Dave Holmes Revisits The Top Movies From February 2004, The Week Of Justin And Janet’s Wardrobe Malfunction

The movie that cemented Bill Murray’s already-solid position as national treasure, put My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields back in our ears, and made us a little wary of Spike Jonze. Sofia Coppola was Oscar-nominated for directing this movie. Greta Gerwig is nominated for Lady Bird this year. In the 14 years in between, do you know how many women were nominated for Best Director? One: Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, a movie which, not for nothing, has exactly one woman in it for about five seconds. Yeah, time is probably up.

Where to stream Lost In Translation

A distaff The Big Monty, in which a bunch of middle-class British women take it all off for a cancer benefit calendar. Helen Mirren wasn’t going to sign on until she heard her friends Julie Walters and Penelope Wilton were on board. This makes it sound like the shoot was a working vacation among friends, the fancy British senior actress version of what Adam Sandler and his posse do with those Grown Ups movies, i.e. my version of heaven.

Where to stream Calendar Girls

Diane Keaton is maybe not who we want to talk about at this particular moment in American history.

So: US television was still caught up in the fever of humiliation reality programming, as Fox’s Joe Millionaire gave way to The Joe Schmo Show, which had just ended its positively cringeworthy first season on Spike. Not to be outdone, Fox returned with My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé, in which a perfectly normal woman named Randi had to convince her family she was marrying an oaf, herself unaware that the oaf in question and his whole big fat obnoxious family were all actors. It was difficult to watch Randi’s actual relationship with her real family fraying in real time, but because they were all fooled, they won a million dollars. American television was weird at this time. (But perhaps not as weird as French television, whose version of this show was called Mon Fiancé Incroyable and called for its hero to convince his family he’d turned gay. Mon dieu!)

Where to stream Something's Gotta Give

This is the first of these movies that I have forgotten entirely, but the internet tells me it starred Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman and was based on an Elmore Leonard book. Whoops, I just forgot about it again, so let’s see what was happening on the pop charts: Outkast had just replaced Outkast at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, as “The Way You Move” took over for “Hey Ya.” The rest of the top 40 contained gems from the enduring likes of Twista, J-Kwon, and Chingy. Perhaps the most interesting of this week’s one-and-doners is Eamon’s “Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back),” the foulest-mouthed, least charitable kiss-off since Gillette’s “Short Dick Man.”

Where to stream The Big Bounce

Charlize Theron gives herself unfortunate teeth, wins Oscar. Back to bad American television! Later in 2004, The WB debuted American Idol’s evil twin Superstar, in which a panel of judges including Tone Loc and Vitamin C tell some very bad singers that they’re very good singers, and America chooses their favorite, who then finds out they’re actually America’s least favorite and that America has been laughing at them this whole time. No, really, all kinds of executives said yes to this idea. There was a set and cameras and a craft service table with bowls of M&Ms and everything. Also, toward the end of the season, worried the live studio audience might not convincingly applaud these awful singers, a producer literally told them the singers were all terminally ill. This is a true story. The producer was Mike Fleiss, the one you know from The Bachelor, and he’s admitted it.

When you think about it, it’s a miracle Donald Trump hasn’t been president for longer.

Where to stream Monster

My friends, I mean this with every cell of my being: we as a culture are not prepared for salt-and-pepper Josh Duhamel. The pre-gay pre-teens who go see Love, Simon in theaters next month are going to carry faint Daddy fetishes with them throughout their lives and never know exactly why.

As for me, I just want Taco Bell Nacho Fries.

The pinnacle of Steve Martin’s mugging period. But at least it got Bonnie Hunt on our movie screens. Did you know you can watch every episode of Bonnie’s short-lived, partially-improvised 1993 CBS sitcom The Building on YouTube? Well, you can.

Where to stream Cheaper By The Dozen

In which Nicole Kidman defends her Civil War-era homestead in a Chanel coat and perfect hair, and Renee Zellweger gets an Oscar for convincingly pronouncing the word “ate” as “et.”

Where to stream Cold Mountain

Yet another vanishing film, featuring a dewy young Chris Evans, future How To Make It In America star Bryan Greenberg, and, because this is 2004, an Erika Christensen who gets top billing over Scarlett Johansson. It’s about kids trying to steal the answers to the SAT, and Entertainment Weekly called it “The Breakfast Club recast as a video game for simpletons,” so now I have to watch it.

Whoops, forgot it again.

Where to stream The Perfect Score

Sean Penn and Tim Robbins do broad Boston drag, win Oscars. Elsewhere in TV, HBO was about to air the final episode of Sex and the City, and a few months later, the first episode of its negative image, Entourage. A couple of years ago, upon the release of the Entourage movie, comedian Gil Ozeri rented a house in the Hollywood Hills, watched every single episode of Entourage, all in a row and without sleeping, and live-streamed it. I was there, and I can tell you: Gil faced higher stakes in those 50 hours than Vinny Chase ever did. It’s all on YouTube. My favorite part was near the end, when Rob Gronkowski’s enormous brother showed up in the middle of the night, wide awake, just because he liked to watch episodes of Entourage.

Where to stream Mystic River

A movie about storytelling, about trust, about fathers and sons and life and death and John August writing a screenplay calibrated perfectly to make me cry. Here’s how emotional this movie makes me: I just got weepy typing the words Big and Fish. It’s gone on to become a stage musical, which I have not seen, because I would have to watch it in some kind of soundproof booth situation so as not to disturb the rest of the crowd.

Where to stream Big Fish

My main memory of this movie is that I had to watch it so that I could speak about it knowledgeably in an audition for a movie-review panel show I was trying to book. But I hadn’t seen the first two, and I was afraid I’d be lost, so I shotgunned all three in one day. That was a megadose of Gollum which not even Elijah Wood’s wide, lovely eyes could counteract. The other movie I had to have opinions about was Who’s Your Daddy, in which Anthony Anderson, Michael Imperioli and Eddie Griffin get urinated on by babies for 80 straight minutes.

I didn’t book the show. I think they went with Ant.

Where to stream The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King

I have not seen this film, so I reached out to America’s leading Faniston, my co-host on the Homophilia podcast Matt McConkey. Here are his thoughts:

“Along Came Polly is truly Peak Aniston. She’s in her final season of Friends, making the 1 million a week she deserves. She’s in her comfort zone—meaning she’s got her signature golden tan and lush locks and taut body on point, and it all serves the role. And yes, she’s still happily married to Brad. But right now, she’s only got eyes for Ben Stiller. There she is on the floor of the salsa club, beckoning Ben to join her—but really, she’s beckoning all of us to join her. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Bask in the effortless glow that is me. We’ll twist, we’ll shimmy. Maybe we’ll have a skinny marg. Hell, let’s just go to Marix and get a pitcher! Courteney and David are there, and I think Najimy’s on her way. Do you have a light? Yeah, I’m a Merit Lights girl. Everything in moderation, right? LOL. Hey, can I tell you something embarrassing? I kind of love that new Britney song, ‘Everytime.’ It’s sad, isn’t it? Sometimes I think she’s misunderstood. Sometimes I think I am, too. Ugh, you know what? Let’s stop being so serious. Let’s have some fun. Let’s dance.’ And we do. We dance with her, completely uninhibited for the first time in our lives, and we know we look like an idiot. And there she is, laughing and holding her face and shaking her head at how ridiculous we are. But she loves us. She sees us. And we see her.”

I am stirred by his words, but no clearer on what this movie is about, so I’ve consulted Wikipedia. It says Ben Stiller plays a life insurance person who meets flighty, devil-may-care Jennifer Aniston, runs computer risk analyses on her, and that’s when I stopped reading but let’s just assume they end up together.

Speaking of risk, out here in Los Angeles at the time, we had the greatest radio station ever: Indie 103.1. It introduced us to Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, The Walkmen, and all sorts of other bands who do cocaine in the book Meet Me In The Bathroom. In fact, at right around this time, Steve Jones was entering the studio to start his own then-weekly show “Jonesy’s Jukebox,” in which he played and said pretty much whatever he wanted to. It was messy and eclectic and frustrating and wonderful. But one cannot sustain such risk for long in a crowded and expensive market like LA; a few years later, Indie 103.1 would become a Spanish-language station, and a couple of years after that, we’d all start trusting the Pandora and Spotify algorithms to make our musical choices. But we’ll always have our memories, and “Jonesy’s Jukebox” lives on at KLOS.

Where to stream Along Came Polly

Obviously, what we were asking Ashton Kutcher for at this time in his career was tense, supernatural psychological drama.

Where to stream The Butterfly Effect

A street-dance movie whose lunch got eaten by 2006’s Step Up, but here are a few facts about it that may or may not be fun:

• Steve Harvey plays the owner of the clubhouse where all the dancing and serving gets done, and his character’s name is Mr. Rad.
• The big street-dance event at which the stars (Omarion! Marques from B2K!) have to serve or be served, is called The Big Bounce, just like the Owen Wilson/Morgan Freeman movie that refuses to stay in my head.
• The background dancers include Glee’s Harry Frum, Jr. and a man who, shortly after this movie’s release, would go to Hollywood nightclub Joseph’s and meet a young Louisiana lass who would be his wife by September: one Kevin Earl Federline.
• The fact that Kevin Federline’s middle name is “Earl” is the most Kevin Federline thing ever.

Have a good Super Bowl weekend, everyone. Don’t drink and drive, and try not to get served.

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the new Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now.

Where to stream You Got Served