It’s difficult to survey the hip-hop of 2004, more bloated and self-referential than ever, and not imagine the mythical AOR wasteland of the mid-’70s. Like rock before it, hip-hop has easily won a cultural acceptance once unthinkable, and our reward is a parade of Jadakisses and G-Unit solo projects, preaching…
For hipsters, the coolest things are to be found twenty years ago, the most dreadful things ten years ago. So starting a few years back, we were deluged with ’80s electro and synth-pop, and we pretended to forget jungle ever existed. Electroclash, the first naive sortie by dance music into…
Ever find yourself missing the word “alternative” as a concept, a signifier, a lifestyle? Nowadays, any dudes-with-guitars collective either has to do the Creed butt-rock thing, the whine-incessantly-about-your-ex-girlfriends emo thing, or the get-beat-up-incessantly-by-your-ex-girlfriends indie-rock thing. It’s harder and harder to find the best aspects of each combined: the fist-pumping intensity…
The sight of six makeup-clad Norwegian satanists on the Ozzfest main stage this summer was a great sign for metal, if not the makers of Max Factor. During recent outings, metal’s biggest event of the year has been plagued by rote rap-rockers like Crazy Town, Papa Roach and Linkin Park,…
Britney got married. Ashlee was caught lip-synching. ODB died. Congress continued to wring its hands about the legality of downloads, which flourished anyway. Conservative groups condemned sex in popular culture, while Usher’s sultry Confessions shot to No. 1. A major label signed a guy who can’t sing, can’t dance and…
Everyone knows all of Usher’s Confessions by now; everyone went to see Prince play “1999” for the very last time. Everyone knows all about Lil Jon and his penchant for hollering “Yayy-uuhhh!” With everyone paying attention to these superstars, a lot of other talented folks got drowned out, and not…
Sales-wise, at least, 2004 was the year Nashville got its groove back. Heavy hitters such as Tim McGraw, George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban and Shania Twain all dropped platinum records, but what has the city more excited than it’s been in years is the fact that it finally managed…
In 2004, the line between indie and mainstream rock disintegrated even faster than Britney Spears’s quickie Vegas marriage. Vinyl obsessives mingled with white-hat-wearing fratheads at Modest Mouse shows, Taking Back Sunday debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts, and Death Cab for Cutie earned O.C.-sanctioned buzz and a major-label…
The Moore the Merrier One film looms over all others in 2004: Fahrenheit 9/11, released in the heat of summer and the heat of an election-year battle, caught all comers in its estimable shadow and rendered them moot. Combined, the dozen or so political docs that received theatrical distribution this…
Who needs studio publicists when every fundamentalist pastor in the country is herding his flock to the multiplex? Why waste good money on TV spots when the Vatican is handing out rave reviews? No doubt about it, Thomas, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was a phenomenon unlike any…
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” exhorts a character in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It’s advice that makers of historically and biographically based movies seem to have taken to heart. After all, why let a few pesky facts get in the way of a…
Our best movies of the year actually may have been anything but the best to a few of our critics — such is the dilemma of offering employment to writers of dissenting opinion. In other words, the No. 1 film of 2004 wasn’t universally heralded by our team of Bill…
What is it about older women and younger men this year? No fewer than five films — The Door in the Floor, The Mother, Being Julia, Birth, and p.s. — featured May/December couplings, with decidedly female Decembers. Three of these constitute an official subgenre, heretofore known as older-woman-seeks-to-date-reincarnated-lost-love-in-younger-man. In Door…
Concert films, save for a handful of exceptions, are a bore — the equivalent of a wish-you-were-here postcard that taunts you with glimpses of what you missed by choosing to avoid the crushing crowds, cigarette smoke, and flicked Bics. Which is why the recently released, and just as quickly closed,…
When Ronald Reagan died on June 5 at the age of 93, his political adherents hailed him as the president who “made America feel better about itself” in the 1980s. Nobody claimed he made America feel better about movie acting. A genial featherweight who went in for neither introspection nor…
The gay films of 2004 merit a solid fair to middling overall rating, with a couple of lovely exceptions. Chief among those was Miguel Albaladejo’s Bear Cub, a poorly titled but beautifully rendered story of a (tubby, hairy) gay man who learns how to parent his abandoned nephew. The Legend…
Have we finally outgrown the notion that movies have to be cloying and cute in order to be acceptable to children? It sure seemed like it this year. Possibly the most sentimental major entry was The Polar Express, but that was due only to the source material — director Robert…
Ever since Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros exploded onto American screens in 2000 — followed soon after by Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God — American audiences have been taking notice of Spanish and Latin American cinema. The year 2004 was no exception, with…
Dear Alexander Payne: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways: 1) You made Election and About Schmidt, two hilarious, probing comedies about suburban anomie and human angst. 2) You followed these with Sideways, transporting the same deep humor into a totally different milieu and combining a loser-buddy…
Perhaps it’s because we see real-life violence on the news every day now, not to mention in political documentaries, but nobody seems too worried about excessive bloodletting in the movies anymore. That’s good news for gorehounds. The year kicked off with Ashton Kutcher impaling his own hands in The Butterfly…
If Marlon Brando — “Bud” to his family and intimates — was not the finest movie actor who ever lived, he certainly had the greatest gift for reinvention. Between the opening night in 1947 when the lean, cruelly handsome young Nebraskan shouted “Stel-lahhhh!” in the Broadway production of A Streetcar…
Flash back to 1999. George Lucas steps back into the director’s chair after two decades of absence and produces the critically derided Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Though its visuals are praised, many writers note the stilted acting and suggest that Lucas’s extensive use of bluescreens rather than…
