The Academy Awards, hosted by Chris Rock and dominated by The Aviator and best picture winner Million Dollar Baby, aired on February 27th. Starting in 2002, I started making top 10 lists of movies I had seen that year and emailing them to a select list of family and friends ( Donnie Darko and City of God were my #1s those first two years). 2004, though, was the first time in my adult life that I hadn't seen the best picture winner before the oscars aired. My friend Ben and I walked down to University Square 4 Theaters a day or two later and saw Million Dollar Baby.
By the next year, I made sure not to come into Oscar season so woefully unprepared. I made it a goal to see all 5 of the nominees before the Oscar show on March 5th, 2006. And I saw them all --Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night & Good Luck. and Munich--with time to put together a top 20 list.
"Mulhern at the Movies" was born.
10 years later, I have come to realize that whether or not I had the same opinion as the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences was not necessarily what drove me. In fact, only one best picture winner (Crash) was also my favorite film of that year (though quite a few were in my top 5). I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing out on anything great. It certainly made things more challenging when they decided to up the number of possible nominees on me. Due to spending the end of 2011 as a student teacher in Africa, I ended up coming up short that year by one nominee--Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a polarizing film that I didn't have a whole lot of interest in anyway.
10 years and hundreds of movies later, we arrive at the movies of 2014. One thing that I have improved upon is my advance scouting. Before the nominations were announced on January 15th, I had already seen 4 of the 8 nominees. In the last week, I've managed to knock out 3 more, leaving only American Sniper left to defeat this eight-headed monster.
All in all, I feel like it was a particularly strong campaign from Hollywood. I could make a case for at least 4, if not 5, movies as the best/my favorite of the year. There were rather obvious snubs, a couple of them more acerbic and controversial than the rest. Having not seen Bradley Cooper or Steve Carell (though I'm seeing Foxcatcher in a few hours) yet, it might be unfair to pass judgment, but a large part of me thinks the voters are insane for not electing David Oloyewo as one of their five. Not only is it a megawatt performance, he's taking on a role that people are often too afraid to commit to for fear that it will do MLK the man, nay, the legend, injustice. He doesn't, but more on that later.
As we always do here at Mulhern on the Movies, we count down from worst to first. Typically, I will give less time and words to the early ones in the countdown, but there are exceptions.
As the great Reverend Al Green was won to say, let us get it on!
#60 Sex Tape
I kind of new going in that this one would be a mistake, but I didn't expect it to be this much of a mistake, considering Cameron "Benji Madden of Good Charlotte's wife" Diaz and Jason Segel are both too talented to let a kind of interesting and timely idea flounder this hard. But flounder it did, like a dying fish. They are Annie and Jay, respectively, a couple looking to spice up their married life by making an awkward, clunky tape on an iPad. In an age where we can't get enough of ourselves, and where couples and uncouples alike send each other dirty snapchats and photos, it feels like something that could absolutely happen. The first quarter of the movie deals with the making of the tape, but as soon as the tape gets leaked, the movie goes off the rails in a major way, its controls set to dick-and-fart autopilot. The retrieval of the tape is obnoxiously stupid and nonsensical and eventually you're just praying for it to be over. With a title and target audience like this, it's not like this could have been hopelessly romantic and wistful, but Segel has made a career of playing that type (see: Marshall Eriksen and the guy who has to forget Sarah Marshall) and he doesn't make much sense in this role. When they talk dirty to each other, it's cringeworthy. I've had a problem with Cameron Diaz speaking nasty ever since Bad Teacher came out. This is even worse.
#59 Divergent
The first installment of this popular YA fiction series starring it-feminist Shailene Woodley runs a good hour too long. Tris (Woodley) is living in a dystopian Harry Potter/Hunger Games mashup. She is supposed to join one of five factions based upon skills and virtue (a la' Gryffindor, Slytherin, et. al) and after her tests finds herself as "Divergent", hard to put into any category--kind of like gypsy jazz. As the movie goes on, she starts to appear to be somewhat of a chosen one--kind of like the Hunger Games. There is a lot of training, there is a lot of infighting among her faction (the dauntless), there is a lot of contrived dialogue and slow explanations. There's the mentor-student, will-they-or-won't relationship with a tough dauntless guy named Four (Theo James) that will keep the tweens on the edge of their seats moving forward, I guess. Other contributors include an out of place Kate Winslet as the villain, and Ashley Judd as Tris's mom, doing that pained expression thing she always does back when she and Morgan Freeman used to Kiss the Girls and tell us about an imminent arrival of a spider. Blargh.
#58 Winter's Tale
On Valentine's Day, I agreed to see this one at the fancy movie theater in Saint Louis Park, where you can order artisan cheeses and flatbread pizza and wine and bring it to your little tabletop while you watched the movie. The food (and company) part of the date was pretty solid. Not the movie part, though. Colin Farrell stars as a young burglar in the early 1900s who, when robbing a mansion, discovers a beautiful girl (Jessica Brown-Findlay of Downton Abbey). They have a brief romance and then she dies in his arms. For whatever reason, Peter the burglar can't die (despite all of evil gangster Russell Crowe's attempts, which include, most notably, throwing him off the Brooklyn Bridge). In the present, Peter is wandering New York City aimlessly when he meets a young girl with cancer and attempts to heal her and fix his past. Unless evil, also-immortal Russell Crowe and devil Will Smith can stop him. Good thing he has a magical white horse to help him along them way!
I'm not even kidding. As my late grandmother was known to say: "Farfetched."
Stay tuned for more over the next 31 days!
No comments:
Post a Comment