Well folks, it’s that time of the year again. With only a few major releases before the year’s end, we are now being inundated with Best/Worst of the Year lists (including our own), and also a whole bunch of supercuts highlighting the year in cinema. It’s been quite a ride, we must say.
2014 will always be the year that America collectively fell in love with a sentient, talking tree and his trigger-happy raccoon sidekick, as well as the year a young boy’s twelve-year journey into maturity captured the imaginations of moviegoers the world over. It was a year when intimate, reserved dramas like Bennett Miller’s “Foxcatcher” and J.C. Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year” rubbed shoulders with massive, far-reaching works of spectacle such as Christopher Nolan’s divisive “Interstellar.” It was the year that there was both a Lego and a Transformers movie, although only one of them was any good. We saw a lot this year – heartfelt indies, smart blockbusters, piss-poor sequels and tales of blood, sweat and redemption. In case you find yourself feeling nostalgic for this year’s highs and lows, Nick Bosworth has put together a terrific eight-minute supercut that showcases a dazzling pastiche of over three hundred of the year’s most recognizable pictures.
It’s interesting to note that among the highlighted films featured in Bosworth’s reel, the ones that seem to be popping up on everyone’s Top Ten of the Year lists – “Boyhood,” “Birdman,” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” immediately come to mind – are films that very much deal with the ramifications of nostalgia and the cruel passage of time. “Boyhood” practically hinges its narrative crux on said notion, while ‘Grand Budapest’ is a screwball love letter to a lost golden era and “Birdamn” finds its erstwhile hero pining for his glory days as a money-making Hollywood mega star (among the universally acclaimed films of 2014, only “Whiplash” does not neatly fit this criteria).
The video is also a reminder that, in spite of some undeniable, cynical crap that was forced upon us in 2014, (looking at you, ‘Sin City’ and ‘Transformers’) this was actually a pretty fucking great year at the movies. Any year where we get blessed with films like “Foxcatcher,” “Interstellar,” “A Most Violent Year,” “The Immigrant,” “Top Five” and “Gone Girl” – just to name a few – is a good year, not to mention some unexpected blockbuster treats in the form of smart entertainment like “Guardians of the Galaxy” and Matt Reeves’ gritty re-thinking of “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.” Even Paul Thomas Anderson’s wooly “Inherent Vice” – an admittedly bewitching art object of a movie that I found too shapeless to really engage in – is wholly and undeniably different, a go-for-broke attempt to draw radically outside the lines. Also, if you weren’t totally sick of Michael Caine’s multiple readings of Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by the end of “Interstellar,” not to worry, because he repeats it again here.
In all seriousness, however, Bosworth’s supercut is well worth the watch: a fitting swan song to the films, good and bad, that entertained us, moved us and made us laugh in 2014. Check out the whole thing below. [JoBlo]
