Jimin Han (@jiminhanwriter) “Manhattan,” “Acceptable Limits”
I have a soft spot for any story line that puts two people with excellent unresolved sexual tension in a situation where they have to pretend to be married. Call me old-fashioned, but it’s always so much fun to watch.Was there one book, either on your list or off your list, fiction or non-fiction, which seems to best encapsulate America in 2014?
Thomas Pikkety’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” about the nature and threat of income inequality, is obviously the book of the year, even if I could not get past the first chapter without dozing off. It’s that unusual book that has its greatest effect through the voices, mostly journalists, that popularize it.
Jean Ho (@jeanho)
Reese Okyong Kwon (@reesekwon) “Looking”
Andrew Haigh’s HBO series had an incredible freshman season. It’s a show so subtle and intimate that it’s easy to overlook, considering that it lives on the same network as “Girls,” which is a continued magnet for controversy, and the far splashier “Game of Thrones.” But while there are droves of stories that attempt to tell the experience of being young and confused, “Looking” manages to find it by distilling it to the one word in its title. It’s about gay men in San Francisco, undoubtedly, and the peculiar triumphs and pitfalls of that scene. But it’s mostly about the optimism and frustration of that age, coupled with the optimism and frustration of hipster life in San Francisco. “Louie,” “So Did the Fat Lady”
Sarah Baker dines on Louis C.K.’s hypocrisy for an early dinner by the East River, and “Louie” introduces the concept of having two complete meals back-to-back—the bang-bang—to the viewing audience. The world will never be the same.
Jenna Le
Sonya Larson (@SonyaLarson) “The Comeback,” “Valerie Is Brought to Her Knees,” an episode that breaks the conventions of male-centric Hollywood without seeming to break a sweat
Christine Hyung-Oak Lee (@xtinehlee)Julianna Margulies’ entire wardrobe in “The Good Wife”
It’s been a fantastic year for this show, and a fantastic year for Julianna Margulies, who won another Emmy for portraying Alicia Florrick. But real talk: It’s Alicia’s magnificent power suits that are going to stay with me.The fight between Helena and Sarah in “Orphan Black,” “Governed As If It Were By Chance,” that culminates with this arresting, indelible, series-high moment:Freddie Prinze Jr. calls out Kiefer Sutherland
Earlier this year, Prinze Jr. unexpectedly spoke out about his time on “24,” saying he “hated every moment of it” and calling Kiefer Sutherland “the most unprofessional dude in the world.” Kiefer Sutherland, ever the gentlemen, responded by saying it was the first he had heard of Freddie’s grievances and wished him the best.
Madeline Albright shows Conan what’s up
When Conan joked that he was going as “slutty Madeline Albright” for Halloween, Albright had a zinger of a response, tweeting “.@ConanOBrien I’m considering going as hunky Conan O’Brien – but that might be too far fetched.” Let that be a lesson: Never go head-to-head with a former Secretary of State!“Last Week Tonight,” which wrapped up its first season in November, had the difficult task of finding a niche in the hyper-competitive realm of late-night comedic news programs. Oliver could not be a Maher, a Stewart or a Colbert. He had to somehow take news that had been thoroughly churned by the 24-hour news cycle, repackage it, add to the conversation, and make it palatable and amusing for an audience who’d already heard all the punch lines — no simple task.It’s harder to make a case for foreign-language movies in a general-interest venue like Salon, these days, and I’m positive there are things I’ve missed that could or should be included here somewhere. Your scolding is welcome, as always. In an age when cable TV drama has arguably become the leading narrative form, what strikes me most about the best films of 2014 is how cinematic they were – how forcefully a case for the wide-screen medium, and for the distinctive use of space, time and sound that defines movies. “Boyhood” would have lost its impact as a TV series, and “Leviathan,” “Winter Sleep,” “Inherent Vice,” “Mr. Turner” and “The Homesman” all featured mesmerizing and unforgettable combinations of cinematography and music.
You won’t find many of the so-called big movies of the year on this list, either of the summer-popcorn variety or the falling-leaves, adult-prestige variety. Which is definitely not to say they were all equally mediocre. Whatever misgivings I had about the surprise summer smash “Guardians of the Galaxy,” for instance, I’d much rather sit through that again than “The Theory of Everything,” the mawkish Stephen Hawking rom-com. “Interstellar” was great in patches, and then left you with too much M. Night Shyamalan aftertaste – and don’t Christopher Nolan’s fans secretly agree with that? Peter Jackson left Middle-earth behind, a decade too late, on a reasonably high note. “Foxcatcher” was a well-made dark-Americana fable that left me feeling only sadness and revulsion. I quite enjoyed Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game,” but it really would have been a lot better as a TV show.
There are all kinds of larger questions about the declining cultural status of movies, the convergence of all media forms and the logic of entertainment capitalism hanging over the art and craft of film right now, but this is not the time and place to address them. How much longer will something like “Winter Sleep” – yeah, a three-and-a-half-hour film in Turkish, with the word “sleep” in the title, ha ha – even be feasible? If Richard Linklater were beginning to make “Boyhood” now, instead of in 2001, how loud would producers laugh? And then there’s the inescapable fact that for a few days towards the end of 2014, it looked as if the most important movie of the year, the one that truly made history, would be a farcical comedy with Seth Rogen and James Franco that we wouldn’t even get to see. Then we saw it, and the movie itself was no biggie once again. Merry merry and happy happy to all! See you at the movies in the New Year.
“Boyhood” Sure, it was easier to appreciate Richard Linklater’s American-family masterpiece – 12 years in the making – when you came to it with few expectations and before it became a leading Oscar contender. But don’t let any of that stop you. As to production, “Boyhood” is unlike any other movie ever made, with its core cast members aging a dozen years alongside Ellar Coltrane, the young star who was 6 when Linklater began the film and 19 when it was finished. (Although Coltrane’s Mason Jr. is nominally the central character, I think the movie’s really about his parents, wonderfully portrayed by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette.) As to execution, “Boyhood” has the breadth of a Russian novel, along with a structural integrity learned from François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, and a fascination with time (and with Texas) that is all Linklater.
“Leviathan” Speaking of Russian novels, I haven’t yet reviewed the new film from Russia’s Andrei Zvyagintsev, but it’s a crackerjack saga about life in a spectacular corner of Putin’s Russia, with distinctive echoes of “Anna Karenina” and “Madame Bovary.” While Zvyagintsev’s previous pictures have been film-festival fave raves, a bit too obscurantist and allegorical for mainstream audiences, “Leviathan” is a social drama of adultery, political intrigue and family betrayal that fires on all cylinders, including the amazing scenery (on the northern coast, near Murmansk), a colorful cast of top-flight Russian actors. and the cinematography of Mikhail Krichman. All possible readings of the title, from the Biblical monster to Thomas Hobbes’ essay to a more Freudian interpretation, are correct.
“Inherent Vice” It takes multiple viewings, I think, to get past the loosey-goosey, episodic surface of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, the first-ever screen adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel. Ultimately, the shaggy-dog absurdism of “Inherent Vice,” along with cinematographer Robert Elswit’s gorgeous, dawn-of-the-‘70s L.A. haze and a subtle, sleepy-eyed performance by Joaquin Phoenix as hippie private eye Doc Sportello, serve to conceal the seriousness and nobility of the quest at its heart. This is a retelling of “Don Quixote” – and, not incidentally, of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” – focused on the essential Anderson-Pynchon questions: Can we find the moment when the American dream went off the rails, and what do we do about it?