second film in my Robert Bresson series, I like it a lot better than the other two I’ve seen so far.

Diary Of A Country Priest – The third Bresson in my series is my least favorite. It’s not as profound as Balthasar and lacks both the virtuoso style and sense of whimsy of Pickpocket. It’s an episodic story about how a young priest’s faith is tested by his community, which seems to hate him. There are some beautiful scenes, but the film doesn’t come together as well as those others. Next up in the Bresson series: A Man Escaped.

Solaris – Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s famously slow sci-fi film both did and did not fail to live up to the hype. The slowness of the film tends to make it seem more profound than it really is. The film’s an ode to solipsism, it proposes that human beings aren’t interesting in exploring other worlds, but only interested in recreating their own world. And concurrently, are most happy living out their own pasts in their own minds because actually connecting with other people is impossible. A ridiculously depressing theory.

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc – Still depressing but not nearly as pessimistic as Solaris is this silent film by Carl Theodor Dreyer. The story’s largely based on the transcripts of Joan’s trial, but it’s told almost entirely in stylized close-ups and totally without musical accompaniment. The performance of Maria Falconetti as Joan is remarkable, and justly famous. One of the very best silent films I’ve ever seen.

This might be the best year yet, at least the top 4 movies I’ve seen is as good as any year so far, and there’s a whole lot of movies I haven’t seen that are supposed to be really good as well.

11. The Man With The Golden Gun – Totally forgettable James Bond film from the Roger Moore years.

10. Herbie Rides Again – Mediocre sequel to The Love Bug, another movie I don’t remember much about.

9. Lenny – Dustin Hoffman gives a very good performance in this otherwise dull biopic about the influential comedian Lenny Bruce. Like most biopics, I guess, the lead performance is much better than the actual film.

8. Murder On The Orient Express – Like the other all-star Agatha Christie adaptation of the 70s (Death On The Nile, #12, 1978) this is a fine adaptation of a very good book. But it’s not really anything more than that. Once you know whodunnit, all there’s left to enjoy is trying to name all the famous people in the film since they’re significantly older than they were when they were first famous. Anyway, Sidney Lumet directs Albert Finney. Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, Martin Basalm, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark and Michael York.

7. That’s Entertainment! – Remember when sitcoms used to fill time in a season by running a show full of clips from previous episodes? Well, this is like one of those, only for MGM musicals. It’s not an especially insightful documentary., but there’s a whole lot of great sequences.

6. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore – Martin Scorsese’s follow-up to Mean Streets is a women’s melodrama that spawned a TV Series. The movie’s actually pretty good, with Ellen Burstyn playing a single mom trying to survive. Kris Kristofferson also stars, along with Diane Ladd, Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster.

5. The Parallax View – One of the more successful paranoid political thrillers. Warren Beatty stars as a journalist trying to figure out why reporters who were present during an assassination are also dying. A weird, creepy little film.

4. The Conversation – Even more paranoid is this Francis Ford Coppola film about an audio technician that can’t communicate with real people. He becomes obsessed with a conversation he was hired to record, and whether or not it’s evidence that a crime is going to be committed. Also stars John Cazale, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, and Cindy Williams. Most Coppola films are bombastic and oversized, this, however, is small and claustrophobic.

3. Celine And Julie Go Boating – A late classic of the French New Wave is this bizarre Jacques Rivette film about two women who become mixed up in a haunted house. The go in the house and become characters in a kind of 19th Century melodrama (this story within the story has a great title: Phantom Ladies Over Paris).I think it’s not available on DVD here, which is a crime.

2. Chinatown – Roman Polanski’s noir classic about how Los Angeles was turned into a major city is a little overrated, probably, but is nonetheless a great film. Jack Nicholson plays the bottom of the barrel private detective that gets mixed up in a case involving murder, missing water, Faye Dunaway, John Huston and a whole lot more. The metaphor of the title is ridiculously perfect.

1. The Godfather Part II – I’ve always preferred it to the first one, though both are great, of course, for a couple of reasons. First is the whole Robert DeNiro storyline. Not only his he great in the role, but I love the look and period detail of the Lower East Side scenes. Second is Lee Strasberg, the famous acting teacher, who plays Hyman Roth (what a name!), the Meyer Lansky based character in the other half of the film. There is, of course, so much else to love in the film: Fredo getting the kiss of death and John Cazale’s great performance, Diane Keaton being as mean as she can to her husband, and Al Pacino’s gradual transformation into truly heartless malevolence.

Like I said, there’s a lot of reportedly great movies I haven’t seen from this year:

Hearts And Minds
The Mystery Of Kaspar Hauser
Ali: Fear Eats The Soul
Young Frankenstein
Lacombe, Lucien
The Phantom Of Liberty
A Woman Under The Influence
Blazing Saddles
General Idi Amin Dada
Swept Away
Lancelot Du Lac
F For Fake
Foxy Brown
Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia
The Longest Yard
The Great Gatsby
The Towering Inferno
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Zardoz

Now that we’ve reached the present, it’s time to go back to the past and countdown the Movies Of The Year for all the years before I was born. These lists should, of course, be much smaller and easier to make. We’ll start with 1975 and work all the way back to 1895 or whatever.

9. The Rocky Horror Picture Show – I despise this movie and all of its annoying fans. One of the great joys of my career was the two years I got to spend harassing those freaks on a weekly basis.

8. Barry Lyndon – A great, fantastic looking film, as Kubrick relied only on natural and candlelight for every shot to light some very beautiful scenes. The problem is that the story’s dreadfully dull. And while the cinematography’s really cool looking, Kubrick repeats the same long zoom shots over and over again, long after we’ve gotten the point. Easily my least favorite Kubrick movie.

7. Shampoo – Warren Beatty plays a hairdresser that Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn and Lee Grant are all after as he’s trying to raise money to open his own shop on election night. It’s a fun little movie on it’s own terms, but probably pretty dated nowadays. Directed by Hal Askby (Bound For Glory, #7, 1976; Coming Home, #13, 1978; Being There, #8, 1979), and written by Beatty and Robert Towne, the guy who wrote Chinatown, Days Of Thunder (#49, 1990) and Mission: Impossible (#13, 1996).

6. Love And Death – Perhaps the most underrated of Woody Allen’s comedies is this pastiche of Russian novels and films. Allen plays, well, the Woody Allen character, this time as a Russian peasant who unwillingly “fights” in the war, tries to win the love of his cousin Sonia (Diane Keaton), and eventually tries to assassinate Napoleon. Along the way, Allen and Keaton digress into pseudodeep philosophical speculations and fascinating discussions of wheat. It was his last true comedy, unless you count his lame efforts in the late 90s, which I don’t.

5. Nashville – Another one of those movies that I need to see again. It’s a Robert Altman cast of thousands film about a political rally/concert. Some of the cast: Henry Gibson, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Karen Black, Jeff Goldblum, Scott Glenn, Shelly Duvall, and Lily Tomlin. Screenwriter Joan tewkesbury hasn;t done much else, though she did direct two episodes of “Felicity”.

4. Dog Day Afternoon – My favorite Al Pacino performance is in this based on a true story film about a totally inept bank robbery that turns into a hostage crises/farce. The great John Cazale costars, along with Chris Sarandon, Lance Henriskson, Carol Kane and Charles Durning. Directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, The Verdict (#1, 1982) and Night Falls On Manhattan (#33, 1997).

3. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Milos Forman’s classic adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel about life in a mental institution as a metaphor for, well, something or other. Jack Nicholson, at his peak, stars as the guy who fakes craziness to avoid a real jail, Louise Fltecher plays the evil bureaucrat Nurse Ratched. Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito and Scatman Crothers also star. One of only three films to win Oscars for Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay, it’s always seemed a little overrated to me.

2. Monty Python And The Holy Grail – I like The Life Of Brian (#3, 1979) better, but this is probably the funniest of the Monty Python movies. If you haven’t seen it, what the hell is wrong with you?

1. Jaws – Steven Spielberg’s adventure film is often credited with inventing the blockbuster and killing the last golden age of American art movies. Of course, neither of those things are true. It’s been so influential, it’s easy to forget how great it really is. A perfect action movie.

Some interesting Unseen movies from this year, but nothing I’m in too big a hurry to see.

Dersu Uzala
The Man Who Would Be King
Grey Gardens
Picnic At Hanging Rock
The Passenger
Cooley High
Switchblade Sisters
Master Of The Flying Guillotine
Dolemite
Farewell, My Lovely
The Day Of The Locust
The Story Of Adele H.
The Great Waldo Pepper
The Wind And The Lion
The Stepford Wives
Tommy
Rollerball
Three Days Of The Condor
Death Race 2000

Well, we’ve made it up to the present. Here’s my list for 2005, presented without comment because, well, I’ve already written about most of these movies elsewhere on the blog. As far as I can tell, it’s a complete coincidence that the top 3 movies are all about the same thing, though they each deal with their subject very differently.

38. The Legend Of Zorro
37. Fantastic Four
36. The Chronicles Of Narnia
35. Fever Pitch
34. Aeon Flux
33. The Dukes Of Hazzard
32. Cry Wolf
31. Charlie & The Chocolate Factory
30. Brothers Grimm
29. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
28. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
27. Kingdom Of Heaven
26. Land Of The Dead
25. Unleashed
24. Syriana
23. Memoirs Of A Geisha
22. War Of The Worlds
21. Mr. And Mrs. Smith
20. Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire
19. Capote
18. Batman Begins
17. The Aristocrats
16. Match Point
15. Walk The Line
14. Elizabethtown
13. Shopgirl
12. Cache
11. Broken Flowers
10. Brokeback Mountain
9. Revenge Of The Sith
8. Serenity
7. The 40 Year Old Virgin
6. No Direction Home
5. Me & You & Everyone We Know
4. The New World
3. Sin City
2. A History Of Violence
1. Munich

Still in the process of watching 2005 movies, of course. But here’s the Unseen ones as of now:

King Kong
Constant Gardener
Constantine
Wedding Crashers
The Island
Hitch
Cinderella Man
Corpse Bride
Red Eye
Flightplan
Lord Of War
Jarhead
Curse Of The Were-Rabbitt
Four Brothers
The Exorcism Of Emily Rose
March Of The Penguins
Pride & Prejudice
Rent
Good Night, And Good Luck
Dark Water
The Upside Of Anger
Sky High
The Family Stone
Domino
Murderball
Grizzly Man
The Squid & The Whale
Mirrormask
Hustle & Flow
Junebug
Coach Carter
Nine Lives
Jesus Is Magic
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
The Interpreter
The Longest Yard
The Bad News Bears
The Baxter
Breakfast On Pluto
Proof
Thumbsucker
In Her Shoes
The Ice Harvest
North Country
The World’s Fastest Indian
V For Vendetta

Well, this is definitely an improvement over 2003, though it’s helped a lot by the addition of a few films that didn’t get released in the US until 2005. But, since I’ve decided to use IMDB’s year designations for these lists, we’ll have to consider them 2004 films.

36. Jersey Girl
35. Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train
34. Outfoxed
33. Bush’s Brain
32. The Hunting Of The President
31. Crash
30. Melinda And Melinda
29. Ray
28. Win A Date With Tad Hamilton
27. Before Sunset
26. Starsky & Hutch
25. Spartan
24. Primer
23. Closer
22. Million Dollar Baby
21. Spider-Man 2
20. Garden State
19. Fahrenheit 9/11
18. The Aviator
17. In Good Company
16. I Heart Huckabees

15. Shaun Of The Dead – Very funny, and good, parody of zombie horror movies that seems to have become ridiculously overrated. I’m not exactly sure how or why that happened. Maybe it was just built up too much before I finally got around to seeing it. Maybe it also hurt that this was the first zombie movie I ever saw. It was only later I watched the four george Romero movies. That’s probably not it though; zombie movies cliches aren’t exactly obscure.

14. Napoleon Dynamite – Another very good movie that seems a little overrated, possibly because I only got around to watching it after all the hype. A lot of the seemingly disproportionate hype around this and Shaun Of The Dead probably also has a lot to do with them being such independent films: they needed the buzz to get the audience they deserved. That’s fine. I was actually pretty bored with this for long stretches, napoleon’s just such a seemingly unlikable character. But the end really makes up for everything. One of the best movie endings of the last decade, for sure.

13. Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow – A fascinating experiment that almost, but not quite, works. It’s a highly stylized homage to classic film serials that unfortunately lacks the quality of writing that allows a movie like Raiders Of the Lost Ark (#1, 1981) to transcend that limited genre. Like Sin City, the film is entirely composed of live actors acting in front of a blue screen. The first half hour or so is terrific, with giant robots attacking the big city and all, but it’s all downhill from there. Jude Law and Gwynneth Paltrow are good, but Angelina Jolie is unfortunately underused.

12. Anchorman – I think Old School (#18, 2003) was really overrated, as is Will Farrell generally. He was good on SNL, but his greatness was relative to the poor quality of the rest of the cast for most of the time he was on the show. I really liked this movie though. It’s not the best of the recent Farrell-Rudd-Vaughn-Wilson-Stiller-Carrell group of comedies, but it is very funny. I think the supporting cast is funnier though, especially Steve Carrell. The massive fight scene between the many San Diego news teams might be the best scene in any comedy of the last 10 years.

11. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind – Yet another movie I watched after everyone else and can’t figure out why is so overrated. I mean, I often see this listed around the internet as a person’s favorite movie and I just don’t see it at all. I though Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet were totally lacking in chemistry. While the film looks really good, and is possibly Charlie Kaufman’s best, most hum at least, screenplay, I really had trouble believing in the romance of it. Maybe I need to see it again.

10. Collateral – Jamie Foxx’s best performance of the year is in this Michael Mann thriller about a cab driver who’s forced to drive a hitman around LA all night. The story, especially the end, is absurd, and Tom Cruise is merely mediocre as a the killer, but Foxx’s solid performance and Mann’s stylish directing make the film worthwhile.

9. Dodgeball – This is the best of the recent Farrell-Rudd-Vaughn-Wilson-Stiller-Carrell group of comedies. Well, this or The 40 Year Old Virgin. The DVD has the real ending, which is much better than the theatrical one. The all-B-list cast includes Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Rip Torn, Stephen Root, Jason Bateman, Gary Cole, Hank Azaria, William Shatner, Lance Armstrong, Chuck Norris and David Hasselhoff.

8. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban – Directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, #24, 2001), this is the darkest Harry Potter movie thus far, at least visually speaking. It’s also the best adaptation of the books into a film. While Chris Columbus’s Sorcerer’s Stone (#3, 2001) was a charming translation of a kid’s book into a kid’s movie, Cuarón’s adaptation turns a kid’s book into a grownup movie about kids. It’s the most serious film in the series.

7. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou – I’ve decided that, with the exception of Rushmore, I probably need to see Wes Anderson’s movies more than once before I make up my mind about them. I’ve only seen this once, so I can’t be sure of this rating, though I did enjoy this movie. Anderson’s great at charming, innocent fun in the face of depression and tragedy, and this movie’s got that in spades. It’s essentially a whole bunch of screwed up people who chose to ignore reality and play instead of and as a means of dealing with, their problems. Like every one of Anderson’s films, I guess. It seemed a little too long though. Seo Jorge, one of the stars of City Of God (#2, 2002) contributes the best part of the film: acoustic, Portugese folk covers of several David Bowie songs.

6. Kill Bill Vol. 2 – There are a lot of great things about this movie, but it just doesn’t have the kinetic energy of the first one. As such it feels both too slow and too long, especially at the end and during the wedding flashback, with David Carradine’s interminable speech-making dragging the film to a dull halt. Still, there’s a whole lot to love here: every scene with Gordon Liu’s kung fu master; the great fight scene between Darryl Hannah and Uma Thurman; Michael Madsen talking to his boss at the bar he’s reduced to working; and the five-point-palm-exploding-heart technique.

5. A Very Long Engagement – Director Jean-Pierrre Jeunet and star Audrey Tautou’s follow-up to Amélie is less cute but just as good. Tautou plays a girl who relentlessly searches for her reportedly deceased fiancée after World War I. Seems he, along with four other Frenchmen were accused of cowardice and forced into the no-man’s land between trenches to be killed by the British. But, apparently, they survived. It’s a predictably beautiful film and an engrossing and thoroughly entertaining mystery. It also stars Denis Levant and Jodie Foster.

4. The Incredibles – Very stylish Pixar movie that might be a little overrated, in that I liked it a lot, but I didn’t think it was one of the best movies of the last decade or anything. Another victim of watching a movie after a yearful of hype, as I basically knew the entire story before ever watching it. Usually, I like films like that better the second time, but alas, I’ve only watched this once. The animation is really cool, though the story isn’t as clever or original as I’d heard.

3. Kung Fu Hustle – Finally musicals and Looney Tunes cartoons are fused with kung fu movies into one film in director/writer/star Stephen Chow’s follow-up to Shaolin Soccer (#9, 2001). These genres have always had a lot in common, what with Hong Kong’s love of the spectacle of human bodies in motion on the one hand and the humor of cartoonish violence on the other. The action’s directed by the great Yeun Woo-Ping, with the help of Sammo hung on a couple of scenes. Pretty much a perfect action comedy.

2. 2046 – Wong Kar-wai’s follow-up to In the Mood For Love (#4, 2000) is not really a sequel, but more of a rumination on what happens after a tragic love story ends. Tony Leung reprises his role as a writer in 1960s Hong Kong, though he’s been reduced to writing cheesy romance novels. He lives in a hotel and has become a bit of a ladies man since being rejected by Maggie Cheung at the end of the first film. He’s also a little obsessed with his successive neighbors in room 2046, a series of women he may or may not also love, a little. They’re played by Zhang Ziyi, who I believe I’ve mentioned her before, and, in her first film since lighting up Wong’s Chungking Express (#2, 1994), the singer Faye Wong. Gong Li plays another version of Maggie Cheung’s character from the first movie, and so does Maggie Cheung. And Chang Chen (from Crouching Tiger (#1, 2000) and Happy Together (#4, 1997) shows up somewhere in there as well. Intercut throughout the film are scenes from a story Leung’s character is writing, set in the year 2046, beautifully shot about a train and some androids that supposedly help people relive or get over memories that they can’t resolve. It’s a strange a beautiful film, complicated but it makes sense even if I can’t describe it intelligibly. Another movie I need to see again.

1. House Of Flying Daggers – Zhang Yimou’s follow-up to Hero (#1, 2002) is a very beautiful film, though not as formalized as that previous film. Instead of imposing a unique color scheme for each scene, the beauty comes more organically out of the setting. This makes the film look more organic, though no less pretty. The film stars Zhang Ziyi as an agent for the title rebel organization and Takeshi Kaneshiro (Chungking Express, Fallen Angels) and Andy Lau (a Cantonese pop star who appeared in Infernal Affairs and Drunken Master 2 (#12, 1994) as a couple of police out to capture the leader of her organization. Of course, none of them are quite what they seem and as the story unfolds there’s a complex sequence of double crosses, fallings in love, and doublings and mirrorings of various scenes and actions. Much like the visual style, the plot lacks the formal play of Hero, but the more traditional genre story is more satisfying in that it manages to not be an apology for totalitarianism. It was a very close call between this and 2046 for #1 movie of the year. But I’ve seen this twice, the second time just a few days ago, whereas I only saw 2046 once several months ago. It’s possible I’ll change my mind at some point in the future. Regardless, they’re both great movies. This is the third Zhang Ziyi film of the 2000s to be ranked #1 on my lists. Yeah, I’m a fan.

A fair number of Unseen movies this year. Some I really want to see, some not so much.

The World
Millions
Hellboy
Incident At Loch Ness
The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers
Troy
Passion Of The Christ
Shrek 2
The Village
Saw
The Butterfly Effect
I, Robot
Finding Neverland
Sideways
The Bourne Supremacy
Ocean’s Twelve
The Terminal
Team America: World Police
Man On Fire
Hotel Rwanda
Alexander
King Arthur
The Downfall
The Notebook
Mean Girls
The Motorcycle Diaries
The Manchurian Candidate
The Machinist
Ladykillers
Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
SuperSize Me
Kinsey
The Polar Express
Miracle
Layer Cake
Friday Night Lights
Control Room
Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence
Maria Full Of Grace
Hidalgo
What The Bleep Do We Know?
Van Helsing
Hitch
Stage Beauty
The Day After Tomorrow
The Chronicles Of Riddick
The Stepford Wives
In The Realms Of The Unreal
Catwoman
She Hate Me
Alien Vs. Predator
PS
Palindromes

Worst officiating ever.