Best movie moments of the year: 2004 Edition

Not so much a moment as a scene, but Jason Schwartzman and Marky Mark eating dinner with the religious family in I Heart Huckabees.

I second that emotion. Marky Mark with the old Spanish lady beats that for me though.

Team America - "durka durka"
Harold and Kumar - Kumar, in fantasy, throws coffee in the face of his wife, a bag of ________.

The opening to 'Mean Girls'

"And on the seventh day, God made guns, for killing the dinosaurs and the homosexuals"

Shame the movie went DOWN in the last half hour: morals blah blah

The bit in Sideways when Paul Giamatti learns his ex-wife has remarried, especially the head tilted sideways (!?) walk to the car to get a bottle. Actually, that movie is full of lots of great moments.

Jason Schwartzman and Marky Mark hitting each other with the red ball in Huckabees. (the Christian family scene was kind of weak) Or the mud-fucking.

Statsky & Hutch breasts scene. So funny and kinda sexy, too.

Starsky, of course ...

The moment in Fahrenheit 9/11 when the screen goes dark and there's audio only.

That, and the Ben-Stiller-puts-cocaine-in-his-coffee scene from the aforementioned Starsky & Hutch.

half of the bits from Shaun of the Dead

uma thurman getting buried alive

There has to be a Mean Girls moment... probably something about Tina Fey's working a second job because her teacher's salary doesn't pay her enough... or lohan and her fake tittehs...

xp: the Bride buried alive is one thing, but her escaping from the grave and walking across the street towards the diner, shedding more dirt than Pig Pen, is another thing entirely.

The montage of Kumar falling in love with/marrying/abusing/making up with the giant bag of weed.

HECTOR!!!!!!!
HECTOR!!!!!!!!
HECTOR!!!!!!!!!
HECTOR!!!!!!!!!!

The tap dance closer at the end of Zatoichi rules the entire year.

In Sideways, Miles's friend (forget the name) encouraging him to self-publish his novel -- "Just get it out there! Get it in libraries!"

The moment where Miles pours the spit bucket over his head will stick with me for a very, very long time.

too many in bad education to recount here

Harold and Kumar singing along with Wilson-Phillips ("Hold On"?)

The look on Nicole Kidman's face in Dogville when she realizes the townsfolk have called in the gangsters. It's a great look, this kind of "you shouldna done that" thing that immediately conveys that things are going to turn out much worse for the townsfolk than for her. And it's pivotal, because it's the first time she starts to flirt with reclaiming the power she's voluntarily given up. It takes her a while to come around to it, but everything that comes later is visible right there.

deel munn, pig, rain and mud in undertow.

so sinister.

Old boy-the squid

Yuck. I don't even want to see that moment.

I must've forgotten to post my favorite moments from 2004 as I wrote about elsewhere.

• Bright Leaves -- Ross McElwee gets shoved into a wheelchair modified with wood-plank handlebars by Vlada Petric, an over-zealous film academic, who then proceeds to hijack McElwee's film by forcing the documentary filmmaker to point his camera up at him while he's pushing the wheelchair around the street for an eerie tracking shot, all the while mocking his original shooting location's lack of "kinesthetics" and denigrating the Michael Curtiz film he's asking him about with knee-jerk auteurist babble about Curtiz being inferior to Orson Welles... all culminating in the riotous jump cut where the doddering old Russian fool kinaesthete is attempting to continue his spiel while none-too-smoothly trying to pull the wheelchair apparatus.
• Before Sunset -- Julie Delpy walks to the back of the ferry as the afternoon begins to bronze over – the very moment when all the small talk ceases and choices must be made.
• Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession -- The many moods (and surfeit of moody self-portraits) of Jerry Harvey.
• Zatôichi -- Gotta dance! In its own way, more divisive than any single moment in Fahrenheit, The Passion or Dogville. Samurai thugs forced to contemplate the beauty of dance triumphing over bloodshed and the spiritual rejection of Mifune in favor of Fosse. “The fuck?”
• Around the World in 80 Days -- “I have seven whi-ves. Juan fo’ ev’ry day uhv zee whee-ck” Autocritique from California’s Gov. Happy-Hands?
• A Dirty Shame -- Selma Blair’s Ursula Udders, fresh from getting a libido-cleansing knock on the noggin, appears for the first time in conservative apparel: a mustard yellow, fringe-collared Sunday Schoolmarm blouse whose buttons ludicrously bisect her grotesquely swollen rack. And, for that matter, the fact that her subsequent head trauma that sends her careening back to the sex-starved enlightenment is set to the Holy Modal Rounders’ rollicking, honky-tonk “Boobs-a-Lot” (the most perfectly chosen music cue of the year).
• Hero -- Moon and Flying Snow’s battle among the yellow leaves.
• House of Flying Daggers -- The first echo game inside the Peony Pavilion.
• Not really taking a side in the Hero vs. Flying Daggers scuffle.
• Sleepover -- Put-upon, fat preteen girl meets her fat preteen Romeo when the two bond over their mutual love for brownies.
• The Notebook -- Joan Allen shows Rachel McAdams just exactly what happens to poor people when they get old: they get ugly.
• Team America: World Police -- “Everyone has AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS-AIDS-AIDS-AIDS-AIDS-AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS-AIDS-AIDS-AIDS, AIDS. AIDS!” Dead on satire of the most overrated musical in post-Rodgers & Hammerstein history? Fuck yeah!
• Farm Family: In Search of Gay Life in Rural America -- “Normal” gay metrophobes go to hilarious lengths to unpack their utter normalcy: “We were never out there, like, twinking out!”
• The Notebook -- James Garner attempts to stick the whole of his vibrating fist into his mouth in an thespian’s master class display of horror.
• Moolaadé -- Pyre of radios.
• Tarnation -- Sing a song of pumpkins, long and harsh. Tip her over and milk it dry.
• Crimson Gold -- INT. HUSSEIN’S APT. NIGHT.
• Closer -- The final shot, wherein Natalie Portman submits her pre-emptive screen test for the lead role in an as-yet-undeveloped biopic on the life (and strut) of Beyoncé Knowles.
• Napoleon Dynamite -- At the bus station, LaFawnduh (the Amazonian internet-mystery woman from Detroit) goes apeshit happy and lets loose with a delighted squeal upon first laying eyes on Napoleon’s wan, nebbish brother Kip. (There’s hope for me yet.)
• Fahrenheit 9/11 -- The astonishingly complex and myriad layers of performance, role-playing and aggrandizement that informs the scene where Lila Lipscomb and a random Bush apologist butt heads in front of the (obviously bat-shit insane) one-woman vigil in front of the White House. Perhaps the only moment in the entire film that feels out of step with Moore’s one-track argumentation.
• Matt Taibbi’s scorching rebuttal to Christopher Hitchens’ opportunistic attack on Michael Moore: “Christopher Hitchens crawling out of a bottle long enough to denounce Michael Moore as a coward. I can't imagine anything more uplifting, except maybe a zoo baboon humping the foot of a medical school cadaver… What Hitchens calls courage is really a willingness to offend one's intellectual constituency…” I have been obsessed with that last line all year, and the comment seemed more meaningful than ever reading Armond White in Slate’s year-end Movie Club, knee-jerkingly laying blame at the foot of the average cinephile (of all people) for destroying film culture.
• Dogville -- A petulant little boy (obviously a stand-in for Von Trier himself) goads, demands, and then finally blackmails Nicole Kidman into taking him over her knee and slapping his naughty, misbehaving ass.
• Vera Drake -- “This is the best Christmas I’ve ever had.” More powerful a rejection of irony than the entirety of The Notebook.
• The Notebook -- The bizarre decision to interpret the role of Rachel McAdams’ father as Josef Stalin.
• Dutch Light -- After nearly an hour and fifteen minutes of lumbering expositionary ado on how the unique atmosphere of Denmark provided painters like Vermeer with their incandescent environmental muse, the filmmakers play it to the most egregious dullards in the audience by demonstrating their thesis with a sub-Science Museum demonstration involving an aquarium and a flashlight.
• The Princess Diaries 2 -- Julie Andrews’ stunt-double mattress surfs down the cheap-ass flight of royal stairs.
• The Village -- A blind Bryce Dallas Howard traverses the entirety of the village with her arm outstretched, her hope that Joaquin Phoenix will grab it and guide her to safety diminishing with each step and her steadily dawning horror.
• Light is Calling -- The girl in the haystack and her soldier caller finally meet in the same frame, looking around in confusion or excitement or sensual pleasure as their blooming romance seems to become one with the sepia-toned, swirling decay of their film stock.
• Good Bye Lenin! -- Mother shuffles out of her apartment (where she’s spent the last few months in a coma and, afterwards, totally unaware of her motherland East Germany’s fall) steps out just in time to see the virtual vivisection of her political beliefs heli-lifted at her doorstep in the form of a desecrated Lenin statue.
• The missing 45 minutes of Ladder 49 that I was gearing up for (after incorrectly reading the press kit and informing my retching companion Jason that the goddamned movie was supposed to be 165 minutes long), consisting of an endless loop of that shitty Robbie Robertson song replayed ad nauseum against an NBC “very special episode” montage of the entire preceding film.
• Kill Bill: Vol. 2 -- Uma, buried alive in a creaky wooden coffin, fellates a flashlight for Tarantino’s and my pleasure. Because obviously the scene isn’t about survival but sexual perversion. Obviously… Please?
• Spider-Man 2 -- The Passion of the Spidey: or, Palm Sunday on the Subway.
• Distant -- The beached, overturned ship seeming to writhe in pain from the falling snow. (Isolated shot of the year.)