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Showing posts with label 2014 Movie Reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2014 Movie Reviews. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

The 14 Best Films of 2014

Only about 6 weeks ago I posted my list of the 10 Best Films of 2014 with the caveat that I had not seen many films (especially many Oscar contenders). I openly admitted that the first few films on that list (mainly Veronica Mars, Wish I Was Here, and Fury) would not make my true Best of 2014 List. I still stand by those selections as films you should eventually see one day, but I was correct in that they did not make my final list. I have seen a considerable amount of films over the past few weeks and many of them are worthy on making my final year-end list.

In the end, I think 2014 ended up being a pretty good year for films. We had quality prestige Oscar-worthy films, classic summer Blockbusters, and delightful Indies. We still haven't had that Holy Shit Movie since The Social Network (only Drive comes close) and we certainly didn't get that film in 2014. But the fact that I needed to expand this list beyond 10 films should tell you something about how good and deep 2014 ended up being for movies.

Similar to my 14 Best T.V. Shows of 2014 list, the number of films in relation to the year may seem gimmicky, but I assure you the number of films I will choose to discuss mainly relates to the quality of good films there are to discuss. Before I write a post like this, I type up all of the films I plan to write about into my iPhone. I initially only wanted to do a Top 10 list, but I had considerable trouble narrowing down the list into only 10. I`could choose to leave off films I discussed in my initial Best-Of Year End list, but not only would that be a disservice to certain films, I use these posts as reference points in later years. Eventually, I was able to pair down my list to 13 solid and worthy candidates- none of which I wanted to leave off of my list. I did add a 14th film because "The Top 13 Films of 2014" doesn't flow quite as nicely, but like I said, all of these films are worthy of being considered the best of the best.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Movie Look Back: American Sniper

When I write movie reviews, I prefer to write them with some sort of broader context. Movies are never seen in a vacuum, therefore discussing the film beyond the film can be helpful. When I initially reviewed American Sniper, I bunched it with another 2014 “prestige” war film, Fury, and called it the death of war films in cinema. Obviously I was being hyperbolic, but since Black Hawk Down, there hasn’t been a straight forward war film I’ve enjoyed- especially one regarding any of the Gulf wars. I was not a fan of American Sniper and I expressed my dislike of the film in my review. I saw the film Friday night of its release and posted my review of the film soon after. Since then, for better or for worse, discussion of the film blew up.

First things first, I stand by my negative review. What other people have thought and Box Office success doesn’t change my feelings and thoughts of the film. The only thing that has changed is my knowledge of what everybody else thought about it. That being said, I have had weeks to reflect on the film which allows me to speak more concisely and accurately. Writing a review after watching a film can turn the review into a jumbled mess, but days and weeks pondering the film allows me time to gather and collect my thoughts.

The biggest fault with this film is Clint Eastwood’s direction, in particular his need to film things quickly and under-budget. Eastwood is notorious for not filming multiple takes and for purposefully excluding scenes from the script. The perfect embodiment of how Eastwood films his movies is the fake baby controversy that dominated your Facebook news feed for a day. Eastwood had intended to use a real baby, but when neither of the child actors to play the baby were available, he used a fake baby. The use of a fake baby was obvious to me as I pointed it out in my initial review, and it would have been noticeable to Eastwood had he looked at his dailies and what he shot. However, since Eastwood doesn’t like to reshoot and Sienna Miller and Bradley Cooper did a good job in that scene, Eastwood said "Eff It" and left that scene in his film.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

An Everyman's Movie Review: Selma

I can't believe how good Selma actually is. I came in to the film thinking that is was going to be Oscar bait, and I came out of it understanding why people were so upset it wasn't nominated for more Academy Awards. While I don't think it should have dominated the nominations the way Birdman and Boyhood did, I do think it deserved more than just a Best Song and a Best Picture nod.

The two films I had stuck in my mind before watching the film was Lincoln and 12 Years A Slave. Both of them are films that were huge Oscar players once the nominations were announced and both were considered the best film of the year at this time in their respected release years. Both Lincoln and 12 Years A Slave are extremely boring and dull films that truly were Oscar bait and both were films I regretted watching. Both of those films seemed like they were more suited for an 8th grade civics class (with the latter actually becoming a part of a high school curriculum) than the most prestigious night in Hollywood.

Selma actually has much more in common with Lincoln than it does with 12 Years A Slave as both films are about an extremely famous civil rights activist doing what they can in order to get a difficult law passed. Both Selma and Lincoln focus on only a particular portion of this famous activist's life and it shows you how they get down and dirty in the trenches. However, where Selma rises above Lincoln is that it not only generates enough good will for its main character where you truly care about his actions and he's a person more than a caricature, but you're enthralled with the minutia of the movement as well.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Wild and Still Alice: Bad Movies With Great Female Performances

I recently wrote an article about The Pervasive Culture of Sexism Among Hollywood and The Academy. The purpose of that article was to highlight the continuing problem that Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress nominees tend to come from, well to put it bluntly, boring and bad movies. Being the Oscar completionist that I am, I tend to watch as many movies as I can (while still working a 9-5 job). However, that becomes a difficult task when I need to use my free time wisely and cherry pick what I think will be the best movies. That tends to cause me to miss these films with great female performances in them because these films are not considered good and therefore they drop on my theoretical queue. There are most certainly bad and boring films with great male performances in them, but they tend to be films like Foxcatcher, and thanks to the patriarchal society of Awards Ceremonies, still get nominated for other major awards. However, this year I was able to watch four of the performances in both the Best Supporting Actress and Best Actress category. Two of those films were Still Alice (Julianne Moore was nominated for Best Actress) and Wild (Reese Witherspoon was nominated for Best Actress and Laura Dern was nominated for Best Supporting Actress). Both Still Alice and Wild follow along this trend of bad and boring movies with great female performances in them. Unfortunately, that still means at the end of the day I'm watching a bad and boring movie- which I strongly dislike. You don't want to watch an entire TV season of a show you don't like or read a book you're not enjoying. 

By nominating Reese Witherspoon and Julianne Moore, The Academy has created a perpetual cycle with more bad movies to come. As Filmdrunk puts it: 


"Yes awards are bullshit. Despite this, this they still matter. Maybe not you, maybe not to me, but in terms of which movies get made, awards matter because they matter to actors. And because awards matter to actors, awards affect actors' choice of projects. Which affects which movies get made, which affects which movies we see. Put simply, a lot of bad movies wouldn't get made if A-list and up-and-coming actors weren't jumping aboard solely for the chance to win awards. To say nothing of the more interesting scripts and novel approaches to material that get shoehorned into predictable awards vehicles in the hopes of pleasing predictable awards voters."


It is this very reason that Wild was made. Although Reese Witherspoon already has her Oscar statute, she is in a new phase of her career where she's trying to be risky and trying new things. She was great in her small role in Mud (and similar to the film's star, Witherspoon is having her own McConaissance), she co-starred in P.T. Anderson's new film Inherent Vice, and she's now started producing films as well. Witherspoon was one of the producers of David Fincher's Gone Girl (and probably expected an Oscar nomination to come from that), and Witherspoon also was a producer on Wild. She is single-handedly responsible for the film's existence. Witherspoon bought the rights to the book in which Wild was based off of, she hand-picked director Jean-Marc Vallee (who just helped Matthew McConaughey and Jered Leto win Oscars for their work in Dallas Buyers Club) and she stars in the project herself. I'm sure Witherspoon got really excited at the prospect of earning three Academy Award Nominations this year.


Friday, January 16, 2015

How American Sniper and Fury Prove War Movies Are Dead

In 2014 we saw the rise of two "prestige" war flicks: Fury and American Sniper. Fury was released first from David Ayer. Ayer had just come off of End Of Watch and had one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Brad Pitt, in his movie. During the promotion of the film, it seemed like a shoe-in to eventually earn an Oscar nomination. However, as the release date neared and closer and closer and people starting seeing the film, Columbia Pictures switched gears and started to care more about box office success than critical success. As it turns out, that was the smart move. As of the writing of this post, Fury has made a little over $85,000,000 dollars and it was estimated it cost $68,000,000 to film. The film also has a whopping 78% on Rotten Tomatoes and exactly 0 Oscar nominations.

A few months later, Clint Eastwood's American Sniper was released at the tail end of Award Season. It surprised most "experts" by earning six Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor (Bradley Cooper), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Jason Hall). And while the film goes wide today and thus will garner more votes, it only has a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes.

While one film is an Academy player and thus will dominate more conversations within the zeitgeist and both films are set during different wars, I lump Fury and American Sniper together because they both suffer from the same problem: Is there any story left to tell regarding modern war films?

Sunday, January 11, 2015

From Birdman to Boyhood: The Huge Risks Directors Took This Year

There are two films that I have constantly seen at the top of many critics Best Of lists in 2014: Birdman and Boyhood, with the latter earning almost the consensus top spot on every list I've seen. It's no coincidence that both those films are huge risks and passion projects from their respected directors. Both filmmakers, Richard Linklater for Boyhood and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for Birdman, have a few movies under their belt (obviously Linklater has a tad more than Inarritu) and decided to release their passion project to the world this year; to release a project that many would consider on the riskier side. Last year's big passion project, Gravity, worked out pretty well for its director Alfonso Cuaron both critically and financially, and now Linklater and Inarritu hope for the same. For the time being, both directors have that whole "critical acclaim" down pat and both look like the two huge players as award season has just started to heat up. As we go down the rabbit hole for the next couple of months and more and more people start talking about these film, the real question is: Should you go out and see them? I'm sure the people, like professional critics, who watch five movies a day appreciated the work these directors did and that paid off in terms of ending up on Year End lists, but should you, the average movie goer go see them? Just because Linklater and Inarritu took risks, doesn't mean they paid off.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Where The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything Falls on The King's Speech Spectrum

Grantland’s Academy Award writer Mark Harris (who is superb; I may not always agree with what he’s saying, but his pieces are always interesting) wrote a piece for the site a few months ago to discuss the upcoming narratives that surround potential Oscar nominees (and winners). The basic thesis of his post, although I highly recommend you read everything for yourself, is that, generally speaking, there are “X movies” and “Y movies”, Basically, “X movies” are bold, daring films, and for the most part, are films that we view as Oscar snubs. Recent examples of X movies are Pulp Fiction, The Social Network, and Goodfellas. These are films that the Academy "didn’t have the balls" to give the Best Picture Oscar to. On the flip side, we have “Y movies”. In laments terms, Y movies are films that are Oscar bait and films that seemingly are enjoyed by an older skewing audience. The film Harris sites to most of as a Y movie is The King’s Speech, especially considering it beat out an X movie- The Social Network (and I would argue Inception as well).

Throughout Harris’ piece, when talking about upcoming narratives for potential Oscar contenders, he compares The King’s Speech to The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. Harris is not the first person I’ve seen make this comparison. It’s a really easy comparison to make. All three are British films and all three go down nice and smooth upon viewing. But really, that’s where the comparisons end. I think it’s wholly unfair to compare The Imitation Game (and to a lesser extent The Theory of Everything) to The King’s Speech, mainly because The King’s Speech is boring as balls and I would never recommend anyone under 55 to watch it.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

An Everyman's Movie Review: Foxcatcher

When I first saw the trailer of Foxcatcher I was instantly hooked. After Moneyball, I was in on director Bennett Miller, I was in on Steve Carell doing his best to win an Oscar, I was in on Channing Tatum trying to expand his range, and I was in on a stylish, creepy movie about a creepy fucking dude. I was so excited about this film, that I ranked it as my #2 most anticipated film of this fall season. In that column I wrote, "I actually can't imagine a scenario where Foxcatcher is bad 'per se' but I can envision a scenario where the film is just not as good as I am hyping it up to be."

As it turns out, Foxcatcher is bad. I mean really bad. It's not Troll 2 or Saving Christmas bad, but it is not a good movie. I could take a movie with great performances that's not very engaging or a movie in which I am self-aware enough to know that I don't like it because my expectations were set way too high (because at least then I can re-watch the film), but neither is the case with Foxcatcher. The film's main problem (among many) is that there is no conflict. For the vast majority of this movie, these characters just exist. They're there, and that's it. I could actually take that if Bennett Miller was properly setting mood and tone to help the audience feel uncomfortable surrounding a creepy situation, but that doesn't happen either. What's most infuriating about the story that's been chosen to be told is that natural conflict should arise. The whole reason this story deserves to be made into a movie is rife with conflict, yet that barely shines through.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Why Nightcrawler Is The Better, Improved Version Of Gone Girl

There are a lot of similarities between David Fincher's Gone Girl and Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler: both star a career-best performance by their A-list leading man, both are a dark, twisted tale brought on by a sociopath, and both are a scathing satire on the relationship Americans have with the media. The only difference is that Gone Girl is directed by an experienced director with a rookie screenwriter, whereas Nightcrawler is directed by a first-time director with a veteran screenwriter. While we like to think as movies as the director's forum (whereas TV is the writer's playground), the reality is that if you do not have a great, or even good script, there's nothing even the best directors can do to tell a masterful story.

That's the main problem with Gone Girl. While David Fincher is at his best in his latest film, and he probably does some of the best directing work of his career, Gone Girl is just an average movie. There's nothing that Fincher could have done to save Gillian Flynn's script, and in fact, Flynn's script in the hands of almost every other director is a flat out bad movie. It is not that Flynn is a bad screenwriter, it's that her original story (Flynn also wrote the book Gone Girl) is so bonkers, bat-shit crazy that I'm surprised it ever became popular enough as a book to get Hollywood's attention. You can read my full review of Gone Girl here.