Bottom Ten | 90-71 | 70-51
We've passed the half way point in the hundred movies of 2014, and from here the groups get a bit smaller. Instead of 20 at a time, we'll go through 15 on the next two lists. Now that we're done with that piece of housecleaning, on to the next batch!
50. Happy Christmas
I don't believe Happy Christmas is the first example of "mumblecore" that I've ever watched, but it's the one that led me to look up the definition. And yeah, it's pretty much the definition of that type of film. Nothing important really happens, no lives change drastically, and the setting is limited to a few houses, offices, and a few other limited settings. By keeping the stakes and the settings simple, it opens it up for the actors to do the heavy lifting.
Fortunately, the cast is up to the task. Anna Kendrick plays an aimless twentysomething named Jenny who is temporarily living with her older brother Jeff (director Joe Swanberg), wife Kelly (Melanie Lynskey), and their absolutely adorable toddler in Chicago. Along the way, Jenny and her friend Carson (Lena Dunham) helps Kelly kickstart her writing career, while Jenny fumbles towards a relationship with part-time babysitter Kevin (Mark Webber). The interaction between the cast is fun to watch, even more so because the dialogue is improvised.
49. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Like 22 Jump Street, the reboot of Planet of the Apes was something that was barely on my radar. After all, the aborted reboot directed by Tim Burton is held in poor regard, and the original series also has a reputation of diminishing returns. Also like 21 Jump Street, I've managed to avoid watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I'm glad it didn't diminish the impact of this new film, which was a very good film.
The part with the apes is by far the best part of the film. The apes are beautifully rendered and the motion capture is well executed, with the apes sign language, expressions, and voice over work a definite strength. Also, each of the primary apes, from the conflicted leader Caesar (Andy Serkis), to his hawkish aide Koba (Toby Kabbell) to the kind and wise Maurice (Karin Konaval). The intrigue and power battles as they stumble towards outright conflict with the surviving humans is pretty riveting.
Although sometimes poignant as well, the human side of the story is where the flaws are. We never get too deep into the motivations and interactions between the hard line leader of the survivors (Gary Oldman) and the more understanding Malcom, who works with Caesar to keep war from breaking out. Even here there's nuance and some good characterization, but nothing on the level of the apes.
48. Kill the Messenger
[CIA NOTE]
This review has been redacted due to its threat to national security. We can neither confirm nor deny that Jeremy Renner, as investigative reporter Gary Webb, was excellent as he tries to piece together a plot by the [REDACTED] to [REDACTED] so that they could then [REDACTED]. We have no comment on how this film may or may not have shown Webb become obsessed with finding the truth of the matter, even as his professional and personal life began to crumble. We also have nothing to add about the rumors that Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Oliver Platt were also highlights of the film, as Webbs superiors who first enthusiastically back him, then turn tail when the [REDACTED] may or may not have begun stonewalling him in an effort to discredit him. We will be taking no questions.
47. X-Men: Days of Future Past
To many fans of the X-Men, this film would be worth watching just because of its impact on the not so beloved X-Men: Last Stand. However, there's a fair deal more to these film besides a change to the timeline. The film spends time in both a pre apocalyptic 70s, when the dreaded Sentinels are but a dream of Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), and the near future, where the X-Men are on their last legs barely staving off destruction in time so Wolverine's (Hugh Jackman) consciousness can be sent back to change the future. Naturally, the 1973 period is a showcase for the big three of Dr. Xavier (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), each of which give their usual good performances. With his appearance in this and Watchmen, Richard Nixon also adds to his lead for being the actual President with the most appearances in comic book movies (this record has not been verified).
Plus, this film has one of the coolest scenes of the year.
46. Into the Woods
Having never seen or heard anything from the stage musical of Into the Woods, I don't have any attachment to it that could render the movie unwatchable. Perhaps it's much better than the film, which would mean it would have to be pretty damn great, because I like the film pretty well. Of particular note was Emily Blunt as The Baker's Wife, Chris Pine as the charming, yet self-absorbed, Cinderella's Prince, and Lilla Crawford as Little Red Riding Hood.
I enjoyed the music and enjoyed the humor that is much more prevalent turns towards a darker side part way through. I also liked Meryl Streep as The Witch, although I wouldn't go so far as putting her in my list of the best supporting performances of the year, unless the qualification is that you sing at least one song.
45. Grand Piano
Yet another film from this year that deals with music, Grand Piano is one of two written by Damien Chazzelle. Whereas some of these films deal with the joy and benefit music can bring, regardless of how well its played, this film tilts more to the side of studying the cost and stress of the pursuit of perfection. Other than scenes at the beginning setting up the concert, a few scenes in the hallways of the auditorium, and a few scenes at the end the movie takes place on a concert stage, where piano virtuoso Tom Selznick (Elijah Wood) is making a comeback attempt after a disastrous performance five years earlier. Adding to his woes is a obsessed listener (John Cusack) who demands Selznick play every note perfectly, or watch as his wife is shot.
Is it a ridiculous premise? Absolutely, but that doesn't stop it from being tensely entertaining nonetheless. Several movies this year used communication through cell phones very effectively, which is credit to the voice acting of those involved. Cusack is menacing yet unhinged, a very bad combination for keeping people alive. Wood does a good job of balancing along the line between being stressed over his big performance, and being terrified for the lives of his wife and himself. Also good is Alex Winter (Bill S. Preston, Esq. himself) as Cusack's sarcastic henchman, who finds it hard to go along with his bosses insanely circuitous plan.
44. Nymph(o)maniac, Part 1
I know these two movies are pretty hard sells. After all, it's a two-part set of films directed by a pretty inaccessible director totaling about 4 hours with a fair amount of (mostly CG'd) heavy sexual content and a dangerous amount of Shia LaBeouf. That's a fair assessment, but it's not completely accurate. The films are often quite funny, and is far more concerned with the journey of the protagonist Joe, and her quest to find who she is. It also has a nice series of intellectual tangents thanks to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard), the audience to Joe's stories. If its true that Joe is a proxy for Von Trier and his career, then Seligman is probably a good stand in for people who spend much of their time trying to figure out the meaning of various scenes and symbols in his films.
There's not a big difference between the two films, so why the considerable difference in rankings? Because of yet another of my favorite scenes of the year, this one Uma Thurman's contribution to the film. It's a master class in awkwardness that makes David Brent and Michael Scott combined look as cool and composed as The Fonz. This clip does not have much context, but with the first five seconds I think you'll be able to suss it out.
43. Birdman
Most critics liked or loved Birdman. The ones that didn't really didn't like it. As for me? I'm somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, the way the movie was shot, as if it was one continuous take, was interesting to watch and gave the movie a frenetic pace that kept in line with the turbulent production of a Ray Carver play that former comic book movie star Riggan Thompson (former comic book movie star Michael Keaton) is trying to put on. It's a last gasp by a broke actor trying to regain some sort of cultural and artistic relevance. All the while, he has to deal with his estranged daughter (the wonderful Emma Stone), an asshole actor with his own ideas how to do things (alleged asshole actor Ed Norton, who often has his own ideas how to do things), and what appears to be a figment of his imagination personified by his most famous character Birdman (voiced by Michael Keaton doing his Batman voice). The cast, which also includes Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis, and Andrea Riseborough, and Amy Ryan, are pretty much stellar. Over all the chaos going on is a percussive score that complements the pace and tone of the film. If it weren't for a couple things, this would be much higher on my list.
But those couple things are hard to ignore. Birdman is not the first movie to feature a critic whose importance far outstrips any semblance of reality. This isn't always a detriment to a film, such as Anton Ego in Ratatouille. But when applied wrong, it can come off as if the director and/or writer is trying to publicly grind an axe against those naysayers with their thumbs and witty putdowns of their masterpieces. While not as heavy handed as, say, Mayor Ebert in Godzilla (1998), and not as baldly vitriolic as Bob Balaban's critic in The Lady in the Water, the representation of the New York Times theater critic in this film (Lindsay Duncan) is still devoid of any semblance of propriety.
More personally relevant is how this films shares such a dim view of technology and those younger folks with their sexting and "tweeter boxes". There's plenty about Millennial entertainment trends and social media habits that are a bit foreign to me, and I'm on the far edge of that group. However, that doesn't mean that everything about it is inherently destructive to culture. What's more, having a twitter account, or Tumblr, or especially a Facebook page isn't some exclusive domain of the young any more. There's nothing to gain at this point for sneering condescendingly at "social media" in general, when there is oh so much about it specifically to mock and deride.
42. Ida
Last year, I made it a goal to expand the reach of my yearly viewings beyond the one foreign language film I watched. I'm happy to say that I achieved that goal. Not counting The Wind Rises, which I didn't see until too late to put in my 2013 list, I saw five and a half films, two in Swedish, two and a half in French, and one in Polish. I also saw another French film, but it was dubbed into English, so that doesn't really count.
Ida was the sole Polish film I saw. It also was the only film of the hundred that was shot in black and white. A story about a young woman named Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), an aspiring nun who discovers her Jewish heritage after visiting her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a disillusioned former Communist operative. They then go looking for her parents remains to bury them properly, as Ida gets to know her only living relative and ponder her future.
The black and white cinematography is beautiful, allowing for the gray looking scenery a sense of contrast that reinforces the somber and sad nature of what's going on in the foreground. Trezbuchowska does a great job of showing Ida's certainty in her path in life, and also in the doubt that starts to creep in as she deals with the loss of a family she didn't know she had. Kulesza is also fascinating to watch, as she deals with the anger at her family's neighbors being the ones to kill them, and also a deep sense of discouragement of how things were pretty bad after the war as well, compounded by her guilt as "Red Wanda", a chief prosecutor for the Communist regime that took over Poland after the defeat of Germany.
41. A Most Violent Year
On paper, a movie about the owner of a heating oil company and his efforts to expand his business in order to keep his prosperity going isn't the most interesting concept. Of course, once you realize when (1981) and where (New York City) this is taking place, you start to see the potential. A Most Violent Year is a story about the cost of doing business in a corrupt world, and how hard it can be to try to stay out of the muck. Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) is the owner of Standard Oil who has to deal with a heck of a lot of headaches. Someone is stealing his heating oil by robbing his drivers, which has the union clamoring for more driver protection, which in this case means carrying guns of questionable legal license. Meanwhile, he's trying to get a leg up on the competition by expanding his terminal to include a port on the East River, a purchase that he needs to secure with payment a month from the start of the film. On top of that he has to deal with his wife and bookkeeper (Jessica Chastain), who is the daughter of a fallen mob boss and has her own ideas about how to handle the company's woes. All of this is further compounded by an impending investigation by the District Attorney, who may or may not have grounds to charge Morales and his company with several counts of misconduct.
Possibly because it was released on New Year's Eve, this film was shut out for the Oscars. It was unlikely that Isaac would have been a likely candidate for Best Actor even if the film had been marketed better, as that field was already loaded. I also am not sure Chastain was quite up to the level of the Best Actress nominees, although she did a great job with a character that is as potentially dangerous to her husband's fortunes as any of the other contenders. The way her privileged yet turbulent background causes her to clash with Isaac, who it's implied rose up through the ranks of the heating oil business to be master of his own domain, is something to watch.
The biggest snub by the academy wasn't for the actors, but for cinematographer Bradford Young, who was doubly snubbed by also not being nominated for the wonderfully shot Selma. His shots exude the cold griminess of the New York winter, whether it's the rich neighborhood of the Morales home, or the dirty industrial zone where the heating oil business is won or lost.
40. The Double
I've never read the Dostoyevsky novella this film is based upon, but I have seen (and love) Brazil, the Terry Gilliam film that clearly was an influence for director/writer Richard Ayoade. It's a nice touch to set the film in a world that while in most ways feels modern is clearly a crushingly dull mess of bureaucracy and barely hidden contempt for the protagonist Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg). It's a world that doesn't seem to value him, even though he evidently is quite good at his job. In fact, the functionaries that he has to interact with daily seems to despise him for his meekness, whether it's a restaurant server (Cathy Moriarty) who makes sure he never has a good meal, or the various security guards and HR personnel who seems to single him out for shabby treatment with the typical Catch-22s they seem to love putting people in. His efforts to woo Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) are continually thwarted, and he is ignored by his boss (Wallace Shawn). What's worse, there's a new employee named James Simon (
Had I remembered this was the film Richard Ayoade, I would have seen this much sooner, as its been on Netflix for a while. I'm glad I did, because it's a wonderful little film. It's well designed, the scenery and production design complementing the absurd banality of the film's world in the best way possible. It's also sharply funny at times, which isn't a surprise coming from a person who knows how to be funny like Ayoade.
39. The Missing Picture
Trying to make a documentary about the tragedy of the nightmare that was the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge is a tough proposition. In their anti-intellectual efforts to bring about a vicious cultural revolution, most of the photographs and film that wasn't outright propaganda has been destroyed, forever lost to the ash heap of history. Also compounding the problem is the fact that so, so many people were killed during their reign of terror. To tell this story, a director would have to get creative.
Cambodian director Rithy Pinh found a way. By using crude painted characters cut out of chunks of wood, he was able to recreate scenes both of the horrors he survived, and the more idyllic memories of the days before Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took the country over, in large part due to instability caused by an illegal war waged by the United States.
The way Pinh integrates some scant extant film from the era with his woodcuts is both creative and effective, evoking a response of shock and sadness as we witness the death of both his mother and father from illness and refusal to eat, respectively. Other poignant scenes includes a terrifying scene where a woman is put on trial and given a death sentence because she had the audacity to pick some wild mangoes, which were forbidden for the subjects of the regime's "re-education" efforts to create an agrarian revolution in the country. Even worse was who her accuser was: her young son.
38. Nightcrawler
It's easy to view the story of Jake Gyllenhaal's freelance newsmonger as one of a character's fall from grace. But the truth is, he was always an awful person, the circumstances and conditions around him just began to favor him. While the target of this film seems a bit outdated, considering the golden age of "If it bleeds, it leads" on local television was at least a decade ago, it's still plenty trenchant on how far one can go if they detach themselves from "useless" burdens such as morality, ethics, and any sense of decency. Gyllenhaal's performance was one of the best of the year, but I think it was one of those roles that is so slimy and offputting that its easy to see why the stodgy, staid voters would be hesitant to support him. It's also too bad that there wasn't more attention paid to Rene Russo, who plays a desperate news producer just trying to pull in the ratings her corporate masters require, knowing that failure might mean the end of the road for her career. All in all, ti's a very good film that shines a light at the decrepit and questionable value of bloodthirsty sensationalist local news.
37. Force Majeure
Force Majeure starts with a rich Swedish family enjoying their week long skiing vacation in the French Alps. They get their picture taken, a token of what they hope will be a fun trip. Then an avalanche is set off as they sit out on the hotel's deck eating lunch, and things change.
No, this is not a disaster film. While there is an avalanche, and it is uncontrolled, it doesn't actually hit the deck. What does happen, however, is an event that makes everyone in the family concerned about the state of things, as it reveals something less than flattering about the father Tomas (Johannes Bah Khunke), much to the chagrin of his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli). Things won't ever be the same for everyone involved.
This film is gorgeously shot, using the serene setting of the ski resort and Alps to the best of their potential. It also uses the sound of the avalanche cannons, used to make sure avalanches are less likely to happen when people are on the slopes, to good effect. Their booming and flashing during the night creates a sort of siege mentality, which ratchets up the tension as the family tries to deal with the unexpected conflict.
The way I'm speaking about it makes it sound rather serious, which isn't quite the case. It's often funny, and it's tone never gets too overwhelmingly stressful. Both leads do a good job of balancing that line between a stubborn husband who is reluctant to admit he may have dropped the ball, and a wife who is pretty damn angry at her husband, but is trying not to let it show because it isn't exactly fair and doesn't want to ruin the vacation for the family. All in all, the film has a lot to say about the expectations of gender norms, as well as how stressful, quick moving situations can often be a good indicator of our base personality.
36. God Help the Girl
A more cynical person than I would look at this film and instantly declare it to be a inconsequential piece of twee nothingness. And if you do a Google Images search, like I did to find an image for it, I'd be hard pressed to disagree with them. Also not helped is that the film was directed by Stuart Murdoch, a member of the indie pop band Belle & Sebastian. But underneath the oh-so-cute exterior of three young Glaswegians forming a band (called God Help the Girl) beats a heart in love with music and the creation of it, and a story about a woman moving on from the pain and suffering of her anorexia and addictions.
Considering it's directed by a musician, and is about musicians, it's little surprise that this is a musical of sorts. Not so much a intricately staged Broadway musical, but more of a pop musical, using sequences that feel more like minature music videos interspersed throughout the film. Emily Browning, as Eve, is the star of the film, although she spends a lot of her time with the core of the band, aspiring musician, part time guitar instructor, full-time music snob, and lifeguard James (Olly Alexander) and his student Cassie (Hannah Murray). The movie, while never sugar-coating Eve's afflictions, is never too rough and glides along gently to its conclusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment