THE PINK SMOKE'S 2014 YEAR IN FILM
JOHN CRIBBS / 2014 HONORS & DISHONORS
THE MONKEY COMETH: BAFFINGLY OVERRATED
Full disclosure: I like movies. Even the movies I don't like, I pretty much like 'em, and enjoy discussing them endlessly. This category, originally subtitled "movies that people treated like the Second Coming when it was more like a monkey coming," is made up of movies I liked watching but whose overwhelmingly enthusiastic receptions I somewhat disagree with.
"I Like My Revenge Vague, Arty and Unshaven": Blue Ruin & The Rover
B-movies became notably arty this year, mainly as a way of avoiding heavy exposition (you get it, right? Ragged hero, road to vengeance? Just trust us and we'll move on) but also to provide Nolan-esque Great Importance to the flimsiest of scenarios. The main problem with that approach is, when the cards are all finally on the table, the hand's never as strong as they make it out to be. Case in point: bluffer Jeremy Saulnier's Kickstarter-darling Blue Ruin, in which a homeless guy who's feeling blue and ruined is temporarily revived when the alleged source of his misery is released from prison and ripe for some brutal (albeit reluctant) retribution. While it's always fun to witness a little improvised vengeance and vagrant DIY survival methods in the tradition of First Blood and No Country for Old Men, once the story turns into one big ridiculous family feud with a goofy gang of gun-toting trailer trash, all pretense at existential allegory are shaved off with the hero's beard. And as much as I appreciate how bumblingly unheroic the lead actor makes his character, once the beard's gone he looks like Joe Lo Truglio - I could not take him seriously after that. Like Blue Ruin, the rover in the Rover is a dirty, unshaven homeless guy on a solo, vague, somewhat misguided mission of vengeance. The bad guys he's after don't even seem like they're all that bad (except that they pull off heists, apparently - in fact, the word "apparently" really pops up a lot in any attempt at a description of Rover's plot)...they're certainly no worse than Guy Pearce's midget-blasting bully. The problem is, you can't minimalize Mad Max: you need all those crazy leather-fetish nutjobs racing around in rugged, skull-adorned dune buggies to counter Rockatansky's stoic road warrior. Without it, it's not a hopeless apocalypse, it's just Australia. ROVER is a better movie overall, but in the end you just can't ignore major off-putting elements such as Robert Pattinson's very Dennis Weaver-in-Touch of Evil-meets-Jay Baruchel-in-Million Dollar Baby type performance as an addled hillbilly. For quality vengeance, give me the John Wick's exact-right-amount-of-action-movie-pretentiousness any year (he may have been bearded, but at least we get to see his rover get killed).
Chef
At first I thought it might seem kind of bullying to take a shot at such a small, inoffensive slice of light entertainment as Chef. I certainly didn't have a bad time while watching it. But afterwards I realized "small" doesn't really describe a movie put together by studio director Jon Favreau and peopled with such A-list buddies as Robert Downey, Jr. and Scarlett Johansson. And I wouldn't say it's exactly inoffensive - it's pleasant, but almost to a fault, so slight it just barely registers onscreen. Obviously Favreau's a fan of fun food movies like Big Night and Tampopo (he borrows heavily from them, and flat-out steals his fairy tale ending from Ratatouille) but those films had more going for them than just aesthetically-pleasing dishes. For one thing they had well-drawn characters: the ones in Chef are all so perfectly set in their convictions that each one seems to be patting Favreau's passionate chef on the back for the entire film. Even obstensible "villains" such as restaurant owner Dustin Hoffman and food critic Oliver Platt are completely justified in their actions and, at the end of the day, respect and admire Favreau. The ol' single father-getting-to-know-his-kid subplot is the only real conflict in the movie, and I don't think anyone was sitting on the edge of their seat wondering how that was going to resolve itself (we've all seen Troop Beverly Hills). Still, it's no wonder the movie won so many people over: a road flick featuring a couple independent cooking experts traveling in a big truck from one trendy American city to the next? It feels like Breaking Bad if it had aired on the Food Network.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Take away all the typically distracting Wes Andersonyness of Wes Anderson's latest film - the man would be on the edge of self-parody if he hadn't already crossed that line long ago - and what you've got is the year's most overrated B-movie. Padded with prison breaks, stolen artwork, murder plots, assassinations and a toboggan chase, all from the pages of a pulp novel (or is it just the memories of the author or something? or a story being told to him? Jesus don't ask me to remember what the christ those superfluous framing sequences had to do with anything), the whole endeavor is less Zweig and more Zorro. Although utilizing elements of old timey serial-type adventure makes this more watchable than the almost plotless Moonrise Kingdom, I feel like I have to judge this movie the way I'd judge The Raid 2. And it's not as good as The Raid 2: Wes Anderson is just too self-conscious a hipster to engage an audience with action and suspense. Just as an example, the overblown, goofy outfit-based prison scenes aren't nearly as funny, scary or, I'll even say, aesthetically-pleasing as those in Muppets Most Wanted. While Ralph Fiennes lends a Hackman-like energy to the proceedings, there's simply no other character in the film who functions as anything beyond a flat paper doll for Anderson to dress up and stick in front of an exhaustingly over-designed symmetrical background. Nothing new there (it's almost pointless to bring it up), but talented performers like Willem Dafoe, Mathieu Amalric, Saoirse Ronan and Tilda Swinton deserve to be more than just set dressing (Adrien Brody, carry on). Speaking of Swinton...
Snowpiercer
Ugh...I don't want to knock this movie too much. I certainly didn't hate it. But it's a political post-apocalyptic movie about a revolution in which the rebelling lower class progressively moves to the front of a train. Which is so goddamn silly. I can't in good conscience deride something like fucking Elysium and give this movie a pass. I mean, the fucking LEGO Movie was a more subtle political allegory. Bong Joon-ho, a much better balancer of art and action than Wes Anderson, put some cool stuff in there - the build-up to the fight in the dark is particularly weird and intense - but for a film as reportedly whacked-out as this, there's just not enough real innovation. Nor does it make any sense: if Ed Harris' over-the-top overseer needed to reduce the train's population, why not simply execute as many inhabitants of the tail section as he wanted at any given time? They don't seem to serve any purpose once they get older other than to become disgruntled and rise up against their oppressors. "Well that's the point right, the ruling class is negligent, they don't care anymore." Shut the shit up. And that's not a happy ending: even if the polar bear doesn't gobble them up, how are the remaining passengers going to survive in a frozen tundra with no food in the middle of nowhere? Without even a Quintet board to pass the time? They should have been happy with their bug bars and plastic explosive cocaine. Again, this is less a baffingly overrated film as a largely disappointing one (and really I'm more disappointed in Kelly Masterson - after waiting six years for his follow-up to his dynamite script Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, this is what we get? And he co-wrote the Bill O'Reilly Kennedy assassination TV movie?? Yikes.)
Obvious Child
Another film that's more of a missed opportunity than flat-out "bad." Gillian Robespierre could have made the decade's most defining political comedy, a character study about how a single woman handles the pressures that come with an unwanted pregnancy while not losing sight of her independent personality. Instead it's a mediocre rom-com about getting by in the big city with a subplot about abortion which the director gives about as much attention as the fart jokes. Every romantic comedy cliche arrives right on time, even the cheesy love-interest-walks-away-then-turns-up-again ending. It's the sort of movie that sneaks onto year-end lists just for being exactly that kind of seemingly modest, under-the-radar little nuggest of a film that's theoretically subversive when the only thing that separates it from the That Awkward Moments and Other Womans of the year is the size of its budget and lack of star power. And I hate to say it, but Jenny Slate is more shrill than adorkable, and scores no cuteness points by simply sitting around in a big box; it doesn't help that the acts of movie characters who are stand-up comedians are always terrible.
JG & JG: The Two Most Overrated Working Auteurs
There's nothing wrong with being oblique. The only real complaint that's been raised in reviews against Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin is that, due to lack of expository dialogue, we don't know exactly what Sco-Jo and her fleet of motorbike minions are up to with their liquid floor shenanigans. That criticism is entirely moot - just think of Species (or, and I can't believe this hasn't been brought up in reviews, Peter Jackson's Bad Taste) or read a synopsis of the novel if you aren't willing to fill in the blanks yourself. Lucidity isn't Glazer's problem; the problem is letting visuals do the heavy lifting while your film coasts on vague ideas about identity, femininity and humanity. 'Cause get it, women are from Venus - they feel alienated from the rest of humanity, as the movie's seductive space invader learns after slipping on Scarlett Johansson's husk to ensnare unsuspecting Scots (even though it's established that the motorcycle mob can simply abduct people in broad daylight, so why the big charade? Could have saved on the price of a van rental. Why does she need a van anyway, it's not like she's picking up six guys in a single outing?) It doesn't matter what purpose these victims serve, but Glazer's evasive direction wants to play cool and detached despite servicing such remarkably inane themes as "men objectify women," "deformed people are beautiful" and "being human is, like, weird isn't it?" That's before even exploring which of the movie's various experiments with style work and which ones don't: ooh we "seamlessly" blend cinéma vérité-via-Blind Date hidden car cam with the narrative! So does Royal Blood's "Figure It Out," and it's just as effective in the context of a music video (which, not surprisingly, is what Under the Skin is closest to stylistically). Like Blue Ruin and The Rover, this is a film overflowing with B-movie artiness and wallowing in narrative ambiguity, resulting in an anti-hero devoid of personality, a story that insists it's something different/better than perfectly acceptable genre films that came before it, and the overall sense of aloofness employed to hide the fact that the movie has nothing original to say.
Marion Cotillard's Polish migrant in James Gray's The Immigrant is another female stranger in a strange land, ready to be exploited the second her feet touch the teeming shore. Because she clutches her shaw so tenaciously to her chest we understand that she's a poor, huddled mess, yet she doesn't seem to yearn to breathe free - she's unbelievably subservient and trusting to a confounding degree from the beginning of the film to the end. She never once controls her own fate: she's almost sent back home as soon as she arrives, an attempt to contact her family nearly gets her deported, she's nearly arrested for murder and only escapes these early attempts to put an end to the pointless plot due to the intervention of Joaquin Phoenix's man-child of a pimp. Five minutes into this movie about a noble immigrant determined to protect her weak "see-stor" and you've got the whole layout in your head: you can set your watch to the minute she'll be pushed into prostitution, to the accidental murder (a scene that ends with an unscrupulous secondary character who, observing the event unseen, slowly...closes...the door - ha!)...you can practically visualize the final shot. The melodramatics are so prosaic it's like Baz Luhrmann without the awful singing and nauseating camera movement. Without any sense of adventure or surprise, we're left with Marion Cotillard's forlorn moper, Joaquin Phoenix's "turbulent" acting style where no RAISED VOLUME! line reading or sudden violent/pouty gesture is the least bit unpredictable and Jeremy Renner playing a magician or something. Gray inexplicably achieved Auteur Greatness after years of well-made but ultimately forgettable crime dramas like Little Odessa, The Yard and We Own the Night with the inexplicably lauded Two Lovers (a film that would make a great cover to a book on Overrated Underrated Movies). The vexing elevation of his reputation reeks of some agent's grand scheme - even alleged interference by Harvey Scissorhands plays into his "struggling genius" narrative - and without the overzealous efforts of the sectarian James Gray cult he'd remain a harmless hack whose output came and went like so many other bland noble efforts. As is, I can't believe I even know his name.
(I would include another J.G. in this group based on the universal praise among cineastes for Goodbye to Language, but Godard's been doing the same kind of bullshit for years now. He's not so much getting away with anything as coasting on a 60-year reputation, and his cinematic "essays" are like comfort food for intellectual film critics. [That movie is literally an old man filming his dog in the backyard with a camcorder. -- chris])
Imitators Idolize, or (to keep up the alphabet theme) "Three W's Who Just Need to Go Away"
Ti West, The Sacrament: West set off this horror pastiche bullshit with the empty House of the Devil. I'm not going to get all high-and-mighty about the taste level involved in fictionalizing a tragedy like the Jonestown massacre, but even fans of this director have got to feel that dipping his wick in the ol' "found footage" subgenre is a sure sign of creative bankrupcy. Ben Wheatley, A Field in England: The black & white digital photography in this Jodorowsky-by-way-of-Guy Ritchie crapfest looks like garbage - it's like a primitive student film even without the amateur acting and juvenile freak-out scenes. I'd rather watch a loop of Kill List's embarrassing ending 18 times than have to sit through this 14-year-old's idea of a bad head trip again. Adam Wingard, The Guest: Utilizing a subpar knock-off John Carpenter score and stealing his title font for your credits does not make you John Carpenter. The fact that The Guest takes place around Halloween is literally the only thing it has in common with any Carpenter movie: it starts off as a bad rip-off of The Stepfather before evolving into a bad rip-off of The Terminator. The worst movie of the year, tied with You're Next for possibly the worst of all time.
OK - enough negativity. (Well, there's a little more.) Let's hand out some awards...
The "Local Hero Award" for most Overrated Underrated Movie: The Immigrant
Best tribute song: "Roger and Bob (Rode Out That Day)" from Willow Creek
Best cover song: KSMB's "Sex Noll Tva" in We Are the Best!
Best eponymous theme song: "We Are the Best!" from We Are the Best!
Movie I wish included an eponymous end credits theme song: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
Movie nobody remembers: Grace of Monaco
Acceptable sequel: Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Sequel I can't believe was even worse than the first one: Amazing Spider-Man 2
Most disposable sequel: The Purge: Anarchy
Most unlikely DTV sequel: Jarhead 2: Field of Fire
No St. Vincent: St. Vincent
Most unnecessary remake: Annie
Weirdest remake: About Last Night
The long-awaited return of an absent genius: Perhaps I'm utilizing the term loosely, but it sure was nice to see Bill Paxton pop up in everything from Edge of Tomorrow to Disney's Million Dollar Arm to Nightcrawler
Biggest disappointment: Snowpiercer
Runner-up: Cuban Fury
Best first half of a movie with a terrible second half: Proxy
God, if Brian DePalma had gotten a hold of this script, had the second half rewritten and directed a 90-minute version of it, the movie could have been a classic. As is, it's a mesh of squirm-inducing uncomfortableness and padded-out melodrama that makes for an agreeable if overlong horror flick. The more successful films of this kind rely heavily on withholding information so they can pull-off cute little subtle twists (think Martyrs or Inside), which is fine except it makes for a tepid second viewing. Not sure if I should hold that against the movie; its real problems are obviously in the second hour when it wastes time trying to out-shock its effective first hour and leans heavily on a terrible performance from the always-unwelcome Joe Swanberg (see also: Thou Wast Mild & Lovely) that replaces a terrific one given by Alexia Rasmussen.
A pleasant surprise: Danny Elfman's score for The Unknown Known
Worst trend of the year: The "oh shit there are different versions of us who conveniently can't exist within the same space for some reason" pseudo-sci fi indie plot: Coherence, The One I Love
Gomorra Award for Over-Stylized Stylessness: Thursday Till Sunday
Best ending: Without a single gunshot fired the entire movie, a pen poised over a piece of paper makes for one unbearably griping climax. A Most Wanted Man
Craziest ending: Tarantula! Enemy
Best title: A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
Most unfortunate title: As Above, So Below
Subtitle that freed me from forcing myself into seeing a movie I had absolutely no interest in out of guilt for wanting to support Michael Keaton: Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
I mean it's gotta be mentioned somewhere, right? There were friggin' rock monsters in Noah.
Best Daniel Radcliffe Movie of the Year: Horns (I thought it was funny!)
Worst Daniel Radcliffe Movie of the Year: What If-? (I didn't think it was funny!)
Wish He Was Gone: Zach Braff
Don't Be Fooled: Edge of Tomorrow
This one was a solid contender for the "overrated underrated" award, but I can't honestly consider any Tom Cruise vehicle "underrated" by anybody, even the ones that underperform. What's funny is that this film famously suffered a "bad title" controversy. I'd love if the studio execs had the power to reset the day and release the movie as LIVE. DIE. REPEAT. - I guarantee the box office returns would have been pretty much the same. Besides that, the source novel has one of the best titles I've ever heard, All You Need is Kill. I saw the movie based on that title, and would actually like to know if it's fair game now that Warner Brothers has no use for it. What the marketing department really should have plugged was the potential for Edge of Repeat to be the next Great Time Travel Movie to rival the mastery of Chris Marker's La Jetée. I've always got an eye on what could be the One: Primer, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Timecrimes/Triangle, the similarly plotted Source Code...all came so close. In recent years I've even sat through Click, Déjà Vu and The Lake House with only the slightest scintilla of hope that they'd somehow land it. I thought they had with Looper, a movie Emily Blunt also managed to walk away from unscathed, but even though most of these recent time travel movies should be renamed "loop movies," that one couldn't even play by its own rules (I still haven't seen this year's Predestination, although it sounds suspiciously like Timecop to me). Doug Liman's movie takes a very workable premise, one strong enough to give it second life after a lukewarm theatrical run, but ropes it and mounts it and rides it like a raging bull the film is terrified will run off at any moment. Sure it's fun to see Cruise adapt to each "new" day with knowledge from his previous incarnation (even though he couldn't possibly anticipate a second or third or fourth attack from an enemy Spider-man style, as each would vary based on the success or failure of the previous punch but whatever) but every time he dies the set-up feels more like a rip-off of Contra than a rip-off of Groundhog Day. That is to say, the movie starts living up to the implied monotony of its rechristened title - live, die and repeat. Live, die and repeat. Who cares if he lives or dies: he's pretty much invincible and nothing's at risk. I suppose you could read into it as meta-commentary on the kind of invulnerable action heroes Tom Cruise usually plays; otherwise, there's no reason to care beyond a certain point, even once he inevitably loses his regeration ability. And don't get me started on the alien invaders' strategy involving the loop - they basically set themselves up to fail, and they make the same ruinous mistake twice. Those kind of things bother me.
Gimmicks that I appreciated, even if they didn't quite work: Atom Egoyan's shifting timeline in The Captive (probably would have been more effective if he hadn't included constant puzzle visuals); The Congress switching over to animation mid-movie (sadly, it may be the most boring live action-to-animation transition since Cool World); Michael Fassbender's performance as Frank in an oversized papier-mâché head (the question is, would it have been interesting at all if I didn't know it was Michael Fassbender?)
Treading Water Award, for A Filmmaker Whose Aesthetic Has Officially Hit a Wall: Michel Gondry, Mood Indigo
Runner-up: Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Second runner-up: Terry Gilliam, The Zero Theorem
Worst character name: Mr. Babadook, The Babadook
Runner-up: Puck Beaverton, Inherent Vice
Best thing I saw in 3-d in 2014: The ape army charging in on horseback, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The "Jeremy Irons in Dungeons and Dragons Award" for giving it your all, even though you probably shouldn't have: Eva Green, 300: Rise of the Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Best villain: Eva Green, 300: Rise of the Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Runner-up: Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known
Still not entirely sure this movie wasn't a joke: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him and Them
Funniest moment: Robert DeNiro party, Neighbors
Best death: "It's ok, I got what I wanted." Stranger by the Lake
Most horrible death: Homeless guy bludgeoned to death for his bottle of wine. Joe
Most shocking death: Stoick, How To Train Your Dragon 2
Most satisfying death: Tom Cruise dying again and again and again, Edge of Tomorrow LIVE. DIE. REPEAT
Most abrupt ending to a sex scene: NPH in Gone Girl
My Favorite Bad Movie of the Year: Lucy
No, my enjoyment of Luc Besson's brainiac bullet ballet version of A Beautiful Mind is not based on my dislike of Under the Skin (even though it is more of a feminist power statement than Jonathan Glazer's roadside odyssey. Maybe it's a tie. Sco-Jo kills lots of men in both movies.). Besson has always wanted to make a live-action anime film, and this flashy La Femme Akira comes even closer to that goal than The Fifth Element. But what really makes Lucy the kind of hyperactive adolescent masturbation fantasy that gets a thumbs up at the end of the day? Is it the fact that Morgan Freeman spends half the movie explaining how an increased metabolism can raise Sco-Jo's consciousness, a cognitive power which she uses to kick bad guys and shoot them with guns, all while firing off sassy one-liners? Or is it that the entire plot hinges on an ensmartened Johansson jumping through hoops to obtain more of the narcotic that raises her intelligence, when she should theoretically have been made intelligent enough to simply synthesize more of the drug herself? Maybe it's the fact that Besson apparently came upon a cache of stock footage and decided to pad out the film with random shots of rainbows, waterfalls and even a montage of various animals doin' it? Could it be bookend scenes of a cro-magnon woman sipping water from a gentle brook (not to mention peeks at the spiraling universe and even a shitty CGI dinosaur to make the movie seem like McG's Tree of Life)? The answer is: it's everything.
Much better than it had any right to be: Locke
Like Boyhood, Steven Knight's Locke is based on a gimmick that could easily polarize its audience: Tom Hardy, alone in a car, driving down an interstate at night for almost the entirety of the film's 84 minute runtime. All his interactions are with people on the phone we never see; occasionally, he chastises his dead father in the rearview mirror. This absolutely should not have worked for even a second. Yet without cheating, the aptly-named Knight manages to capture the indescribable, contradicting feeling of liberation and confinement that surfaces during a solo nocturnal drive. Like a cinematic redrawing of Butor's Second Thoughts, the real-time isolation of the story encapsulates the major turning points of a man's life. The childhood experiences that defined you. The inescapable disappointment at your failures as a husband and a father. The triumphant feeling of your hard work and a lifetime of acquired expertise actually making a difference in the world (when it looked like Richard Sherman might miss the Super Bowl to be with his wife at the birth of their son and my wife argued that nobody would skip a Super Bowl appearance for child birth, my response was: "But Locke missed the largest concrete pour in the history of Birmingham!") The whole may not be substantial enough to form a legitimate classic, but add one outstanding performance by Hardy - not to mention great support from the cast voicing characters on the phone, all of whom were brought together in a hotel room to record their lines live as Hardy drove around - and Locke is as good as this sort of thing possibly could be.
Not as good as it should have been: Calvary
So close to a masterpiece. Every fiber of my being wants to get behind John Michael McDonagh's sophomore effort, a masterfully made bit of cinema that definitely has more than an average amount of ideas and a really stellar cast to communicate them. I sat watching the film with a delighted smile in reserve for the killer scene that would undoubtedly consolidate all these ideas into a tangible burst of aesthetic and thematic unification. Annnnd...it just never happened. "A for effort" is the sadly faint praise I can offer this Nazarin-style examination of how the antiquated codes of priesthood struggle to hold sway in modern society - it's a plane hovering over the "brilliance" runway that refuses to land. McDonagh lays out so much throughout the movie that its wordless, Bressonian epilogue doesn't quite reinforce. Or maybe it does, I don't know; the fact that I'm not certain works against the film, that's for sure. I can't come up with a single suggestion to make the movie better - it could be that some of the characters are too broad, or it's not funny enough...whatever it is, I can't put my finger on it. Buried somehwere within Calvary is an even better movie than Boyhood or Norte or Stranger by the Lake, if only I could find it. Very frustrating.
Just in case I needed a reminder how hopelessly unfunny Seth MacFarlane is in any given media: A Million Ways to Die in the West
Performances:
Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler), Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin and Liv LeMoyne (We Are the Best!), Patrick d'Assumcao (Stranger by the Lake), Emmanuelle Devos and Sandrine Kiberlain (Violette), Masaharu Fukuyama (Like Father Like Son), Paulina Garcia (Gloria), Lumita Gheorghiu (Child's Pose), Brendan Gleeson (Calvary), John Goodman (The Gambler), Eva Green (300: Rise of an Empire), Tom Hardy (Locke), Isabelle Huppert & Kool Shen (Abuse of Weakness), Carla Juni (Wetlands), Sid Lucero and Mae Paner (Norte, the End of History), Bill Nighy (Price), Gary Poulter (Joe), Susan Sarandon (Ping Pong Summer), Sam Shephard (Cold in July), Timothy Spall, Dorothy Atkinson, Paul Jesson, Marion Bailey, Ruth Sheen and Martin Savage (Mr. Turner), Hilary Swank (The Homesman), David Thewlis (The Zero Theorem), Marisa Tomei (Love is Strange), Luke Wilson (The Skeleton Twins)
Best performance of the year: Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler
Best John Cleese impersonation: Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight
The year Tilda Swinton went full-on Holy Motors: Snowpiercer, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Zero Theorem
Geniuses most in need of new agent: I know every film can't be devised and directed by Mike Leigh and that actors gotta eat, but I implore Imelda Staunton and Lesley Manville to note that playing a dwarf in fucking Snow White and the Huntsman became the final role on Bob Hoskin's filmography, and to think about that before agreeing to appear as CG-miniaturized Stooge-esque fairies opposite Juno Temple in another self-fellating Disney "reinvention" like Maleficent
Best cameo: Michael Shannon (with axe) in They Came Together
Best 2-for-1 cameo by human wreck editions of formerly gorgeous actors: Val Kilmer and Colleen Camp in Palo Alto
Movie I most wish had a MAD Magazine parody based on it: Ida
The Alan Dean Foster Award for Movie I'd Like to Read the Novelization Of: Nightcrawler by James Ellroy
Does it kind of feel like David Fincher has become the Oprah's Book Club of filmmakers? Gone Girl
A pretty great year for breakthrough female directors: Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), Asia Argento (Misunderstood), Amma Asante (Belle), Ava DuVernay (Selma), Katrin Gebbe (Nothing Bad Can Happen), Eliza Hittman (It Felt Like Love), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Lucía Puenzo (The German Doctor)
Filmmaker of the year: Isao Takahata, The Tale of Princess Kaguya
Filmfucker of the Year: Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin
Most frustrating exclusions from my 2014 round-up (due to my having not seen them yet): The Look of Silence, Winter Sleep
Did not see nor intend to see: Inherent Vice, Interstellar
Most looking forward to in 2015: What else but the long-awaited next entry to a beloved, rebooted fantasy film series that started in the late 70's of which the original writer-director helmed four installments before handing the reins to a T.V. guy, who may or may not choose to include the series' famous dwarfs in hoods running around on a desert planet: Phantasm: Ravager*
* Watch out, Fast Five and Final Destination 5 - you may be about to lose your shared position of "best Part 5 of all time." (The "V" is in Ravager...they haven't played it up in the marketing like they did with OblIVion but it's totally there.)
Best blu-rays (& dvds):
1. Sorcerer
2. The 'Burbs (Arrow Video)
3. All That Jazz (Criterion)
4. The Long Goodbye & Thieves Like Us (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)
5. Scanners (Criterion)
6. UHF - 25th Anniversary Edition (Shout Factory)
7. Kiki's Delivery Service (Disney)
8. Sabata (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)
9. The Missouri Breaks
10. The Werner Herzog Collection (Shout Factory)
MOMENTS
Vilko's wife flashes her "Vilko!" tattoo. Abuse of Weakness
Emmanuelle Seigner's Vanda dismissively tosses Sacher-Masoch's book into the phony fire. Venus in Fur
Benicio del Toro's slave-slash-secretary grabs the Infinity Stone, goes Gaby Rodgers. Guardians of the Galaxy
"I like to think if you're seeing me you're having the worst day of your life." Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler
Inmate Danny Trejo, auditioning for the Gulag revue, declares himself a triple threat: singer, dancer, murderer. Muppets Most Wanted
"Nice try, Escape-O." Muppets Most Wanted
"You love the word 'obsession' - I can see the glow in your face when you say it." The Unknown Known
"We're in reality and they're in the fantastical. Reality is going to lose!" Why Don't You Play in Hell?
A red balloon rising past the window becomes the greatest John Woo parody/homage in film history. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
The uncanny in the banal: a bag on a string that's hoisted up and down past the window in The Strange Little Cat
The almost inperceptible transitions between years in Boyhood
Avalanche. Force Majeure
Earthquake. The Wind Rises
The church burns down. Calvary
Dolls with beating hearts. The German Doctor
Dumping a body in downtown Detroit. Only Lovers Left Alive
The drowned victim's towel left abandoned on the beach. Stranger by the Lake
The drowning victim's baby left abandoned on the beach. Under the Skin
A creepy skeleton puppet street performance punctuates a significant life change for both Jon Favreau's Chef and Paulina Garcia's Gloria (although it's a little more profound in Gloria)
Oh yeah, there was a creepy skeleton puppet in Skeleton Twins too wasn't there?
Everybody freeze! Luke Wilson is on top of this broken glass situation. The Skeleton Twins
Time in a Bottle: The unlikely marriage of super-speed ass-kicking and Jim Croce. X-Men: Days of Future Past
O Holy Night: Wakwak administers a festive beatdown - and just when we were starting to think life in a Filipino prison wasn't so bad! (They even got a pet monkey.) Norte ,the End of History
Ryota compares the two chewed-up straws. Like Father, Like Son
The nurse's stepson steps up to defend her: "She's my mother." Ryota's gotta respect that. Like Father, Like Son
The crazy religious sister's psychotic reaction to Fabian telling her off on the porch. Norte ,the End of History
Timothy Spall's face as Mr. Turner is forced to endure the intolerable gooseberry discussion at a patron's house.
Unable to come up with a reason for there being dried blood on the dollar bill, he simply leaves the store. Blue Ruin
Will you relax - James LeGros is definitely NOT going to need to see some ID in order to sell you 500 pounds of that highly restricted ammonium nitrate. Night Moves
Ray Winstone munches on yet another comatose critter while stowing away in the ark, callously wiping out one species of animal after another any time he's got the munchies. Noah
Michael Parks channels Brak and proclaims his love for Pouteenie Weenie. Tusk
Chris Evans and Vlad Ivanov sniper each other from opposite ends of the train as it snakes interminably around a particularly long curve in the track. Snowpiercer
Ice Cube beats up a plant. 22 Jump Street
Sexually frustrated Milo confesses he may have "exhausted all the possibilities of pornography." Calvary
Alejandro Jodorowsky confesses to "raping" Frank Herbert, but clarifies that he raped him "with love." Jodorowsky's Dune
Frank Henenlotter tells Criterion to go fuck itself. Rewind This
Benjamin Haydon's long walk to the lake as the other artists make fun of him. Mr. Turner
Cheer-worthy moment of the year #1: The band punks the hell out of the rude rec center crowd at Santa Rock. We Are the Best!
Cheer-worthy moment of the year #2: Godzilla wrests open the MUTO's mouth and sprays atomic breath down its throat.
Boss Muto's breakdown of film budgets based on how much he spends on his mistresses' meals. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
Hans Castorp, a German expatriate in Japan. The Wind Rises
"Helmut Gregor," a German expatriate in Patagonia. The German Doctor
The cheesy magician in the Christian group in Manila. Norte, the End of History
The doctor catches intronitis and is forced to turn and mug for the camera. "Kill me!" Too Many Cooks
Rumsfeld's "If you want peace, you have to be prepared to go to war" evokes McNamara's "In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil" - but of course, Rumsfeld doesn't say "evil." He never would! The Unknown Known
"Certain things shouldn't have happened." The closest we'll ever get to an admission of guilt from Rumsfeld and his Chesire-grin. The Unknown Known
"What if my problem isn't that I don't understand people but that I don't like them? What if I was the kind of person who was obliged to hurt you for this?" One creepily calculated threat from Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler
Ethan Hawke pulls the GTO to the side of the road so he can settle this communication bullshit. Boyhood
John Wick makes a dinner reservation for 12.
Isabelle Huppert teaches herself to laugh again following months of recuperating from a stroke. Abuse of Weakness
Willis Earl Beal explains how magic works in the real world. Memphis
Ethan Hawke's answer to whether real magic exists in the world. Boyhood
Worst scene of the year, possibly of all time, that everybody seems to love for some reason #1: "It's a present - a pillow the little dear has embroidered himself!" Nymph()maniac Vol 1
Worst scene of the year, possibly of all time, that everybody seems to love for some reason #2: Jefferson Starship in The Skeleton Twins. Who do you think you are, movie? Mannequin? Meshach Taylor must be rolling over in his grave.
A scarce moment of television brilliance: Vera Farmiga auditions by singing "Maybe This Time" on Bates Motel (also her enacting falling into the Grand Canyon in the subsequent episode - goddamn, if only the show was worthy of her awesomeness!)
For more 2014 End-of-the-Year Movie madness, check out:
Ian Loffill @ Notes and scribblings
Related Articles
<<Previous Page 1 2 3 4 Next Page>>
home about contact us featured writings years in review film productions
All rights reserved The Pink Smoke © 2014