Face it, as fun as 10-best lists may be, they’re really just opinionated tip sheets for the awards season. They don’t necessarily capture the way many of us remember the movies. So here is a different version of the year in motion pictures from one popcorn muncher to another.
The Ballad of the Box Office Blues: If readers’ e-mails are any indication, everyone from studio heads to folks no longer willing to pay the price of the ticket have a theory about why 2005’s box office was a disaster. Some of the best minds, however, are taking a step back to wonder “How bad was it really?” And for the really skeptical among us, there’s always the quandary: What exactly is the correlation between box office and quality (see next item). Global warming has more doubters than the notion that Hollywood’s sky is tumbling. Given that the evidence is far fuzzier (how do you factor in all that DVD revenue?) and almost entirely from industry handwringers, don’t pull out your hankies just yet.
When good box office happens to bad (OK, mediocre) movies: Coming in at No.3, “War of the Worlds”; No.11, the remake of “The Longest Yard”; No.16, “The Pacifier”; No.18, “Flightplan”; No.21, “Monster-in-Law”; No.22, “Are We There Yet?”
In the “We have nobody to blame but ourselves” category: Buying a ticket is the movie’s equivalent of voting. So here are a few of the good candidates studios ran that audiences didn’t come out for. “Cinderella Man”: Russell Crowe’s boorish antics didn’t help this beautiful dirge, but Ron Howard’s movie was soulful entertainment. “In Her Shoes”: Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette play two sisters from Philadelphia, but it’s the movie’s journey to Shirley
MacLaine’s character’s condo in a Florida retirement community that was as endearing as it was spot on about intergenerational tangos. “Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story”: Turns out that animals and kids aren’t the draw they once were. Writer-director John Gatins reined in, then let loose, our emotions like the best jockey with his story about a hobbled horse and a family in need of rehabilitation.
The worst movie I dodged: No critic should slam a film they haven’t watched. But what the heck. The the trailer for “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” was punishment enough.
The worst movie I couldn’t avoid: When a fellow moviegoer leaned over during “The Fog’s” closing credits and said, “Now, don’t you want your money back?” I felt guilty. Critics should have to take the hit too, if only to feel the sting at picking the wrong thing on a Friday night. Money-back contenders abound: “The Pacifier,” “Are We There Yet,” “Miss Congeniality 2.”
The defense rests: 2005 will go down as the year Terrence Howard acted like a tenacious attorney. Actually, lawyer is the only role the 35-year-old actor didn’t play. Exhibit A: His turn as a Memphis pimp aching to be a rapper in “Hustle & Flow.” Exhibit B: His tormented television exec in “Crash.” Exhibits C, D, and E: magnetic character portraits in “Lackawanna Blues,” “Four Brothers,” “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.”
Saint Joan of Arch: Joan Allen’s edgy performance in the serrated comedy “The Upside of Anger” is a feat to behold. It wasn’t simply her jilted character’s raging narcissism that commanded everyone’s attention in the movie. Allen got to the rended heart of the movie’s humor without ever winking.
A star is airborne: Wes Craven’s “Red Eye” isn’t exactly long-haul entertainment, but the suspenseful flight rode on Rachel McAdams’ (“Mean Girls” “The Notebook”) appealing performance. In an interview with The Denver Post, the director likened his lead to an actor he’s worked with in 1999 – someone by the name of Meryl Streep. We don’t know about that, but McAdams hints at interesting destinations to come.
The great states of Dakota – Fanning, that is: The wee star with the alert eyes played daughter to two daddies this year and stared down two different disasters. One came from aliens in “War of the World,” starring Tom Cruise. The other – more harrowing and true – was brought on by near economic collapse of a family’s farm in “Dreamer,” starring Kurt Russell. As different as these flicks and her duties were, one thing remained constant: pound for pound Fanning was a more expressive presence than her elders.
Stop thief!: There should be a nicer phrase for scene-stealing performances. After all, if it’s one like Norman Lloyd’s in “In Her Shoes,” then it’s an example of exquisite collaboration. Lloyd plays the bed-ridden, blind professor who helps Cameron Diaz’s learning-phobic character read. His is the sort of moment that makes you feel nostalgic for your best teach. It also forces a “who is that guy?” search. Two of the films this “unknown” has been in: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” (1945) and “Saboteur” (1942)
Going long: It was a year when directors made it far too easy to mourn the never-to-be-recovered minutes their movies stole from us. Here’s a short list of some too long flicks: “Batman Begins,” “Wedding Crashers,” and, yes, “King Kong.” How, then, to explain that Marco Tullio Giordana’s family saga as national melodrama “The Best of Youth,” earned every minute of its two-part, six-hour running time? We’d undertake that sojourn again in a heartbeat.
The soundtrack that kept thumping after the movie faded to black: The two-disc album for “It’s All Gone Pete Tong,” about a deaf club DJ has been in the car’s CD changer since May, when the movie came and went.
Not quite Aaron Copland’s America: The mournful lilt of a French horn signals the oh-so- telling Americana ambitions of Howard Shore’s score for David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence.” Shore’s restraint only underscores how bizarre, graphic (and contradictory) our relationship to movie violence can be.
The Tim Conway-Harvey Corman Award for on-camera giggles: It was real. It was ugly. It was real ugly. When that nice salon attendant rips the hair off Steve Carell’s character in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” we know we’re watching documentary. The dead giveaway? Actor Paul Rudd’s barely suppressed (albeit appalled) laughter.
This year’s “What was I thinking review?”: What to do when a director is so fluid in cinema’s many dialects that his average movies are better than other filmmakers’ bests? Such is the case with Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds.” Blinded by the craft of the opening act, I ignored writer David Koepp’s thudding script and the steadily belittling drama of one family’s plight in a global catastrophe. Runner-up, yet even more humiliating: “Stealth’s” three stars. Let ’80s rockers Gang of Four sum up my sorry excuse: “I love a man (and a woman) in a uniform.”
