As you’ve no doubt noticed, this has been a rough year in terms of keeping up with movies. If you’ve been reading, you know why, so I’m not going to dwell on it. I do continue to find time to watch movies, and that’s the important thing, even if they aren’t always seen in a timely manner, or even in theatres. Movies are one of my great loves in life, and they always will be.
What about this year’s movies, thus far? So far, I’ve been predominantly relegated to watching studio films and the “big” blockbusters, so a lot of interesting and relatively acclaimed indie films (“Bad Words”, “The Raid 2”, “Chef”, and “Under the Skin”) have been missed. (Of course, I still haven’t seen “Divergent”, either. Go figure.) What isn’t seen in theatres, let alone missed altogether, is immediately added to the Netflix Queue, so a lot of these will be seen eventually.
What I have seen has been something of a mixed bag. This summer has continued the trend, although there has definitely been some top-notch franchise entries this year. What are my favorites? Well, that’s part of the point of this blog, although don’t worry– the least honorable mention will get their due, as well.
=“How to Train Your Dragon 2”: Unless something damn-near amazing comes out in the next six months, here’s my favorite movie of 2014, and very possibly, the best. The film hit especially close to home after my father died last October, but that only deepened the impact of this story of a son trying to cut his own path, while also following the one his father sets out for him.
=“The LEGO Movie”: Two animated films at the top? So far, but that’s how awesome Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s wicked trip of a movie is. Yeah, they’re also poking fun at action tropes in the “Jump Street” films, but seeing it come to life in brick form, with wonderful ingenuity and imagination (which turns out to be the main theme of the film), with a cast finely tuned comedically, makes it just that much cooler. As the song says, “Everything is Awesome!!”
=“Noah”: Arguably the year’s most controversial blockbuster, Darren Aronofsky’s brave, visually stunning epic, reimagining the Bible story from how we know it, is one that etched a deep carving into my memory banks that will likely be there for a while. I don’t know if I’d put it in the Oscar race for Best Picture, but if the film doesn’t get some below-the-line love (especially for Clint Mansell’s stellar, year-best score), I’m not going to be happy, although honestly, I won’t be surprised, either. I can’t wait to watch some of these sequences in HD at home.
=“Showing Sydney”: Writer-director Edgar Muniz has continued to impress me with the insight and feeling he brings to personal stories about creative people stuck in difficult times at their lives. This one, about a young woman who has an ugly reflection held up for her to see when a movie is made about her, is another triumph for the smart indie filmmaker, who should be much better known that he is.
=“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”: I’m not going to say fistfights have broken out over whether this terrific thriller is the best Marvel solo movie since “Iron Man”, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they had. Personally, I can’t imagine how anyone could think otherwise, since no film outside of “The Avengers” has had quite the collective impact this one did to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even causing a bit of a reboot to the first season of “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”, no less. It also helps that the film is damn fun in it’s own right.
=“Eroticide”: Another filmmaker screener request, and a very fine one, to boot, as a man finds himself in a toxic love triangle with two women that turns into an emotionally, and physically, devastating moment of truth for the three people involved. The less said the better, as this 30-plus minute short is quite an emotional roller coaster.
Beyond that, the first six months of 2014 has been a collection of quirky, wonderful smaller films accentuated by a couple of pretty great blockbuster films. Let’s start with the blockbusters, and honestly, you’ll be hard pressed to find people saying a bad word about either “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and Gareth Edwards’s haunting reboot of “Godzilla”, though both do have some detractors. (Same goes with Disney’s revisionist fairy tale, “Maleficent”, which grew on me the more I thought about it, but not enough to put it with the earlier films.) Going into the indie realm brings Wes Anderson’s delightful “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, with a great performance by Ralph Fiennes and some of the finest technical qualities of any Anderson film; the Joss Whedon-scripted love story, “In Your Eyes”, which was made available online, and is another winner from Whedon; “Belle”, a historical drama about a mixed-race young woman finding her place in 18th Century English society, propelled by a terrific lead performance by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, one of the few, real Oscar possibilities in this young year; “Veronica Mars”, Rob Thomas’s Kickstarter-financed big-screen version of his cult TV show, with Kristen Bell returning to the role that made her famous; “Draft Day”, Ivan Reitman’s football draft comedy-drama with Kevin Costner trying to rebuild the Cleveland Browns with some wheeling and dealing; and finally, “Monster Killer” and “Under the Dark Wing”, a couple more “screener” films that take intriguing looks at the monster hunter genre and a criminal’s existential dilemma, respectively.
There’s more to my movie year, though, and a lot of it was disappointment in franchises that have been great in the past. In this era of reboots and sequels by the dozens each year, it’s not a surprise, but whether it was “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit”, “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”, “Muppets Most Wanted”, “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones”, or Michael Bay’s dreadful “Transformers: Age of Extinction”, the latter which holds the title for “worst in show” thus far, Hollywood made me wonder, to varying degrees, where the inspiration had gone with each of these franchise placeholders. (The disappointment was lessened by “22 Jump Street” and “300: Rise of an Empire”, on account on the former being a sly send-up of endless sequels, and the latter– which boasted a fine, over-the-top Eva Green, as well as a wild sex scene involving her –was a sequel to a movie I wasn’t high on to begin with.)
The remaining six movies I’ve seen from the 2014 calender year are average pieces of filmmaking all around– nothing great, but nothing terribly awful, either. The ones I enjoyed most were Disney’s “Million Dollar Arm” and George Clooney’s “The Monuments Men”, which took true stories, and told them in entertaining, inoffensive ways. The first documentary I’ve seen this year is “Mitt”, a fly-on-the-wall work as bland as the 2012 Presidential nominee whose campaign it covers. On the comedy front, Seth McFarlane’s “A Million Ways to Die in the West” was definitely more enjoyable than the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore rom-com “Blended”, but neither one is so unfunny that it lacks entertainment value. That just leaves the young love drama, “Endless Love”, which I’ve pretty much forgotten about, except for having seen it at the end of a day-long date with my girlfriend back in February.
The rest of 2014 should be an interesting mix of big hits and indie sleepers, but first, the rest of the summer is on the horizon, and it promises to be a doozy one. In July, the big draw is going to be “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”, which is already starting to draw rave reviews, with “Hercules”, “The Purge: Anarchy”, “Sex Tape”, “Tammy”, and “Planes: Fire & Rescue” feeling very much like also-rans in comparisons. (Luc Besson’s “Lucy”, with Scarlett Johansson, is another matter.) August looks to be more exciting, with Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” starting the month off with a bang that will (hopefully) reverberate through late-summer films ranging from “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” and “Get On Up” (a James Brown biopic) to “The Expendables 3” and “As Above, So Below”, with potential sleepers like “If I Stay”, “When the Game Stands Tall”, and “The Hundred-Foot Journey” looking to make an impression with adults after all the geek blockbusters we’ve seen this year. Me? I’ll take what I can get, and hopefully, these and other movies will deliver the goods before the Oscar season gets underway.
I can’t wait.
Viva La Resistance!
Brian Skutle
www.sonic-cinema.com
