Entertainment Weekly: LISA'S TOP TEN
LISA'S TOP TEN.(Movies/Best & Worst)(Ranking;)(A History Of Violence)(Brokeback Mountain)(The Best of Youth And lo)(King Kong)(Munich)(The World)(Me and You and Everyone We Know)(Crash)(2046)(Look at Me)(The Adventures of SharkBoy and LavaGirl in 3-D)(Derailed)(Elizabethtown)(Movie Review)
Entertainment Weekly; 12/30/2005; Schwarzbaum, Lisa
Byline: Lisa Schwarzbaum
1 A History Of Violence The quiet, crucial "a" in A History of Violence is where greatness lies. See, David Cronenberg's pared-down, free-range masterpiece--part B-movie Western, part adaptation of a graphic novel, part resonant cultural stock-taking--doesn't style itself as a big, definitive chronicle of man's inhumanity to man. It doesn't shout, or proclaim, or, for that matter, murmur suggestively that its heart is with the art-house crowd. No, the story of Indiana diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), who loves his wife and kids, loves his life and town, serves his neighbors, and pays his taxes, is just one modest example of how precariously one modest guy's peaceable nature presides over his darker side. A couple of gun-waving criminals burst into his diner, he protects his clientele, dispatches the bad guys, and is hailed by the media as a hero and--bang!--a couple of different bad guys show up claiming Tom as one of their clan, a Mafia killer named Joey. This is not Tom's beautiful life! How did he get here? Is this the American way? A History of Violence is a symphony of economy, control, and brilliant misdirection: Every shot matters, every shading of emotion (from a uniformly superb cast, including Mortensen, in a revelatory performance, and Maria Bello as his wife) is in the service of a mood, a feeling, a sense of interior psychological polarization that is Cronenberg's mesmerizing specialty. Right to the last shot, this thrilling, hardheaded work refuses to draw conclusions. But I'll draw one: This is the best movie of the year.
2 Brokeback Mountain The word gay isn't quite right, since the passionate romantic and sexual relationship between the two young men in Ang Lee's elegiac, revolutionary Hollywood love story is rooted in a sensibility that predates such cosmopolitan sexual discussion. The word cowboy isn't quite right either, since Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, the lovers played so hauntingly by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, are really more like no-account Wyoming sheepherders wearing movie-cowboy Stetsons when they first fall in love atop the big-sky privacy of Brokeback Mountain. But sure, feel free to call Brokeback Mountain the great must-see "gay cowboy" movie, since the picture defies narrowness of definition (and, for that matter, target audience) anyhow. Which is exactly its power and glory. Brokeback is precise about time and place--every detail matters in the spare telling, the ardent performances. But it's profound and expansive about what love means to two good men who have no idea what to do with private happiness that has no outlet in public, down off that mountain.
3 The Best of Youth And lo, the most absorbing, profoundly satisfying marathon movie experience of the year was a six-hour Italian TV miniseries, released here theatrically in two juicy three-hour portions. The story of Nicola and Matteo Carati begins in 1966 when the Turin-born brothers are just entering adulthood, and continues for 40 years--four decades of convulsive social, cultural, and political change, embodied in the twined lives of these vivid characters, their friends, and family. It's the Carati Saga--satisfying as a fat novel, piquant as a soap opera, and instantly engrossing. Unintended good news for the millions who missed the show in theaters: The DVD release scheduled for early next year promises the unparalleled pleasure of bunkering at home for all six hours at a gulp.
4 King Kong On the other hand, here's one meant to be seen right now, on a giant screen, with a giant audience, for maximum enjoyment of Peter Jackson's outsize filmboy moviemaking talents. With a giddy delight in his own prowess as the new reigning wizard of epic storytelling in an age of CGI, Jackson and his collaborators retell the famous tale of hairy ape and dainty blondie not only as an homage to the 1933 original, and not only as a love affair between a beauty and the beast she loves, but also as a mash note to moviemaking itself. (Naomi Watts, a radiant heartbreaker, mixes the softness of an old-fashioned movie star with the self-confident intelligence of a more modern role model.) This colossal Kong wears its jumbo three-hour running time with glee, wit, and affection, ever mindful that it don't mean a CGI thing if it ain't got that emotional swing.
5 Munich The resounding achievement of Steven Spielberg's taut, rewardingly adult political thriller about the aftermath of the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics is the determination not to make anything easy for anyone: not for audiences, not for partisans of one political point of view or another, and certainly not for the men assigned, via the highest reaches of the Israeli government (according to secret information impossible to corroborate), to avenge those deaths. Munich is about what happened back then, of course, but the rigor and persistence of its inquiries lead directly to the kind of world we live in now. With passion, fierce intelligence, a mature tolerance for ambiguity, and a one-two punch of visual muscle from Spielberg and verbal sinew from Tony Kushner, Munich lets no one off the hook as it examines the eternally escalating price of revenge.
6 The World The title of Jia Zhangke's deliciously heartbreaking, deadpan parable about cultural dislocation and the discontents of Westernization in present-day China is a specimen of irony. The microcosm in which his computer-literate, cell-phone-addicted, plugged-in young people don't quite plug in to one another is indeed called The World, a real-life Beijing theme park where many of the planet's most famous man-made attractions have been scaled down and reproduced, a kind of Chinese Epcot Center. A tour guide proudly points out America has lost its Twin Towers, but they still have theirs, oblivious to the bubble-like conditions in which all the young employees working as guides and guards and performers are losing their own cultural identity. The World is slow and long...rather like the world.
7 Me and You and Everyone We Know The danger in thumping for a work as small, personal, and evanescent as Miranda July's lovely, utterly original, elementally feminine video creation is that when promoted to 10 Best-ness, the movie looks so very...small. But upon second viewing, the charms of Me and You and Everyone We Know's oddball originality flutter just as brightly. The bits-and-pieces structure, the collage approach to dramatizing the possibilities and limitations of communication in a digital age, the use of a little boy unwittingly engaged in a poop-filled, dirty online conversation with a grown woman, the lurching not-quite-connection between the fringy artist-woman played by July and the weird shoe salesman played by John Hawkes--it all works. July's sensibilities aren't for everyone, but that's exactly what I love in an art pic: Her art is for her. And hooray, it speaks to me, too.
8 Crash In the car culture of Los Angeles--so dependent on every vehicle obeying the rules as strangers whiz by one another, so vulnerable to disaster if the pattern gets snarled--writer-director Paul Haggis has found an inspired metaphor with which to explore a modern-day L.A. snarl of race, class, and culture. The interlocking stories he tells pile up with raw, almost sickening power--Korean versus black, black versus white, Anglo versus Latino, on and on into the Southern California night. People don't do the right thing in this smashup; they tend instead to assume the worst about one another and cause those wishes to come true. And yet there's something cleansing and seriously optimistic about the way Crash lays out the wreckage, then suggests a way to get back on the road.
9 2046 Nobody does it like Wong Kar-Wai--the achingly sensual imagery devoted to love that never quite works out right, the breathtaking compositions built like shrines to an impossible notion of romance. 2046 takes up where In the Mood for Love left off, in a past-and-futuristic miasma of yearning, regret, loss, and gorgeous people gorgeously dressed. (Here's all the passion Ziyi Zhang couldn't muster in Memoirs of a Geisha.) Part erotic sci-fi fantasy, part longing for a vanished era of mournful rakes and lonely ladies of the night, 2046 isn't a story to follow so much as a pool of movie beauty in which to submerge.
10 Look at Me There are those who hear echoes of Woody Allen in Agnes Jaoui's marvelous, sharp-witted social satire Look at Me, but I'm not one of them. Certainly, the glitteringly perceptive filmmaker observes striving, hypocrisy, and unanswered need among the haute-cultured set with the kind of familiarity Allen brings to his urban drawing-room comedy psychodramas. And heaven knows she has sharp ears for smart-set talk at its most self-incriminating. But what's inimitably soft, personal, and anti-Allen about Look at Me is the filmmaker's empathy for even the worst poseur in this expertly shaped drama built on the gaps between facade and reality.
The Worst
1 Chicken Little The standards are falling! The standards are falling! In creating its first completely CG family-oriented blockbuster, Disney put all its eggs in one basket: Technological Sophistication. That left nothing for the basket marked Charming Originality. As a result, the thousands of computerized feathers in this witless takeoff on the famous fable look fluffy, but the story is trite, the characters imitative, and the many references to other cooler, more successful expressions of pop culture are presumptuous. What a turkey.
2 Elizabethtown Pop songs. Lots of songs. So many songs in so self-indulgent a movie. So many blank stares from Orlando Bloom as a character who learns unexceptional lessons about family and forgiveness. Hey, here's an idea, rather than sitting through someone else's slow-moving road trip to adulthood, why not make a mixtape, get in a car, and take your own?
3 Stay What's real? What's present? What's past? Who's dead? Who's alive? Why is Ewan McGregor wearing high-water pants in this impenetrable puzzle picture? And why, unlike with Memento, don't we care?
4 Derailed Nothing derails a thriller like thrills that are evident miles down the track. This nasty little exercise in escalating preposterousness begins with Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen falling for each other as strangers on a train (I can't even imagine them as Friends), then careers toward a plot twist we already guessed at as the train was pulling out of the station.
5 The Adventures of SharkBoy and LavaGirl in 3-D It's cool to collaborate on a comic-book- superhero home-movie project with your kid, especially if you're pretty good at digital moviemaking: You're a hero of a dad! It's not so cool to peddle that home-movie project--so clunky, so slight of story--as a commercial movie deserving of other kids' allowance money.
[BOX:]
Readers' Choice
What was the best film of the year (in wide release before Dec. 8)?
56% Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
14% Batman Begins
13% Walk the Line
10% Wedding Crashers
7% Cinderella Man
COPYRIGHT 2005 Time, Inc.
personally I loved Elizabethtown - I don't see why so many people hated it and it wasn't just cause Orli was in it and I do think that HOV is phenomenal - I just don't think I can watch that one multiple times and I think Goblet of Fire is definitely one of the BEST films of the year... jmnsho....
Entertainment Weekly; 12/30/2005; Schwarzbaum, Lisa
Byline: Lisa Schwarzbaum
1 A History Of Violence The quiet, crucial "a" in A History of Violence is where greatness lies. See, David Cronenberg's pared-down, free-range masterpiece--part B-movie Western, part adaptation of a graphic novel, part resonant cultural stock-taking--doesn't style itself as a big, definitive chronicle of man's inhumanity to man. It doesn't shout, or proclaim, or, for that matter, murmur suggestively that its heart is with the art-house crowd. No, the story of Indiana diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), who loves his wife and kids, loves his life and town, serves his neighbors, and pays his taxes, is just one modest example of how precariously one modest guy's peaceable nature presides over his darker side. A couple of gun-waving criminals burst into his diner, he protects his clientele, dispatches the bad guys, and is hailed by the media as a hero and--bang!--a couple of different bad guys show up claiming Tom as one of their clan, a Mafia killer named Joey. This is not Tom's beautiful life! How did he get here? Is this the American way? A History of Violence is a symphony of economy, control, and brilliant misdirection: Every shot matters, every shading of emotion (from a uniformly superb cast, including Mortensen, in a revelatory performance, and Maria Bello as his wife) is in the service of a mood, a feeling, a sense of interior psychological polarization that is Cronenberg's mesmerizing specialty. Right to the last shot, this thrilling, hardheaded work refuses to draw conclusions. But I'll draw one: This is the best movie of the year.
2 Brokeback Mountain The word gay isn't quite right, since the passionate romantic and sexual relationship between the two young men in Ang Lee's elegiac, revolutionary Hollywood love story is rooted in a sensibility that predates such cosmopolitan sexual discussion. The word cowboy isn't quite right either, since Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, the lovers played so hauntingly by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, are really more like no-account Wyoming sheepherders wearing movie-cowboy Stetsons when they first fall in love atop the big-sky privacy of Brokeback Mountain. But sure, feel free to call Brokeback Mountain the great must-see "gay cowboy" movie, since the picture defies narrowness of definition (and, for that matter, target audience) anyhow. Which is exactly its power and glory. Brokeback is precise about time and place--every detail matters in the spare telling, the ardent performances. But it's profound and expansive about what love means to two good men who have no idea what to do with private happiness that has no outlet in public, down off that mountain.
3 The Best of Youth And lo, the most absorbing, profoundly satisfying marathon movie experience of the year was a six-hour Italian TV miniseries, released here theatrically in two juicy three-hour portions. The story of Nicola and Matteo Carati begins in 1966 when the Turin-born brothers are just entering adulthood, and continues for 40 years--four decades of convulsive social, cultural, and political change, embodied in the twined lives of these vivid characters, their friends, and family. It's the Carati Saga--satisfying as a fat novel, piquant as a soap opera, and instantly engrossing. Unintended good news for the millions who missed the show in theaters: The DVD release scheduled for early next year promises the unparalleled pleasure of bunkering at home for all six hours at a gulp.
4 King Kong On the other hand, here's one meant to be seen right now, on a giant screen, with a giant audience, for maximum enjoyment of Peter Jackson's outsize filmboy moviemaking talents. With a giddy delight in his own prowess as the new reigning wizard of epic storytelling in an age of CGI, Jackson and his collaborators retell the famous tale of hairy ape and dainty blondie not only as an homage to the 1933 original, and not only as a love affair between a beauty and the beast she loves, but also as a mash note to moviemaking itself. (Naomi Watts, a radiant heartbreaker, mixes the softness of an old-fashioned movie star with the self-confident intelligence of a more modern role model.) This colossal Kong wears its jumbo three-hour running time with glee, wit, and affection, ever mindful that it don't mean a CGI thing if it ain't got that emotional swing.
5 Munich The resounding achievement of Steven Spielberg's taut, rewardingly adult political thriller about the aftermath of the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics is the determination not to make anything easy for anyone: not for audiences, not for partisans of one political point of view or another, and certainly not for the men assigned, via the highest reaches of the Israeli government (according to secret information impossible to corroborate), to avenge those deaths. Munich is about what happened back then, of course, but the rigor and persistence of its inquiries lead directly to the kind of world we live in now. With passion, fierce intelligence, a mature tolerance for ambiguity, and a one-two punch of visual muscle from Spielberg and verbal sinew from Tony Kushner, Munich lets no one off the hook as it examines the eternally escalating price of revenge.
6 The World The title of Jia Zhangke's deliciously heartbreaking, deadpan parable about cultural dislocation and the discontents of Westernization in present-day China is a specimen of irony. The microcosm in which his computer-literate, cell-phone-addicted, plugged-in young people don't quite plug in to one another is indeed called The World, a real-life Beijing theme park where many of the planet's most famous man-made attractions have been scaled down and reproduced, a kind of Chinese Epcot Center. A tour guide proudly points out America has lost its Twin Towers, but they still have theirs, oblivious to the bubble-like conditions in which all the young employees working as guides and guards and performers are losing their own cultural identity. The World is slow and long...rather like the world.
7 Me and You and Everyone We Know The danger in thumping for a work as small, personal, and evanescent as Miranda July's lovely, utterly original, elementally feminine video creation is that when promoted to 10 Best-ness, the movie looks so very...small. But upon second viewing, the charms of Me and You and Everyone We Know's oddball originality flutter just as brightly. The bits-and-pieces structure, the collage approach to dramatizing the possibilities and limitations of communication in a digital age, the use of a little boy unwittingly engaged in a poop-filled, dirty online conversation with a grown woman, the lurching not-quite-connection between the fringy artist-woman played by July and the weird shoe salesman played by John Hawkes--it all works. July's sensibilities aren't for everyone, but that's exactly what I love in an art pic: Her art is for her. And hooray, it speaks to me, too.
8 Crash In the car culture of Los Angeles--so dependent on every vehicle obeying the rules as strangers whiz by one another, so vulnerable to disaster if the pattern gets snarled--writer-director Paul Haggis has found an inspired metaphor with which to explore a modern-day L.A. snarl of race, class, and culture. The interlocking stories he tells pile up with raw, almost sickening power--Korean versus black, black versus white, Anglo versus Latino, on and on into the Southern California night. People don't do the right thing in this smashup; they tend instead to assume the worst about one another and cause those wishes to come true. And yet there's something cleansing and seriously optimistic about the way Crash lays out the wreckage, then suggests a way to get back on the road.
9 2046 Nobody does it like Wong Kar-Wai--the achingly sensual imagery devoted to love that never quite works out right, the breathtaking compositions built like shrines to an impossible notion of romance. 2046 takes up where In the Mood for Love left off, in a past-and-futuristic miasma of yearning, regret, loss, and gorgeous people gorgeously dressed. (Here's all the passion Ziyi Zhang couldn't muster in Memoirs of a Geisha.) Part erotic sci-fi fantasy, part longing for a vanished era of mournful rakes and lonely ladies of the night, 2046 isn't a story to follow so much as a pool of movie beauty in which to submerge.
10 Look at Me There are those who hear echoes of Woody Allen in Agnes Jaoui's marvelous, sharp-witted social satire Look at Me, but I'm not one of them. Certainly, the glitteringly perceptive filmmaker observes striving, hypocrisy, and unanswered need among the haute-cultured set with the kind of familiarity Allen brings to his urban drawing-room comedy psychodramas. And heaven knows she has sharp ears for smart-set talk at its most self-incriminating. But what's inimitably soft, personal, and anti-Allen about Look at Me is the filmmaker's empathy for even the worst poseur in this expertly shaped drama built on the gaps between facade and reality.
The Worst
1 Chicken Little The standards are falling! The standards are falling! In creating its first completely CG family-oriented blockbuster, Disney put all its eggs in one basket: Technological Sophistication. That left nothing for the basket marked Charming Originality. As a result, the thousands of computerized feathers in this witless takeoff on the famous fable look fluffy, but the story is trite, the characters imitative, and the many references to other cooler, more successful expressions of pop culture are presumptuous. What a turkey.
2 Elizabethtown Pop songs. Lots of songs. So many songs in so self-indulgent a movie. So many blank stares from Orlando Bloom as a character who learns unexceptional lessons about family and forgiveness. Hey, here's an idea, rather than sitting through someone else's slow-moving road trip to adulthood, why not make a mixtape, get in a car, and take your own?
3 Stay What's real? What's present? What's past? Who's dead? Who's alive? Why is Ewan McGregor wearing high-water pants in this impenetrable puzzle picture? And why, unlike with Memento, don't we care?
4 Derailed Nothing derails a thriller like thrills that are evident miles down the track. This nasty little exercise in escalating preposterousness begins with Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen falling for each other as strangers on a train (I can't even imagine them as Friends), then careers toward a plot twist we already guessed at as the train was pulling out of the station.
5 The Adventures of SharkBoy and LavaGirl in 3-D It's cool to collaborate on a comic-book- superhero home-movie project with your kid, especially if you're pretty good at digital moviemaking: You're a hero of a dad! It's not so cool to peddle that home-movie project--so clunky, so slight of story--as a commercial movie deserving of other kids' allowance money.
[BOX:]
Readers' Choice
What was the best film of the year (in wide release before Dec. 8)?
56% Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
14% Batman Begins
13% Walk the Line
10% Wedding Crashers
7% Cinderella Man
COPYRIGHT 2005 Time, Inc.
personally I loved Elizabethtown - I don't see why so many people hated it and it wasn't just cause Orli was in it and I do think that HOV is phenomenal - I just don't think I can watch that one multiple times and I think Goblet of Fire is definitely one of the BEST films of the year... jmnsho....