My "The Best Movies of 2005" List---Part 1

I am going to take a moment and reflect on the movies that entertained me in 2005. It was going to be a top ten list, but I barely saw more than ten movies last year. I decided to put the whole list up and just comment on each.

First up... "Elecktra" staring that girl from Alias (Jennifer Garner)

Was this supposed to be a sequel to Daredevil? I don't really remember anything about the plot of this movie, but Jennifer Garner is a hottie and she fights ninjas so I guess that was worth the price of the ticket. Wait?!?! It costs $8.75 to buy a movie ticket? Jen, you're not that hot. This was worse than Daredevil, which wasn't THAT great to begin with.

The second movie that I saw last year was... "SinCity" another comic book movie

Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller brought the comic/noir world onto movies screens panel by panel. It was more entertaining than Elecktra, but that isn't saying much. This film was visually impressive, damn impressive, but the stories got too violent and too sensationalized. I have never read any of the Sin City the comics, but I have read some of Frank Miller's other series (Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Returns). I wasn't impressed with these stories. Anti-heroes struggling against a corrupt system, "eh" I've seen that before.

Third... "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith"

Being the dorkie guy that I am I was obligated to see this movie. I was never a huge fan of any of the Star Wars movies. They have been entertaining, but I have never seen anything in any of the Star Wars movies that you couldn't find by randomly turning on the Sci-fi Channel on any night of the week. However, the effects were good, the story did entertain and it was pleasing to see that whinny Anakin Skywalker get sliced into pieces.

Next, number four... George A. Romero's "Land of the Dead"

This was probably the best genre movie that I saw this year. I am a fan of all of Romero's horror films, because he spins his "dead" sub-genre to reflect the ugliness of our culture in the ugliness of his zombies. Night of the Living Dead, filmed at the end of the 1960's, has a group of innocent people being lynched by a mob of zombies in rural America. Dawn of the Dead portrays the mindlessness of mass consumerism. I admit I don't know what Day of the Dead is about, but from what I understand that movie was cut down a lot from the original vision. How I interpreted Land of the Dead is that American culture has given too much blind faith that the actions of our leaders are being done for the benefit of the masses when the reality is that many of our leaders are looking out only for their own selfish interests. In LotD the zombies seem to be a metaphor for terrorism, an entity that wants destruction and can now reach us on our city streets.