These films were released in 2005

Jarhead

[/types]]

Jarhead is a film about the other harsh reality of war, the tens of thousands of soldiers who endure endless days and weeks of crushing boredom, loneliness and deprivation, only to never get the chance to use the skills that they’ve often spent years honing. Anthony “Swoff” Swofford (Jake Gyllenhall) was a Marine Scout-Sniper during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He lives and breathes for that one perfect head-shot during a shooting war. “I want the pink mist,” he tells us, referring to the blood spray that results from a 7.62mm slug passing through a human cranium.

Continue reading

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

[/types]]

The Harry Potter films have been, on the whole, getting progressively better with each installment. The first step was ditching the more commercially-minded American director Chris Columbus in favor of two filmmakers whose work you would not normally associate with these fantastic elements. For this fourth chapter, they chose British director Mike Newell, probably best known for the violent mob drama Donnie Brasco.

Continue reading

Hustle & Flow

[/types]]

I’m either too old, too white or just too dumb to get it, but I’m never been able to wrap my brain around the use of the word “pimp” as a synonym for making something stylish in a flashy way. How did our culture take a word derived from the criminal exploitation of women and elevate it to some sort of exalted pop status?

Continue reading

The Ice Harvest

[/types]]

Modern film noir isn’t the easiest style to successfully bring off, at least not without appearing overly cute or self-conscious about it. This blood-soaked mix of dark humor and double cross manages to navigate that minefield without making the audience look at their watches until the end credits roll.

The last film to so adroitly combine noir elements, ironic humor and a byzantine plot was Wild Things and The Ice Harvest is good deal less trashy and more sophisticated than that potboiler.

Continue reading

Walk the Line

[/types]]

During the last Oscar ceremony, Jon Stewart cheekily referred to Walk the Line as “Ray with white people.” Like all successful humor, the joke has an element of truth to it. There are significant parallels between the two films and the lives of the men at the center of their stories.

Continue reading

Proof

[/types]]

John Madden’s adaptation of David Auburn’s stage play examines the situation of a young woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) living under two long shadows cast by her recently deceased father (Anthony Hopkins). Robert, the father, was a unparalleled math genius and Catherine, the daughter seems paralyzed by the pressure to follow in his footsteps. Robert was also crippled by severe schizophrenia that virtually ended his teaching career and Catherine fears the genetic legacy of her father’s mental illness.

Continue reading

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Hey, I went to see a juvenile sex comedy and an actual love story broke out. The 40-Year-Old Virgin manages to shoehorn two wildly disparate storylines successfully into one film. On one hand, you have a raunchy workplace comedy about a trio of sex-starved low-lifes working in a store that suspiciously resembles Circuit City, while on the other you have a surprisingly sweet romantic comedy about two people with more on their mind than the horizontal lambada.

Continue reading

Cinderella Man

[/types]]

Ron Howard has a reputation for excessive sentimentality in his films. I’ll reserve judgment on whether this is deserved for another time, but if it is true, Howard was the perfect director for Cinderella Man. This mostly accurate story of real life boxer James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe) needs a filmmaker willing to yank on the heartstrings like a team of Clydesdales. This film is so consciously old fashioned that it really ought to have been filmed in black and white in the old 4:3 Academy aspect ratio.

Continue reading

Paradise Now

[/types]]

The suicide bomber has to be the most impenetrable enigma to the western mind. I don’t think we can even comprehend the idea of a young person, presumably healthy in body and mind, purposely throwing away his or her life just to kill a few people who are often not even a party to the conflict in which the bomber is engaged. We can wrap our brains around the concept of a soldier sacrificing himself as he runs up Omaha Beach into the teeth of a German machine gun nest, but there are two key differences. One, his death is not the goal but just a consequence and, two, the people getting killed on the other side are soldiers as well.

Continue reading

Flightplan

[/types]]

It’s not so unusual to find that Jodie Foster is the smartest thing about one of her own movies. Even when she’s slumming for a paycheck like she is in this potboiler, she projects a level of intelligence that often makes the film seem better than it really is.

Thus, it’s no surprise that Ms. Foster is the smartest thing about Flightplan. Sadly, that’s really no accomplishment, since the seat cushions on the airplane set are smarter than this simple, linear but mind-blowingly illogical rift on Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. If a person had the same level of brain activity found in this script, he or she would be harvested for organs before the doctors pulled the plug.

Continue reading