2005 Worst Movies (Page #12)

The docu-drama "First Descent" chronicles the rebellious, inspiring and sometimes controversial rise of snowboarding--as seen through the eyes of the snowboarders setting the standards and breaking the boundaries of this worldwide phenomenon.

"First Descent" spotlights a handful of snowboarding's early pioneers (including Shawn Farmer, Nick Perata and Terje Haakonsen) and some of the ultra-sponsored superstar phenoms at snowboarding's current cutting edge (Shaun White and Hannah Teter) and literally takes them to the edge--the snow blanketed mountains of Alaska—where these five icons face some of the most challenging and hard-core natural terrain on the planet. The five come for different reasons—Perata and Farmer to see if they still have what it takes, Haakonsen to add another credit to his Big Mountain resume, and White and Teter to undertake their first Big Mountain ride ever—and yet all seek to challenge themselves to accomplish the best snowboarding feat of their lives down peaks of powder no rider has ever descended.

Leading up to their first descent, the crew of five share their stories, comparing viewpoints, individual lifestyles, and unedited opinions on the evolution of snowboarding that began as a delinquent child of skiing and now stands as an international cultural movement that has permanently changed the face of winter sports.

Intercutting footage from the snowboarding revolution of the '80s and '90s, real-life accounts from both notorious and famed riders, and dramatic, newly-filmed scenes from the biggest winter contests and experiences these riders undergo on their way to and in Alaska, "First Descent" creates a fast-paced portrait of a snowsport that has quickly evolved from a fringe hobby to a full-fledged global event.

In a night pregnant with a strange mix of tension and dizzy abandon, lovers Carla and Martin prowl clubs before drunkenly wandering back to his car. While he comes across as crass nouveau riche, she appears more liberal. Their conspicuous affluence, however, makes them ideal targets for kidnappers, and the trio of Trece, Budu and Niga gets a bead on them and promptly sweeps them up at gunpoint. The kidnappers then demand $20,000 to be delivered in two hours. Carla phones her rich father Sergio to procure the money, but chaos soon ensues. A botched ATM robbery is followed by a stopover at the palatial estate of a gay drug dealer.

The Stones, a New England family, have their annual holiday gathering. The eldest son brings his girlfriend home to meet his parents, brothers and sisters. The bohemian Stones greet their visitor--a high-powered, controlling New Yorker--with a mix of awkwardness, confusion and hostility. Before the holiday is over, relationships will unravel while new ones are formed, secrets will be revealed, and the family Stone will come together through its extraordinary capacity for love.

In the future, after the human civilization ended by war and pollution, only those few people who had the power and technology escaped the disaster. Those people built the last human city of Ecoban. As its energy source is the pollutant, the people of Ecoban plan to destroy the inhabitants of Marr to get more pollutant. Standing against Ecoban is a young man who wants only to clear the skies of the clouds to show the wonderful heavens to the girl he loves.

Four zoo animals are shipped back to their homeland by an animal rights group that feels they belong in the wild. When the ship capsizes, the animals find themselves stranded in Madagascar. Having had humans care for them their entire life, they know nothing about survival and must work together with the locals to help them fit in.

"MirrorMask" centers on Helena, a 15 year old girl in a family of circus entertainers, who often wishes she could run off and join real life. After a fight with her parents about her future plans, her mother falls quite ill and Helena is convinced that it is all her fault. On the eve of her mother's major surgery, she dreams that she is in a strange world with two opposing queens, bizarre creatures, and masked inhabitants. All is not well in this new world - the white queen has fallen ill and can only be restored by the MirrorMask, and it's up to Helena to find it. But as her adventures continue, she begins to wonder whether she's in a dream, or something far more sinister.

A deaf-mute man, Ryu, works in a smelting factory and inhabits his own silent world, oblivious to the din both at work and in his downscale apartment building. He idolizes his sister, who urgently needs a kidney transplant, and when he's laid off and then tricked out of his savings by organ traffickers, his wacko girlfriend, Yeong-mi, suggests kidnapping his former boss's daughter to pay for his sister's operation. Yeong-mi sees it as social revenge. Ryu, initially scared of the consequences, finally agrees after seeing another laid-off worker attempt hara-kiri outside the boss's home. After kidnapping the boss's daughter, their whole plan starts to quickly unravel with horrible consequences.

When David (Mark Ruffalo) sublet his quaint San Francisco apartment, the last thing he expected—or wanted—was a roommate. He had only begun to make a complete mess of the place when a pretty young woman named Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon) suddenly shows up, adamantly insisting the apartment is hers. David assumes there's been a giant misunderstanding…until Elizabeth disappears as mysteriously as she appeared. Changing the locks does nothing to deter Elizabeth, who begins to appear and disappear at will—mostly to rebuke David for his personal living habits in her apartment. Convinced that she is a ghost, David tries to help Elizabeth cross over to the "other side." But while Elizabeth has discovered she does have a distinctly ethereal quality—she can walk through walls—she is equally convinced that she is somehow still alive and isn't crossing over anywhere. As Elizabeth and David search for the truth about who Elizabeth is and how she came to be in her present state, their relationship deepens into love. Unfortunately, they have very little time before their prospects for a future together permanently fade away.

In the 1970s, a group of teenage surfers from a tough neighborhood known as "Dogtown" in Venice, California pioneered a revolutionary new style of skateboarding. Riding the waves at the Pacific Ocean Park pier, the Z-Boyz, known for their aggressive style and hard street attitude, combined the death-defying moves of surfing with the art of skateboarding and became overnight sensations and local legends. With empty pools as their canvas, the Z-boyz paved the way to what is now referred to as "extreme sports," and created a lifestyle that spread infectiously to beomce a worldwide counterculture phenomenon. But all of this fame would take its toll on the friendships that they thought would last a lifetime as the sport that started out as an afternoon hobby turned into big business.

Sequel to "House of 1000 Corpses" is set some months later with the Texas State Police making a full-scale attack against the murderous Firefly family residence for the 1,000+ murders and disappearances of the past several years. But three of the family members escape, including Otis, Baby Firefly and Baby's father Captain Spaulding. The evil trio go on a road trip, leaving dozens of mangled bodies in their wake. Evading a massive Texas Rangers dragnet as well as a group of equally murderous bounty hunters led by Ken Dwyer (the brother of a policeman Mamma Firefly killed in 'House of...') who's obsessed with finding the deadly killers, the surviving Firefly clan gather at a run-down amusement park owned by Captain Spaulding's half-brother, Charlie Altamont, whom offers them shelter and a new base of operations for their killing spree as Sheriff Dwyer, the Texas Rangers, the FBI and others slowly close in.