The Worst Best Movies of 2014

The most “overrated” movies of 2014, from “Nymphomaniac” to “Locke” to “The Double”.

There are critics, and then there are trolls. A troll is someone who enjoys raining on the parade, to take a beloved classic and tell you everything you thought you enjoyed about it was wrong. The troll only hates something because everyone else enjoys it, and the troll wants to define himself or herself by blazing their own path and forming an interesting, provocative opinion that challenges the status quo of their peers.

I’d hate to think that my opinion on an individual movie would completely define my own personality or my taste in film. That’s because each year, a number of highly critically acclaimed films come out, and not every critic can reasonably get behind all of them. In fact, some critics find a handful of films in this bunch downright bad, and they struggle to explain what all the fuss is about. It happens every year, with just about every movie. Yes, even “Boyhood.”

And yet each year, there are angry commenters who shun the first critic to break the 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, and there are people who aim to invalidate a critic’s entire reputation by saying, “How could you hate X and yet give a good review to Y?”

This year I found myself on the far end of a few of these critical spectrums; that doesn’t change the fact that I absolutely loved loved LOVED so many of the other critical darlings and cultural hits from 2014. Yes, that one too.

So take this list with a grain of salt. It’s not meant to be contrarian or say these movies are overrated. Just know that much as I disliked this small batch of films, they’re each admirable, ambitious and memorable in a way you could very well love. Just don’t hold it against me.

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Nymphomaniac

Lars von Trier’s two-part opus on sexuality is as explicit as you’d imagine.

Think of a kiss, maybe the first kiss you ever had, or the first kiss with your loved one: what was the most thrilling thing about it? The excitement doesn’t lie in the sloppy locking of lips or tongues, but in the anticipation, the closeness and the connection between the two parties. Viewed at its most mechanical, there’s nothing exciting at all about a first kiss.

The same can be true of sex, which has become tangled up with so many complex emotions, excitement not always being one of them. Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” created fanfare as a scandalous sex drama because von Trier has become equal parts auteur and “persona non grata”, but his two-part opus does the job of removing the romanticism from sex. In the most explicit ways and on the grandest scale possible, it uses sex only as a lens through which to understand broader ideas about the world, spirituality and humanity.

Volume 1 examines the mechanics of sex while contrasting it with the philosophy and beauty of the more mundane things in the world. Volume 2 dares us to change our lens yet again, equating the main character’s sexual escapades to the Stations of the Cross and making sex truly about a woman searching for fulfillment. The collective whole is provocative, perverse, bizarrely funny and highly explicit, and what’s so surprising and disappointing is how thoughtful and fresh Vol. 1 feels while Vol. 2 could not be more depressing, repulsive and torturous. Continue reading “Nymphomaniac”

Very Early 2014 Movie Preview

25 interesting films worth getting excited for at this very early stage.

This time last year I published a list of some of my most anticipated movies of 2013, and although I acknowledged at the time that I really had no clue of the quality of any of the films, let alone what they would even be about, it’s amazing the picks that landed and the ones that didn’t.

In the plus column, I plugged “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “Gravity,” “Prisoners,” “The Place Beyond the Pines,” “Captain Phillips,” “This is the End,” “Before Midnight” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”  Not a bad batting average.

On the minus side however, I talked about “To the Wonder,” “Oldboy,” “Ender’s Game,” “I’m So Excited” and “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III.”

And a handful, including “The Monuments Men,” “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” and “Labor Day”  still have not come out. How about that for a prediction?

So which of the 25 movies I’ve picked here will we be talking about at the end of 2014? It could be all of them.

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