The Best and Worst Movies of the Year

The Academy Award nominations were announced recently, and I'm pretty please with them. I'm glad to see a movie like Lord of the Rings get lots of nominations, because more fantasyish movies need to be made. Anyway, now is a good time to share my worthless opinion with you on what movies I think were the best and worst of the year. I'll do the same thing with music sometime soon. Here we go!

Best Movie: It's a tie!

Moulin Rouge: No movie this has made me get that shivery feeling down my spine more than Moulin Rouge. I love it more every time I see. I love the music, and I'm not sick of the soundtrack despite having listened to it at least 3 gajillion times and getting it stuck in my head for days on end. I love Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman and the fat dude who played Zidler or Sidler or whatever his name is. And on top of it being a wonderful movie, it now has a wonderful DVD with tonnes of fun extra features. It would definitely be the best movie of the year if it didn't have to share the honour with:

Ginger Snaps: The stupid Academy didn't nominate it for anything, but Ginger Snaps is my new favourite werewolf movie. Everything about this movie, from the clever Carrie-like "am I a normal teenager or a werewolf?" theme to the creepy music. This movie was gory, and there are few movies these days that use gore effectively. Also, it's Canadian, but without the "shitty movie" feel of most Canadian movies. Oh, and Ginger is hot as hell, which always helps. If you haven't seen this movie yet, go out and rent it now. This, too, has a wonderful DVD (only in Canada though, so if you're in the US, move here).

Honourable mentions:

Lord of the Rings: I was hoping to be blown away by this movie. However, while I can recognize that everything about this movie was perfect, it just didn't have the impact on me that the two movies mentioned above did. I have to see it again to really judge it fairly.

Memento: A movie that actually required you to think! Plus it had such an original gimmick that it wasn't like watching a normal movie...it was a whole new experience.

Harry Potter: All it did was bring the book to life on the screen. The fact that they didn't completely screw it up is reason enough to mention this movie here.

Other good movies: Jeepers Creepers, Josie and the Pussycats (screw you, I liked it), Vanilla Sky, Freddy Got Fingered (Tom Green is a genius), Shrek, Monsters Inc, Legally Blond, Ocean's 11, Fast and the Furious, Final Fantasy, Amelie, and probably a few others I'm forgetting.

Worst Movie:

Driven: I like every movie I see, and this is no exception, but it's the only one I can think of that was undeniably, objectively, total crap. There really wasn't anything good about it, except a few good songs on the soundtrack (although I used to think so, I now realize that Estella Warren isn't even that hot). There were moments where I couldn't help but laugh at the bad dialogue or shitty especial effects. As I mentioned, I was still entertained (except during the boring parts), but it's just a scientific fact that Driven was a piece of smelly elephant dung that's been sitting in the sun all day and got puked on by a llama. A gay llama.