Friday, December 30, 2005

My Favorite Flicks in 2005



Anyone that knows me knows that I am a movie and documentary-aholic. These were my 10 favorite flicks of the year. Some of them were released prior to 2005 but I just got around to seeing them this year. Each and everyone one of them provoked chills, tears, and discussions. Hope you take the time to check them out. The plot outlines are courtesy of rottentomatoes.com

SAW 2: In SAW, a huge horror hit in 2004, a masked man called Jigsaw orchestrated the kidnapping of two people, chained them in a disgusting bathroom in an abandoned house, and played vicious, brutal mind games with them that potentially could lead to their freedom. Jigsaw is back for more gory fun in SAW II, but this time he comes out from behind the mask to terrorize a troubled cop face-to-face. Tobin Bell reprises his brief role as Jigsaw in the first film with a major starring turn in the sequel. Dying of cancer, Jigsaw lets himself get caught, only to show Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) that his son, Daniel (Erik Knudsen), has been taken hostage with seven other people, all of whom have been placed in a house of horrors with only the slimmest chance of escaping with their lives. Jigsaw promises Matthews that Daniel will live only if the cop follows the rules of the game, but time is running out, as the captives' bodies have been poisoned with a toxin that will soon destroy them. Meanwhile, in the dank, mysterious, booby-trapped house, the ever-more-desperate group of people (including Shawnee Smith, who is back as Amanda, the lone survivor of SAW) furiously try to find their connection to each other and a way out, but blood and violence lie in their path. Like its predecessor, SAW II is a frightening thriller filled with plenty of tricks and treats to satisfy even the most jaded horror fan.


YELLOW ASPHALT:One of the main characters in Israeli filmmaker Danny Vereté's documentary-like first feature, YELLOW ASPHALT, is the cruel Negev desert landscape. The film is a triptych examining collisions between Bedouin tribes and their Israeli neighbors. In BLACK SPOT, an oil tanker speeding down a desert highway hits a Bedouin child. When the drivers (Zevik Raz and Moshe Ivgi) frantically try to hide the dead boy, they are discovered. A standoff ensues between the unapologetic Israelis and the threatening Bedouin tribesman, while the child's mother wails in a heap of black burqua on the sand. In HERE IS NOT THERE, tribal elders refuse to let Tamam (Tatjana Blacher), a German woman with blue, made-up eyes behind a veil, leave her Bedouin husband, so she steals away in the night. Tamam recalls happier times while desperately dragging her crying daughters through the desert, and her vengeful husband hunts them down. Finally, in RED ROOFS, when the affair between a married Israeli farmer, Shmuel (Motti Katz), and his Bedouin maid, Suhilla (Raida Adon), is discovered by the tribe, death and dishonor touch all involved. Vereté's film is an unflinching portrait of oppression and the precarious intermingling of ancient customs and the modern world.



OSAMA:A 12-year-old girl, her mother, and a local village boy narrowly survive the brutal end of a peaceful demonstration organized by women who are oppressed by the cruel Taliban regime. After witnessing such inhumane treatment, the mother is reminded of her own hardships as she and her daughter struggle to maintain their existence. With the young girl's father and brother killed, they must find any source of income they can while hiding it from the strict Taliban, which mandates that no woman may work or be outside the home without a legal male companion.

The mother and her daughter care for patients at a sparse, under-stocked hospital run by foreigners. After a Taliban raid, the hospital is shut down and the mother and daughter are without income. Desperate for any type of job, the mother is forced to cut her daughter's hair and dress her as a boy so that she might earn money for the family.

The mother pleads with a grocer who knew her husband to help her and hire the young girl to work in his store. He agrees and attempts to protect the girl - now disguised as a boy - and teach her how to be more convincing. One afternoon, the Taliban's religious police force all the men to a mosque for prayer. The girl, unfamiliar with the ways men pray, makes several mistakes and raises suspicion with one of the Taliban officials overseeing the ritual. He approaches the grocer and the girl after the prayers and questions them. The girl is filled with fright, but with the grocer's help dispels the official's doubt.

The following day, all the boys of the village are corralled and taken to the Madrassa, a religious school which doubles as a center for Taliban military training. While attending the school, the girl's masculinity is constantly called into question. The young village beggar from the first scene, aware of the girl's secret, interjects and helps her, concealing her true identity by declaring her name is Osama.

After increasing suspicions surface with the students and Taliban instructors, the girl is punished for not being able to complete a task proving her masculinity. In the end, the girl's own physiology defies her to reveal her true identity.

As a result of her monumental lie, she is put on trial in front of the Taliban court and sentenced to marry an old Mullah. Upon arriving at his home, the destitute girl discovers he has three other wives - and she's forced to join them in their miserable world.


I loved the following flick so much it inspired a discussion amongst friends and I, and a posting in this blog entitled Two Months To Live pt2


MY LIFE WITHOUT ME:Ann is 23, she has 2 daughters, a husband who spends more time unemployed than working, a mother who hates the world, a father who has spent the last ten years in jail, a strange predilection for the audio-books of soap operas and a job as a night janitor in a university she could never go to in the dayime. They live in a trailer on the yard of her mother’s house, on the outskirts of Vancouver. However, this gray existence changes completely when, after a medical check-up, a shy doctor tells her that she has very little time left, hardly two months to live. Ann decides to keep her condition a secret, not to tell anybody, not even her husband. She doesn't want people around her with long faces mumbling the word "death." She starts to make a list of "things to do before dying" which she completes little by little. The list goes from "saying exactly what I think" to "getting fake fingernails." Unexpectedly, Ann discovers an appetite for life that drives her to live her last days with a sensual and furious intensity she had not known before. During that time she prepares her daughters life without her, meets a solitary wounded man who she seduces (and paradoxically brings back to life), and faces what remains of her life with a courage she never knew she had.



THE BEAT MY HEART SKIPPED:Director Jacques Audiard and screenwriter Tonino Benacquista, who shared a 2002 Cesar Award for Best Original Screenplay for READ MY LIPS, team up again in THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, a gritty psychological drama set in the dark, dank streets of Paris. The film is based on James Toback's cult favorite FINGERS, in which Harvey Keitel played a tortured soul trapped between his love of the piano and his involvement with the mob. In this remake, Romain Duris stars as Tom, a ne-'er-do-well who works with two scheming real estate men, Fabrice (Jonathan Zaccai) and Sami (Gilles Cohen), who have little or no morals. When Tom sees his mother's old agent, he decides to return to the piano, practicing Bach's Toccata in E Minor for an important audition that he envisions could be a life-changing event. He hires a Vietnamese woman, Miao-Lin (Linh-Dan Pham), as his teacher, even though they speak different languages. While struggling to regain his mastery of the piano -- which he gave up after his virtuoso mother's tragic death -- he is called upon by his partners to participate in shady deals and even help one of them cheat on his wife (Aure Atika). He also has a troublesome relationship with his father (Niels Arestrup), who asks Tom to collect money he is owed, putting him in dangerous situations. THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED is an intelligent, involving film, told in long takes with a handheld camera to heighten the emotional impact of scene after scene.




CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: Acclaimed director Tim Burton brings his vividly imaginative style to the beloved Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, about eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka (JOHNNY DEPP) and Charlie Bucket (FREDDIE HIGHMORE), a good-hearted boy from a poor family who lives in the shadow of Wonka's extraordinary factory.

Most nights in the Bucket home, dinner is a watered-down bowl of cabbage soup, which young Charlie gladly shares with his mother (HELENA BONHAM CARTER) and father (NOAH TAYLOR) and both pairs of grandparents. Theirs is a tiny, tumbledown, drafty old house but it is filled with love. Every night, the last thing Charlie sees from his window is the great factory, and he drifts off to sleep dreaming about what might be inside.

For nearly fifteen years, no one has seen a single worker going in or coming out of the factory, or caught a glimpse of Willy Wonka himself, yet, mysteriously, great quantities of chocolate are still being made and shipped to shops all over the world.

One day Willy Wonka makes a momentous announcement. He will open his famous factory and reveal "all of its secrets and magic" to five lucky children who find golden tickets hidden inside five randomly selected Wonka chocolate bars.

Nothing would make Charlie's family happier than to see him win but the odds are very much against him as they can only afford to buy one chocolate bar a year, for his birthday.

Indeed, one by one, news breaks around the world about the children finding golden tickets and Charlie's hope grows dimmer. First there is gluttonous Augustus Gloop, who thinks of nothing but stuffing sweets into his mouth all day, followed by spoiled Veruca Salt, who throws fits if her father doesn't buy her everything she wants. Next comes Violet Beauregarde, a champion gum chewer who cares only for the trophies in her display case, and finally surly Mike Teavee, who's always showing off how much smarter he is than everyone else.

But then, something wonderful happens. Charlie finds some money on the snowy street and takes it to the nearest store for a Wonka Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, thinking only of how hungry he is and how good it will taste. There, under the wrapper is a flash of gold. It's the last ticket. Charlie is going to the factory! His Grandpa Joe (DAVID KELLY) is so excited by the news that he springs out of bed as if suddenly years younger, remembering a happier time when he used to work in the factory, before Willy Wonka closed its gates to the town forever. The family decides that Grandpa Joe should be the one to accompany Charlie on this once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

Once inside, Charlie is dazzled by one amazing sight after another. Wondrous gleaming contraptions of Wonka's own invention churn, pop and whistle, producing ever new and different edible delights. Crews of merry Oompa-Loompas mine mountains of fudge beside a frothy chocolate waterfall or ride a translucent, spun-sugar, dragon-headed boat down a chocolate river past crops of twisted candy cane trees and edible mint-sugar grass.

Marshmallow cherry creams grow on shrubs, ripe and sweet. Elsewhere, a hundred trained squirrels on a hundred tiny stools shell nuts for chocolate bars faster than any machine and Wonka himself pilots an impossible glass elevator that rockets sideways, slantways and every which way you can think of through the vast and fantastic factory.

Almost as intriguing as his fanciful inventions is Willy Wonka himself, a gracious but most unconventional host. He thinks about almost nothing but candy - except, every once in a while, when he suddenly seems to be thinking about something that happened long ago, that he can't quite talk about. It's been said that Wonka hasn't stepped outside the factory for years. Who he truly is and why he has devoted his life to making sweets Charlie can only guess.

Meanwhile, the other children prove to be a rotten bunch, so consumed with themselves that they scarcely appreciate the wonder of Wonka's creations. One by one, their greedy, spoiled, mean-spirited or know-it-all personalities lead them into all kinds of trouble that force them off the tour before it's even finished.

When only little Charlie Bucket is left, Willy Wonka reveals the final secret, the absolute grandest prize of all: the keys to the factory itself. Long isolated from his own family, Wonka feels it is time to find an heir to his candy empire, someone he can trust to carry on with his life's work and so he devised this elaborate contest to select that one special child.

What he never expects is that his act of immeasurable generosity might bring him an even more valuable gift in return.



CRY WOLF :In the new thriller Cry_Wolf, eight unsuspecting high school seniors playing a game of lies come face-to-face with terror and learn that nobody believes a liar…even when they're telling the truth.

After one too many incidents of bad behavior at his last school, Owen Matthews (Julian Morris) arrives at Westlake Prep – where a young woman has recently been found murdered in the dark woods near the boarding school's campus. Owen quickly falls in with the school's unofficial "liar's club," including the beautiful and savvy Dodger (Lindy Booth of Dawn of the Dead and Wrong Turn) and quick-talking, short-tempered Tom (Jared Padalecki of the new television series Supernatural). At Owen's suggestion, his new friends decide to expand their game's reach beyond campus, by spreading an online rumor that a serial killer called "The Wolf" committed the recent murder and is planning to strike again.

The mischievous group's descriptions of "The Wolf's" intended victims are based on the people they know best – each other. Only when the school's journalism teacher, Rich Walker (Jon Bon Jovi), warns the group about the kinds of predators that lurk on the internet does Owen begin to regret sending their falsified story into cyberspace. When the described "victims" suddenly start to disappear, Owen, Dodger, and Tom are no longer able to determine where the lies end and the truth begins. As someone – or something – starts hunting the players themselves, the game turns terrifyingly real.



HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE:Difficult times lie ahead for Harry Potter.

Beset by nightmares that leave his scar hurting more than usual, Harry (DANIEL RADCLIFFE) is all too happy to escape his disturbing dreams by attending the Quidditch World Cup with his friends Ron (RUPERT GRINT) and Hermione (EMMA WATSON).

But something sinister ignites the skies at the Quidditch campsite - the Dark Mark, the sign of the evil Lord Voldemort. It's conjured by his followers, the Death Eaters, who haven't dared to appear in public since Voldemort (RALPH FIENNES) was last seen thirteen years ago - the night he murdered Harry's parents.

Harry longs to get back inside the safe walls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where Professor Dumbledore (MICHAEL GAMBON) can protect him. But things are going to be a little different this year.

Dumbledore announces that Hogwarts will host the Triwizard Tournament, one of the most exciting and dangerous of the wizarding community's magical competitions. One champion will be selected from each of the three largest and most prestigious wizarding schools to compete in a series of life-threatening tasks in pursuit of winning the coveted Triwizard Cup.

The Hogwarts students watch in awe as the elegant girls of the Beauxbatons Academy and the dark and brooding boys of Durmstrang Institute fill the Great Hall, breathlessly awaiting the selection of their champions.

Ministry of Magic official Barty Crouch (ROGER LLOYD PACK) and Professor Dumbledore preside over a candlelit ceremony fraught with anticipation as the enchanted Goblet of Fire selects one student from each school to compete. Amidst a hail of sparks and flames, the cup names Durmstrang's Quidditch superstar Victor Krum (STANISLAV IANEVSKI), followed by Beauxbatons' exquisite Fleur Delacour (CLÉMENCE POÉSY) and finally, Hogwarts' popular all-around golden boy Cedric Diggory (ROBERT PATTINSON). But then, inexplicably, the Goblet spits out one final name: Harry Potter.

At just 14 years old, Harry is three years too young to enter the grueling competition. He insists that he didn't put his name in the Goblet and that he really doesn't want to compete. But the Goblet's decision is binding, and compete he must.

Suspicion and jealousy abound as muckraking journalist Rita Skeeter (MIRANDA RICHARDSON) fans the flames of the Harry Potter backlash with her outrageous gossip columns. Even Ron begins to believe his "fame seeking" friend somehow tricked the cup into selecting him.

Suspecting that whoever did enter Harry's name in the Tournament deliberately wants to put him in grave danger, Dumbledore asks Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody (BRENDAN GLEESON), the eccentric new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, to keep his highly perceptive and magical eye trained on the teenage wizard.

Harry prepares for the challenging Triwizard tasks - evading a fire-breathing dragon, diving into the depths of a great lake and navigating a maze with a life of its own. But nothing is more daunting than the most terrifying challenge of them all - finding a date for the Yule Ball.

For Harry, dealing with dragons, merpeople and grindylows is a walk in the park compared to asking the lovely Cho Chang (KATIE LEUNG) to the Yule Ball. And if Ron weren't so distracted, perhaps he would acknowledge a change in his feelings for Hermione.

Events take an ominous turn when someone is murdered on Hogwarts grounds. Scared and still haunted by dreams of Voldemort, Harry turns to Dumbledore. But even the venerable Headmaster admits that there are no longer any easy answers.

As Harry and the other champions battle through their last task and the advancing tendrils of the ominous maze, someone or something is keeping a watchful eye. Victory is in sight, but as they edge closer to the Triwizard Cup, all is not as it seems - and Harry soon finds himself hurtling head-first toward an inevitable encounter with true evil...



THE CORPSE BRIDE: Building on their past productive relationship (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, ED WOOD), Tim Burton and Johnny Depp create a colorful riot of a film that revives the increasingly rare method of stop-motion animation. Over the period of 10 years that Burton worked to complete the film, new techniques were created to speed the process, including a new way to change the character models' facial expressions by using gears in their heads. Of particular note is the lilting score by Danny Elfman, another longtime Burton collaborator. Fun for adults and children, CORPSE BRIDE is another welcome walk through Tim Burton's twisted mind.




THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL (DOCUMENTARY) :

Directors Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni drew upon the documentary style of Robert Flaherty (NANOOK OF THE NORTH), who recreated events to comprehensively portray his subjects. The pair tirelessly filmed spontaneous events for much of the mother-baby story, but chose to recreate certain moments in the family's daily life. A particularly humorous and insightful example involves a young boy who clearly feels conflicted between his family life and his desire for a more Western life. The film creates a contrast between the two, showing the boy listening to traditional fables in his family's tent, but then dreaming about owning a television. This spare film provides a visually enchanting and unique learning experience.

Labels: 2005, movies

Posted by @ 11:51 PM
2 comment from:  Aisha,  Mia,