The Monthly Countdown: February 2015

In which I list the 10 best movies that I saw for the first time last month.

Time for another installment in what is fast becoming my favorite regular series that I do here: The Monthly Countdown.  This is where I briefly discuss the top ten movies that I saw for the first time last month.  This means that even though I've been working my way through the Friday the 13th series for the second time (the likely subject of numerous Revisited articles), none of them factor into this list.  Of the 40 movies that I saw in February, 28 of them were first-time viewings.  This means that the list that follows represents the top third of movies that I saw last month.  Starting off this list we have...

10) John Wick - I have already gone over how John Wick is one of my favorite movies from 2014.  With its unsettling degree of confidence in its premise and an unprecedented degree of world building for a film that was never guaranteed a sequel, it was the best possible version of the movie that it wanted to be: a sleekly shot, semi-serious, action-packed, revenge-driven B-movie.

Directed by Reeve's stunt double from The Matrix, its action pedigree shows in its carefully staged, stunningly choreographed fight sequences between Wick and any number of muscle-headed Mafiosos and amoral assassins.  Like the best Keanu Reeves movies, the actor is afforded exceedingly few lines, allowing his indomitable screen presence to convey the entirety of his character.  Despite the absurdity of its trailer, it was one of the 2014's premium action movies that fans of the genre would be loathe to miss.

9) Kingsman: The Secret Service - I've said it before and I'll say it again: Kingsman is the first definitively good movie of 2015.  Despite its occasionally problematic worldview, Matthew Vaugn's send-up to the old-school British spies of the Bond and Avengers franchises was an infectiously fun action-comedy romp.  Striking the perfect balance between those two genres, it was never so serious that it couldn't revel in graphically exploding the heads of the 1%, but never so light-hearted that it couldn't stoop to needlessly savage beat-downs scored to "Freebird."

Its probably the first time in history that "Manners.  Maketh.  Man." has caught on outside of the faculty of a stuffy English boarding school, which is essentially the heart of the film.  It's an ultra-violent action movie that's an enamored with broken bones and gun shots as it is with the dapper and thoroughly impractical accoutrement of the campiest Bond movies.  It's a loud, messy, hilarious, brutal, arousing and contradictory good time that's everything you could hope for in a pre-summer blockbuster.

8) Locke - Here's another movie that I only heard about because of Chris Stuckmann.  It's a quiet character study of a man whose comfortable life falls apart as he drives to the hospital after work to help the woman that he cheated on his wife with give birth to his bastard son.  The only character that we ever see in Locke and all of his interactions with the rest of the cast occur over the phone.  But despite this inherent handicap, it's one of the most moving and subversively dramatic films of the year, proving once again that "one good performance" is enough to carry any film.

Tom Hardy's absence among the Best Actor nominees is almost as egregious an oversight as Jake Gyllenhaal and David Oyelowo.  His perfect performance is a true one-man show: forcing him to react just as convincingly to voice overs as other actors do with physical costars.  In fact, the most strikingly memorable scenes from the film are where he argues with the imagined ghost of his father, having to carry the entirety of that dramatic exchange with nothing more than an his own imagination to play off of.

7) Rosewater - After watching Rosewater, it's hard to believe that this is Jon Stewart's directorial debut.  To be fair, his 2500+ appearances on and writing credits for The Daily Show certainly helped, as did the familiarity of the political subject matter that he was depicting, but it's still mind-boggling to think that this was his first time as the man behind the camera.  It has a confidence and skill that belies his lack of experience in that role.

Stewart is only one half of the film's resounding quality.  The other is leading man Gael Garcia Bernal, who plays detained Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari.  His quietly powerful career - which includes starring roles in Amores Perros, The Motorcycle Diaries and Babel - comes to a head in this performance, where more than half of his screen time alternates between  blind-folded interrogation and solitary confinement.  The unique combination of director and leading man, not to mention the timeliness of its story, made it a must-see film for politically conscious movie-goers around the world.

6) The French Connection - The French Connection is a movie that's been on my radar for an incredibly long time.  It won the 1971 Oscar for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing.  It was directed by William Friedkin, the legendary man behind of the camera for The Exorcist.  And although it never seems to crop up on anybody's top movies lists, it's one whose popular and critical appeal remain strong more than forty years after its initial theatrical run.

Although the film struggles to find itself in its first half, once the investigation for the mastermind of a high-stakes drug deal gets fully underway, it transforms into one of the best movies about cops and criminals ever shot.  In one scene, Gene Hackman commandeers a car to chase down an elevated train, which is instantly recognizable to modern audiences as the blueprint for Batman Begins' riveting climax.  It executes its simple plot and cardboard characters with such unwavering skill that it's still a cultural icon decades after it first tantalized audiences.

5) Enemy - Anybody who saw my Top 30 of 2014 list had to have figured that this (and perhaps a few other recent entries) would make this countdown.  Although I have described it in the past as the arthouse love-child of Fight Club and Vertigo, it's a movie that bafflingly struggles against any kind of glibly rambled-off label.  And while it's a film that actively defies understanding, the kind of close analysis that it demands of its audience makes it one of the most intellectually rewarding films to come out of 2014's crop of films.

Although on its surface Enemy is about a pair of maybe-twins mucking about in each other's lives, it's actually something far more complex than that.  It's a movie that demands close retrospection and repeated viewings (and maybe a few spoiler-laden video reviews) before coming to terms with what's actually going on in it.  Most viewers aren't equipped with the necessary analytical tools to figure it out - which most will overwhelmingly hate for it - and that's okay.  No one movie is made for every person.  But for those of you who can stomach an obscure arthouse film that demands more from its audience, this is one of the true gems from 2014.

4) Infernal Affairs - While The Departed is remembered today mostly as the movie that finally earned Martin Scorsese his belated Academy Award for Best Director, it's something that's stuck with me since 2006.  It's a complex story about an undercover cop inside of a criminal empire and a conspiratorial mole that's risen through the ranks of the police.  In the ultimate game of cat and mouse, both men try to root out their counterpart within their respective organizations without giving their true loyalties away.

While The Departed did it best, Infernal Affairs is where it all began: a sleekly-made Hong Kong thriller that isn't weighed down by three films worth of content.  Although The Departed takes its plot from Infernal Affairs, it draws on elements from all three films in the franchise.  This means that while Infernal Affairs is considerably lighter on content than its American remake, it's both faster paced and more focused.  Fans of Asian cinema, police procedurals and, yes, The Departed, should check out this confidently unconventional crime thriller.

3) Under the Skin - I honestly can't think of any better a way of describing in that how I already did in my Top 30 of 2014 countdown:

Arthouse movies are a funny thing.  Often created with roughly equal parts pretentious directing and obtuse writing, they rarely appeal to anybody outside of a very narrowly defined demographic of self-described intellectuals.  From almost any given year, I couldn't name a single arthouse film released during it, let alone a good one.  Between Enemy and Under the Skin, however, 2014 gave us two.

Under the Skin is an arthouse sci-fi / horror film featuring a near-solo performance by the immaculate Scarlett Johansson.  Utilizing a controlled form of photo-realism - including partially improved scenes and physically deformed actors - it is easily the most haunting and visually arresting film of the entire year.  Like Enemy, however, this is unlike anything most mainstream audiences have ever seen: something that most wouldn't like, let alone tolerate.  If you can sit through a slow, near dialogless film that trusts its audience to figure out what's going on through visuals alone, you'll hardly find a more memorable or rewarding film from this or any other year.

2) Boyhood - Acting as a time capsule of the Bush and early Obama years, Boyhood is one of the most singularly unique films to come out in recent memory.  Shot intermittently over the course of twelve years, it details the childhood of its protagonist from his perspective.  This means that his mother's physical abuse at the hands of her alcoholic second husband happens almost entirely off screen - that the his parents' rocky, post-divorce relationship is shown only at a distance - and that a greater emphasis is placed on the increasingly recent events of his adolescence, regardless of how much more important earlier events were in shaping the kind of person that he ultimately becomes.

Boyhood may very well be the best movie that I'll never see again.  This doesn't mean that it was any less of a film, just that it's an experience that, like childhood, only needs to happen once.  I can only hope that this will prove to be Ellar Coltraine's breakout role, as he gave a succession of increasingly fantastic performances for a character that changed as much, and as rapidly, as he did.

1) Nightcrawler - Even considering the Academy's aesthetically conservative leanings, it's astounding to me that Nightcrawler was relegated to a single nomination for its admittedly excellent screenplay.  Jake Gyllenhaal gave what was hands down the performance of the year.  Riz Ahmed and Rene Russo gave two of the most memorably fantastic supporting performances of 2014.  Furthermore, it easily beats any of the so-called Best Picture nominees for overall quality and contemporary significance.

Lewis Bloom, a sociopathic charmer trying to make it big any way that he can, is a Nightcrawler: a video journalistic who films blood-splattered footage for the morning news.  But when he faces resistance from a desperate news director and a competing Nightcrawler team, he blurs the fine line between reporting on news and creating it.  Nightcrawler plumbs the depths of journalistic ethics in a year mired by the omnipresent Gamer Gate controversy: showing just how far some people will go for a fat commission and a pat on the back.

So what were your favorite films that you saw for the first time in February?

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