Top 5: Movies of 2005

As I indicated in my review of Serenity I have long intended to publish a list of my top 5 movies of 2005. Through a combination of memory, searching through saved ticket stubs and glances at my movie reviews from the last 12 months I have reconstructed the list of eligible films. If I’ve left anything out then it obviously wasn’t memorable enough to earn a place on the top 5 list anyway. These are the 13 movies I saw in the cinema in the year 2005 (nine of them in UGC in Dublin, my favouritest cinema ever):

  1. Team America: World Police
  2. Garden State
  3. Alexander
  4. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  5. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
  6. Wedding Crashers
  7. Batman Begins
  8. The Longest Yard
  9. Serenity
  10. Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
  11. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
  12. Doom
  13. King Kong

The list is in approximate chronological order. Unfortunately Greystones cinema doesn’t print the movie name or the date on its tickets so I’m not certain when I saw Alexander, and I don’t seem to have my ticket from Batman Begins.

They’re the contenders, these are the winners:

5. Batman Begins

The best Batman since the 1960s version starring Quahog’s mayor Adam West and alleged porn star Burt Ward. This could have placed in the list just by virtue of its amazing addition to the movie link game (just look at that cast list!) Fortunately it also happpened to have a great story, spectacular photography and visual effects, and a cast that was mostly composed of people who aren’t engaged to lunatic scientologists.

4. Wedding Crashers

Potentially the best Frat Pack movie to date (pending a second viewing to make a final comparison to Old School). Owen Wilson plays… well, Owen Wilson. Come to think of it, Vince Vaughan pretty much plays Owen Wilson too. I guess you’ll like this if you’re an Owen Wilson fan.

3. Garden State

I went to this because there was nothing else in the cinema that looked even remotely interesting. It turned out to be the best film I had seen in months. I hate to say "quirky" because you’ll think of Ally McBeal, which wouldn’t be a good comparison. I’m not going to sum this one up any better than I did first time around.

2. Serenity

I had never seen Firefly before I saw this. I bought the whole series on the strength of this movie, and I haven’t been disappointed. This one was hugely popular with a less-than-huge group of people. I was one of those people. I just love Joss Whedon’s characters, and these are at least as good as the ones I gave a decade of my life to in Buffy and Angel. The fact that this movie has barely recouped its budget in the worldwide box office, but that it was top of Amazon’s DVD sales chart for weeks, is probably indicative of the change that has being taking place in movie economics in recent years. But who cares about economics when there are explosions and psychics and canibals and spaceships?

1. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

I said in my Serenity review that I would be impressed if Peter Jackson could beat Joss Whedon to the top spot in this list. Who would have thought that it would be taken by a movie I only heard of days before I saw it? One which enjoyed, let’s say, rather less than widespread hype. I cried laughing at this movie many times. The only place I saw this movie take in anyone else’s yearly roundup was number nine in Empire. That was while I was skimming the magazine in my cinema seat just before the movie started. It really deserved a wider audience than it seems to have found. I expect it will do well in smallscreenland.

I know there are some popular movies that I missed this year. Narnia probably wouldn’t have been a contender, but would Sin City have been? It made both Empire‘s and Jonathon Ross’s top five. Sideways seemingly got good reviews from everyone except my brother, who hated it. What have I not seen that would be on this list if I had? And do you agree with me on the ones I have rated? What’s your top 5 of 2005?

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