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The Best Films of 2004

In this extreme year, nothing was quite as outlandish as Team America’s showstopping scene of hardcore marionette sex.

The Best Films of 2004
Photo: Warner Bros.

More so than usual, 2004 was a year of extremes. Election fever was the hot cinematic malady, headlined by Michael Moore’s specious Fahrenheit 9/11 and the anti-Bush documentary brigade, while Mel Gibson’s medieval torture-chamber piece The Passion of the Christ fervently represented the other end of the cultural-political spectrum. Such polarizing works were par for the course during a year in which Hollywood genres experienced some of their finest, and lousiest, moments. Superhero epics Spiderman 2, Hellboy, and The Incredibles packed a wallop that offset The Punisher’s wimpy comic book claptrap. Mike Hodges (I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead) and Pedro Almodóvar (Bad Education) rejuvenated film noir even as Tony Scott worked to quell this mini-resurgence with his disingenuous Man on Fire. Meanwhile, zombies provided both scares (Dawn of the Dead) and laughs (Shaun of the Dead), and Zhang Yimou helped erase the memory of Quentin Tarantino’s vacuous Kill Bill doubleheader with his martial arts extravaganzas Hero and House of Flying Daggers. There was, to be sure, some consistency among the cineplex’s bipolar offerings. The awful Shrek 2 and Shark Tale confirmed that DreamWorks’s animation unit is still no match for Pixar, the endearingly mopey Paul Giamatti (in Sideways) solidified his status as Hollywood’s finest character actor, and Charlie Kaufman once again proved himself king of the quirky head trip with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But in this extreme—and extremely schizophrenic—year, nothing was quite as outlandish as Team America: World Police’s showstopping scene of hardcore marionette sex. Nick Schager


ED GONZALEZ


The Best Films of 2004

1. Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar)

Like Talk to Her, Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education touches on themes of unconscious desire, except its characters are always, well, conscious. But being conscious doesn’t always mean being lucid, something embodied by the sad relationship between the film’s two leads, an actor-cum-diva played by Gael García Bernal and a filmmaker played by Fele Martínez. Like Eusebio Poncela’s relationship to Antonio Banderas in Law of Desire (and Naomi Watts’s obsession with Laura Harring in David Lynch’s brilliant Mulholland Drive), their power struggle is one part ego trip and one part wish fulfillment, a dangerous combination Almodóvar likens to our quasi-narcissistic and obsessive relationship to movies.


2. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi)

In a year overstuffed with Democratic-sponsored polemics targeting Dubya, the war in Iraq, and corporate malfeasance, Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold towered above them all. The genius of the film’s deceptively simple narrative, as written by Panahi’s frequent collaborator, the great Abbas Kiarostami, is how it seamlessly evokes America’s post-9/11 immigration policy in the intra-Iranian embarrassments suffered by the film’s lead, a pizza deliveryman who shoots himself in the head after a botched jewel heist. The film’s contemporary resonance is as flabbergasting as the subtle and acute precision of its social critique. This is allegory as truth.


3. Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont)

Bruno Dumont has said that he’s intrigued by the way people in Europe are attracted to American films, and he uses the sex and violence in Twentynine Palms as a pretext—not only to address the “nature” of American violence but to dissect the way audiences intellectually and emotionally respond to it. Dumont is clearly fascinated by America’s wide-open spaces, and much of Twentynine Palms, the existential story of a couple who love, fight, and fuck their way through the California desert, is a sinister poem to the way we look at the world and the way it looks back.


4. Dogville (Lars von Trier)

From the gooseberries in Ma Ginger’s garden to the German Hummels Nicole Kidman’s Grace collects throughout her stay in Dogville, everything in Lars von Trier’s latest provocation is a symbolic gesture of some kind. Narrated by John Hurt, this acerbic “illustration” of a small town’s curious notions of entitlement unspools as a Christian allegory by way of Mark Twain or Dr. Seuss. Von Trier understands that the root of American aggression is the arrogant elite’s subjugation of the culturally underprivileged. The director walks a fine line: Dogville isn’t anti-American, but anti-oppression.

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5. Secret Things (Jean-Claude Brisseau)

In stripping Secret Things of any and all aesthetic bullshit, Jean-Claude Brisseau mediates the relationship between his two leads by bringing us closer to them. Call it an anti-distancing approach. Nathalie and Sandrine’s struggle to conquer a demonic hottie’s empire mirrors the struggle of disenfranchised masses trying to overthrow despotic leaders. Their weapon is sex and every assault is contrived as a political maneuver. Alliances repeatedly shift, and the higher they move up the social ladder the more dangerous things get. Happily and ridiculously over the top, the film plays out as a war of anarchic, sexual primitisim.


6. Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood)

The story of a woman who becomes a boxing sensation after winning the affections of her would-be manager, Clint Eastwood’s latest casts Hilary Swank as the David to the actor-director’s Goliath. Told with the kind of rough-hewn sentimentality that suggests a gravel-voiced grandfather recounting war stories while chugging jiggers of scotch, the film envisions an elegiac boulevard of broken dreams where characters drown in the spiritual anemia of noir shadows and Morgan Freeman serves as a Greek chorus. Million Dollar Baby could have just as easily been called Eastwood Wept (boy, does he ever!)—regardless, it’s the best American film of 2004.


7. Son Frère (Patrice Chéreau)

Patrice Chéreau cuts to the core of human agony with the kind of precision that escapes most living directors. In the mournful Son Frère, he chronicles a desperate reconnect between two brothers (played by Bruno Todeschini and Éric Caravaca) when one is diagnosed with a mysterious blood disease, scrutinizing identity politics and the existential burden of the human flesh. However old, taut, hairy, saggy or cut-up, it’s all the same: a gratuitous barrier that too often prevents us from crawling inside each other. The beauty of Chéreau’s films is that they ask us to emotionally transcend that skin.


8. Raja (Jacques Doillon)

The story of a girl who goes to work with her cousin at a pasha in Morocco owned by a lazy, intellectual Frenchman, Jacques Doillon’s sharply written Raja is a romantic tug-of-war that brings to mind both a Shakespearean comedy of errors (see the film’s version of the Macbeth witches) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s underrated interracial smackdown Besieged. Despite the countless power shifts, petty back-stabbings and disappointing sex, Raja (Najat Benssallem) and Fred (a hot-to-trot Pascal Greggory) never stop having fun, perhaps because they understand that chasing someone is often more fun than having them.

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9. The Keys to the House (Gianni Amelio)

The closest kin to Gianni Amelio’s heartbreaking The Keys to the House may be Chéreau’s Son Frère. The word “kin” is crucial here, because both films are about the nature of family ties. Though not as ponderous as Aleksandr Sokurov’s Father and Son, Keys to the House similarly feels as if its being telegraphed from a cosmic fugue state, and means to get (and stay) beneath the skin. Indeed, one of the film’s wonders is how Amelio’s oblique compositions, sound cues and everyone’s hushed whispers and silent pauses create a mood of suspended animation meant to evoke the frustration of familial detachment.


10. When Will I Be Loved (James Toback)

An Indiewood version of Indecent Proposal, When Will I Be Loved’s pacing is like that of a screwball comedy, but the film’s social commentary is obscenely vicious. James Toback’s many ideas on sex, class and gender sometimes go nowhere, suggesting a spoken word performance gone horribly wrong, but I can’t think of a more transfixing and complex ballet of images, sounds and politics all year than Neve Campbell’s ingenious rich-bitch seducing and destroying two presumptuous men at once by using her perceived female weaknesses against them.


Honorable Mention

Hero, Bright Leaves, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, Tarnation, The Manchurian Candidate, Cellular, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, Before Sunset, BAADASSSSS! and Moolaadé.


Worst of 2004

Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, The Phantom of the Opera, Sleepover, A Cinderella Story, New York Minute, Saved!, The United States of Leland, Garfield: The Movie, Napoleon Dynamite, and Shark Tale.

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NICK SCHAGER


The Best Films of 2004

1. House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou)

Drenched in pulsating primary colors and bursting with exquisitely choreographed, gasp-worthy combat, Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers—a samurai epic about the love triangle between a fetching assassin and the two warriors chasing after her—bests the filmmaker’s impressive Hero in virtually every way. Boasting a fervently melodramatic soul, Flying Daggers wonderfully conveys how the act of loving another can be a game, a sacrifice, a ruse, a weapon, a betrayal, and most of all, a political act. Yimou’s elevation of his central romance above the story’s larger political backdrop reveals his faith in love’s overpowering grandness.


2. Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar)

Pedro Almodóvar’s most satisfying work in nearly a decade, Bad Education is the Spanish auteur’s delirious, noir-flavored fantasia about the mutable nature of self and the symbiotic relationship between reality and cinematic illusion. A convoluted tale of childhood sexual abuse, stolen identities and the Catholic Church’s moral bankruptcy, Almodóvar’s latest—bolstered by a stunningly versatile triple-performance by Gael García Bernal as an aspiring screenwriter, a mysterious murderer and a thieving, cross-dressing diva—vividly captures how movies function as the vehicles by which we live out our most forbidden and dangerous desires.


3. The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller)

The Big Red One, iconoclastic genre filmmaker Samuel Fuller’s 1980 masterpiece about a WWII rifle company on the front lines, was already an underrated gem before this “reconstructed” cut stormed theaters. Restoring 40 long-lost minutes, Fuller’s semi-autobiographical epic retains its dedication to exposing the inherent absurdity and tragedy of war—few films have ever conveyed the experience of being on the ground, on the run and scared to death with such unromantic immediacy.


4. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (Mike Hodges)

In noir, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and the overpowering inevitability of failure and death seeps into every grimy back alley and grungy apartment of Mike Hodges’s cool, intensely morose I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Raw and nasty, the film—about a reformed gangster who returns to his criminal stomping ground to avenge a murder—intently examines humanity’s darkest impulses while hinting that our choices are not fully our own, and turns a conventional genre setup into a sleek, dreamy, jet-black treatise on the immutability of man’s vicious nature.

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5. Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood)

A sentimental tale told unsentimentally, Million Dollar Baby utilizes a conventional rags-to-riches story (at least until its calamitous third act) as the vehicle for an austere rumination on the terribly high cost of salvation. Clint Eastwood’s tender film achieves an unaffected beauty through graceful understatement, and alongside the stellar Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, Hilary Swank—as a desperate, relentless would-be champion driven to greatness by a grizzled trainer with whom she develops a surrogate father-daughter relationship—delivers a heartfelt performance of stunning versatility.


6. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi)

An incisive portrait of one man’s quiet rage at, and violent response to, social inequality, Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold plays out like an Iranian version of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Expressionless, overweight pizza deliveryman and war veteran Hussein, resentful of the treatment he receives from Tehran’s wealthy and powerful, is driven to carry out an ill-fated robbery that ends in murder. Capturing the sights and sounds of an economically and culturally divided city, Panahi orchestrates his narrative’s slow build-up to disaster with calculating precision, while Abbas Kiarostami’s nuanced script dramatizes Hussein’s fury as the byproduct, not of jealousy or greed, but of wounded self-esteem.


7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)

Acutely illustrating how each moment in our life helps us construct—in ways both large and small—who we are at the present moment, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a unique depiction of man’s desire to avert heartache. Gondry’s digital-electric direction melds present and past experiences in a swirling pastiche of CGI-enhanced images, and the filmmaker’s repetition of simple motifs gives his film a subtle interconnectedness that mirrors its forlorn protagonist’s tangled web of memories.


8. Sideways (Alexander Payne)

As Miles Raymond, a struggling novelist, high school English teacher, and enthusiastic wine connoisseur, Paul Giamatti gives a performance of such pent-up desperation and heartbreaking moroseness that he transforms his short-tempered and sullen killjoy into a figure of quiet, tender tragedy. With Sideways, and unlike in his condescending, faux-humanistic About Schmidt, Alexander Payne refrains from eliciting cheap laughs at his characters’ expense, instead structuring the gentle comedy like the vino Miles adores—light, sweet and refreshing to both one’s senses and intellect.

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9. The Blind Swordsman: Zatôichi (Takeshi Kitano)

Takeshi “Beat” Kitano’s reimagining of Zatôichi, the 19th-century blind swordsman who roamed the Japanese countryside righting wrongs, is a burst of bloody, CGI-enhanced clashes and joyous musical-inspired set pieces. Ferocious yet funny, intense yet elegant, Kitano’s film stays true to the Zatôichi series’s humanism and to its compassionate hero’s devilish sense of humor while reconfiguring the iconic masseuse, gambler and killer as a withdrawn, physically imposing assassin poised to disembowel at the slightest provocation. An adaptation that imaginatively interprets rather than regurgitates its source material, The Blind Swordsman: Zatôichi shreds this year’s action-movie competition.


10. Team America: World Police (Trey Parker)

Gleefully skewering bloated Jerry Bruckheimer-produced blockbusters while insulting liberals, conservatives and myriad foreign cultures, Team America: World Police is the funniest, filthiest and shrewdest politically-minded film of this election year. From a musical number titled “Everyone Has AIDS” to a graphic love scene between two flexible marionettes, Matt Parker and Trey Stone’s puppet-rific film about a terror-fighting super-squad delivers the riotously vulgar goods. More surprising, however, is the levelheaded patriotism—bereft of the right’s righteous militarism and the left’s pandering wishy-washiness—lurking beneath the film’s exterior of nasty sex, ceaseless profanity and martial arts mayhem.


Honorable Mention

The Aviator, Before Sunset, Kinsey, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Dogville, The Manchurian Candidate, Maria Full of Grace, Hero, A Dirty Shame, and Father and Son.


Worst of 2004

The Passion of the Christ, Napoleon Dynamite, The Door in the Floor, Little Black Book, Fahrenheit 9/11, What the Bleep Do We Know?, The Village, Surviving Christmas, Beyond the Sea, and Van Helsing.

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