My Top Ten Films of 2004

It is a year that critics hailed as a strong year for movies, but opening Art Forum or San Francisco Guardian all you find are these obscure entries whose names won’t ever register in your mind. After all, top ten is the manifesto of taste, and luckily film makers around the world continue to create and innovate regardless of how Hollywood or Bollywood dictate the industry.


2046 (China): After four years in production, the much anticipated and star-studded film from Wong Kar Wai was finally released in China last September. Loosely connected with In the Mood for Love, plotwise it is much less coherent but visually it is even more composed and color-saturated. Future and past alternated and added both mystery and fantasy to an otherwise rather tedious story. It transcended over layers of metaphors and became a rhapsody for lost love and memories.

The Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind (US): Charlie Kauffman and Michael Condry were a perfect team to make a movie that could be both intellectually challenging and visually stimulating. Surrealism is at its full play here in the dream sequence, where Condry paid his homage to Brunel without confusing audiences with absurdity or symbolism. Kate Winslet rules!

Maria Full of Grace (Joshua Matson, Colombia): When I got searched at least times in the Bogota airport last summer, I heard stories of drug smuggling and how women would swallow to carry them. After I came back I found this film in theatre just in time and it made me cringe in tears.

I am not Scared (Gabriele Salvatores, Italy): This small gem won some critic's award earlier in the year but quickly disappeared without a trace due to lack of marketing. Adapted from a bestseller in Italy, the film depicted a strange world from a nine year old boy’s eyes, where menace, wonders, boredom makes everyday life both a thrilling and tedious existence. The opening shot where a group of kids cycled through a sun-drenched wheat field deserves to be seen by all the cinematographers-want-to-be.

Memories of Murder (Jong Ho-Bo, South Korea): Korea continues to churn out high quality films which are both entertaining (this one is a thriller) and politically relevant. There is another anti-Hollywood ending --The serial killer was never found, which would leave most audience walking out of theatre in chills. Life is never what it seems to be.

Proteus (John Greyson, Canada): Greyson returned to the gay theme after making Law of Enclosure, and his new project retained his political outrage but followed a more straightforward plot line, about an interracial affair in the 18th century South Africa that led to execution under the sodomy law.

Trilogy: On the Run, An Amazing Couple, After Life. (Lucas Belvaux, France/Belgum) These three films, one thriller, one comedy, one melodrama, have to be seen together. Delvaux played both the game of genre and the game of perspectives. The side characters in one film became main characters in another, and all three films can share the same scenes although from different narrative points of views.

Corporation (Mark Achbar, Canada): I am a leftist. I am not a fan of globalization. I am against multi-nationals, big business interest, and extreme capitalism. I am an environmentalist looking for alternative resources and sustainable growth…therefore I vote for this film!

Cell Phone (Feng Xiao Gang, China): Usually only a few types of Chinese films get released in US: Martial arts, underground films, stories set in distant past. Since Cell Phone was a major box office hit and was about how cell phones changed people’s life in contemporary Beijing, it probably would never see the Western audiences. Feng is a great satirist, revealing the absurdity of modern life with subtle sense of humor. After the film, many of the couples checked each other’s cell phones and ended up breaking up, and many of the dialogues became popular phrases in the everyday Chinese.

Sexual Dependency (Rodrigo Bellot, Bolivia): First time director, two continents, five interrelated stories, and split screen for more than two hours…this sounds a formula for disaster but Bellot miraculously pulled them together into a very coherent and viewable movie that touched upon all that tensions caused by race, social economic class, geopolitics and sexuality