Best Scenes of the Year: 2004
Submitted by Kza on Tue, 12/21/2004 - 03:21
Tags:
- Yellow leaves, from Hero.
- Escape from the suburbs, from Dawn of the Dead.
- Grace in the limo, from Dogville.
- Elastigirl vs. the electronic doors, from The Incredibles.
- The beginning is the end (the beach house), from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
- David comes out of the bathroom, from Twentynine Palms.
- Retrieving the wallet, from Sideways.
- The El battle/Spidey unmasked, from Spider-Man 2.
- Beatrix vs. Elle, from Kill Bill Vol. 2.
- Tap tap tap, from Infernal Affairs.
- A short skit by Pedro Sanchez, from Napoleon Dynamite.
- "This is probably going to hurt", from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
- How is Jude Law not himself?, from I ♥ Huckabees
- Meeting in the park, from The Woodsman.
- Dave Mustaine, from Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.
- Scenes from a marriage, from Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle.
- Opening credits, from She Hate Me.
- "You are having a car accident", from I, Robot.
- Ivy vs. the “creature”, from The Village.
- George blows it, from Mean Creek.
Author Comments:
My picks for the best scenes from 2004 movies. "Scene" here is pretty flexible; some of these entries range from about 30 seconds to about five minutes or more, and one of them is simply the non-narrative opening credits. I decided to keep it to one scene per movie, else most of this would be (unfairly) dominated by Hero. (I say "unfairly" because I haven't seen Eternal Sunshine since the theater, and my memory of it is shaky at best. How ironic.)
I also picked that Elastigirl scene as the best action scene from The Incredibles, but I agonized. The finale is flat-out spectacular, and the chase/fight in the jungle is magnificent as well. Just saw the movie again with both kids this time, and it's even better on a second viewing.
Yeah, there's definitely lots of good stuff to choose from in The Incredibles. I went with the Elastigirl scene cuz I like those kinds of action scenes where there's a kind of clockwork logic at work... knawmean? When there's a character trying to deal with an environment that works by way of a cold, hard kind of causality, if that makes any sense at all. I'm trying to think of examples, and the only thing that comes to mind are certain episodes of Aeon Flux.
So did you like Cube, then?
Ha! I feel like I'm being forced to choke down my own words, since, a long time ago on another board, I called Cube "the worst movie ever".
No, I really hated Cube. Certainly the idea's interesting, and I love a deathtrap as much as the next person, but the characters were so awfully written that I could barely tolerate it. And I'm not sure I totally followed the "rules" of the Cube, either, seeing it was based on math (prime numbers or something?). With a movie like that, I want to think that if I were a character in it, I'd have a fighting chance. But no, I'd be that guy that got sliced into bite-sized chunks.
And yet, I've been very tempted to give Hypercube a try...
:-) I just watched a "trailer" for Cube Zero, in which some guy in a cube monitoring the rest of the cube (an employee, I guess) tries to save one of the female prisoners. I say "trailer" grudgingly because it shows nothing. For all I know, they did the whole thing in Flash.
Hypercube only scores in the fives on IMDb. I'm not feeling temptation yet. With your hatred of the original, I guess you really do have a weakness for cold, hard causality.
you've seen Life Aquatic? whats it like?
Heh heh, I'm in the middle of composing my blog entry, right this very second. Look for it here when it's done.
Short version: Not as bad as some reviews make it out to be, but still unsatisfying. But if you've decided to name yourself after a Wes Anderson film, by all means, go see it :-)
Okay, it's up!
cool, great review! i'm still gonna see it though, give it a go ;)
Please do! I liked Rushmore and Tenenbaums the first time I saw them, but I really liked them on the second viewing. It's possible that pattern will hold with Aquatic.
Mmmmmm, good list!
I definitely have to agree with your choices for I <3 Huckabees, Dogville, Spider-Man 2, and The Life Aquatic.
Not a bad year for movies...
Thanks!
Yeah, 2004 wasn't too bad; it had its moments. But there's quite a few 2004 films I haven't seen, so I'm kinda unwilling to give it a descriptor just yet.