Tuesday, January 04, 2005

My fave movies of 2004

Here's the website to find all the releases:

http://movieweb.com/movies/releases/year.php?2004

I'd just like to point out that a movie called "Chooch" was released this year.

Here's my top 10:

1. Before Sunset
2. Eternal Sunshine
3. Control Room
4. The Mother
5. Vera Drake
6. Hmmm....this part was easy but as I scan the list of the others I can't rank them because I feel that they are not good enough to be in my top ten. So we'll call it a top five, with 6 other notable movies of the year in no particular order:

Miracle (best sports movie, although I liked Friday Night Lights, too)
The Forgotten (silliest movie that made me jump the most)
Shaun of the Dead (funniest)
Secret Window (mediocre movie saved by Johnny Depp)
Birth (interesting and pretty to look at but pretty dumb)
Kill Bill 2 (best action)
Undertow (most intriguing work by a fairly new director who needs to quit biting Terence Malick's style so hard)

Worst movies of 2004:
1. Code 46-a horrible piece of shit that everyone involved wish they could forget about, I'm sure
2. The Ladykillers-a real clunker by the Cohen brothers. They need to quit smoking so much weed or something.
3. The Stepford Wives-Eech! Obvious test-audience influence and last-minute panic-induced editing.

Walked out on:
What the Bleep
Door in the Floor (walked out after sex scene between Kim Basinger and teenager that I was waiting to see, although I waited until it a few minutes after the scene was over so I wouldn't look like a perv)
This is far fewer movies than I usually walk out on in a year, maybe I am getting more patient.



9 comments:

Alice said...

i had a dream that reminded me of 'eternal sunshine' just the other night. in fact, it also relates to your post about miller's dance party. in this dream, i left the dance party to head back to my apartment (i currently live around the corner from scott) but as i exited i was all of a sudden in north berkeley walking towards this other apartment building i lived in back in 1998. as i rounded the corner from euclid to ridge rd. on my way back to the building, i looked up and saw that it had disappeared. everything surrounding it was in tact. i was just staring at a vacant lot as if someone had come in with an eraser and totally wiped it from existence. i'm not sure if i totally liked that movie (it had been hyped beyond belief before i finally saw it a month ago) but i'm totally down with having dreams about memory erasure.

DB said...

1) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2) Before Sunset
3) The Dreamers
4) Baadassss!
5) Fahrenheit 9/11
6) Open Water
7) Anchorman
8) Sideways
9) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
10)I Heart Huckabee's

You could probably make a much better Top 10 list with all the movies I didn't see this year. I didn't see a single movie released in September...where the hell was I?

DB said...

Worst 3 of 2004

1) The Terminal
2) Alexander
3) Catwoman

They're all pretty putrid, but "The Terminal" is truly something special.

beckler said...

I was gonna list the terminal as "the movie most likely to be on my worst movie list if i had seen it". I'd also like to note that I saw 73 movies last year, all but a few of them in the theater. glad to see you liked before the sunset so much. i definitely concur.

DB said...

I have to revise my list because I saw "The Aviator" last night. I would move it to 6 or 7 on my list and bump everything else down one.

beckler said...

Hmmm...I should see it. I saw "a very long engagement" last night and it will have absolutely no effect on my list. So long and dumb!! There was all kinds of unnecessary computer animation bullshit. Everything in it looks fake. There is a scene where a dog is bounding through a flower field that is shot from way above and if you look carefully, the dog is leaping in a fake, computer-animated way!! Was that really necessary? Does a real dog jump in a way that the director didn't like?

By the way, as a private aside (probably no on is reading these comments but us), how do you feel about me barricading the cats outside? I don't know what else to do. I think D.P. is mad at me cuz I woke him up nailing up the barricade this morning, but I can't have cats sneaking in and spraying our house!

DB said...

The problem with that is last night I came out of the bathroom and a stray cat had broken through the barricade. When he heard me, he started panicking like a caged rat, knocking over boxes, trying to jump through windows, and so forth. The barricade just made it a lot worse. I think we should just make sure to never leave the bathroom or kitchen doors open.

beckler said...

That's scary!! OK, we can try to keep the doors closed, but you should check out the new, improved,nailed-in barricade because the stray cats are now peeing on the stuff in the back room, which includes a box of my clothes, some of which i may want to wear someday.

DB said...

I'm getting sick of those damn cats. Maybe we should leave the food out under the stairs or on the porch. I haven't even seen Raider since it started raining.