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LET'S START OFF WITH 8 FILMS THAT I UNFORTUNATELY DID NOT GET TO SEE IN 2004
(any of which could have made this list)
Ken Jacobs' forty-year-in-the-making Star Spangled to Death; Tom Anderson's look at the world of American Cinema, Los Angeles Plays Itself; Lou Ye's follow-up to his great Suzhou River, The Purple Butterfly, starring the wonderfully charming Ziyi Zhang; Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future; Catherine Breillat's Sex is Comedy, a look at the making of her film, Fat Girl; Takeshi Kitano's lavishly-looking Dolls; the Turkish film, Distant; and Guy Maddin's peep show extravaganza, Cowards Bend the Knee...
I'm sure in the future, I'll see these films and adjust my Best of List accordingly - although that wouldn't be the purist way of doing things, so I'll still keep this page up, but if you want to see any updated versions of the best films of 2004, go to my 2004 Top Ten List, or my 2004 Rankings Page, in order to see all the films of last year, ranked from best to worst - Both of these lists will be updated whenever I see another 2004 US release, and I'll hope that by this time next year, I'll not have this problem any longer...
WELL, ON WITH THE SHOW...HERE ARE SOME FILMS THAT DIDN'T QUITE MAKE THE LIST
(but are still well worth seeing)
A pair of films from England start us off - The Mother, Robert Michell's look at a woman in crisis - losing her husband at sixty and falling for a younger man - a powerful look at sexuality over sixty -- and Young Adam, a sad tribute to Vigo's L'Atalante, with the brooding power of Ewan McGregor and the lilting sexualness of Tilda Swinton...
Also we had The Door in The Floor, a highly overlooked film with one of the best performances of the year from Jeff Bridges (speaking of highly overlooked) and a pair of films from a pair of the greatest Filmmakers around today, Takeshi Kitano's elegantly blunt The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, and let's not forget the latest philosophical take on modern Politics and the ugly art of War from the Grand Master, Jean Luc Godard, Notre Musique...
Then we have a pair of hard-hitting socio-political diatribes - the Senegalese Moolaade from another master, Ousmane Sembene - the horror story of female circumcision in the Islamic world of Afrika and Joshua Marston's debut film, Maria Full of Grace, starring the beautifully tragic Catalina Sandino Moreno as a young pregnant Columbian girl who's only way out is to become a drug mule for the Cartel...
Then there was the long-anticipated film noirish new Almadovar film, Bad Education and Lars Von Trier's experiment in horror/slash/critique/slash/unabashed idolotry, The Five Obstructions...
There was also Wes Anderson's latest colourful pretention, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Hong Kong police thriller, Infernal Affairs, which will (unfortunately) be remade by Hollywood, but (fortunately) it will be helmed by Martin Scorsese but (unfortunately again) star Leonardo DiCrapio - just rent the original please!!
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AND NOW, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, THE BEST FILMS OF 2004:
#20) Hero
A cornucopia of kaleidoscopic colours, swirling about in a melange of sword-clanging, arrow-swooshing, high-kicking, blood-letting frenzy - Individual moments (the arrow barrage / the leaf-changing sword battle / the fight to the death in a rainy courtyard / the colour coded Rashomon storytelling) meld together to form an ultra-coherent archetypical epic tale of love, desire, passion, madness, revenge and heroic sacrifices - Zhang Yimou, who has always been a disciple of the language of colour, here plays his self-proclaimed warm-up act to House of Flying Daggers like the lost history of China done on a beautifully nuanced acid trip - Is this what Kurasowa would have done if he had his Ran/Dreams mindset back in 1950?
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#19) We Don't Live Here Anymore
With the feel of an early seventies film - in the style of Rafelson, Penn, Bogdanovich - the story of two couples, both in the throes of discord and ennui, and the mindgames and mindfucks they cast upon each other. Peter Krause, Naomi Watts, Mark Ruffalo and (especially) Laura Dern form a complete and uninterrupted adulterous square of deceit, diception and denial. A wickidly acerbic look at the downward spiral of both marriages and all the ensuing friendships that go along with it. Ruffalo's character puncuates the message home with his end-of-story narration, about the myths of love, sex and the omnipresent persistance of social status and wealth.
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#18) Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind
From the wonderfully warped mind of Charlie Kauffman, although not as warped as his Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine plays out like Kafka done by Dali - Carrey, in a surprisingly sedate role, and Kate Winslet, utterly near-perfect as always, play a couple who decide to not just call it quits, but have their minds erased as well (a thing that doesn't seem so strange in the mix of the movie) - Michel Gondry, who two years ago made the lesser Human Nature, here puts together a brilliantly ramshackle mess of a movie, running every way but the expected way - shakingly hilarious and at the same time, a 'real' love story (certainly much better than a certain sinking ship romance that also starred the lovely Miss Winslet)
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#17) Sideways
Alexander Payne, who with each successive film, grows more and more into the auteur we see here in his fourth film, Sideways. The story of two men, one successful and immature, the other a failure and insecure, who take one last trip - to wine country - before the impending nuptials of the one. Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church are marvelous as this very undynamic duo and Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen are hilarious as their would be lovers. Payne has created a real-feeling venue for these great - and usually under rated - actors to play around in and investigate their own self worth. A smart, witty, un-farrelly-brothered comedy.
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#16) Blissfully Yours
Many sources - the Village Voice and Film Comment especially - have been calling the nearly unpronouncably named Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (but you can call him Joe, really you can), the great auteur of the day. And finally - thanks to the Anthology Film Archives in New York City - I am able to see the second of so far three Weerasethakul films. Blissfully Yours, which seems to begin in the middle of an already transpiring scene, and decides to place its "opening" credits approximently halfway through its running time, is a slap in the face to filmmaking - in the same way Godard and Truffaut were in 1960. A postmodern ode of cinematic revelry and epicurean delights.
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#15) Closer
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#14) House of Flying Daggers
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#13) Twenty-Nine Palms
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#12) Father and Son
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#11) The Return
Imagined as if a dream out of Picasso's blue period, this Russian tale of a forgetting father and his two forgotten sons, is a moody nihilistic near-masterpiece of melancholic despair - as many a Russian film/novel/poem is. There is not a moment in this film that the feeling of dread is not oozing out of its very pores. A permeation of doom that you know will eventually bring itself to fruition in the most harrowing - and surprisingly unexpected and sudden - manner. A brooding manly film full of anger and resentment - and unintended revenge. And to think, this is just his first film...
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#10) Vera Drake
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#9) Anatomy of Hell
How can you not love a film that involves both the use of large garden equipment as a wake-up dildo up the ass and a toast drank with water and the menstrual fluids of one of its toastees!? Okay, maybe there isn't much to love. Maybe repulsion is a better word. Or repugnancy. Or violation. Whatever the word is, you cannot stay mute about your reaction to Catherine Breillat's latest grand offence. An ugly, repulsive film full of ugly repulsive images, all coming full circle back to the beauty of original sin. Breillat holds no punches, and I wouldn't want her too.
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#8)The Brown Bunny
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#7) Before Sunset
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#6) Kill Bill, Volume 2
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#5) Birth
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#4) Primer
With a non-existent budget and not a single name actor, nor anything even close to resembling a special effect, first time helmer, Shane Carruth has given birth to the most dizzying, dazzling and deceptively simple science fiction stories since Kubrick was giving Arthur C. Clarke his strained seriousness best. The story of time travel and its bizarre complexities on the timeline of this universe and the possibility of variant realities somehwere out there in the space-time continuum. All this without ever even entertaining the thought of CGI - a cerebral sci-fi morality tale with the outer edged impressionism of a still-evolving Stanley Kubrick.
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#3) Goodbye Dragon Inn
Never one for over-dialoguing his films, Tsai Ming-liang - the Taiwanese master of minimilism - brings us his sweet, sad, somber ode to the days of yesteryear. A concrete slab of a movie theatre is having one last night before closing down forever. King Hu's classic film, Dragon Inn is playing upon the screen as the theatres patrons - some there to watch the movie, most there for cheap sexual encounters - wander about the old building like ghosts of days past. Once someone finally speaks (about forty minutes into the film) it si to speak of ghosts and spirits that haunt the theatre. Tsai has given us a modern day ghost story full of the footstep echoings of the past.
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#2) The Time of the Wolf
Michael Haneke has been known to be a blantant provocateur when it comes to the subjects of his films. He has shown, without any fear or sentimentality, the forces of evil that run amok in this world. Psychotic home intruders terrorize and brutally slay an innocent family. A woman is emotionally devoured by her unwanted desires for self-mutilation and degredation. And now, a mother and her two children are thrown head-first and hard, into a post-apocalyptic world with no meaning or honour left among humanity - and never once does Haneke even attempt to explain why or how or what happened. A brilliantly photographed nightmarish sociopathic look at modern society gone all wrong.
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#1) Dogville
Lars Von Trier, easily one of the most creative and original auteurs working in cinema today, has created a masterpiece (yet another one) that outshines even his own prior masterpieces (with the possible exception of his Dreyeresque version of Medea). Set upon a minimilistic soundstage, in the homagal manner of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Dogville exists as both a heated diatribe on the American value system and a mesmorizing - near lyrical - montage of the insecurities of the human species. Von Trier's Dogville, seemingly sedate at first, is actually Darwinism at its most rabid and contagious - a brilliantly vile attack on the supposed Christian ethics of society.
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