The best movies of 2014, according to Hans Morgenstern — Part 1

It’s the end of the year, and once again here is a list of the best films I caught this year. As opposed to other years, I’m including short films and even a couple of multimedia experiences, including some works that some might exclusively consider “art.”

If there is one characteristic I search for in moving image experiences it is the feeling of transcendence. To this writer and lover of the art of the moving image — sometimes above narrative and definitely beyond the confines of the classical Hollywood cinema form — that often means subverting the medium. It would be unfair to place the burden of that on narrative films that often come up this time of year, begging to be noticed for an Oscar award. But it was a grueling awards season this year only because not many of these films stood out as genuinely spectacular (I’m thinking Unbroken, The Gambler, Into the Woods and Interstellar)

In this two-part post, I hope to give you a taste of films that you would not expect for an end-of-the-year summary, including links to some that you might be able to see now, on-line. All of these were true surprising experiences and many, yes, had that moment of transcendence. But of course there were indie, world and even some studio films that impressed with acting and narrative technique.

Though I must take personal acquaintance out of the mix, as that has an effect on opinion, allow me to note that I saw wonderful films by some local Miami filmmakers this year. The Miami International Film Festival gave us the incredible short documentary “Cherry Pop: The Story of the World’s Fanciest Cat” by Kareem Tabsch, co-founder of Miami’s chain of O Cinemas. He cracked up when I asked if it was a mockumentary. It’s not.

MIFF also gave us “Ectotherms,” an atmospheric film of suburban malaise distinct to Miami by Monica Peña, operations manager at the Miami Beach Cinematheque (read my interview with her here). She also finished a short documentary that captures a side of Miami Beach few who haven’t been there have ever seen. It premiered at Miami’s Borscht Film Festival. Watch “Pink Sidewalks” below:

http://vimeo.com/113324954

Speaking of Borscht, I saw only a few of this year’s offerings, but they inspired lots of writing on my part in the “Miami New Times.” “Cool As Ice 2” is an amazing meta sequel to Cool As Ice by the talented duo of Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer. Then there is “Papa Machete,” by Jonathan David Kane, a poetic short documentary about an elderly Haitian Machete Fencing master that is now headed to Sundance. I also lobbied hard to get Borscht the “Golden Orange” from the Florida Film Critics Circle. They won it (read all my Borscht coverage and check out videos by following this link).

Finally, though Art Basel – Miami Beach this year meant a preview for Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, it more importantly allowed me to spend a lot of time with Auto Body, an group exhibition in response to gender inequality in art that featured art by women artists. It was a performance and video-based exhibit with nothing for sale. A lot of it was based on destruction over creation or vice-versa. It opened with Cheryl Pope destroying hundreds of water balloons sustained from the ceiling using only her head and closed with Naama Tsabar leading an all-girl band through an immaculate cover of Pulp’s “Babies,” which descended into abstract noise at song’s end, while Tsabar spent a half-hour bashing the stage to pieces with her guitar. In between my friend dancer Ana Mendez choreographed a fall down and “up” a metal staircase she titled “Liminal Being,” which she repeated several times each day of the exhibit. It was raw, real and visceral, showing both strength and human vulnerability, something that could be said for much of the art in this exhibit.

But much of what made Auto Body were short films, and indeed some of the most incredible visuals I saw this year unfolded on those 25 screens. I wrote a preview here, with several interviews. Next I wrote a reactionary summary of part of day 1 of the event here. The latter includes some of the video highlights at the exhibition, which lasted four days and even caught the attention of the “New York Times.” Here’s a snippet of one of the highlights (those offended by naked female bodies should not play this):

There are some terrific film experiences above that made 2014 memorable, there’s also a distinctive style coming out of Miami, be it abstract or narrative-based, that is worth further exploration in another post. Some are already using the term “Miami Wave.” I just feel too close to them to rank them among the films I feel less personally attached to in the list below and in part 2 of this post, which will appear on this blog tomorrow. Though, recalling this year in local art and film, I do feel like I have already written about my favorite film of 2014.

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I’m going to start this list by presenting an example of one of the great short films I saw in 2014, which I will consider number 20 of my top 20 film experiences of 2014, then I’ll present the rest of the first half of this list. Where available, all titles link to the item description page on Amazon. If you purchase via the specific link, you will be financially supporting this blog. If we reviewed it here, there will be a link to the review under the poster art. Finally if we haven’t reviewed it, I’ll try to share a few words about the film’s significance.

20. Collection petites planètes • volume 7 • Maricel Yasa

Do not dismiss this as a music video. It’s a slice-of-life exploration of Buenos Aires with the beautiful accompaniment of the music of Maricel Yasa. Her soft, airy vocals and active acoustic guitar plucking is sometimes accompanied by a droning, high-pitched violin but it mostly melds with the sounds of the city, be they rumbling buses or kids setting off sporadic fireworks in a park. Filmmaker Vincent Moon (we wrote a lot about him here), shows no shame in his probing camera work, which is as spontaneous as the scenes he captures, he drifts close to his subjects and shows as much respect for their surroundings. His work has beauty and an earthy quality that is both beautiful and sometimes sublimely poetic.

19.  Blue Ruin

With Blue Ruin, director Jeremy Saulnier gives us a suspense film not driven by plot twists but a human incompetence that reveals the blinding power of a grudge allowed to fester for way too long. The performances by these unknown actors are handled with great care. There’s an every-man quality to them that far from glamorizes the revenge flick. There’s little panache but great sensitivity in showing how hard it is to kill, adding to the nerve-racking pace of the film without contrived enhancements of editing and music.

18. Whiplash

Refreshingly intense, Whiplash not only features two of this year’s great male performances by Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons, but it  has an unrelenting pace fueled by twisted passion. They may not be musicians, but Teller and Simmons give a lot to convey their weirdo drive for technical musical perfection. The crazy thing is that it’s jazz, a music to be loved for its human imperfection. However, to get to that — ahem — transcendent level of greatness in the music, you have to master perfect form, and it comes through pain, and, man, is pain conveyed to the hilt in this film.

17. Wild

Read Ana Morgenstern’s review

16. Force Majeure

Read my review

15. Listen Up Philip

Read my review

14. Lake Los Angeles

Read my review in “Miami New Times”

13. Snowpiercer

Read Ana Morgenstern’s review

12. Birdman

Read my review

11. Hide Your Smiling Faces

Read my review

Tomorrow: the top 10 films (or videos) of 2014. Update, it’s live:

The best movies of 2014, according to Hans Morgenstern — Part 2

—Hans Morgenstern

(Copyright 2014 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)

‘Interstellar’ is an enthralling experience … when emo astronauts stop weeping — a film review

There is no denying one thing about Interstellar:  it’s an epic space adventure made for the big screen. It features set pieces that will dazzle and impressive alien landscapes that will enthrall. The effects, which include a near-scale spaceship seemingly tearing through the stratosphere and popping into the silence of space, are unforgettable. The appearance of an intergalactic wormhole that will carry our brave explores to another galaxy against the stark backdrop of what looks like a painted planet Saturn is both surreal yet geeky cool.

There is no need spoiling what lies on the other side of the titular crossroads, and I would hate to reveal how director Christopher Nolan presents the theory of the wormhole in not one scene but two that occur at different points of the movie yet are still connected to the moment of the spaceship’s penetration of the portal both narratively and visually. He’s a smart filmmaker, but I feel obliged to warn viewers to lower their expectations.

It will be easy for ticket buyers to understand why plot points were held so secretive ahead of the release of Interstellar once they see the film. It’s a preposterous yet sprawling movie filled with several overwrought pauses in action for lots of tearful emoting or explaining of theoretical astrophysics between sequences of action, and then there’s the ludicrous third act. As opposed to the much more interesting Inception, this film feels clunky, arriving at a trite finale that’s more supernatural than scientific.* Both films share an action-packed climax that unfolds in alternate levels of time and space featuring fast-paced inter-cutting, but one did it much better: Inception. In that film, time felt reinvented like Chinese boxes on a plain. But with Interstellar Nolan pads nearly three hours full of expository theory to inform the viewer with a weird logic that actually disarms anything interesting about the impressive visuals and ideas that occur throughout the film. To end on a note that does not so much defy astrophysics as it does wash its hands of it, devolving into a convoluted idea that feels more desperate to tie up loose ends in a fantastical reach for closure betrays much of what’s impressive about the film: the awe-inspiring visuals.

It’s so ironic that in this near future version of our planet, children are being taught that the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969 was staged. We learn this when the film’s hero, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), is called to a parent-teacher conference regarding his daughter Murph’s (Mackenzie Foy) defiance to the idea that a conspiracy theory has become a fact. After all, she has a legit, vintage text book her dad had given her, and he was an astronaut for NASA once. But in this dystopian future, NASA has been dismantled and people have more earthly concerns. Mother Earth is revolting against human kind, and people cannot grow corn fast enough to sustain life on a planet overcome by dust storms.

To double the irony, Nolan has made no secret about the influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that downplayed emotions and exposition to achieve moments of transcendence that are rarely achieved in film. Of course, Nolan also qualified his comments to say he was not trying to match the masterpiece by Stanley Kubrick. I studied the movie for my Master’s thesis (you can read an abridged version of my analysis beginning with this post: How Stanley Kubrick broke the rules of Classical Hollywood cinema and made a better film with ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’: My MA thesis redux – part 1 of 4), and I can tell you, if Nolan would have taken the fundamental notion of presenting a film that relies more on visuals over language, viewers would have come away with a more memorable experience.

By no means did I enter Interstellar expecting a film equivalent to 2001. It would be unfair considering the influence 2001 has had on so many films since its release, not to mention the era when it was released, so many decades ago, and the changes to commercial film since then. What I did expect of Nolan is to place some trust in the power of visual language without weighing it down with characters continuously declaring their feelings tearfully or espousing theoretical knowledge as the narrative bumbles along. Adding to the encumbrance is an operatic, overly present score by the often cheesy Hans Zimmer. So he uses organs, but anyone who has heard the impressionistic work of Philip Glass or even the bombast of early Yes, has heard the instrument used more effectively.

The film pays off when the extraneous noise, like the music and dialogue, are toned down. It’s hard to buy these emo astronauts. Thank goodness they have a pair of robots, voiced by Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart — who look like monoliths with inventive articulation and act like R2-D2 — that are programmed with senses of humor. Then there are even more secondary characters, including a surprise appearance by a famous actor, but none ever feel written with the right amount of sympathy, and too much repetition of how they feel comes across as patronizing to the audience instead of adding dimension to their characters. The most sympathetic performance of all turns out to be that of young Murph. Foy plays a frustrated young woman desperate to be taken seriously but also reaching out for the love she needs from her too-noble-for-his-family’s-good father. She brings the right amount of restraint and spunk to the character that makes her the most endearing element of the entire cast. Her absence in the second half of the film feels pronounced after a capably somber Jessica Chastain steps in as an older Murph after one of the film’s genuinely emotional plot twists creates a powerful leap in time for the space travelers.

As for some of the other performers of note, Anne Hathaway plays Cooper’s foil Amelia, and though she is a wonderful actress, there is not enough substance in her role for Hathaway to pull out a dynamic enough performance to remember. She played a much meatier character in The Dark Knight Rises as Catwoman. Her acting chops are betrayed here by a mostly hollowly written character, which deflates a key speech for Amelia at the center of the film. Finally, as for McConaughey, the dude knows how to push the waterworks from his tear ducts, but sometimes he comes across mush-mouthed in his attempt to ground Cooper as the modest hero of the movie.

It’s not like the stakes are not heavy in this film. This space journey has both the human race at stake as well as the personal baggage of the astronauts. It’s just delivered with so much sentiment that it all feels rather strained. Some will roll their eyes, thinking, “enough already!” Others who love being spoon-fed emotional drama, will go along with this melodrama and have a cathartic cry. As for the film’s finale, I love mysticism in the movies, but the tonal inconsistency of so much astrophysical theory, which is suddenly allowed to be subverted by another force that is grounded in a convenient kind of supernature makes it all hard to swallow. But if you can forgive Interstellar’s redundant sentimentality and a final act that will invariably disappoint anyone with some knowledge of theory and astrophysics, the movie’s still worth the price of admission. Those splurging for the IMAX experience will feel less ripped off than those waiting for a home video release, so take advantage. Much of what works in the film is purely visual and kinetic, and Nolan is at the top of his game at least in that sense.

—

*Last year Gravity received the ire of popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson for its slips in logic, but at least that film tried to seem realistic.

—Hans Morgenstern

Interstellar runs 169 minutes and is rated PG-13 (there is some light cussing and some moments of terror and startling deaths). It’s in theaters at every multiplex in the U.S. today, including IMAX. Paramount Pictures invited us to a preview screening in IMAX for the purpose of this review.

(Copyright 2014 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)