Bad year for movies in 2005

[rwolf]

I am sure that everyone who is a movie fan was aware that 2005 was just aweful for movies.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4577136.stm

Ever notice how lots of the movies that get academy awards are the ones that don't reside in your video library?

I find it funny that the movies that most people actually enjoy watching are the ones less likely to win awards or receive recognition. Hollywood is really out of sync with reality.

 

[nintenho]

Very true. I still can't get my mind around how such a convulsed and manipulative movie like Crash can get an oscar. Movies are getting so pretentious these days!

 

[Graham]

Sith was a very fun movie, very enjoybale, that said I was happy kong got awarded. No movie has made me laugh so hard for the first half then feel so depressed in the second, it was quite brilliant.

I didn't see many other movies. Narnia and *cough* four brothers are the only two I can think of having seen in the past year (there were a number more, but they were quite forgettable - All I remember was falling asleep in four brothers, which was a first for me).

 

[Guden Oden]

I only saw Sith and Kong at the movies last year I think. Can't think of any else. It's too expensive for me to both go to the movies all the time and keep up my DVD buying addiction. Though, wasn't Sith released in '04?

Strangely enough, I saw both those movies in Oslo, Norway (in case some confused 'murrican thought perhaps I might have meant Oslo, Kentucky. ) Oslo's a great city for watching movies in, but NOT driving in. It certainly must be one of the worst capital cities as far as driving is concerned, very confusing and congested and with narrow streets and tram cars vying for the limited space... Lucky me tho, it wasn't me at the wheel, heh.

'05 is probably the year when I watched the fewest movies ever, and there's not that many I can name off-hand that I just gotta collect and stick on my DVD shelves. I got Sin City, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Constantine already, none of which I watched at the movies first. Then apart from those, there's not all that many collect-worthy movies left of last year.

 

[_xxx_]

SinCity was great, Constantine and Batman were acceptable (as "didn't make me puke") and the rest was just total crap IMHO. Very bad year.

 

[MPI]

Sheesh, widen your horizons a little...

A History of Violence
The Constant Gardener
Syriana
Breakback Mountin'
40 year old virgin
Howl's moving castle
Broken Flowers(even though not everyone like it)

There were some pretty damn good movies last year, there are not only blockbuster action movies out there, you know...

 

[Guden Oden]

Are any of those movies blockbusters? Or at least trying to go for such status?
I believe the point of the topic was to lament the lack of high-quality big-budget movies.

Aside from that though, I wholeheartedly agree there might be lots of lower-budget/profile 2005 movies that are worth watching. I just don't have the kind of money to splash out on tickets for them, that's all...

 

[Kanyamagufa]

Very true. I still can't get my mind around how such a convulsed and manipulative movie like Crash can get an oscar. Movies are getting so pretentious these days!

I'm not disagreeing with you and I'm not saying you're right, but even though you think that this film was terrible would it be so difficult to have an open mind about it? Obviously a lot of people thought it was a good movie, so it couldn't have been all bad.

Not many films have the possibility of making their audiences better people. I don't expect "Crash" to work any miracles, but I believe anyone seeing it is likely to be moved to have a little more sympathy for people not like themselves. The movie contains hurt, coldness and cruelty, but is it without hope? Not at all. Stand back and consider. All of these people, superficially so different, share the city and learn that they share similar fears and hopes. Until several hundred years ago, most people everywhere on earth never saw anybody who didn't look like them. They were not racist because, as far as they knew, there was only one race. You may have to look hard to see it, but "Crash" is a film about progress.

That certainly seems worthy of an Oscar to me.

 

[3dilettante]

It's risky to draw conclusions from one off-beat year in the academy, but this may just be a sign that the catch-all summer blockbuster won't be the reigning champion of cinema.

It's not like this is new, before Jaws and ET, the situation was similar.

Audiences have way more options when it comes to entertainment, and these options often allow for more personal selections.

Look at the movies that did win at the Oscars. Their box-office receipts are smaller than Kong and Sith, but they sure as hell haven't lost money. They make back several times their costs in DVD and Pay-per-View by not targeting "general audience".

Sometimes, a story or concept won't appeal to a mass audience, and sometimes the story being told is worthwhile anyway.

Look at Sith, were parts of it fun? I guess, but I'd puke if it won something like best picture. It cost several hundred million dollars for us to watch some of the best actors in Hollywood fail to emote in front of a green screen with lines worse than the most drunken daytime soap episodes. I thought they were using babelfish to get lines from some insane telenovela on Univision or Telemundo.

The Oscars are meant to reward cinematic quality, and while I don't think Crash is the best movie I've seen, it had more quality than Sith and for all its excesses much more self-control than the 3-hour Kong where you don't see the monkey for an hour and a boring boat cruise.

Not that the Academy isn't full of itself.

What is ironic about this is how the awards kept touting the social experience of uber-expensive cinematic experience when their picks show how times have changed.

Worse, they always pass over comedies, the most social of all movie types that would most likely be best seen in a theater. The academy is so fixated on pathos that they ignore quality and profoundity in lighter fare.

It would be difficult, for a comedy to win best picture, only because it seems stupid for a the makers of a comedy to take it seriously. There really should be a best comedy category.

 

[nintenho]

I'm not disagreeing with you and I'm not saying you're right, but even though you think that this film was terrible would it be so difficult to have an open mind about it? Obviously a lot of people thought it was a good movie, so it couldn't have been all bad.



That certainly seems worthy of an Oscar to me.

My prolem with Crash is that it had no subtlety. You have a whole bunch of idiotic pointless characters looking for fancy ways to senselessly admire themselves just so that they can change their self-image (poor black man, bigot cop, etc). Whenever anybody ever asks me why I'm so polarized against this movie, I just ask them how do they not see how extrememely selfish and amoral it is to measure tact with relativity?

The way a REAL racism movie, such as To Kill A Mockingbird or A Rasin In The Sun, work is that they observe that humans always look at a very small part of everything and that whatever that that small thing should fall under some sort of self-renewing need to better yourself by having the character reference a hierarchy of needs. Basically, you should show characters that are being irrational.

For some reason, a lot of writers just don't get that there is a difference between what is obvious and what is glorified. Personally I think that the writers just wanted to feel like their's only ten different people in Los Angeles.

 

[nintenho]

Bumped for sheer entertainment value.

 

[Miksu]

I wouldn't say that year 2005 was especially bad when talking about movies. We got Sin City and Batman which both were really good movies and people watched them alot. New Harry Potter wasn't that bad either and it's 7th in the all-time boxoffice list.

 

[L233]

That certainly seems worthy of an Oscar to me.

There's Ebert, and then there are others:
“one of those self-congratulatory liberal jerk-off movies that roll around every once in a while to remind us of how white people suffer too, how nobody is without his prejudices, and how, when the going gets tough, even the white-supremacist cop who gets his kicks from sexually harassing innocent black motorists is capable of rising to the occasion."

 

[Kaotik]

Even though I've let myself slip a bit out of the movie world, watching less and less movies in theatres, I've tried to keep up by buying more DVD's instead.

And for 2005, I don't necessarily agree - there were several brilliant movies, to mention few, Corpse Bride, Batman Begins, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, King Kong, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Island and so on.

 

[Fodder]

I wouldn't call any of those brilliant, in fact I'd go so far as to say at least a couple (eg. Narnia) were downright awful. That's not to say there haven't been quality offerings; I loved Capote, Good Night & Good Luck and a few others.

 

[WhiningKhan]

I find it funny that the movies that most people actually enjoy watching are the ones less likely to win awards or receive recognition.

Rhetorical question: Are the awards supposed to imply that the film is artistically acclaimed, or that it has made big money in the box office?

I really don't see anything strange in that. There are always more flies buzzing on a pile of shit than on a glass of fine wine.