2014: #6- #4

We arrive at the top 6. The reason it's 6, and not 5, is simple: the more I kept thinking about it, the more I thought you could make an argument for any of these last 6 to be the best movie of the year. I figure that at least one point, each of them were under consideration in my head for the coveted #1 spot. If you have been reading the blog at all, and if you have followed the race this year, you'll know that a couple of obvious ones have not been listed yet. For as much as I try to avoid it and go my own way every year, movies are acclaimed for a reason. Every now and then, generation Y-er that I am, I wish there could be ties at the top.

But there can be only one. Here are my five runners-up:

#6 Selma

Ava Duvernay is no fool. In a recent interview with "Entertainment Weekly", she claimed to have known early on that she'd be a long shot for best director this year. "It's math," she says. To say the director's branch of the Academy has a No Girls Allowed in Our Treehouse vibe to it would be putting it far too gently; 9 out of every 10 of them is a male, and, to make matters worse, 9 out of 10 are white. And white guilt will only take you so far in Hollywood without Brad Pitt attached as a producer (though you would think having Oprah attached might have helped). Only four females ever have been nominated for the prize, and Kathryn Bigelow made history only a few years ago with her win for Zero Dark Thirty. The Academy just simply isn't ready yet, and that's a damn shame. Bennett Miller and Morton Tyldum, who both did fine jobs but nothing groundbreaking, should have been tossed in favor of Duvernay and Fincher, but I guess that's just me.

The Oscar snub that got even more press is David Oyelowo not getting nominated for best actor. I still don't know if any us plebes quite get what went into this ludicrous oversight. Oyelowo, who is British, emulated MLK so precisely that I forgot I wasn't actually watching MLK. Because of the way he is revered by so many in our country, it has been dangerous territory to put any sort of mainstream biopic about him out. Good thing this isn't one. Selma focuses on one major moment in the Civil Rights movement. When Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) is refused the right to vote in Selma, Alabama, Dr. King pays a visit to president LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) to ask for voting rights to be granted. When LBJ says he has bigger fish to fry, he and his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) link up with some of his fellow SCLC clergy members (played by Common and The Wire/Treme's Wendell Pierce, among others) and takes their cause to Selma, After their first attempt to march to slimy Governor George Wallace's (Tim Roth, who does an outstanding job) house in Montgomery is disastrous, the movement becomes national, and bus loads of liberal college students and families of all races come down to help out.

(Side note: I found out recently that my uncle went down to Selma at that time to march with a group from his Chicago area temple. He said it was very eye-opening, and that he had to take night shifts to stand guard outside the church they were staying in, which was awfully nerve-wracking for a teenager. Pretty cool, no?)

Oyelowo is not just a snub, he's a revelation as a vociferous leader who is equal parts commanding and humble and scared. In short, he's human and he carries plenty of doubts and worries along with him, and just as importantly, he recognizes that he makes mistakes.

#5 Top Five

Hands down, the comedy of the year. Not even close. Lego Movie was outwardly clever, We Are the Best! was innocent and naive, but Top Five is gut-busting throughout. Touted occasionally as the black Annie Hall (which has a little bit of truth to it), Top Five has writer/director/star Chris Rock as Andre Allen, and it goes without saying that it's more than a little autobiographical. Allen, who started out as an edgy stand-up comic, has made millions as the face of  Hammy the Bear (read: Grown Ups, Madagascar), a gun-toting vigilante bear, who is more Rambo than Ted. He is tired of going out and people shouting "Hammy!" at him on the street (much like Chappelle going into hiding when people yelled "I'm Rick James, b**ch!" at him in front of his kids at theme parks), and he wants people to take him and his new film Uprize, about the Haitian revolution, seriously. To the world, he is Hammy the Bear and the fiancee' of reality TV star Erica Long (Gabrielle Union), who is about to get married on live television, a la' Kim and Kris "72 days" Humphries.

Enter journalist Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson), who he reluctantly accepts an interview with. They walk around New York the entire day, talking and visiting some of his old hangouts in Brooklyn, including an impromptu drop-in on his friends and family (Jay Pharaoh, Tracy Morgan, Leslie Jones, Hassan "Wee-Bay Brice" Johnson) and she gets a little more insight into his roots. She asks him the tough questions, like "Why aren't you funny anymore?" and, knowing that he and she are both recovering alcoholics, "When did you know you hit bottom?" Throughout the wild day they are all over the city, promoting Uprize on radio spots, hitting press conferences, walking through parks, dropping in on her mom and daughter at her apartment, and all over. The interview takes a scary turn when he admits his fears about the wedding and they both realize their feelings for one another.

It's as if Rock called in every favor he had for this movie. Beyond the actors I've previously listed, Top Five features (deep breath): Kevin Hart (his agent), JB Smoove (Silk, his bodyguard/driver and best friend), Romany Malco (Erica's manager), UW Alum Anders Holm (Chelsea's beau Brad), Cedric the Entertainer (his friend in Houston), Brian Regan (a radio engineer), and, all playing themselves--Jerry Seinfeld, Whoopi Goldberg, Adam Sandler, Charlie Rose, Taraji P. Henderson, Gabourey Sidibe, Sway and yes, DMX. Everybody adds a little something, but Rock has stated in interviews that he wouldn't have done the movie unless he had landed Dawson, a good friend of his offscreen. Onscreen, their chemistry, bantering and spats feel totally real, so I can see why he waited. The title, by the way, refers to something that is often done in the hip-hop community: Stating and making the case for your top 5 MCs of all time. This starts when Chelsea and Andre visit his old friends and becomes a running theme throughout. Make sure you wait to watch the credits, because about halfway through, Seinfeld delivers his top five, and it's phenomenal. Save a couple of low-brow grossouts, all of the laughs are more than earned, and the dialogue-wise, it may be the best written this year.

#4 Boyhood

"So leeettt me goooooo, I don't wanna be your...hero..."

Get ready to hear the Family of the Year song that has become the award-season theme for Boyhood piping out of the speakers of the Kodak Theater plenty of times tonight. Most importantly, it will probably be the song you hear at the end of the broadcast as Linklater and his producers and actors rush the stage to accept the final award of the night. Boyhood has a very good shot to win best picture this year. I was talking to my mom yesterday, who sees almost as many movies as I do, and we both said that we would be fine with that as an outcome. "Just the dedication alone over a twelve year period makes it seem justified," she said. If Boyhood wins tonight, it will be more about the commitment and the concept than the movie itself. And honestly, I have nothing but respect for Linklater and the job he took on, and like everyone else, I agree: The idea behind it is fascinating, and I have never seen anything quite like it.

But what about the movie itself?

The detractors vs. gushers argument surrounding this Boyhood is always the same--"Well, nothing really happens." against "That's life, you know? Just a series of moments." I see both sides of the coin on this one. The thought that there aren't really any climactic events is more or less true. However, what unfolds on screen is engaging enough to make almost three hours never feel like it drags. Each vignette of Mason's (Ellar Coltrane) life is probably in the neighborhood of 8 to 10 minutes long, so that helps push things forward. He and his sister Samantha (the director's daughter, Lorelai Linklater) are growing up with a single mom (Patricia Arquette) who struggles to find love and herself as she works her way through motherhood. Their dad (Ethan Hawke) pops in and out intermittently as the "fun" parent, taking them bowling and to Astros games on alternating weekends. Maybe a third of the way into the movie, his mom starts dating her professor, Bill (Marco Perella), and they eventually get married and move in with him and his kids, Mindy (Jamie Howard) and Randy (Andy Villareal). After a couple of years, the mixed family dynamic rears its ugly head and things go south in a hurry; Mason, Samantha and mom escaping his abusive clutches may be the only scene in the movie that could be considered a climax.

As Mason gets thinner and taller and longer in the face, he also gets a little more brooding and cynical, wanting to pursue art but not always willing to put in the time. She marries again, this time to  Desert Storm vet Jim (Brad Hawkins) and so does Dad, to Annie (Jennie Tooley). Sam and Mason's parents are more grown up, but it doesn't exactly mean they've got it all figured out. Maybe they never do, and both Hawke and Arquette convey this "we're doing the best we can with what we've got" notion wonderfully throughout. The last half of the movie, without really giving anything away, focuses on teenage-to-college-freshman Mason, as he experiences random make-outs, beer, weed, road trips, love and heartbreak and light debauchery for the first time.

When your cast and crew only gets together for a week or two throughout the year, your options are going to be limited, and though there are decently seamless transitions, Boyhood can't help but feel like vignettes. The choices that Linklater makes to connect the story are minimal, and that's a good thing. Much of the time, you only know what year you are in by the song that soundtracking the scene. In a particularly funny section early on, the viewer gets the true time capsule feel when Samantha slaps Mason in his bunk bed and begins singing "Oops, I did it again."

There is a crew of 8 or 9 of us in my grade who all became friends in middle school and stayed friends throughout high school and somewhat in college. I still talk semi-regularly to just about all of them, a couple more than others, certainly, but no love lost--6 of them were in attendance at my wedding. Looking back, more than half of us were living with divorced or separated parents through our formative years. So to me, the strength of Boyhood (and everyone approaches the relative strengths of this film differently) was the ability to see certain aspects of my own upbringing in Mason's. As a filmmaker, that's really all that you can ask for.