You decide!

What was the best movie of the year?
	The Aviator
	Collateral
	Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
	Fahrenheit 9/11
	The Incredibles
	Kill Bill, Vol. 2
	Kinsey
	Maria Full of Grace
	Million Dollar Baby
	Sideways
Free polls from Pollhost.com

EW critic Owen Gleiberman's top 10 films of 2004:

1. Sideways
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. The Incredibles
4. Maria Full of Grace
5. Kinsey
6. Before Sunset
7. Osama
8. Open Water
9. 13 Going on 30
10. Ray

EW critic Lisa Schwarzbaum's top 10 films of 2004:

1. Sideways
2. Million Dollar Baby
3. The Incredibles
4. Maria Full of Grace
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
6. Moolaade
7. Collateral
8. The Aviator
9. The Return
10. Bright Leaves

the subway is a porno...

Roger Ebert's Best Films of 2004:

1. Million Dollar Baby
2. Kill Bill, Vol. 2
3. Vera Drake
4. Spider-Man 2
5. Moolaade
6. The Aviator
7. Baadasssss!
8. Sideways
9. Hotel Rwanda
10. Undertow

No. 7 is particularly comical...

i was born in the desert...

I now present the three best albums of the year:

1.
This is post-punk at its best. Interpol has now released two singularly brilliant albums, both of which will become rock classics (see their 2002 debut album, Turn on the Bright Lights, which earned them favorable comparisons with the likes of Joy Division and The Fall).


2.
Addictive beyond repair, this New Wave glam rock band delivers the year's best debut. Who can resist the doom-thumping dance beats of tracks like "Take Me Out," "Michael," and "Darts of Pleasure"?


3.
This is the year's comeback album. Robert Smith transcends the 80s, finally, and it is a sight to behold.

something beautiful, something free...

And the National Board of Review's top ten picks for 2004:

1. Finding Neverland
2. The Aviator
3. Closer
4. Million Dollar Baby
5. Sideways
6. Kinsey
7. Vera Drake
8. Ray
9. Collateral
10. Hotel Rwanda

Finding Neverland was much too sappy for top honors. However, Johnny Depp was indeed shown to be the most versatile actor alive.

reach out and touch faith!

New York Magazine film critic Ken Tucker's Top Ten of 2004:

1. Sideways
2. The Incredibles
3. How to Draw a Bunny
4. Collateral
5. House of Flying Daggers
6. End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
8. Kill Bill, Vol. 2
9. A Very Long Engagement
10. Fahrenheit 9/11

If only Vol. 2 were really a top ten film...Tarantino, you disappointed me to no end. I suppose even self-indulgence has its limits!

mírala mírala mírala...

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone has chosen his top 10 films of 2004:

1. Sideways
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Million Dollar Baby
4. The Aviator
5. The Incredibles
6. Kinsey
7. Closer
8. Finding Neverland
9. Kill Bill, Vol. 2
10. Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11--campaign advertisement as film? Please. In that case, the Swift Boat ads were infinitely more interesting.

words like violence...

AFI's 10 best films of 2004 (in alphabetical order):

-The Aviator
-Collateral
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
-Friday Night Lights
-The Incredibles
-Kinsey
-Maria Full of Grace
-Million Dollar Baby
-Sideways
-Spider-Man 2

Kinsey is so overrated. It's the typical injured-intellectual movie that has become so fashionable since A Beautiful Mind. And in no way does it even approach Crowe's graceful acting in that film. Away with you, Liam Neeson!

#1 - WES ANDERSON

Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving--he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility.

Anderson's masterpiece, Rushmore, was completed in 1998. Critics gave the film an overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception: by the time it opened in wide release in February, 1999, Premiere magazine had called Rushmore the best film of the year, and co-star Bill Murray had already been named Best Supporting Actor by both the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Associations, as well as the National Film Critics Society. A bittersweet coming-of-age tale about an underachieving but ambitious-to-a-fault teen, played with gusto by then unknown Jason Schwartzman, the film scored points for its wry, deadpan sense of humor and inventive visuals. Anderson drew from sources as disparate as Murmur of the Heart, Charles Schultz's Peanuts cartoons, and Meatballs, giving the proceedings a giddy absurdity without ever losing genuine compassion for his characters. Easily the most original and creative movie of the 1990s, Rushmore quickly established a cult following the likes of which had not been seen since the time of the Evil Dead movies. Despite the orgy of positive reviews and Touchstone studios' aggressive marketing campaign, however, the director's second feature failed to resonate with mainstream audiences who may have been expecting a laugh-a-minute Murray vehicle. Worse yet, when Academy Awards nominations were announced in mid-February, Murray was passed over in favor of actors in more traditionally high-minded roles.

Still, Anderson's ardent fans--including director Martin Scorsese, who listed Bottle Rocket as one of his 10 favorite movies of the 1990s--eagerly awaited his 2001 effort. Titled The Royal Tenenbaums, the J.D. Salinger-inspired tale revolved around a loose-knit, oddly-dressed, super-intellectual Manhattan family, and reunited some of the cast of Rushmore with a new phalanx of stars including Danny Glover, Anjelica Huston, and Gene Hackman. Given a careful platform release by Touchstone, the film garnered enough critical praise and positive word-of-mouth to rally over $50 million dollars in box office receipts--more than three times that of Rushmore--proving perhaps that the public had finally come around to Anderson's uniquely skewed worldview. At the very least, the members of the Academy had: In February, 2002, Anderson and Wilson garnered a Best Original Screenplay nomination for their multi-character opus.

What's next for the quirky and highly imaginative Anderson? The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou will be released nationwide on December 25th. The film follows the internationally famous oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his crew--Team Zissou--as they set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly non-existant Jaguar Shark that killed Zissou's partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure.

#2 - QUENTIN TARANTINO

Director/screenwriter/actor/producer Quentin Tarantino was perhaps the most distinctive and volatile talent to emerge in American film in the early '90s. Unlike the previous generation of American filmmakers, Tarantino learned his craft from his days as a video clerk, rather than as a film school student. Consequently, he developed an audacious fusion of pop culture and independent art house cinema; his films were thrillers that were distinguished as much by their clever, twisting dialogue as their outbursts of extreme violence.

In 1994, Tarantino's status was elevated to major film icon. Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that May, beginning the flood of good reviews for the picture. Before Pulp Fiction was released in October, Oliver Stone's bombastic version of Natural Born Killers hit the theaters in August; Tarantino, who wrote the screenplay for that film, distanced himself from it and was only credited for writing the basic story. Pulp Fiction soon eclipsed Natural Born Killers in both acclaim and popularity. The film expertly captured the skill, wit, and violent temperament that is now associated with all Tarantino movies. Made for eight million dollars, the film eventually grossed over 100 million dollars and topped many critics' top ten lists. Pulp Fiction earned seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (Tarantino and Avary), Best Actor (John Travolta), Best Supporting Actor (Samuel L. Jackson), and Best Supporting Actress (Uma Thurman).

In late 2002/early 2003, hype soon started to build around his fourth feature, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003). A kinetic homage to revenge movies of the 1970s, Kill Bill featured Uma Thurman as a former assassin known as "The Bride." Waking from a five-year coma after her former comrades turned her wedding day into a frenzied bloodbath, The Bride vowed vengeance on both the assassins and her former boss, Bill (David Carradine). Easily one of the best films of 2003, Vol. 1 epitomized Tarantino's fascination with violence. However, instead of presenting a kind of violence that should strike fear into our hearts, Tarantino managed the trasnformative feat of presenting violence as an artform. Riveting visuals in an ultraviolent landscape gracefully recalled the kung-fu genre, and even drew parallels with the great director Stanley Kubrick.

What's next for Tarantino? Watch out for Inglorious Bastards, scheduled to be released in 2006, about a group of American soliders during WWII who manage to escape a Nazi execution squad.

#3 - JOEL & ETHAN COEN

Combining thoughtful eccentricity, wry humor, arch irony, and often brutal violence, the films of the Coen brothers have become synonymous with a style of filmmaking that pays tribute to classic American movie genres--especially film noir--while sustaining a firmly postmodern feel. Beginning with Blood Simple, their brutal, stylish 1984 debut, the brothers have amassed a body of work that has established them as two of the most compelling figures in American and world cinemas.

Fargo (1996), the Coen brothers' masterpiece, was a black, violent crime comedy with a surprisingly warm heart. It recalled Blood Simple in its themes of greed, corruption, and murder, but provided a more redemptive sentiment than was afforded to the characters of the previous film. What makes this film the best of the Coen brothers canon is that it succeeds in creating an entire universe of semi-absurdist characters, replete with their own unconsciously slapstick language. Fargo was not just a town in North Dakota--it was a simpler world hidden amidst our very own about which there was much to learn in the way of human nature and its particular eccentricities. The brothers shared a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for their work, and another Oscar, for Best Actress, went to Frances McDormand, to whom Joel had been married since 1984.

Following Fargo, the Coens went on to make The Big Lebowski in 1998. A blend of bungled crime and warped comedy, Lebowski was a laid-back, irreverent revision of the hardboiled L.A. detective genre. Probably the most original comedy of the 1990s, Lebowski was a testament to the Coen brothers' versatility in film and storytelling.

The year 2000 brought the Coens into the depression-era with O Brother, Where art Thou? An admittedly loose adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, O Brother starred George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as escaped convicts on a surreal journey through 1930s Mississippi. Blending crackpot comedy, melodrama, folky country music, and film noir, O Brother was proof that the Coen brothers truly had no limits.

Wasting no time in production of their next feature, the following year found Joel the recipient of his third Best Director award at Cannes for the darkly comic, monochromatic post-noir The Man Who Wasn't There. Starring Billy Bob Thornton as a humble, small-town barber who gets mixed up in a tangled web of blackmail and deceit, the moody atmosphere of The Man Who Wasn't There eschewed the wacky antics of O Brother in favor of a darker, more moody tone that recalled such earlier Coen efforts as Blood Simple and Barton Fink.

Two years later, Joel and Ethan re-teamed with Clooney for Intolerable Cruelty, a film that represented their version of a '30s screwball comedy. The film was noteworthy in that it was the first movie made by the brothers that did not originate with them; they rewrote a script that was already in existence. Joel and Ethan were also listed as executive producers on the 2003 Terry Zwigoff film Bad Santa, a story that came from one of their original ideas.

What's next for the prolific Coen brothers? 2005 should see the release of Paris, je t'aime, a film exploring the plurality of cinema in the neighborhoods of Paris.

#4 - TERRY ZWIGOFF

Sarcasm masking sensitivity and vulnerability is a theme with which Terry Zwigoff is quite familiar. Zwigoff's first feature-length documentary, Crumb (1994), proved to be a devastating examination of a family utterly divorced from mainstream "normalcy" as well as a portrait of a uniquely twisted artist. Crumb's emotionally disturbed brother Maxon was a particularly poignant reminder of the suffering dysfunctional families can inflict. Winner of several critics' awards as well as one of the best-reviewed films of the 1990s, Crumb was partly responsible for the Academy's drastic reassessment of its nomination process when it failed to receive an Oscar nod for Best Documentary. Though Zwigoff's unflinching film caused a riff with his subject, he and Crumb were reconciled several years later.

Refusing to go Hollywood and compromise his long-standing aversion to corporate commercialism, Zwigoff turned down numerous projects, including The Virgin Suicides (2000), and struggled for five years to get an adaptation of cartoonist Daniel Clowes's graphic novel Ghost World made. Co-scripted with Clowes and starring the inimitably deadpan Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson as two alienated teens stuck in a generic suburban city, Ghost World was far wiser, funnier, and more moving than the usual teen film. Suffering from more than just an average case of adolescent anomie, Birch's Enid's journey toward an alternative life is aided by Illeana Douglas's hilariously earnest art teacher and Steve Buscemi's gently eccentric collector Seymour; all of the players exude veritable humanity rather than Hollywood gloss. Directed with an assured low-key style that suited both its subject and its comic book source, Ghost World showed that Zwigoff could handle a fictional narrative as well as documentaries and became a summer 2001 art house hit. Seymour's onscreen record collection of jazz and blues 78s belongs to Zwigoff himself.

In last year's Bad Santa, Zwigoff takes the dry humor to a whole new level. Giving one of the best performances of the year, Billy Bob Thornton stars as the bad Santa--a nihilistic, sometimes-suicidal version of the Grinch who stole Christmas. Of course, like all of Zwigoff's films, Bad Santa doesn't merely start and end with the dry wit. Rather, the sarcasm is shown to mask vulnerability, tenderness, and genuine emotion. The Thornton character is not the monster he projects himself to be. When he befriends an introverted 8-year-old boy, we get a glimpse of the bad Santa's true self. Nietzsche once wrote that compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell, and you should be able to break a tooth on it. "That way it will have delicacy and sweetness." Such delicate sweetness is found in Thornton's character through his friendship with the kid--one of the most disarming relationships in film that year.

What's next for Zwigoff? Look for the 2005 release of Art School Confidential, about an undercover cop (John Malkovich) who poses as an artist before coming to the conclusion that pretending to be a serial killer will lead him to great acclaim.

#5 - STEPHEN DALDRY

British film director Stephen Daldry has only given us two movies, and yet they are both true gems. His first feature was 2000's Billy Elliot, set in northern England, against the gritty backdrop of the 1984 coal miner strikes. Billy Elliot's story of a boy's desire to be a ballet dancer was praised and damned for its sentimentality, with critics declaring it either a moving story of triumphant nonconformity, or "emotional pornography." Regardless, Billy Elliot became a local and international smash, earning raves for young acting neophyte Jamie Bell's performance as the titular boy and Oscar nominations for screenwriter Lee Hall, supporting actress Julie Walters, and director Daldry.

Daldry followed his freshman triumph by directing Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, and Nicole Kidman in The Hours (2001). Adapted by playwright David Hare from Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours gracefully interweaves three stories about a critical day in the lives of Kidman's Virginia Woolf as she struggles to write her esteemed 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, Moore's unhappy 1950s housewife who finds solace in Woolf's book, and Streep's 2001 incarnation of Clarissa "Dalloway." Finding visual analogues for the novel's challenging interiority and deftly juggling the scenarios' thematic echoes concerning the women's search for meaning in their lives, Daldry and Hare earned kudos for adapting an "unadaptable" book, while Streep, Moore and Kidman's superb performances garnered further raves for Daldry's direction. Bolstering the film's pre-Oscar buzz, The Hours won the Best Picture prize from the National Board of Review and appeared on the American Film Institute's 2002 Ten Best Films list. When the Academy Award nominations were announced in February of 2003, few were surprised that The Hours earned nine nominations in all, including one for Best Director.

Stephen Daldry fans can look forward to this year's release of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, starring Jude Law. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Chabon, the film takes place in 1930s New York and is about two young cousins who create a comic book superhero named The Escapist, who (in Chabon's words) "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!"

#6 - ALFONSO CUARÓN

In the last three years, Alfonso Cuarón has left an indelible mark upon the film world. Among the most successful and talked-about Mexican filmmakers of his generation, Cuarón has shown a remarkable versatility, able to embrace the Hollywood blockbuster as well as rough-edged and darker-themed contemporary stories set to please independent film buffs.

In 1995, Cuarón released his first feature film produced in the United States, A Little Princess, a graceful and elegant adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novel. Cuarón's next feature was also a literary adaptation, a modernized version of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Robert De Niro. But Cuarón's next project found him making a sharp left turn; shot in Mexico with a Spanish-speaking cast, Y Tu Mamá También was a funny, provocative, and controversial tragicomedy about two sexually obsessed teenagers who take an extended road trip with an attractive woman in her thirties. The film's open portrayal of sexuality and frequent rude humor, as well as the politically and socially relevant asides, made the film an international hit and a major success with critics. The film quickly propelled Cuarón into the elite list of contemporary directors who are at once unconventional, uncompromising, and wholly unpredictable.

This past summer, Cuarón released the darker, more emotional, and most mature third film in the successful Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Easily the best of the series, Cuarón's film perfectly captured Harry's pivotal transformation from child magician to young-adult sorcerer.

Cuarón's next film, tenatively titled Mexico '68, is based on Mexico's violent student revolt of 1968. The film is scheduled to be released in 2006.

#7 - PETER JACKSON

After directing The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003), Peter Jackson has easily cemented his reputation as the most ambitious director alive today. The three sprawling films about a hobbit and his ring have done for the new millennium what the Star Wars trilogy did for the 70's and 80's. Jackson managed to create an entirely different world on film--a whole other mythology that differs from our own in magical, whimsical ways, the power of which is difficult to dismiss as mere childish fantasy. While we cannot credit Jackson for defining humanity--for that transcendent feat goes to Shakespeare--we can certainly give him credit for reminding us what it means to be human in a world ruled by scientific materialism, utterly devoid of inspiration.

#8 - TODD SOLONDZ

After such heart-wrenching pictures of suburban hell and general human dysfunction as 1995's Welcome to the Dollhouse and 1998's Happiness, Todd Solondz has firmly established himself as the miscreant's director. Dollhouse tells the bleak, perverse tale of outcast teenager Dawn "Wienerdog" Wiener (played expertly by Heather Matarazzo). When Dawn asks a fellow student at her junior high why he hates her so much, he unhesitatingly replies, "Because you're ugly." We come to learn that Dawn isn't so much the stereotypical loser who's naturally uncomfortable in her own skin, as she is the stereotypical loser who's made to feel uncomfortable in her own skin by the fact that other people project their own insecurities onto her.

However, Welcome to the Dollhouse was a mere prelude to Solondz's more mature--and certainly more uncomfortable--black comedy, Happiness. In the words of producer Christine Vachon, Happiness is a "nonjudgmental film about a pedophile." One of its central plotlines--about a father who has an unnatural attraction to his young son's friends--caused sizable unhappiness among various critics and cultural watchdogs. However, the film also won considerable acclaim, premiering at the 1998 Cannes Festival to a positive reception and going on to establish Solondz further as one of the most original and provocative directors of his era.

Solondz's eagerly anticipated next film, Palindromes, is scheduled for release later this year.

#9 - NEIL LABUTE

"She'll be reaching for the sleeping pills within a week, and you and me, we'll laugh about this until we're very old men." Those are the words of Aaron Eckhart's lead character in Neil LaBute's shocking psychological drama, In the Company of Men. Few movies have attracted the kind of attention that LaBute's first film attracted upon its 1997 release. Some praised the film as brilliant, while others decried its seeming misogyny as morally abhorrent.

The film recounts the story of two thirtysomething white collar business partners--both of whom have been rejected by women--who conspire to find a vulnerable woman, simultaneously date her, and then break up with her just to assuage their damaged egos. As if this premise weren't disturbing enough, the two men choose to play their psychological game on a deaf woman. And if that's not enough for you, LaBute goes one step further by ending the film without correcting the wrong perpetrated by the men. There is no justice, and no redemption. There is only vile hatred without consequence.

In 2003, LaBute turned in yet another mini-masterpiece with The Shape of Things, this time turning the tables and instead giving the woman in the film the role of psychological sadist. In that film, LaBute explores the moral and ethical implications of our culture of beauty--a culture that is explicitly and undeniably obsessed with the surface of things.

In analyzing LaBute's films beyond their shock value, we get the sense that LaBute is not so much presenting the world as a dark, immoral throwaway as most people (including the infamous Roger Ebert) have insisted, but is rather presenting the moral and ethical implications of treating other people as means instead of ends in themselves. LaBute's films present a very Kantian philosophy that would have us believe that human beings, by virtue of being rational, are worthy of our respect. As such, an individual cannot use another individual for her own ends without depriving that individual of her autonomy, and thereby her very humanity.

Indeed, as we watch in horror as the two businessmen play with the deaf woman's heart as a way to relieve the pain of their hurt vanity in In the Company of Men, we recognize that the woman becomes something less than human in the eyes of the business partners. She is stripped of her autonomy as she's tricked into being fodder for the pair of psychological vultures. By showing the consequences of dispensing with Kant's categorical imperative, LaBute at once confirms the intuitive power of Kant's moral philosophy, and his own adherence to it.

LaBute is perhaps the preeminent moralist among directors alive today. His films are shocking, unsettling, and profoundly disturbing; however, the discomfort they inspire in us only serves to confirm that our moral intuitions are consonant with his own Kantian worldview. Perhaps it's a sly and underhanded way of expressing a moral sentiment, but that certainly doesn't make it any less compelling.

#10 - OLIVER STONE

Oliver Stone provided us with the definitive paean to self-realizing violence in his 1994 masterpiece, Natural Born Killers. Rife with metaphor, mayhem, and murder, the film captures the logical conclusion to the existential angst that was bound to grow out of the sterile materialism of the 1980s. Indeed, Stone even resorted to the help of musical miscreant Trent Reznor for added sonic ambiance, prominently featuring his "Something I Can Never Have" in the film's climactic scene.

In the end, Stone's film is emblematic of the ironic criticism that defined the end of the twentieth century: Natural Born Killers was simultaneously celebrated by those who saw it as a condemnation of the media's glorification of violence, and decried by those who claimed it did little more than glorify the very violence it purported to condemn. Defiant in his unwillingness to be classified and boxed into a corner, Stone instead succeeded in condemning society, all the while laughing at its unfounded sense of outrage.

Stone continued his success with the witty, gritty, sexy comedy, U-Turn. An intriguingly shameless character study, the film features daringly tenacious performances from the likes of Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez, Nick Nolte, Billy Bob Thornton, and Laurie Metcalf. It is the perennial actor's movie, as it allows the stars free reign to channel their proverbial underbellies. What results is one of the most sublime (and grossly underrated) comedies of the 1990s.

What's next for Mr. Oliver Stone? Catch his epic Alexander later this year, which promises to tell the ultimately tragic story of one of the greatest military leaders in the history of warfare.