Counterpoint: Becky's Monthly Countdown for March 2015

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

With another passing month comes another contested list of the best movies that Becky and I saw during it.  And exempting movies that one of us had already seen beforehand, our lists look very much the same.  The problem is just how many movies didn't count toward one or the other's list.  Becky's top ten for March are

Chappie
Cinderella
Dragonball Z: The Tree of Might
Gone Girl
The Guest
Insurgent
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
Non-Stop
Rear Window
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Chappie, Cinderella, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, Non-Stop and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel all made it onto my list for the month.  I've already shared my disappointed feelings concerning Insurgent on Unreality.  The remaining four are all movies that I'd already seen and were thus disqualified from my own list.

Dragonball Z: The Tree of Might - Despite being so non-canon it hurts, The Tree of Might is easily the best of the pre-Battle of Gods DBZ movies that I've seen.  The fighting and animation are both on par with the the series, resulting in a pretty fun way to pass a spare 60 minutes.

The problem with the movie comes in two-fold, however.  The first is that it is hopelessly non-canon, and as a result the stakes simply can't be as high as any 60 stretch of the TV series of which it's based.  I mean, who cares if Goku lives or dies here, because it will not affect his adventures on Namek and elsewhere in the slightest.  The other is that the plot, while functional in getting the fighting underway, is simply non-cohesive mess of retcons and "this would look cool" mentality.

Gone Girl - Obviously I loved this movie, seeing as how it made my top 30 list of 2014 movies.  It's an intelligent, bitingly condemnatory take on everything from media crusaders, the court of public opinion and public law enforcement that only a director as skilled as David Fincher could pull off.

What issues I did take with the film were notably subdued when I gave it another go-around with Becky.  Yes, it still drags near the end (although not as much when you realize that it's not actually wrapping up yet).  And yes, it's not as satisfying as a narrative as it probably should be (although it's more satisfying when you realize that the movie is about everything except for the plot).  And two months later, I'm still not over the fact that Rosamund Pike didn't win Best Actress.

The Guest - This is another one from my top 30 list of 2014 movies and one that I knew would be right up Becky's alley.  It's a slickly made retro-horror movie that has a lot of fun with its psychotic premise of a mentally unstable soldier looking out for his dead comrade's family in the only way that makes sense to his twisted mind.

Although it over-thinks and over-explains its core premise, The Guest is one of last year's better horror movies, mostly because of how much fun it has with itself.  Fans of highly stylized arthouse "genre" films like Drive will love the movie for its color pallet and underground soundtrack.  Fans 80s-styled horror will love its well-executed slasher motifs.  And fans of Disney will get a preview for what they can expect from their new Beast.

Insurgent - Needless to say, I wasn't impressed with the sequel to the promising (if ultimately unfulfilling) Divergent.  Its post-apocalyptic premise was sound for a half-measure of Magic: the Gathering's celebrated Ravnica setting.  Its character was a poor man's Katniss and her brother a potentially exquisite antagonist.  Even the film's promotional imagery was evocative of the much-lauded Ghost in the Shell, which lent itself a lot of promise that it sadly failed to deliver on.

The problem was that despite all of its effort, the Divergent series simply couldn't live up to The Hunger Games.  Its protagonists were obnoxious caricatures.  Its setting was a painfully obvious metaphor for a teenaged caste system.  Its underlying message was a sickly mix of "nobody understands me" and "science is evil."  There is absolutely no reason why anybody should bother with the series after this abominable entry.

Rear Window - I still can't believe that Becky somehow made it as far through life as she had without ever seeing this Hitchcockian masterpiece.  Sure, it might not be as good as Psycho, or even Rope.  Hell, other than Vertigo, it's probably my least favorite of the director's work.  But a "bad" Hitchcock movie is still a Hitchcock movie, which means that it's still a masterpiece.

For all of my talk of it being bad, there's really very little to dislike about this retro who-done-it.  Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly are absolutely sublime together.  The setting lends itself to any number of increasingly interesting mini narratives, including the plot-centered "man across the way kills his wife" scenario.  If you haven't seen this yet, please check it out.  I guarantee you that it's worth the effort.

So what was your favorite movie that you saw for the first time in March?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Join the Filmquisition on Twitter (@Filmquisition) or by subscribing to this blog.

The Monthly Countdown: March 2015

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

March was a poor month for new movies: at least for me.  Sure, there were great movies that were released last month and there were great movies that I saw last month, but very few of them were first-time viewings for me.  Despite having seen thirty movies in March (which is already a step down from previous months), only 14 of them were new to me.  Most of them were chosen because Becky - not myself - hadn't already seen them, and that was just something that I wouldn't let go down on my watch.

10) Justice League: New Frontier - DC is as much the go-to brand for animated superhero movies as Marvel is for live action ones.  And although New Frontiers is a pretty sizable step down from the likes of War, Throne of Atlantis and The Flashpoint Paradox, it never the less provides an interesting spin on established DC canon by crossing it with the dated concerns of Watchmen.

New Frontier pretty much makes my case for a Martian Manhunter solo movie for me (although still expect to find an AdapNation focussing on that a few weeks from now).  Although just one of many competing plot lines, his is by far the most interesting and fleshed out.  On top of that, the film has the creepiest kids book outside of The Babadook and top-notch (it stylistically dated) animation.

9) Run All Night - This is the third and latest team-up between rebranded action star Liam Neeson and genre director Jaume Collet-Serra.  Although I'm getting pretty tired of Liam Neeson by way of Tom Cruise, this actually is one of his better action movies and the most thematically, stylistically and aesthetically mature of the duo's collaborations.

That's not to say that Run All Night is a great, or even strictly speaking good, movie, just that it's comparatively better than similar movies that the actor has starred in recently.  It starts unnecessarily en medias res and the characters are not as fleshed out as I would have liked (even if their interactions hint at something deeper just underneath the surface).  Still, Collet-Serra knows how to engagingly stage and action scene and Neeson and Harris lend this movie a far better cast than it deserves.

8) Non-Stop - Although Run All Night is their most refined and mature collaboration to date, Non-Stop is ultimately their best.  Its narrative - concerning US Air Martials and the state of post 9-11 aviation security - is both thematically relevant and inherently exciting.  It's set-up of a killer hidden among the passengers of a mid-flight air craft is the perfect mix of mystery and paranoia that made The Thing such an exceptional horror movie.  And, like Run All Night, Neeson and Moore give the film more acting cred than it rightly deserves.

While the payoff is a little weaker than its build-up and the sub plot of purposefully framing the Air Marshal is a bit superfluous given everything else that's happening on that plane, it mostly all holds together.  Although a bit lighter than Run All Night, it does hit its action notes more strongly and confidently.

7) Dragonball Z: Lord Slug - Of the five Dragonball Z we saw in March, this was the only one that I hadn't seen already (even if Lord Slug Abridged already covered its climactic "twist").  And while it's not as well animated or exciting as some, and its plot is overly derivative of Dragonball, it's still easily one of the best movies of the franchise.

Lord Slug is hardly original.  In fact, it's amazing that it took until Team Four Star's parody for anybody to point out how ultimately carbon copied it is from Goku's fight against King Piccolo.  But I'm not ranking movies based on originality here: only on how their overall quality.  And, for that, Lord Slug was an exciting, well choreographed, well animated and well executed vision of a hopelessly non-canon Dragonball Z.

6) Chappie - Contrary to popular belief, I liked Chappie.  It was an interesting, well-imagined, narratively and thematically ambitious movie from the director of District 9.  Dev Patel is especially delightful to watch, Chappie's attempts at being a gangster are adorable and the trio of conflict that composed the core of the film were all incredibly interesting.

The problem is, however, that there just was not enough time to cover all of the ground that writer-director Neill Blomkamp wanted to cram into two-hour movie.  Although Chappie comes with three times the ambition of District 9, it has only one third the focus of it and is all the worse for this.  Chappie is not the transhumanist masterpiece that some have made it out as, but it is the kind of ambitious science fiction movie that we need a lot more of these days.

5) The Tale of the Princess Kaguya - If the Oscar for Best Animated Feature was simply awarded to the film with the best animation, there's no doubt in my mind that The Tale of the Princess Kaguya would have handily won the award this year.  Its breathtaking, brush stroke animation blew away every other film that came out in 2014 and is Exhibit A for why 2-D animation still has a place in the world today.

But for as sublime as the visual quality of the film was, the narrative it conveyed was a bit flat, even for those like myself who were familiar with the story of the moon princess.  Incredibly slow-paced and resistant to all conventions of modern structuring, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a movie that will frustrate audiences as often as it excites them, and often at the same time.  It's certainly no Big Hero 6 or The Lego Movie, but its half-measured success will hopefully convince a few of those in power to invest more effort into traditionally animated films.

4) Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole - What little I heard and saw of this movie when it first came out did not encourage me to seek in out in full.  While it was undoubtedly a beautifully rendered vision, it basically looked like Lord of the Rings with Owls.  I even thought that the guy who voiced Soren was Elijah Wood!

Legend of the Guardians, though, is a surprisingly dark tale of lost innocence and conflicting loyalties: of brother turned against brother when one's ambitions pulls him from what he knows to be right.  It's grim subject matter and savage fight scenes should actually come as no surprise once you realize that the movie's directed by Man of Steel's own Zack Snyder, who intended this to launch a high fantasy franchise to rival How to Train Your Dragon.  Its failure to find an audience is one of the most disappointing things to happen to the genre in quite some time, since it really is an excellent piece of cinema that I would have loved to see developed into something a bit more substantial.

3) The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - I did not expect to enjoy this movie at all.  We watched the first movie at Becky's behest, and I was less than impressed with it.  Despite a stellar cast of British icons, it did little more than reinforce how adorable folksy racism in old people is and take a stab at the phrase "life begins at 50."  What's more is that there was nowhere for the story to go from where everything left off: everybody was already either dead, dying, split up or hooked up by the movie's end, and the novel upon which it was based lacked a sequel.

To my surprise, however, I actually loved the movie.  Having already established its expansive cast of characters, gotten rid of the obnoxious hag of the bunch and paired everybody up in seemingly happily ever afters, the second movie was allowed to deeply explore the characters and their interactions with one another in ways that the first could never possibly hope to.  There really wasn't much of a plot to speak of, but seeing as that's where the first film faltered, that's not such a bad thing.  It's a cleverly insightful character study of the old and aging, and unquestionably this year's best Dev Patel movie.

2) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - Growing up, I had been lead to believe that Dr. Strangelove was the greatest political comedy of all time: outrageously lampooning the cold war with a mostly serious story of a pending nuclear holocaust.  Although I had never seen it myself, its reputation hung over me since I first started getting into movies, and it naturally was a high priority on my watch list.

Whatever it was that I was expecting to see when I popped Dr. Strangelove into the BluRay player, this was certainly not it.  It maintained far too strait a face to ever possibly be a comedy, despite the obvious cartoonishness of certain key characters and scenes.  I can't help but think that the original ending for the film - in which the war room erupts in a pie fight between the US generals and their Soviet guests -would have been a better fit when all was said and done, even if the movie that did hit theaters in 1964 was the most brilliantly under-stated satires in film history.

1) Cinderella - As awesome as the oddly disappointing Dr. Strangelove or the unexpectedly fun Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel were, there was never any doubt in my mind that Disney's live-action Cinderella would top the month's list of best first-time viewings for me.  I've already seen it twice in theaters and am planning on making time for a third before it slinks away on BluRay.

Alice in Wonderland proved that Disney's live-action remakes could be profitable.  Maleficent proved that they could be good.  Cinderella, however, proved that they could be even better than the animated originals: fleshing out the wish-fulfillment fantasy of an abused girl into a near historical drama made with the same care and consideration as most year's Best Picture contenders.

So what was your favorite movie that you saw for the first time in March?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Join the Filmquisition on Twitter (@Filmquisition) or by subscribing to this blog.

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?

Join the Filmquisition on Twitter (@Filmquisition) or by subscribing to this blog.

Ask questions or share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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.

Join the Filmquisition on Twitter (@Filmquisition) or by subscribing to this blog.

Ask questions or share your thoughts in the comments section below.

The Monthly Countdown: January 2015

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

I promised new content in 2015 and here it is: a new monthly series that will count down the top ten movies that I saw for the first time in the previous month.  I don't think that it's any secret that I end up seeing a lot of movies: it's almost exclusively what Becky and I do in our free time.  Last month, I saw 27 movies (just shy of averaging one every day), 24 of which were first time views for me.  Most were pretty good (and a few a little disappointing), but a surprising number of them were truly exceptional.  Admittedly, a lot of the high-end films are because we're trying to get in as many Oscar nominees as possible before the 22nd, but certainly not all.  There is, for example:

10) The Raid: Redemption - This Indonesian martial arts film proves that good films don't need to be complicated, include big name talent or draw from a bloated special effects budget: they just need to be good.  In fact, the film's lead, Iko Uwais, was not a professional actor before this film, but a martial artist.  Because of this, director Gareth Evans needed to do very little beyond choosing a setting and pointing the camera at Iko as he punches, kicks and headbutts his way through an escalating series of equally talented opponents.

The Raid is an action movie with every fiber of its being.  Action is the sole point: both a means and an end in of itself.  Iko's prominently displayed skills in Pencak Silat are visually dazzling and the only special effects that this film really needs.  It even features better staged and executed gun-jitsu than Equilibrium, which was that film's greatest strength by far.

9) Gone Girl - Like In the Mood for Love, Gone Girl is a film that, despite an initially cool reception, has really gotten under my skin.  The more that I thought about it - something that I couldn't help but do in the days after actually seeing it - the more I liked it and the more I found to consider which initially escaped my attention.

Because despite what you might at first think, Gone Girl is not a movie about a media darling's disappearance and eventual return.  That's the plot, yes, but the actual point of the film is everything surrounding that: everything other than Amy Dunne.  It is at its core a deconstruction of the media, media crusaders, public opinion, law enforcement, feminism, marriage and social privilege.  It's about everything dredged up and put on display because of her disappearance.  Amy Dunne is simply the occasion that director David Fincher found to address the sound-bitten, honey-combed court of public opinion that loves nothing more than another dead white girl to increase ratings and direct web traffic.

8) Foxcatcher - You might recall that I named Foxcatcher one of the ten movies that you definitely need to see in order to be prepared for this month's Oscar ceremony.  After having actually seen it myself, I can confirm that to be the case.  Foxcatcher is a maddeningly restrained, intricately nuanced character study of not only John du Pont, but of the Olympian brothers that found themselves caught in his web of privilege, power and paranoia.

Foxcatcher showcases some of the most subtle, nuanced and rewarding performances that I've seen in any film outside of The Godfather.  And although it lacks its forebearer's narrative breadth and depth, it is an ominous, fatalistically doomed story whose conclusion is telegraphed in its pervasively bleak tone and uniformly uncomfortable narrative.  Steve Carell is an absolute revelation as John du Pont, but Mark Rufallo and the sadly overlooked Channing Tatum are just as, if not even more, impressive.  Foxcatcher is without a doubt the definitive "actor's movie" of 2014.

7) The Grand Budapest Hotel - I'll admit it.  I never liked Wes Anderson.  His films were always too eccentric and unreal for me to really invest myself in.  With the exception of Moonrise Kingdom, which I found to be just okay, his films all seemed to achieve the same nebulous level of mediocrity between average and good.  There was no doubting that he had talent, but that talent never really seemed to add up to a good film.  That summation of his career ends with The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Obligated to see it owing to its Best Picture nomination, I was utterly floored by how much I actually enjoyed the film.  It was quirky, yes, but wasn't defined by that like some kind of celluloid hipster.  It applied those eccentricities into its engaging characters and thoroughly enjoyable story.  It's also one of the most visually arresting films of the year: the likely front-runner among the technical categories from its impeccable costuming, hairstyling and production design, all of which create the illusion of a picture book (complimenting its needlessly, although pleasingly, layered narrative).

6) Snowpiercer - This is a movie that I will definitely be making a point to review in the near future.  It is easily the most ambitiously creative science fiction film of 2014 not named Interstellar.  Between its Korean director, American cast and French source material, it is easily one of the most international films of the year as well: a multiplicity that lends itself to creating such a uniquely envisioned and executed film.

Much has been made of Chris Evans intended retirement from non-Marvel acting.  Before this film, he'd never really impressed me as anything other than Captain America.  He was as good as anything in Fantastic Four (which isn't saying much) and a fun addition to Scott Pilgrim vs The World, but he never really wowed me as anything other than Cap'.  Sowpiercer illustrates that he has so many great performances left to give and that doing any less would be nothing less than a mistake.

5) Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods - As I have mentioned earlier, Battle of Gods is easily the best 90 minutes from the entire Dragon Ball meta-franchise.  It's funnier than Dragon Ball and nearly as exciting as Dragon Ball Z.  It forces its characters into interesting new directions, such as Goku having to accept a power than he cannot achieve on his own and Vegeta having to relinquish that power to him.  It makes excellent use of its full cast of characters, allowing the most ridiculous situations to develop from the most seemingly mundane interactions (such as Beerus trying to destroy the Earth because Buu refused to share his pudding with him).

If this is the new face of Dragon Ball, then I am 100% on board with it.  Broad humor, organic characters and tactically placed fight scenes are a drastic improvement on the latter series confusion of punches for plot and kicks for character arcs.  And with Akira Toriyama back at the helm, I can't wait for this year's Resurrection of F.

4) Whiplash - Without a doubt, Whiplash is the most energized film from this last year.  It's not a nuanced character piece like Foxcatcher nor a sophisticated vision of a single human life like Boyhood, but a piledriving depiction of a dysfunctional creative relationship between a gifted musician and his abusive mentor.

At this point, the Best Supporting Actor Oscar is J.K. Simmons' to lose.  No other supporting role is given so much screentime, so many showy moments nor so much phenomenal material to work with.  And as things currently stand, Whiplash may very well prove to be this year's big winner at the Academy Awards, potentially upsetting the races for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing and Best Sound Mixing.  With as exceptional as this film is, and as fanatical as its fanbase is, nothing - nothing - is out of the question.

3) In Cold Blood - It is an absolute travesty that something like In Cold Blood could be overlooked for Best Picture when in its same year something like Doctor Dolittle could somehow make the grade.  In Cold Blood is easily my second favorite film from 1967 - behind equally overlooked Cool Hand Luke - and handily ranks among my absolute favorite films.

It goes without saying that a script adapted from a Truman Capote novel is going to be well written, but what is most surprising is just how much better the actual direction of the film is.  It juggles the criminal and law portions of the narrative with equal ease, paralleling in one darkly beautiful moment how heart-rendingly close the murderous Perry was to growing up like the murdered Nancy Cutter.  And in the moments before his death, the shots of him reflecting on the tragedy of his life  as the rain-spattered windows seem to cast unfallen tears along his sullen face are among the most morose and beautiful that I have ever seen.

2) The Raid 2 - For as fantastic as The Raid was - and make no mistake, it was fantastic - The Raid 2 is in every way the superior of the two films.  It explodes the film's criminal underworld outward with reckless abandon, as if mollifying those critics who called its predecessor overly simplistic was its sole narrative aim.  The resulting film is an Indonesian Frakenstein: stitching together The Departed and The Killer together with Pencak Silat and setting it loose on an unsuspecting public.

While the fight scenes in The Raid came off all as a bit samey (other than the obvious final boss fight in the end), The Raid 2 keeps each increasingly elaborate sequence distinct and memorable from one another.  Where there was really only one "boss fight" in the first film, the second features an increasingly eccentric cast of assassins - including a Machete wielding hobo, a relaxed baseball player, a deaf girl with a pair of claw hammers and the dark reflection of Iko's own Rama - each with their own set of weapons, fight styles and immediately memorable combat scenes.

1) Seven Samurai - When she showed us Rashomon in one of my film classes at ISU, Dr. Zeng told us that the reason why she wasn't showing us Seven Samurai was because we would see that in every other applicable film class that we would ever take with any other professor, and she didn't want to be the one to show it to us for the umpteenth time.  The problem was that ISU was pretty short on film professors, and she was the only one that I ever had.  As a result, despite having seen and liked A Bugs Life, seen and loved The Magnificent Seven and seeing and loving any number of Kurosawa's other films, Seven Samurai had somehow eluded me until this last month.

Having now seen it, however, it easily ranks among the ten best films that I have ever seen, and for good reason.  Despite an incredibly large cast of characters, each one is not only rendered distinct from one another, but substantially develops over the course of the narrative.  Despite its imposing 207 minute run time, the film never drags: keeping a forward momentum that carries it through an escalating series of battles between Samurai, villagers and bandits.  This is definitely a film that I plan on revisiting and reviewing in further depth in the near future, because I feel that there is so much left to discover on subsequent viewings that my initial impression of this film will prove to woefully inadequate on its own.

So what films did you see in January for the first time?  Which were your favorites of those?  Please let us know in the comment section below.

If you liked what you read, please share this post on social media and subscribe to this blog in order to keep up with the latest posts.  Ask questions or share your thoughts in the comments section below.