Favorite Movies 2005

I've seen 185 movies in theatres this year, and here are my awards...

***FAVORITE MOVIES - 2005***
1- King Kong
2- War of the Worlds
3- Sin City
4- Brokeback Mountain
5- Crash
6- Kingdom of Heaven
7- Serenity
8- Cinderella Man
9- Gus Van Sant's Last Days
10- Me and You and Everyone We Know
11- Nine Lives
12- Pride & Prejudice
13- Broken Flowers
14- Bee Season
15- Oliver Twist

16- Batman Begins
17- Jarhead
18- Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
19- A History of Violence
20- Unleashed
21- Millions
22- The Devil's Rejects
23- Rent
24- Stay
25- Shopgirl
26- The Weather Man
27- The Squid and the Whale
28- The Exorcism of Emily Rose
29- Hustle & Flow
30- Proof

***BEST FOREIGN MOVIES***
1- OldBoy
2- The Edukators
3- Downfall
4- Kung-Fu Hustle
5- My Summer of Love

***BEST COMEDIES***
1- The 40 Year Old Virgin
2- Wedding Crashers
3- Fever Pitch
4- Waiting...
5- Fun with Dick and Jane

Special Mention: Grizzly Man

***BEST ANIMATED FILM***
1- Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

***BEST DOCUMENTARIES***
1- Murderball
2- My Date with Drew
3- Gunner Palace
4- Rize
5- First Descent

Worst Documentary: Grizzly Man
Hated and Not Seen: March of the Penguins

***BOTTOM 10 - 2005***
10- Son of the Mask
9- A Sound of Thunder
8- King's Ransom
7- Undiscovered
6- Just like Heaven
5- Flightplan
4- Dark Water
3- High Tension
2- Stealth
1- Elektra

Munich

I am currently not caring much about Munich, Steven Spielberg's incredibly quickly done film about the events that followed the kidnap and murder on the Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympics by the Palestinians. The movie is about revenge, political revenge, and it's also about morality, once the characters we follow start questioning their actions. What the movie also does is to reflect the current political state of the world, and it's been also discussed the fact that Spielberg is Jewish, making a film about Jews against Palestinians. Once you see the movie you can see that he doesn't take sides, he's against both and he defends both. The screenplay, written by Tony Kushner (Angels in America) with some first drafts by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider, Ali), based on George Jonas' book Vengeance, is very smart about that. The problem with all of that is I that I want to see a movie, and much like Good Night and Good Luck, The Constant Gardener or Syriana, I really don't care about the political messages the movie wants to give me, what I want is a movie, with good characters and a good story, it's even better if I really get into it emotionally. That happened to me with Munich, but the it lost me, especially at the 2 hour mark, when the movie should've ended instead of changing shifts for some uninteresting 45 more minutes.

After the aforementioned beginning at the Olympics, we jump to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (played Lynn Cohen) who says, "Forget peace for now", and forms a group of revenge seeking assassins who must work like undercover terrorists and travel all through Europe searching and killing the 11 people (mostly by bombing their rooms, so that it makes noise, literally and non) who are being held responsible for Munich. Living everything behind, they sign a contract that tells them they do not exist anymore, and can't contact anybody because nobody knows who they are anymore. They will be contacted only by a man named Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), who pays them and asks them for reports every now and then.
The group is led by Avner (Eric Bana), a former bodyguard of the Prime Minister, with a hero father he never lived up to. He's has a pregnant wife at the movie. Then we have getaway driver Steve (Daniel Craig), document forger Hans (Hanns Zischler), toy maker turned bomb maker Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz) and Carl (Ciaran Hinds), the cleanup man. None of them are actually killers by the way, but they will be. Once they start looking for their targets, Avner meets and kind of befriends (though never truly trusting) Louis (Mathieu Amalric), a French man who knows where to find everybody in exchange for some serious amounts of money. He's helps them because he thinks they are not working for the government which he has no intention to help, but he thinks that this is a personal vendetta, and family he does care about.

The whole second hour or so of the movie is about the killings, at times well perpetrated, and at other times with many problems, some even comical, because the bombs can't seem to work as well as they expect. Still, whenever they work, it makes for terrific scenes of realistic brutality. This also works amazingly well at the beginning of the movie when the athletes are killed. Spielberg uses actual footage of the TV stations transmitting live from Munich, and then he creates the inside happenings with brilliant and horrific results.
The acting in the movie is worth nothing, though not as good as a whole as I was expecting. Bana is good, especially in the scenes with his family, but I never got really connected to his feelings during the attacks, mostly the script's fault. Daniel Craig is ok, but his character is really underused, and they really didn't need a big name for the part. The best performance of the movie is that by Ciaran Hinds. Really strong work, eating every scene and line he has up.

The final act is what I really didn't like, as the team (or what's left of it) is dissolved after an attempt to kill the biggest name in their list. The movie then focuses on Avner (and forgets about the rest) and the state of paranoia he's set in after returning to his family. Every turn he makes he thinks someone is after him, maybe with reason, maybe not. And so he plays a lot against Ephraim in a morality battle discussing whether or not what they did was worth something, since even worse people soon replaced the people they killed. And these same discussions were held inside the team before, so I felt that this whole climax didn't work at all, and should've been cut, or even better, changed so that Bana would've had to go on a personal revenge, though that is not what's in the book so I guess that was not doable.

The movie is technically perfect, with an excellent 70s looking cinematography by Janusz Kaminski. The score by John Williams though, didn't quite work for me.
And so the movie works great during the beginning, and then falls flat at the end, not knowing what to do to be a great movie, and opting to try and be relevant in today's world. It succeeds in that, but the problem is that with so many important political movies out this year, why should I care for this one in particular? And so I don't, again (just like with Syriana) preferring Paradise Now, the Palestinian movie about suicide bombers questioning their methods since it’s going to keep happening over and over again and never stop. As a film, with good but not excellent acting, and an emotional attachment that was just not there, Munich, and Spielberg, did not impress me, and it would need some big parts of it getting cut to do it.

Aeon Flux

In a mix of The Island and The Cell, and a little bit of Elektra, a very lesbian looking first scene opens up Aeon Flux, Charlize Theron's follow up to her Oscar winning performance in Monster a few years ago. Based on the beloved Peter Chung MTV cartoon that was part of Liquid TV back in the 90s, the series' style is well translated, as good as possible I would say, to the big screen by director Karyn Kusama and writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi. They have a pretty good story, great visuals, but they fail completely in the dialogue department, which is awfully delivered by top notch, award winning actresses. If they can't do it, imagine how bad it is.

But that's the dialogue, because the story got me interested and it's actually smart. 400 Years in the future, what's left of us formed in an utopic civilization and live all together in Bregna, the only hospitable city on Earth thanks to the walls that protect us from whatever is outside, including the disease that wiped us out years ago. Bregna is ruled by scientist, led by the Goodchild family, and since there's a ruler in Marton Csokas' Trevor Goodchild and his younger brother Oren (played by Jonny Lee Miller), there's also a rebel group in the Monicans, who are led by Frances McDormand's Handler. The Monicans are an underground group of gadget equipped and martial arts trained killers that our heroine Aeon is part of. Charlize plays Aeon of course and she's cool. Great costumes and she always looks very sexy and beautiful. She was the most credible in the acting department (the rest were not good) but that dialogue was still troubling. McDormand is there's for maybe 3 short scenes total, and she's got a weird Carrot-Top like hairdo. She's pretty much wasted here but I guess we didn't need her that much. And then there's Sophie Okonedo who plays Aeon's sidekick Sithandra. Not much to say about her other than one of the coolest ideas ever put on a movie: she's got hands instead of feet. And it's awesome.

The story later incorporates some nice cloning ideas as Aeon discovers the truth about the government and about some people that have been kidnapped and disappeared lately, including her sister, and the movie is interesting or the most part. With cool costumes and gadgets, and a few pretty good backgrounds and futuristic ideas, Aeon Flux is weak compared to the great cartoon, but is not a bad movie at all.

The Ringer

Johnny Knoxville's Steve pretends to be a retard named Jeffie so he can compete in the Special Olympics and win money in The Ringer. Directed by Barry W. Blaustein (who's written many Eddie Murphy movies like Coming to America, Boomerang and The Nutty Professor) and written by Ricky Blitt (Family Guy), the story is not stupid or tasteless as one would expect. It's silly but is also funny, and despite a very weak beginning, it gets very good once Knoxville gets to the pre-Olympic competitions and is joined by the other mentally challenged athletes. Sorry about the retard remark before, btw.

But why does he go to the Olympics? Because he needs to raise money to pay for surgery for a friend, who is not actually a friend but an old guy he should've fired at work but instead decided to hire as a lawn mower and after an accident the guy ended up with three fingers chopped off his hand. And it's a huge hospital bill because apparently in this movie's time there are none of those organizations that pay the bills for you if you can't. But oh well, I guess it's necessary for the story to work. There's another reason too, as Steve's uncle Gary (played by a what-the-hell-are-you-doing-taking-these-roles Brian Cox) needs money to pay the mobs for his gambling.
At the Olympics, Jeffie must compete against Jimmy (played by Leonard Flowers), the mentally challenged superstar who's won the games 6 times in a row. There's also Katherine Heigl's Lynn, an instructor at the Olympics who helps Jeffie along the way while he falls in love with her.

There's been some controversy lately about this movie, as South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are saying the movie rips off an episode of their series they released in early 2004, but the movie's producers say the script was written before that. Lawsuits may be filed, but whatever the outcome, the South Park episode was funny, and movie is funny too. Supported (mostly) by a cast of real life mentally challenged actors, The Ringer shows its heart, and it's surprisingly respectful of the characters we all thought it would be making fun of.

Fun with Dick and Jane

Sorry for being so unoriginal but yes, I had Fun with Dick and Jane, a lot of it. Written by Peter Tolan, Nicholas Stoller and the genius that is Judd Apatow (The Ben Stiller Show, Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, The 40 Year Old Virgin), and directed by Dean Parisot of the amazing Galaxy Quest fame, this remake of the Jane Fonda/George Seagal 1977 comedy follows once again the monetary fall of Dick and Jane Harper and their subsequent run to get their lives back by stealing. Any way they can.

Right from the start the movie is one laugh after another, and not chuckles but real laughs. The entire first 45 minutes or so are some of the most funny sequences of the year as Dick is betrayed by the company he works at, Globodyne, which goes bankrupt in a matter of minutes on national television, loses everything he has, and even gets involved with Mexican immigrants. After deciding to join the life of crime, his wife Jane joins him and the laughs continue nonstop.
Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni play the titular characters and both of them are great. We all know Carrey is one of the most talented comedians there is, as well as a gifted actor overall (even though the Academy keeps to overlooking him time and time again), but Leoni joins in on the fun and she gives a very good performance too.
The rest of the cast is formed by Jacob Davich and Gloria Garayua, who play the young son of the Harpers and their Mexican maid. They are part of a very funny subplot as the kid, who has been mostly raised by the maid, speaks in Spanish almost all the time even though his parents have no idea what he's saying. And finally there are Richard Jenkins who plays Dick's boss Frank Bascom, and the always reliable and scene-stealer Alec Baldwin as the president of Globodyne. Great job by both of them.

I had mixed feelings towards the movie from the trailers, but once it started and I read Apatow's name there I knew the movie would be good, and it is. Favored by a running time of only 90 minutes, the movie made me laugh a lot, even towards the end when it got to the inevitable silly finale that clean our heroes of everything they've done and gives them a happy ending. Short and right to the point, which is to entertain us and make us laugh, Fun with Dick and Jane is fun, for real.

The Family Stone

Filmmaker Thomas Bezucha follows up his little seen 2000 effort Big Eden with The Family Stone, a Christmas comedy about the titular family who reunite for the holidays as always but there's something different this time, eldest son Everett is bringing home his fiancée Meredith, whom they've never met before, but they are all going to hate, and the result is a funny and at times touching story of family love.

I should correct myself, because not all of them haven't met the outsider. Amy (played by Hollywood's It Girl Rachel McAdams), the youngest daughter did, and she hates her. She met her once, she tells the family before Everett and Meredith arrive, and then she goes on and on about all of Meredith's faults, and so there's no way the girl has a chance. Dermot Mulroney plays Everett and Sarah Jessica Parker, in her first released work after Sex and the City (she has a role in Strangers with Candy which was delayed to next year), plays the uptight, business driven, big talker and icy looking Meredith. When we first met her we know she's a bitch, but the minute she steps into the house we can't help but suffer for her. The way they treat her is horrendous, and there's a point when she even has to get out of there and move to the local inn to escape from then, and get her sister Julie (Claire Danes) to get there as soon as possible for support.
Two Stones so far, and there's more to go. The other big piece of the romantic part of puzzle is Everett and Amy's brother Ben (played by Luke Wilson), the easy going and free spirit member of the family. The other siblings are Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) who has a young daughter and is currently pregnant, and Thad (Ty Giordano) who is deaf and gay, and has a partner in Patrick (Brian White), who happens to be African-American. And finally the parents, who headline the serious part of the movie, Sybil (Diane Keaton) and Kelly (Craig T. Nelson), and they are keeping a secret from most of their kids.

There will be drama and comedy, laughing and crying, loving and hating, but at the end the will be happy together because after all, this is a family movie and set on Christmas, so you can't complain about that. Still, the movie works because of the very strong acting, led by Sarah Jessica Parker who gives a great performance and could get a supporting nod (if they go for that) at the Oscars, once everyone realizes that the one we all thought was going to steal the movie didn't. And that is Diane Keaton, who is pretty good too, but though it seemed like this was an Oscar grabber role for her, the part is surprisingly small and in the background of the others. Manipulative with our emotions, even. Luke Wilson and Rachel McAdams play their characters really great too.
With so many characters to work on (McAdams' Amy even gets a second subplot as All the Real Girls' Paul Schneider shows up late in the movie as a former boyfriend), Bezucha is not able to really develop them as they should, and so some of them, even the big names, get just really great scenes but overall you can tell there's something missing for the story to completely work. I do thank Bezucha though, for not getting all melodramatic towards the end when you can tell that is going to be a cry fest, but he does it in a different way and it works very well. Thanks to very good acting and a couple of great scenes, The Family Stone is not a great movie but is good enough, and definitely worth watching.

King Kong (2005)

Every once in a while comes a movie that is so epic that it makes regular epics seem indies, a movie that is so perfectly done that we try to complain about something, and we can only think of complaining about it having too much of this or that, when in fact it's just enough, and less would've been better, but more too. And what a coincidence that a single filmmaker is able to create two of these in such a short period, as Peter Jackson follows up his Lord of the Rings trilogy with a remake of the movie that inspired him to be a filmmaker, King Kong. Jackson remakes and honors the Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack 1933 original, and he also betters it, adding everything the original could not put on screen not because of technology in the case of the visual effects, but because the times were simpler, and what makes this new version a perfect film are its developed characters and its refined story.

The overall story is the same, as filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black in a serious but still Jack Black role) finds a map to an inexistent island, and gets Captain Englehorn (played by Thomas Kretschmann), the captain of the S.S. Venture to take him there to film a movie. He also takes his film crew, which includes Colin Hanks as Carl's assistant Preston, hungry unemployed actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts with an award worthy performance), movie hero Bruce Baxter (played by Early Edition's Kyle Chandler) and famous writer Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody in a perfect not really hero performance). Also on board are Englehorn's crew of sailors including Evan Parke's Hayes and Jamie Bell's Jimmy, none of them aware of the real destination of the ship, Skull Island. There they will find a forgotten civilization, dinosaurs, huge insects and bats, and the titular ape, which happens to be big, very big.
Jackson uses his LotR collaborator Richard Taylor and his WETA team of visual effects once again to make magic with a million things to delight us with. There's the wonderful 30s New York they recreated, which serves as the beginning of the movie showing the depression era and the working class people our would be damsel in distress Ann Darrow comes from. And it also serves for the magnificent climax of the movie three hours later with the classic scene high up in the Empire State Building, as beauty and beast contemplate the sunset recreating their first encounter back at Skull Island. Both scenes are so remarkably beautiful, depicting their love story that goes beyond everything I could've expected.

And that is something Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (both of them also shared credits for the LotR screenplays) really better from the original story, the relationship between Kong and Ann. Kong was in love with Fay Wray back in the day but that love was not reciprocal. Here the ape falls in love with Naomi Watts, and she falls right back, even putting her life on the line just as Kong defended her from more than one T-Rex and several other dangers before. The way they work together is fantastic, and it works better because of the magical by Andy Serkis who moves as Kong as perfect as he did Gollum (Serkis also gets a regular role as Lumpy the Cook, and he makes the part more than it could ever be, showing us that he is truly a great actor). The chemistry is special, and it's no problem that they are human and ape, especially after we see them dance in Central Park in one of the most graceful scenes in the movie. We know Kong dies at the end of the movie just as in the previous versions, but the way it happens here resembles Jack and Rose's emotionally epic finale in Titanic and it works so amazingly well here you'll cry again, and it won't be the first time in this movie alone.

But there's more than that. There's also Carl Denham's story, a man so obsessed with making his film he could die rescuing his camera from whatever danger it faces. While kidnapped Ann spends time with Kong in the island, Denham and Driscoll lead a team of sailors to rescue her, but it's not that easy. Their journey puts them against many dinosaurs, Kong himself in the famous giant log scene, and finally, in a scene that could've perfectly given the movie an R rating, they battle giant bugs of all kinds known and unknown. And the scene is so horrific I had to close my eyes at times. Black is marvelous once again after they bring Kong back to Manhattan, and he gets to savor fame as he gives the world its 8th Wonder.

Six times Academy Award nominee James Newton Howard scores the film (after LotR's scorer Howard Shored departed from the project) and his once again perfectly Award worthy, giving us hints to the original Max Steiner score. Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie and conceptual designer Alan Lee help Jackson once again achieve a flawless look for the movie giving those sunset and aerial scenes an enchanted complexion. Remaking a classic is tough, but when the people behind it put so much dedication to create something so big, gorgeous and majestic as King Kong, the result is more than good. The result is the best movie of the year and also one of the best movies ever made.

Brokeback Mountain

I've been calling this the 'gay cowboys' movie ever since it was announced. The premise was not something I knew how I would react to and so it was funny to call it that and not actually think about it, but there was something in the idea and the movie could actually be worth something, it is. Based on Annie Proulx short story, Academy Award nominee Ang Lee directs Brokeback Mountain, the story of two young men in 1963 Wyoming who meet and fall in love during one summer spent at the titular mountain while herding sheep, and form a relation that will affect their entire lives.
Beautifully translated for the big screen by Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show) and Diana Ossana, the story is makes for powerful performances by its two leads Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Far from dreaming about the current gay marriage craze of today's world, theirs is one of the greatest, most honest and genuine love stories ever put on film.

The story is not that of two flamboyant gay men living happy together throughout their lives, and not even their beginning is easy. It all starts after a drinking night, and their first sexual interaction can already put off some people. It's raw and violent, and quite unexpected if you don't already know what the movie is about. But after that it transforms into the story of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, who are not gay, but feel the attraction between each other, but there's nothing they can do about it, because the world they live in is not prepared for it, and they know for a fact what happens to those that even dare to live together. So what happened at Brokeback must stay at Brokeback, but is not that easy, and we receive the first hit after they separate for the first time, as Ennis breaks in tears at a nearby alley back in town, vomiting and internally bleeding from the situation. Heath Ledger's terrific performance of Ennis is breathtaking. He plays him quite but very emotionally wounded, understanding what happens and what must be done but knowing inside himself what he really wants. This is an Oscar worthy performance, and the best I've seen all year over Philip Seymour Hoffman's Capote and Joaquin Phoenix's Johnny Cash.
And then Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack, the most outspoken of the two about their relationship. He loves Ennis more than anything in the world, even after he eventually marries and has a son. Gyllenhaal's is too an Oscar worthy performance, making his character truly hurt and hateful towards the world for the relationship he's not able to live the way he wants.
And so just as Ennis, he ends up married, and that takes us to the women.

Michelle Williams is outstanding as Alma Del Mar, and she also puts a very internal performance that kicks in the very moment Ennis and Jack reunite for the first time 4 years after Brokeback Mountain. It's a double punch scene as we are touched by the reunion in which the two men can't help but fall in love right back and fiercely kiss, but then Alma sees them, and we are loaded with an incredible guilt and at the painful sight of Michelle Williams reaction. That alone is an award worthy performance, and then she cements it with a scene many years later when she finally tells Ennis that she's known the truth all the time, and never said anything knowing that her husband and his friend did not go fishing during those two or three times a year they went back to Brokeback during the rest of their lives. Oscar might be a bit too much though, as she only appears every now and then during the twenty years the story takes us, but she has a chance and the performance is no short of mesmerizing.
And then we have the former Disney Princess Anne Hathaway as Lureen Twist, a woman so much into herself that she never knew about her husband's situation. I mentioned that the story spans through twenty years, and Hathaway’s Lureen was the only character I felt the aging did not work, and it was almost distracting to watch. Her acting is great, so there is not problem at all, and she gets naked (Michelle Williams as well, not together of course) which will help get male audiences in.
Finally there's Linda Cardellini who plays Cassie Cartwright on Ennis' life, and her role is way too small, just two or three scenes, but one of those is better than many supporting performances in most movies this year.

Ang Lee deserves much praise and awards for his work here, with the actors and with everything else like the team he assembled behind the camera. Usual Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams and the upcoming Babel) collaborator Rodrigo Prieto films the vast fields of Brokeback with a delicate hand, making for one of the most wonderful scenery put on film this year. And then the amazing score by Gustavo Santaolalla (The Motorcycle Diaries, and another Gonzalez Inarritu collaborator) whose acoustic guitar hits just at the right times when the men are together, silencing just as their hearts are empty when they are separated.
As I was watching the movie, I knew it was something different, I knew it was excellent, and then a final scene towards the end with Ennis and his daughter (a young woman about to get married) made me cry. Affecting, real and deeply haunting, Brokeback Mountain is everything you could wish for from a love story, gay or not, and it's one of the best movies of the year.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Other than it sucks to type its long title, I'm not sure how I really feel about The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe yet. Actually, I'm not sure how bad I think it is yet, or if maybe I'll end up thinking it's just an ok movie.
I think kids will love it, of course, because it has fantasy and it has cute animals and it has kids, but for adults, well, lets just say that I spent most of the time drawing parallels with Christianity and the Lord of the Rings movies, and there's a lot to compare about them here. The problem first is that the world of Narnia is disappointingly small, at least what we get to see in this part because future films will most probably expand it, but in a very different story because apparently all the books have different characters and only Aslan the lion is part of all of them. The second and bigger problem is that this is a Disney movie, and more important, a Walden Media movie, meaning that they are going to the little kids and of course they are getting a PG rating for the movie, making it feel like it's an epic story on a diet. It really sucks because with the huge battles with swords and animals biting other animals' necks, the action needs some kind of blood, at least a little, but there's none of it, not even wounds, and they even cut away from the money shots at the killing scenes, because those would've also given them a higher rating.

Based on the acclaimed and super famous (they say, because I'd never heard about Narnia before the movie started being promoted) books by C.S. Lewis (who I hear was a friend and rival of J.R.R. Tolkien), the story is adapted by Ann Peacock, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely and Shrek and Shrek 2 director Andrew Adamson who is also at the helm here. This is an epic story with an ancient prophecy, and it involves 4 human children going to Narnia to rescue from The White Witch, which has ruled for the past hundred years, a hundred years without Christmas. The children must be two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve, and they will are to be take the power from the White Witch and then go on to rule Narnia. Since they are children, they will be helped in battle by the savior/messiah Aslan. I put a lot of the religious stuff there but don't worry, is all handled very well and sporadic (there's also Santa, though but more on him later).

I really liked the beginning of the movie, very dark and scary set in England during a bombing of London in World War II. The our four heroes are sent to a house for refugee children and the magic begins. The scenes at the mansion are great and the kids show some good chemistry there. The first couple of visits to Narnia are very well staged and with some good magic in them which is then lost as the movie progresses. Even right at times during those first visits as Mr. Tumnus first scene with Lucy and the White Witch's first scene with Edmund are totally pedophelic.
But let me explain, the kids are siblings Peter (William Moseley), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), Susan (Anna Popplewell) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) Pevensie and they get to Narnia via a wardrobe they found in the aforementioned mansion while playing hide and seek. When they get there, they are told the prophecy by a talking beaver and his wife (voiced by Ray Winstone and Dawn French) who then take them to see Aslan with the help of an allied Fox voiced by Rupert Everett (and yes, all animals talk). On their way they also meet with Santa, who is there for just one scene and brings them gifts in a very Galadriel kind of way so the gifts are all either weapons or magic items they will eventually use when it's necessary for the story. They will end up fighting Tilda Swinton's White Witch and her battalion of animals (which are different from the good animals: Cheetas are good and White Tigers are bad, for example) and Ork-like beasts. The centaurs are good and very cool by the way. Besides freeing Narnia from the constant winter brought by the White Witch, beating her will bring back to life Mr. Tumnus (a faun, played by James McAvoy) and many other creatures that the White Witch has turned into stone, the penalty for those who don't report to the police that they've seen a human. The police are half bull-half humans by the way.

I liked the 4 kids, well written characters and good actors. They did a great job even though their characters get way cliched towards the end. The White Witch and Aslan are pretty good too, though there's not enough of them for us to really care about them, which pretty much sucks because Aslan is supposed to be kind of like Gandalf but it just doesn't work.
And then the rest is bad, most of the secondary characters need a lot of work as they have no backstory at all (specially the lead centaur and the professor back at the mansion who is played by a wasted Jim Broadbent), and that was my problem with the entire story and the prophecy, even though there are a lot of characters, it's all too simple.

On the technical aspects, the cinematography and the score are almost non-existent (and the 3 pop songs at the end by Alanis Morissette, Imogene Heap and Tim Finn, sucked). The costumes, though kind of generic, are pretty good, and the art direction is pretty good too.
The special effects, while great at times (specially with the animals, Aslan in particular rules), sucks at others like with the sledges. Very disappointing compared with the excellent work ILM did with War of the Worlds this year (there's a little WETA and KNB here too but I'm blaming ILM). The movie is really long at two and a half hours, but it is extremely well paced to me it felt like it was less than two hours.
Overall, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is for kids, little ones, and they will be entertained by it, but they'll be the only ones. Now that I've thought about it, Narnia is ok, but definitely no Middle Earth, no Oz, not even Fantasia.

Syriana

I have the same feeling about Syriana as I had when I saw Traffic years ago. The movie has lots of stuff going on, very important stuff, very detailed, very well done, but it is just way too much. Syriana is exhausting. Written and directed by Traffic's Oscar winning screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, this is a fictitious movie based on Robert Baer's non-fiction book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism.

The plot is very convoluted, with around a dozen characters playing in around five or six different stories, all with the same idea: global politics, oil business and the corrupt US government.
We have George Clooney as Bob Barnes, a CIA spy in the Middle East. This is the character that is supposedly based on Robert Baer. He sells some weapons to terrorists, kills terrorists, and then gets double crossed by the CIA and is brutally tortured by more terrorists. All while he tries to find out what it is that he's been doing for the government so he can learn why is he being attacked now. We know nothing about his personal life though, so there's nothing to care about him.

There's also Matt Damon as Bryan Woodman, an energy analyst in Geneva, Switzerland who gets power giving advise to an Iranian Prince about oil politics, thanks to a personal tragedy. Amanda Peet plays Bryan' suffering wife Julie. The Iranian Prince is Nasir Al-Subaai, played by Alexander Siddig. He's possibly going to be given the power by his father, so he's trying to figure out what to do with his politics. He wants to go with the Chinese, which would be better for his country, but that would mean to go against the oil companies and the US government. He's fighting for the throne with his brother Hamed Al-Subaai (played by Nadim Sawalha), who is all for continuing like they are now.

And then there's Jeffrey Wright (brilliant in Angels in America and also Broken Flowers earlier this year) as Bennett Holiday, a big time Washington, DC lawyer working on the merger of two big oil companies fighting for Middle Eastern territory. In this story we have Chris Cooper as Jimmy Pope, one of the companies' CEO and Christopher Plummer as Dean Whiting, the head of Bennett's law firm. There are also William Hurt, Mark Strong, and a couple more people somewhere in there. Bennett's got personal problems too, as his drunken father (played by William C. Mitchell) daily visits him which embarrasses him.

The acting is pretty good, but nobody is really excellent, meaning that I won't be nominating any of these people for any supporting Oscars. Is the movie smart? Of course it is, maybe too smart. You get all these data and information and we are supposed to feel angry about current world politics, but that's about it, because we truly don't care about any of these characters. Maybe a little bit about the young Pakistani men and the working father, but with a movie out there now like Paradise Now, the suicide bombers in this movie don't mean much. And so I couldn't get myself to like Syriana. Same happened to me with The Constant Gardener earlier this year, the movie is technically excellent, but it's just not enjoyable.