2004 Top Ten
January 2, 2005
The year in movies, 2004, is hard to categorize. I’ve heard some say that it was one of the weakest years in recent memory, with little to make up for the absence of a ‘Lord of the Rings’ blockbuster, which always, the previous three years, guaranteed us something big, and brilliant to close the year. These are the people who loathed “The Passion of the Christ”, scoffed at “Napoleon Dynamite”, and were indifferent about “Fahrenheit 9/11”. Then there is the other camp that loved this year at the movies, what with its odd array of good summer popcorn films (some of them sequels better than the original), its explosion of Sundance Film Festival indy’s into the mainstream, and its strong “smaller”, script-driven, character-driven, dialogue heavy late-season gems (“Sideways”, “Kinsey”) that make up, a bit, for stuff like “Garfield”, “Little Black Book”, and “Baby Geniuses 2”. These are the people that applauded Mel Gibson, turned ‘Dynamite’ into an oddball hit, and hooted at Michael Moore’s rabblerousing documentary that, in retrospect, did as much to unseat George Bush as an ill-planned war. I, however, belong to neither of these polar opposites, I rest squarely in the middle (I haven’t even seen “Napoleon Dynamite”); while I believe there was no surefire, out-of-the-box behemoth this year (‘Return of the King’ last year), and that there were long stretches of calendar this year where nothing good was worth your eight bucks (18 with large popcorn, medium soda, and overprice box of Milk Duds), there were enough strong films, both big and small, to warrant a slightly positive year-in-review. And instead of harping on the negative, because, in all seriousness, I try to skip as many bad films as I possibly can (when I start making Roger Ebert money, then I’ll commit to everything), and before I unspool my top ten, let’s take a quick glance at the positive in a year of ups and downs.
First off, we had an abnormally good summer movie season, with unusually strong “tent pole” sequels, such as Alfonso Cuaron’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”, easily the best of that popular franchise, and the funny, technically spectacular “Shrek 2”, the years highest grossing film. Add to that the thriller “Jaws”-without-a-budget shark flick “Open Water”, one of the many Sundance films this year to hit big, the early destruction scenes in “The Day After Tomorrow” (stop the film after 45-minutes, the rest sucks), Moore’s polarizing “Fahrenheit 9/11”, Robert Redford and Willem Dafoe mano-a-mano in the superb kidnapping drama “The Clearing”, and Mario Van Pebbles’ filmmaking family odyssey “Baadasssss!”, and we had quite a good first half of the year. Following summer, Michael Mann dropped us a hellish L.A. nightmare of a cab ride in “Collateral”, with great performances by Tom Cruise, and Jamie Foxx (also praise-worthy in the effective bio “Ray”), Johnny Depp kept a hot streak alive with the touching “Finding Neverland”, Peter Berg’s “Friday Night Lights” was one of the best football films ever made (thought the competition is weak), and a little animated masterpiece called “The Incredibles” made us all believe that you’re only yourself once you finally realize that only yourself is just good enough. Of the films not making the list, Brad Bird’s gorgeous Pixar film was the toughest to cut, but any one of these films could have made a list of the year’s top ten (oh, throw in “Garden State”, “Maria Full of Grace”, “Festival Express”, “Super-Size Me”, “Touching the Void”, and “Infernal Affairs” too), as well as a number of films I’m yet to see- including “House of Flying Daggers”, “Vera Drake”, “The Sea Inside”, “Hotel Rwanda”, and “Million Dollar Baby”- due to late local openings, but, sticking to my guns, here are, in descending order, my choices for the ten best motion pictures of 2004.
10. Spider-Man 2: I think everybody knew Sam Raimi’s sequel would be big, but I don’t think anybody knew just how good it was going to be, far surpassing the 2001 original in storytelling, emotion, computer graphics, performance, wit, and spectacle. Of the many highlights, Spider-Man’s duel with Doc Ock (the year’s best, and most sympathetic villain) aboard a speeding above ground subway train is the crowing thrill in a film with at least four dazzling set pieces. Simply put, the greatest comic book/super hero film of all time
9. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring: A deceptively simple tale about a Buddhist monk, isolated in a gorgeous South Korean lake forest, who raises an abandoned baby, told through various stages in his life (symbolized in the titles five seasons), forms the center of Kim Ki-Duk’s wonderful, life affirming meditation on religion, and inner peace. Slow, poignant, beautifully composed, and most of all, wholly enlightening, this was the best South Korean import of the year, and should be seen on DVD, preferably while meditating, with your eyes open, of course.
8. Before Sunset: Writer, Director Richard Linklater is a master of the filmed conversation, and this sequel (picking up nine years after “Before Sunrise”) finds Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walking the streets, and floating the rivers of Paris for 80 minutes of “What Ifs”, and “How Comes”, before ending on a truly satisfying note. Like fine jazz, the conversation seems improvised, but in the hands of such professionals, this film was the sweetest chat-fest of the year. Hopefully, it won’t take another nine years to see where Jesse and Celine go from here.
7. Intimate Strangers: Last year, my number one film was “Man on the Train”, an entertaining study of two men, one good, one bad, as they talk and talk, and realize that maybe they’d have been better off choosing the other man’s path. That masterpiece was directed by France’s best director, Patrice Leconte, and much like ‘Train’, Leconte’s latest film, “Intimate Strangers” (recently released on DVD) is another deeply interesting, and uncommonly “active” chamber drama about human interaction, this time between a woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) having marital problems, and the tax accountant (Fabrice Luchini) who she mistakes to be a shrink, unloading all of her troubles on his unsuspecting feet. Complex, and well acted, Leconte’s film becomes a dangerous game of mixed signals and misunderstandings, as the repressed accountant falls for the beautiful woman (or does he relish in the role playing?) and the woman’s husband, impotent and crippled, begins a threatening jealous discourse with the faux shrink. Leconte loves to explore basic relationships, throw in an absurd, often playful twist, and let the psychoanalysis speak for itself. “Intimate Strangers” takes patience, but it’s a revealing session.
6. Osama: The first film shot in post-Taliban Afghanistan, Siddiq Barmak’s masterly drama about a 12-year-old girl pretending to be a boy (named, highly symbolic, Osama) to escape Taliban oppression, is a sobering, intensely sad cinematic journey into a regime whose practices date them no better than cavemen. With touches of Kiarostami, Majidi, and Truffaut, “Osama” takes us into the lives of children sadly lacking the basic tools to enjoy a kind world. The first true work of art to come as a direct result of the War on Terror- let’s hope we see more like it, and what a miracle it will be if we see better than it.
5. Hero: I feel funny even putting this colorful Chinese Martial Arts epic, directed by the great Zhang Yimou (“House of Flying Daggers”) onto a list dated 2004, considering it has been in the can for more than two years, but since its American release was just last summer, it needs to be mentioned. Jet Li stars as a warrior who tells a yarn to the Chinese Emperor about the star-crossed lovers he faced, and disposed of, in the name of the Emperor’s safety. Or is it all a lie, a conspiracy to overthrow the exalted one? Told in three flashbacks, each with its own distinctive color scheme (my favorite; the red and yellows of the forest, where Zhang Ziyi and Maggie Cheung duke it out), the structure is less effective than Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”, but that doesn’t matter, because Christopher Doyle’s cinematography, and Yimou’s mise-en-scene make “Hero” the most eye popping Asian film to hit the States this year.
4. The Aviator: Martin Scorsese knows Hollywood, and he knows how to recreate its glory days, as seen in this mid-life masterpiece from one of our all-time greats. Leonardo DiCaprio gives a stunning performance as Howard Hughes, the millionaire who took Hollywood, and aviation, by storm in the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, but lost his sanity with a debilitating germ phobia. With Cate Blanchett peerlessly tackling Katherine Hepburn (the scene where she introduces Howard to her uppity, crazy East coast family is a hoot), and Scorsese, and Dante Ferretti brilliantly recreating Hughes’ mammoth “Hell’s Angels” shoot, “The Aviator” is as big as Hughes’ ego, and twice as sturdy.
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: You can note now that the final three films on this list, though remarkably different, are all basic variations on the troubles of relationships, and this mind-boggling trip into the subconscious from ace writer Charlie Kaufman hurts the most. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet (both scene stealers in later ’04 offerings, he in ‘Lemony Snicket’, she in “Finding Neverland”) star for the brilliant visualist Michel Gondry as a couple who meet on Valentines Day, and a year later, will be erasing each other from their memories, thanks to a radical new company of brain-erasers, led by Tom Wilkinson. The first time you watch ‘Eternal Sunshine’ you are working overtime trying to figure out the time frame, as Carrey races through his mind trying to desperately stop the procedure, the second time you watch to pick up what you may have missed, and by the third time you watch this one-of-a-kind head-trip into the romantic psyche, you’re absolutely blown away by the sheer audacity of the concept, and how pitch perfect its understanding of heartache really is. Carrey and Winslet have never been better, and Kaufman’s script is the most original of the year.
2. Sideways: I’ll be completely honest here, one of the reasons this great Alexander Payne buddy dramedy isn’t number one on my list is because every critic and their brother has already said the same, so, even though it’s just as good as my number one, for the sake of being different, it’s number two here. Or maybe, to ease my conscious, we’ll settle for co-number ones, but make no mistake, “Sideways”, a film about two middle-age guys, old college buddies, vacationing in sunny Californian wine vineyards, days before one (Thomas Hayden Church) is scheduled to tie the knot, is as good as the heaps of praise it’s received. You don’t need to be a wine enthusiast to appreciate the subtleties and warmth of Payne and Jim Taylor’s beautiful script, and in the way, as the trip moves along, and gets complicated with the introduction of two sweet women (Sandra Oh, and future Oscar-winner Virginia Madsen), the two friends begin to realize that, as they get older, their position in this world, as fleeting as it is, is only what you make of it. Paul Giamatti is a revelation as Miles, the failed novelist, slightly alcoholic wine nut, and Church- the frontrunner for Best Supporting Actor- is equally as powerful, and funny as Jack, the whoring bridegroom and ex-actor, determined to have a good time before marriage. Three scenes; Madsen’s monologue to Giamatti about the perfect bottle of wine, as a metaphor for life, Church’s late-night motel room breakdown, and Miles confronting his now pregnant ex-wife, give “Sideways” the kind of depth a seemingly light romantic road trip needs to rise above the rest. It doesn’t just rise; it soars.
1. Kill Bill: Vol. 2: Now for something completely different, well, from the warmth and perception of “Sideways” anyway, but not in the cinema of Quentin Tarantino, whose every film is an outside-the-mainstream-box kick in the cinematic gut. The second half of 2003’s chop-sockey “Kill Bill: Vol. 1”, part two is more Spaghetti Western than straight Eastern Martial Arts homage (dig the constant Sergio Leone references, Ennio Morricone music cues, and numerous tributes to “The Searchers”), but is just as inventive and entertaining, made better by a romantic subplot that lends much needed emotion to the revenge killing and sadistic torture Uma Thurman’s character goes through. Where Vol. 1 jumped around, playing games with structure and narrative, Vol. 2 is more linear (save for the Pai Mei, and Karen Kim detours), and lets us in on the reasoning behind Bill’s brutal massacre, and her eventual revenge lust. Depending on how you look at him, Quentin Tarantino is either too exclusive in his obscure referencing, or he’s a genius reinventing genre’s he grew up idolizing, but one thing that is practically impossible to deny (please try, if you can) is that the man is a unique entity on the film scene, and seen as a whole (though Vol. 2 stands alone, I think) “Kill Bill”, the four hour epic he originally intended, is some kind of mad journey into the far regions of murder, swordplay, motherhood, anime, revenge, bloodletting, and ultimate forgiveness, made possible through acts of beautifully staged carnage. With dialogue as sharp as Hanzo steel, performances as skilled as a Seijun Suzuki yakuza assassin, action as playfully operatic as a Morricone score, and direction as wild and canny as pre-70’s Godard, Tarantino’s masterwork is a film buff’s guide to the vast possibilities, and endless imagination, of genre revision.
by Adam Suraf