Looking back on the films that were released in 2004 and the specific memories that I have around going to see them makes me realize that 2004 was the first year that really felt like part of the 00 decade in a solid way. Before that my memories and experiences blur with the previous. There were flashes of things that feel like the aughts before this; Lost in Translation from the previous fall feels very this decade. But still, up through 2003 I also have a lot of memories that feel like holdovers of the 90s. Every decade seems to take a few years to figure out what its identity is going to be and clearly this has become the digital decade. A time defined by spending our time looking at screens and recreating our lives and identities as much as we can on the Internet. It’s the decade of eBooks replacing weather worn heirlooms, digital downloads replacing trips to the CD shop, social networking bringing your night out back home with you into your bedroom. This was the year when I started to see people carrying around iPods everywhere, when all of my friends packed their music collections into giant Tupperware containers and dragged them up to the attic. And the movies, they felt like they had found their own unique voices. Gone, finally, was the swarm of indie directors doing their best Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith impressions. This year was all about the fresh, the new: springtime on the Internet and in the cinemas. And I guess it had to be, we were only a year away from YouTube.
10-Spider-Man 2 ***
In 2002 Sam Raimi released a big budget, big screen film version of Spider-Man that while having a strong sense of silver age fun and manic, kinetic pacing never really materialized as a fully successful film. The special effects were kind of bad, the dialogue wasn’t quite up to par, and the origin story was a bit formulaic. But the thing ended up making more money than Scrooge McDuck because, hey, it’s fricking Spider-Man swinging around on the big screen. Who doesn’t want that? Since the whole enterprise was so financially successful, of course this sequel was made. All of those things that weren’t quite up to par with the first film were just a little bit better, and the results were a summer blockbuster that came off as more satisfying than the first. The kinks on the CGI seemed to be worked out, the script was actually kind of funny in places, and the characters could be explored more now that the introductions were out of the way. Now we were really talking. This was a super hero movie that wasn’t an embarrassment. And the public seemed to agree because the sequel pulled in just as many truckloads of money as the first. I couldn’t help but walk out of this one primed for a third. If it improved on the second as much as this one did on the first we could be dealing with something really cool. Oh man, I can’t wait. This is going to be great! Right?
9-Garden State ***
So before it went on for about six seasons too long Scrubs was a really funny show that mixed wacky Family Guy-esque asides with strong character work and an infectious heart. A lot of what made the show successful was the cast, and the anchor of the whole deal was a young comedic actor by the name of Zach Braff. He’s likable, he’s self-effacing, and this was his first shot at writing/directing a film. This is one that gets a lot of flack from people, and I think it’s because of the way it flies in the face of the unassuming persona that Braff had projected up to this point. Garden State is a movie that takes itself seriously. It’s a film that lives and dies on its indie credibility. The music is going to be as college radio as possible, the characters as quirky as you’ll buy; this is nothing like the goofy good times of Scrubs. And while people huff and puff about a whole bunch of scene nonsense, they also ignore that this is a film that’s really funny, has a lot of great acting, and is as impressive a first effort from a new writer/director as you’re likely to see from anyone not named Orson Welles. Yeah, it goes heavier places than it probably earns and yeah it doesn’t seem to know where exactly to go in its third act, but this is in no way a bad film. Come on; let your hipster cred fall by the wayside, give this one another chance with non-judgmental eyes. It will change your life.
8- Shaun of the Dead ****
The past decade has experienced a real zombie glut. I think the ball got rolling with Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002, but it really started picking up momentum in 2004 with Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead and this send up of the genre by British imports Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. Of all the zombie movies, zombie books, zombie parties, etc that I’ve experienced over the past ten years, this is definitely my favorite zombie thing. AMC’s new series The Walking Dead has started off strong and might give it a run for it’s money, but for now I’ll stick with Shaun as my go to reanimated dead fix. The thing that really makes this film is not just that it’s an effective comedy, which it is, but that it is also a really effective zombie movie even with all of the gags ignored. You get all of the gore and kills that you would expect in a straight interpretation of the zombie apocalypse story in addition to the laughs inherent in a parody. The reason it works is that the film manages to be satirical without becoming insulting to its source material. Yes there are some well worn tropes inherent in zombie films, but this film gets it’s laughs not by making fun of them, but by wrapping itself in the exploitation even more so than most horror interpretations of the material. Shaun of the Dead doesn’t think that other zombie movies are ridiculous; it thinks that they are awesome. Factor in that Pegg and Wright are really good writers and you actually get characters that are more three dimensional and are developed better than you do in any sort of other horror movie and you end up having seen flat-out a good film rather than just a good comedy. The blend of horror and comedy here creates a ridiculously fun movie going experience that I haven’t seen since probably Ghostbusters.
7-The Incredibles ****
My current love affair with Pixar started when I saw this film in 2004. Up to that point I wasn’t sold on giving them a chance despite the rave reviews that all of their stuff got. I was even a little indignant about it. Critics will give a rave to anything that is computer animated. What’s the deal? This is kids stuff! Yeah I had seen the first two Toy Story films, and yeah they were pretty enjoyable for little kids stuff, but did they really deserve such unanimous gushing? And none of the other stuff they were putting out looked interesting to me at all. Finding Nemo? This is the sort of talking animal garbage that I wasn’t really interested in even when I was a kid. But The Incredibles had superheroes and back in 2004 I hadn’t yet been completely burned out by superheroes on film, so I found myself in the strange position of being pretty excited to give this one a chance. And you know, it of course paid off. The animation is gorgeous, the action is fun, the characters are all likable and well crafted, the humor works, the emotional moments work; everything about this film comes together to form a delightful little package. And I’ve come to realize that the same can probably be said for all Pixar films, though I’ve yet to see them all. I have seen all of the ones that have come out since The Incredibles however, and I seem to like each one more than the last. And that’s not to take anything away from this film. If I was making genre lists this one would be high up on both my family films and superhero films lists. And Brad Bird has since planted himself firmly on my list of directors to watch. I’m even kind of interested to see what he does with Mission Impossible next year.
6- The Ladykillers ****
I’ve talked before about how 2003 and 2004 is widely viewed as the low point of the Coen brothers’ careers. Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers are both pegged as huge missteps by the brothers and at the time of their releases many people were questioning whether or not they had lost it completely. Were their careers over? Although I think things were being overstated I can understand where people were coming from when it comes to Intolerable Cruelty. Despite the fact that I think there are still things to like about it, it is clearly the worst film that the Coens have made. But why The Ladykillers gets lumped in beside it is completely beyond me. This movie is absolutely hilarious! You have Tom Hanks returning to his comedy roots and crafting the patently ridiculous character of an insidious southern gentleman who dresses like Colonel Sanders, speaks like Edgar Allen Poe, and is completely out of place in a modern setting. You’ve got JK Simmons playing a safari jacket wearing demolitions expert named Mr. Pancake who has a gigantic Nordic life partner named Mountain Girl and gets into regular shouting matches with a stereotypical street punk played by Marlon Wayans and named Gawain. There’s Irma P. Hall randomly giving a touching, authentic, Oscar worthy performance as a kindly old woman duped into being an accessory to robbery. And it’s all presented with the patented and beautiful Coen brothers visual style and accompanied by a sublime gospel soundtrack. I guess the closest relative to this film in the Coens canon is The Hudsucker Proxy and I’ve heard that many people aren’t too fond of that one either; but I’ll never understand it. When the Coens go pure screwball they make the kind of films that you can’t see anywhere else and I find the unique experience of it to be an absolute delight. Without this film my life would lack the crucial and oft quoted phrase, “he brought his BITCH to the Waffle Hut!” and that would just be plain criminal.
5- Closer ****
I knew back in 2004 that Mike Nichols was the director of The Graduate, and I knew that that was one of my favorite movies, but I was curiously ignorant as to what else he had done over the course of his lengthy career. When I heard that he was the director of this film I decided to give it a chance. I would have probably passed it up otherwise, and I’m glad that I didn’t. It’s not hard to figure out that the screenplay was adapted from a stage play. The strength of the film is the dialogue and the dissecting of the relationships shared by the four main characters. I knew going into the film that I had a massive crush on Jude Law, but what I wasn’t prepared for was being completely won over by this guy Clive Owen who I walked out of the film adoring. This was the first thing that I saw him in and the result was a real Betty or Veronica predicament of man crushes. If it came down to it, whom would I choose, Law or Owen? It makes me tense just thinking about it. Add to that Natalie Portman being an angelic vision of beauty through this whole thing and Julia Roberts keeping up with the other three in the only interesting role I can remember her taking during this past decade and you’ve got a real satisfying little prying look into the dysfunctional relationships of a flawed quartet of individuals. And I would be remiss in not mentioning the Damien Rice song ‘The Blower’s Daughter’ that hauntingly bookends the film. It coupled with the two slow motion shots of Portman walking down crowded city streets gives me beauty chills every time I think about it. The lasting impression of the image almost makes me forget how depressing these people’s lives and decisions turn out to be. But that’s kind of the point, I guess.
4- Mean Girls ****
It’s hard for me to decide which I want more, Tina Fey to continue making more episodes of 30 Rock, or Tina Fey trying her hand at writing another movie. I had seen snippets of her work on SNL, but I’d never really paid much attention to that show or the fact that she was the head writer during her tenure there, so I didn’t know what I was going into when I went to see this one. I figured it would be a pretty typical teenage comedy with the benefit of a bunch of sweet boobs thrown in. So I was pretty taken aback when this movie was legitimately hilarious all of the way through. And yes, it is also chock full of some pretty sweet boobs. It’s painful to talk about what the years of hard traveling have done to Lindsey Lohan between this film and now (both to her beauty and to her career), but that doesn’t even really matter as three of my huge young actress crushes support her here in Lizzy Caplan, Rachel McAdams, and Amanda Seyfried. There are so many girls here to love! But special attention should be given to Seyfried who gets the role of “the dumb one” and absolutely knocks it out of the park with the humor. Most girls play that character way too broad and goofy and end up being embarrassingly unfunny, but she plays the whole thing straight and makes a real cinder block of a character come off as absolutely loveable and hilarious. The satire of teen behavior is smart, the dialogue is infinitely quotable, and Mean Girls has aged so finely over the years that it has sat just below Election at the top of my favorite teen films of all time list. So what else does Tina Fey have up her sleeve? 30 Rock hasn’t run out of steam for me, and she’s certainly crafted the perfect character to showcase her acting talents in Liz Lemon, so I can’t really complain about getting new episodes of that show every week. But I certainly hope that instead of overstaying its welcome like the US version of The Office is currently doing, 30 Rock bows out gracefully while at its creative peak and then Fey gets back into the business of filmmaking.
3-I Heart Huckabees ****
David O’Russell has a reputation as being difficult, eccentric, and a little bit of a genius. I Heart Huckabees, I think, has the reputation of being his overreaching mess of a follow-up to the universally loved Three Kings. Despite these criticisms I love it. I love that it overreaches to the point of being messy. I love that it wallows in that mess until it starts to look like insanity. I don’t think it was O’Russell losing control of the project as much as I believe it was him refusing to institute any limits of control over this absolutely insane story full of completely original characters. How else would one deal with the issues that this film brings to the table? What better way to explore questions of the existential variety? Are we in a universe of connection or isolation, design or chaos? Is my state of consciousness everything or nothing? Does any of it matter when you’re watching a film that is this funny and is this full of terrific performances? And oh lord, the great comedic performances. Jason Schwartzman, Isabelle Huppert, Dustin Hoffman, Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Mark Wahlberg playing a dope, and Dame Shania Twain. That’s an all-star lineup. Every time I re-watch this I think that maybe this is going to be the time that it comes off as having aged badly. Maybe this will be the time that I am annoyed with how much it has going on and how pretentiously it goes about presenting it all. But every time I watch it I always end up coming out of the other end feeling like I’ve had a very cathartic experience. A little forced chaos to dull the noise of false order is just the right medicine during a night in while dealing with an existential crisis.
2-Sideways *****
Alexander Payne is a herculean filmmaker. Everything he touches turns to melancholy beauty. He’s built up enough credit with me for his work over the last ten years that I can’t imagine seeing anything that has his name on it and not loving it. What you have here is a coming of age story about two middle aged men who should have reached this point of maturity many years ago, but have been in a continued state of arrested development. It’s a sort of road movie, but the journey isn’t what’s important, it’s the interactions between the two main characters. They have no real destination that they need to reach, there are no stakes or tension in the journey they are taking; and yet Paul Giamatti’s Miles and Thomas Hayden Church’s Jack are so real, so well written, that every moment they are on screen together is pure entertainment. Both Jack and Miles have a handful of good qualities and a truckload of negatives. They are cads, curmudgeons, and yet they are presented in a relatable enough light that you find yourself always rooting for them to figure life out and get their heads on straight. Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh support them well as surprise love interests who show up early on during their soul-searching mission into wine country. They play characters that are better than our male protagonists, more self-actualized, and yet it’s always made believable that they would actually show an interest in Miles and Jack. They see them the same way we do, as dysfunctional but with potential. These characters are no starry eyed little girls, but actual grown, whole women. That’s a refreshing change of pace for a Hollywood where leading men well into their fifties are constantly paired up with leading ladies who are barely half their age. Payne films the whole thing with a grainy, natural light, 70s travelogue feel and the visuals of the film tend to envelop you like a warm hug. Sideways works great as a comedy, but more so it astounds as a character study; a portrait of obsessions and insecurities. By the time Miles’ character reaches his sublime conclusion you will have gone from feeling contempt toward him to feeling like you’ve shared a journey together and you now sit there right in his shoes. This film is a marvel of screenwriting and directing coming together to elevate each other into a unique experience. It made a bunch of wine talk affecting for goodness’ sake; so much so that there were marked decreases in Merlot sales and huge increases in the sales of Pinot Noir after the film’s release. This is the film that inspired a world to finally stand up in unison, raise their voices, and declare to the heavens, “we’re not drinking F’n Merlot”!
1-The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou *****
The Life Aquatic is easily Wes Anderson’s messiest, most sprawling, most poorly received film. There are so many characters, so many locations, and so much intricate design work that it’s almost intrinsically apparent that the whole project got away from Anderson a little bit. It feels less tight, less polished than his other films. I remember Bill Murray showing up during some sort of awards ceremony during its production and referring to it as the film shoot that would not end. And yet, I completely love it. I can’t think of a better way to capture the adventurer’s spirit of the main character than with a real adventure of a production. This is Anderson’s Apocalypse Now, a film shoot just as exhausting and immersive for the people making it as the story is for the characters in the script. The looseness in the editing (loose only relative to Anderson’s other films) gives the feel of a group of explorers winging it out on the open sea and seeing what they come up with. What better way to make a film about a group of filmmaking explorers and adventurers? Especially when dealing with characters who have come upon hard times and may be in the twilight of their careers. During the release of this film Anderson was facing similar criticisms as Zissou. While his first three films were all heralded as unique, near genius works of a true auteur, by the time The Life Aquatic came along critics were starting to grumble about similarities in themes, visual style, and even cast from film to film. There is a sort of Meta experience going on as you watch the film, will this film be Anderson’s downfall or will he be able to pull it all together by the end and make it his Jaguar Shark? Your mileage may vary, but it seems to me that this is a film that has grown in reputation since its release, even with people who were initially put off by it, and I would call it a rousing success. This is a dense, rich experience, and perhaps the benefit of multiple viewings is what it takes to fully explore the tapestry of what the film has to offer and to fully appreciate all of the work that Anderson and his crew put into it. And all talk about production and critical reception aside, what you’re getting here is a really gorgeous, really touching, and really funny movie full of fun performances. Of course you have the immortal Bill Murray playing the titular role, a role that is tailored to his strengths perhaps more than any other he has taken in his career, and watching him bring to life the callous yet wounded Zissou is just as much of a joy as you would imagine. But a diverse cast of some of the greatest actors working today also surrounds Murray, offering up even more joy to those who love to watch good actors ply their craft. Angelica Houston plays his estranged wife, Owen Wilson his long lost son, Willem Dafoe his jealous protégé, and Cate Blanchett his object of desire. That is a strong group of lieutenants. And in addition to that you get Jeff Goldblum showing up and riffing on his oddball persona, Seu Jorge hanging out in the background and singing delightful covers of Bowie songs in Portuguese, and Robyn Cohen playing an always inexplicably topless assistant. This film is like a diorama, chock full of so many little touches and details that it takes a fine-tooth comb to separate out and fully appreciate all of its delights. It’s funny enough to have you laughing all the way through, but by the time Ned and Steve’s father/son dynamic reaches it’s climax and the leftover emotion from that mingles in with Steve’s own unresolved father/son issues with the dearly departed Esteban during the Jaguar Shark reveal scene, there are also plenty of tears to be had. To quote the poster for Wayne’s World, “I laughed, I cried, I hurled”.
