My Top-10 films of 2014

If I were to identify a theme present in most of the films on my top-10 this year it would be genre films that managed approach things from an interesting angle or simply films with familiar trappings that completely subverted my expectations. I guess as someone who see's a lot of movies, reads about a lot of movies, and ends up writing about a lot of movies, I want to be surprised, and this list consists of the ten best surprises I encountered this year.

10 – Dear White People

Forget the loaded titled that sparked a short-lived Twitter campaign, this debut feature from writer/director Justin Simien is one of the sharpest and smartest comedic satires about race since Spike Lee's “Do The Right Thing."  “Dear White People” examines culture-clash in a post-racial America through a nuanced lens of youthful identity panic and turns what could have been a simple and predictable story about a racially divided college into a universal message about learning how to define yourself instead of living up to the expectations of others.

09 – Snowpiercer

From South Korean genre director Bong joon-ho comes his first English language film, a multinational post-apocalyptic action thriller about a team of survivors fighting their way through a train that separates the worlds population by class as they get closer to the engine room. There they hope to find a path to freedom and equality. This is an unapologetic, bleak vision of our world's current Geo-political mess, in which joon-ho refuses to supply any easy answers. Filled with shocking blasts of action violence and beautifully arranged set-pieces, “Snowpiercer” takes the tropes of a familiar hero story and forces the audience to examine difficult political questions.

08 – Blue Ruin

Set in small town, rural America, this mini-budge revenge tale is another film that leaves you guessing all the way through. Almost a Coen Brothers archetype, our protagonist is an unassuming, ill-equipped nebish who takes on more than he is capable of dealing with when trying to right the wrongs between two warring families. While the tone or look of the film never suggests overt comedy, the priceless scenes of actor Macon Blair fumbling through learning how to shoot guns, dispose of a bodies and hide from his pursuers creates a nervous laughter throughout.

07 – The One I Love

There have been plenty of indie flicks about young couples who're stuck in a vacation home to work through their relationship problems, but never one as chilling and surreal as director Charlie McDowell and writer Justin Lader's “The One I Love.” Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss are sent to vacation house per recommendation of a counselor and after some drinking and music they find that the house provides a type of strange existential therapy that can't easily be explained. I don't want to say too much because going on the ride is all the better when you don't know anything about it. All I will say is that the movie takes an absurd premise and follows it to it's natural extremes, and does so without overshadowing the original theme of what it takes for a young marriage to resolve problems of trust and communication.

06 – Gone Girl

David Fincher's adaptation of Gillian Flynn's popular airport novel “Gone Girl” also examines trust issues between sorted lovers. Fincher is a master at work here, as he takes what could have been a overwrought and over-written B-movie, and through his own cinematic brilliance, he confidently guides us through a brooding noir yarn that somehow manages to jump the shark three times and recover just as quick.

05 – Only Lovers Left Alive

Indie veteran and uber-cool NY hipster Jim Jarmusch made a film about rock and roll, vampire junkies and reworked a well-worn and tired cinematic myth to create a sarcastic and post-modern world of his own. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are captivating as bored shut-ins who have to live their lonely lives away from the public that worships them. Jarmusch's romantically lit vision of the deteriorating industrial neighborhoods of Detroit also suggests that these character's observations about the generational and economic changes in high/low culture has had a measurable effect on America's global relevance.

04 – Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal gives his best performance yet in Dan Gilroy's black-as-coal media satire “Nightcrawler.” Here he plays Luis Bloom, a desperate and eager swindler who goes to uncomfortable lengths to film the fallout of crime scenes before his competitors get there first. Gilroy compares the hunger to succeed with a sociopaths lack of empathy, creating a nocturnal LA milieu where the loners and losers rule the city.

03 – Whiplash

Forget those warm and fuzzy flicks about an older mentor and his younger talented protegee looking for words of wisdom. Damien Chazelle's “Whiplash” re-examines this familiar set-up as an abusive and epic power struggle. Miles Teller as the masochistic and ambitious college jazz drummer and JK Simmons as his Hannibal-Lector-like teacher steal the air from every scene as they fill their spaces full of raw and tangible tension, boiling to a fever pitch until arriving at one of the best movie ending of last decade.

02 – Boyhood

Richard Linklater's twelve year project about a Texas boy growing up in a broken family creates an emotional scope far larger than the average coming-of-age drama usually aspires. By watching these actors age on camera and by composing each scene as a mini narrative within the larger context of someone's life, this movie becomes a living photo album full of the key memories that define who we are--be it the big moments that change everything or the small, insignificant moments that we forget as time passes.

01 – Under the Skin

Unlike anything else this year, this intimate sci-fi horror slinked it's way into brain and never let me go. Scarlett Johansson says very little as a predatory vixen who roams the poorly lit streets of Scotland looking for her prey. Without explicitly trying, British director Jonathan Glazer illustrates a compelling allegory about sexual power dynamics and gender politics, wrapped in a sensual thriller that will possess a patient audience with it's icy atmosphere and nightmarish visuals.

Honorable Mentions:

Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Stranger by the Lake, Birdman, Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Obvious Child, Locke

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2015

Boyhood review

                 Since emerging from and headlining the indie film explosion of the early ‘90s, Austin Texas director Richard Linklater has never been content to stay in familiar territory, constantly pushing himself into unexplored and challenging storytelling avenues. While contemporaries such as Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith were defining their brand and building a devoted fanbase on genre familiarity, Linklater strove to try new things and ignore all expectations.  Later on when he would occasionally make a mainstream comedy like “School of Rock,” in the context of his wildly diverse career even that felt like formal experiment to make a movie in direct opposition to his interest in narrative stream-of-consciousness, displayed in films such as “Slacker” and “Waking Life.”

                With this in mind, it seems only fitting that Linklater would be using his off-time between the  shoots of his regular film schedules to whittle away at a 12 year passion project, documenting the growth and the age of the same cast around the malleable blueprint of a plot. “Boyhood,” in many ways, is the ultimate thesis of Linklater’s formal interests in storytelling and character examination through means of pure cinema. Of course, all of this would mean a whole lot of nothing if it weren’t also emotionally engaging, brutally honest and surprisingly funny.

                On the surface this film tells the story of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), a Texas-born child named named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as hewho transitions from childhood to manhood, starting at age six when the production began in 2002 and ending with his move to college in 2014. Certainly, the movie’s center of consciousness is with Mason and he's our emotional conduit through the broader story of his broken family (and to a greater extent, the condition of post-911 Americana). But it is within the journey of his formative years that the lives of his parents also play out in subtle complexity.  After a rocky divorce his mother, played by Patricia Arquette, goes back to college to make a better living for Mason and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), and his father, played by Ethan Hawk, also makes his transition from deadbeat struggling musician to accepting eventual responsibility.  Each story interweaves and informs the other, creating a breathy, yet dense emotional tapestry of modern suburban angst.

                By casting a six year old unknown and hoping that he would appropriately age into the role, Linklater gambled on the entirety of the film’s artistic success on this actor, and luckily for him the experiment pays off without ever feeling like a needless gimmick or publicity stunt.  Earlier on  Coltrane's performace is interior and quietly effecting, oftentimes letting the louder characters in his scenes shape his on screen personality through contrast. As he grows the character slowly exposes a firmer identity and develops from a cypher of our own nostalgia into having his own distinct perspective and intellectual agency. Both Ethan Hawk and Patricia Arquette are better here than they may have ever been before and, impressively, they sustain their performance over the long period, infusing their characters with the natural growth they have accumulated both as actors and as people. Simply put, they ‘act’ real, and the significant trick that the movie plays on the audience is that after a while you stop thinking about production’s logistics.

                Almost a formal cousin to Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” trilogy, this film is interested in the deep exploration of character through dialogue, social milieu, and scenic rhythms in editing that outlines the passage of time.  Because of the purposely fluid nature of the plot—oftentimes avoiding the kinds of traditional conceits and beats of more rigorously written coming of age dramas—“Boyhood” may alienate some audiences hoping for the excitement of rising tensions, the exuberance of an underlined ‘ah-ha’ moment, or the comfort of resolution.  What you get instead is a teenage life lived in all its messy and glorious intricacies.

Grade: A-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014