FILMS WORTH SEEING IN EARLY 2006 IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM IN 2005

Here are some films that don't deserve a rip job:

Brokeback Mountain
Ang Lee's simple gay cowboy love story is just that. The screenplay stays unflinchingly true to Annie Proulx's short story and the ballad of Jack and Ennis is destined to sound a sad melody both because the stars are crossed and because our lovers have chosen so. Lee's only misstep (and it's a minor one) is to ring the bell harder on the suffering of living a lie than the pain of Jack and Ennis living without each other. And Heath Ledger's stellar performance almost renders Lee's languid direction suspenseful.

Walk the Line
Even though this man in dark sunglasses is white and calls himself the Man in Black, it's not a stretch to say that we've seen this biopic before and recently. But Ray lacks the overarching love story that provides a pitch-perfect frame for Johnny Cash's life. When the wounded dog gets famous, starts hitting the sauce, the pills and the powder and it all starts ringing too familiar, it's Johnny and June Carter's love that bring this film back into focus and the Tennessee Three's two-step on the Folsom Prison stage that sounds the refrain.


Junebug
There wasn't a film in 2005 that hit more authentic notes than Junebug. Alessandro Nivola plays George, who returns home to his rural North Carolina town from life in the big city (Chicago) with his lover sophisticate Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz). Nivola, who maybe best known for playing Nicolas Cage's brother Castor Troy in Face/Off, is more than up to the challenge, playing a prodigal son-done-good whose dispassion hides a weariness of being the Bible Belt choir boy. But it's Amy Adams who steals the show as George's guileless, idiot-loquacious sister, Ashley, who ultimately faces the hardest knocks with the most understanding.

REVIEW: KING KONG

Come the month of February, when the Oscar nominations are doled out, I'm thinking Vegas will post 3:2 odds on Peter Jackson winning another Best Director nod for King Kong.

Should that happen, I'm thinking there are 3:2 odds that I will commit suicide and sign my note, Disillusioned Film Lover.

I hear the critics hailing, however. Look at the marvelously recreated Depression-era New York City! What a committed performance by Naomi Watts! Look at the giant gorilla, humanized by the filmic miracle of computer graphics! All of which is not up for debate.

But what is apparently up for debate, apparently, at least in Peter Jackson's double-Oscar-winning frontal lobe is the validity of a two-hour love story between a woman and a prehistoric ape. That after all was the aim of the original pre-CGI King Kong. Jackson's post-millenium re-imagining is first a one-hour story of a struggling actress named Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) who might as well have been named Moxie McMoxie, followed by 90-minutes of deleted scenes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, followed by an anti-climactic ending that does very little to tie any of the thematic strands of the first two hours together.

The result is a bloated scourge of a film, an exhausting exercise that includes Jackson's inexplicable taste for portraying aborigines and natives as monstrosities, four dinosaur chases, and a body count that goes mostly unmentioned through the rest of the film. Naomi Watts goes traipsing through miles of jungle avoiding dinosaur jaws on the toughest barefeet in the history of film. And the final 120 minutes of the film contain approximately eight total lines of dialogue.

I'd recommend therapy for Peter Jackson, who can't seem to get over painting his cartoonish fear of marauding, half-naked darkies with spears all over the silver screen in three-hour film after three-hour film. Peter, you fooled me once with orcs. This time, it's clear you have problems.

King Kong is an epic disaster of prehistoric proportions. Don't let Roger Ebert and company persuade you otherwise.