Movie Moments Of The Year - 2014

Another cobbled together list of some of my favourite moments from 2014's films as well as older ones I saw for the first time. So here's a leisurely stroll through them...

2014 films:

• The story of creation in Noah - beautifully composed as it also worked in evolution and epic timescales into the mythology of the story.
• "SPACESHIP! SPACESHIP! SPACESHIP!! SPACESHIP!!" - The LEGO Movie.
• The Grand Budapest Hotel - every perfectly centred frame.
• Those final credits of 22 Jump Street - they're funny cuz their true...
• Being in the same theatre with Caroll Spinney (the puppeteer of Big Bird and Oscar The Grouch) and James Randi within the same week during Hot Docs.

• The breathless car chase in Nightcrawler.
• The bracing last 10 minutes of Whiplash.
• The wonderful sing-a-long in A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence (more fully described here).
• And then followed later in the film by the gut punch...
• The docking scene and entry into the black hole sequence from Interstellar.

• Melanie Lynskey in Happy Christmas.
• The end discussion of the erotic novel in Happy Christmas - please tell me there are extended outtakes of that somewhere on the DVD...
• Alejandro Jodorowsky's brief passionate anger about a director's ownership of their dream of the story in Jodorowsky's Dune.
• Gone Girl's moment of realization that she once again has been trapped into playing a role and once again has to take action...
• The butterflies arriving with Spring in The Duke Of Burgundy.

• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds performing "Higgs Boson Blues" and "Jubilee Street" in the awesome music doc 20000 Days On Earth.
• The opening single take swooping shot in The Town That Dreaded Sundown which introduces all the major players at once.
• The first reading of the play with Edward Norton in Birdman where Michael Keaton's actor actually improvises and reacts instead of sticking to the script.
• Both times that "Une Femme Avec Toi" plays in The New Girlfriend - both are emotional high points.
• The avalanche in Force Majeure and the immediate consequences.

• Little Groot's dance at the end of Guardians Of The Galaxy.
• The opening titles of The World Of Kanako - insane and perfectly capturing the tone and pace of the film to follow.
• The hallucinogenic trip in They Have Escaped.
• Michael Keaton enters a small New York City liquor store lit up like a Christmas tree in Birdman.
• Norte: The End Of History's turning point: the off screen murder.

• The Guest dispatching some bullies.
• Ghostly visitors in the documentary The Darkside - subtle and effective at getting the storyteller's experiences across.
• The explanation (which involves the idea of fornication with sandwiches) of why vampires prefer virgin blood in What We Do In The Shadows.
• Scarlett Johansson in repose in Chef.

• Though I didn't like the film much, that final shot in The Immigrant is glorious. As is the entirety of Marion Cotillard's performance.
• Dave Franco's De Niro impersonation in Neighbors.
• The impressive car chase in The Raid 2.
• A royal meeting in the garden in A Little Chaos.

Older films:

• Light and shadow in The Uninvited.
• Those damn minions in Despicable Me - I just couldn't help smiling during every scene they were in. Great comedic creations.
• The massive iceberg calving event towards the end of Chasing Ice. Also the time lapse photos of glaciers shrinking over a few years were remarkable.
• "Cool" from West Side Story - the energy, anger and frustration of youth captured in dance.
• A final walk on the beach in About Time.

• Sorcerer - the unbearable tension of the rope bridge crossings of both trucks.
• Every bit of spittle that flies from the mouth's of the characters of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf.
• Russian Roulette in The Deer Hunter - after hearing about the scene after all these years, it was even worse than I imagined.
• The over-the-top-and-around-the-bend practical effects at the end of Society. Extra gooey...
• Trouble Every Day's two "graphic" moments were absolutely harrowing.

• A drunken walk across a banquet table with a fire extinguisher in Ashes And Diamonds.
• The depiction of insanity and an insane asylum in the Japanese silent film A Page Of Madness.
• This moment from the B-movie Deadly Spawn. Baffling.
• Meg Tilly's shrieking accusation in Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers.

• Slim Pickens' death scene in Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid - waiting for his life to fade away like the setting sun.
• The build up of tension towards the end of The Bedford Incident.
• Spotting all sorts of unknown-at-the-time faces in Prime Time (aka American Raspberry).
• Crossing water using floating pieces of wood in 36th Chamber Of Shaolin.

And finally:

• Watching some of my all-time favourite films (Network, 12 Angry Men and To Kill A Mockingbird) for the first time with The Boy.

My Favourite Films of 2014

A personal list of the films that excited me, moved me and stuck with me this past year...


1. Grand Budapest Hotel

I have loved every Wes Anderson film so far. It's not just his style (though I fell for every wonderfully designed, coloured and centered frame in this film), it's his whole approach to storytelling - and dammit if this wasn't a great story with some lovely human touches. And Ralph Fiennes should get recognized for a brilliant comedic turn - particularly since he made my son laugh harder than anyone else on screen this year.

2. Gone Girl

Another case of both substance and gorgeous style. Fincher's version of the novel manages to allow sympathy, empathy and detest for BOTH main characters. And like most great magicians, he pulls the trick off with a sense of effortlessness.

3. A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence

The beauty of Roy Andersson's films (in particular with his trilogy: Songs From The Second Floor, You The Living and this one) is that through absurdity, humour and the occasional stunning image, he brings you both the warmth and the horror of humanity and leaves it up to you what to take away. There's nothing else like it.

4. Whiplash

The drums drive the film forward with a distinct pulse through raucous periods, through tension filled moments and even through a few of the quieter sections. It feels like the perfect vehicle to represent the insistent drive for perfection that consumes these characters.

5. The Duke Of Burgundy

I absolutely feasted on the smorgasbord of images and sounds on display - like director Peter Strickand's previous film "Berberian Sound Studio" and one of 2013's faves "Upstream Color", my senses came away satiated to the gills.

6. Nightcrawler

Satirical, tense, blackly comic and even provoked a spontaneous round of applause after the best damn car chase I've seen since I don't know when. Can't wait to see it again.

7. Clouds Of Sils Maria

The film may have layers upon layers of meta, but it does so within the confines of the stories. The real joy, though, is in watching and listening to Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart interact and react to each other.

8. Interstellar

I tend to agree with just about any negative points made about the film - from the comments about thin characters to the rather pointless (but I think accurate) criticism of its science - but none of that stops me from just getting lost in the grandeur of the space sequences, the ideas and the unstoppable effect that time has on us. And I don't think I took a breath from that docking scene all the way to the black hole - almost like I was left dangling out in space...

9. Boyhood

My own Boy is somewhere in the middle of the arc travelled here by the character of Mason, so forgive me for attaching personal feelings to this film. But that's what it does so fantastically well - it finds those smaller moments in the life of its characters to really bring them out and feel like true people.

10. 20000 Days On Earth

Nick Cave has led a pretty remarkable life and through his storytelling (and what a great teller of stories he is), several surreal sequences, a variety of old clips and recent concert footage, we get a fascinating portrait painted.

11. Inherent Vice

A drug-fueled, paranoid, modern retro take on The Big Sleep. All the "messiness" of the film is (at least in my opinion) by design. The fun of experiencing it is being thrown into Doc's confused brain and the ever-growing list of characters and plot points.

12. Wild

I will likely always be a Jean-Marc Vallee fanboy (simply due the C.R.A.Z.Y. and Cafe De Flore), but I didn't go in with massive expectations for his latest. His skill (and his editing team's as well) at cutting to sound (not just music, but dialogue and ambient sound) is remarkable and helps to tell this solo trek with flashbacks in a fresh and emotional way. Reese Witherspoon is great and Laura Dern puts in one of the best supporting performances of the year.

13. Locke

I'm not sure this "one man in a car on the phone" movie would have worked with anyone but Tom Hardy. With his calm matter of fact demeanour and Welsh accent, he helps make it a terribly interesting journey up a British motorway. I never found it dull in the least as we slowly learn the details of the reasons for his sudden left turn.

14. The Town That Dreaded Sundown

A compelling, moody, surprising and absolutely gorgeous film that pleases aesthetically, but also encourages you to actively engage with its visuals, colours and foreground/background object placements. A wonderful surprise and a new take on "rebooting" an old story.

15. Birdman

The device of making the entire film seem like a single take (even though the 2 hour run time is spread over several days) kept me completely engaged with Michael Keaton's struggling actor/celebrity and allowed me into his state of mind. The performances all around were entertaining and the film delivered many more laughs than expected.

16. The New Girlfriend

Francois Ozon has been an up and down director for me (even within individual films), but this is easily the best thing I've seen by him - particularly in the way he brought some well deserved emotion to the surface during several key points in this story of a man and a woman coming to terms with their true feelings about who they are.

17. The LEGO Movie

That astronaut had a crack in his helmet almost exactly like the LEGO figure I had when I was a kid. So there was no going back at that point...There was no need to turn around, though, as the energy, humour and creativity of the animation was more than enough to keep that smile locked on my face.

18. Force Majeure

Possibly the best looking film of the year. Every single damn shot was composed so very carefully and helped tell the tale of a relationship that was already precarious and whose slide might not be preventable once it begins to crumble. That avalanche metaphor is kinda perfect for this story.

19. They Have Escaped

Not your average teen runaway story, this Finnish road film marries great hallucinatory sights and sounds to show attempts to escape adulthood.

20. The Rover

Bleak, but riveting. You could feel every bit of desperation in each and every character.


15 Honourable Mentions:

Leviathan, The Babadook, Guardians Of The Galaxy, 1001 Grams, The World Of Kanako, What We Do In The Shadows, Kabukicho Love Hotel, Shrew's Nest, Happy Christmas, Coherence, Spring, The One I Love, Cold In July, American Interior, God's Pocket.

The 2013 CAST Awards

For the 4th year running, good friend James McNally (also the founder and curator of the great short film screening series Shorts That Are Not Pants) has polled a disparate group of Toronto film writers/bloggers/cineastes for their 10 best films of the past year. The resulting final CAST (Cinema Appreciation Society of Toronto) awards provides not only a fine looking Top 10, but also allows you to walk through all the individual lists (including mine) to get a glimpse of a wide variety of taste and hopefully garner a few ideas for additional films to watch.

The full list with additional stats and individual member's votes can be found here. Below is the top 15:

1. Her
2. 12 Years a Slave
3. Before Midnight
4. Gravity
5. Inside Llewyn Davis
6. Mud
7. Frances Ha
8. The Wolf of Wall Street
9. Upstream Color
10. Dallas Buyers Club
11. Blue is the Warmest Color
12. The Broken Circle Breakdown
13. Museum Hours
14. Stoker
15. Spring Breakers

Except for Blue is the Warmest Color (which I haven't yet seen) and Frances Ha (which simply never connected with me), I'm kinda in love with this list. My entire top 5 is represented within it and 10 of my top 20 make it. I don't know what that says about me and my taste, but it sure means a lot of great cinema was appreciated this year.

My Favourite Films of 2013

A personal list of the films that excited me, moved me and stuck with me this past year...


1. Museum Hours

One of the most wonderful examinations of the intertwining relationship between life and art that I've seen, Museum Hours also provided me with the most eye-opening "wow" moments of the year as it delighted in matching scenes from both those worlds.

2. Her

Spike Jonze takes a sci-fi concept (about artificial intelligences so advanced, you can fall in love with them) as a springboard to look at human relationships, what we need from our partners/friends and how crippling loneliness can truly be. There's also plenty of humour, great performances all around and some wonderful detail built into the not-to-distant-future world that's been rendered on screen.

3. Before Midnight

If I didn't like or respect every choice that Jesse and Celine made during the course of the film (or, for that matter, all 3 films), I completely believed that each of them would make those decisions. A practically perfect and complete realization of complex characters that frustrate you as they also endear themselves to you. And the opening car ride is easily one of the best scenes of the year.

4. Broken Circle Breakdown

Through its use of music (American folk to die for) and a broken narrative structure, this Belgian/Dutch film by Felix van Groeningen (The Misfortunates) heightens and emphasizes each and every little moment, shows the pointlessness of each little argument and really does invoke the old saw that you should "live every moment to its fullest".

5. Upstream Color

This movie is tactile. I could almost feel it. It immersed me into its sound field & visuals and enveloped my senses like few other films have. There's more to it, but the visceral feelings I had throughout are more than enough reason for me to love it.

6. Starred Up

There was a palpable sense of authenticity about this British prison story (my favourite film from TIFF) that helped bring a sense of unease and unpredictability to each and every scene. Its characters are extraordinarily flawed individuals that you felt could explode at any given moment, but who could also surprise via their cunning, logic and occasional ability to see the bigger picture and not just the end of a shiv. The film is nigh on perfect in its depiction of not just the brutal life of the slammer, but of the different ways men desperately crave respect (in all its forms) and the lengths to which they will go to get it.

7. Like Father Like Son

Like most Kore-eda films, this one excels in its little moments - in particular just about every moment either of the two adorable 6 year-old boys is on screen. No matter what subject or theme Kore-eda considers, he always manages to bring real and interesting people to his stories with whom you kind of want to stay in touch. Even if they may be terribly misguided at times.

8. Mud

I'm not sure any other story this year engrossed me more in its narrative details. Everything gelled perfectly: the pacing, the sense of place, the characters. Jeff Nichols has now made my list of "anything he does, I'll watch".

9. Twenty Feet From Stardom

When Merry Clayton (the female vocalist in the Rolling Stones classic "Gimme Shelter") ferociously rips into Neil Young's "Southern Man" with her killer backing band and glowers straight through the camera lens to her audience, it gave me my number one goose-bump raising moment of 2013. It's goddamn glorious. The rest of the film ain't too shabby either as it introduces numerous other incredibly talented yet rarely acknowledged backup singers from a variety of rock genres and does them a great deal of justice.

10. Short Term 12

Brie Larson gives one of the best performances of the year in an affecting story of damaged young people that never once hits a false note or feels like it was pleading for an emotional response.

11. Blue Ruin

A consistently surprising and suspenseful revenge film with a confused, complex, imperfect protagonist makes for a messy moral landscape - and I can't wait for more people to get a chance to see it.

12. The Wolf Of Wall Street

I'll admit I'm still a bit conflicted about Scorsese's latest...I hear the criticism - a lack of a moral centre, the fact that it might actually bring more fame & money to the story's real-life slimeball and how much of it is "Scorsese-retread" - and I can even agree with some of it, but it doesn't change the fact that it also contains numerous memorable scenes and was 3 hours worth of engaging entertainment. And Kyle Chandler's FBI agent provides just the right amount of humanity at the end to bring me back out of the cesspool.

13. The Battery

A novel take on the zombie movie with two former baseball players doing the best they can to avoid the roving hordes while also trying not to kill each other. Refreshing, original and gorgeous looking to boot.

14. Stoker

I can't help but love a movie that dives headlong into a lurid morass and then just revels and bathes in it (this may explain why I really did enjoy The Wolf Of Wall Street). A great example of what modern day melodrama can be - I can't help but think that Douglas Sirk would've been impressed.

15. Intruders

A film that shifts tonally on a dime (It's a comedy! No, its a mystery! No, it's a thriller! No, it's a satire of modern day Korean...Wait, what kind of movie is this?!), but never lets go of you or your interest in where the story is going.

16. Gravity

For all its technical marvel and beautiful images, Gravity is at its core a thrill ride and more intense than most any amusement park ride. It probably took me about an hour to regain my legs afterwards.

17. Muscle Shoals

If it only succeeded in reinforcing the genius of Wilson Pickett's cover of "Hey Jude" (and Duane Allman's role in it), Muscle Shoals would be a great music documentary. It's much more though, as it tells several bittersweet stories revolving around the overflowing amount of classic soul and rock that came from this tiny corner of Alabama.

18. Valentine Road

I've rarely been as angry walking out of a movie as I was after seeing this documentary about the murder of an 8th grade student by one of his classmates. It's a useful anger though - one that makes you want to ensure nothing like this could happen anywhere within your reach. The systemic failure at every turn by every adult to help either of these children is shameful and tragic.

19. 12 Years A Slave

12 Years A Slave never shies away from showing you the horrific nature of the lives of slaves, but it also never purposely tries to wring every last tear from you. The emotion it earns at the end of the film is completely honest.

20. The World's End

As funny as expected, but also a look at the dangers of living in the past. I'm not sure anyone expected a movie about a pub crawl could be this mature.


15 Honourable Mentions:

We Are The Best!, Much Ado About Nothing, Spring Breakers, Side Effects, Drinking Buddies, A Story Of Children And Film, Metalhead, The Lunchbox, Under The Skin, Sound City, Rewind This!, 15 Reasons To Live, Motivational Growth, Cheap Thrills, Enough Said