Important Anniversaries Marked in 2014

* The Oscar winners noted were released in the previous year, but given the award in the year noted.

10 Years Ago (2004)

Mel Gibson made waves of controversy and took his first irreversible steps toward becoming a racist and anti-Semitic Hollywood pariah with the release of The Passion of the Christ.

Number of films I've seen: 109
My average rating: 6.33/10
My best of the year: Sideways directed by Alexander Payne
My worst of the year: The Phantom of the Opera directed by Joel Schumacher

directing debuts: Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead)

notable deaths: Actors Marlon Brando (80) and Christopher Reeve (52); President Ronald Reagan (93); Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (75); musician Ray Charles (73)

Top grossing film for the year (domestic): Shrek 2 ($441.2 million)
(worldwide): Shrek 2 ($919.8 million)

Academy Award Best Picture winner*: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King directed by Peter Jackson

Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner: Farhenheit 9/11 directed by Michael Moore

Movies from my collection
Before Sunset
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Garden State
The Incredibles
Kill Bill: volume 2
Million Dollar Baby
Napoleon Dynamite
Ocean's 12
Sideways

Non-movie related

- Facebook launched on 4 February
- The Madrid train bombings committed by al-Qaeda on 11 March
- Groundbreaking for the new World Trade Center tower began on 4 July. The skyscraper is still not completed.
- On 26 December, a major earthquake under the Indian Ocean caused a massive tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people in as many as 14 countries.

Horror Classic Movie Review: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I'm not entirely sure this film belongs in this October series because it's not a film that was part of my childhood memories of scary movies. I don't think I saw this until I was in college. But the film was always something I was aware of. Everyone knew about Leatherface and how this was supposed to be one of the scariest movies. It actually scare me quite a lot when I did finally see it.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

A demented family portrait.

The most terrifying movies I’ve seen all come out of the 1970s, the time of the New Hollywood Golden Age, when studios were willing to back risky projects because audiences were willing to lay down money for challenging subject matter. Sometimes they just wanted visceral thrills. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre certainly provided the latter, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a challenging film or that it has anything of real importance to say. Its sole purpose is to scare the shit out of whoever is daring enough to see it. Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s story is a depiction of a demented hick family in central Texas, where they prey on helpless victims, offering them a sadistic nightmare of torture.

From My Collection: Blazing Saddles Movie Review

I can’t imagine sitting down and watching Blazing Saddles now for the first time and coming away enjoying it very much. It’s got some funny gags, classic lines, and as a satire of the Western genre and the marginalization of black people in the United States it can be searingly funny. But much of what made the film work so well was that it was made the early 70s. Mel Brooks was a well-known name, but he was not yet a well-known satirist. The Producers was a big success a few years earlier, but Young Frankenstein would follow later in 1974 and still to come were High Anxiety and History of the World: Part I.

Classic Movie Review: The Godfather Part II

At the time it was made, could anyone have imagined that a sequel to The Godfather would possibly be anything near to the quality and sophistication of the first film? And yet Francis Ford Coppola surpassed his own film in many ways with The Godfather Part II. It is wider and more epic in scope, covering both the rise of a young Vito Corleone in 1920s Little Italy and the decline of his youngest son Michael 30-odd years later. It covers the ground both before and after the time period in which the first film is set.