The Rocketdog Blog

The Ten Best Movies of 2005: A Confessional

I’d thought about doing a top ten of 2005 list like a lot of movie-writin’-about folks are doing around this time of year. Unfortunately, as soon as I started to plot this llst out I was forced to confront a harsh and embarrassing reality about myself: I don’t even think I watched 10 movies last year that were actually released in 2005. Here I write a blog that’s at least 70% ostensibly about movies, and I don’t even fucking watch movies. Well THAT sure bummed me out. Stupid goddamn blog.

It’s been a dirty secret of mine for a while now that I don’t actually see all that many movies. I’ve been doing better recently, but the thing is that once I started film school, watching movies became sort of like homework. Even if whatever I was watching wasn’t for a class, I’d inevitably end up writing out three or four pages of notes, because I felt like I should be doing stuff like that. The obsessive analysis just got too be too much work, and it stopped being fun. Why do anything you don’t enjoy anymore if you don’t have to?

So this is embarrassing for a lot of reasons, obviously, considering the profession I claim to be trying to break into. I tried doing something about it on my old blog when, back around this time last year, I made plans to watch at least 100 movies in 2005, and afterwards post a short review of each one. A year later, my grand total for reviews written in 2005…well, it was four. I wrote reviews on four movies. Out of 100. And the really sad thing is that, even leaving the reviews aside, I didn’t watch 100 movies last year. Nowhere close. I wasn’t really keeping track, so I can’t be sure, but I probably didn’t even see half of that.

But here I am with my stupid list, which I decided to draw up anyway. Sort of. I guess you could say I kind of half-assed it. In fact, I kind of really half-assed it (one-quarter-assed it?!?). Not only are several of the movies on this list not actually from 2005, there are at least two movies on this list that I didn’t even watch in 2005, but since they were released last year I’ve included them anyway in order to make the list at least marginally relevant (ha ha!).

So here we go: In descending order, a list of the 10 best movies I watched in 2005, regardless of whether or not they were actually made in 2005, or frankly whether I even got around to watching them in 2005! Thanks a lot for reading the blog. I’m going to go slam my head in the refrigerator door for a few hours.

(I’m in the middle of a personal Woody Allen retrospective right now, so there are a few of those on the list. For films not released in 2005, I’ve indicated the appropriate year in parenthesis after the title.)

My ten favorites:

Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)
Capote
Grizzly Man
Bananas (1971)
Brokeback Mountain
Interiors (1978)
March of the Penguins
A History of Violence
Love and Death (1975)
Supervixens (1975)

A few honorable mentions:

War of the Worlds
Play it Again, Sam (1972)
Winged Migration (2001)
Harry Potter and the Whatever It Was This Year
The Aristocrats

Labels: metablogging, movies

posted by nick @ 12:42 PM