Film critic groups are weighing in with their award nominations, and Oscar campaigns are being mounted, and the usual suspects are lining up on talk shows to do the vote-for-me shuffle. As always, almost all of these movies (good or mediocre) opened in November or December, specifically to get the attention of voters.
By and large, critics took the bait. (The Golden Globe nominations were especially shameless.) So nothing that opened in the first 10 months of the year counts?
Meanwhile, the two great headline-grabbers of the first six months of 2004, “The Passion of the Christ” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” are absent from most year-end awards – but you can expect to see them in the Oscar nominations.
Those two films were lightning bolts, even if very little was said about them as movies. Each became a political cause, their faults ignored and their greatness exaggerated, depending on whether the speaker was waving a red or a blue flag. Both movies were flawed but interesting products of their directors’ obsessions, and both became fodder for the pundits.
Perusing my marked-up calendar of the last 12 months, I was forced to conclude that 2004 was a very ordinary year for movies. Take away Michael Moore and Jesus Christ, and you’ve got a handful of really terrific movies plus a large batch of pretty good ones.
What were the year’s winners? Given the success of Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers,” you’d have to say the costume martial-arts movie is firmly established on the multiplex beachhead. Jamie Foxx was a huge winner, giving two sensational performances in “Collateral” and “Ray.” Goodbye, “Booty Call,” hello Oscar. The true-life drama was popular, as movies about Ray Charles, Howard Hughes, J.M. Barrie, Che Guevara, Alfred Kinsey and Alexander the Great rolled out in close proximity. (Picture that group in a period martial-arts movie. Never mind.)
And a repeat shout-out to one of my winners from 2003: zombies. Again, the undead fared well, in the very clever “Shaun of the Dead” and the strong remake, “Dawn of the Dead.” Plus, they sort of rhyme.
And the losers? Well, Tom Hanks had a rough year; “The Ladykillers,” “The Terminal,” and “The Polar Express” were all box-office disappointments (and the latter set a new standard for useless technical information as part of its publicity campaign). Christmas took a body blow, being linked to a pair of DOA comedies, “Surviving Christmas” and “Christmas with the Kranks.” And Ben Affleck … aw, let’s not pick on Ben Affleck.
When it came time to settle my own best-of accounts, I kept coming back to the adventures of a high-school nerd in a small town in Idaho. Made on a tiny budget by a first-time director from Preston, Idaho, named Jared Hess, “Napoleon Dynamite” remains my favorite movie of 2004. It loves its oddball characters, it moves to its own sprung rhythm, and it makes room for people who frequently are left out of movies.
That sense of originality was rare. But here are the 10 movies that seemed most original to me in 2004, listed in order of how much I like them. A delicious bass to each of the following:
“Napoleon Dynamite.” You can learn so much from this movie: how to cook steak, how to draw a “liger,” how to run for elective office.
“Sideways.” A big critics group fave that actually deserves its awards. Alexander Payne’s film about guys on a road trip in the Santa Barbara wine country has both slapstick and philosophy, sometimes within the same scene.
“Birth.” My choice as most unfairly overlooked movie of the year. Nicole Kidman plays a widow convinced that a 10-year-old boy is the reincarnation of her dead husband. The movie follows its premise to a fascinating extreme, and it’s beautifully directed by Jonathan Glazer.
“Collateral.” Director Michael Mann found a slinky groove with this tale of a hit man (Tom Cruise) ferried around L.A. at night by a cab driver (Jamie Foxx).
“Before Sunset.” A sequel to Richard Linklater’s 1995 film “Before Sunrise,” this reflective gem reunites one-night lovers Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for a talkative afternoon in Paris. All the conversation led up to the most perfect ending of the year.
“Red Lights.” Alfred Hitchcock would have approved of Cedric Kahn’s taut French thriller, about a bickering couple who drive into the countryside and get off on the wrong road.
“Intimate Strangers.” Another good French film, from director Patrice Leconte, which begins with a woman walking into the office of a tax attorney she thinks is her new psychiatrist – and spilling her guts to him. Their relationship takes off from there.
“Kill Bill, Vol. 2.” I dragged my heels on Vol. 1, but this part made me a believer in Quentin Tarantino’s mad enterprise. His salute to B-movie conventions could not have been made by anyone else.
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Another unique offering from “Adaptation” author Charlie Kaufman, a rumination on love and memory with lovely performances by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
“Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself).” Neat little sleeper that disappeared quickly. It’s hard to convince people that a movie with that title is one of the most life-affirming pictures of the year, but it’s true.
A second 10-plus would be made up of: “The Incredibles,” Mike Leigh’s “Vera Drake,” “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” “The Motorcycle Diaries,” “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” which breathed new life into the series, “Shaun of the Dead,” “Blind Shaft” (a grungy Chinese film I liked even more than the two eye-filling Zhang Yimou films mentioned above), “Kitchen Stories,” “Rick,” “Dogville,” and “Hellboy.”
And that doesn’t quite fit in “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring,” or the nail-biting documentary “Touching the Void,” or, in fact, “Passion of the Christ,” which had its share of burned-in images that stuck with me. So it was not a bad year.
But there were bad movies. And ladies and gentlemen, there must be a reckoning. Hold your nose as we pass by this murderer’s row:
“Van Helsing.” All hail the worst movie of 2004, all the more so for being a cool idea that is now completely wrecked. Dracula and Frankenstein will survive, but the $200 million budget is gone forever.
“Alexander.” I cherish the hissing sex scene between Colin Farrell and Rosario Dawson, but Oliver Stone’s wild stab at the life of the Macedonian conqueror is otherwise a trial.
“Alfie.” Jude Law was miscast in the cocky womanizer role that Michael Caine made famous, and the whole enterprise felt weirdly out of date.
“Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius.” Was there ever a sports movie drearier than this bio of the long-suffering golfer? “Passion of the Christ” star Jim Caviezel did a lot of agonizing this year.
“Godsend.” An evil kid movie with the window dressing of Robert De Niro, which suggests the once-dignified actor is building a nice retirement fund.
“Welcome to Mooseport.” One of the deadest comedies of recent memory, with Gene Hackman and Ray Romano in a small-town election and zzzzz….
“Scooby-Doo 2.” The product placement was more passionately rendered than the characters in a movie that suggested that Shaggy and his animated hound suffered from self-esteem issues and a cycle of shame.
“Walking Tall.” When a movie doesn’t come up to the level of its leading man, and that leading man is The Rock, you can bet the movie has problems.
“Head in the Clouds.” Charlize Theron and real-life beau Stuart Townsend in a truly vacuous movie about romantic places in the 1920s and ’30s – it feels like a first draft of somebody’s distant memory of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
“A Shark Tale.” It had its chuckles, and the animation was state-of-the-art. But there was something dispiriting about so much effort expended on a charmless blockbuster that relied on pop-culture references for its laughs – and by the way, are little kids big “Godfather” fans?
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
“Before Sunset,” with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.
“Hero”
“Shaun of the Dead,” with Simon Pegg.
Jamie Foxx in “Ray.”
Robert Horton
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