Movies I've seen in 2014 so far!

Hola mon bloggo!

I didn't use you for six months again so it's time to use you again, again! Yeah!

I saw a great movie last week called Prisoners, and it made me think of other great movies I've seen this year, and also how I wish I had a list of all the movies I've seen this year so I can easily compare it to other movies I've seen this year. This year! So I have decided to try and list all the movies I've seen this year, along with me saying a small something about each of them in an attempt to create a list of all the movies I've seen this year. I would very much like to catalog all of the movies I watch, and this is an attempt to do so.

I'm going to list these in roughly the order I watched them. I haven't kept track of when I watched what, but I am super clever so I think I can order them well enough.

Ok, here goes! Movies I've watched in the first half of 2014! Yeah!

Gravity

I heard loads of great things about this, I ended up disappointed. Large chunks of the movie were entirely CG and I didn't like how it looked. It was an OK movie but nowhere near deserving of the praise it received. George Clooney was great in it though, I rarely see things with him in, but he's great when I do.

Escape Plan

Oh how I was looking forward to a new wave of action movies that team Stallone up with Schwarzenegger. Then Expendables 1 and 2 came out and they were bland as all hell. Then I watched Escape Plan and my dreams were shattered completely. :(

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

I read all of the Hunger Games books before seeing any of the movies and I quite liked them, the second probably being my favourite. I found the first film to be mediocre, but this second was great. It had less of the shaky-cam action scenes that I didn't like in the first, plus Jennifer Lawrence is great. Really good!

Knights of Badassdom

I was shown the trailer for this about 4 years ago it seems, the film got shelved for boring production reasons, and now it finally came out. And how disappointing it was. A film about a larping weekend that turns real when someone accidentally summons an evil demon sounds really fun and cool, but this was so very boring. It had a bland script, bland acting, shit CGI. Blah.

The Wolf of Wall Street

This was pretty good. I'm not a huge fan of the "period crime" genre of movie that this sort of belongs to, but this was interesting and well-acted enough for me to like it. I'm a big fan of Jonah Hill and I thought he was great.

Frozen

Pretty good. After the first two thirds were great, I thought they were setting up some cool, subversive ending, but instead the film turned into bland love bland. Blah. Also, "Do you want to build a snowman?" was a much better song that "Let it go".

How I would have ended it!

Have that one dude not be evil, then when Veronica Mars gets back to town she can kiss him, the curse doesn't break and they go "What!? I guess we weren't in love after all!". Then I would have some plot reason for all the characters to end up on a huge cliff, Veronica turns to ice, Ice Queen then jumps off the cliff to commit suicide over her shameful actions. This act of love turns Veronica back to human, she jumps off the cliff after Icey and she makes a big slide out of ice so they survive the fall. Then I would give Veronica flame powers so she can thaw the city. Done!

Grand Piano

The brilliant trailer for this film sold me completely. Elijah Wood plays a master pianist who has to give a perfect performance of the most difficult piano piece ever written, else he dies. Excellent! The wackiness of this is perfectly balanced with the terror. A bonkers concept played amazingly straight. Yeah!

Nymphomaniac

I only watched Volume I of this. It did not make me want to watch Volume II. I really liked Lars von Trier's previous film Melancholia, plus I thought Antichrist was good too, but Nympho was a mess. There were some things I did like, such as Stellan Skarsgard giving his hilarious fishing analogies to the different sex scenes, but aside from that it was meh.

Veronica Mars

I was an ultra fan of the TV show so I was very excited by this Kickstarted movie. I can only imagine this plays as a confusing mess to people who haven't seen the show, but to me it was glorious. They set up some things that don't get resolved in the film so I really hope another comes out at some point.

Homefront

Jason Statham punching an evil James Franco. YEAH!

Ruby Sparks

A weird rom-com about a writer who writes about a dream girl and then she magically comes to life. It's a pretty great deconstruction of manic pixie dream girls as the relationship the two share becomes unsustainable so the writer starts messing with her brain. It starts as a light comedy but gets dark and fucked up near the end. I liked it. But the end end was awful.

Another Earth

The first of three movies written by and starring Brit Marling that I watched. She is possibly my new favourite person. This is a dark, depressing drama about a teen girl about to leave for college who crashes her car and kills the wife and child of Ethan Rom from Lost. Also, another Earth appears in the sky, seemingly a copy of our own Earth. After a few years in prison, Brit tries to make nice with Ethan Rom by cleaning his house. Drama ensues. I would recommend this so much.

Sound of My Voice

The second of three movies written by and starring Brit Marling that I watched. She is possibly my new favourite person. In this film, a couple of journalists infiltrate a cult that is headed by Brit Marling, who claims to be from the future. It's really good, the best part for me being the incredibly dark opening followed by the hilarious secret handshake. It's great. I would recommend this so much.

The East
The third of three movies written by and starring Brit Marling that I watched. She is possibly my new favourite person. This lacks the sci-fi elements the other two Brit Marling films had, but makes up for it with her kissing Ellen Page. Yeah! In this, Brit Marling is a private investigator who goes undercover with an anarchist group, causing her to question her view of the world. I would say it's my least favourite of her three films I've seen, it's really good but the other two were gosh darn great. I would recommend this.

Timer
A rom-com starring Anya from Buffy. It was ok. Everyone has a timer implanted in them which counts down the time until they meet their soul mate. It's a bit bland, but not too bland.

Mr Nobody
A hard to describe film that was really good. It's about this guy and all the different paths he could have taken in his life. It's good.

Snowpiercer
An amazing film! It's set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where all surviving members of humanity live on a really, really long train. It's full of satire as the closer to the front of the train you get, the higher class of society you live in. It's got some great action and doesn't mess around with horrifically murdering its cast. Totally watch it.

Tom Yum Goong 2
The best Tony Jaa film since his first two! After Tom Yum Goong 1 he made a whole bunch of crap, but this was pretty good. It has the girl from Chocolate in, who I think is great, but she seemed underutilized in this. There are some cool fight scenes and the ending is stupidly awesome.

Never Let Me Go
A depressing romance about a society that clones the dregs of society to use as organ donors when the need arises. It's really bleak and nasty and great.

Pandorum
A couple of guys wake up on a spaceship with no memory of who they are or how they got there. It's a dark action/horror film that's really good and has lots of cool twists and such.

Rurouni Kenshin
A live-action Kenshin film! I was a big fan of the anime but was apprehensive about this so put off watching it when it came out. Then I saw a trailer for the sequel and thought "I should probably watch the first one now" so I did. And it was pretty good. Way too much time was given to the boring villains, and a bunch of main character introductions were really rushed, but I thought it was great anyways.

The Double
Directed by Richard Ayoade and starring Jesse Eisenberg, this is a film about a guy who meets another guy who looks exactly like himself, and may or may not be evil. It's pretty great. It looks and feels like a low-budget thriller from the 70s, it's so very cool.

Patema Inverted
Anime about this girl who comes from underneath the earth's crust where gravity is inverted. She then meets some guy and they fall in love but have to fight against the evil dudes! It's pretty good.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Captain America! Yeah! This was great. I am so much in love with all of the Marvel films, they're lovely.

In Your Eyes
This was written by Joss Whedon, so obviously I watched it. It's a pretty cool concept but plays a bit bland. A boy and girl who live very far away somehow join their emotions, so what one feels the other does. It's ok.

Enemy
Directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, this is a film about a guy who meets another guy who looks exactly like himself, and may or may not be evil. It's nothing like The Double, that was more of a black comedy where this is a tense thriller. It starts slow but builds to an awesome ending.

Martyrs
Blimey, this was fucked up. A french film about a girl who was tortured as a child, and now she's all grown up she sees a devil thing that forces her to do horrible things. This goes completely off the rails about 10 minutes in, continues being batshit crazy, and for the first two thirds I was absolutely loving it. Wicked plot twists, insane ultra violence and some terrifying directing all made this film amazing and horrifying at the same time. Then the last third begins and it all turns to utter shit. It saddened me so much. If they kept up the glorious insanity from the first two thirds for the final third this would have become one of my favourite films of all time. Unfortunately the last third is just so mean, and nasty, and most of all unnecessary that it ruins the rest of the film. It makes me sad.

Blue Is the Warmest Color
Another french film, I am beau cultured, avec tres bien. But it's about lesbians, so maybe I am less cultured than I think. It was pretty good. A confused teen girl is all confused about life and thinks she might be gay, so she starts going out with this older lady. There are some very explicit sex scenes in this, and I shocked myself by thinking the lesbian sex scenes probably went on for too long. There aren't many of them, but they go on and on and on. Great film though. It made me really hungry for spaghetti.

The Lego Movie
Everything is awesome! Or just pretty good.

True Grit
I watched 30 minutes of this a few years ago, but then fell asleep. Not because the film was boring, but because I was really tired. I watched it in it's entirety and it's great. The ending didn't seem to fit with the tone of the film, but my understanding is this is a remake of an adaptation, and they didn't want to change the plot too much. Great!

Tim's Vermeer
A documentary about fine art, because as mentioned above I am so very cultured. This old painter guy named Vermeer from 700 years ago or something was apparently really good, too good in fact. So a modern day inventor believes he figured out how Vermeer managed to paint as amazingly as he did and decides to make a replica of one of his paintings using that technique. It's really interesting.

Jodorowsky's Dune
Another documentary, this time about the director Alejandro Jodorowsky who had planned to make an adaptation of Dune, back in the 1970s. His film eventually fell apart due to lack of money, but the film he set out to make would have been incredibly ambitious, more so than any other film to date. This unmade film also had a huge effect on cinema history, influences Star Wars, Alien, and a whole host of other sci-fi films today. Good!

The Grand Budapest Hotel
I like Wes Anderson, he's kooky and weird and fun. I like his films. I liked this film.

Exam
An independent British film set entirely in a single room, about a group of people taking a mysterious exam for a mysterious job. It was ok.

Miracle Mile
This was brilliant! A crazy thriller from the 80s about a guy who answers a ringing payphone at 4am, and is told that nuclear war has begun and the nukes will hit in an hour. He doesn't know whether to believe the phone or not, but he races around the city to meet up with a girl he likes anyways. It's awesome!

Godzilla
The new Godzilla! It was quite good. There were lots of stupid things in it, and the human characters were boring, but Godzilla himself was cool.

X-Men: Days of Future Past
New X-Men! It might be the best of the X-Men films, I'm not sure. There's a lot of great stuff in this. I liked it.

The Raid 2
Fucking yes! Best film I've seen all year! I'm unsure if it's better than the first or not, but that really doesn't matter. It's a different style of film but still has amazing action scenes with a whole bunch of cool characters. It is a much slower film than the first but the last 30 minutes were almost solid punching. Yes! A negative thing I do have to say about it that's very nit-picky, is that the bad guys seemed under-powered compared to the first. At the end of the Raid 1, the bad guy fought against two people at the same time and was winning the fight until the good guys cheated for the win. I very much like this, evil should be stronger than good, else why would anyone choose to be evil? However, the end of the Raid 2 has the good guy mowing down everyone in his path. The final fight was awesomely choreographed but I felt that it lacked the tension of a strong opponent that the first film had. Still, it was amazing.

Prisoners

A great film! Not normally the type of thing I care for, but this was so very good. Hugh Jackman's daughter and her friend go missing one day, and it's up to super investigator Jake Gyllenhaal to find them. It's very slow and dark, and riveting! I am always impressed when I see Hugh Jackman doing proper acting, he is clearly a great actor, but sometimes he likes to be in films where he punches lots of dudes. And other times he likes to be in films where he mopes around, and is angry. Really good!

Under the Skin
This was weird, and unnerving, but I'm not sure if I liked it. There were parts I did like, but other parts I didn't. It stars Scarlett Johansson as a sexy alien who drives around Scotland seducing men, driving them back to her place and then doing something to them. There's some great visuals in this and I think Scarlett Johansson was really good as a confused alien, but I had real problems with the ending.

Urgh. That's a lot of movies. And only giving short little comments about each is neither fun to read nor write. I'm not entirely sure why I did this...

Look out for a similar post about games I played so far in 2014 soon!