During 2005 I went to the movies for 47 times, which is probably is a lot more movie-going than most people do, but still not much for me, since it's the first time in recent years I drop below the once-a-week average. Anyway, here are my favourite movies of the year:



Crash, by Paul Haggis, was absolutely astounding in every way, and features one of the best-written scripts I've ever seen. I just can't understand why didn't Hollywood hype this (it went through theatres with discretion, even though it stayed there for months) — it's the best movie to come out of California in 2005.



Rois et Reine / Kings and Queen, by Arnaud Desplechin. One of those cases I went to see a movie without a clue of what it is about, and it took me completely by surprise. The first few minutes of the 2,5 hour are awkward and seem to invite people to leave the room, but suddently the whole character of the movie changes and you're in for a very extravagant mix of drama and comedy. Features some of the funniest onscreen situations of 2005 as well as what might be one of the hardest blows to the stomach in film history. The fact that I've seen Kings and Queen in a recent trip to Lisbon but it is yet to premiere in Porto is a criminal example of the mismanagement of portuguese movie theatres.



Alice, by Marco Martins. A portuguese movie done right is already big news, even bigger when that movie is this good. The story of a father looking for his missing daughter in a claustrophic vision of Lisbon is flawless.

Other five star movies I've seen in 2005 were:

- Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve
- Mike Nichols' Closer
- Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby
- Alexander Payne's Sideways
- Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy
- Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener

There were also a number of movies that are worth taking note, some of each could have gotten to the 5-star pantheon had I woken up the right side of bed:

- Zach Braff's Garden State
- Niels Muller's The Assassination of Richard Nixon
- Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall
- Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern's Aaltra
- Jacques Audiard's The Beat that my Heart Skipped
- Pavel Pavlokovsky's My Summer of Love
- Spike Lee's She Hate Me
- Kim Ki-Duk's 3-Iron

Aaltra and She Hate Me sharing the title of Weirdest Movie of the Year, in a funny kitschy kind of way. There were also disappointments, and as far as I'm concerned three great directors failled miserabily: War of the Worlds proves canned crap is the best to expect from Sunday Afternoon Spielberg (but I'm hoping that Munich will prove Monday Night Spielberg is still a good filmmaker when it premieres here); The Brothers Grimm, rather than being Terry Gilliam's triumphant return, totally sucked; and Last Days closed Gus van Sant's Trilogy of People Dying in a complete boring and irrelevant fashion. Of course, the final chapter of that other set of two trilogies is not even worth mentioning, such a bad unplayable videogame it was.···

Public domain movie torrents, most being B-movie or old cartoon stuff. But wait! Don't buy that deluxe German Cinema DVD box set — classics such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis and M, or Murnau's Nosferatu are also freely available at the Archive.org film collection.···

Whatever is your spending time with family holiday of choice — Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa or Festivus — may it be merry and rich in chocolate-based desserts. Have a Merry Holiday.···

New at Unreasonable People, almost two years too late, a new exhibition called 'Wrecks'.···

Superstar film critic Roger Ebert's Best of 2005, I've seen only two of the top ten (Crash and King Kong) so far — perhaps the others will premiere here in Portugal between January and April, always the best season of the year for going to the movie theatres here. Crash is indeed fantastic (but somehow I expected to see better things during 2005), but I really can't agree on King Kong being top ten stuff. It's great, it's fun, but very, very bloated, and after a while in the middlesection of the 190 movie your mind starts to wander in cynical fashion what's gonna happen next, after the evil tribe, the giant ape, the dinossaur stampede, the velociraptors, the T-Rexes, the giant wasps, the giant lobsters, the giant worms, the giant bats... c'mon, we are here to see King Kong climbing the Empire State Building, not further action sequences against oversized wildlife. But still beat the crap out of Star Wars.···

Freeplay certainly looks interesting for anyone looking for some quick music for video or film, shame about the licensing being free only in the United States though.···

Take a look at my friend Sara's Deviantart page, she's definitely got the Photoshop skills.···

Another blog, this one for us closet pop culture historians: The World of Kane.···

Totally Unauthorized, a Hollywood crew member's diary. Plenty of the inevitable funny stories that happen in a shoot, plenty of comments on the inhumane schedules that disrupt any attempt at a personal life.···

Given how much time I sometimes spend in coffeehouses just waiting for people, I might consider having a go at making latte art.···

Now you can print your own Monopoly money (PDF).···

Bunny suicide techniques. via kottke···

A MP3 of a 1878 sound recording spawned an antique sounds thread at Boing Boing, but it is in fact amazing. I own a 1865 encyclopaedia that was given to me by my grandmother (it used to be her grandfather's) and that kind of past relic is already a bit mindboggling for me. I guess my family doesn't have a tradition of keeping old things around.···

Oh, I'm back in Porto by the way. Many thanks to Sérgio and Sara (and the absent Marcelino) for having me at their house, and also to Rita and Tó and Joana and Susana for having me come over for diner. As for Lisbon, I keep everything I said about the needless aggressiveness of that city, but I must say I enjoyed my stay enough to be considering the sacrilege of shooting parts of my next project there. Places I discovered to come back to: The Noo Bai bar at Adamastor Overlook, Vértigo Café at Carmo, the lovely Cape Verdian restaurant (I'm sorry I didn't get the name) at the slopy streets of Mouraria, the very very flourescent-lit bookstore of the Cinema King.···

It's Art, a downloadable PDF magazine.···

I never paid much attention to French cinema, to be frank (Arnaud Desplechin's Rois et Reine, here in theatres now, is an otherworldly must-see exception), but Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous (Quicktime req'd), a 1978 short which consists basically of the director (some say a hired F1 driver) playing real Grand Theft Auto with a Ferrari in the streets of Paris (hitting 220Km/h in parts), is not to be missed.···

I'm still in Lisbon. The showing of Words and Thoughts in RGB at Santiago Alquimista went well, even if it was projected at wrong aspect ratio which stretched the image vertically, and the place is so expensive it hurts (3 euros for an undersized glass of beer). However, of all the things I've made perhaps it is just the one video that can survive that. Nobody even noticed. Since then I've been loitering around, engaging in situationistic wanderings through the Capital of the Empire between lunches, coffees and dinners, and the thing that really bugs me is the unneeded aggressiveness. Porto being a similar scale city (many people don't agree with me on this but I think more than half the size qualifies as the same order of magnitude), there isn't the constant anxiety I see here. And I think planning is to blame: Incredibly wide boulevards in which crossing the street is a life threatning action, a subway that moves like a black iron prison, heavy and brisk (can't the doors slide gently, do the warning sirens need to be so head-splittingly loud?), pavements colonized by cars or hideous baroque Christmas lights, which besides ugly are annoying — the act of walking is anxious, and needn't be like that. So tomorrow I'll be back in Porto, and probably miss all those other things only the Capital of the Empire is allowed to have.···

I'm going down to Lisbon for a few days. Tomorrow (Friday, December 2nd) at 22:30 you may watch Words and Thoughts in RGB at Santiago Alquimista, during the ArteNonStop arts festival. See you there.···

Farewell to Overhead, the Monochrom MP3 tribute to that classic classroom item, the overhead projector. Funny and distressing (how fetishistic can our generation get?) at the same time.···

A Brief Economic History of the World. If there's a Black Art, for me, that's Economics. I always get this weird feeling about our society, the metaphor of bodybuilders on steroids comes to mind. I find the fact that 'sustainable development' is even an issue (suggesting 'unsustainable development') a bit worrying.···

More goodies: Civilization II downloadable for free. Back in the day, CivII and Sensible Soccer are to blame for a lost adolescence.···

Paint.NET seems a nice free alternative to Photoshop (Windows only though), and unlike the GIMP its user interface doesn't look like a nuclear power plant control room.···