The Next Best Films of 2014

I saw around 100 movies that opened in 2014, which is a pretty typical year for me.  Rarely less than 90, hard to see more than 120.

Of those 100 movies. Boyhood is the best.

Here are the next dozen or so movies that I consider to be my 90th percentile for the year:

2.  Whiplash

This is the one other film from 2014 that I've seen twice, though it's possible there are one or two others I'd try to see again.

JK Simmons won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and the film also won Oscars for editing and for sound mixing.

Simmons is the leader of the top ensemble at a Juilliard-like performing arts school, and Miles Teller is a student who yearns to be playing drums in this ensemble.  And the two are both crazy.  Simmons might be an actual psychopath, or he might just take a little bit too seriously the idea that you've got to tear down in order to build up.  Which, just to say, is the entire premise behind boot camp for the US armed forces.  But what would drive Miles Teller's student to put up with this?  He's obsessed in his own way, firm in his belief in a youthful romanticism where it's clearly better to be famous and dead than a living nobody.  Which belief he'll happily advertise to his girlfriend, to family at a holiday dinner, to anyone -- though there are so few people who want to be around someone so obsessed that his world is defined entirely by the JK Simmons character.

Simmons is a long-time character actor who's done great work in films like Juno and who hits it out of the park here.  Teller is one of the best young actors around, who amazed in The Spectacular Now and amazes again here.

The film's technical excellence is key to its success.  We have to hear the music, the drums, the subtle change in tempo from one playing of the riff to the next.  And its edited to within an inch of its life, especially in the closing ten or fifteen minutes.

It's in those final minutes that we finally come to understand why these two characters are together. JK Simmons' entire life relies on Miles Teller for validation.  If Teller isn't a great drummer, then there's no mark left on this world for all of Simmons' teaching career.  And Teller can only survive if there's someone to appreciate the greatness he yearns to have.  They might hate one another forever and always, but they need one another as deeply as life itself.

3 & 4

American Sniper & Interstellar

Like Boyhood, Interstellar kept me going for some three hours without much looking at the watch.  The story may or may not make sense.  Belay that; like most time travel the story is a mess when you sit down and think about it.  But it's imaginative and different.  The acting might be better than the movie deserves.  The effects are well-done without ever feeling like video games.  Hans Zimmer provides good musical accompaniment.  I'd be interested to see how it holds up on a second viewing.

And American Sniper hasn't quite left my mind in the month since I've seen it.  If anything, its call seems to be getting louder as the days go by.  Bradley Cooper's performance as the Chris Kyle is sensational.  He submerges himself in the role.  There's no trace of the Bradley Cooper in Silver  Linings Playbook.  There's just this man in this role.  The direction by Clint Eastwood does good service to a script that manages to glorify the lead character's actions in Iraq while being unflinching in its depiction of the damage to the character and his marriage on the home front.  As such, it's pro-war and anti-war and can be read as one wishes.  It's quiet, powerful film-making, another demonstration of Clint Eastwood's stature as one of the leading directors of the past three decades.

And in no particular order:

The documentaries Citizen Four, Remote Area Medical, Elaine Stritch Shoot Me and Life Itself.

Citizen Four won the Oscar.  Set mostly in a single hotel in Hong Kong during the days when Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's spying programs were beginning to be reported.  It works on multiple levels.  Snowden is someone who understands in abstract and theory the risks of what he's doing who in a matter of days comes to understand the reality of it.

Remote Area Medical is a little-seen movie which depicts one weekend of free medicine at a NASCAR track by the Virginia/Tennessee border.  Who are the people who'll line up in the dead of night for the opportunity to have someone look at their teeth or their eyes?  Who are the people who'll give up a weekend to provide the necessary services?  The documentary never stops to score political points.  It lets the footage speak for itself.  I'm the kid who grew up fixated on the behind-the-scenes aspect of things, the secret corridors at Disneyworld or the secrets of putting up skyscrapers or bridges, or the secrets of making Kermit ride a bike.  The film appealed to the kid by spending lots of time on the logistics of the clinic while simultaneously appealing to the adult who's thinking about the policy issues of our health care system.

The Elaine Stritch movie is very narrowly tailored for people who like showtunes, and isn't quite on a league with the other two.  But the film is such a perfect embodiment of its subject that I feel it deserves mention.

Life Itself is the documentary about Roger Ebert that was overlooked entirely by the Oscars.  It's from the director of Hoop Dreams, another documentary that the Oscars overlooked which was fiercely advocated by Ebert.  In spite of, or perhaps because of, the level of trust between the subject and the filmmaker, it stays just shy of hagiography, taking pains to ask if not to fully tackle questions raised by Ebert's career (prime example, how close to the filmmakers he critiqued should Ebert be?).  Which is fine in the end, because there are people who are better than the rest of us, and Ebert was clearly one of them.

Fault in Our Stars and Edge of Tomorrow

If only every movie for teens could be as good as Fault in Our Stars, and every sf adventure as good as Edge of Tomorrow.

Fault in Our Stars has an excellent cast, in both the primary and supporting roles, holds some surprises to those who haven't read the book, and elicits tears without ever being too (or at least not too too) blatantly manipulative.  Edge of Tomorrow falters a bit in its final scene which is poorly set up, poorly blocked, and thus incoherent, but before then...  Tom Cruise gives a performance with surprisingly little ego, well-matched by Emily Blunt and by a script that is unusually intelligent for the sf action movie.

Locke.

So it's basically a guy talking in a car for 90 minutes.  And I don't think you'll ever find the concept done better than this.  Tom Hardy shows he's much more than Bane.

Nightcrawler

Fierce acting by Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo helps cover any ethical uncertainties in the script.  And from a co-writer of Freejack!

Gone Girl

Good performances, a surprisingly puckish sense of humor, Hollywood gloss at its best and most powerful.

Pride

Surprisingly good, based on a true story of gay & lesbian Londoners coming to the aid of striking miners during the Thatcher era.  Paint-by-numbers as based-on-true-story movies often are, but the quality of the performances and of the script put it well above average in the genre.

Looper & Friends

So this Looper movie that opened on Friday, it is indeed pretty good, and I'd highly recommend the JABberwocky client list, many/most of whom have an inner sf geek, go and see it.

The barest bones of the concept:  we have time travel, since time travel is illegal only criminals travel in time, and criminals are sent back 30 years to be offed, in fact there are dedicated specialists who take care of that. Every once in a while, the specialist gets to "close the loop," kiling the 30-years-in-future version of himself that's just been sent 30 years into the future's past.  Yes, it's a time travel movie, so if this explanation is hard to follow don't blame me.  And specifically here, the future has a guy called "the rainmaker" who is taking over the mobs en masse, closing loops en masse, sending all his enemies back in time.  Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis play the same dude, the +30 and the -30 versions.  Bruce Willis doesn't want his loop to be closed, he wants to find and kill the person who's going to become "the rainmaker," this will not endear either of them to the mob headed by Jeff Bridges that runs the whole looper thing in the -30.

Mostly, this is handled with lots of pluses.  Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed, has an ace cast and an ace tech team, and the movie is well made, suspenseful, not without its bits of humor.

The time travel?  Well, it makes sense.  Or it makes as much sense as it can.  Like any time travel movie, if you get to thinking too hard about the consequences of the things that happen, you realize it's all quite nonsensical.  But Goldilocks would approve of the way the script makes just enough effort to make all of this seem logical complete with just enough hand-waving to cover up the illogic that you're willing to cut it some slack.

It's a nice contrast to some of the other attempts Hollywood will take to deal with sf themes, like the laughable In Time from a year ago.

Though just to say, for anyone who's seen, as one good example, Brian de Palma's The Fury, there's a scene that should easily reveal the identity of The Rainmaker long before the characters in the film get around to figuring it out.

Also worth seeing:  Michael Pena and Jake Gyllenhal in End of Watch.

Another auteur genre piece, this one written and directed by David Ayer,whom the posters remind us wrote the script for Training Day.

More good casting.  Gyllenhal and Pena have amazing chemistry and rapport together, and the script requires them to say things that always seem right, even at their most cliche.

As with Looper, a bit of slack needs to be cut.  The good guys can spend the whole movie radioing for backup and have it come nicely and quickly, until the final act when the back-up is most desperately needed and all of a sudden it's like the additional units need to drive to South Central from Santa Barbara.

This isn't Training Day.  It's a movie, and shit happens, but it's the cop drama that really has only the nicest things to say about cops.

It's safe to say I made the right decision to head to the movies after the first act of Harper Reagan, a play from an up-and-coming British playwright that makes it to New York a few years after a London debut.  A series of two-character scenes about a women I don't care about with family trouble I don't care about meeting characters I don't care about.  I hate walking out of plays, but with all the movies on my list and this play doing nothing for me...

Of course, I'm sure the reviews will be extravagant in their praise.  As I'd suspected, they've been very good for the play Detroit that I saw last weekend.

Friday night I saw an old "new to me" Hitchcock movie, Marnie from 1964, playing at the Loews Jersey as the lead-in to a 50th anniversary Bond double feature on Saturday of Dr. No and Goldfinger.  I'd have seen Goldfinger if not for a party to go to Saturday night, but had to settle for Marnie.  Even though it has Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren, who was also in The Birds for Hitchcock, there are lots of good reasons why this is obscure Hitchcock.  Marnie, the character played by Tippi Hedren, is a bag of troubled woman cliches.  Sean Connery's reaction to her makes absolutely no sense at all.  The production values are kind of cheesy, scenes of people driving that look unconvincing by standards of a 1922 silent film, blatantly matte-painted backgrounds to the point that they distract from the actual important things happening in the frame.  (I'm looking at the Wikipedia entry after typing this last sentence and seeing that these were things that were picked on by critics at the time.)

However, if you've seen a lot of Hitchcock, there's so much of Hitchcock in this movie that it's fascinating to ponder on in the context of his career.  There are so many Hitchcock women like the ones here, the suave debonair matinee idol like Sean Connery is a fixture of Hitchcock's work from Farley Granger in Rope through all the Hitchcock with Cary Grant or James Stewart.  There's a very good score by Bernard Herrmann who started in film with Citizen Kane and did a number of Hitchcock films later on.

Based on a novel by Winston Graham, the screenplay is the first by Jay Presson Allen.  This gives the movie a little extra resonance for me, Jay Presson Allen wrote (with her daughter) a stage play based on The Big Love, a book by Tedd Thomey which was part of my portfolio at Scott Meredith, and it's the one time I've gotten to go to a Broadway premiere and after-party. And it turns out that Jay Presson Allen was hired to script after Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain, and a one-time Scott Meredith employee himself, was fired.  Who knew!

The Loews Jersey has a 50'-wide screen.  There was music on the Wonder Organ before the performance.  It would be nice if they would get the balcony open, they've been talking about this for as long as I've taken in the occasional movie (they show one Fri/Sat per month from September to May).  I'm told the problem is less putting in the seats than being in a city-owned building with the city not rushing to repair the fire escapes and put in updated alarm systems.