2014: The Year of Shitty Movies

Hey there, cats and kittens,

While this time of year typically brings great joy to release my list of the best films of the year (as I did in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013), I regret to inform you that there will be no top ten list this year. This past year has given us, by far, the worst slate of motion pictures in more than a decade. Whereas the previous year gave us such noteworthy greats as "Wadjda," "12 Years a Slave," and "Nebraska," this year gave us a disappointing mess, for lack of a better word.

There were a variety of different duds, from blockbusters ("Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier") to independent artsy movies ("Only Lovers Left Alive"), and movies so boring the best solution was probably to turn them off ("Particle Fever" and "Le-Weekend"). Some big names gave us crap, too -- there was Darren Aronofsky's worst film ("Noah"), and Tim Burton's most boring ("Big Eyes"). And of course, how can I not forget Mr. Clint Eastwood? Eastwood, though still a universally-loved legend, this year not only gave us the awful "Jersey Boys" (which actually was ridiculed by the critics), but he also directed the most divisive, controversial (and arguably the worst) movie of his career: "American Sniper." Aside from the fact that this movie dumbs down and rewrites history while painting the Iraq War in black-and-white moral terms, this movie was simply boring--dreadfully boring (and you would think that a guy with four Oscars would notice a fake baby). Aside from its opening moments, there wasn't a single scene that really engaged me, and people might be able to legitimately claim it's "powerful" if they've never seen a plethora of other superior war movies. "American Sniper" is one of the worst movies of the year.

Then there's "Birdman," a movie I really, really wanted to like. What a cast -- Michael Keaton, in his comeback role, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis. Coupled with a clever screenplay, as well as a respected director and great cinematography, this should have been a movie I really liked. And yet, like so many other 2014 movies, I felt letdown and bored out of my mind. That being said, I hope Keaton wins the Oscar. His performance is excellent, and is one of the few good things about "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)." Perhaps one day, I will re-watch it and enjoy it, but I doubt that will happen.

There were movies that had great performances, like the always perfect Marion Cotillard (deservedly nominated this year for "Two Days, One Night") in "The Immigrant," Joaquin Phoenix in "Inherent Vice," Tom Cruise in "Edge of Tomorrow," Melissa McCarthy in "St. Vincent," Oscar Isaac in "A Most Violent Year," and the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman in "A Most Wanted Man"; great performances in crap movies that could cure insomnia. There were other movies that were just utterly ridiculous, like "Fury," a movie in which five Americans in a tank defeat practically the entire Nazi army, or pretentious junk like "Begin Again," or dull documentaries like "Citizenfour," or puffed-up animation such as "Big Hero 6," Disney's movie where they turn a likable healthcare-providing robot into a weapon of mass destruction. And it wasn't simply Hollywood that released such garbage. Films from a variety of different nations also bored me to tears: "Ida" from Poland; "The Tale of Princess Kaguya" and "The Wind Rises" from Japan; "Stranger by the Lake" and "Ernest and Celestine" (two radically different movies) from France; "What If" from Canada; "The Missing Piece" from Cambodia; "Calvary" from Ireland; "Mr. Turner," "Starred Up," and "Under the Skin" from the U.K.; and "Force Majeure" and "We Are the Best" from Sweden and Denmark.

Maybe I should just quit.

Here's hoping for better movies in 2015.

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Into the Woods

Once the familiar becomes strange, as Michael Sandel has said, things are never quite the same. So it is in Disney's adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's "Into the Woods." Here, the familiar becomes quite strange. I recall complaining to my theatre professor when my university put on a production of "Into the Woods" my freshman year that I didn't care for the sudden change in mood during the second act of the musical. But he and others convinced me of this necessity; strange is often quite good, and Disney, of all studios, has done a mostly good job of avoiding the "Disneyfication" of these famous stories like it did for practically a century.

"Into the Woods" is a musical featuring a variety of different fairy tales so juxtaposed with each other that one might be advised to take a copious amount of notes. There's the usual suspects: a little hungry girl with a red cape; Cinderella, slaving away at home for her terrible step-family; Jack, unable to help his mother because their cow will not produce any milk. But then there's something about a curse being placed on a house of a baker and his wife, or something like that. The plot is not too interesting. But the couple are forced to collect a series of items for a witch (Meryl Streep), who placed the curse, and so on their journey they come across all these characters.

Many of the musical numbers fall fairly flat in terms of interest, but there is something certainly peculiar about it all. Here, as our characters sing, the woods are just trees, and the trees are just woods; stay on the path, they may try, but something wicked surely will come. Little by little, we see these characters' stories becoming intertwined. Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) embarks on her journey into the woods to bring some bread to Granny (who is sick in bed), and, as we all expect, she comes across a hungry wolf (Johnny Depp). Depp appears only in one sequence as the Wolf, ears pointed and tie undone, with long black claws. It's a pretty good scene, and despite the (mostly) unfair wave of recent criticism he has recently received, like when the Washington Post's Stephanie Merry called him a "51-year-old ham," it shows that Depp still has it. Is the sequence disturbing? Yes, but by now everyone knows the dark history of these old fairy tales and their didactic nature -- take a read to find out what really happens to Cinderella's stepsisters in the original Grimm stories.

The other actors are also quite good. I knew Meryl Streep and Anna Kendrick (Cinderella) could sing, but I had no idea Tracy Ullman (Jack's mother) and James Corden, who plays the baker, could as well. But the one who really is impressive is Captain Kirk himself -- Chris Pine, as Prince Charming, belts out "Agony" with co-star Billy Magnussen in one of the best scenes in the movie. Also giving good performances are Crawford and Daniel Huttlestone as Jack (of the "Beanstalk" story). (Huttlestone appeared in "Les Miserables" two years ago and Crawford makes her film debut here; she also played the title character in "Annie" in the Broadway revival.)

Job certainly well done to director Rob Marshall. We all knew he could get great singing from his actors from his previous movies, but beyond that he deserves credit for this incredible production design, especially its design by Dennis Gassner and Anna Pinnock, and visual effects team lead by Christian Irles, Matt Johnson, and Stefano Pepin. In addition to a nomination for Streep and the production design team, Colleen Atwood is deservedly nominated for her costumer design. This is truly one of the most visually impressive movies of the year, especially the sequences featuring the angry lady-giant, imaginably one of the more difficult moments to visualize. Beyond that, there might be some disappointment. There isn't quite as much thought as I think many people would want, and I don't think there's any way of being able to decipher if this is or isn't a parable about AIDS, as some have theorized the original musical is. Still, compared to many of the disappointing duds of December, "Into the Woods" is quite the treat.

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Selma

"Our feet are tired, but are souls are rested."
-Martin Luther King

In the opening scene of "Selma," directed by Ava DuVernay, Martin Luther King stares into a mirror and mentions a "disdain for hopelessness." He's simultaneously putting on his tie. It is 1965. It's an incredible way to open the movie, with a haunting score by Jason Moran (in his debut). But then we immediately go from Oslo, Norway to Birmingham, Alabama, where four young girls are descending stairs in what appears to be a church, and it doesn't require a PhD in History to at least suspect what is coming. The church explodes, killing the four girls inside.

King, played exceptionally by David Oyelowo, is not going to tire from his success in helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and becoming a Nobel laureate -- he's instead going to Washington, D.C. to try and stress to President Lyndon Johnson that more urgent work is desperately needed, and they need LBJ's help. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act, blacks are still being systematically persecuted, and this is made possible by segregationist white governors, police chiefs, juries, etc. If a perpetrator actually sees his day in court (a rarity), then the white jury always finds the white criminal not guilty. Why? Because, MLK tells LBJ, to serve on a jury, a person needs to be registered to vote. And while, technically, blacks did have the right to vote in 1965, as the next scene demonstrates, this was often not actually the case. In the scene, Annie Lee Cooper (played by Oprah Winfrey, a producer of the film), attempts to register (again) to vote. She is rudely asked to recite the preamble to the Constitution. Upon beginning, she is then rudely demanded to identify how many county judges there are in Alabama. She answers correctly. "Name them," is the next order. Her request is denied.

The film accurately portrays Cooper's bravery and her punching a police officer, and Winfrey has stated that she wished to portray the character because of her courage. The depiction of President Johnson, however, has become a bit more controversial. A group of historians and Johnson advisers have pushed back against the notion that King and Johnson had a tense relationship, or that they disagreed about the procedure for solving the problems. Johnson historian Julian E. Zelizer recently wrote at Vox that Johnson and the civil rights leaders were partners, not adversaries. And as Bill Moyers, himself a former Johnson adviser, has pointed out, it was not Johnson who was behind the wiretapping of King's phones. The culprit? Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, two years earlier. And it should not be doubted that the FBI was ruthless toward King. In addition to the wiretapping, an FBI agent, using terms like "filthy" and "abnormal," sent King a letter suggesting the civil rights leader kill himself.

While the scenes with Johnson might be seen as dumbing-down the history of everything, I don't think they hurt the film too much. While it's truly bizarre that Oyelowo didn't receive a Best Act nomination, his fellow Brits give disappointing performances. Tom Wilkinson isn't particularly good as LBJ, and neither is Tim Roth, whose accent sounds more like an exaggerated version of Kevin Spacey in "House of Cards" than it does than the venomous governor of Alabama, George Wallace (whose daughter, incidentally, claimed Wallace saw the errors of his ways and regretted his years of proclaiming that in Alabama there would be "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever"). The rest of the cast, however, is sufficient and plentiful: Common, Wendell Pierce, Lorraine Toussaint, and Cuba Gooding, Jr. all appear as civil rights activists, as does Martin Sheen as a judge hearing the case of the legality of the banning of marching in Selma, and Carmen Ejogo (another Brit) is excellent as Coretta Scott King. In her scenes, Ejogo (who also played the character in "Boycott" from 2001 and who had met her) portrays Coretta not only as a concerned wife but one understandingly angry about her husband's infidelity in scenes demonstrating that DuVernay and her team aren't afraid of de-mythologizing MLK a bit.

"Selma it is." King and his advisers agree to go to Selma to march to Montgomery in a demonstration to demand their right to vote. They concentrate on a "defined battleground," and predictably are met with violence; it's "open season," as Johnson warns. One young man is shot and killed in front of his family. In scenes that provoke demonstrators to ask how it can be that troops were being sent to Vietnam but not Selma, skulls are cracked and scores of people chased. These are not, in any stretch of the imagination, easy moments to watch. As the judge Sheen plays notes, "the wrongs are enormous." So it was then, and so it is, frankly, now.

Is "Selma" a great film? No, and at times it doesn't aspire to be more than a mediocre movie about history, much like "The Imitation Game" before it. I hope that this continues the success of Oyelowo, who also appeared in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" and "Lee Daniels' The Butler," and I hope that the Academy (which is 93 percent white and 76 percent male, and has been stung by a Twitter campaign called #OscarsSoWhite with tweets like "they didn't see 'Selma' but their housekeeper said it was really good") continues to not only diversify but also has enough sense to nominate DuVarney when she earns it. That being said, "Selma" is a movie you should see, but that does not make it one of the year's best.

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The Interview

This is what all the fuss was about? A film showcasing James Franco trying way, way too hard? A film light on satire and heavy on bathroom jokes? Yes, indeed, this is, we have all found out, at the center of a geopolitical scandal like none before it. What was meant to be the third part of the Rogen/Franco trilogy (the first being the overrated "The Pineapple Express" and the second being the underrated "This Is the End") has become one of the most controversial motion pictures of our time, and all for nothing.

Here, Franco is Dave Skylark, a celebrity news journalist who shares a concern with his producer, Aaron Ropoport (Seth Rogen), that they and their show are not taken seriously by their fellow journalists and the public. Anxious to show the world their true talent, they discover that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (his name has not been altered for the movie; perhaps his personality hasn't, either) is a huge fan of the show, and so they have an epiphany: interview Kim himself. The CIA, however, isn't opposed to the idea of the two of them going to the most isolated nation in the world, but they would certainly appreciate it if the two of them could "take him out." Dave and Aaron are understandably a bit stunned. "You mean for drinks?" Aaron asks.

In "The Interview," Franco gives the least funny performance of his entire career, a performance so devoid of humor it makes his job as Oscar host look like a gem. He creates a character that is perhaps the most annoying in cinematic history, a rich celebration of desperate gibberish and cruel obnoxiousness. Just when it can't become any more over the top, he goes full-Smeagol, twitching and squirming about -- and we're barely ten minutes into the movie. Franco is an actor who is known for his immoderate hyperactivity in movies, but may this movie be a warning to all actors to avoid such an approach.

The movie continues, but the laughs do not. There are practically a dozen cameos, and none of them funny. Eminem comes out as gay ("the greatest moment in gay history"), Rob Lowe has no hair, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays with dogs, or something -- the stuff of comedic genius. Hollywood (and late-night comedians) need to learn that celebrity cameos aren't automatically funny, and they certainly aren't here. Rogen himself, though, usually offering the only chuckles sprinkled throughout the movie, doesn't really provide anything unique compared to his previous material. True, Rogen and Franco do have a couple of funny moments. As the North Korean guards bang on their door, the two, with material to assassinate Kim, must surely hide it, so they expectedly perform a false conversation: "Uh, I'm gonna take a shower." To which the reply is, "Okay...I'm gonna take one with you." Skylark and Kim develop a bit of a friendship; the latter shows off his tank that was a gift to his grandfather from Stalin. "In my country," Skylark assures him, "it's pronounced 'Stallone.'" The two relate to one another, and there are obvious allegories to the Kim-Dennis Rodman "friendship."

At least some props must be given: There are a few genuinely good moments of satire, not only poking fun at America's enemies, but America itself. The actor who plays Kim (Randall Park) is pretty good, and I couldn't help but think that the movie does, in fact, get better as it goes. I, for one, will never not be a joyful witness to a mocking of such a disgusting pig like Kim. (My sincere apologies to pigs everywhere for the comparison, for it is truly unjust.) 

But my ultimate conclusion is that this is certainly a missed opportunity. I know this is pretentious of me, but I think most folks would not understand that the portrayals of Kim, North Korea, and how North Koreans view their leader are not quite exaggerations in the movie. The film accurately portrays the fake crying, the charades of propaganda throughout every aspect of the country, and the deification of the Kim supreme leaders. Kang Chol-hwan, a defector from North Korea who survived ten years in a North Korean concentration camp, wrote in his memories that to his childish eyes, "Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-il were perfect beings, untarnished by any base human function. I was convinced, as we all were, that neither of them urinated or defecated. Who could imagine such things of gods?" "The Interview" puts it in a bit more sophomoric way by stating that Kim "has no need for a butthole."  Perhaps a movie like "The Interview" will help people everywhere realize not only the numerous absurdities of North Korea, but also the atrocities, the ultimate and complete oppression that is totally unprecedented, unlike anything ever seen in recent humor history. (Imagine if Hitler and Stalin dominated every aspect of their respective citizens' lives and if their families ruled for three generations.)

One could wonder if it's a good idea to laugh about this sort of thing when such things are actually occurring. Beyond that, while there now appears to be some doubt about who actually hacked Sony, some have argued that putting on your Uncle Sam hat and chanting U-S-A! as you watch Kim being mocked is what Kim actually wants you to do. But memories of this scandal behind the release of "The Interview" will far outlive the movie itself. And beyond that, as mentioned, this is a dismal attempt at satirizing a terrible despot. The Greatest Generation had "The Great Dictator." We have "The Interview."

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