2014 Favorites

We now return you to 2015, already in progress

The internet ate my writeup of Still Alice, but to sum up: if you’d told me that one of the year’s most emotionally evocative scenes would involve Kristen Stewart delivering a monologue from Angels in America, I’d have assumed you were talking about the SNL reunion.

Same rules as usual this year, only I’ve expanded each category to five joint “winners” plus the usual sleepers (because there were a lot of great performances and productions this time around, and of such varying style).  I’ve done away with the Body of Work category, because it’s too much to keep track of, and assumes that I see absolutely everything, which I can’t.  Note that “Favorite Characters” cannot be portrayals of real people. I’ve added “The Unseen” and “The Unsung,” which comprise, respectively, the movies I wanted to see but did not have a chance to, and the movies I saw but for whatever reason did not write about on the blog (these reasons range from losing a file to not having time to simple disinterest – I don’t make money on this [but you could change that if you really wanted to: paypal billyramoneFTW at gmail).  Use the left-hand navigation or the infinite down-scroll to check out my writeups of each film.

2014 Favorites

Picture

Only Lovers Left Alive

Selma

Tracks

Birdman

A Most Violent Year

Sleepers: Wild and The Imitation Game

Actress

Charlotte Gainsbourg as Joe – Nymphomaniac

Jessica Chastain as Miss Julie – Miss Julie

Mia Wasikowska as Robyn Davidson – Tracks

Tilda Swinton as Eve – Only Lovers Left Alive

Julianne Moore as Alice Howland – Still Alice

Sleeper: Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed – Wild

Actor

David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr. – Selma

Colin Farrell as John – Miss Julie

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gunther Bachman – A Most Wanted Man

Tom Hardy as Ivan Locke – Locke

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing – The Imitation Game

Sleeper: Ralph Fiennes as M. Gustave – The Grand Budapest Hotel

Supporting Actress

Rachel McAdams as Annabel Richter – A Most Wanted Man

Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King – Selma

Kristen Stewart as Lydia Howland – Still Alice

Emma Stone as Sam Thomson – Birdman

Samantha Morton as Kathleen – Miss Julie

Sleeper: Stacy Martin as Young Joe – Nymphomaniac

Supporting Actor

Elyes Gabel as Julian – A Most Violent Year

LaKeith Lee Stanfield as Jimmie Lee Jackson – Selma

J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher – Whiplash

Edward Norton as Mike Shiner – Birdman

Tony Revolori as Zero Mustafa – The Grand Budapest Hotel

Sleeper: Matthew Goode as Hugh Alexander – The Imitation Game

Director

Ava DuVernay – Selma

Liv Ullmann – Miss Julie

Lars von Trier – Nymphomaniac

Alejandro González Iñárritu – Birdman

J.C. Chandor – A Most Violent Year

Screenplay

Lars von Trier – Nymphomaniac

Alejandro González Iñárritu – Birdman

Gillian Robespierre – Obvious Child

Ava DuVernay/Paul Webb – Selma

Jim Jarmusch – Only Lovers Left Alive

Favorite Characters

Eleanor Rigby (played by Jessica Chastain) – The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby

Eve, Adam, and Ava (played by Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, and Mia Wasikowska) – Only Lovers Left Alive

Best Cameo

William Mapother as the Preacher – I Origins

Persona non Grata Forever

Clint Eastwood

Unseen

Boyhood, The Theory of Everything, Camp X-Ray, Big Eyes, Two Days-One Night, Ida, Winter Sleep

Unsung

Ragnarok, Still Alice, Into the Woods, The Big Ask

Best use of “Chastaining”

Well, Jessica Chastain was in four films this year, and she “Chastained” in one of them (The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby), so I can’t in good conscience give this award to anyone else.  In a close second, however, are Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda in Rob the Mob.

That does it for 2014.  If we ever meet, let’s talk about movies.  See you this year!  -RH

Whiplash

I’m Buddy Rich when I fly off the handle

Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), a young jazz student at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory in New York City, spends nearly a year (his time) and nearly two hours (our time) confronting that beast of a fact that we artists learn all too early yet never accept: his plebeian family, concerned with division-3 sports and the accomplishments of his jock cousins, are just never going to “get it.”  If we all accepted that, maybe we would get more work done.  Or maybe we would be drained of all the audacity that fuels our best work.  It’s hard to tell with Andrew, because he’s never actually portrayed as an “artist”: he doesn’t make anything of his own.  But damned if memorizing Juan Tizol and Hank Levy charts isn’t going to bring him respect.

Whiplash is a tough film to pin down, which is probably good, but let’s ignore for a minute the pedantic misreading of musical history that defines the entire personality of Andrew’s scrupulous conductor/teacher, Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), and just look at this as a film.  The narrative follows Andrew as he shoots for greatness, albeit alone, sort of forgetting that successful musicians (especially in jazz, and including idol Charlie Parker) play with other people.  Andrew flaunts the fact that he has no friends.  He deplores his extended family, and even seems to resent his father (warm-faced Paul Reiser) for the fact that his mother (conveniently!) left the family when Andrew was a baby – not to mention the fact that he mixes popcorn with Raisinets, which is just undignified.  Andrew is put in Fletcher’s class as alternate to the core drummer, then promoted to core without anything close to a promise that he’ll keep that position.  It’s not just his opponents, Ryan (Austin Stowell) and Carl (Nate Lang); it’s Fletcher, known to abuse students and play mind games (and like any other coach/drill-sergeant villain, he’s not above hurling every sexist, homophobic, and otherwise offensive adjective at his proteges).  So it’s set up as a formula Student vs. Mean Teacher narrative in the Sports Underdog tradition, complete with the thought that, like Buddy Rich, the Mean Teacher is actually a big softie who is just being hard on his students so that they can achieve greatness – as Fletcher controversially puts it, the worst thing you can say to someone is “Good job.”

Thus, Whiplash‘s plot can be easily plugged into any pyramid graph you’ve ever seen, but the performances and the motivations of the characters are what allow it to be something of its own (or at least to try as hard as Andrew to be that).  What’s going on with Fletcher, exactly?  Well, “softie” doesn’t come to mind when dealing with a character who calls teenagers “retards,” harangues them so hard that they hang themselves, and instructs a student to “get the fuck out of my sight before I demolish you” (the latter is the film’s single deliberate gut-buster, which Simmons can make out of just about any line, and wisely reserves that talent when it comes to this character).

There’s one other character worth mentioning: Nicole (Melissa Benoist), a movie-theatre attendant/cashier whom Andrew is sweet on already (he frequents her theatre so often that he has a “usual” candy).  The development between them, beginning with Andrew asking her out “for pizza or something,” is as charmingly awkward as it is in real life at that age, yet more organic than a contrived Meet Cute because it doesn’t need to pretend to be anything more complicated than a teenage boy asking out a teenage girl for the first time.  Romance is indicated by a simple shot of a flat shoe sliding over a table leg to the other person’s side.  The issue with Nicole is that she’s introduced as an important character, and we like her, and then she is used as a plot device that exists mostly in the background, and eventually not at all: Andrew breaks it off with her after Fletcher becomes hard on him, assuming that having a girlfriend will distract him from his practice.  She reacts as she should: incredulous that he would just assume this about her without ever mentioning it before.  Later, when he gets a chance at what he thinks is his big break, he phones Nicole to invite her, but she blows him off, mentioning (whether true or not) that she has a boyfriend now.  At least she’s given the last atom of agency between them, but Benoist’s performance is so genuine (she is, in many ways, the most realistic character in the film) that her absence in the second half is sorely felt, especially considering the lack of women in the film anyway (why does there only seem to be one female student at Shaffer?).  Instead, Nicole is used as a convenient way of saying that warriors like Andrew need to be lone wolves in order to be successful, and that idea is never combated by anyone else.

Fletcher’s “revenge” scheme later is the most unexpected and ingenious device in the film, and leads up to a figurative battle, during which both blood and sweat fly. The cinematography throughout focuses on excruciatingly closeup details of minute movements – a trumpeter’s first breath before blowing, the lighting of a cigarette, blood spreading from injured hands into a bucket of ice-water, etc.  It’s not as calculated and thematic as the cinematography in, say, Birdman, but boy, does it make one pay attention (in a film that is, perhaps, not about details, but still lets its characters care about the things they care about simply because they care about them, in spite of the formula narrative they’re living).

Just as Inside Llewyn Davis was not a bad film simply because the ’60s folk scene was “friendlier” than depicted by the Coens, it doesn’t much matter that Charlie Parker’s exploits after getting a symbol frisbee’d at his head were different than what Fletcher tells Andrew.  As ostentatious as Whiplash‘s “message”(s) may be, it’s still a story about the people living within this world, not the lore.

Whiplash (2014); written and directed by Damien Chazelle; starring Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons, Melissa Benoist, and Paul Reiser.