Greetings, fellow movie-lovers. As I did last year at this time, I am going to take a look at how the year 2004 is shaping up so far, film-wise.

As of the 30th of June, I have seen 28 films, twelve of which were released this year. This is a definite improvement over last year, but first I had to wade through the usual crop of repertory films and 2003 releases...


FESTIVAL AND REPERTORY SCREENINGS

January started off with International House's Alain Delon festival, "Man in the Shadows." It featured seven films and a television documentary, and I was fortunate to get out to half of them, starting with Rene Clement's 1960 film Purple Noon, which is the film that made Delon an international star. The next night I saw Jean-Pierre Melville: A Portrait in Nine Poses, which was made for French television in 1971, followed by Melville's 1972 swan song Un Flic. The following week I caught Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse, and would have gone back to see Luchino Visconti's three-hour Rocco and His Brothers, but I found out that it was going to be shown on Turner Classic Movies later in the month and decided to save the $6 plus gas and tolls.

The end of January brought The Animation Show to the Prince Music Theater. Curated by Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge, it was a breathtaking compendium of animated shorts -- many of them nominated for Oscars -- bookended by Hertzfeld's idiosyncratic and ultraviolent creations. It's now available on DVD, but personally I'm waiting for the Bitter Films collection that's due out next year.

That was it until April, when I caught five films in the Philadelphia Film Festival. The first was a screening of Tobe Hooper's latest, a remake of The Toolbox Murders, which featured a question and answer period with the man himself. The questions ranged from insipid to horribly pretentious, but Hooper grinned and bore them all.

Next came a pair of horror films -- a Japanese vampire/yakuza/action film called Moon Child and Stuart Gordon's latest, King of the Ants. The former is to be avoided at all costs (you'd think I would have learned my lesson with Versus, the horrid zombie/yakuza/action film I got suckered into two years ago), but King of the Ants is an intelligently-made, uncompromising revenge story that takes its characters and its violence seriously. There are some seriously messed-up sequences in the film, so don't tread into it lightly, but if you do want to check it out, make sure you catch the unrated version.

To cap off the festival, my friend Kevin Pease joined me for screenings of Bill Plympton's '50s pastiche Hair High, which the ever personable animator attended, and Stephen Fry's witty Bright Young Things, which is getting a general release later this summer. Both are well worth seeking out.

Finally, May saw the re-release of two very different films in theaters, but both were mandatory viewing. First was Monty Python's Life of the Brian, which was great to finally see on the big screen, closely followed by the original, Japanese-language, Raymond Burr-less Godzilla. That was quite a revelation, let me tell you. Accept no mangled, English-dubbed substitute.


2003 RELEASES

Apart from the screenings at International House and the Prince, the only other film I saw in January was Robert Altman's The Company, which actually played in Princeton before making it to Philadelphia. And February was dominated by four holdovers from the previous year, namely Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, Silvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville, Errol Morris' The Fog of War and Fernando Meirelles' City of God. Unsurprisingly, all were nominated for Academy Awards, but Mystic River and The Fog of War were the only ones that were able to evade the Return of the King sweep. (If it hadn't been for that, City of God would have definitely gotten the cinematography and editing rewards.)


AND THE REST

As in years past, nothing seemed worth seeing at all until March, when David Mamet's Spartan grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go. A military thriller packed with Mamet's patented tough-guy talk and double crosses and startling revelations galore, it also earns points for letting the audience fill in some of the blanks themselves.

Another film that required heavy mental lifting was Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, his second collaboration with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. This film was a lot more successful than their previous outing, Human Nature -- and will definitely reward multiple viewings, as long as you can get past the fact that the camera shakes sometimes.

Toward the end of the month, Kevin and I did another one of our patented two-shots, catching Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl and the Coen Brothers' The Ladykillers on the same day. Jersey Girl turned out to be pretty much your standard "workaholic learns how to be a good parent" movie (which I just so happen to have been an extra on), but The Ladykillers was a wickedly funny black comedy that harkened back to the spirit of Raising Arizona and Blood Simple. And it was a respectable remake that did well by its source material while still exuding total Coenness.

April saw the release of the first comic book movie of the year, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy, which is the movie that The Hulk desperately wanted to be. And then came Kill Bill: Vol. 2, which completed the saga in the second-most satisfying way possible. (The most satisfying way would have been if the Miramax marketing machine had allowed it to go out as one film as Quentin Tarantino had originally intended, but there's always DVD...)

May brought Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World back to the area after a brief stop during the Philadelphia Film Festival. Maddin's work is maddeningly difficult to describe, but he's probably perfectly happy with that. Suffice to say, if you are intrigued by the concept of Isabella Rosellini singing the praises of her new glass legs, which are filled with Canadian lager, you need to see this film.

Soon after, Jim Jarmusch, another filmmaker of a singular vision, invaded the art houses with Coffee and Cigarettes, his collection of observations about the titular vices and the people who partake of them, frequently at the same time. And the end of the month saw me risking cognitive dissonance by consenting to see Shrek 2, the inevitable follow-up to the first Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature. (Can you tell I'm still a little miffed about that?) It wasn't bad, but it still didn't need to exist, either.

Speaking of Oscar winners, Yoji Yamada's Twilight Samurai didn't win the award for Best Foreign Film this year, but it was easy to see why it was nominated. A deliberately-paced yet captivating film, it took great care to recreate its period setting and gave us characters who looked like they've actually lived in their roles all of their lives.

Finally, I capped off the month of June with a pair of movies -- Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2, which I caught at a 10:40 a.m. showing on opening day, and Michael Moore's incendiary Fahrenheit 9/11, which came later in the afternoon. Both were eagerly anticipated and hyped and neither disappointed. As far as their respective genres go -- summer blockbuster and muckraking documentary -- these are clearly the films to beat this year.

I can only hope the few that I have earmarked for the remainder of the year come close. If nothing else, there's always the new Pixar...