The Archivis' First Annual Thinking Man Awards (Films of 2014)

Alo Party Peoples.

Let me make a couple of things clear, first off, film making is not engineering. While technical execution is definitely something I notice and value, unlike some fans of certain other mediums I could name, it isn't my only criteria for whether something is good. That's why I don't give out numbered scores, I don't think one can boil complex subjective opinions about an art form down to a percentage. A prime example of this is Neill Blomkamp's Elysium from last year. From a technical perspective, it's amazing, the man knows how to wring every last drop of pathos from each expertly arranged shot, but his script was an awkward hard-left polemic about U.S. immigration policy that had no emotional center, and the production falls flat as a result.

Also, this isn't a list of the best movies of 2014, and that's for a couple of reasons. One of which is that I didn't see every movie to come out this year, critical darlings such as Gone Girl or Snowpiercer, and likely Academy Award front-runners like Boyhood or Birdman are productions that I heard a lot of good things about, but haven't seen for one reason or another. This is a list of my favorite movies that I did see this year, because quality is in the eye of the beholder. There are things that I really enjoyed this year that I know some of my readers despised, but I promised myself that I would be honest in my appraisal, because otherwise I would be doing you, my readers, a disservice. Enough from me, lets get to the part you came here for. The only criteria is that it has to have had a wide release by Christmas so you can see it by the end of the year. First up, the runners up and stuff that didn't meet the release criteria. In no particular order...

• Earth To Echo: Director Dave Green and writer Henry Gayden went and made E.T. for the Digital Age on more than a superficial level, and I fully expect that this movie will take E.T's place among the digital generation, or Net-generation, or Post-Millenials, or whatever we decide to call the generation born after 2003. If you have children that age and need a Christmas gift for them, go with this movie, they'll love it.
• Edge of Tomorrow: Most people didn't see this Doug Liman directed action flick in theaters, enough for Warner Bros. to re-brand it Live, Die, Repeat when it got to home media, but now's your chance to catch up. It's the best Tom Cruise movie in years, the Mass Effect/Halo/Call of Duty inspired visuals are amazing, and they compliment a screenplay that successfully uses video game mechanics to tell an engaging story in a non-interactive medium.
• 22 Jump Street: Phil Lord and Chris Miller, two of the best comedians working in Hollywood today, hit another one out of the park with the sequel to their 2011 hit 21 Jump Street, an in-name only adaptation of a mostly forgotten 1980s' cop show was a fantastic comedy, and also a meta-commentary on the nature of comedy sequels. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum continue to be a fantastic comic duo, make sure to watch through the credits.
• Foxcatcher: A fantastic actor's showcase, and a superb work of dark, foreboding atmosphere courtesy of director Bennett Miller. I fully expect Steve Carrel and Channing Tatum to get Oscar nominations for their roles.
• The Zero Theorem: Are you looking for a 21st' Century take on the themes and ideas of The Matrix? Did Lucy look promising in that regard, but disappoint you with it's pretentious insanity? Then I've got the movie for you. Director Terry Gilliam's sets are gorgeous, Christoph Waltz is amazing in it, and it serves as a fascinating look into the paradoxically interconnected yet isolating nature of our wired, information saturated, post-Digital world. Definitely worth checking out if you can find it.
• Life Itself: A fantastic documentary chronicling the life of the late Roger Ebert, the man you can thank for film critics being anything more than just that guy who writes about movies in the newspaper. Probably soon to become mandatory viewing in film classes.

And now...

The Archivis' Top Seven Favorite Movies of 2014

#7) Noah Directed and Written by Darren Aronofsky

Distributed by Paramount
Pictures

Even before seeing Noah, I knew that it would be a polarizing film, just because of its source material. That the actual film depicted the titular Noah as an insane radical willing to let all of humanity die in keeping to his interpretation of the Creator's (the movie never uses the word 'god', another point of contention) plans made that even more apparent. Sure enough, I had plenty of discussion with my devout Christian father about it, and I can completely understand feeling that Darren Aronofsky is spitting on holy writ. However, I was looking at it through a secular lense as a fantasy movie, and in that light, Noah is at once an environmentalist polemic, a fantastic visual effects showcase, a chilling character study, and a stunning epic. With so many disparate parts, it shouldn't be able to work, but just out of sheer artistic effort, it does. The only reason it isn't any higher is that the sort of barely controlled madness on display is on the verge of reaching Lucy levels of pretentiousness. If you've seen either movie, you know exactly what I'm talking about.


#6) The Lego Movie Directed and Written by Phil Lord and Chris Miller

Distributed by
Warner Bros.

No, you haven't taken leave of your senses, I'm being serious. I can't believe it either, but The Lego Movie was far better than it had any right or reason to be. It's easy to look at this as symbolizing the final victory of Corporate Hollywood and the culmination of the Franchise Age, and it is a symbol of that, but it's also a good movie in spite of that. Besides the breathtakingly detailed animation and fantastic voice cast, what really made The Lego Movie able to transcend its origins as a pumped up toy commercial and become something truly special was a lively, funny, and even intelligent script about the dissonance between Lego as a creative tool and the way that Lego sells its product from Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the best in the business at turning stupid ideas into good final products.


#5) Interstellar Directed by Christopher Nolan, Written by Johnathan Nolan

Distributed by
Warner Bros./Paramount

This was the movie that I was looking forward to more than any other this year, and it certainly delivered in a lot of ways. Christopher Nolan's decades spanning space epic was a lot of things. At once an IMAX show reel of gorgeous spaceflight sequences, a condemnation, albiet out of date, of the abandonment of manned space travel, the most human feeling film that Nolan has made to date, and one of the most hard science adhering blockbusters ever. That's, like a list of things that will potentially get your movie in my good graces, enough that I can't put it any higher out of fear that it's pandering to my sweet spots, and also some wonky-ness in the third act including "experimental" sound mixing that occasionally drowns out dialogue in such a way that, no joke, I thought was the result of an inexperinced projectionist not knowing how to work with 70 mm film.


#4) The Fault In Our Stars Directed by Josh Boone, Written by Scott Neustader and Micheal H. Weber

Distributed by
20th Century Fox

John Green is a man that I respect a good deal, but he's also a pretty weird dude that writes some pretty offbeat books. So I was thus interested to see how one of them would work on the silver screen. It turns out that, at least this one, becomes a sweet, immensely watchable romantic comedy that still manages to capture the gravity of it's subject matter. This is after all a movie about teenagers dying of cancer. Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort have fantastic chemistry, director Josh Boone gives it a fun, indie-vibe charm, and unlike pretty much every other YA movie that I saw this year, the people making it actually gave a s*** about something other than their bottom line, and tried to make the best movie possible. Even if it wasn't a charming little production, that alone would get it in my good graces.



#3) Guardians of the Galaxy Directed by James Gunn, Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman

Distributed by
Marvel/Disney

I know that it might seem odd to put a big ridiculous action movie from Marvel/Disney above Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan, but hot damn, Guardians of the Galaxy is just a wonderful time at the movies. James Gunn, a veteran of the indie scene for years before getting this shot at the big leauges, made a gleefully irreverent action-comedy that also works as a pulp space opera in the vein of the original Star Wars or The Fifth Element that feels almost, well, alien in a grim, self-serious 21st' Century blockbuster scene. The assembled cast have fantastic chemistry with one another, every frame is bursting with imagination, and it's a welcome change of pace.




#2) Captain America: The Winter Soldier Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, Written by Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, and Ed Brubaker

Distributed by
Marvel/Disney

This is the best Marvel Studios movie to date. Not only is it a good action movie, and to be clear Winter Soldier is a great action movie, with excellent fight choreography and visual effects, but it has the confidence in itself to tackle the big problem, at least from a marketing standpoint, with using this character in a modern setting. i.e. you can't not get political with a character named after a country that wears its flag as a uniform, especially the United States these days. It does this by continuing the vein of post-9/11 allegory that has permeated much of Marvel's Phase 2 release cycle, taking on the myriad of issues relating to NSA wiretapping and casting it's hero in the role of Edward Snowden in Star Spangled Spandex, a bold move, and they manage to pull it off without coming off as preachy.




#1) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Directed by Matt Reeves, Written by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver 

Distributed by
20th Century Fox

Screen Junkies summed up the appeal of the current Planet of the Apes series really well in their Honest Trailer of Dawn with the following words. "Settle in for the thinking man's summer blockbuster, chock full of; complicated characters, political maneuvering, family dynamics, and a monkey dual-wielding machine guns on horseback fighting a tank!" This is the best kind of mass entertainment, pulling of the miraculous feat of being both a smart, compelling work of big idea sci-fi drama, and a crowd pleasing spectacle at the same time, what one critic called "the antithesis of what we're usually asked to accept in the middle of summer". It's fantastically acted, intelligently written, and a viscerally thrilling action movie. Easily the best of this summer, and my favorite movie of the year.

Before we go, here are some observations about this year in movies.

• This is the year that Captain America was a better spy thriller than Jack Ryan.
• This year was the return of the Biblical epic to mainstream movie going.
• We learned that the ladies can open a movie, that the Marvel Studios name can open a movie, but that Tom Cruise evidently cannot.
• We learned that the profiting-off-nostalgia wave has reached the Nineties.
• This was the year that showed the YA movie trend is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
• This was the year that Sony was crippled by a malware attack that was almost definitely North Korea over The Interview, a movie about assassinating Kim Jong Un. If that isn't a testament to the power of cinema, I don't know what is.

That was fun, and it isn't lost on me that most of my choices have a somewhat fanciful/fantastical bent to them. Part of that is personal interest, and part of it is that a lot of studio output is genre material these days, and has been since Star Wars ushered in the modern blockbuster. For context on my choices, you can see a list of the movies that I saw this year here, and for my worst list you can go here. Happy New Year, my readers, let's hope for some more gems in 2015.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B