The big story in movies last year was plunging attendance: down 6.2 percent from 2005. Everyone had a theory about why, and among the proposed culprits were DVDs, crying children, on-screen advertisements, and patrons yakking on cell phones. My own guess was that people had wised up to all the slick advertising and puffy reviews, had grown tired of organizing their evenings around a two-hour block of corporatized cheese. But according to an online study cited last month in the New York Times, the real reason is more prosaic: ticket prices have risen about 5 percent since 2003, and people think they’re too expensive. It’s a sign of the times–moviegoing, a middle-class entertainment for more than a century, is becoming too expensive for the middle class.
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Last year’s drop in attendance is particularly dispiriting because so many good movies came and went without finding an audience, from big-studio rollouts like Cinderella Man to art-house secrets like Lila Says. I had even more trouble than usual whittling my year-end list down to ten movies, as evidenced by my weaselly genre categories at the end. In the 50s, when the nation’s theater owners were first feeling the competition of television, they came up with the advertising slogan “Movies are better than ever.” I wouldn’t go that far, but in 2005 movies were better than usual. Here are the best:
Gunner Palace. Michael Tucker arrived in Baghdad as an embedded reporter in September 2003; his documentary about an artillery division stationed in the bombed-out Al Azimiyah palace not only exposes problems that make the war unwinnable (soldiers’ ignorance of the culture, ineffective training of Iraqi civil defense forces, abuse of the civilian population) but allows the young grunts to comment on their experience through rap and music.
My Summer of Love. A homely orphan in rural West Yorkshire (Nathalie Press) is drawn into a steamy affair with a posh bird visiting from the city (Emily Blunt), much to the displeasure of the country girl’s older brother (Paddy Considine), who’s returned from prison a sanctimonious evangelical Christian. This small-scale British drama by Pawel Pawlikowski was promoted for its lesbian romance, but despite all the idyllic afternoons on rolling hills, it’s a story of brutality and betrayal.
Best comedies: Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic.
Best movies I couldn’t jam into any of the above categories: The Ballad of Jack and Rose, The Beautiful Country, Breakfast on Pluto, Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Crash, The Constant Gardener, Good Night, and Good Luck, Kontroll, Layer Cake, Millions, Munich, Nine Lives, Purple Butterfly, Separate Lies, The Squid and the Whale, Thumbsucker, Tony Takitani, Walk the Line, Yes.
