Best of 2014
I'm not sure what's going on with this year, there were a few impressive movies, but mostly, impressive acting attached to stale stuff. I haven't seen a lot of the movies coming out for Awards season, but not for lack of trying, only last weekend there were 0 new movies coming out in the Chicago Area. Anyway. The best goddamn movies of 2014 are below.
01. Boyhood
This would come as no surprise to anyone that knows me. It is a titanic effort made by the best movie director working today, he eschews his sleepy, psychologically-eloquent, thick-aired, style for the first half of the film and provides a compelling small drama about the things that really matter in life. Watching this movie in a theatre, I glanced at confused moviegoers as they braced for the melodrama that was sure to happen, an accident, some murder, a disturbing secret, only to be disappointed and surprised with a gut punch of real human emotion, real human drama. Boyhood is one of the most important films of this decade.
02. Birdman
Speaking of melodrama, Iñarritu is one of those directors that dances between the ridiculous and the sublime, he heightens the drama and creates fractured narratives that demand of their audience full emotional attention and commitment. Birdman is the most challenging of all his movies, everything about it is vertiginous and plastic, the acting is theater-like the camera trickery impossibly evident. Both dreamlike and gritty. Mexican cinematrographer Emanuel Lubezki is a treasure, this pairing with Iñarritu is a treat. I hope they continue working together.
03. The Wind Rises
Hayao Miyazaki's "last movie" (his last "last movie" was Spirited Away) is a serious love affair to engineering and craft, he manages to do justice to an awkward subject matter, the joy of creating weapons of destruction.
04. The Dance of Reality
This movie has the following scenes, a naked mother dancing with her son, a boy being torn out of his long gold locks, nazis torturing a naked man, a woman healing a husband by urinating on him, a discussion about the existence of god by with a woman exclusively singing operatically. Alejandro Jodorowski (who hasn't made a new movie in decades) manipulates deftly digital cinematography and movie techniques that weren't available in his time weaving these scenes into a heartfelt autobiographical story about a old genius in supplicant conversation with his younger self. It is weird, and brilliant.
05. Coherence and 06. The One I Love
These two movies make the best double feature of the year, two movies that provide psychological thrills on a small budget, theater of the mind at its most clever and exciting.
07. Only Lovers Left Alive
Leave it to Jim Jarmusch to turn two elder vamipires into a drony talkie about feelings, liberating the immortal creatures from the tedium of the latest iterations of the species in cinema. Along with the best score on any movie in 2014.
08. I Origins
Another low budget scifi of ideas, a pretty deft and tense film from Brit Marling and Mike Cahil, whom along with Zal Batmanglij make one of the most exciting filmmaking team working today.
09. Print The Legend
(or the Agony and Ecstasy of Bre Pettis) is a great documentary about an important subject, 3d printing is heavily discussed, but most importantly, the topics of open source, and the buyouts and lawsuits that involve creating something new technology in present-day America.
10. Tusk
Kevin Smith is unbound, and weird, and scary and fucked up, Tusk has horrible shifts in tone, but I love how Smith is determined to fuck up the expectations of what a movie should be.
