One of the great joys of the film dork is finding a new What the hell is this? movie, one that they can share with their friends as a baffling experience. There are, however, some fine gradations to the uncategorizable surprise that are sometimes overlooked.
Let’s start from a generally uncontroversial place: The Oscars are nonsense. Just utter bullshit. We are idiots for paying a single moment of attention to them.
And yet. Like many goofballs, I can’t turn away. It’s like playing craps in one of the less reputable Vegas casinos, in downtown rather than on the Strip.
As I catch up on movies from the last year that I missed in theaters, it’s increasingly clear that all the laments about 2014 being a bad one for film are total nonsense.
The list of excellent movies, or at least the one I’m working on, keeps growing: leaving aside the quiet awards juggernaut of Boyhood (all deserved), that list already includes the tense revelations of Blue Ruin and Calvary, James Gray’s monumental The Immigrant, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Pynchon-noir Inherent Vice … not to mention Ida, Under The Skin, Wetlands, Obvious Child, Noah, and We Are The Best!
