Yeah, I’m alive. Yes, there’s a reason I’ve been lying low for the past couple weeks. A passably good reason. I expect to be able to say more about it in the next week or two, but not yet.

My Beautiful Wife and I took turns helming a week of crockpot cooking. A whole week each. From picking the recipe, shopping for it, making it, cleaning the crock pot, and preparing the next day’s meal. Eight total crockpots of various success.

My crock pot meals were a bust. How did I bjork up a crock pot dinner? I dunno, but I sure did. All four of ‘em. I made a mango curry chicken that was a disaster. I spent $30 on fresh ingredients and it looked as appetizing as a truck stop toilet and tasted like sheer confusion.

[Honest answer: the recipe called for a can of coconut milk and I mistakenly used one of those cans of sickeningly sweet coconut creme meant for tropical drinks instead. Bleah!] My missus made a coconut curry chicken crockpot on her week that knocked my metaphorical socks off. It was amazing.

The purpose of the crock pot dinners was so that we could come home, eat, and get to the gym.

Gym count over the past 14 days: Zero.

Here’s the thing about stringing together crock pot meals: You are always cooking the next meal after you have eaten. It’s weird to prepcook when you are stuffed to the gills.

We’ve been catching up on our Oscar-nominated films. The only serious contenders we have not seen are Grand Budapest Hotel, Foxcatcher, and Two Days, One Night.  We’re going to get to Grand Budapest in the Scotsman Theater this weekend. I have zero interest in seeing Foxcatcher.

I have an irrational dislike of Marion Cottilard, so I’m not going out of my way to see Two Days, One Night, either. Do you have those celebrities?  You despise them, but you can’t exactly articulate why? I think it’s her name. I can’t say “Cottilard,” without overpronouncing it like the bored narrator in a French film.  “Cout-tee-yaaaaaargrgrgrgrgrgrd.” And seriously, what’s with the hype? What has she ever done that was “Wow!”?  I don’t get it. She bores the shit out of me, much like the aforementioned narrator in a French film.

See also: Cummydick Fingerbunny. I’m not sure what deal Fingerbunny cut with the Devil, but okay. His name is musical and weird. Also, he’s uninspiring as an actor. The chicks who used to think Johnny Depp was mysterious and cute and who like effeminate, non-threatening, scarf-laden men have retethered their hearts to a mooring at Fingerbunny’s marina. Whatevs. Take away the accent and Fingerbunny would be selling shoes at Sole Proprietor Discount Footwear. Bah.

This is the list of movies that were released in 2014 that I have seen. There were a lot of 2013 movies that I watched in the early months of 2014, but these are only the flicks released last calendar year that I watched:

BEST

1. Whiplash
2. Chef
3. Birdman
4. Begin Again
5. Wild
6. Draft Day
7. Boyhood
8. St. Vincent

GOOD

Selma
Bad words
Penguins of Madagascar
Babadook
Mistaken for Strangers (doc)
Snowpiercer
The Drop
X Men: Days of Future Past
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
A Most Wanted Man
Edge of Tomorrow
American Sniper
A Most Violent Year
This is Where I Leave You
Captain America: Winter Soldier

Serviceable

Men, Women, and Children
Hollidaysburg
Imitation Game
Unbroken
Into the Woods
Nonstop
Peabody and Sherman
Million Dollar Arm
Night Moves
Fault in Our Stars
Still Alice
America (doc)
I Origins
Lucy
Get On Up
The Hundred Foot Journey
Expendables 3
November Man
The Maze Runner
A Walk among the Tombstones
The Skeleton Twins
The Equalizer
Gone Girl
Fury
John Wick
Nightcrawler
Interstellar
Cake
Showrunner (doc)
The Guest
Time Lapse
Tell

Meh

Theory of Everything
Guardians of the Galaxy
Big Hero 6
The Monuments Men
Book of Life
Big Eyes
Need for Speed
Stonehurst Asylum
22 Jump Street
Horns
Muppets Most Wanted
Railway Man
As Above, So Below
Dracula Untold
Maze Runner
By the Gun

Worst

Outcast
And So It Goes
The Interview
3 Days to Kill
The Giver
Horrible Bosses 2
The Judge
My Life in Dirty Pictures (doc)

5. The Lego Movie
4. Oculus
3. A Million Ways to Die in the West
2. Left Behind
1. [see below]

 

Feel free to call me out and tell me that I’m an idiot.

Some thoughts from the above list:

Whiplash. Golly, this movie has stuck in my brain for almost two weeks. I’m not a fan of jazz. I don’t understand jazz. But I was swept away by this cast of thorny and offputting characters. The third act turn blindsided me. Did not see that one coming. JK Simmons is absolutely brilliant in keeping one teeny tiny toe of the viewer’s empathy in his firm grasp while he rants and raves like a lunatic. The editing it took to make an actor who could drum (a little) look like a prodigy is astounding. Consider me in Camp Whiplash all the way through the awards ceremony.

Chef. Much hyped by critics, but no awards love. You’ll never look at a grilled cheese sandwich the same way again. This movie has no third act turn at all. Which, in the framework of the story, was appropriate, fresh, and appreciated. Gentle and authentic.

Birdman. Seriously, I was trying to resist the critical gravity of this mindfuck. But I cannot deny the artistry here. This movie reminded me tangentially of The Aristocrats, where twenty comedians tell the same joke over and over to demonstrate how a skilled practitioner of an artform plies his/her craft.  Birdman is an acting crucible in the form of a script. It would only take one false note to bring down this strange house of cards. It dances on the razor’s edge. There are meta scenes where the actors in Keaton’s character’s play turn in a great performance, and then they do it over again as a really great performance, illustrating that the first performance you liked was actually crap.

You could recast Birdman twenty times with the top two hundred actors and actresses working today and I don’t think you could ever come as close to perfection as Keaton-Gallifinakis-Watts-Norton-Stone.  The difficulty level of this script would certainly float the lightweights to the top of the cereal milk.

Wild. I was prepared to hate this movie for the pseudo-feminist claptrap I assumed it would be. I was right about the pseudo-feminist claptrap part, but completely won over by the perseverance of Witherspoon’s vulnerable portrayal of Cheryl Strayed.  Strayed took 90-some days to walk the 2600 mile Pacific Crest Trail alone. I was only biking the 300 mile Katy Trail for six days alone, but the incessant internal dialog was the same. Wild definitely took me back to revisit the solitude and the pain.

Boyhood. I have nothing to say that hasn’t been written a thousand times. Young boy Ellar Coltrane was adorable. Teenage Ellar Coltrane was a surly, fishlipped douche. The aggregate of this stunt remains impressive.

The Drop. This movie was too smart for me. And I don’t mean that ironically. I love it when the director doesn’t connect every dot, but the dots were too far apart for me to connect as fast as was required to keep up with the next plot point.

The LEGO Movie. Save your breath. The plastic emperor has no snap-on clothes. The animation was pisspoor and the Family Guy-style non sequitor jokes weren’t funny. The anti-capitalism middle-finger plot had my eyes rolling so hard I had nerve damage for a week afterwards.

Oculus. Would have been in my top five movies if not for the cowardice of the last six minutes. Have some balls to end a movie without necessarily setting up a franchise; a total cheat that undermined every ounce of goodwill it had banked until the final turn, and turned a stellar horror movie into a steaming pile of disappointment.

Left Behind. I don’t want to crap on this movie. Really. But Christian or not Christian, this movie was so bad. SO bad. Forehead-on-the-coffee table bad. Twenty minutes in, there was no doubt that I would not see a worse movie this year than Left Behind.

Inherent Vice. Oh, not so fast, Left Behind. A challenger appears. Combine one of my least favorite authors with my least favorite directors, and you get the unholy alliance of poseurdom that is Inherent Vice. This movie is a practical joke perpetrated by Baby Boomers on all subsequent generations of moviegoers. The only thing this movie got right was the grainy, Seventies look. IV fancies itself The Big Lebowski meets Hunter S. Thompson. If you can make it to the end credits of this visual vomit, you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Go sell pretentious somewhere else. We’re all full-up here.  WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR.

Biggest Surprise: Penguins of Madagascar. I’ve purposely never seen a Madagascar movie. I was trying very hard not to see this spinoff, but a former friend wanted to watch it in the Scotsman Theater. I absolutely howled. I laughed until my sides hurt. The writers obviously cribbed from the timing of the Marx Brothers.

Biggest Disappointment: Fury. It was an okay movie. But I had trailer-mania and I was chomping at the bit for six months to see Fury. Ehn. It didn’t break any new ground for a WWII movie. Pitt’s Bieber haircut was jarring every frame in was on screen. Not since Kelly’s Heroes has there been such a blatant anachronistic coifs in the genre.

Out of My Douchebag File and Into My Respect: Dan Stevens. Piefaced derp-a-herp in Downton Abbey, but completely unrecognizable in A Walk Among the Tombstones and The Guest. I can’t continue to hate on a talented chameleon actor like him.

Okay. Lemmehave it. What were your worst and best films of 2014?