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e’ve been hearing for years that television is better than film. 2014 was the year where Hollywood said, “If we’re going down, we’re going down swinging.” Believe it or not, The LEGO Movie set the tone for the whole year: I really felt the effort of filmmakers putting care and creative energy into movies that might be perceived as corporate cash-grabs. There was a lot of original action to be found in indies, documentaries – every category across the boards. I enjoy pairing up titles as fun thematic double bills. If a movie appears by itself, it is sui generis and stands alone. Gone Girl David Fincher doesn’t do happy-go-lucky. He’ll probably never make anything that would ever be described as a romp. Based on Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel, Fincher’s acid triumph stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as a certain species of perfect couple. Pike disappears on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, and it turns out that Affleck hates her and is happy to see her go. Believe me when I say the plot thickens; Fincher and Flynn poke holes and reveal lies that were right in front of us from the beginning. This is good, adult, disturbing stuff that makes The War of the Roses look like a spitball skirmish. Boyhood / Birdman Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood for a few days at a time, for twelve years. After putting all twelve short films together, Boyhood is the result: we watch a kid (Ellar Coltrane) become an adult in a trimmed-down version of “real time”. Other than the Harry Potter films and Michael Apted’s Up series, I’ve never seen anything like it. Stanley Kubrick said that the one thing cinema couldn’t do is the sweep of a person’s life. Boyhood gets damn close, so close that the term “epic” seems downright puny. Coltrane is no Hollywood trained seal, and it’s just as amazing watching the evolution of Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, playing Coltrane’s parents. Time passes in a nightmarish, headlong way in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s stunning Birdman. Michael Keaton owns the film in a quasi-autobiographical role as a washed-up
b y B r y a n Va n C a m p e n actor in comic book movies trying one last desperate time for a comeback by writing, directing and starring in a Broadway play. The film unravels as one unbroken shot that can take us anywhere inside or outside the theater; Birdman starts as a boundless series of rehearsal disasters and cumulative flop sweat, but soon moves into cosmic matters. Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts and Zach Galifianakis stand out in a terrific ensemble. Big Hero 6 Disney’s animated Big Hero 6, very loosely adapted from a Marvel comic title, has tons of style, a thrilling sense of scope, action sequences of pure flight and fancy, mass and movement. It also has a key central performance by Scott Adsit (30 Rock) of considerable charm, humor and warmth. Your kids will zip out of the theater humming the superhero skirmishes, while you will be surprised at how emotional you got watching a walking balloon animal. The Grand Budapest Hotel / Interstellar Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is great, along with The LEGO Movie easily the first really fine movie of the year. Anderson’s group outings are as meticulously choreographed as the settings for his films: elaborate ornate pop-up book pages, a world as intricate and clockwork as the insides of a Swiss watch. At one point the film shifts into stop-motion animation and it totally works. After you see the sequence, you’ll wonder how Anderson could have done it any other way. There are flashes of nudity and surprising violence and Ralph Fiennes explodes throughout with comic bursts of exquisite profanity. Who knew how funny he could be? I caught up with Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar just before deadline, and I continue to be impressed by Nolan’s ability to make popular entertainment from fairly heady subjects. It’s also a somewhat more humanist riff on 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Everyman astronaut Matthew McConaughey searches for a planet that can take over for Earth. Nolan’s signature editing style compresses entire lifetimes and spans eons; I’m not sure if the film’s third act solution works in hard science terms, but I’ll take my reservations as testaments to the film’s cumulative power.
Frank /Big Eyes Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank is one of the best rock movies to describe being outside the fish bowl one day and well inside the next. It’s all about this songwriter wannabe Jon (Domhnall Gleeson).One day, he sees a mad man attempt to drown himself, and it turns out the mad man was the keyboard player for this guy Frank’s band, and suddenly Jon has a gig. Frank (Michael Fassbender) is kind of a cult legend because the guy’s always wearing this goofy Bob’s Big Boy-style papier-mâché head. Frank’s head never comes off. Never. Fassbender has a great character to play here, based on Christopher Mark Sievey. It’s safe to say that Fassbender gets every bit he can out of Frank’s manic yet fragile nature. Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, based on the twisted story of Walter and Margaret Keane (Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams) is his best, most interesting film since 1994’s Ed Wood. No wonder since this little-known story of art theft – Keane claimed credit for his wife’s notorious “Big Eyes” paintings – was written by the writers of Ed Wood, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. (They also penned the Larry Flynt and Andy Kaufman bio-pics.) A Million Ways to Die in the West/They Came Together I loved Seth MacFarlane’s wicked and wise Western parody A Million Ways to Die in the West, the funniest such spoof to come down the pike since Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. MacFarlane and Charlize Theron are terrific as two people who realize how much smarter and savvier they are in MacFarlane’s nightmare vision of how cheap life was in the Old West. MacFarlane’s cartoon staging aside, all the movie’s appalling visions of death happen to be based in fact. Neil Patrick Harris, Giovanni Ribisi and Sarah Silverman are great scene stealers. Director David Wain and co-writer Michael Showalter (MTV’s “The State”)’s latest comedy They Came Together does the Airplane! thing to the Nora Ephron formula – the odious You Got Mail is the main model spoofed here, continued on page 18
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A Year BVC Presents: on the Aisle Best Films of 2014
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