Tell me yours and if you click on this link I’ll tell you mine. BONUS I also tell you my favorites from 2013 and 2012 in a drive-by shooting at the end. BAM.
Now that my hair’s dry I must go to the grocery store. It’s been ages, the pantry is DRY like the Sahara I’m telling you.
Turns out I haven’t told you about my favorites since 2011. So I thought I’d drop a quick note to ya about 2014 while I’m waiting for my hair to dry. You are welcome! 🙂 HA!
I saw 29 movies in 2014, thanks to Project Life for reminding me of some of the titles as I sorta lost track of keeping up my list OOPS.
1, 2. My favorite two movies in 2014 were Only Lovers Left Alive and Words & Pictures with the former maintaining a slight lead over the latter were I forced to name an absolute favorite. They were both movies about relationships; about both who and what we choose to have in our lives; about the importance of art, words and music; about what maintains us across time; about how we have to live within our own choices and our weakness, and while sometimes that does damage, sometimes that’s a place to have strength. They were both filled with lovely performances and I loved them to pieces.
3. My third favorite movie was Guardians of the Galaxy, by far the most fun I had in the theater (both times!) all year. I’ve already watched it at home, I’ve listened to the music a million times (after I put the soundtrack into the correct order-it-was-played-in-the-movie order; that IS the music of much of my childhood, I was born in ’68 after all); and it only furthered the extreme goodwill I have had toward Chris Pratt since Everwood (where he got to play a *slightly* more layered character than his Parks & Rec tour de force as Andy Dwyer).
4. Calvary. Wicked powerful performance by Brendan Glesson. Very moving.
5. The Imitation Game. Love Cumberbatch, love Knightley, LOVE Matthew Goode (LOVE HIM, WATCH THIS!) Bring a kleenex for the ending–and I don’t mean the ending of the war. Lords of kobol, the horrible things we have done to people for so-called morality are just sickening.
6. Begin Again. I just rewatched this after recommending it to a friend for the James Corden performance as she’s geeking out into him in Into the Woods. This movie, like my numbers 1 and 2, is really about choosing what’s important to you and then being forced to live with that decision, through good and bad. I read an article recently about how this director (who also did Once, which I did NOT like, too sappy por moi) does all these films about unrequited relationships and how weird that is (how he thinks that’s what true love is, some unconsummated-esque state of being). I actually thought this movie was NOT about a relationship between Knightly and Ruffalo and that what happens romantically in HIS life in the movie was truly perfect. If you’ve ever seen Kevin Williamson defend the idea that Dawson was indeed Joey’s soul mate even if Pacey is her forever relationship…well I don’t think the Knightly/Ruffalo characters needed to be in love. That was my take anyway.
I also REALLY like: A Most Wanted Man (we sure are assholes, us Americans); The Grand Budapest Hotel (fantastic, but not as good as the fabfabfabulous Moonrise Kingdom, the standard against which all his movies shall forever be judged); Wish I Was Here, even if it stretched the reality a bit for Kate Hudson to be Zach Braff’s wife (doesn’t it seem Judd Apatow-esque to always have the homelier guy have the most gorgeous girl); Rob the Mob, which was fun and had some great performances from lesser known peeps; Wild, which I found oddly affecting; Magic in the Moonlight; and Edge of Tomorrow which was HILARIOUS. I mean the first 35 minutes of that movie are magically funny. Boyhood is definitely worth seeing, although maybe not deserving of its mostly format-based hype.
I liked but ultimately found unsatisfying Snowpiercer and Birdman.
I saw some other movies that were OK or fine but not horrible. You can check the list and ask me if you’d like to know about one or another in particular, I obviously am happy to share opinions/thoughts. HA.
What I did think was HORRIBLE was: Wolf of Wall Street, what an egotisitical piece of utter bullpucky; Under the Skin, monotonous and bizarre but not bizarre interesting more like bizarre this director told, showed and gave us NOTHING HERE; and sadly the new Chris Rock movie Top Five which I really really wanted to like because I think he’s a comic genius (and wicked smaht, yes please say that with a Boston accent) but ultimately was a big hot steaming mess.
AND BONUS:
I saw 30 movies in 2013 and my favorites were: Flight, Zero Dark Thirty; Much Ado About Nothing (LOVE!!), Mud, Fast & Furious 6 (YES I SAID IT), Fruitvale Station, American Hustle, and it’s a tough call between Dallas Buyers Club and Philomena. Least favorites were: Byzantium (overwrought), What Maisie Knew (sadly not very compelling), To Rome with Love (lame)….I don’t know, looking over that list right now nothing jumps out as me as SUCKING AS MUCH AS WOLF OF WALL STREET. So maybe I just didn’t really see many bad movies in 2013.
I saw 34 movies in 2012 and my favorites were: the aforementioned Moonrise Kingdom; Silver Linings Playbook; Skyfall (SO GOOD); Cabin in the Woods (damn smart); A Separation, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Least favorites: Magic Mike (so disappointing), Killer Joe (so disgusting horrifying); and Battleship (so so so so bad). OH WAIT I actually wrote a post about my 2012 faves. I guess my memory has changed things, eh. HA.
No idea what made me pick this up in the bookstore the other night but it was actually kinda tough to put down…despite being really nasty and vile and mean and icky. People have been killed, tricked, screwed over and continue to mess with each other throughout the book. But at the very deep down heart of it is a sweet teenage love story gone wrong. And there’s some clever wonderings about theology folded in as well if you’re interested in that.
I’m definitely interested in reading more of Hill’s stuff although I definitely need a palate cleanser before that.
Christoph Waltz is SO (appropriately) creeptastic in this movie. And then I think about who and how he is in other movies…and then I listened to him being interviewed by Elvis Mitchell on The Treatment…and I’m wondering if creepy is where his true acting forte lies. (GAH. Horrifying.)
This is such an intensely weird, unsettling story. Well acted, well directed. But certainly not lovable.
There were some things about it that I thought could have been fleshed out more. And in some ways it’s one of those movies that doesn’t really GO anywhere with what it’s got to say (it just calmly tells this woman’s story from one point to another). But it’s worth seeing.
Gift from Dad for christmas in 2007, finally found its way to the top of the list. Heh.
First book finished in 2015 and it’s a doozy–I started it back in November and while admittedly I don’t have designated reading time these days (I’m not on public transit for school), it took me longer than it could have. It’s got numerous, very disparate sections as the characters keep (unbeknownst to themselves) reincarnating and regrouping in different places and times. There were some sections I just looooved (Nsara) and others I had a hard(er) time maintaining focus/interest in.
But throughout he’s not just telling you a story or having characters interact–this is a novel (and novelist) of big, huge, ginormous ideas and just as the characters in this book struggle with them through all different times and places, they are the questions that really inform our entire existence. So exhausting to think about at times! The ideas of how we move through our own histories, and how we arrange our belief systems, and how we choose to negotiate with others… truly fascinating, sometimes disturbing, never boring.
Having JUST finished an entire year of Project Life (scrapbooking, basically), I couldn’t stop grinning at this quote: “What’s hardest to catch is daily life. This is what I think rarely gets written down, or even remembered by those who did it–what you did on the days when you did ordinary things, how it felt doing it, the small variations time and again, until years passed.”
And questions like this one are what keep me up at night, usually worrying for my students’ futures in this messed up world of ours: What causes well-fed and secure people to work for the subjugation and immiseraton of starving insecure people? How many people can the Earth support? Why is there evil? How can we make a decent existence? How can we give to our children and the generations following a world restored to health?”
Because when it comes right down to what’s really important: how can we be decent humans in THIS life…and possibly our next?