2005 is a year which brought us some good films, but also some ridiculous CGI-soaked pieces as well, some redeemable, others dull and embarrassing. Here are the five films I saw which didn't make it into my personal top 10 list for the year 2005.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, David Kelly, Christopher Lee, Anasophia Robb
Release Date: July 15, 2005
Running Time: 115 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
I once heard someone remark that it was odd that Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was more about Charlie, while Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was more about Willy Wonka. Many recent Tim Burton films seem to have gotten a lot of flak from the public for a variety of reasons. There seems to be, in many cases, a lot of style over substance, and even then, Burton's stylistic choices favor an excess of colorful swirls, bizarre imagery, and soon-to-be-dated CGI. Like Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory delivers something of a butchering to its source material, this time following the book almost to a T while at the same time losing track of the spirit of the book entirely. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory succeeds, however, largely because it does manage to remain aware of how it will never replace or even live up to the original film. Thus it can focus on just trying to do something new and interesting, regardless of whether or not the result is superior to the original. Both the child and adult cast do a pretty great job of bringing something new to the characters, and the factory has a lot more beauty to it than the previous factory did- I mean, the chocolate actually looks like chocolate. And for what it's worth, it's not only highly entertaining but fairly visually impressive as well.
Fantastic Four
Director: Tim Story
Starring: Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis, Julian McMahon
Release Date: July 8, 2005
Running Time: 106 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5
Fantastic Four is a much more interesting and satisfying if, instead of seeing it as a failed superhero movie, you imagine it as a satire of superhero movies. Viewed through this lens it is not a failure, but rather a profound and comic statement on the shallow ethics, awkward fanservice, and circuitous logic of superhero films. Of course, this is not what the people who made it were trying to do at all. But I think that there is a lot to enjoy here, even if the enjoyment mainly comes from the "this movie is so bad it's good" viewer mentality. And if you can't buy that, then I suppose I'll at least admit it's something of a guilty pleasure. I mean, imagine this: superheroes go to space and get random superpowers because of a solar storm which affects them in impossible ways. They get back to earth and instead of fighting crime, they just spend most of the movie in a lab testing their powers. Yeah, they do save people, but all of the problems that they fix are really just problems that they themselves caused, and they get praised for it anyways. Maybe it's just because I like unconventional things, but to me this sounds hilarious, and the movie's faltering cheesy sense of humor only makes the movie that much easier to make fun of. I know it sounds like I'm defending Fantastic Four, but I guess what it comes down to is that I'm not saying that it's a good movie, but rather, a decent movie- if you know what angle to approach it from.
Because of Winn-Dixie
Director: Wayne Wang
Starring: Anasophia Robb, Jeff Daniels, Cicely Tyson, Luke Benward, Dave Matthews
Release Date: February 18, 2005
Running Time: 106 minutes
Rating: 3/5
I don't believe that Because of Winn Dixie is necessarily a bad movie. But that being said, it's about as mediocre and forgettable as a dog movie can get. Looking back, there are certain images and scenes that stick with me based on the two or three times that I watched it as a kid (why my parents were so bent on submerging me in dog movies, I'll never know): there's the pet store, the guy with the guitar, the librarian, the weird old lady who hung bottles up on a tree, and the dog who was afraid of thunderstorms. And I think it's these tiny moments with the good-old quirky small town characters that make the movie work- the serendipity of finding a stray dog in a grocery store, etc, etc. But the movie is so inundated in "charm", that you can hardly breathe- oh, a dog, how cute, oh, Anasophia Robb, how adorable. Because of Winn Dixie is a movie which is too saccharine to constitute anything close to a story- the entire "struggle" is basically this girl trying to learn responsibility by owning the dog, and the worst that can happen is her landlord saying she can't keep the dog. Awww. The acting, the characters, the setting of the story, all of it is constructed fairly well, as it must have been in the Kate DiCamillo novel that it was adapted from. But the film becomes a bore so quickly that at its very best, Because of Winn-Dixie is just a film that a family might see once on kids' night, and then never see again.
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Starring: Taylor Lautner, Taylor Dooley, Cayden Boyd, George Lopez, Jacob Davich
Release Date: June 10, 2005
Running Time: 94 minutes
Rating: 2.5/5
What is it with Robert Rodriguez? I like talking about how there are different types of strangeness in films. Some films are strange because they're surrealist, and therefore intentionally strange (take Lynch or Bunuel, for example). But other films are strange simply because they started with a normal fantasy plot, and then took the imagination up to 11 without going back and thinking "hey, will this idea work?" Thus we have films like the ones that Robert Rodriguez makes: more specifically, Spy Kids and its sequels... and this film. In Spy Kids we had henchmen made out of thumbs, secret agents being mutated into those colorful strange creatures that you see on kids shows, and brains... yeah, difficult to explain. Here, you have floating eyeballs, a planet named Drool, a CGI rollercoaster, a boy who bites through metal, a girl who melts into a puddle... you know, I just give up on trying to describe this mess. Like Speed Racer, Sharkboy & Lavagirl is pretty much a kids' movie which is why too trippy for either kids or adults to handle. It's one of those films with a lot of artistic effort and a lot of heart that really winds up being more of a guilty pleasure film than a legitimately entertaining one- mainly on account of how difficult it is to tolerate the mind-numb of ridiculously named characters and locations seen in the film. In the end, a movie that never arises to the level of infuriatingly bad, but somehow stumbles a bit too often to become at the very least a decent picture.
Kingdom of Heaven
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Ghassan Massoud, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons
Release Date: May 6, 2005
Running Time: 144 minutes
Rating: 2/5
Ridley Scott has made some good movies and bad movies over the years, but out of all of the films by him that I've seen, this is without a doubt the worst. For an action-intense movie about the crusades, Kingdom of Heaven is unfathomably boring. If you asked me to tell you what happened, I couldn't, and that's not just because I watched it on a road trip. I saw this maybe two or three years ago; and have no idea what any of the characters' were, what their motivation was, or what they actually did over the course of the movie. There was Orlando Bloom, Eva Green played an Arab, I think? There's a lot of swords, a lot of guys getting killed and fighting in the woods, but it's unclear why they're fighting; there's Jerusalem or somewhere and it's getting besieged and there's an Arab prince as well- looking back, it seems like I didn't pay much attention, but I assure you, I did try. Kingdom of Heaven is simply a movie where every second of the movie that you see is telling you not to pay attention, trying to get you to look away from the movie simply by reason of how dully the movie is shot: the story uses the most gray muted color palettes to accentuate the "badass" medieval elements but this aesthetic itself gives the film a very drab and hard-to-digest visual gloss. If it was any other movie, I might see it again to catch up on those little details I may have missed, but Kingdom of Heaven I don't think I'd see again if you paid me.
-Julian Rhodes
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