We at the Weekly like to envision ourselves as being at the vanguard of Las Vegas media, leaning out into the wind as our city sails into the future, kings of our world. At least, that's how we used to see ourselves until that DiCaprio kid ruined it for everybody. But we still cling to our rebel status, and in that vein, we present our annual idiosyncratic take on everyone's favorite movie awards.
Depp is perfectly fine and respectable as a writer of children's theater in Finding Neverland, but his writer of horror fiction in Secret Window is the true follow-up to his Pirates triumph. Alone in most scenes, he stomps around in a tattered bathrobe, mussed hair and heavy glasses, cracking his jaw and forever misplacing his coffee cup. He feels like a real writer; you can almost see him thinking. He's a tour-de-force propping up a cornball movie all by himself.
Playing a mountainous, libidinous athlete in the unbearable White Chicks, Terry Crewes (Baadasssss!) had to pretend he was attracted to one of the Wayans brothers in hideous blonde drag. Not only did he pull it off, but he made it look like fun, too. His joyous, fearlessly physical performance might have even earned applause from Joe E. Brown, who played a similar role in Some Like It Hot.
Christian Bale lost more than 60 pounds to play haunted Trevor Reznik in The Machinist, a little-seen gem of a thriller, usually the kind of thing that gets the Academy's attention. His ribs stick out so clearly that it's actually painful to watch, with Bale conveying the anguish of Trevor's sleepless life simply by the way he looks and moves. The rest of the performance is excellent as well, but it's those jutting ribs that first grab your attention.
The winner in this category is actually a tie between Exorcist: The Beginning and ... Exorcist: The Beginning. To make sure this movie was as awful as possible, they had to make it twice. Paul Schrader's $30 million original version was deemed too cerebral, so Renny Harlin was given $50 million to remake the intended gorefest. The money went into creating laughably digital demonic hyenas, and the only scary aspect of the film is that it ultimately grossed only half of its combined budgets.
Portraying Bobby Darin in the often chaotic biopic, Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey sometimes resembled his own character's father. That's icky to the max. But his vocal stylings—he sang every tune—were so eerily on target as to cause Roger Ebert to remark that the actor's versions of Darin classics like "Mack the Knife," "Artificial Flowers" and the title tune might be superior to the late dynamo's. Condemn the entire enterprise as a vanity project if you like—Spacey starred, directed and produced, ending up with a movie that felt both insubstantial and bloated—but call the sound track a tour de force unequaled by any other actor to date.
After receiving some of the best reviews of his life for House of Sand and Fog, the obvious choice for Ben Kingsley's next role was the lethargic villain of Thunderbirds. What's up next for this Oscar winner and four-time Oscar nominee? Why, the film version of the video game Bloodrayne, of course, directed by none other than Uwe Boll, the man responsible for the worst film versions of video games ever (House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark).
This might seem like an oxymoronic category, but Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey proved that supposition false with Mean Girls, a clever, biting and well-written satire of the brutal life of high-school girls. Not as dark as something like Heathers or Welcome to the Dollhouse, Mean Girls speaks an accessible language and stars Lindsay Lohan, one of the hottest teen queens of the moment, while effectively conveying the truth that intolerance, cruelty and superficiality define the lives of teenagers in America.
Some actors just add class to trash—witness Oscar-nominated Don Cheadle as a cartoonish thug in the featherweight Pierce Brosnan heist caper After the Sunset. Cheadle's innate screen charisma lends even this throwaway time-killer an entertaining edge in what amounts to an extended cameo. Then catch him bidding for Oscar in the gut-wrenching Hotel Rwanda, revealing the humanity of an individual in the face of mass murder. If there's anything this chameleon actor can't reasonably portray, Hollywood hasn't bumped into it yet. We suspect it never will.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Sideways didn't exactly clean up at the box office, but they look like blockbusters next to the $5.6 million that Richard Linklater's bittersweet romance, Before Sunset, took in. I'm not alone in this sentiment—the film placed first in the sixth annual Village Voice film poll, while Eternal Sunshine and Sideways placed second and fourth, respectively.
Who cares that John Williams earned his 43rd nomination for the score on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? I was so moved by the songs in Zach Braff's beautiful Garden State that I ran straight from the theater to the record store to buy the CD—and they were already sold out!
Nicole Kidman proved she had no peer with her three 2004 performances. In Lars von Trier's aggravating, brilliant Dogville, she played the suffering fugitive Grace, and in Jonathan Glazer's underrated Birth, she played the shy, grieving widow whose husband may or may not have returned to her in the body of a ten-year-old boy. Then she stood tall above the lame The Stepford Wives, in which she gorgeously stalked through a supermarket aisle as if it were a fashion show runway.
Like Audrey, 22 year-old Anne Hathaway first appeared to American audiences as a real-life royalty in The Princess Diaries, carrying a combination of grace, humor, warmth, dazzling beauty and budding sexuality. This year's Princess Diaries sequel was only so-so, but in Ella Enchanted, Hathaway proved she had the raw charm to stop men's hearts and to care for the needs of the downtrodden. Plus they both have those big, haunting eyes.
David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees had editors and website designers working overtime trying to figure out just how to replicate a little heart in print and/or in HTML code. Not to mention that the word Huckabees sent most spell-checkers whirring into overtime. It might even have been worth it if the movie were any good.