Holiday Movie Guide 3: The College Years

Big Hero 6

Early into Big Hero 6, young Hiro is introduced to his brother Satoshi's new invention, a personal healthcare robot called Baymax. After assessing and treating Hiro's wound, having just had a piece of sticky tape torn off his arm by his brother, Baymax asks the following question: "Are you satisfied with your care?" Hiro says something to the tune of, "What does that matter?", to which Baymax replies, "I cannot deactivate until you say that you are satisfied with your care." It's at this point that I began to tear up and mentally gave Big Hero 6 a big "fuck you." Because I'd seen this movie before. It came out in 1999, and it was called The Iron Giant. In that film, a young boy finds a robot out in the middle of the forest that tries to follow him home, leading him to demand, "You stay. I go. No following." In the film's climax, the government has launched a nuclear bomb at the boy's city to destroy the robot, because they don't understand it and therefore fear it. The robot has come to the realisation that he needs to sacrifice himself by flying into the bomb to save the people responsible for it. Hogarth begs him not to go. The robot bends down to him, and says, "You stay. I go. No following." And, sure enough, in Big Hero 6's final moments, Hiro and Baymax find themselves in a situation in which the robot has to sacrifice his life so that the boy may live, and the only way to ensure this is for the boy to say that he is satisfied with his care. He has to be the one to order the death of his friend. Not only his friend, but his big brother, who dies in an explosion early in the film. His big brother who was established as his protector, the person he could rely on to rescue him no matter what. As Hiro grieves, Baymax continues to insist that, "Satoshi is here", something Hiro dismisses as the robot being unable to comprehend death. It turns out he was talking literally, as just when Hiro needs it most, Baymax loads video recordings of his brother iterating on the robot's design. But, "Satoshi is here", means more than that, I think. Satoshi, Hiro's great protector, becomes reincarnated in Baymax, an artificial intelligence designed explicitly to protect people. When Hiro realises he needs to let Baymax deactivate in order to save the day, he says through tears. "I can't lose you too." He's not just watching his friend die, he's watching his brother die again. This is fucking powerful stuff, and it's kind of amazing Disney have pulled it off in a movie so bloated with other stories. You see, it's a super hero origin movie as well, a sub-genre notorious for an underdeveloped villain being the necessary result of needing to establish a universe and motive for the hero to be born in. But not only is Big Hero 6 trying to be a super hero origin movie, it's also trying to be a super hero team origin movie. All of the hip-cat scientists Satoshi works with have cool establishing moments in the beginning of the film that foreshadow their super abilities come the time for Avengers to Assemble. But there simply isn't enough time in one movie to fully flesh out a hero, a team and a villain. It's necessary to get all of this out of the way in one movie, however. If the first film was about the origin of the hero and formation of the team with no villain, it wouldn't work. If the second film was about the formation of the team with another underdeveloped villain, it wouldn't work. Disney understood that a couple of elements were going to get let down with this flick, and mercifully, they made the right choice to hammer home on the relationship between Hiro and his AI brother. In the amount of time that every member of the team is developed, the same amount of time is given to Hiro and Baymax flying around San Fransokyo (don't ask, but it looks so fucking cool), in which, among other things, Baymax is fascinated with the texture of a rope attached to a flying weather vane, delicately running his fingers along its surface. Disney knew there would be stinky parts to this movie, but they've done the absolute best job of handling it. The Iron Giant has found its spiritual successor. Fucking Disney, I swear to God.

St. Vincent

As the credits roll for St. Vincent, a fixed camera documents Bill Murray sitting on his shitty deck chair. He's got his headphones on, listening to a cassette tape of Bob Dylan's Shelter from the Storm on his Walkman, singing along out of key and time as he waters his dead pot plant with a garden hose. Eventually, he gets sick of having to hold it, so he just inserts the hose into the pot plant far enough that it sticks. This works for about 30 seconds before the water pressure forces the hose out of the container and onto the ground. He casually looks down at it, still singing along, and hops up to move over to the sun lounger in the middle of the dirt patch he calls his backyard. The camera swaps to a static top-down angle and he lies down and continues to ramble along to the song until it finishes and the screen fades to black. It's far and away the standout moment of St. Vincent, and in being so, it kind of proves the realisation I had about halfway into the film. St. Vincent is a bad movie; it's a poorly written quirky indie dramedy that panders to its audience in all of the worst ways and sacrifices moments of real emotion to the almighty God of convenient story beats. But it's also got Bill Murray in it, and for some reason, he seems to care enough about the source material to try and elevate it out of the mucky muck it wallows in. So, in the end, St. Vincent is a bad movie that I really liked, mainly because, as the credits showed, I'll watch Bill Murray do pretty much anything. This is not to discredit the few moments in which the film actually got somewhere with its material. There's a subplot involving Murray's cantankerous, gambling-addicted drunk showing another side of himself when he visits his wife who is in a home, suffering from dementia. So as not to freak her out when he drops by, he dresses up like a doctor, and offers no indication that he's her husband. In one of their scenes, he makes her laugh and she calls him by his real name. Recognising a potential breakthrough, he turns and says, "It's me! It's Vin!" For a brief second, she looks like she sees him, before the disease kicks back in and she gets lost once more, and all Vincent can do is look away and cry. In another subplot of the film, he suffers from a stroke, and when we next see him conscious, half of his face is paralysed. The people who care for him show up for a visit as he's undergoing speech therapy. Being an old man asked to say the word "dog", which is displayed with a picture on a card, can't be too dignifying an experience, and Vincent is trying to get the words out that he wants the nurse out of his room, but can barely enunciate. In a fit of defeated rage, he tips his table over and shouts. Let me remind you that this is Bill Murray we're watching here, a man whose warm and inviting legacy has left many people feeling like he's a grandfather to us all, and we're seeing him break. It is hard as hell to watch, because it's so daring. But don't worry, the movie's too scared to get too real for too long. The subplot that ties those two subplots together (I don't think the movie even has a main one) is that Vincent is running out of money. A loan shark is breathing down his neck with vague threats of violence and the home his wife is in needs the money he promised them months ago. But, rather than get real, the movie decides instead to have Vincent have the stroke in front of the loan shark, leading him to believe he's dead and therefore in no need to repay the debt, to have his paralysed face and immobility healed in a neat little montage, and to erase the necessity to have him pay his wife's bills by having her die. But, offensive to the audience as this is, it never rings truly hollow, because, as I said, Bill Murray seems to give a shit. And he doesn't deserve all of the credit, either. Melissa McCarthy, whose star-stealing performance in Bridesmaids deserved better than the roles for her that followed, knocks it out of the fucking park as the mother going through a rough divorce whose son finds a father figure in the titular next door neighbour. One scene has her detailing just how shit her life currently is to a Catholic school teacher played by the equally out-of-the-fucking-park-knocker, Chris O'Dowd. It's a really poorly-written monologue, but McCarthy's delivery of it, just the sheer fact that she gives a fuck, elevates it far beyond what it deserves. That's a sentiment that runs through the whole film; it deserves far less than what it has. But it's lucky enough to have a cast that try to make it more than what it is. And, above all of that, it has Bill Murray. One actor should never be enough to recommend a film, but there will always be an exception to a rule, and that exception is Bill Murray.

The Imitation Game

There's nothing expressly bad about The Imitation Game. It's well-crafted, professionally acted and it tells a story that is worth being told. But there's nothing expressly good about it, either, and I think that stems from its seeming unwillingness to really commit to any of its themes. There's a scene about two-thirds of the way through the film when brilliant mathematician Alan Turing and his team have cracked the Enigma code, which was garbled, but freely accessible, radio broadcasts detailing all German positions and plans during World War II. They're staring at a board of the position of every German plane and ship for that day, and one of them realises an imminent attack on an Allied Forces boat. What becomes a frantic race to notify the ship becomes a slow realisation that sending the ship off course to avoid the attack would be far too conspicuous, and could easily lead the Germans to believe that someone has cracked Enigma. To make matters worse, one of the mathematicians recognises the ship as the one his brother his currently stationed on. He begs the room to make one exception, but he and they all know that simply isn't possible. "We're not God," he says to Alan through tears. "Yes, we are," Alan replies. Good shit, right? The sort of shit you'd want this movie to double down on and really explore, right? Well, fuck you. This scene is followed by a quick series of moments explaining that they used statistical probability to choose which attacks to avoid or intercept, and which to leave alone. It's almost like there...isn't any sort of moral quandary here, which certainly isn't the case. It's just that the film is too afraid to lock into any of its ideas. Even the plot that it locks onto more than the others, a focus on Turing's homosexuality and subsequent persecution for such, pulls its punches where it needs to swing hard and fast the most. A lot of people don't realise it was illegal to be gay in the UK until 1967, and in spite of everything Turing did for his country, he was found guilty of being an abomination and, instead of going to prison and being unable to work, he accepted chemical castration as his punishment. The movie lightly suggests that the chemicals began to fuck with his ability to think straight, but the word to focus on here is lightly. It lightly suggests the chemicals began to fuck with his ability to think straight. It lightly condemns the abhorrent and nauseating treatment this hero found himself subject to. The string of events is powerful, but only if you put them together yourself, because the movie seems terrified that you might have an opinion on the matter, or that it might affect your opinion on the matter. It's not just here that it drops the ball, though. It's terrified that an in-depth examination into the machinations of Turing's machine would put the audience to sleep, relegating its explanation to a handful of stock-standard "Eureka!" moments. I wanted to walk out of the theater knowing pretty well how the machine worked. I walked out with a vague idea that it was the genesis for the modern computer. I mean, this was a story kept hidden by MI6 for decades. If it's coming out of hiding, you should want to tell it the best fucking way you can. Hit hard with Turing's persecution for being nothing more than a human being. Go deep into how brilliant his mind was. Turn over every rock involved with the notion that the knowledge provided by his machine led his team to pass judgement on who lived and who died every day until the war ended. Hell, there's even a subplot involving the fact that the only mind comparable to Turing's was a woman's, whose brilliance was looked over by everybody for not having a doodle, and the movie does nothing beyond say, "Yeah, ain't that fucked up?" before moving right along. I've said this before, but it doesn't ring any truer than right now: the only thing worse than a film that you hate is a film that you feel nothing for, and the only thing worse than a film that you feel nothing for is a film that you feel nothing for that could have been great. The Imitation Game is what it is, and there's nothing sadder than that.

Birdman

Birdman opens in the dressing room of Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton), an actor who used to be a household name for playing a superhero that has since disappeared into obscurity. He's one day away from beginning previews of a Broadway adaptation of a beloved book that he's writing, directing and starring in. As he talks to his daughter on Skype, my eyes trailed to a piece of paper stuck to his mirror. It read, "A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing." There are a lot of things that can be said about Birdman. It can be said that the fact that the film has been made to look like its been done entirely in one take is obviously not honest and is indicative of a movie desperately trying to dazzle you with technical brilliance and shy you away from thinking this is a compensation for lack of depth. On the other hand, it can be said that the "one-take" aesthetic enhances the idea that Riggan is a man putting everything on the line in a desperate attempt to be relevant again, and it's leaving him feeling like it could all come crashing down at a moment's notice, with one tiny mistake, but he can't go at a pace any slower than what he's currently going at. It can be said that the film's ambiguous narrative that constantly blurs lines between time and reality doesn't really amount to anything revelatory, and only serves to distract you from the fact that this is a film about a self-obsessed jerk talking to himself for two hours. On the other hand, it can be said that the film requires that ambiguous blend of fiction and reality because it's a very intimate depiction of a man at wit's end experiencing an existential crisis that is manifesting itself in the form of a character he used to play. It can be said that Riggan's rant to a critic who is planning on writing an awful review for the play before she's even seen it, in which he takes her to task for never bothering to talk about the technical craft or intent in a piece of art, instead getting bogged down in buzz-words and references to other works is hypocritical when the film itself can't go a single scene without a shameless pop culture reference to someone like Justin Bieber. On the other hand, it can be said that that's the point. Birdman isn't for everybody. The aforementioned one-take aesthetic, coupled with its fondness for Extreme Close-Ups and an all-jazz-drumming soundtrack makes for a very intense, frenetic two hours. But Birdman isn't trying to be for everybody. Birdman is just Birdman, and that's maybe the greatest praise I can give it. It's interesting that the movie I saw before this, on the same day, was The Imitation Game, a movie that certainly wants you to think that it is what it is, but is really a false, half-hearted version of what it could be. But that's just my opinion, right? Well, that's the beauty of Birdman. It's completely aware of itself, from its aforementioned condemnation of and conviction to cultural references, to casting Michael Keaton, a man whose career evaporated after he stopped playing a superhero, as a character whose career evaporated after he stopped playing a superhero, to casting Edward Norton, a man notorious for being brilliant, but difficult to work with, as a character who is notorious for being brilliant, but difficult to work with. Any criticism you may have for the film, the film has already covered it during the film, which is appropriate when you consider that this entire thing is about a man who can't get out of his own head. And even though it doesn't care if you like it or not, it still tries to cater to everybody. People with any understanding or respect for the craft of film-making, people who appreciate dark, complicated, and unresolved character drama, and people who are sitting down to a movie called Birdman and are expecting to laugh will all be catered to. But every one of those people will also be challenged. Riggan spends the entire film trying to reconcile whether or not he's capable of being good, as an actor and a person. In the end, he realises the only way to win the respect and legacy he so desperately desires is to take the scene where his character kills himself to end the play, and to actually kill himself to end the play. Except he manages to survive by only shooting off his nose, in a move that earns him legendary status and unprecedented praise from critics and public alike. Except he didn't shoot off his nose, because when he removes the bandages, he just looks like he's been punched in the face. But he's happy. And then he hops out onto the windowsill of his hospital room and flies away into the sunrise. That's Birdman. I fucking loved Birdman, but who cares what I think? Birdman will still be Birdman, and frankly, there's nothing better than that.

American Sniper

Much of the public had already made up its mind about American Sniper before I got a chance to sit down to it. Being one of the few American productions to address the Iraq war, directed by the politically outspoken Clint Eastwood no less, it was always going to garner a lot of attention. And, for the most part, people's reservations on what the movie was going to be weren't going to change after they saw it. A lot of people assumed it was going to be the "Ooh-rah"-inest, "America, fuck yeah!" propaganda-fueled, Islamaphobic recruitment film of the decade, and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing to them, they were able to walk out of the theater thinking they were right. Celebrities have tweeted their distaste and support for the flick in equal measure, allowing these people to feel further validated in their steadfast notion of what this movie is. Personally, I didn't know what to expect of American Sniper. Apart from knowing there was a scene where a Cabbage Patch Kid was used as a baby, I didn't have much to go by. I'd heard a bit of what people had thought of it, and I'd seen the stellar trailer for it. Going by the trailer alone, I was expecting a film that dissected the psychological impact that a war in which the enemy wears the same clothes as the innocents can have on a person. The movie that I saw was kind of about that, but it was a little more complicated than that. And it's that complication that it locks onto, resulting in a film that's not enjoyable in the slightest, because it isn't supposed to be. Like the conflict it covers, it's complicated. Telling the true-enough story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who accumulated around 160 kills during his services, the film uses him as a vessel to look at what war has always done to those who fight in it, and the ways in which we see and react to such a person. The movie opens with Kyle perched with his sniper rifle, looking at an Iraqi woman and child moving towards an American tank. The mother hands the child a grenade, and the child begins to run towards the tank. As the music intensifies, and Kyle's finger goes towards the trigger, the movie hard cuts to a handful of scenes about his childhood, in which we see two children being taught by their God-fearing father that there are three types of people in the world: wolves, sheep, and sheep dogs, and that he'll beat the shit out of them if they don't grow up to be anything other than sheep dogs. From there, it's a relatively swift series of scenes that show the young Texan grow up, enlist, find a girl, and head out to war following the events of September 11, 2001, all leading back around to that opening scene. Kyle pulls the trigger, and ends the boy's life. The mother screams in pain and rushes to her son, picks up the grenade and attempts to throw it. Kyle takes her down too. His spotter commends him. "Get the fuck off me," Kyle replies. This didn't happen when I saw the movie, but I've been told by people I trust that the theater broke into applause at the sight of seeing a Middle Eastern woman and child gunned down by a Caucasian soldier. The very thought of that makes me nauseous, but let me run with it to try and understand it. It's their reaction to a movie they feel is giving them the reason to. Except I don't think it is. Watching American Sniper reminded me more than a little of Starship Troopers. Stay with me, here. Starship Troopers was initially hailed and condemned for being a jingoistic, nationalistic, dogmatic piece of trash that painted a future where the world's government was simply "America". What people only realised in later years was that the film was a complete act of satire - a scathing, stone-faced critique of the way Paul Verhoeven saw the country. In a lot of ways, I see American Sniper as a similar beast. It's not satire, but it's asking you to at least think about what it's saying as opposed to what it's showing. If you didn't know, Chris Kyle was murdered by a wounded veteran, probably due to the PTSD he was suffering from. The film ends with real footage of his funeral procession, a humongous-scale event that drew countless people out of the woodwork to commemorate a hero. And it's there that the word is finally used - hero. And sure, going by what we see, we're looking at a hero, but let's think about what's being said. This was a complicated conflict, and it remains so to this day. Imagine being in it. Kyle desperately searches for the evil he can prescribe purpose to, a Hitler or a Ho Chi Minh that he can call a villain, and finds it in a psycho with a penchant for drilling children's heads, and a merciless sniper whose skill matches his own. It's such a movie thing to do, but that's the point: movies like this have clearly defined notions of good and evil, and Kyle needs this. From here, Kyle spends each tour hunting them only to have them slip through his fingers over and over, and no amount of ally deaths that he caused or level-headed pleas from his wife to let go of the confusion and focus on what matters will stop him, because he claims his country still needs defending. But there's no hiding it by the end: this is a man so full of confused rage with nowhere to direct it but at the one thing he can call bad. It destroys him. A soldier he rescued tries to thank him at an auto shop back home, and Kyle can't even look him in the eye. He's arguing with his wife while driving down the freeway, and a tailgating van behind him leads him to believe he's in a car chase. The only thing that saves him in the end is visiting and rehabilitating wounded veterans. What a selfless act of heroism, right? That's what you see, but think about what you're being told. The only way he can return to his normal life is to sink himself straight back into the horrors of war, to look upon the result of something it's all to easy to call evil and to face it every day until it eventually kills him. Chris Kyle enjoyed killing those he did. He called them "savages". Think of that what you will. But if you think American Sniper is justifying your world view, think again. You don't get one side of a coin without the other. And while the film might support the conflict in Iraq, it doesn't support the way we're talking about it. We called Chris Kyle a hero, but it's not that easy. It's a little more complicated than that.

Dumb and Dumber To

The big mystery of Dumb and Dumber To is why it isn't funny when it's a carbon copy of its predecessor. It's not like this can't work; Home Alone 2 taught us that it can actually work pretty well. Why is it then that seeing all of these jokes that made us laugh twenty years ago and still make us laugh don't work in this context? The answer is actually rather simple: it's the heart, or lack thereof. Dumb and Dumber was, at its core, a sweet-natured flick about two best friends supporting each other no matter what. Anyone who got hurt deserved it, and nobody did anything deliberately to hurt another's feelings. Dumb and Dumber To has such a strong disdain for everyone in it that there's rarely a moment when it isn't trying to pull humour from someone else's pain. Don't get me wrong, now: comedy comes from pain, but there has to be a point to it. One of Dumb and Dumber To's few funny moments occurs with the return of the Mutt Cutts van. Harry and Lloyd fly over a hill in a recreation of the shot in the first film, slow-mo close ups documenting their joy at having their old friend back, before the front of the van nosedives into the road and they wreck it. So, that's comedy coming from pain, but what's the point? That you the audience are fucking idiots for thinking you might have wanted this. The closest thing I could possibly describe as enjoying this movie was taking mental note of how much the six (fucking six) writers must love Breaking Bad, Empire of the Sun, Jeff Daniel's butt crack and cruel jokes towards anyone that isn't a white, straight, physically and mentally able man. Dumb and Dumber To has no heart. It's not laughing with you, but at you. It's an ugly fucking turd.

The Interview

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2014: A Year In Film

Top Ten Films That I Saw In 2014

1. her

Ultimately, her is asking you some tough questions. Do we need technology, or do we need people? Or do we just need to work on being happy, with whomever or whatever makes us so? That's for you to decide. What I know is that in a season of film so full of watered-down shit that I struggle to find anything to say about it other than "Don't bother", it's so refreshing and overwhelming to experience a film so honest and heartfelt and personal and raw and insightful and challenging and just fucking perfect that I have so much to say I struggle to find the place to start. Thank her.

1. Guardians of the Galaxy

I imagine it would have been tempting to play it safe with Guardians of the Galaxy, to merely pepper the self-referential humour into it the same way Thor: The Dark World did. Instead, they latched onto it with full conviction, delivering a movie with five violent, cynical, morally-questionable jerks that it then asks us to fall in love with. But we do, because as Star-Lord says, "I may be an a-hole, but I'm not 100% a dick." It's also, verbose character analyses aside, a ridiculously entertaining good time at the movies. Marvel have been putting out quality films one after another, but they've finally made one that's going to be memorable. My inner twelve-year-old could not be happier. Go see it. See it twice.

1. Calvary

The Catholic church hasn't been the most popular of late. As more and more evidence of its countless covered-up incidents of child abuse has been revealed, the church has found itself at the ire of much of the world. I think one of the reasons I love Calvary so much is that it has the stones to stand bravely in front of the angry mob in defence. Father Lavelle theorises in one of the film's later scenes that people spend too much time focusing on sin, and not enough on virtues, going on to cite forgiveness as a particularly underrated quality, which stems from the film's central idea that spirituality and faith have never been the problem. Organisation of them has.

1. Interstellar

Personally, I'm so grateful there are still people that have the ability (read: money) to create films so full of ambition, and ideas, and love for the craft, and love for us, even if they're imperfect experiences. When the majority of Hollywood productions can't get much further than "What if, like, Dracula was, like, a superhero?", I'll more than happily take one film that shoots for the heavens with zero care for how far it falls short. It's just icing on the cake that it shatters the stratosphere. Stop getting stroppy about the science and just go see a movie. Christopher Nolan is one of the few people left making them.

1. The Babadook

So, The Babadook is pretty gutsy as far as narratives go, and it approaches being a horror flick with the same confidence. Jennifer Kent takes a huge gamble by having Amelia read The Babadook almost in its entirety fifteen minutes in. The cat's out of the bag in terms of what the monster is going to look like, something movies like this often rely on to generate interest. It works here, though, partly because of the established tone I mentioned, leaving you in a constant state of anticipated terror regardless of whether or not you've seen the ghost, but mostly because she understands that the supernatural boogeyman is far less terrifying than the possibility of a real one. ... It's also, above all else, a top-notch Australian production that, by taking genuine, relatable human drama and visualising it as a monster, succeeds where many fail in making a horror movie that's actually horrific.

1. The Lego Movie

The writing perfectly captures the play time dialogue you used to make, adding gloriously innocent depth and excitement to what is a bunch of pegged pieces of plastic stuck to a mat. It makes it all the more heartbreaking when the reveal comes that this isn't the child's Lego. It's his dad's: a man who always followed the instructions, who created perfect little universes that didn't stray a single brick from the box, who glued his pieces to the board so that there can never be any irregularities or innovations. Because he's afraid. Afraid that if he tries to be creative, he'll fail. Afraid that if he goes against the instructions, he'll be ridiculed. But that's the beauty of Lego: you can't fail. If it looks bad, just pull it apart and try it again. Pull it apart anyway! The possibilities are endless. The Lego hero stares up at the Lego villain, as the scene is mirrored with the child looking up at his father, and he says, "You don't have to be the bad guy. You are the most talented, most interesting, and most extraordinary person in the universe. And you are capable of amazing things." Jesus, I cried buckets.

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel

My absolute favourite thing about The Grand Budapest Hotel comes from one man asking another a question, and like a good storyteller, he knows that a question is just an opportunity to tell a tale. How did Zero come to own the building? That isn't really answered until the last couple of minutes. Does that make it a bad story? We come to the last shot of the film. The young girl is still sat by the grave, reading the book. The film is the author's retelling of Zero's account of his childhood memories. There must be something worth hearing in a story so old.

1. Godzilla

Do you want to know why movies like Transformers or The Hobbit make you tired? It's not the length. It's the fact that your awareness of its falsity is made all the more apparent by its impossible cinematography. When you can do so much of the special thing, it ceases to be special. Godzilla understands this, and I can't stress this enough, fucking perfectly. If we as humanity are the protagonist, the movie is seen through our eyes, and this is done by keeping the camera stuck firmly on two legs. We catch glimpses of these humongous beasts through windshields, or from a rooftop, or from inside the goggles of a paratrooper descending into the den of Gods. If the camera is level, it's because we're looking out of a high-rise window, otherwise the camera is looking up. This is all to elicit a particular emotion from the audience. It's not excitement, it's not tension and it's not fear: it's awe.

1. The Wolf of Wall Street

In the wrong hands, The Wolf of Wall Street could have easily been a dopey, heavy-handed anti-capitalism flick. Thankfully, it's smart enough to not be anti-anything. If anything, it's anti-addiction to things that are addictive, but even that's not really the case. It's simply about the nature of people, specifically those that seize on opportunity and allow it to consume them. As hard as it may be to hear, Jordan Belfort, the coke-sniffing, midget-tossing, two-timing, wife-bashing, money-stealing, no-good, dirty lying rat, isn't a monster. He's a person, and he used to be just like you. And you can be just like him. All you've got to do is listen closely.

1. 12 Years a Slave

At just over two hours, it's one of the few times that the phrase "emotionally draining" isn't just a couple of buzz words. There were more than a few times in the film I found myself thinking, "Hit the space bar and take five", because what I was watching was so fucking harrowing that I was fidgeting, unable to get comfortable and desperate for a brief moment of reprieve. And then I realised that was the point. It's hard to watch because it should be. This is a film built to transcend race, religion or politics and just put you in the shoes of a human being legally recognised as a slave. Solomon Northup received no moment of reprieve, so why should you?

Honourable Mentions

The Rover

The Rover's most impressive quality is its realisation that the apocalypse would probably be just as tedious and boring as what came before it. It also recognises that, chances are, people won't change their tune or realise that simply surviving is the only thing that makes us human.  ... They'll still cling furiously to the notion that, even in the face of the end of the world, they have a purpose and they're special. When they're not. They're all, collectively, just the ones clever, cowardly or lucky enough to have not bit the bullet yet.

What We Do In The Shadows

Watching dumb people fail is sad. Watching just-slightly-out-of-touch people fail is hilarious. Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi know this. The New Zealander vampires that are the focus of mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows are good at what they do. Or at least, they were. The comedy of the film stems from their resistance to fully adapt to the changing world.

Gone Girl

We don't want reality. Reality is boring. We want to be someone else, to play a role. That is what Gone Girl is about at its core: who we are is rarely who we want to be. Most of us come to terms with that, make peace with the reality of our situation. Some of us don't. Some of us see meeting a new person as a chance to be a new person. But what happens when you like the person you're pretending to be more than the person you are?

Bottom Five

Wolf Creek 2

In the end, Wolf Creek 2 is just too dopey: it wants to deliver a film that salutes the first film and treads new ground, but its method to achieve that is to remove maturity and push everything into excess, and the result is a morally empty maggot of a film that says nothing. It's a film that's clearly satirising the [racism] that runs rampant through Australia, but it's so fucking moronic in its delivery that it winds up kind of championing it.

Deliver Us From Evil

When the end of a so-called horror film's second act is a knife fight in a stairwell between a muscled-up douchebag and a red-eyed monster man, that's the cue to vow never to watch an "Inspired by true events" horror movie again, get up, walk out and salvage what's left of your Sunday afternoon with something a little less moronic. It's what Eric Bana would want you to do.

Sin Titty 2: A Dame to Kill For

What does it say of your movie when you're only willing to let a woman have some depth if she's got her tits out? What does it say of your movie when the most I got out of it was relief that there's still one person with some say in Hollywood that cares about Mickey Rourke? What does it say of your movie when your sixty-five million dollar production only makes two on its opening day? Go home, Sin City 2. You're drunk.

Need for Speed

Need For Speed is the simple story of a small town American mechanic who causes the injuries and occasional death of countless civilians, cops and fellow racers because he gotta go fast. Or his friend died or something, who fucking cares? If you want to sit in pain for two hours, save your money and headbutt a brick.

Transformers: Age of Extinction

It fucking sucked.

Interstellar

We don't deserve Christopher Nolan. His career has been built upon giving us small character drama hidden amongst humongous genre flicks, which is exactly what Steven Spielberg used to do better than anybody. Christopher Nolan is the second coming of Steven Spielberg. And yet all we seem to want to do with him is pick apart the plot holes and logic jumps his movies seem prone to. Granted, when we start to analyse the logic and rules of Inception's dream theory and dream robbers, it begins to unravel on itself. But to do that, we have to neglect the fact that the movie is really about the much smaller issue of Leonardo Dicaprio's relationship insecurities that just so happens to be represented through this immense spectacle. We also love to tear apart his love for exposition; to explain his complicated concepts with lengthy dialogue. Granted, this is a storytelling technique often frowned upon for its tendency to grind the narrative to a halt and, depending on the density of the exposition, confuse and alienate the audience. But Christopher Nolan is all about the complete opposite of that. He actively refuses to let his films halt when delivering exposition, often having them occur while the event he's exposing is taking place. He understands that timeless reason we go to the movies: to escape. If you're sitting on a roller coaster and take time to really soak in your surroundings, you'll notice the machinery and how it's operating, and if you focus on that, a piece of you won't be able to enjoy the ride as much as if you just fucking went with it. People are already starting to pull apart Insterstellar's final act, claiming that it spends so much time establishing its science to eschew all of it for an emotional conclusion. Like there was ever any science to begin with. Interstellar doesn't have a science, it has a concept. It's a concept that has groundings in science, but ultimately its intent isn't to teach you about the inner machinations of inter-dimensional travel, but to use the idea of inter-dimensional travel to tell a very small story of why a human being is compelled to survive even in the most dire of odds. Just fucking go with it.

To be entirely fair, I wasn't expecting Intserstellar to be as minimal at its core as it was. Having done my best to avoid as much advertising for it as possible, all that I was aware of was that Earth was depleted of its natural resources and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) was leaving his kids behind to search the universe for a new home. I was expecting the film to be focused more on the species than the individual. Because as much as I just hammered home the point that Christopher Nolan's films are always smaller than they appear, they're still generally focused on the big concept. And I wasn't entirely emotionally on board with this movie at first. I'm a very selfish person when it comes to environmental sustainability. I say that I don't give a shit because I know nothing monumentally devastating is going to happen in my lifetime, and I don't care enough about the species to give thought to who comes after me. The truth is I'm just scared. I'm scared to stop and research and potentially acknowledge the possibility that our planet is declining on a curve faster than we think; that a time might come when there simply isn't a contingency plan. But what I don't joke about, what I openly care about, are the people close to me. Their lives are important to me. I don't think I'm very alone in this, and Christopher Nolan seems to agree. Interstellar is about saving the human race second, and about Cooper saving his daughter first. It's literally represented in the film as Plan A and Plan B: Plan A is to find a sustainable planet in enough time to get Earth's dwindling population out of there immediately, and Plan B is to use the frozen embryos on board the ship to repopulate humanity. This attitude results in a film built upon countless immensely moving, tiny human moments. My personal favourite occurs about a third of the way through the movie. Cooper walks past the bedroom of one of his crew mates, Romilly (David Gyasi). Romilly is staring at the wall, having trouble comprehending the idea that there's only a few centimetres between him and a vast sea of nothing that can kill him in seconds. It's so decidedly unreal. Cooper gives him his earphones, and as Romilly puts them in his ears, rainfall and thunder fill the deathly quiet. Romilly closes his eyes and breathes deep, and Cooper leaves the room.

At its core, Interstellar isn't about all the ways a human can survive, but all the reasons a human would want to survive. Cooper is easy to understand: if he doesn't live, then his family dies and he never sees his daughter again. It's simple, but it adds incredible weight to the film's more scientific moments. One of the three potentially viable planets previously visited by astronauts that could be their new home sits on the fringes of a black hole. The difference in gravitational pull means that every hour spent down there is seven years up here. Cooper, Brand (Anne Hathaway) and Doyle (Wes Bentley) touch down to assess the viability of the planet. As Brand gets closer to the information needed, Cooper realises that the landmass in the distance is actually a colossal approaching tidal wave (gravity and black holes, you see). Brand jeopardises the mission by refusing to leave without collecting the data, leaving them riding the wave. The crash kills Doyle and water logs their ship. I began to sweat as Cooper and Brand yelled at each other about whose fault it was. Every minute they spent waiting to leave was costing them days and months. When they get back to the space station, Romilly greets them. "It's been 23 years," he says almost too calmly. As if the crushingly devastating weight of that reality wasn't enough, Cooper proceeds immediately to watch all of the video messages his family had sent over the last two decades. Because in light of what just went down, this is the only thing he cares about. It's a glorious long take that focuses solely on Cooper's face as he runs the entire gamut of emotion: delirious laughter at seeing his children grow up to uncontrollable tears as he realises he wasn't there to see any of it. His son, Tom (Casey Affleck), grows up, gets married, starts having children and comes to terms with the fact that his dad must no longer be alive and that he has to let go. The consequence of human error is felt in overwhelming magnitude; mere minutes ago, Cooper and Brand were yelling about a waterlogged spaceship while Earth ticked on mercilessly. Tom says goodbye, the screen goes blank, and after a few seconds, switches back on. Cooper knows who it is immediately. "Hi Murph (Jessica Chastain)," he whispers, as he looks upon the adult face of the daughter whose heart he irreversibly broke when he left for the mission. "Today is a special day," Murph says. "Because you said that we might be the same age when you got back. And today, I'm the age that you were when you left me." Just let that sink in.

And that's only just Cooper. Interstellar has a bit of a weird conclusion to its second act, in which Matt Damon shows up and kind of fucks up everything for everyone. I was trying to reconcile the subplot's inclusion into the story, and at first, I saw it born from a feeling of necessity to give the film an easily-identifiable villain. But that's unfair and untrue. It may partly serve that purpose, but its grander goal is to explore the darker side of humanity's drive to survive. His inclusion in the film's cast was kept a secret (a move that I think has strengths and weaknesses), and his introductory scene involves him being awoken from suspended animation and breaking down in tears at the sight of another human face. "Pray you never know how good it feels," he says of that moment. It's after this that he briefs the team on the supposedly habitable planet he summoned them to. During this, the ship receives a transmission from Murph, who has just found out that Brand's father (Michael Caine), the man who convinced them to leave everything for this mission, the man who created Plan B only if Plan A didn't work, was a liar. On his deathbed, he admits that even if they can find another habitable planet, it's impossible to move Earth's population there. Plan B was the only option that there ever was. Cooper and Brand are stunned. But Dr. Mann knew. He knew that humanity would never band together to save their species if it didn't mean saving themselves too. I sure wouldn't. Professor Brand sacrificed a huge part of his humanity for the good of a species, if you choose to see it that way. In light of this new information, the mission changes for Cooper. This planet is supposedly habitable, so the job is done, and it's time to get the fuck back home to Murph. Only it isn't habitable, obviously. Dr. Mann lied, because the harsh reality that he was one of twelve people sent out to find a new home and that, through pure luck of the draw, he was sent to one giant, frozen cloud, was too much for him to bear. He didn't want to be alone, so he pressed the "This is a Good Planet. Come Here" button, knowing full well the degree to which such a decision could fuck up the mission. Because even in the face of extinction, he didn't want to be alone and forgotten. Could you blame him? It's such an ugly, raw human thing to do, and it's truly stomach-churning because it is no less human the the film's more beautiful scenes. It's showing us the other side of the same coin.

In my opinion, this is far and away the best performance of Matt Damon's career. He projects a gut-wrenching image of a man truly at his wits end. He is pure and unrelenting determination from the moment he attacks Cooper, and totally ignorant to the futility of his actions. The two men wrestle and punch each other in astronaut suits in a fight scene that's pretty fucking ridiculous to watch, but don't mistake this for an unintentionally hilarious moment. It's supposed to look stupid. There is so much happening on a grander scale, so much at stake, and yet humanity is still just two guys in big suits awkwardly smacking the shit out of each other, because it's what one of them thinks he should be doing. Mann starts headbutting Cooper's helmet to crack it. Cooper pleads with him, "There's a 50-50 chance that your helmet will shatter too!" Mann pauses. "Those are the best odds I've had in years." There's no stopping a man who has seen the other side of the abyss. He steals a shuttle and heads back to the space station, with the intent of heading to the last potentially habitable planet and surviving his legacy. Cooper and Brand place overrides on the ship to prevent him from automatically docking. Mann does it manually. Of course, his human calculations are off, and the ship refuses to air lock. Matt Damon bears the face of a man who doesn't fucking care, because rational thought shit itself and died long ago. The air lock fails. The shuttle blows up. Dr. Mann's legacy dies. There's a point earlier in his plot where he recites a Dylan Thomas poem previously read by Professor Brand. As he spoke the words, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light", I desperately wanted him to stop. He was tainting the beauty of Professor Brand's recital. He was turning a rallying cry to fight to the dying breath for what you believe in to a...well, a rallying cry to fight to the dying breath for what you believe in. And then I realised the purpose of Dr. Mann leaving his employees with that piece of poetry was to leave them with their own interpretation of it. Accompanying Cooper, it's a mission statement to never forget who he's fighting for, and to never relent or compromise. But accompanying Mann, it's changes to an insensitive, cowardly endorsement to fight tooth and nail to save yourself, regardless of the consequences. Even accompanying Professor Brand himself, in light of his dishonesty, the poem changes shape once more, pushing him to leave what makes him human behind so that a species doesn't go extinct. And it's in this that Interstellar perhaps impresses most strongly the fact that Dr. Mann is not a villain. He's just the other side of our coin. "Do not go gentle into that good night."

So, I picked one of Interstellar's big twists really early on. Many of its early scenes involve young Murph talking about a ghost she believes is haunting the house, sending her messages. Particular books are falling off the shelf of their own accord, messages are being sent in Morse Code and eventually, coordinates are provided in dust that sets Cooper off to finding NASA and his mission. Later in the film, she speaks of her ghost and how her father always assumed she called it a ghost because she was scared, and how that was inaccurate. She called it a ghost because it felt like a person, and I immediately knew that somehow, Cooper was the ghost. What I couldn't work out was why he would send the message that Murph deciphers: "Stay." And I couldn't work it out because, even though the film had sold me on thinking small within a big situation, I was still thinking too big. I was trying to work out how "Stay" could be some sort of assurance that Earth would be okay in the end, when what it really was was Cooper begging with himself not to leave his daughter. And when that realisation came, so much more of the film came into focus. Earlier, Cooper and Brand are arguing because there's two planets left to explore and they only have fuel for one if they're to also get home. The aforementioned Dr. Mann is broadcasting a signal, a more favourable sign in Cooper's eyes. The up until now unmentioned Edmonds' planet stopped broadcasting a while back, but his planet showed much promise before that. It's a tricky choice to make, until Cooper throws into the mix that Brand was involved with Edmonds, and that love was clouding her judgement. "Yes Cooper, the thought of possibly seeing him again excites me," Brand says, after putting forth the idea that her heart knows Edmonds planet is habitable because love is a science that we simply haven't yet come to understand. It was what I initially thought to be a throwaway speech (knocked out of the fucking park by Anne Hathaway), until the film's revelation locked it firmly back into place. Cooper may be the biggest idiot out of everyone in this film. The final shot reveals that Brand was right. Though, for reasons unknown, Edmonds isn't alive (old age? Relativity rearing its cruel head once again), his planet is well and truly habitable. Adding to this is the fact that, to get back to the ghost, Cooper never believed Murph. He humoured her by telling her to apply scientific theory to her belief, but all she really needed to do was follow her heart. And she was right. You don't need a much bigger indicator that real science doesn't play a pivotal fucking role in the heart of this flick. I haven't gone into the hows or whys of Cooper being the ghost, and frankly, I don't want to. It works entirely within its own logic, and that's all that should matter. Earlier in the film, Romilly uses a pencil pushing through a folded up piece of paper to explain wormhole theory (yes, it's from Event Horizon. No, that shouldn't be seen as a bad thing). I'm dumb. The audience is dumb. I need the Event Horizon lesson. We need the science distilled into these simple analogies so that we can understand its context in the greater narrative. You know, the whole reason we're watching a movie in the first place. There's two ways a conclusion to this could go. The first is a half-hour lesson on how Nolan's fourth-dimensional time travel works. The second is Cooper simply saying, "They found a way," so that the film can focus on the idea of him spending what feels like two years in space to come home and have to say goodbye to your daughter who is now dying of old age, the same daughter he fucking promised he would see again. I know which one I want more. 

And the movie's not done ripping every emotion out of me either. The film's conclusion left me feeling broken, and I couldn't quite pinpoint why. For all intents and purposes, it was a happy ending. Or at least, the happiest ending it could be. Earth hadn't found a new home, but it had found a way to get Earth's population into space and it's all within their power to take it from there. So why didn't I feel happy? A night's sleep brought the answer. Cooper spent the whole film adamant that his actions were for his daughter first and humanity second, a sentiment I was able to get behind immediately, but in the final act, he comes to realise he can't save his daughter without also saving humanity, sacrificing a literal lifetime in the process. Without initially realising it, Christopher Nolan had torn apart my apathy for our species. And as if that wasn't enough, Cooper's monumental sacrifice was just to get us off Earth. The problem isn't solved. It's up to us to finish the job. He gave up everything for us to have a second chance. And after saying goodbye to his old, dying daughter, he heads off to find Brand, wherever the fuck she is. He enters the film lamenting that humanity was once a proud explorer, and he leaves the film as its new generation. He has to search. As the final shot shows, Brand is alive and breathing the air of our new home. But the wormhole to her is now closed. There's no folded up piece of paper from Saturn to another galaxy now. Cooper let go of watching his daughter grow up so we could have the tools to save ourselves. Your opinion of Interstellar is your own, and I wouldn't even begin to think I had the ability to make you think differently of it. But personally, I'm so grateful there are still people that have the ability (read: money) to create films so full of ambition, and ideas, and love for the craft, and love for us, even if they're imperfect experiences. When the majority of Hollywood productions can't get much further than "What if, like, Dracula was, like, a superhero?", I'll more than happily take one film that shoots for the heavens with zero care for how far it falls short. It's just icing on the cake that it shatters the stratosphere. Stop getting stroppy about the science and just go see a movie. Christopher Nolan is one of the few people left making them.

P.S. I couldn't find a logical place to put this following thought:
1. Topher Grace getting a tyre iron out of his car as Casey Affleck's truck approached was another hilarious, yet overwhelmingly powerful human moment of someone standing so steadfast and strong in defence of something they think they should stand for, regardless of how silly they know their actions to be. Like, what is he really going to do with that thing?