Best Movies of 2014

Honorable Mention

13.The Fault in Our Stars
12.Captain America: The Winter Solder
11.Fury

10. Noah
9.Inherent Vice
8.Guardians of the Galaxy
7.The Grand Budapest Hotel
6.American Sniper
5.Interstellar
4.Gone Girl
3.Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
2.The Imitation Game
1.Into The Woods

I've been movie blogging since 2005 but have a hard time putting together best of the year lists because I often don't see many of a given years most promising films until later. So I've decided to put together some belated best of lists.

Honorable Mention:

15.Tomorrowland
14.Sleeping With Other People
13.Hail Caesar!
12.Creed
11.The Witch: A New England Folktale

10.April and the Extraordinary World
9. Mad Max: Fury Road
8.Trumbo
7.The Walk
6.Steve Jobs
5.The Revenant
4.Brooklyn
3.The Measure of A Man
2.The Big Short
1.Spotlight

My Top 10 Favorite TV Shows of All Time (yep they are all hour long drama's)

10. Police Woman
9. Babylon 5
8. Boston Legal
7. Boardwalk Empire
6. The West Wing (seasons 1-4)
5. Marcus Welby M.D.
4. Mad Men
3. Six Feet Under
2. Twin Peaks
1. Homicide: Life on the Street

Rules Don't Apply (2016)

Rules Don't Apply is Warren Beatty's first film role since Town & Country in 2001, and the first feature film he's directed since Bulworth in 1998. Once one of Hollywood's biggest stars and a noted playboy, Beatty might now be principally noted for his left wing politics (and the fact that he's married to Annette Bening) but Rules Don't Apply isn't much of a political movie, instead it is to my reading the kind of movie you make when you want to make one last movie.

The prospect of playing Howard Hughes has got to have been something that had been percolating in Beatty's mind for some time, he co-wrote the story on which this movie is based and adapted it into a screenplay. Beatty seems to be having a ball playing the part which seems like a mixture of Joe Biden and Garry Shandling getting stoned. While Hughes is a major player in the story its not principally about him, instead its a rather old fashioned romance between Hughes employee Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich) and young starlet Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins). The two meet when Forbes is assigned to be Mabrey's driver when she first comes to Hollywood in the late 1950's, right around the same time Beatty first came there in real life. The two leads have a surprisingly strong chemistry together, and while there is the request misunderstandings inherent to this type of picture, it's played with a nice old fashioned subtlety and class which is refreshing at the same time its being nostalgic.

Beatty loads the film with big names in small parts, including Matthew Broderick, Alec Baldwin, Candice Bergen, Dabney Coleman, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Steve Coogan, Oliver Platt, Paul Sorvino, Martin Sheen and of course Annette Bening. The film is very lose with the real Howard Hughes time line, moving the whole Clifford Irving fake memories affair up about eight years and having him still signing starlets in 1959, two years after he started selling RKO for parts. This is a pleasurable eccentric meander of a film, the kind we don't get enough of and a vanity project in the best sense of the term. ***1/2

The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

I did not know this story, and its quite gripping. Based on the 1985 best selling German book of the same name by Stefan Aust, The Baader Menhof Complex tells the true story of a far left West German terrorist group known as The Red Army Faction from 1967-1977 and its best known  members Andreas Baader and the former reporter Ulrike Meinhof. The group was responsible for a series of bombings at U.S. military installations and the bank robbery's they used to finance them. After the groups ringleaders were captured and put on trail a series of additional terrorist actions were undertaken by their followers with the intent to free this leadership. These actions including a plane hijacking with 86 people on board (sub-contracted to sympathetic middle-easterners), an attack on the German embassy in Stockholm, and the murder of the West German Attorney General. A story of maniacal obsession Meinhof started out as a reasonable enough person principally opposed to the American war in Vietnam who got seduced by evil, while Baader started off pretty much an asshole. Lots of twists in this made all the more intriguing by the fact that they really happened. The protest turned riot scene near the beginning of the film is by its self worth seeing. ****

Bad Santa (2003)

I believe this is the film that inaugurated the "Bad" sequences of films which has since encompassed grandpa's, mom's, and teachers. The "Bad Santa" of the title is Willie T. Soke (played perfectly by Billy Bob Thorton) an oft drunk and perpetually ornery mall Santa who along with his elf Marcus Skidmore (Tony Cox) have for years been running a scam where they travel around the country and rob the malls they work at on Christmas Eve. This time in Arizona Willie is good naturedly stocked by a rather awkward and odd fat kid named Thurman Merman (Brett Kelley) who he reluctantly ends up befriending and who might just rekindle what good is left in the old grump. It took me awhile to get into this one but in the end it won me over, its strangely sweet in it's own way. Bernie Mac, Ethan Phillips, Octavia Spencer and Cloris Leachman have small rolls, and this was John Ritter's last live action film. Lauren Graham plays Willie's love interest, and I'd forgotten just how beautiful she looked in her mid 30's, I'm not saying she doesn't still look great, but in her mid 30's, wow. ***

The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)

Cinematic hit-piece from Hammer films choses to focus only on Frankenstein's evil qualities and ignore the good. That's a joke of course but it kind of works because this is not a good movie, mostly it feels lazy and cheap. This lackluster and belated follow up to 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein and 1958's The Revenge of Frankenstein has Peter Cushing again playing Dr. F, this time returning to his home castle roughly 10 years after the events of the first two films to resume is research, and like previously things don't work out that well for him. Though generally unimpressive perhaps the most memorably bad thing about this film is the monster itself, very different from the innovative look of Christopher Lee as the creature in the first film, this time the ghoul (played by New Zealander wrestler Kiwi Kingston) is a kind of puddy variation on the classic Boris Karloff take and looks plan terrible. Lame. **