Just the thought of Jim Carrey taking home an Oscar for Best Actor is enough to send many fans into conniptions. Because Carrey can't seem to shake his reputation as a rubber-faced juvenile actor, the superb performance he offered in \Eternal Sunshine"" will most likely be forgotten.
Ignoring Carrey would be the single biggest oversight the Oscars could offer. ""Eternal Sunshine"" showed Carrey at his most perplexing and most subtle. He managed to portray the anguish and awkwardness of his character with equal skill. Carrey became Joel Barish more thoroughly than he filled Andy Kaufman's shoes in ""Man on the Moon.""
In a film that offered notable performances from Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst and Mark Ruffalo, Carrey stood apart. Against a talented cast, he showed his best days weren't confined to the toilet humor of his early career. ""Eternal Sunshine"" may be one of the most looked-over movies of 2004, but Carrey's presence alone easily made it one of the best.
Few things are as iconic as great cinematic bad guys. The Terminator, Cruella De Vil, Mr. Smith and the German guy from ""Die Hard."" A great bad guy can make a movie. And some of this year's movies had great villains-like fire. ""Ladder 49"" made a movie out of the most universally hated bad guy this side of Captain Hook.
But 2004 had a number of even better loathsome baddies. ""Syndrome"" proved a perfect foil to ""The Incredibles,"" and Tom Cruise wasn't outdone in Jamie Foxx's then-best performance in ""Collateral."" Depending on your interpretation, either Jews or Romans were one of the year's best in ""The Passion of the Christ."" Some movies even found a way to make Christmas hatable; Tim Allen and Ben Affleck ruined the Yuletide season in ""Surviving Christmas"" and ""Christmas with the Kranks.""
But easily Cinema's best villain of the year was George Bush in ""Fahrenheit 9/11.""
Wow, what a bad dude this guy was.
Actors always want to play the bad guy, because they get the coolest lines, and Bush's part is no exception! Lines such as ""What an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite, I call you my base,"" and, ""There's an old saying in Tennessee-I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee... that says, fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again,"" strike fear into the hearts of the heroes and reaffirms Bush's villainous role.
Michael Moore painted him as the definition of evil. He created a war to run a pipeline through Iraq, let all of his underlings do the dirty work and then laughed callously about terrorist attacks while playing a game of golf. It is almost like Bush is the prototype for the next Bond villain. Probably somewhere on the cutting room floor there is a scene where Bush evilly strokes a kitten while telling Moore every little detail of his plan.
A Hollywood screenwriter didn't fabricate the suave style and cool demeanor of Bush's malevolence.
This isn't to say that all 2004's bad guys went over very well. ""Alien vs. Predator"" should have been two hours of acid-spewing, razor-edged-projectile-throwing, jaw-jabbing, stealth-hunting special effects and powerhouse battles. Instead it was 100 minutes of heavy exposition, awkward character development and wasted opportunities.
2004's best movie villains may range from George W. Bush to fire, but no good guy fared worse than Joaquin Phoenix. After career-defining roles in ""Gladiator"" and ""The Yards"" as capable villains, he ruined everything. As an actor he was stiff, and as characters, he kept getting stabbed and trapped in burning buildings. River's baby brother desperately needs a sinister role in '05.
It was an even worse year for Tom Hanks, who failed to hit gold in the uneven ""Terminal,"" the tedious ""Polar Express"" and the acting-heavy, content-weak ""Ladykillers."" 2004 ends a tremendous streak of good luck in role choices by Hanks, dating back to ""Forrest Gump.""
But it wasn't just actors who did poorly, indeed many movies did poorly too. Every year sees its share of cheap, twisting M. Night Shyamalan rip-offs. This year's over-conceived derivatives ranged from ""The Forgotten"" to ""Wicker Park."" 2004's worst Shyamalan ripoff came from Shyamalan himself, with the self-cannibalizing ""The Village."" Shyamalan once proved that twists are cool. Now he has proven sometimes the scariest twist at the end of a movie is simply for the movie to suck. Didn't see that coming.
An overwhelming focus was placed on historical epics, with none of that emphasis paying off. First, Disney's ""Alamo"" was overrun by mediocre reviews, then the pricey ""Troy"" proved that not even Brad Pitt in a mini-tunic could bring people to see a big screen war reenactment. Naturally, then, ""Alexander"" must have seemed like a good idea. It wasn't.
But where historical epics failed, history succeeded. The greatest failure of a movie financier in 2004 came when Michael Eisner ordered Miramax not to release ""Fahrenheit 9/11,"" which would become the most profitable documentary ever.
