Munich, Soldier's Girl, The Horseman on the Roof, & The Assassination of Richard Nixon

Munich is now the best movie of last year I've seen. At least, until I think of something else. Syriana, A History of Violence, The Constant Gardener, Pride & Prejudice, Match Point, The Squid and the Whale, The New World, and probably a few others also would have been good movies to be nominated for Oscars over Crash (which still sucks), Capote, and Good Night, & Good Luck, none of which were particularly amazing movies. I still haven't seen Brokeback Mountain, but I'm pretty damn sure I'm not going to enjoy it as much as my list of great films of last year. Munich was a little long for my tastes, but it's a damn good movie anyway, and it's got an amazing central performance from Eric Bana. I'm not sure that Spielberg made quite the movie with no real moral judgments on terrorism and the responses to them that he says he did. The final shot sort of belies that doesn't it? Anyway, it's Spielberg's best film in years.

Soldier's Girl is really good. Too bad the DVD I got had no menu, frequently popped up a "Property of Showtime" message and just sucked. What the hell? Apparently, this has happened to a few others, who've purchased the DVD. What the hell Showtime? You make this good movie about a transsexual and the soldier who loved him/her and how the military is seriously messed up with respect to sexuality. Andre Braugher, Shawn Hatosy, and Troy Garity are all good, but Lee Pace is amazing. If I didn't know that Lee Pace was a guy (from the very excellent Wonderfalls, no less), I would have been shocked to find that out. Not an amazingly attractive woman, but still pretty good.

The Horseman on the Roof was weak. There are times when I just randomly added movies to my queue based on good reviews from the NY Times. This was clearly one of them. Sure, a story about cholera and revolutionaries in post-Napoleonic Europe sounds like a fascinating story, and Juliette Binoche and Olivier Martinez are both attractive, but there was just no there there in the movie.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon just sounded like too interesting of a movie to skip out on. Based on a true story of a guy who wanted to hijack a plane to fly it into the White House and kill Nixon? Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle? Where did it go wrong? Probably because I don't really care to see a man broken down throughout the entire film.