My Top 10 films of 2014

Continuing yesterday's post, here's the main event! My Top 10 films of 2014.

Before we begin, I'm sure someone will bring up the fact that a film I called "the most brilliant and subversively political film you'll see all year," a movie I said, " might be the most cinematically daring film of this decade, if not this century," is not on this list. The truth is, I didn't think it was fair to these other twenty films to make them measure up to the opus that was TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION. I gave it four thumbs up last summer and if you're curious about why, check out this review, or buy my book on all of Michael Bay's movies - MICHAEL F-ING BAY: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay's Films.


1. Boyhood - I feel like these first three or four films are in a dead heat with each other. I give BOYHOOD the edge because it's a deceptively simple story, yet really quietly powerful. I've seen a few people snark about how the film has no point beyond just showing people get older. Some even say that it's no different than watching characters grow up over the course of a long-running TV series or a continuing film series like HARRY POTTER. I think that misses some of the point of BOYHOOD, which often seems to be about the quieter, mini-milestones of youth. It's a character-heavy story that doesn't burden itself so much with making each year fill a "character-defining moment" quota. After a lot of thought, I think it works because it puts the audience in the shoes of the parents, always aware that their child will continue to grow and evolve, and wondering what sort of young man he'll become. There's a moment with Patricia Arquette near the end that really drives home how much we've been following the story of her life as well as her son's. So let the naysayers cry about how there was "no story." That just makes me more impressed with how this movie provokes an audience to feel.

2. Nightcrawler - If you're in the middle of writing a dark suspense film, like I am, NIGHTCRAWLER is both essential viewing and also confidence-crushing. Working from his own script in his directing debut, Dan Gilroy pulls off one of the most intense films of the last year. At least two sequences will have your heart racing and the wonderful thing is that by the time each of those emerges, the film has taken so many risks that we truly feel like anything can happen. I saw this movie while I was working on a script that had a total sociopath at its core and I was struggling with how to depict that without pandering to the audience. The first two scenes alone were a revelation in unfurling that sort of character. Jake Gyllenhaal gives what is likely his best performance ever as the ambitious and slimy Lou Bloom. He makes your skin crawl even before he gets to the really nasty stuff. Unfortunately, he's so good that the Oscar buzz for his performance seems to be overshadowing the equally deserving Rene Russo. And in a year that was even slightly less competitive, I bet Riz Ahmed would be a dark horse contender for Best Supporting Actor buzz.

3. Whiplash - For my money, it's one of the best films of the year, capped off with a fantastic performance by J.K. Simmons as a band conductor at one of the best schools in the country. Miles Tellar plays the jazz drumming student desperate to earn his respect, to the point that he endures a lot of verbal and (technically) physical abuse. It's also a very small-scale movie. Though there were turns in the story that came as a gut punch to me, it's much more about character than plot. Any writer seeking to learn from strong character writing (and that should be all of you) really would benefit from studying this film. Don't walk into this movie with the misconception that a film needs to be an epic in order to be one of the year's best. Simmons deserves the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this one.

4. Selma - Like THE CRUCIBLE, SELMA tells a story about the past with very direct commentary on our present. Some of the parallels are so of the moment that for a moment, you might almost think that it was conceived in direct response to recent incidents. The film wisely doesn't attempt to be a full biopic on Dr. King and instead focuses on the marches Dr. King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in an effort to protest obstacles put in place to prevent black citizens from registering to vote in the South. This is a film as much about 2014 as any other contemporary film. I'm aware this is an intensely competitive year, but director Ava DuVernay deserves to be singled out by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America for her extraordinary work here. SELMA is more than an "eat your vegetables" movie. It's an important film that honors some brave men and women who stood up for their rights and forced a nation to look hard at it's own shame.

5. Gone Girl - What I appreciated most about Gone Girl is that this was not a film that felt like it made a choice between having a complex, twisting plot and complex characters. There's enough real estate here for both. Usually in these kinds of films, the plot goes through so many contortions that the characters either don't have time to be fleshed out, or the film needs them to be cyphers so that later twists aren't telegraphed. Wild Things is a good example of this, a fun, trashy thriller with more turns than a roller coaster, but barely any pretension about its cast of characters. It's far harder to tell a story about complex people and maintain enough mystery about them to keep shocking us late into a complex story. Ben Affleck is quite good as a man suspected in the disappearance of his wife, maintaining his innocence even as the evidence piles up, but Rosemund Pike utterly owns this movie with her Hitchcock-blonde portrayal of that wife, Amy. If you've gone this long without learning of the many twists in this film, see it before someone ruins it.

6. The Lego Movie - We all wrote this off before seeing it, and we all ended up with egg on our face afterwards when this was as clever, fun and moving as some of the better Pixar films. Writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller remind us that even a questionable idea can be - wait for it - awesome with the proper execution. At this point, Lord and Miller could be announced on a remake of Birth of a Nation and I'd say, "Let's give them a chance before we judge."

7.  Birdman - the story of a washed up actor who saw his career plummet after walking away from the latest sequel in his superhero franchise twenty years ago. That actor, Riggan Thomsan, (played by Michael Keaton) is on the verge of a possible comeback via the Broadway play he's directing, starring in, and adapted. The problem is the show isn't very good and it's just had to recast one of its main players at the start of previews. The film's thoroughly character-driven from start to finish. As much as the three-act structure is there, this is not a movie where you'll be overtly aware of the structure. You will notice the film's technique of appearing to have all been shot in one take. Though the visual effect is seamless, I found it occasionally showy to the point of distracting. That doesn't change that this is a well-made, well-acted film.

8. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - Dawn is probably the best film this summer at building tension and character simultaneously, and that equation adds up to tragedy. Even if you went into this story unaware of how events have to turn to line up with later installments, you'd probably be struck by the inevitability of the events, specifically the war between apes and humans. After this, there's no excuse for fully CGI-characters to not feel as real as ones played by human actors. This is a movie that opens with some fifteen minutes in ape society and it's absolutely riveting. As it develops the conflict between humans and apes it's clear neither side really wants a war, but the ones doing the most saber-rattling are provoked into it out of the fear that if they don't strike first, they will be run over. Both sides have their justifications and once the die is cast, the saddest moment of the film comes when it's apparent there will be no way to avoid the consequences. It's rare to get this sense of tragedy in a summer movie. In fact, it's probably even rarer to find this sort of craft in a franchise that's some eight films in.

9. Interstellar - INTERSTELLAR is a hard movie to write about, even though it ranks among director Christopher Nolan's best. It's also one of his most emotional. The director has a rep for being cold, but the script - co-written with his brother Jonathan Nolan - wisely makes the emotional relationship between McConaughey's Cooper and his daughter Murph into its backbone. The sequence where he awakens from decades of cryo-sleep to catch up on years of recorded messages from his daughter as family as they grew up without him. I have some issues with the third act (I think Murph makes a critical realization WAY too fast considering what a logistical leap that it is, and then a later scene involving Cooper and Murph is too rushed and abrupt to be a fitting emotional catharsis for that relationship.) So much of this film works that if its ambitions outstrip its ability in a few spots, I can roll with it. Best seen on the biggest screen you can find.

10. X-Men: Days of Future Past - Not just my favorite comic book movie of the year, but one of my favorite comic book movies ever. The degree of difficulty on this was insanely high. There's the blending of two casts in what is essentially a crossover between the two X-MEN continuities, a complex time travel plot, and solid character arcs for multiple leads. On top of that, there's a coda that addresses some of the missteps of the past films and brings closure to a 15 year saga while putting us on a path to tell new stories with the younger cast. The fact that any of this feels effortless or simple is just a tribute to the fine work of credited writers Simon Kinberg, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn and director Bryan Singer. If you want to write superhero movies, you need to study this film.

NIGHTCRAWLER - a must-see study in creating "unlikable" characters

There will be some general story spoilers for the first half of this, but not much that you can't deduce from the trailer. I'm going to warn you before I blow bigger stuff, and then I'm going to tip-toe around the last 20 minutes or so of the film. I'm not sure how other reviewers have decided to handle this, but much of the back half of the film plays better if you go in fresh.

Right from the start, NIGHTCRAWLER lets you know that it's about a character who isn't going to be easy to like. At. All. We meet Jake Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom as he breaks into a construction site to steal materials to re-sell as scrap. A guard catches him and Lou unconvincingly tries to talk his way out of it before beating up the guard and then stealing his expensive watch.

In the next scene, Lou tries to sell the scrap to a junk dealer and it's apparent that Lou either can't read social cues or actively has decided not to cater to them. First he tries to negotiate a higher price for his find, in the process pissing off the dealer. Then he asks the man if he can have a job, not even waiting for the owner to really respond before launching into a long, prepared speech about how he's a hard worker and not going to come with an entitled attitude like so many of his generation.

Lou Bloom is the kind of guy who makes you uncomfortable when he talks to you. At first, he reminded me of people who read The Secret or who took one of those bullshit life coaching classes where they preach persistence above all else, no matter the reaction. In Lou's world, "no" doesn't mean "no" so much as it's a provocation to reload and try again. Even if we hadn't seen how Lou obtained his junk, that sequence with the dealer alone would be enough for us to find him off-putting.

Eventually, we come to understand that his alien nature is what gives him his power. It puts his opponents off-balance, and opponents is precisely the right word because Lou treats every encounter like it's a move in a larger chess game. He has zero empathy with anyone, to the point where he's a near sociopath.

Quickly, Lou becomes fascinated by the work of videographers who spend nights listening to police scanners and arriving at accident and crime scenes with the intent of shooting and selling footage to local news stations. Fatal accidents and shootings command the biggest bucks, and while some might cringe at the moral issues involved in crashing a carjacking scene and filming a victim take his last breaths while paramedics work to save him, Lou has no such qualms. It's as if he's found his calling.

Before long, Lou has added another member to his team, a young man named Rick (Riz Ahmed, doing good work as one of the movie's only likable characters) who's desperate for a job. In another marvelous dialogue scene, Lou firmly informs the young man that this isn't a playing job, it's an "internship." He hits all the usual points about how this can be an "opportunity" for the young man and if you don't want to punch Lou in the face by the end of this scene, you've never tried hunting for a job in at least the last ten years.

The fascinating thing about this is how Lou manages to get exactly what he wants through sheer force of personality. There's no charisma to what he does, nothing that gives a person the grounds to think, "Well, he seems like a totally nice guy. I'll go the extra mile for him." He is unapologetic and emotionally detached. When engages people, it's only to get something he wants and the reparte is almost entirely on showing the person how screwed they are if they don't comply. It's not so much horse-trading as it is, "I'm going to take your horse. And I'm going to explain why you're better off just letting that happen."

There's a long history in film and TV of charismatic assholes, and yet, they often become beloved characters. Think of Ari Gold from Entourage, a character who is the epitome of every horrible trait you could find in his profession. He's a bully, he's racist, he threatens people, he destroys careers... and yet even as he does this, there's such magnetism to the character that one almost goes, "Ha ha... that's our Ari! What's he up to next?" He's not even at Walter White levels of "Wow, that was awful, but it was badass too!" Watch those guys (or Boston Legal's Alan Shore, or Scrubs's Dr. Cox, to name two other notable TV assholes) and some dark part of your soul goes, "Damn, I wish I could be cool as those guys." I don't know if there's anything "cool" about Lou Bloom.

This is not a criticism of Gyllenhaal's performance, by the way. Quite the opposite, he commits to Lou's horrible nature fully and completely, with no attempt at all to smooth off some rough edges to get us rooting for the guy. There's possibly a great counterexample even within the same film, through Bill Paxton's character as a rival nightcrawler. Paxton's chasing down the same sort of footage, preying on victims of violence in much the same way. Even as he's being a loudmouth, there's something likable about the guy. He's "a guy you could have a beer with." It's not even that the film seems to be trying to get us to like Paxton, we just kind of accept him. It shows just how hard they work to make sure Lou doesn't provoke a "Hey, he's kinda fun!" reaction.

Every success Lou has is followed up in pretty short measure by some scene that reminds us Lou is pretty slimy. Midway through the film, he takes news director Nina (Rene Russo) out to drinks. He's already asked her out and been rebuffed in an earlier scene and after a relatively unveiled threat to take his footage elsewhere, Lou manages to talk her into joining him.

What follows is a truly despicable conversation where he causally reveals to Nina that he's researched a great deal about her on the internet, successfully targets her insecurity and vulnerability - specifically that she is probably not long for that job and that the upcoming ratings period is crucial to her future - and extorts her not only for a higher pay rate, but also better credit, important introductions at the station and, oh yes, sexual favors. While there is a token attempt to let Nina know that accepting this deal benefits her, it's more of the "do this and I won't have to shoot you" variety rather than a true "win-win." This isn't deal-making, it's blackmail.

(Russo, by the way, is also excellent in her supporting role. It's a real shame that her only other roles since 2005 have been in the THOR movies.)

HEAVIER SPOILERS BELOW

Of course, all this pales when cast against what Lou does in the second half of the film. Thanks to a police scanner (and a mandate to chase stories that prey on the white fear of urban crime creeping into their "safe" communities) Lou arrives on the scene of a home invasion just before the suspects flee. He gets footage of them and their car, then enters the affluent home and rolls footage on the brutal aftermath. Three people have been shot dead in gruesome fashion, their bodies left to bleed throughout the opulent setting. Lou gets what he needs and flees the scene before the cops arrive.

Nina's practically salivating at the footage (which has been clipped of the footage of the killers by the time Lou passes it on) and makes it the lead of the next newscast. Some of her colleagues have clear misgivings about using it, but Nina knows it's ratings gold and watching her direct the reporters' live commentary on the footage makes it clear just how she wants this story received. The local news mandate is to scare the crap out of their viewers - that way they'll keep coming back for updates.

And then there's the matter of how Lou exploits the footage he held back of the killers. Even with a spoiler warning, I feel like it would be a crime to blow this for the audience. Suffice to say that Lou's amoral nature and desire to create a newsworthy event goes far past most people's moral threshold. It actually makes him vulnerable for once, as he enters into a negotiation where someone else has leverage over him. There's some nice writing of that scene, where both players realize the power dynamic has shifted. You can almost see the gears working in their heads as that happens. It's the kind of moment we don't get enough of in film, seeing characters actually think. (It's also a nice showcase for the actor who becomes Gyllenhaal's sparring partner in that sequence.)

Watching Lou's plans play out make for some of the most intense moments in film this year. Watching this, you would never guess that it was screenwriter Dan Gilroy's directing debut. Not only does he have a wonderful command of character and dialogue in the script, but Gilroy has an innate sense of where to put the camera. He knows when to lock us into a particular character's point of view and watch tension build at a distance, and he knows when to put us right in the thick of the action. I felt like I was watching the work of Michael Mann circa Collateral.

As someone currently working on a script involving a sociopath and a character who isn't likable or redeemable in the least, NIGHTCRAWLER was a valuable study. There's a lot this script can teach about character crafting. I've said before that one of the necessary components of any great script is a strong character we don't feel like we've seen before. Lou Bloom is not the sort of character I've run across often. Creating him is an act of bravery on the part of Gillroy and Gyllenhaal, and it won't surprise me if that boldness is rewarded throughout Oscar season.