Counterpoint: Becky's Monthly Countdown - January 2015

In which Becky shares her wrong different opinion on a Filmquisition post.

It should come as no surprise to anybody that Becky is my constant movie watching partner.  With very little exception, what she watches, I watch and what I watch, she watches.  So it's only natural that she'd want to get in on The Monthly Countdown.  And, for the most part, we seem to agree with what was best from January.

American Sniper

Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods

Gojira

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Imitation Game

Into the Woods

The Raid: Redemption

Selma

Seven Samurai

The Theory of Everything

As could be expected, there's a lot of crossover between our two lists.  The Raid: Redemption, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Seven Samurai were present on both of our lists.  Let's take a look at where our opinions differed.

American Sniper - I initially loved American Sniper about as much as Becky did.  It was an exciting film and grippingly portrayed a man struggling (and generally failing) to reenter into domesticity following multiple tours in the Middle East.  Bradley Cooper is an exceptional actor who was innately excellent as Chris "The Legend" Kyle.

The problem is, though, that the film simply doesn't hold up.  Never mind repeated viewings, it fails to hold up upon retrospection.  Although I initially gave it an 8.5 (a high 8.5 at that) it slipped lower and lower in my esteem until it wound up at a middling 7.5.  Clint Eastwood spend so much time trying to channel Katheryn Bigelow instead of making his own movie that the end result comes off as a poor man's Hurt Locker, without enough meat on its bones to keep me coming back to it after first watching it.

Gojira - Both Becky and I love horror movies.  There's a reason why so many of my initial blog posts were reviews of them.  And, more and more, we're starting to catch up with old Kaiju movies.  Last month we finally saw patient zero: the original king of the monsters (not to be confused with Godzilla: King of the Monsters).  And the thing is, it wasn't anything like the campier, more light-hearted Godzilla movies that we were more used to seeing.  It was dark and foreboding and weighed down by atomic despair.  And every last bit of it was awesome.

Despite being made in 1954, the film holds up remarkably well today.  Despite obviously being a man in a dinosaur costume knocking over miniature buildings in a model city, the special effects were never the less shockingly effective.  Godzilla's assault on Tokyo is burned into my mind as one of the most well-shot and memorable scenes in all of cinema.

The Imitation Game - This is Becky's favorite of the Academy Award's Best Picture nominees, and it's not really all that surprising why.  It's a well directed, well acted, well written historical drama that strikes the proper balance between wartime drama, post-war persecution and the personal enigma that is Alan Turing.

I actually had the opposite reaction when it came to this movie as I did American Sniper.  I initially gave it a solidly well-earned 7.5, but the more that I thought it over - the more that I revisited the film in the days and weeks which followed - the more that I realized that it was a genuinely great film.  And while it did pale against most of its fellow Best Picture nominees, that doesn't diminish the quality of the film that hit theaters late last year.

Into the Woods - Although we saw this film together, I didn't include it on my own list for January because I had actually seen it already over Christmas.  It was a stunningly rendered vision of the incredible stage musical with an outstanding cast and singular direction.  Johnny Depp was an inspired choice for the Wolf, as was Meryl Streep as the Witch, and Chris Pine channeled is ordinarily glib charisma to good use as Cinderella's prince.  Anna Kendrick, James Gordon, Tracey Ullman, Lila Crawford and that kid from Les Miserables were all outstanding in their respective roles.

If Into the Woods can be faulted for anything, it's for not including the reprise of "Agony" in its final act - in which the two princes, after winning over their princesses, are now pining after new damsels (this time, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) - and for not properly explaining why the witch lost her powers.  Otherwise, it was a powerful, moving and toe-tappingly great film that makes you wonder how it ever managed to get away with a PG rating in the first place.

Selma - Although I'm not quite as enamored with Selma as most critics are, I obviously liked the film.  After all, it made my top 30 movies list for 2014.  I just think that in a year crowded with an unprecedented number of great films, maybe it was the strong competition - rather than racially-motivated discrimination - that kept Selma out of certain Oscar contests (although slighting David Oyelowo for a Best Actor nomination is still a head-scratcher for me).

Both powerful and timely, Selma is arguably the most important film to come out last year.  Acting essentially as a "Civil Rights For Dummies" how-to guide to social revolution, it shows how civil disobedience, rather than violence, is the surest path to positive change - how being oppositional can mean never striking out against your oppressors.

The Theory of Everything - Despite being my patently least favorite of this year's crop of Best Picture nominees, The Theory of Everything is still an entertaining, informative and worthwhile film.  It's as well acted as it ever needed to be (thanks to the exceptional Eddie Redmayne) and better written than it deserved to be (I was expecting Lifetime Channel level schmaltz, personally).

Although not my favorite performance of the year (that would be Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler), Eddie Redmayne really knocked it out of the park on this one, so much so that I don't mind him winning the award in the least.  He gave an astoundingly good performance that's immediately reminiscent to Daniel-Day Lewis in My Left Foot without ever being derivative of it.

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