Film Notes 2005

You'll note that there are no one-star films on the list. Actually, Decasia originally had one star, but I decided to lump it in with the two-star films. This means that I didn't see any films that lacked any redeeming value in the past nine months. There are such films out there, but I tend to avoid them pretty successfully. Next year great films will get three stars and lackluster films will get none. I plan to actually write something about the films I note, although the main list will stay on the right of the page. Since it's five titles long, every time I get through five movies, I'll hopefully post an entry with something more substantial about each one. This should motivate me to write more about movies since that's something I want to do periodically but not every time I finish watching one.

And now, on through the list. Brokeback Mountain left an unbelievable number of shots and scenes imprinted on my brain. Manohla Dargis in the NYTimes details the film's merits perfectly.

Cafe Lumiere is probably the most lyrical, visuals-over-plot film I've seen in a theater. The big screen does at least as much for something like this as for spectacles like King Kong.

Andrew Adamson directed Shrek. I think his Narnia movie is directed at the same audience. Neither delighted me.

I made a lot of notes on the themes covered in Hiroshima Mon Amour and then I lost them. They probably included destruction on macro and human scales, architecture, the facade of sanity vs. the presence of sanity, association of person and place, memory vs. dream vs. madness, among other topics.

It's possible that nothing this year, film-related or not, was more memorable than the Film Society screening of Bad Education that started in Boliou and ended in Olin.

Memorable: George Sanders as the theater critic in All About Eve, esp. his devastating scene with the titular actress Eve near the end.

Memorable: John Malkovich vs. Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons.

Memorable: The Hardacre Film Festival, incl. Riding Giants.

Claude Chabrol, in Phantom of the Cinematheque, recalling Henri Langlois's advice that a film should be significant not for its perfection, but for the unforgettable moments it creates.

Memorable: Midnight screening of Mallrats at the Uptown with Jack.

And finally, here are the lists I used to determine which films from 2005 I should get around to seeing. Individual lists were capped at around 10 and communally generated lists at 20. Each mention on each list was tallied, even though I value some more than others.

David Ansen
American Film Institute
Sight & Sound Poll
Roger Ebert
Peter Travers
Richard Schickel
Richard Corliss
Stephen Holden
Manohla Dargis
A.O. Scott
Village Voice Take 7 Poll
J. Hoberman
Dave Kehr
Kent Jones
Metacritic
Film Comment Poll (not yet)