Top movies of 2005 embrace controversy

A pretty good year for movies, 2005. While empty-headed, would-be special-effects behemoths like "The Island" and "Stealth" crashed and burned, and with even the much-hyped $200 million-plus "King Kong" so far performing well below movie-industry box-office expectations, it was small pictures like "Crash" and "Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Brokeback Mountain" that generated buzz all out of proportion to their modest budgets.

That's buzz, not bucks, with only "Crash" making much of a dent at the national box office with a $55 million take. The others lagged far behind. (To put things in perspective, "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith," the year's box-office champ by a country mile, took in $380.2 million. Clearly, the era of the blockbuster is far from over.)

But by forthrightly taking on such tindery topics as race relations ("Crash"), the tug-of-war between media and government over national security vs. freedom of the press ("Good Night, and Good Luck"), the responsibilities of an artist in creating his art ("Capote") or gay relationships ("Brokeback"), these pictures and others like them made moviegoing in 2005 a most stimulating experience.

Among the most stimulating movies of the year, in this reviewer's opinion:

1. "Good Night, and Good Luck" George Clooney had himself quite the year in 2005. As director/co-writer/star of "Good Night, and Good Luck" and executive producer and star of "Syriana," the Hollywood hunk had his fingerprints all over two of the most provocative pictures to come out of the dream factory this year, proving once and for all that he is much more than just another pretty Tinseltown face.

Looks aside, Clooney is a skilled filmmaker with an impressive command of his craft. In "Good Night, and Good Luck" he combines moody black and white cinematography with an Oscarworthy performance by David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow to powerfully evoke the era of the '50s when the respected newsman had his famous televised face-off with Sen. Joe McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare.

2. "Me and You and Everyone We Know" Filmmaker Miranda July pulled off a remarkable feat with her first feature. Set in such commonplace settings as a nondescript apartment, a shoe store and a suburban bus stop, her picture is an uncommonly perceptive look at loneliness, yearning and hope.

Her tale of a forlorn performance artist (played by July herself) who falls for the troubled, newly divorced father of two comically curious young sons treads lightly on dangerous ground, particularly in scenes involving adolescent sexuality and online pornography. But July's unique brand of whimsical delicacy defuses the danger and infuses the scenes with an unexpected sweetness. A total original, "Me and You" is disarming and challenging in unexpected ways.

3. "Crash" So many movies these days are about nothing at all beyond special effects and explosions. Not "Crash." Race relations in the uneasily simmering melting pot that is Los Angeles are on the front burner, but the picture is not a polemic. It views the racial stress fractures interlaced across the face of America with empathy toward all of its characters and malice toward none.

The picture has no real villains, though some of its characters certainly perpetrate acts of racially motivated villainy. And although some of its people commit saintly acts, there are no saints here, either. Filmmaker Paul Haggis weaves multiple plot strands into a complex, fascinating whole.

4. "Batman Begins" Here we have the best "Bat" movie yet, bar none. Director-writer Christopher Nolan and his co-screenwriter David S. Goyer understand that what sets the Dark Knight apart from all other comic-book superheroes and makes him an archetype is not the cowl or the cape or the cool equipment or the colorful crooks.

Rather, it's the anguish and the rage of a man who saw his parents murdered when he was a boy. That rage is what makes Batman such a ferociously formidable figure.

Christian Bale captures that ferocity in a performance that overshadows all other actors who have donned the cape and cowl before him.

5. "Syriana" Director Stephen Gaghan's marvelously convoluted political thriller takes a highly jaundiced view of international relations, where all deals are underhanded and even the most watchful and world-weary of spies is unable to watch his back carefully enough to prevent a treacherous shiv from being plunged into it by supposedly trustworthy associates.

As a CIA agent hung out to dry by high higher-ups, George Clooney is the troubled conscience at the center of this story of petropolitics that's played for keeps by a wide-ranging group of cutthroat characters that includes oil moguls, high-level government officials, heartless torturers and suicide jihadists.

6. "Munich" In the most disciplined and astringent film of his career, Steven Spielberg looks back at the massacre of Israeli athletes by terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the extraordinary secret campaign of retribution authorized by Golda Meir in which Palestinian operatives believed responsible for planning the atrocity were hunted down and assassinated by Israeli agents.

"Munich" makes the case that vengeance is soul-corroding work, even vengeance triggered by the highest motives. The picture does not condemn the assassins or the people who dispatched them, but neither does it rejoice in their work.

7. "Capote" Portrait of the artist as a seductive charmer.

Portrait of the artist as a manipulative schemer. Portrait of the artist as a ruthless genius. Philip Seymour Hoffman combines all those facets of Truman Capote, one of the great writers of the last century, in one of the great film performances of this century.

The picture focuses on how the writer morally compromised himself to write his masterpiece, "In Cold Blood," making a devil's bargain that produced a great work of literature but which cost the writer his soul.

8. "The Constant Gardener" Director Fernando Meirelles seamlessly marries a heart-rending love story with an absorbing espionage thriller in his screen adaptation of John Le Carre's best seller.

A staid British diplomat's all-consuming love for his young wife causes him to probe deeply into the motives behind her murder in Africa. That probing reveals a far-reaching cover-up of a conspiracy by a Western corporation to exploit the native population in a deadly fashion.

Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz make an incandescent couple. The twisty plot demands the audience pay close attention to what's going on, but it rewards that attention with a story of great substance.

9. "The Squid and the Whale" Using the fracturing of his parents' marriage for inspiration, filmmaker Noah Baumbach offers an almost unbearably intimate exploration of the pain of divorce as it affects the couple's two young sons. Jeff Daniels stands out in the fine ensemble cast with his prickly portrayal of the controlling husband and father.

10. "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" Mournful whimsy is the order of the day and on ample display in Burton's tale of a well-meaning but dithery groom-to-be who finds himself more or less wed to a woman who's dead -- but not quite. A masterwork of stop-motion animation, this "Bride" possesses a spirit and an aspect that seems inspired to a degree by the works of Edward Gorey: morose, offbeat and elegant.

MISSED THESE? DON'T WORRY

And at the other end of the spectrum we have what we'll call the Fetid Five, pictures that seem not to have been released but rather escaped into the world like noxious germs from a sabotaged bioweapons lab. Beware their deadly awfulness.

1. "Alone in the Dark" Christian Slater listlessly battles badly rendered computer-generated Alien-style creatures in a grade-Z horror picture.

2. "The Island" Michael "Boom Boom" Bay sets a futuristic tale of two clones on the run (Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson) to the percussive beat of mammoth explosions and the sharp sounds of shattering glass in the year's most empty-headed sci-fi epic.

3. "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" The filth flows free in Rob Schneider's sequel to his unaccountably popular 1999 comedy, "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo." The language is foul, and the sight gags -- and we do mean gag -- are fouler.

4. "A Sound of Thunder" Absurd-looking monsters and wretched acting by the likes of Edward Burns and Ben Kingsley are all this creaky time-travel story has to offer.

5. "Bewitched" With her eyes alarmingly wide and voice bizarrely whispery in this awful reworking of the sprightly '60s sitcom, Nicole Kidman calls to mind not Elizabeth Montgomery but Marilyn Monroe -- with a lobotomy. On speed.

Soren Andersen is the film reviewer for the Tacoma News Tribune.

c.2005 Tacoma News Tribune