Note- This was originally a script for a video revising my best of 2014 list that I was never able to record for various reasons.
Alo Party Peoples.
My name is Greg Byrne, and tonight I’ll be taking you through the best that popular cinema had to offer in 2014. I know I already did one, but I’ve had some time to think and it could use some revision. Some movies have risen in my opinion, others have fallen, I’ve caught up on some of the stuff I missed through home video, and limiting myself to seven films made the original list lean more than a little heavily on sci-fi/fantasy material.
Because of that last one I’m expanding this list to an even ten. After all, I’m on record as stating that plenty of old guard critics turn their noses up at genre entries, so why should I do the same to their jam? To put it another way, if I get to have Tom Cruise dying over and over again in a mashup of Aliens and Groundhog Day, they get to have Richard Linklater’s real-life version of The Truman Show, fair is fair.
Now, I present my Top Ten Best Movies of 2014, that I saw.
#10) Interstellar
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| Directed by Christopher Nolan Written by Johnathan Nolan |
I bet you thought this would be higher, I know I certainly did.
Thinking back on it, Christopher Nolan’s love letter to the space program has more than a few problems. It can’t decide whether it wants to be hard sci-fi or pulp sci-fi, there is a case to be made that not taking Earth out of the picture once the primary cast leaves it undermines a lot of the tension in the third act, and the sound mixing is occasionally bad enough that one could be forgiven for assuming the projectionist fell asleep on the job. That being said, I can’t help but admire sticking as close to hard science as a story about rocketing off through mysterious portals to unexplored alien worlds can hope to, and yes, the message that the end of manned spaceflight symbolizes the death of human ambition appeals to the misguided idealist in me, and it’s actually become relevant again since Ted Cruz is now head of the committee overseeing NASA. Just when we were putting money into the space program again.
#9) 22 Jump Street
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| Directed and Written by Phil Lord and Chris Miller |
Phil Lord and Chris Miller have really come into their own this year. They might not exactly be big names yet, but they’ve got a couple of big hits under their belts that audiences and critics alike have loved. They seem to have mastered a comedic doublethink where they’re more than willing to mock the shallow and easily disposed of kinds of movies they make while at the same time proving themselves and their work to be quite indisposable. Their latest outing builds its jokes around the all too common sequel killer of making the first movie again but with more money involved, while making the conflict between that and the main cast’s desire to branch out into something new the central conflict of the movie. All while somehow never coming off as pretentious and being the best pure comedy of the year.
#8) Gone Girl
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| Directed by David Fincher Written by Gillian Flynn |
Gone Girl starts out as a kind-of-cheesy murder mystery by way of the Lifetime Channel that just happens to have a much higher budget and a lot more talent involved than that description might imply. But then, almost out of nowhere, it reveals its true colors as a lurid, sleazy, and just a little trashy psychological-thriller. How trashy are we talking? It’s the kind of film that gets in a clear two frame shot of Ben Affleck’s penis in the middle of the resolution more or less because it can, but with a director like David Fincher at the helm it becomes something close to a masterpiece.
#7) Noah
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| Directed and Written by Darren Aronofsky |
There were a lot more religious and/or Bible movies this year for whatever reason. Some of them were forgettable fluff, some of them were strangely empty, and then there’s Noah. Darren Aronofsky took a look at the rather short and straightforward section of Genesis that is Noah’s ark and decided to make it less like Sunday School and more like Lord of the Rings... and a rant against over-consumption of fossil fuels (in case antediluvian humanity being a bunch of globalized city dwellers tearing up the Earth in search of a sparking rock was too subtle)... and a psychological horror film once Noah and company get on the ark. Just one of those angles would probably be enough to carry a movie, but combining all of them results in a unique and bizarrely brilliant film that’s like nothing else you’ll see in theaters.
#6) The Fault In Our Stars
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| Directed by Josh Boone Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber |
In 2012, author and vlogger John Green turned a bog-standard teenybopper romance story into something like a deconstruction of its own genre by throwing the ever-present specter of death into the proceedings, and the resulting book, The Fault In Our Stars, won the hearts of crying teenage girls on Tumblr the world over. In 2014, director Josh Boone turned that book into a movie that still captures the spirit of its source material and the gravity of its subject matter, but also reconstructs its genre by showing that love can transcend the mortal coil. In a year awash with YA movies, this was something special, mostly because the people involved put actual effort into making the best movie possible. That alone would have gotten it in my good graces, but it also being a charming little production earns it a spot on this list.
#5) The Lego Movie
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| Directed and Written by Phil Lord and Chris Miller |
Phil Lord and Chris Miller's other big hit in 2014, while obviously playing to a different audience than 22 Jump Street, comes at its subject matter with the same liberal dosage of meta-humor that allows them to transcend the inanity of their premises. The Lego Movie starts out looking like the kind of soulless, purely profit-driven, toyetic film-as-product that could only exist in the Franchise Age in the worst possible way, but then quickly becomes a sharply cutting satire of pretty much everything wrong with corporate Hollywood and the way Lego sells its products, without resorting to jaded cynicism or coming off as mean spirited. That shouldn’t be possible to pull off, but Lord and Miller somehow managed to do just that. Everything is awesome, even when it really shouldn’t be able to.
#4) Guardians of the Galaxy
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| Directed by James Gunn Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman |
Everything was awesome about this too. James Gunn, a veteran of the indie scene for years made his entry into the big leagues with 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 landscape. If anyone high up at Disney sees this, let me give you some advice. Since he’s already in your Rolodex, get this man on a Star Wars project A.S.A.P. You will not regret it, I guarantee.
#3) Captain America: The Winter Soldier
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| Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo Written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely |
The best and riskiest Marvel Studios project to date, Winter Soldier goes above and beyond simply being a phenomenal action film, and gets as close to controversial as a money-printing arm of the Disney Empire will ever dare to get. Taking on the fact that you kind of have to get political with this character in a modern setting, it pits Steve Rogers and company up against the 21st’ Century surveillance state by making them whistleblowers in Star Spangled Spandex, while still being an immensely entertaining spy thriller adventure romp.
#2) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
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| Directed by Matt Reeves Written by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver |
Much like its predecessor in 2011, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is the best kind of summer blockbuster. It manages to be a smart, thoughtful piece of big-idea sci-fi while also being a gripping war drama that just happens to involve sentient monkeys, and then it becomes a viscerally thrilling action film in the third act. We’ll get to what was better in a second, but this was easily the best film of the summer, the opposite of what we usually expect in that season, and is my favorite movie of the year.
#1) Selma
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| Directed by Ava DuVernay Written by Paul Webb |
In a year when the achievements and shortcomings of the Civil Rights movement were one of the most talked about aspects of culture, Ava DuVernay’s Selma strips away the mythology around Martin Luther King to reveal the imperfect human underneath, and claims that he had more in common with the protesters in Ferguson than the sanitized version of the man we usually see. It boldly posits that society does not improve on a preset timer, but only improves when those who will not stand for an unjust status quo tackle it head on and force society to change for the better. Gripping, brutal, and emotionally moving, Selma is a spectacular film, and while it might not be my favorite movie of the year, it is definitely the best film to be released in 2014.
Let’s see what’s coming up in 2015. The Wachowskis are doing a space opera, that sounds like a party, Divergent 2 looks hilarious, a new Avengers, and ooh, a new Star Wars, no matter how that turns out, it will probably be something to talk about. Thanks for watching, and have a nice day. Oh, and before you ask, I’m probably not doing a video version of the worst list since that hasn't really changed.
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