Dispatches from the Popcorn Stadium: 100 Films of 2014 (20-11)

Bottom Ten | 90-71 | 70-51 | 50-36 | 35-21

So this is even later getting up here than I intended, considering the Oscars were last night and I've yet to write the post for the Top 10. The truth is that I grossly underestimated how much effort it would be to write even just a couple paragraphs for 100 films. By the time I had finished the first 80 I was writing about, I'm pretty certain my mind was fried like an egg. For my own sanity, I had to back away from the keyboard for a while. In the meantime, the usual things (especially work) got in the way, and it made it difficult to write last week. If I were shooting for timeliness with these posts I would have missed the mark.

But I'm not doing this for the hits (although I'd appreciate it if you click through and read on). I'm doing this because I have some things to say about the films I saw. Well, about 45-50 of them or so. The rest I see as an exercise to figure out how to say "eh, it was OK, I guess" in the form of two paragraphs.

Unlike last year, there aren't any clear favorites in my top 20. I'm pretty confident that my top 10 is my top 10, but there's a pretty good chance any of these could be #11, or even higher, depending upo which one I've seen most recently. We start with a film that should have won more than one Oscar, a film that was literally more than a decade in the making.

The DVD Case Pantheon: The World's End

Spoiler Warning: If you don't want to be spoiled for the big twist, watch this film first, then read on.

I'm kind of a late comer to the Edgar Wright fan club. I was aware of Shaun of the Dead when it came out, and heard the reviews, but as I'm not much of a zombie fan I didn't make any effort to see it*. Being that I was a late comer to checking out british TV shows, I didn't jump on the Spaced bandwagon until relatively recently. My first real appreciation for his work was when I went to see Hot Fuzz, unaware of what I was getting into. The result was one of my favorite movies of 2007, which is saying something as that is one of my favorite years of movies. Three years later came Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which again made my top ten for that year.  By then Edgar Wright was on my "must see" list, along with The Coen Brothers and the Andersons Wes and P.T.**