Probably my most anticipated movie of the year was Noah, which was a tremendous disappointment - interesting visuals, but not enough to make up for so little story and so little character. At least with The Fountain, there was a clear sense of what Aronofsky was trying to do, even if again any sense of believable character was lost in the shuffle (which is why The Wrestler was such an unexpected delight).
The other big disappointment was They Came Together, a comedy written and directed by, and starring, many of my favorite people. Everything is just played so broad and so big that, as a parody, it's up there with Date Movie and that kind of thing, and as a comedy, it was seriously difficult to force myself to keep watching. I can't believe I'm saying that about something David Wain directed.
The Grand Budapest Hotel fits very nicely in with the post-Darjeeling phase of Wes Anderson's career, the most visually stunning phase. I'll have to see it again to decide if I love it as much as Fantastic Mr Fox, which I think benefits from having so many understated moments compared to the zaniness that punctuates Moonrise Kingdom and Budapest.
Birdman and Boyhood were among the best movies I saw, but in both cases, it felt like elements other than the story itself were what made it great. If you just sit down and tell someone the story, there's not nearly as much going on. And that's okay! That's movies! Showing more, doing more, than the page can convey is not something that is limited to action movies and slapstick. But I'm a storyteller by trade; the story is almost always the thing I respond to most strongly.
That said, the performances holding those movies up - and the direction - are the year's best. I would love to see Michael Keaton win an Oscar.
Interstellar was fun, and I liked how much of it took place on Earth. Wild and Cake both gave meaty material to actresses normally not associated with it, but Wild was far more successful, not because of any deficit in Jennifer Aniston but because her character in Cake just wasn't very likeable, and was so strictly defined by loss and her response to it, whereas Reese Witherspoon had a more varied palette to work with.
The Lego Movie was this year's inexplicably overrated movie, taking over for Frozen from last year. It's not bad. It's certainly competent. But none of it stood out for me. I can understand being grateful to take your kids to a movie that isn't all comedy yelling and poop jokes.
In ongoing superhero stuff, the second Captain America was nearly as good as the first one - they're my two favorite Avengers-related movies - while the second Amazing Spider-Man movie was even more pointless, muddled, and wrongheaded than the first one. I could go on for paragraphs about what the Andrew Garfield version of this franchise gets wrong about both Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, even apart from how bored we all are with origin stories and the too-many-villains problems that have plagued these movies since Batman Returns. The new X-Men movie, thankfully, was far better than most of the rest.
The superhero standout for me was Guardians of the Galaxy, which I'm pretty sure remains my favorite movie of the year even after Oscar season. It's a little bit Star Wars, if Luke were Indiana Jones and Han a raccoon. It has flaws -- the villains are the least compelling characters, and Gamora is far less interesting and far less powerful than in the comics, which I'm hoping they repair in the sequel rather than make her a generic space love interest. But fuck and damn, James Gunn made a hell of an adventure picture.
Runners-up for favorite movie? The Babadook, by far the best horror movie of the year and the best since, I don't know, You're Next or The Children. The One I Love, a very smart movie with very smart people and a couple of my favorite actors, Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss. Obvious Child and The Skeleton Twins, fantastic and intimate ... dramedies, I guess? ... with some of my favorite SNL alumni, and some Oscar nominations wouldn't have been out of place here. Gone Girl and Nightcrawler explored sociopathy from very different places and to different ends.
I believe we're going to watch Inherent Vice or Theory of Everything today, so who knows, one of them may wind up my favorite movie - and I'm not saying much about animated features because I haven't yet seen two that I'm looking forward to (Kaguya and Song of the Sea). Only Lovers Left Alive and Snowpiercer were last year (2013, that is), right? Well, they were excellent too, in any case. It's a TV blog, I'm not going to worry about being encyclopedic.
"But I'm a storyteller by trade; the story is almost always the thing I respond to most strongly."
ReplyDeleteI find myself telling people some variation on this pretty often. It's mental work to get my brain into an alternate gear for appreciating pure visual artistry and such. Worth doing, but it's never going to be my default mode.