Article published December 26, 2004
Sequels, documentaries make their mark this year in cinema
By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER
The movie gods giveth.
The movie gods taketh away.
That, in a celluloid chestnut, was what it was like to go to the movies in Toledo in 2004. After eight years of dark, the Maumee Indoor Theatre reopened in May with a $3 million restoration. In late August, just before Labor Day, a summer storm swooped down Lagrange Street ripping the marquee off the Ohio Theatre, which only months earlier had been promised a $100,000 restoration from a federal grant.
In April, National Amusements closed the Franklin Mall 6, the only regular theater in Toledo that had been showing films from the mini-majors, studio divisions like Fox Searchlight and Miramax. A few months later, the theater chain opened the Cinematheque within the existing Super Cinemas in Holland, dedicating four, sometimes five screens to quirky sensibilities, foreign films, documentaries.
And just in time, too.
If ever a movie trend could be simultaneously thrilling and annoying, it was the rise of the political documentary in 2004. Thrilling, because pointed, provocative political filmmaking of any sort is an endangered species at the multiplex. Annoying, because if you went into most of these films looking for ideas, even the more scotching ones like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, you weren't likely to have any preconceptions challenged.And yet Moore's film proved so influential - though not in its ultimate goal, to unseat a sitting president - that in its wake, Toledo's Media Decompression Collective organized a nearly four-month long festival of activist shorts and documentaries.
But then, preaching to the converted became a theme in itself this year. Last winter, the most unlikely blockbuster in history landed on Ash Wednesday - Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ - and it went on to gross an astonishing $370 million in the United States, a figure all the more amazing because the film, of course, is in Aramaic with English subtitles.
At the moment, it's the third biggest money maker of 2004, lagging behind only Spider-Man 2 and Shrek 2. And even in this, Toledo had a hand: According to its distributors, Newmarket Films, Toledo was one of the movie's strongest markets, with sold-out screenings right through Easter.
What was so controversial?
Its unrelentingly bloody portrait of the final hours of Jesus Christ - which some said obscured his larger message, while those who returned three and four times (often in packed church buses) insisted the suffering was the message. Regardless of how you came down on it, The Passion was unique in another way: Of the year's biggest hits - The Incredibles, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - it was one of the few with copious amounts of graphic violence.
In 2004, a glance at the box office, in almost any week, would tell you that the only constant was that family films worked like gangbusters. Another thing: teen movies weren't the sure things they used to be; even if the best one all year, Mean Girls, featured former Rossford native Jonathan Bennett as Lindsay Lohan's love interest.
Katie Holmes, who got engaged to actor Chris Klein at about this time last year, had a quiet 2004; her only vehicle First Daughter, died a lonely death in September. Meanwhile blink and you missed him: Johnny O'Neal, a former member of the Murphys, popped up as Toledo's Art Tatum in the Ray Charles biopic, Ray.
And how were the movies?
Pretty unique, actually. Sequels, in particular, were excellent, mainly because studios hired smart directors like Sam Raimi (Spider-Man 2) to shoot them rather than the usual expressionless second stringers. Documentaries, like Super-Size Me, continued to gain more of a foothold outside the art house. Large studio pictures as different as the remake of Dawn of the Dead and Michael Mann's Collateral brought an ounce of the art house into the mainstream, while brisk, simple thrillers like Maria Full of Grace shook the art house of its too-tasteful tedium.
Of course, the real estate between those opposites is vast. But what follows didn't touch it with a 10-foot Ben Affleck. Here are my picks for the best of 2004:
1. Before Sunset. There are not very many of these, but Richard Linklater's luminous, beautifully wrought waltz around Paris is a perfect movie. Does it matter that it's a sequel to a film not many saw to begin with? Not even a little. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy find themselves in the City of Light, a decade after first meeting, with only a couple of hours to catch up. After School of Rock (which was my No. 1 last year), Linklater has become the rarest kind of great filmmaker: the kind whose pretense is as invisible as his direction. Here is a guy who makes 85 minutes of chat sexy.
Out on video now.
2. The Incredibles. What does it say that the most insightful take on the American family this year came from a cartoon? By bringing in outside director Brad Bird to tell the smart, whiz-bang story of a superhero family anxious to push beyond mediocrity, Pixar hit its sixth film in a row out of the park, and this time, they also pointed the way toward an emotionally resonant and adult future for American animation.
In theaters now.
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ignore the heavy title. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play lovers who have their memories of each other erased. Fate has other plans. Meanwhile the real star is French director Michel Gondry, who finds wondrous, touching, and innovative ways to visualize a past headed into the dust bin.
Out on video now.
4. Maria Full of Grace. A white-knuckle ride about a Colombian girl (Catalina Sandino Moreno) smuggling heroin into New York who sees an escape route, then grabs it. Shot by the instinctive first-time filmmaker Joshua Marston, Maria is an urgent thriller about immigration, poverty, and guts that doesn't wallow or sentimentalize or bore, but leaves you jittery for a remarkable reason: it plays at the speed of an everyday life.
Out on video now.
5. Sideways. A touching, rowdy comedy about two college buddies (Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) who spend a week in wine country and wind up pouring themselves a vintage bottle of self-loathing. And then hope. It's so warm and raunchy and romantic, it's hard to imagine an audience not adoring it.
In theaters now.
6. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Normally I'm not one for message movies, but this knowingly ridiculous stoner classic, about a couple of overachievers with the munchies, is frequently hilarious, endearing, and smart about the ways that ethnicity is marginalized in pop culture. Slyly subversive satire.
Out on video Jan. 4.
7. House of Flying Daggers. An outrageously lavish spectacle, with a plot, I think: Director Zhang Yimou, who had a left-field hit in September with Hero, comes up with something about a fierce female assassin followed by samurai police. Eye candy at its most breathtaking.
Opens in Toledo Jan. 21.
8. I Heart Huckabees. While audiences argued the meaning of Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Passion of the Christ, director David O. Russell made a splattery, playful comedy that argued the meaning of everything. Now here is an unlikely film for a major studio: an absurdist explosion of screwball wordplay with a surprisingly funny turn by Mark Wahlberg, who steals the movie from a cast boasting Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin. Sweet and chaotic.
Out on video Feb. 22.
9. Spartan. Dumped in theaters by Warner Bros. with barely a trailer to announce it, David Mamet's exceedingly paranoid political thriller with Val Kilmer lets its plot and shadowy characters slink gradually into view. Mamet grips you with a confidence that's rare for him as a director, and then needles you with that piercing, repetitive dialogue of his. It's artificial, for sure, but irresistible entertainment, and an unsettling view of a political climate where no act of honor is left unpunished.
Out on video now.
10. Ocean's Twelve. Sometimes he makes a commercial hit, and sometimes an experiment. With this fun sequel to his 2001 hit, Steven Soderbergh took a leap: an off-kilter heist flick that plays less like a real movie than a rolling party, as well as an admission that sequels by nature tend to be desperate. The banter, though, is anything but, ranging from Hollywood insider-ish to cheerfully silly to slick to self-conscious. Do I really look 50? George Clooney, 43, asks anyone who will listen.
In theaters now.
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Fifteen honorable mentions (in order, from No. 11 to No. 25): Collateral, Born into Brothels, Spider-Man 2, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Baadasssss!, The Control Room, Dawn of the Dead, Infernal Affairs, The Aviator, When Otar Left, Million Dollar Baby, Closer, Dig!, A Very Long Engagement, Twilight Samurai.
And the 10 most putrid (in order of general annoyance, front to back): Man on Fire, The Passion of the Christ, Bush's Brain, Finding Neverland, Christmas with the Kranks, Danny Deckchair, Van Helsing, The Village, Catwoman, and A Shark Tale.
Take that, 2004.
Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com or 419-724-6117.
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