Laura took Christmas week off and wanted to go see movies damn near every day, so we saw a bunch of them. Here's what I thought:

Movie: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. With its movie within a movie recapitulating a movie based on a series of noir thriller books meant to be movies, this is too convoluted to deconstruct. Fortunately, it's funny enough often enough to enjoy anyway. Does seem like an awful lot of people get shot. B+

Movie: The Ice Harvest. The Wichita this is set in doesn't strike me as all that familiar -- a couple dark shots of downtown, a (possibly Oldtown) restaurant I'd never go to, a plausible albeit ridiculous (possibly Eastborough) house, some strip joints I know nothing about, a wintry pond that I suppose could be a sand pit (most of which have been turned into virtual Florida housing tracts). Also don't know anything about crooked lawyers and mobsters, but someone in this town seems to be taking in more money than honest work pays. This is really just a broken down film noir, and setting it in Wichita has got to be cheaper and less cliched than setting it in Hollywood. The cliched femme fatale also comes cheaper, as does Randy Quaid's mob boss character. Picks up a bit at the end, when it improbably turns into a buddy picture -- too late for Billy Bob Thornton, I'm afraid. B

Movie: Syriana. People say this is overly complicated, but it strikes me as underdeveloped. The thread with the Pakistani oil workers recruited for a suicide mission could have been cut without losing anything other than the vague hint that there's more to the world than the schemers who populate the rest of the story. Of the latter George Clooney's CIA agent and Jeffrey Wright's lawyer (or whatever) go through their motions without making much sense -- the former is presumably conflicted, the latter just dull. Matt Damon's business analyst is appropriately glib and cynical -- he gets the best lines in the movie when he taunts an oil prince on what his patch of sand will amount to once the West sucks it dry -- then briefly turns idealist with results that will make him all the more cynical. Only the Texas oil bosses seem to know who they are and why they do what they do, while the government people who do their bidding and rationalize it as being in the national interest come off as the most clueless of all. A big part of the value here is the cinematic breadth -- how much territory it covers, and in that at least the oil field shots are most interesting. But as a story, and hence as a critique, it's underdeveloped. B+

Movie: Jarhead. When I was draft bait back in the Vietnam era I hated war and injustice and all that, but what I really feared was boot camp. That was well before it became a staple of cinematic sado-masochism, of which this movie is state of the art. On the other hand, there's little reason to think that anything here rings false. (Last night I saw a clip on the news where the Navy was recruiting Seals using remarkably similar footage, including crawling under barbed wire while drill masters shot guns overhead, but they didn't include the bit where the soldier raised his head too high and had it taken off.) The 1990-91 war against Iraq seems on the mark too, at least from one vantage point -- on the ground, close enough to the action to see the charred remains but quick enough to get a shot off. Trained to kill one on one, Swofford is an inexperienced anachronism. For my money, that makes him a fool. Likely he would agree. A-

Movie: Munich. This is Steven Spielberg's remake of a HBO movie called Sword of Gideon -- same book, same events, bigger budget, less pointed message. The story is about one of Israel's covert assassination teams sent into Europe following the 1972 when a group from the Palestinian Black September organization abducted and killed eleven Israelis at the Munich Olympics. The team was given a list of Palestinians, allegedly responsible for Munich, and a large budget to practice their revenge. They shoot one guy easily, kill another with a relatively neat bomb, then another with a messier one. They in turn become the prey of the Palestinians, although this is much more muted in the Spielberg version. They also start to harbor doubts, although this is handled differently in the two versions, with the earlier one both more plausible and more pointed. Another advantage of Sword is that it spares us the Avner-debates-Ali scene, which while fair enough is an odd touch for a cold-blooded killers movie. But the big difference between the two movies is expands the context to include the whole Munich incident in the hypergory style he's developed lately, and not just as prologue: it reappears periodically, even spliced into Avner's nightmares. (He was safe at home in Israel at the time, happy with his pregnant wife, so his nightmares are mere transference -- a handy substitute for the violence he was actually involved in.) The problem with adding the Munich scenes is that it only adds part of the context -- Avner's motivation, but not Ali's. Black September itself was a short-lived offshoot of the PLO named for events in 1969 when the PLO was routed by Jordan, forcing them to flee first to Syria then to Lebanon, and its primary intent was revenge against Jordan. But context is a game that can be extended way back -- at least as far as the sainted Trumpeldor (d. 1920). The problem with the limited context here is that it distracts from the assassins' responsibility for their own acts. One thing that made Sword a much more powerful movie was it forced Avner to think for himself: his first surprise was how easy it was to kill at first, then later how complicated it became; he further learned what it meant to be a target, and got a sense of how Israel was using him. Ultimately he makes a distinction between being a soldier (a tank commander, but in Munich he was Mossad) and a killer. Sword doesn't overreach. On the other hand, Spielberg expands the story in several ways. Usefully, he includes several events not in Sword, including a commando raid in Beirut where we briefly meet future Israeli PM Ehud Barak. And he includes one scene that sums up the program perfectly: they snatch a Greek hotel manager who before they blew up his place had been friendly and generous to them, who when they dumped him was furious at how they had used him -- he stands for Europe, the victim of both sides, the victim both times. Going into this I didn't expect much from Spielberg but hoped writer Tony Kushner might pull something out of it. It's a mixed bag. But the fact that I can remember Sword of Gideon so vividly two decades after the only time I've seen it testifies to its power and importance. Hegel was the first to show how the master-slave dialectic destroys both -- a profound insight that applies just as well to these killers. B

Movie: Smokers. Not in general distribution, but it's not every day that we get a world premiere here in Wichita. And I suppose some disclosure is in order: my nephew Mike Hull, working with Axel Foley, wrote, directed, and acted in this DV film, and I put some money into it. Also I've read the script, and seen rough cuts of it before, but this is the first time I've seen the final cut. The plot is: dumb young kid from Wichita moves to New York, where he tries to buy reefer on the street. Hooks up with a local dealer in the park; later hooks up with another dealer, who specializes in primo buds, also originally from Kansas. Several other dealers do business elsewhere, with connections to the first two, and most of the film consists of routine daily business including connections with other smokers. In due course, one set of dealers decides to rob the Kansas dealer, and the schlemiel from Wichita gets caught in the middle. Not much of a plot, but enough to get by, with the film scoring most on its slice of life details. The editing has a lot of split screen effects, which underscores the steady movement. It was shot dirt cheap, but a lot of care has gone into putting it together. I may be biased, but I had more fun watching this than any other film in this batch. [website] A-

Movie: The Squid and the Whale. Production-wise Noah Baumbach's Sundance-winning film doesn't strike me as any better than Smokers. But it does have some name actors, and a more rounded, nuanced story. Set in Brooklyn in the '80s, two writers (each a Ph.D. in literature) divorce and divvy up time with two teenage sons. Beyond that, it's character development, or perhaps more accurately, character deconstruction. Presumably the story started out as autobiographical, with Baumbach the elder son, but the father comes off as such a pompous snob it may have wound up as parody. Or maybe not. A-

Movie: Breakfast on Pluto. A comedy of manners, I'd say, about a cross-dressing Irish orphan (Cillian Murphy) bending genders in the midst of Ulster's troubles. I didn't find it very interesting in watching it, but numerous little bits resonate in memory. For instance, the hero (Paddy, aka Kitten) is nabbed in a London disco bombing, then brutally interrogated by a hard-nosed cop who suspects him of planting the bomb, but later takes pity on on him and sets him up with a job in a house of prostitution, visited by his unacknowledged father, a priest played by Liam Neeson. B

Looking back through my notebook, these are the movies I saw in 2005 (*including a few 2004 releases that we got to late, or got here late), in approximate rank order:

1. A History of Violence [A]
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [A]
3. Walk on Water [A]
4. Crash [A-]
5. The Merchant of Venice [A-]
6. Million Dollar Baby [A-]*
7. Vera Drake [A-]*
8. Capote [A-]
9. Hustle & Flow [A-]
10. Good Night and Good Luck [A-]
11. Jarhead [A-]
12. The Squid and the Whale [A-]
13. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou [B+]*
14. Lord of War [B+]
15. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang [B+]
16. The Aviator [B+]
17. Broken Flowers [B+]
18. Paradise Now [B+]
19. House of Flying Daggers [B+]*
20. Syriana [B+]
21. Finding Neverland [B+]*
22. The Constant Gardener [B+]
23. Sin City [B]
24. Munich [B]
25. The Ice Harvest [B]
26. Breakfast on Pluto [B]
27. Kingdom of Heaven [B]
28. March of the Penguins [B]

Several movies in town that we might get around to: Brokeback Mountain, Pride and Prejudice, Walk the Line. That the grade list stops at B shows I did a pretty good job of avoiding crap this year. (E.g., Laura went to see War of the Worlds and Rent without me.) Needless to say, some things just don't get here, and others don't get here very fast. For a further roundup, see what Wichita's top film critics have to say.

Postscript: Laura thinks I overrated Hitchhiker's Guide, Capote, and Sin City, and underrated Hustle & Flow, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Syriana, The Ice Harvest, Breakfast on Pluto, and possibly others.