I don’t know how much I have to say about 2004. It was a bad year by virtue of where I was and the relationship I was in. It was a year in which things continued to fall apart for me and things continued not to work very well.
I started working at Gamestop as a store manager, opening a new store in a town called Conway that was roughly 30 minutes from me. It was interesting because the store opened before the anchor store, Target, had opened so our start was slow and the pressure was applied immediately. I worked at Gamestop just under two years and while I made some friends there and there were some good times, it was enormously stressful and I hated it a lot.
I was auditioning for bands and not getting anywhere, although I did make a good friend from that process who helped keep me sane while I was in Arkansas. We still keep in touch on social media and I am really glad to have met Daniel. We did some music projects together which was awesome.
While at Gamestop I met Bob Reeves. He had been a store manager at EB Games in the past and was hired as a store manager for Gamestop. He was placed at my store for training and shadowed me for a few weeks. We hit it off right away and had a ton of things in common including being into metal and both being singers. He had been trying to get his band back on its feet following some setbacks. He was mostly a screamer and was interested in having a clean singer for the project so I eventually joined his band, Voodoo Lords.
Bob, or Lord Animal which was his performance name, became my absolute best friend in Arkansas. I genuinely wouldn’t know what I would have done without him and I may not have made it. We became very close very fast and band practices and hang outs at his house became my refuge. I can’t overstate how important this was to my mental health and survival while I was there.
Bob didn’t stay at Gamestop long, he learned that the plan had been for him to replace me because the district manager was a douchebag who never had faith in me. He refused to do that. When I was eventually let go from Gamestop, he helped me get a job at Altell, which was the best job I had in Arkansas and was super clutch for me. He worked there even after it was bought and absorbed by Verizon. I worked there until I moved out of Arkansas.
Voodoo Lords never really got on its feet despite going through a few different guitarists and drummers. It continues to be a source of pain for me that we never played out live or had any decent recordings. My intention was always to go back to Arkansas and finish things with the band. Unfortunately, Bob had a heart attack and died in his sleep around 10 years ago now. He was only three months younger than me and I did not expect something like that to happen to him at that age. It was, and remains, devastating for me. I feel a healthy amount of guilt for having left and not getting to finish things. I miss him every day.
Movies this year felt less than to me, even as I look back over the list. As ever, I wonder if my taste was colored by the emotional distress I was in but one consistent thing about the movies that I was drawn to this year is that they are largely movies that were kind of like comfort food for me. They are movies that largely feel like home when I was far from it. Some of them are movies that maybe aren’t the best but they felt a certain kind of way to me and I made me feel a certain kind of way. I make no apologies but I acknowledge that my love for them relates more to how they made me feel than quality. I think they are good but it is more about how they make me feel.
Runners up roughly by release order: The Butterfly Effect, The Big Bounce, Euro Trip, Starsky and Hutch, Dawn of the Dead, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Hellboy, Kill Bill Volume 2, the Punisher, Man on Fire, Troy, Shrek 2, Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgandy, the Bourne Supremacy, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Without a Paddle, I Heart Huckabees, National Treasure, Ocean’s Twelve (I guess), Meet the Fockers, the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and In Good Company.
If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 2004 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 22-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!
1.Shaun of the Dead-Edgar Wright
Shaun of the Dead is a zombie romantic comedy horror movie that probably shouldn’t work but works enormously well and kicked off the Cornetto Trilogy (or Blood and Ice Cream if you prefer). It also introduced Simon Pegg and Nick Frost to Americans helped launch them to international stardom.
Shaun (Simon Pegg) is a retail manager (personal touchpoint: check) in a struggling relationship (Personal touchpoint: check) with Liz (Kate Ashfield) who is in the process of completely botching his anniversary dinner while facing tensions with his roommate Pete (Peter Serofinowicz) and best friend/roommate Ed (Nick Frost) when the movie begins. Liz breaks up with him with the support of her friend Dianne (Lucy Davis) and her boyfriend David (Dylan Moran), who is not so secretly in love with Dianne. Shaun is despondent about this and goes to the neighborhood pub, the Winchester, with Ed to drown his sorrows. All of these things serve to draw Shaun’s attention away from what the weird shit going on in the background that looks an awful lot like some kind of an outbreak. This is confirmed when Pete yells at them for making too much noise and is sporting a bite on his hand he says he got from a guy trying to mug him and bit his hand. Shaun wakes up the next morning to find a zombie girl in the yard, and Pete has turned while in the shower for work.
What ensues is Shaun and Ed trying to round up loved ones to survive the zombie apocalypse. This includes Shaun’s mom (Penelope Wilton), Shaun’s step-dad Philip (Bill Nighy) briefly, and Liz and her friends. Spoiler alert: It goes badly.
Shaun of the Dead is masterful with how it blends comedy, horror, and romance together seamlessly. The stakes always feel real, the characters are compelling and well-drawn, the horror elements are raw and gory, and the romance feels real and earned. This veritable magic trick is largely achieved with taking each of the elements seriously in their own right. The zombies are never played for laughs and the consequences of being caught by them are dire. The comedy largely stems from the dialogue and the ridiculousness of the situations as opposed to any kind of jokes about the zombies themselves. When characters die, you feel it. There are real emotions here and it makes for an enormously satisfying complete package.
Shaun of the Dead also exists in a world where people know what zombies are. It isn’t like the Walking Dead where no one has ever seen a George Romero movie before. This exists in a world aware of film and television and references that but never goes overboard with acknowledgement of tropes and genre conventions even while it is using or subverting them.
The performances are great here, particularly from Pegg and Frost. Shaun and Ed are characters that are flawed but they are given life and layers in their performances. Dylan Moran is also awesome as David because he is able to play him as an absolute shitbird with total commitment. Kate Ashfield is great as Liz as she is more than just a love interest and presents as a strong and fully fleshed human being who can take care of herself.
The idea for Shaun of the Dead came from the fourth episode of the first series of Spaced, a show that Simon Pegg wrote with Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) and was directed by Edgar Wright, in which Pegg’s character Tim is playing Resident Evil 2 and has a drug induced fantasy about being attacked by zombies at a reception for a really bad performance art show. They thought it was fun and brought the sensibility they used for Spaced to this project. As an added treat for Spaced fans, Jessica Hynes appears in Shaun of the Dead as Yvonne, Shaun’s counterpart in a group of survivors that mirrors Shaun’s group exactly. Julia Deakins who played Marsha in Spaced was Yvonne’s mom in this scene. This was entirely lost on me the first time I saw the movie because I had not yet seen Spaced but it is incredibly cool now that I have.
This was my introduction to Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost and it just about knocked me over how much it was right up my alley. I have always been a fan of British comedy and this blended British comedy with the pop culture that I am drawn to. It led me to check out Spaced, which was hard to get my hands on initially but my friend Jim Darko whose website I wrote for, sent me a copy of the Region 2 DVDs and I had to do some region lock shenanigans to get them to play on my X-Box. As much as I loved and identified with Shaun of the Dead, I loved and identified with Spaced so much more. I was so into it that I named my cats Tim, Daisy, and Marsha all of whom have now passed and I miss them each desperately.
Shaun of the Dead kicked off years worth of love for Edgar Wright as a director and I have loved pretty much everything he has done since. You will several of his movies pop up on this list in the future. His sensibilities as a direction hit my sweet spot almost perfectly. Equally, Simon Pegg’s writing is generally spot on to my taste as well. When they team together, and add in Nick Frost, magic is made.
I love the Cornetto Trilogy, named for the inclusion of different flavors of Cornetto ice cream cones in each movie, but this one is my favorite. The blend of horror, comedy, and romance works perfectly and is just so much to my taste that it is kind of crazy. This movie made me start to think about wanting to be a filmmaker again and made me realize that this kind of storytelling can be done and can be popular. It really got my creative juices flowing and has had a lasting impact on the stories that I write. I am always up for watching Shaun of the Dead and when I saw it in the theater in Arkansas it became a spark of light inside me that eventually led me out of the darkness. As these years progress, there are more of these things that helped me get to where I ultimately am now and this is one of the first. It is cool to look at the beginning of something like this, both in terms of my own creativity and just a fandom that I have come to love deeply.
2.Spider-man 2-Sam Raimi
Still considered to be one of the best super hero movies ever made, Spider-man 2 is an improvement on the original in almost every way.
With the origin story out of the way, Spider-man 2 is free to just tell a Spider-man story without having to do much place setting. Peter Parker (Toby Maguire) is out on his own, in college, working a pizza delivery job, trying to maintain his friendships, and still fighting crime as Spider-man. He is doing all this pretty badly. This is causing problems for both Peter and Spider-man as his life falls apart, Peter realizes that his powers are ‘shorting out’ on him, which leads him to give up being Spider-man.
Meanwhile, his best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco) has taken over his father’s company, and continues to blame Spider-man for killing Norman, while funding tech research and development projects. One such project is spearheaded by Dr Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) who is working on a fusion based energy source. Octavius is a brilliant scientist who has developed an AI driven harness with mechanical arms to help him handle the radioactive materials. He is able to control with these his mind, thanks to an inhibitor chip mounted to his neck that allows him to control the arms and not the other way around. Through Harry, Peter connects with Octavius and feels like he has found a mentor and someone he aspires to be. Everything goes wrong with an accident occurs during the fusion test that leads to the inhibitor chip being destroyed and Octavius going crazy under the tentacles influence. Peter has to once again don the Spider-man suit to stop Doc Ock from destroying the city.
Doc Ock has long been one of Spider-man’s most popular villains but he is also one of the goofiest. A portly fellow with a Moe haircut and welding goggles does not cut a terribly intimidating figure but Alfred Molina plays Octavius with such gravitas and humanity that it undercuts any silliness in favor of tragedy and desperation. The connection that Peter has with Octavius is palpable and has become a template for the character in the MCU (for better or worse).
The frenemy vibes between Peter and Harry carries its own tension as it is a shoe that is always teetering on being dropped. Peter trying to maintain his friendship while hiding that he is Spider-man to a man who believes Spider-man killed his father is handled very well here and sets the stage for the one compelling plot line of Spider-man 3. Maguire and Franco are both excellent here.
Spider-man 2 also brings a little more Sam Raimi to the proceedings where the original film was a fairly straight ahead super hero movie. Raimi’s fingerprints are all over this movie with more of his personal style injected in the more standard fair. The scene in the hospital in which doctors are trying to get the arms off of an unconscious Octavius plays out almost identically to an Evil Dead 2 scene and it was awesome.
Not everything in the movie is awesome, however. The relationship between Peter and MJ (Kirsten Dunst) is further developed but this trilogy of movies keeps the relationship on a treadmill. Dunst is good as MJ here but the handling of this relationship is one of the only things that feels like a misstep in this movie. MJ is presented here as a receptacle for disappointment in Peter not being able to show up on time or at all and I think that gives the character the real short shrift.
I shouldn’t have to tell you that my favorite super hero dropping one of his best movies into the center of my ongoing despair was exactly what I needed. Spidey swung in like an old friend and saved me from the life I was stuck in and it was just what I needed. There were still some missing elements from the comics but this was so much more of what I wanted than the first movie, which was no slouch either. Getting this at such a rough time for me was an absolute godsend.
Even in the modern age of the MCU, Spider-man 2 holds up. Alfred Molina’s return in Spider-man: No Way Home further solidified how amazing this installment is. It let us all know what these movies could be, a promise which was broken with the next installment but has been fulfilled years later. This is, without question, a masterpiece.
3.Dodgeball-Rawston Marshall Thurber
An irreverent comedy about struggling gym owner Peter LaFleur on the cusp of losing his gym to the bank and his battle with rival gym owner White Goodman (Ben Stiller) who has to compete in a Dodgeball competition in order to make enough money to save his gym, Dodgeball is at once playing on reliable cliché to subvert expectations.
The plot is not a new one and sports films (and breakdancing films) have been using this framework forever, but Dodgeball brings a broad and silly tone that isn’t afraid to be gross and fucked up while maintaining constant laughs the entire way through. As cliché as the plot is, Dodgeball has taken over the trope in most people’s minds at this point. No one sees this plot and says ‘that is just like Breakin’ 2 (Sure say that is too obscure a reference but tell that to everyone who says “Electric Boogaloo” in any joke about a sequel title ever), they say ‘that is just like Dodgeball.’ Or at least they do whenever I explain the plot of my movie the Lords of Cornhole to them.
The cast here is insane with Christine Taylor, Justin Long, Stephen Root, Rip Torn, Gary Cole, Jason Bateman, and Alan Tyduck. Chuck Norris even shows up in this thing. This is a tour de force of comedy talent firing on all cylinders in an enormously funny movie. There have been rumors of a sequel for years but I kind of hope they just let this one sit as it is because it is perfect the way it is.
This became an instant classic for me. I saw it in the theater and it once again became an inspirational movie for me in terms of what I wanted to write and make. I didn’t realize at the time that I would do just that in 2023, but it, like Shaun of the Dead, really got my creative juices flowing.
Dodgeball is enormously quotable and I have been doing just that since I first saw it. Pretty much everything Ben Stiller says in this movie is a quotable line. His character is ridiculous and he plays him perfectly. This is another one of those comfort movies for me and it always feels better when I watch it. It also wanted me to start going by Patrick the Pirate and just talk like a pirate all the time. It was a weird time.
My mom loved this movie too. I talked to her about while visiting home and they were watching it. She said that one of the reasons she loved it is because Peter reminded her of me. I said ‘you mean because he is a lazy failure at everything?’ and she said ‘no, because he has a dry sarcastic sense of humor and he does everything he can to help people around him, even when he doesn’t have much himself.’ I said ‘oh.’ And then cried by myself later that night. She didn’t always say shit like that but it was always nice when she did and I have thought about it every time I have watched it since, but also, more importantly, every time I saw her watch it after that.
4.The Incredibles-Brad Bird
The best Fantastic Four movie ever made in much the same way that Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie ever made, Pixar’s the Incredibles brought super heroes to Disney, which was much more novel of a concept than it would eventually become.
Telling the story of a family group of super heroes who are forced to reckon with the legacy of their past heroics when a former fan becomes supervillain Syndrome (Jason Lee) and the Parr family has to come out of retirement. The Incredibles is very Fantastic Four coded with the family themselves featuring remixed Fantastic Four powers and names: Bob Parr (Craig T Nelson) is Mr. Incredible who basically has the Thing’s power set without being made of rock and his name is an obvious nod to Mr. Fantastic, Helen Parr( Holly Hunter) is Elastigirl, who has Mr. Fantastic’s stretch powers and her name riffs on the Invisible Woman, Violet Parr (Sarah Vowell) has invisibility powers that mimic the Invisible Woman, and Dash Parr (Spencer Fox) is a speedster and the only one not to have an analog with an FF member. Further they have Jack Jack Parr who, much like Franklin Richards, may very well be the most powerful of them and is still a baby.
The table setting here is not what makes the Incredible work so well, it is the story and the characters’ relationships that does the heavy lifting and shows that Pixar understands the Fantastic Four in a way that no one making a Fantastic Four did until last year when we got the MCU version.
This was a bright and colorful breath of fresh air and was just so satisfying when it came out. I am generally a pretty big fan of Pixar and it was awesome to see them come into my particular fandom in a way so satisfying.
It is disappointing, then, that the Incredibles 2 was just a rehash of the first movie with a lame twist that was obvious from the jump and delivered with a more workman like duty than the love and excitement of the first movie. Only the Jack Jack vs Raccoon scene in the second is something I would revisit from the sequel which is really too bad. There is currently an Incredibles 3 in development and I hope it is done better. Also, if they could refrain from full screen strobe effects, that would be great.
Poor sequel aside, the Incredibles is top tier Pixar and top tier superhero content. It looks amazing, is exciting, funny, and heartfelt. It is also just fun and that is always welcome in a genre just lousy with grimdark grit and edgelord sensibilities. This is one of my absolute favorite Pixar movies.
5.Team America World Police-Trey Parker
An irreverent political satire that is a both a musical and send up of Jerry Bruckheimer movies by way of marionette puppet tv show Thunderbirds, Team America World Police takes aim at post-911 neo-conservative paranoia and self-important liberal protest.
Following the story of Gary (Trey Parker) a theater actor recruited by Spottswoode (Dean Norris), the head of a secret government team of operatives known as Team America in order to use his acting skills to infiltrate an internation terrorist organization lead by North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. Gary and the rest of the team proceed to wreak havoc and destruction everywhere they go while claiming to be the saviors of the nations they have destroyed. Meanwhile, a cadre of activist actors escalate the conflicts in a misguided attempt to save the world while placating their own egos.
The center of several controversies, Team America was almost given an NC-17 rating for its graphic depictions of puppet sex and had to be edited nine times to get it to an R-rating. It was pulled by Paramount for a time in 2014 after theaters planned anniversary showings of it in the place of the Interview, which was pulled for tensions it caused with North Korea and the terror threats they made against theaters showing either film.
Team America released at a politically fraught time, which seems somewhat quaint to say in the current political climate, and as such the pointed political criticism at both sides of the issue read like a voice of reason in a sea of divisiveness. I saw this in the theater and loved it. The songs were hilarious and while I didn’t agree entirely with some of the points made, it is hard to argue with Matt and Trey. Their satire is always on point and whether I agree or not, I see their point. They are to my mind the keenest satirists working today and they are able to cut through bullshit with clear eyes and hilarious insights.
Team America is not my favorite thing Matt and Trey have done but it is still better than a lot of other creators’ best. It is well observed, sharp, and hilarious. It is also kind of important and I wish there was more like this in the world. It is hard to imagine how something like this might work in this political moment as I can’t imagine a level of absurdity greater than the level of absurdity in reality but South Park…er sorry, America Park is doing it pretty great job now.