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.

From My Collection: The Hudsucker Proxy Movie Review

Full disclosure: I’m an almost shameless lover of the Coen brothers. There’s hardly a film they’ve made that I don’t like and with one exception, I own every one of their films on DVD. That doesn’t mean I’m blind to the things that don’t work and the films that fail in some very important aspects. With that said, The Hudsucker Proxy was always a film I liked for its quirky Coen-ness, but clearly I wasn’t crazy about it because it took me fourteen years after I got my first DVD player (and nineteen years after the film was released) to purchase a copy.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare Movie Review

This is one of the few films in this October series that I watched for the first time. This was kind of a big deal when it was released when I was in high school, but I just didn't have much interest in horror movies anymore. The premise was sort of interesting, but I just never got around to it. No, it had no direct effect on me as a kid, but it was part of the conversation, so I thought it important to include it. Also, it's the only one of the Nightmare series I hadn't seen.

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

Artists often talk about their work as if it were a living, breathing thing. In the artist’s mind, an inanimate object takes on qualities that make it seem like it’s more than the material it’s made from. Once an audience gets a hold of a piece of art, the metaphor takes on a whole new life as meanings are ascribed, intentions discussed, and, in the case of pop culture, obsessions are created. The Nightmare on Elm Street series and, more specifically, Freddy became cult sensations through the 1980s. You might say they took on a life of their own outside their various creators, in particular the original creator Wes Craven, whose idea had morphed into something completely different by the last two or three films.

The idea for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare had been kicking around since A Nightmare on Elm Street 3. New Line had rejected the premise in favor of a more traditional slasher film. You can call New Nightmare the seventh film in the series, but it doesn’t fit within the series continuity. It takes place in the ostensible real world of Hollywood, where Heather Langenkamp (playing herself) lives with her husband Chase (David Newsom) and their young son Dylan (Miko Hughes). Chase is a special effects guy who’s been secretly working on a new Freddy glove for Wes Craven (who also plays himself, in addition to writing and directing the film). Craven the character has a new idea for a horror movie and he wants Heather to star. However, she’s being tormented by phone calls taunting her with the Freddy nursery rhyme and she has ambivalent feelings about her son being exposed to those kinds of films.

Barcelona Movie Review

Whit Stillman’s Metropolitandrew on his own experiences going to debutante balls and hobnobbing with wealthy socialites. His second film, Barcelona, similarly drew on his own life, this time mining the time he spent living abroad. Ted and Fred Boynton are cousins who share Ted’s apartment for a short time when Fred turns up unexpectedly as part of a Navy advance man ahead of the arrival of the Sixth Fleet’s shore leave. Ted works for an American company out of their Barcelona office. Fred is a brash outspoken American who vehemently defends the United States’ honor against the frequent verbal abuse levied by Spanish locals. Ted is a bit more reserved, though no less a patriot, and versed in some of the subtleties of Spanish culture.

John Cusack Focus: Bullets Over Broadway Movie Review

This may be less a John Cusack film than a Woody Allen film, but it's far enough against type for Cusack that I think it's interesting to include it in this short compendium. I could just as easily file this review under my "Modern Classics" heading. This film almost made my list of the top 5 Woody Allen films. So close!

Of all of Woody Allen’s films, Bullets Over Broadway might be the most underrated. And though John Cusack is just one in a long line of actors to basically perform the Woody role on screen, his is probably the best. Not only does he get the mannerisms, the rhythms of speech, and the mania one hundred percent right, but somehow he makes the role his own. It’s less straight imitation than internal adaptation.

Modern Classic Movie Review: Pulp Fiction

As a special treat to celebrate my 100th movie review posted to this site (I've actually written more than 100, but they haven't all been posted here) I decided to write a full length review of the film that got me interested in film in the first place.

Additionally, over the next few weeks I will post, in pieces, the full analysis I did on the film several years ago. Keep your eyes open for that starting this week.

It’s amazing to me that after roughly twenty viewings from beginning to end plus an exhaustive shot-by-shot study of it, there are still moments in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction that make me smile, chuckle or even downright surprise me: The Wolf’s smile of appreciation for the delicious coffee served up by Jimmy; Mia Wallace’s tomato joke to break the tension after an intense scene. Incredibly, watching it again for this review, I even pulled out something new that I had never picked up on before. And it wasn’t even a minor detail, but one that ties into one of the major themes of the film.

Old Film Review: Star Trek Generations

I’ve just taken a second look at Star Trek: Generations, that transition film between the original crew of Kirk, Spock and McCoy to “The Next Generation” of Picard and Riker. It blatantly attempts to accomplish two major feats: to bridge the gap between the first series of six films starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy to what would become a new series with a new crew that could take the adventures further into the future; and to kind of one-up the previous films in terms of action sequences and effects.

It succeeds at one of those tasks. It utilizes visual effects (including what I imagine must be a combination of CGI and miniatures) which continue to hold up 16 years later. Barring a handful of obvious blue screen shots involving close-ups of characters, the seams are difficult to spot (at least on my tiny television).