The best entertainment of 2004

Peter Jackson and co rode the wave of success at the Oscars. Picture / Mark Mitchell

So that was 2004. Just in case you missed it, here's the entertainment events and phenomena of the year in 10 easy steps.

1. THE CLEAN SWEEP

When Steven Spielberg opened that last envelope, a cheer went up which left us hoarse but happy for days afterwards. Peter Jackson had done it. Not only had he and the film empire he'd built around him in Wellington delivered a remarkable trilogy of films which had done some of biggest box office in film history, he had the Oscar to go with it.

Not just one - Jackson took away three prizes for best film, director and adapted screenplay. The Return of the King took another eight on that night in early March, winning every category it had been nominated in, equalling the 11-strong haul of Ben Hur and Titanic.

That included triple wins for Jackson's partner Fran Walsh as co-producer, co-writer and co-composer of the film's theme song, and a double win for previous winner Richard Taylor for makeup and costume design.

As the predominantly Kiwi LOTR team made their speeches, addressing family and colleagues watching in a different hemisphere and time zone, MC Billy Crystal quipped: "It's official, There is no one left in New Zealand left to thank."

Of course, the LOTR squad weren't the only New Zealanders featuring on the big night. As the youngest ever nominee for best actress for Whale Rider, Keisha Castle-Hughes prevented the night from feeling like a random event, that New Zealand film-makers were up there on that mythical platform called "the world stage".

The second and third of Jackson's three films were the international box office champs of movies released in their respective years. Last year, the biggest grossing film was Shrek 2, co-directed and written by New Zealander Andrew Adamson who spent the latter half of the year filming The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in Auckland and the South Island.

Come December this year, both Adamson's film and Jackson's King Kong will be coming to a cinema near you. It seems New Zealand film-makers won't be leaving the world stage alone for a while yet. - Russell Baillie

2. THE LITTLE GADGET

Video may have killed the radio star but the iPod has redefined the industry. Forget radio, forget LPs, forget tapes, forget CDs. Today you can carry your music collection everywhere you go and listen to any song, so long as you don't mind ignoring a copyright law or two.

Apple New Zealand says it has shipped "tens of thousands" of the little beasts in the past quarter alone and demand over Christmas was "extremely, wildly good". Apple's iPod, and the iPod Mini, and let's not forget the iPod Photo, have revolutionised the music industry as we know it and have introduced a legal and above-board version of Napster that promises to open up the back catalogues and change the music distribution model.

Digital music is here to stay and there's no way the genie can be stuffed back in the bottle. The 20GB iPod is New Zealanders' first choice. Among the minis, the silver model is the hottest potato. The blue and pink battle it out for second.

The mini might only (only!) hold 4GB (gigabytes) of music but that's 1000 songs. The iPod proper comes in a range of sizes from the piddling 20GB through to the behemoth iPod Photo with its 60GB capacity. That's enough to carry all three Lord of the Rings (extended version) DVD quality movies. Just like Doctor Who's Tardis, the iPod is small on the outside, almost infinitely large on the inside. And, like the Tardis, it's a time machine, playing the songs of your youth. Journey back to the days of yore, with the mullet and shoulder pads or worse, mop heads and drainpipe trousers. The times, they are a'changing. - Paul Brislen

3. THE DOCO

It was a year for documentaries big and small. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 which took the Palme d'Or at Cannes (and may make a mark at the Oscars) may have been the biggest but we thought the best were much smaller films which took us into the lives of ordinary people.

With television documentary an endangered species, audiences seemed to enjoy the big-screen kind and the gumption of exhibitors such as the Rialto and Auckland's Academy (where, in Christmas week, four of the five films on show were docos) is to be applauded.

What's interesting, too, is the way in which the documentary has inflected much feature film-making: Gus van Sant's Elephant (see page 10) and Michael Winterbottom's In This World were two which showed that non-fiction film-makers have plenty to offer fiction. - Peter Calder

4. THE IDOLS

Having watched the American and Australian versions, our own NZ Idol franchise whipped up the requisite brief outburst of national pop hysteria. God-fearing smoothie Ben Lummis took out the title over compact rocker Michael Murphy.

But by year's end it felt like the pair's post-Idol careers had stalled. Yes, Lummis' single They Can't Take That Away was the biggest local seller of the year but its accompanying album barely dented the charts. Meanwhile, Murphy's debut album released during the pre-Christmas rush hasn't managed to dent the top 20. It seems many of us have been too busy buying the recordings of a generation of local music stars who made their names with their own songs. Brooke Fraser's 2003 release What to Do with Daylight was the biggest selling album in New Zealand last year, while Scribe's Crusader, and Goldenhorse's Riverhead were among the eight NZ albums in the top 20 biggest sellers. - Russell Baillie

5. THE PASSION

The major critics mostly panned The Passion of the Christ. The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards backed an appeal to lower the film's rating from R16 to R15. The director, Mel Gibson, bankrolled the US$25 million ($34.6 million) budget and was amply rewarded for his investment. (The worldwide box office was north of US$600 million ($832 million) by the time it went to DVD, and in the United States it took US$370 million ($513 million) at the box office, beaten only by Shrek 2 and Spider-Man 2.)

Gibson's film was one of the entertainment year's biggest events and it continues to break new ground. Gibson didn't try to sell the film through the usual channels - where marketing budgets can equal production costs - instead relying on (largely Christian) word of mouth. He has also announced that he won't buy into the mightily expensive process of lobbying for Oscar votes.

Was the movie any good? Gibson has told interviewers that the film has changed lives - prompted murderers to confess, for example, and renewed lapsed faiths - but for our money the ultra-conservative Catholic's version of the last 12 hours in Christ's life was a bludgeoning gorefest whose lip-licking attention to detail bordered on the pornographic. - Peter Calder

6. THE BLOG

If the most beautiful word in the English language is mother, then the ugliest must be "blog". It sounds like something you should flush away. Yet that unsexy word entered the New Zealand mainstream last year. It was bloggers - those who write weblogs, disseminate opinions and so forth - who undid CBS senior journalist Dan Rather by pointing out flaws in the documents he used to damn President Bush's National Guard record. These bloggers proved again that the webworld is full of people who know stuff, and blog about it.

Closer to home, blogging became a topic for discussion and debate. The annual Net Guide Awards proved how clever some bloggers can be - the winner of the best personal blog was a guy who wrote as a 26-year-old woman and drew comparisons with Bridget Jones's Diary.

At the high end, blogging can provide insight into another person's world, allow ideas to be worked out in the public domain, political opinion to be aired unfiltered, and humour or satire which cannot find a place in mainstream media to have an audience. At the low end it can be adolescent rants about how crap television was last night.

A blog can be the on-line equivalent to tagging: you scribble to prove you exist, that you matter in this anonymous world. I blog, therefore I am. Ironically blogging is largely anonymous and conducted in the safety of cyberspace. The ultimate nerd activity.

Unlike print or television media, bloggers get immediate feedback because it is computer-based. As a medium it is uniquely democratic and, best of all, as yet unregulated. - Graham Reid, who contributes a weblog to www.publicaddress.net

7. THE TEENAGE DRAMA QUEEN

Keisha's Oscar nomination was but one sign that female teenage stars were getting more powerful by the month. Also much-nominated early in the year was Scarlett Johansson, who turned 20 last last month, for her roles in Lost in Translation and Girl With A Pearl Earring, who has since consolidated her American it-girl status and has nine movies on the way. Likewise, 19-year-old Brit Keira Knightley continues on her roll, even if her flick King Arthur didn't light up the global box office last year like her previous Pirates of the Caribbean did. She heads into the new year with one British period drama (Pride and Prejudice) and two Hollywood thrillers attached to her name.

Some stars, such as Hillary Duff and Anne Hathaway, continued to play role-model princesses in updated fairytales aimed at tween-agers. The Olsen twins added their first fully-fledged feature to their entertainment portfolio only for Mary-Kate to puncture their picture-perfect image by going into treatment for an eating disorder as the film, New York Minute, foundered at the box office. But the teen female breakthrough star of the year appeared to be 18-year-old American redhead Lindsay Lohan who, having delivered Mean Girls and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, has now lined up seven further movies, an album, and all the tabloid headlines a Hollywood starlet could hope for. - Russell Baillie

8. THE PROTEST SINGER

In his hit A Girl Like You, Edwyn Collins had a line about there "being too many protest singers, not enough protest songs". Which sounded prescient for last year as much of American rock old guard - and a few newbies - attempted to swing voters towards John Kerry with their endorsement and benefit concerts in the lead-up to the US presidential elections. But after Michael Moore got up conservative American noses, it appeared a backlash against politically outspoken celebrities swept the nation and may have helped Dubya's re-election.

Country singer Linda Ronstadt was booed for her pro-Moore comments on a Las Vegas stage and some Hollywood liberals had the mickey taken out of them in the puppet-satire flick Team America: World Police.

Across the Atlantic, U2 frontman Bono addressed the British Labour Party conference on his areas of political expertise. And he was one of the few originals who featured on the remake of the Band Aid single Do They Know It's Christmas? which helped to mark the 20th anniversary of Live Aid - which finally arrived on DVD.

Back in the US, there were albums everywhere with anti-Bush and anti-Iraq War sentiments, ranging from the surprisingly good (Green Day's American Idiot) to the predictable (Eminem) to the career-killing (R.E.M) to the awful (A Perfect Circle). Back here, many local stars found themselves a cause celebre in jailed asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui. - Russell Baillie

9. THE BLADE

You could put it down to the Lord of the Rings influence. Though even one George Lucas figured out early on that even in space, one shoot-out looks pretty much like the last one. And swords do bring a certain dignity to screen violence that harks back to old Hollywood as well as Asian film lore. Last year, there were blades galore, whether it was Tom Cruise carving through the Taranaki scrub in The Last Samurai, Brad Pitt working through some Trojans in Troy, Clive Owen redefining the myth of Excalibur in King Arthur or Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah having the year's best swordfight in the confines of a caravan in Kill Bill 2.

Then there was the Asian contingent, big on blink-and-you'll-miss-it bladework which included Zatoichi and Hero. But let us not forget the year's most stylish sword-wielder, Puss In Boots of Shrek 2. Those feline reactions, that Zorro accent and, of course, that rapier wit.

- Russell Baillie

10. THE WARDROBE MALFUNCTION

As if it wasn't already hard enough being Janet Jackson. There's that business with your older brother that is never going to go away. There are all those young Mickey Mouse Club gals who were in nappies when you were helping to define modern dancepop, and have now taken your market share. And you get the biggest television audience of your life - the halftime slot at the Superbowl with Justin Timberlake to help push your new album, and then what happens? You suffer a "wardrobe malfunction" and America is scandalised by a flash of that nipple brooch thingamy. If you want to look on the bright side, hey at least it kind of matched the rest of your leather B&D number. (And what was Justin wearing? Would have it killed the kid to have dressed up a little? Just because he's the new Michael Jackson, doesn't mean he has to look that white). Next thing you know, you're off the Grammy invite list, television stations which carried the newsflash are being fined and Timberlake has added a phrase to the English language with his apology: "I am sorry if anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance at the Super Bowl. It was not intentional and is regrettable."

Soon the whole world is going wardrobe malfunction crazy. Every time Christina Aguilera or Paris Hilton breathed, there was the risk of another one. Hollywood starlet Tara Reid suffered a similar embarrassment on the red carpet at a birthday party for Sean "P Diddy" Combs. And even Miss Universe wasn't immune to a spot of war-mal - at a Sydney fashion show Jennifer Hawkins (Aussie rugby league cheerleader in her former life) lost her designer skirt on the catwalk. She laughed it off: "It was just a pity I wasn't wearing better panties." And at a country music awards in Nashville, Dolly Parton announced: There's not going to be no wardrobe malfunction this evening. There's not supposed to be, it's not planned. But, as tight as my clothes are, there's no telling what will happen. If it does happen, I'm going to wipe out the first three rows." - Russell Baillie