Or, BRETT'S FAVORITE MOVIES OF 2014 THAT WEREN’T GODZILLA
My list that I put together last year sucked. I just didn’t see very many movies, and so I went all-in this year, watching everything I could. I caught most of the big summer releases and a few smaller movies in between. There have been quite a lot of really good movies, which is awesome, but these are my favorites. Godzilla is on the list too, obviously, but having written about it twice already, I didn’t see the point in putting you guys through that again.
The Rover - Movie of the year, probably? I’ve always found myself more drawn to this kind of movie: small, stripped down, with a simple threadbare plot and only a few characters to work with. The whole movie is just watching a very quiet, very angry Guy Pearce on a single-minded journey to get his car back from a handful of thieves who stole it somewhere in the Australian outback. What’s the “Collapse” which the beginning of the movie refers to? Who knows. There’s no attempt at exposition, no answers to why things are so terrible, why life is so cheap. Pearce is incredible in this movie, and so is Robert Pattinson as a filthy halfwit redneck forced to tag along on this bloody trip.
The Raid 2: Berandal - The theater my friend and I saw this in was empty save for another six or seven people, but we were all there for the same purpose: to watch the sequel to one of the best fight movies ever made. It was like going to church. I didn’t think it was really possible to top the fights in the Raid, but Gareth Evans and his team really scaled things up and managed to pull it off. The first half is a little slow, but around the halfway mark the movie turns into fights on top of fights, with one incredible car chase thrown in just to mix things up and keep you on your toes. One of the movie’s three assassins, Hammer Girl, is probably my favorite movie character of the year.
Under the Skin - I haphazardly tried to write about this once before and was unsuccessful. This is a movie about an alien disguised as a human who seduces and kidnaps men, then takes them to be, uh, farmed, yes, but it’s also very much a movie about gender, identity, and self image/body issues. There’s a lot going on here that parallels a lot of my current interests, and there are scenes that look like the kind of things I’ve tried to draw and express in my own work. It’s inhuman, it’s haunting, it’s beautiful, it‘s heartbreaking. I hope Scarlett Johansson does more weird stuff like this and steps back a bit more from doing ridiculous action movies, because her performance is incredible.
John Wick - Next to the Raid 2, this is the best action I’ve seen in a movie this year. There’s some great, interesting world building going on, a lot of emphasis is put on the criminal underworld that Keanu Reeves’s titular assassin finds himself strolling back into, a world filled with great character actors and smooth gunfight choreography with a big headshot count. While there isn’t really anything groundbreaking going on here, it’s stylish, expertly crafted, and a lot of fun.
The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears - The Belgian couple who directed this movie are clearly really into giallo, but not so much into things like storytelling or comprehensible narratives. A man returns home from a business trip to find his wife has gone missing. In searching for her and trying to hire a detective to help him out, he unearths a lot of weird, grisly things in the apartment building where he lives. The strange people he encounters couldn’t care less about his plight and are more concerned with talking about their own weird shit, nightmares and hallucinations come fast and hard, and people start dying from vaginal knife wounds in their skulls. Don’t even try making sense of it or following the events as they take place, just enjoy the repurposed music from old Italian films (lots of Morricone in there!) and take in the insane, gorgeous visuals. There’s a nightmare sequence that really got under my skin that I’m never going to be able to forget, one full of false awakenings and gore. It can get exhausting after a while, but I haven’t seen anything quite like this in a long time.
Honorable mentions: Interstellar, Noah, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Enemy, Blue Ruin
Movies I didn't get to see: Nightcrawler, Birdman, Lucy, The Guest, Tokyo Tribe, Inherent Vice, Big Hero 6, Why Don't You Play in Hell?, Gone Girl, Fury