Welcome, welcome, to the fifth annual heavily disclaimered review of the year in film, in which I, a man with children and shoes and other things to do, cast a myopic eye over the things I’ve been able to see that were released in 2014.
January again brought an overflow of awards consideration, with two films that themselves considered troubling darknesses at the heart of the United States: The Wolf Of Wall Street held such a lurid mirror up to greed it was in danger of becoming a disco ball, while 12 Years A Slave showed us a past of hatred and racism we all wish was further away than the subsequent events of the year suggest. American introspection was then balanced by weaponised cock-waving, first in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit – a solid bit of Cold War nostalgia – and then in Lone Survivor, which is the closest a nation’s uncritical attitude of militarist interventionalism can get to fellating itself without spilling bullets everywhere. All of which means probably the most fun you could have in a cinema in January was either watching Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, a Latino-focused spin-off of Jason Blum’s microbudget series with enough quality to nudge it away from tokenism towards actual diversity, or sitting quietly in an empty screen thinking about silence and stories made of light.
February gave us two different looks at our relationship with technology. Her built a credible future so casually that it featured high-waist slacks, then smartly ignored it in order to tell a story about loneliness and the emotional legitimacy of loving things. Meanwhile Robocop seemed on the verge of saying something perceptive about a few of the year’s recurring themes – humanity, the military, policing – but was too enchanted by the hardware it was scrutinising (specifically, Joel Kinnaman’s shiny metal buttocks) to deliver. The Lego Movie over-delivered, demonstrating how anti-corporate stances can earn corporations like Time Warners hundreds of millions of dollars and still leave audiences unironically humming conformist anthems, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues had the overwrought, under-nourishing feel of a reformed supergroup, and Matthew McConaughey won an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club for the ability to deflate himself like a balloon.
In March 300: Rise Of An Empire offered an interrogation of masculinity roughly equivalent to staring at a novelty chocolate penis, while, on a level of filmmaking so distant it seems appropriately alien and inscrutable, Under The Skin tore apart conceptions of sex, power and people with traumatic force. Also very good was The Grand Budapest Hotel, in which Wes Anderson revitalised his flagging meticulousness by filling it with people who for once seemed more than carefully dry-brushed miniatures. The Zero Theorem offered glimpses of Terry Gilliam’s masterful eclecticism but hadn’t the budget or scope to do much apart from echo earlier excellence, while, in the way of the comic book adventures which now seem the principal conduit for Hollywood to tell us stories about ourselves, Captain America: The Winter Soldier threw unimaginable amounts of money at achieving something quite small: being a decent conspiracy thriller with a great lead.
Richard Ayoade’s The Double arrived in April and was similar to The Zero Theorem in being a bit like Brazil and lacking the impossible exuberance that made Gilliam’s classic fly. Star Mia Wasikowska then swapped shadows for sunlight in Tracks, a film about her interesting face and the impractical size of Australia. The Raid 2 was also defined by scale, the sequel upsizing a film built around compact brutality for a looser whole that nevertheless delivered its quota of broken limbs. And then Divergent saw out the month with the sort of passable dystopia we should all get used to seeing around these parts now they’ve run out of Hunger Games books.
For my birthday in May I got the knife-like simplicity of Blue Ruin, the sort of ruthless revenge thriller than will drown you in a fucking puddle and you should watch it. Softer and sandier was The Two Faces Of January, which dabbled in jealousy and revenge but never really got under the crawling skin of Patricia Highsmith’s writing. Edge Of Tomorrow harnessed the intuitive grammar of video game progression to Tom Cruise’s ability to make being existentially beleaguered look really fun, above all underlining that he is a star, and he endures. Also enduring was X-Men: Days Of Future Past, a remarkably functional bit of blockbuster acrobatics that contorted itself around a time-slip plot to make possible the inclusion of old and new versions of heroes and villains who get to be friends and enemies all at once, while still providing a leading role for the newly-huge Jennifer Lawrence and lovingly mending the dropped-plate bullshit of X-Men 3. Conversely Godzilla was a blockbuster about a massive lizard who wakes up, and also included humans who were near him, for some reason.
In June I watched nothing, apparently, perhaps in preparation for the stupidity of Transformers: Age of Extinction in July. Michael Bay’s film was marked by a savage empty proficiency, the screeching bellow of a soulless machine tearing at sex, industry and nationalism in the search for significance and only finding a senseless abyss. Luckily the rest of the month was great. Boyhood allowed the passing of time to tell its story – an old one, a flick-book of photographs, but loaded with underplayed emotion – and in rediscovering its allegorical core, that we are them and they are us, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes made a fine drama about trust and violence. The Purge: Anarchy finally delivered the politically keen and Carpenter-esque night of danger in the city the first film promised, and Guardians Of The Galaxy was the kind of fancy dress outfit you get away with if you’re really confident and popular – good and fun, and not just because it reminded me of Firefly.
August was shit – The Inbetweeners 2 was an exhausted bank of cock jokes and sixth form characterisation that’s lost its home counties yearning on the way to becoming a feature length Lad Bible viral. The Expendables 3, the comeback that keeps coming back, is perhaps the first of the series to qualify as an actual film rather than a disjointed fight card of yestermen. It’s also not very good, but still better than Lucy, a slick, squalid action nothing which gradually accelerates to nowhere.
In September A Most Wanted Man was a chance to say goodbye to Philip Seymour Hoffman as he stomped around a beautifully shot Hamburg like a sad espionage bear. The Equaliser was also about espionage, specifically the sort that doesn’t exist but does give retired CIA man and not-Edward Woodward Denzel Washington the ability to make a machine gun from a cup. And then there was Maps To The Stars, Cronenberg’s first film about Hollywood, and one which steadfastly snares that loop of agents and egos, that air-kiss uncertainty of a business that coalesces and disperses according to the jagged rhythms of art and profit. Mia Wasikowska is in this too, and her face is still interesting.
In October the largest part of Gone Girl’s shock and pull came directly from its thriller source, something which overshadowed the excellence of its adaptation, its frozen photography and precise plotting. Fury gave us the metal howl of tank battle drama but landed on a grim nihilism when it seemed to be aiming for plain old horrors of war, while The Maze Runner was another of those young adult fantasies that recreate the social perils of high school with life and death consequences attached. Then, suddenly, two of the year’s best films were here. Nightcrawler was partly about the miasmic sprawl of LA and reality viewed through lenses, but it was lent brilliance by Jake Gyllenhaal’s imitative inhumanity, a figure of singular impulse and threat that bears cross-coast comparison with Travis Bickle. And then there was The Babadook, a film elevated from door-knock horror by an Essie Davis performance of fraught, human sympathy, and a bump-in-the-night story good enough to reach for truths about grief and motherhood.
I only saw one film in November – The Drop, an aimless bit of Dennis Lehane exploitation and small Brooklyn kitchens featuring Tom Hardy, who increasingly seems to have learnt acting from a still image of Marlon Brando. December brought Get Santa, which was less Christmas magic and more card-trick-from-a-cracker (and, after Black Death, featured a frankly disappointing lack of pagan brutalism from director Christopher Smith). In St Vincent Bill Murray played on idealised public conceptions of himself – warmth masked by an inscrutable exterior – in an otherwise unremarkable parade of sentimentality. And, finally, there was The Interview, which is crass and useless in a way that almost makes its international scrutiny profound, but then doesn’t, although James Franco’s relentless stupidity might make you laugh eventually, like a dog who repeatedly runs into a wall.
And that’s everything. The things I feel stupidest for not having seen are Interstellar and Pride, and the best film I’ve caught up with this year was the stark madness of Wake In Fright (a perfect, poisoned backdrop for Tracks). The most fun I had seeing movies this year was at a screening of The Last Temptation Of Christ at Wells Cathedral, although fun is probably the wrong word – the film is serious, the setting was cold and lofty, and warmed only by a sense of the forbidden. The best television I saw this year was Utopia – imperfect, but brilliant in that initial burst and the first episode of season 2 – and Dennis Potter’s Karaoke, which struck me like a version of Mulholland Dr as filtered through the nicotine haze of my Nana’s Clapham flat in the mid-’90s. Oh, and it wasn’t officially released in the UK this year, but I saw Snowpiercer this year, too. What the fuck are you lot on about? It’s rubbish.
