1. Boyhood
I saw this film way back in June at the Nantucket Film Festival but it has stayed with me. It is a wonderful piece of filmmaking. Some people say Boyhood is boring or is just a gimmick. Well, yes, it is a gimmick, but it was an incredible idea to shoot a movie every year for 12 years, and watch the actors age along with their characters. The director, Richard Linklater, took a huge chance in picking a 6-year-old boy (Ellar Coltrane) to play this part. Think about Star Wars Episode I. But Ellar turned out to be amazing and so are the more well-known actors, Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, who play his parents. The beauty of this film is that it allows us to watch a family's normal life for 12 years, all without explosions or car chases. I loved it.
Together with Boyhood, these are the top two films of the year according to most critics, and one of them should win the Best Picture Oscar. Birdman really blew me away. The cast, including Michael Keating, Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Zach Galifianakis, Naomi Watts, and Amy Ryan, is amazing but they also had a really nice script to work from. My favorite movie line of the year is in Birdman when someone asks Watts how she knows Norton. She says, "We share a vagina." There is a huge energy crammed into a small space in this film, which follows the cast backstage at a Broadway theatre in long uninterrupted scenes. The person responsible is the director, Alejandro Inarritu. This film is the story of a washed-up actor, who used to play a superhero, attempting a comeback, who is played by a washed-up actor, who used to play a superhero, attempting a comeback. At the end, you wonder what really happened, what is real, and what is fantasy.
This was the first film I saw in 2014. It definitely suffered in the Oscar race by being released so early in the year but it is a great film with a great cast and an amazing true story to tell. Who could make up a plot where a bunch of art historians and artists are drafted into the army to save the art of Europe after D-Day? I've seen The Monuments Men three times and I have cried at the end every time. Some people think it must be a comedy since it has Bill Murray, John Goodman, and Bob Balaban. But these guys can act and their presence along with George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Jean Dujardin (The Artist), and Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey) makes for a very enjoyable movie. George Clooney also directed and shows once again that he has great taste in movies. He gives The Monuments Men a nice combination of action and camaraderie.
I've been a fan of Shailene Woodley since I first saw her in The Descendants in 2011. She is also starring in the Divergent series, the best of the current crop of young-adult dystopian dramas. The Fault in Our Stars, from the book by John Green, tells the story of two high-school kids, suffering from cancer, who meet and fall in love. The two kids are played by Woodley and Ansel Elgort, who also plays Woodley's brother in Divergent. They are both great and this movie does an excellent job of portraying them as people, not just cancer victims. It's was nice to see Laura Dern as Woodley's mother. Dern also plays Reese Witherspoon's mother in Wild, for which she is nominated for Best Supporting Actress. The Fault in Our Stars is a very romantic story where disaster is always waiting around the corner. And it has the most unusual setting for a first kiss that I have ever seen.
This is the third film, along with Boyhood and Birdman, that is on my list as well as being nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. This is a small film that will leave you feeling like you have post-traumatic stress disorder. It tells the story of a young man (Miles Teller) whose dream is to be drummer like Buddy Rich. He joins a jazz band at a prestigious Julliard-like school which is run by a teacher (J.K. Simmons) who likes to push his students to the breaking point. Thus begins a battle of wills that continues until the last seconds of Whiplash. The tension just builds and builds until the amazing last scene. Teller is a rising star, seen last year in The Spectacular Now, and in Divergent. He is excellent, and Simmons who is one of the hardest working character actors in Hollywood is nothing short of amazing. And he is also very scary. Simmons is nominated for Best Supporting Actor and is expected to win.
As you know, I see a lot of movies and, once in a while, I am rewarded by discovering a gem. Calvary is a gem that almost no one has seen. It won "Overlooked Film of the Year" from the Phoenix Film Critics Society which is very appropriate. Even though Calvary is a small film, it has a powerhouse Irish cast including Brendan Gleeson (best known as Mad-Eye Moody in Harry Potter), Chris O'Dowd (Girls), Kelly Reilly (Sherlock Holmes), and Aidan Gillen (Little Finger in Game of Thrones). Gleeson plays a priest in a small town in Ireland who is threatened with murder during confession in the first scene of the movie. This sets off a cataclysmic series of events leading to a shocking end of the film. The cast is great and the screenplay is amazing. This is an excellent movie. Rent it!
I'm not big on Tom Cruise films these days, but the trailer for Edge of Tomorrow was appealing, and I like Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada, Into the Woods) a lot. But, when I saw it, Edge of Tomorrow really blew me away. It is a very clever film, set in the near future when Earth is being attacked and destroyed by an alien invasion. Tom Cruise is a soldier with no experience forced to fight the aliens and he gets killed very quickly, but he wakes up and has to relive this day over and over. He realizes that another, much more accomplished soldier (Blunt), is also having this experience. They work together to try and defeat the aliens. This film has many nice echoes of Groundhog Day, and also mimics everyone's experience playing video games where you try to get a little bit further every time you play. Blunt is great as usual, and this is a very good role for Cruise. Bill Paxton has a nice supporting role as Cruise's Sergeant.
This is another film I saw way back at the Nantucket Film Festival. Love is Strange tells the story of two men (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina) in New York City, who have been together for 30 years but now have the opportunity to get married. As a result, Molina loses his job with the archdiocese, and the couple lose their apartment in NYC. They are forced to live with friends and relatives, including Lithgow's niece (Marisa Tomei) and her son (Charlie Tahan). Lithgow and Molina are incredible as the old married couple. My favorite scene is when they are forced to share a teenage boy's bunkbed. This is a very bittersweet movie about love and I fell in love with it.
This movie came out of nowhere. Who expected a Lego movie to appeal to adults as well as kids and have nice characters and a good script? But it does. This film, with the song that everyone ends up singing, tells the story of a lonely Lego piece named Emmett, who is trying to figure out his life. Along the way, he makes a bunch of friends, including an interesting woman, Wyldstyle, who happens to be dating Batman. The Lego story is framed by the story of the real-life boy who wants to play with the Lego and his father (Will Ferrell) who wants him to not to touch it. The plot is a bit like The Matrix, where Emmett is the "Special" who will lead all the Lego pieces to the promised land. The characters are all very inventive and the script is very funny. My favorite character is Batman. I love his song about darkness.
Anyway, like the song says, Everything in this movie is Awesome!
This was a pretty good year for Science Fiction movies, including Edge of Tomorrow, which made my Top Ten, and Guardians of the Galaxy, which almost did. The other great SciFi movie of the year was Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's latest film. I was looking forward to seeing it from when I saw the first teaser trailer and it did not disappoint (Sorry Robin). In Interstellar, the Earth is becoming unlivable due to global warming, and astronauts are sent through a wormhole to look for a new planet to live on. The amazing cast includes Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Matt Damon, Michael Caine, and John Lithgow. Physicist, Kip Thorne, acted as technical advisor for the movie and designed the special effects of the wormhole and black hole. This time travel, inter-dimensional story is really a love story between a father and a daughter, and between two people who have lost the ones they love. I liked it a lot.
