Another year
pinched off from our collective backside and therefore we must suffer the
inevitable splash of cold water upon the buttocks that is the top and bottom 5,
before we can reach for the toilet paper of moving on with our lives. I will
say, only movies I have seen personally are in the running. That’s my insurance
policy against people demanding to know why I haven’t bowed towards the East,
and chanted “Hail Indie Out.!” the minimum number of times.
Just to digress
for a moment, it was cunning of Inside Out to include the idea of emotions,
because I’m only really interested in movies that have some kind of narrative
design and interesting characters and that aren’t interactive toy shop windows
for people who couldn’t leave their comfort zone if it was in the path of a
herd of charging wildebeest. But now it’s time to get out your betting slips,
'cause it’s time to make like Sesame Street and learn how to count to five!
Fifth Best:
Speaking of refusing
to leave a comfort zone, our fifth best movie wears nostalgia like crispy duck
wears a pancake. But in this case, it’s actually managing to capture the spirit
and movie style of retro-action adventure, not say, parading a bunch of
geriatric characters before us in sparkly costumes in the hope we’ll start
throwing money and underpants: it’s Mad
Max Fury Road! Keeps everything interesting with a very basic story and
great action, plus I thought it was integral to put it somewhere on this list
as everyone else seems to be doing so also.
Fifth Worst:
An attempt at
comedy that falls flat is the basic unit of raw despair. A movie that
unfailingly produces one every five seconds is officially worse than being held
hostage by Somalian pirates. Surprisingly, I’m not talking about Vacation (which
at least had some fun writing, as long as you keep the TV on mute), but Mortdecai - a movie that utterly and
completely failed at comedy, action, entertainment, movie design and getting
out of the way of my gun!
Fourth best:
You know, the
more I look back on Spectre, the
less I think of it, at least compared to Skyfall. The set pieces don't feel
like vast cohesive wholes, the writing isn't great, some of the theme song was aggressively
boring, and characters just don't have the same grim despair-fueled spark, none
of which changes the fact that I watched the movie like three times this year,
so I’m putting it in fourth, mainly because it’s far too late to give any
awards to Skyfall. That ship has sailed, realised it's forgot its keys, come
back, then sailed again.
Fourth Worst:
It’s said of
course, that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. A popular if
untrue saying, and a guideline that the wachowski brothers should've bore in
mind before they passed around the ether-soaked rags and made Jupiter Ascending. I did hesitate a
little to stick in the bottom five a movie I’m pretty sure I didn’t see and
wasn’t for me, but then I tried to picture someone who it was for and did get
it, and then that they were introduced as my future daughter in-law, and then I
pictured myself chasing them across the croquet lawn with an elephant gun.
Third Best:
You know me; I
don’t think it’s a good year unless I’ve lost at least one piece of furniture
to a movie that makes me cack my pants with the force of a shotgun blast. I
thought triple-A movies had forgotten how to effectively pace themselves and
build atmosphere, but Marvel’s Ant-Man
means my sofa can’t get complacent just yet. Linear plot's self-explanatory and
the protagonist's very likeable and since that seems to be the running theme of
this top 5, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. What do you want from me? This
wasn’t exactly a 2014-grade year.
Third Worst:
There was a
time when I would have been more hesitant about putting movie franchise
spin-offs into a bottom five, as most of them only exist because someone needed
to fill a space next to a film and they would of filled the space with cakes of
mulchy feces, if they thought that would turn a profit. But then again, that’s
hardly an attitude exclusive to movie spinoffs these days, and if a movie in my
top 3 can be a movie spin-off, then there are still good people out there! Not
on Point Break’s development team,
however! Half of whom didn’t give a crap, while the other half lived in the
office fish tank!
Second Best:
I like Star
Wars as you know. I wouldn’t go so as far as to petition to rename new year’s
day “Hooray for Star Wars!” but I will take the opportunity to big up movies
that fly the same flag, that ending the lives of endless streams of thinking,
feeling human beings of varying moral character is, while entertaining,
slightly grim. And that’s what I liked about Star Wars: The Force Awakens - you can almost feel the crushing
weight that sits upon the shoulders of its engaging characters, but it doesn’t
take itself so seriously that we can’t spend an hour or so killing space Nazis
on the moon. Yes, you heard me right, I said, "killing face Yahtzees with
a spoon".
Second Worst:
Well, this is
about as late an entry as late gets, but you really would be hard-pressed to
find worse than one of the first movies I reviewed. I say “reviewed”, perhaps
the better word would be, “autopsied”. Terrible Acting, Horrendous Visuals and
with dialogue as irritating as chicken wire across the plums, Fantastic Four can die in a hole. I’d
think of a more roundabout way of saying that, but I refuse to put more effort
in than the writers did.
First Best:
Oh, how I
ummed. Oh, how I ahhed. Ah, how I ohhed between this and Star Wars. Like I
said, it wasn’t as good as last year. There were only few movies that made me
go: “Yes! All of this! In my face!" Eventually, I decided that the top
spot is a place for the most interesting movie, if not the unqualified best
one. So while Ridley Scott has directed some questionable movies over the past
few years, he’s finally found his footing again with the innovative and yet
deceptively-simple organic storytelling mechanics of The Martian -yeah, just dropping the name like it ain’t no thing.
First Worst:
And similarly,
the worst movie needn’t necessarily be the most objectively badly-made or
frustrating one, but the movie with the worst intentions. Fantastic Four and Point
Break feel like the writers were all wearing oven-mitts, but a movie that has
every advantage in the world and then calmly, decisively and deliberately puts
its todger in a saucepan full of hot bleach is somehow orders of magnitude
worse: It’s Fifty Shades Of Grey! I
will never understand the logic behind movies based off bestselling novels:
“Here’s this book people seem to like, primarily for its uniqueness, let's make
it a movie and make it just like everything else! I see no reason why people
could be anything less than delighted! Do you think my todger’s clean yet? I
think the bellend's fallen off!”
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