AT LONG LAST, THE BEST OF 2004 – A GREAT YEAR FOR MOVIES

I know, I know. I’ve been mentioning and promising: “Here comes the list. I’m working on my list.” I’m sure by this point, you’re all listed out. I understand, and I apologize for the delay. But hey, at least I’m joining the game sooner than I did last year.

What’s taken me so long? Well, I really wanted to see as many contenders for best of the year as possible, and with 2004 releases, that includes a lot of movies. This was one of the best years for film in recent memory. Of the 350-400 films receiving a theatrical release for at least a week in either NYC or LA, I saw somewhere around 100. That doesn’t include a number of films still without distribution or coming out in 2005, and for the purposes of this list, I only included 2004 theatrical releases.

There are several films I wanted to see and will probably get to in the coming weeks, but at a certain point I simply had to say, “That’s enough.” Why today? Damn fine question. Because today is the beginning of the CONVERSATION. The wha? If you’re familiar with Slate.com’s “Movie Club,” you’ll have an idea of what some cohorts and myself have in mind for the CONVERSATION. We were a little tired of the “pros” having all the fun, and besides, certain members of the Slate crew were giving some of us headaches. For some reason, the Dorothy Parkers of film bloggerdom — the great cinetrix and Liz Penn — decided to honor me with a seat at their table. Joining us will also be the estimable Filmbrain and the all-seeing, all-knowing David Hudson. The discussion will start today and continue through Monday, ostensibly centered around this weekend’s Golden Globes, but really just all about the movies of 2004. Hopefully, you’ll also be joining us, so head over to the CONVERSATION.

BUT BEFORE YOU DO, don’t leave yet. The lists of the best are below – the worst will come later. My comments on the “Top 10” and “Next Tier” can be found by clicking on the film titles. And without further ado …

The Top 10 Films of 2004

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2. Before Sunset
3. Bad Education
4. Sideways
5. The Incredibles
6. I ♥ Huckabees
7. Spider-Man 2
8. Tarnation
9. The Door in the Floor
10. The Aviator

The Next Tier

• Fahrenheit 9/11
• Garden State
• Hero
• Hotel Rwanda
• House of Flying Daggers
• Million Dollar Baby

Rerelease/Reconstruction Special Mention
The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut

Other Honorable Mention
Baadasssss!, Born Into Brothels, DiG!, End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones, Finding Neverland, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Kill Bill, Vol. 2, Maria Full of Grace, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, The Motorcycle Diaries, Undertow, Vera Drake, William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Might have made it (or might not!) had I seen them
Assassination of Richard Nixon, Dogville, Goodbye Dragon Inn, Last Life in the Universe, Moolaadé, Primer, Red Lights, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring, A Very Long Engagement, and others, I’m sure.

The Top 10 Films of 2004
The order, and even to some degree the content, of these 10 has fluctuated several times over the past week and half. What was the main qualification for a film to make this list? I suppose a combination of the initial experience seeing the movie and the degree to which it stuck with me after it was over. After the top 3 or 4, the actual ranking order could easily change in my head, but there’s no doubt in my mind – nor has their been basically since March – what was number 1.

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Speaking of Slate, the online mag’s film critic and leader of the “Movie Club” wrote my exact sentiments in his Top 10 list: “I’m a little dismayed that not everyone shares my conviction that this is an inexhaustible masterpiece and, by a wide margin, the best film in many years.” Exactly! Here is a film which touches on love and loss, memory and innate knowledge, fantasy and reality; but in the end what is important is living and experiencing all that life has to give. The story and themes are expressed in every single frame, visually and verbally. No matter how great Charlie Kaufman’s initial script may have been, this film is an example of why the greatest works of cinema come from true collaboration – the acting could not be better; the special effects could not be better; the editing could not be tighter; the music and sound design could not be more appropriate to every emotion and situation; the cinematography could not be more breathtaking and informative; and pulling it all together is Michel Gondry who somehow from Kaufman’s words had a vision of something magical. I don’t even dream of being able to make a film like this one day: the creative vision involved seems beyond my comprehension. I’ve seen Eternal Sunshine three times now, and whenever the film is over, my mouth sits open and I stare in wonder as the credits roll across the screen, in awe of a movie in its near-perfect form.
   

2. Before Sunset: Pay very close attention – Richard Linklater is quite simply the most versatile and one of the most important directors working today; he proved that to me with this film. What can’t he do – mainstream Hollywood comedy (The School of Rock), experimental (Waking Life), two person romantic comedy-drama (this film and its predecessor); hip, knowing, indie comedy (Dazed and Confused). And he’s just getting started, with Sci-Fi coming this year (A Scanner Darkly) and a fascinating ongoing project which he plans to shoot over the next 20 years (or something like that) using the same cast and watching it age naturally. OK, maybe he’s not so great at period heist films, but big deal – one movie. For those who think Before Sunset is too talky and not really a movie, you are sorely mistaken. This film is a breathtaking work of craftsmanship, and the best way to see how is to compare it to its predecessor, Before Sunrise. I loved that film 10 years ago, not because I thought I was Ethan Hawke’s character, but because I understood the issues and fears that concerned him. I have aged with these characters (and in fact, I believe I am actually roughly the same age), and so while I again find myself in very different circumstances, I still identify with the places in life they find themselves. But that’s true for the very form of the film too. Whereas the characters in Before Sunrise were young and brash and carefree, willing to spend a whole night together and make youth-filled promises that probably won’t be kept, all within a movie that spans an entire night (they’re young; they have all the time in the world), Before Sunset creates a different, older, more mature reality. This film is in real-time. There are responsibilities and deadlines. The choices these characters make affect themselves and others. Everything is much more immediate. Yet the story and the characters never lose the qualities – in some ways, the innocence – of what we started to love in the first film. They’re still not that comfortable with each other, even though they’ve been dreaming of each other for all this time. Hawke still can’t bring himself to be forward enough to touch Julie Delpy’s hair. And what happens when the time is up? Well, no matter how apparent it seems, the end really is left up in the air. If we’re lucky, Linklater, Hawke and Delpy will let us stew in our hopes and fears about this couple until 2013, and then they’ll take us on this ride again – one appropriate to people in their 40s.
   

3. Bad Education: I wrote plenty about this film back in November. Anyone who reads this site knows of my appreciation for film noir, and what Pedro Almodóvar does in this film is turn that venerable American film style on its head. I’m not going to say that this is the director’s best film, and we’ve seen a lot of his tricks in his previous work. Still, Bad Education is a culmination of everything that has come before it. It is a flawlessly crafted film, audacious in its subject matter and daring in its storytelling. The film will challenge your expectations, and just when you think you know where it’s heading and what you’re seeing, you suddenly find yourself reevaluating everything you think you know. A brilliant film from a brilliant filmmaker.
   

4. Sideways: What Sideways has in common with the three films above is its craftsmanship. Yes, maybe I’m overusing that word, but the common element of all these films is how damn well made they are. Each of these movies show a filmmaker working at the top of his game, and >Alexander Payne is no exception. There is so much going on in every scene of this film both in terms of the various relationships and the progression of the individual characters. In its own subtle way, the film is also a visually magnificent example of a director paying incredible attention to detail in relation to mise-en-scene. It’s hard for some people to get excited about a film like Sideways because it’s so grounded in reality. These people’s lives seem too much like ours, and even if we don’t share their experiences, we identify with them. (And to a certain NYTimes film critic: no, not just to the critic, you pretentious, narcissistic, insecure twit. By the way — everyone is a critic! If not about wine, about sports; if not about sports, about film; if not about film, about cars. Everyone is a critic, and a potentially obsessive one, within one’s area of interests and expertise.) And thank you, Mr. Payne, for cutting to black before the cliché last shot of someone opening a door and everyone knowing that we have a happy, fairy tale ending.
   

5. The Incredibles: Simply the best and most complex animated film, maybe ever. A film that paid as much attention to its script, and the psychology within, as to its style. It doesn’t matter if the individual characters were simple and basic near-stereotypes of a sitcom family; they were still magnificently created three-dimensional characters, with quirks and actions that expressed their thoughts and feelings as much as their words did. A wonderfully conceived picture with moments that made me say to myself, “Screw a movie of The Fantastic Four; it can’t get better than this.” The movie did start a little slow for me, but about 25-30 minutes it, I started smiling and couldn’t stop until the credits rolled.
   

6. I ♥ Huckabees: I know, I know. At least 50% of you think this was an utter piece of crap. A nonsensical waste of time. A pretentious experiment in esoteric bullshit with director David O. Russell simply flexing his cinematic muscles and saying, “Look how smart I am. Can you keep up?” You know what? I can totally understand that point-of-view. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. For probably the first time ever, I saw a movie that I thought was absolutely brilliant, but at the same time, I was able to understand why it made some people so damn angry. The filmmaking is flawless; the performances (especially a dead-on perfect Mark Wahlberg) are fantastic; but the subject matter is difficult. It’s one of those things you either allow yourself to go with, or you don’t. If you don’t buy in to the basic abstract chaos universal connectedness theories debated in the film, you’re not going to be able to appreciate the film itself. In many ways, I think I ♥ Huckabees is more of a red state/blue state divided movie than either Fahrenheit 9/11 or The Passion of the Christ. That’s neither a judgment nor an attempt to say that if you don’t like the movie you’re dumb. It just seems to be a reality, as much as a reality can exist. I will never try to convince anyone to like I ♥ Huckabees. It’s a fruitless endeavor. Yet it’s still a phenomenal film.
   

7. Spider-Man 2: This film was basically as close as you can get to the perfect action movie. What bugs me more than anything else is lazy filmmaking. Audiences accept it. They’ll like the lowest common denominator, so absolutely terrible movies like The Day After Tomorrow will get made with lots of big effects, and a lot of people will be satisfied. But why can’t Hollywood make smart action films? Why can’t they put in the time to create stories, even if they’re fantastic and outside reality, that are believable and relatable and don’t depend on Deus ex Machina or some ridiculous coincidence to become resolved. Oh, well, all of Hollywood may not be able to do that, but Sam Raimi can. Spider-Man 2 isn’t just a great action movie or comic-book movie. It’s just a great movie, period.
   

8. Tarnation: This documentary made noise on the festival circuit in large part because of the story of its making. Director Jonathan Caouette edited the entire movie in Apple’s iMovie, and the whole thing cost just a couple hundred dollars. (At least until some expensive music rights and film transfers came up.) It’s a fascinating experiment in moviemaking and a stunning experience in moviewatching. And that’s just talking about the look, style and tone of the film; throw in a powerful and upsetting story about the filmmakers life, upbringing and his relationship with a mentally-ill mother, and you’ve got one of the most unique moviegoing experiences of the year.
   

9. The Door in the Floor: More than any other film this year, The Door in the Floor increased in my estimation the more I thought about it. The film has one gigantic flaw – Kim Basinger’s awful , sleepwalker-like performance – but as I wrote back in July, Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-worthy turn more than makes up for it. This film definitely has its flaws, but the central storyline and its emotional impact is very strong. Yet another film that deals with love and loss and life and living, and another film that handles its subject magnificently.
   

10. The Aviator: OK, if you’re going to accuse me of bias, here’s the spot. But this 10th slot turned into a bit of a crapshoot for me, with Martin Scorsese’s epic swapping in and out of the spot for the last week or two. Ultimately, The Aviator is not a great Scorsese movie, but then again, a great Scorsese movie is most likely the best movie of the year, and even if this film doesn’t qualify as a great Scorsese movie, it is still a great movie. While you can sometimes feel the film’s length, the three hours of The Aviator flies by relatively quickly. Cate Blanchett is phenomenal, and Leonardo DiCaprio more than adequately handles himself in this role. I think all the criticism about him being too young looking or lacking gravitas is a load of bullshit. That’s not what I saw up on that screen. Could The Aviator have been served by a better script? Sure. But what’s on the screen is still a magnificent example of epic filmmaking, and if the movie had been made by anyone else, that filmmaker would have probably guaranteed himself/herself a directing Oscar.

The Next Tier

• Fahrenheit 9/11 and Hotel Rwanda: I pair these two films together because they are overtly political films; both great movies made with a certain degree of heavy-handedness that can be off-putting. But politics aside (I know … impossible), these are both films that expose atrocities at least indirectly attributed to our government, whether it was run by democrats or republicans., and the both pack an emotional punch that will leave many audience members sniffling by film’s end. Strangely enough, Hotel Rwanda suffers more than Michael Moore’s documentary from telling the audience too explicitly what it must think and know too directly. Still, there were probably not two movies that were more important too see this year, and while neither film may be subtle, they both get their points across expertly without ever being boring. And also in Hotel Rwanda’s favor, regardless of how obvious much of the movie is, Don Cheadle gives one of the best, and at times most subtle, performances of the year.
  

• Hero and House of Flying Daggers: Many critics are putting these two films together on their own year-end lists. I don’t think that’s necessarily fair since the films aren’t really related other than the fact that they’re both directed by Zhang Yimou and both are elegant, graceful and opulent martial arts dramas. However, I also understand the desire to group them together because the flaws of one film are the strengths of the other. I really loved Hero, but more for its visual dynamism than its relatively predictable Rashomon-like story. The narrative of House of Flying Daggers proved more satisfying to me than that of Hero, but the look of the film, while still incredible in its own right, was not as breathtaking to me as that of its predecessor. Specifically, I can’t get the colors of Hero out of my head. The various sequences in that film revolved around bright, vibrant color themes while Daggers exists in a far more neutral world of mild green and yellow. Hero still pops visually in my head. Is this solely due to the genius of Hero cinematographer Christopher Doyle? Well, maybe not “just,” but certainly he deserves a degree of credit. Would Daggers have been a more complete and better movie for me had he shot it? I guess we’ll never know.
  

• Garden State: Few movies really surprised me this year as much as Garden State. It came along as one of several indie hipster favorites this summer, and I was just having trouble believing the hype. Was this really a great movie? Or simply a fantastic soundtrack? But to my delight, Zach Braff put together a quirky, touching, satisfying little film (with a fantastic soundtrack that managed to actually serve the film rather than simply exist as a cool collection of songs), far more complete and mature than I ever expected.
  

• Million Dollar Baby: So this is where I get into trouble with many of my fellow film-bloggers, but I don’t really care. Clint Eastwood’s boxing tragi-drama packs a punch (sorry), and it’s as simple as that. Does the film contain some clichés? Yes, but it also manages to avoid others. Is the movie manipulative? Of course. That criticism is such a bogus one to place on a movie since any film worth its weight manipulates. The question is do the manipulations make sense and are they annoying. For many people, Eastwood’s manipulations in this film are simply too much. I really think it’s just backlash against the overabundance of critical praise heaped on the film which I would consider overdone but not totally unwarranted. This is not Eastwood’s best film – that honor still goes to the brilliant Unforgiven in my book – but it is an expertly pieced together movie. The look of the movie really blew me away. I know some people have criticized the film for being too dark and a poor (and failed) attempt at mimicking all-time great D.P. Gordon Willis, but I found it to be a magnificently controlled look and environment dictating space, mood and tone that was a perfect companion for the story Eastwood was telling. This is a flawed film with a script that could have used a bit more work (such as excising some extraneous and unnecessary subplots), but it moves along like a jazz piece in a way I can only describe using an oxymoron: simplified complexity. The last third of the film came at me by surprise, and it dragged on a bit too long, but it also took me to a place I never expected to go, and at least in my experience, I wasn’t pissed-off going there.

Rerelease/Reconstruction Special Mention
Two very different films were released in new versions this year, and I thought they both deserved mention. I hesitated to consider either for the above lists because the basic stories were not new, but both The Big Red One: The Reconstruction and Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut were vastly different, and to my mind better, films than their original releases. I didn’t see the original version of Sam Fuller’s World War II drama until after watching this “reconstruction” with something like 50 minutes of new footage, but it is a dramatically more complete film. And while I never disliked the movie, I also was never the kind of rabid fan of Donnie Darko that helped turn it into a cult phenomenon, but I walked out of “The Director’s Cut” with a much better sense of what I had seen, and ironically, rather than disappointing me by completely changing my original analysis of the film, “The Director’s Cut” simply enhanced, expanded and fleshed out all the things I had taken from the original cut.

And that’s that! All the other films I listed as Honorable Mentions were also great times at the movies, and there are still a number of films that didn’t make any of these lists even though I really enjoyed them – I just decided that at some point, I had to draw the line. So while I found Napoleon Dynamite to be a fun distraction, I didn’t get much more from it. And while I may be one of the few people out there who loves the original Manchurian Candidate but also was satisfied by Jonathan Demme’s new twist on the idea, the film simply didn’t quite transcend into a level of greatness for me. I also liked many things about Closer, Kinsey and The Dreamers, but there was enough I didn’t like as well. And while The Sea Inside contains a powerful and subtle performance by the brilliant Javier Bardem, and the issues of the film challenged me as I thought about it afterward, it simply didn’t move me on an emotional level the way it seemed to affect so many others.

And then, as I mentioned before, there were a bunch of films that weren’t released in 2004 – some will come out this year, others are still awaiting distribution – such as Palindromes, Look at Me and The Green Hat which certainly fit in with the top movies I saw this year, but I won’t place on a list until they receive their theatrical releases.

I’ll have a few more year-in-review comments over the next couple days (best performances, most overrated films, worst of the year) both here and in the course of the discussion over at the Conversation. But for now, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.