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January 13, 2005
... and the rest
The top five most disappointing movies of 2004
1. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Kerry Conran:
Everything I saw on screen and in print about this movie seemed liked it would be one of my favorite movies of all time. A grand adventure starring Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow against an entirely CG backdrop of fighteracepunk robots. What didn't show was that Kerry Conran, while incredibly gifted with computers and production design, sucked as a director, not even pulling off the super basic things correctly.
2. Hero, Zhang Yimou:
I had been looking forward to this for close to a year when I saw the trailer and it looked absolutely astounding. Wire-fu to one-up Crouching Tiger from a director with teeth; and Jet Li to boot. The cinematography looked gorgeous, and of course it was, but it looked like it should've been one of the best (and kick-ass) movies. The movie itself, however, was merely a retread of the trailer: lots of fighting (only half of which was any good) and not much else.
3. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson:
I was setting myself up for this. The Royal Tenenbaums showed some signs of Wes resting on his laurels, but I had just re-watched it recently and a lot of my quibbles disappeared. Aquatic continued the trend. It never really came alive for me; I noticed a couple things lifted directly from the previous films and the great parts were few and far between (though the soundtrack is, as always, magnificent). Emily really liked it, so I guessed there's always hope.
4. Wimbledon, Richard Loncraine:
Ok, I didn't expect it to be good, but it had Kirsten Dunst and Paul Bettany and a connection (apparently very tenuous) to that brilliant if inconsistent English cabal that keeps churning out good product. What came out was something close to the incompetence of Sky Captain; even the director of Resident Evil: Apocalypse had some idea of what movie he was making. This was a terrible jumble of sports movie and romantic comedy tidbits without making any sense.
5. A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet:
I really thought Jeunet would be perfect for this. Instead his sprawling, loose nature gets caught up in the necessarily intricate WWI mystery. It even seems to make the movie less lush, which is a terrible shame.
Posted by bing at January 13, 2005 09:28 PM