2004-12-28 - 2:10 p.m.
My Year-End Movie Review
Here is my list of movies for 2004... the good, the bad and the utterly UN-FUNNY...
| THE GOOD!!! | Big Fish, Something's Gotta Give, The Butterfly Effect, Mystic River, Hidalgo, Dawn of the Dead (the modern remake), Scooby Doo 2 (A's Pick.. lol..), Jersey Girl, Hellboy, Taking Lives, Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Punisher, Van Helsing, Shrek 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Chronicles of Riddick, Stepford Wives, Saved, the Terminal, Farenheit 9/11, Ju-on: the Grudge, I, Robot, The Incredibles, Underworld, Uptown Girls, Thirteen, Connie and Carla, 13 Going on 30, Mean Girls (was great even though I abhor Lindsey Lohan..), Napoleon Dynamite, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, The Village, My Life Without Me, Hero, The Forgotten, Shaun of the Dead, Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason |
| THE BAD!!! | Secret Window (though I loved King's story), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Clearing, A Home at the End of the World, The Grudge (scary but pales in comparison to the original, most of Kill Bill vol. 2, most of the porn I've seen this year, Freddy vs. Jason, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Le Divorce, Passion of the Christ, Exorcist: The Beginning.. |
Incidentally, the best and the worst (i.m.o.) films were both released within a week of each other in December..
For the worst film, my nomination goes to... drumroll please... Darkness.. **WARNING: MOVIE SPOILER, STOP READING IF YOU'D LIKE TO ACTUALLY SEE THIS HORRID PIECE OF CRAP**It was absolutely terrible..
1. It took forever to find a plot thread and the outcome was unclear... for example, the outcome should evil win, wasn't spelled out for you.. in other words I didn't care if the good guys won or not because the stakes weren't mentioned..
2. the characters weren't really likable so you didn't really care what happened to them
3. Because it squeaked by with a PG-13 rating, missing were the usual elements which make a horror film horrifying, such as violence of any type abd any type of gore whatsoever..
4. The only thing that made the movie even close to scary was the cutaway scenes and the dizzying camera angles.. Basically the premise is that a nice family moves into an old house that's been empty for 40 years. Suddenly Dad has some horrible mental illness, the little boy is getting beaten and bruised by spirits, and the mother is unconcerned with any of it.. Quite frankly when she gets hers in the end, I wanted to cheer! I utterly loathed her throughout the entire movie.. ugh..! Save your $10 because this is two hours of your life that you'll never get back..
Every year, however, a film opens that makes me completely forget all of the times that I was robbed by the entertainment industry, such as in the case of Darkness...
This year that film was Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Utterly fantastic!! The scenery was hauntingly beautiful with incredible costumes. The story was lovely with protagonists that you genuinely want to see have a happy ending, the antagonist, Count Olaf is someone so horrible and dreadful that you want something horrendous to happen to him early on in the movie. Fortunately, the "beloved" Count is played so skillfully by Jim Carrey that even if you want something bad to happen to him, you don't want him to die and forever remove himself from the story. The children that played the Baudelaire orphans were equally engaging. It was such a great movie, I went to see it twice in the opening week and dragged along several dissenting people who found themselves equally as enamoured. I can't wait until I can get it on video... a small aside: the soundtrack was pretty cool also. That will be another must-have!
