Oscars preview? What Oscars preview?

You may realize from the tenor of some of my posts that I feel a bit disconnected from the world down here in Australia.

It's not that I don't have access to the internet and all the modern conveniences that keep all of us in touch with each other. I do. I never like to create the impression that Australia is a place where high-speed internet is dependent on whether or not a kangaroo has tripped over the wire that day. (In fact, my internet is better and more reliable here than it was in Los Angeles.)

But it's true that I have felt, sort of, out of it down here. I didn't watch a minute of the Olympics, for example -- and that wasn't out of protest.

My interest in the Oscars, the show itself, has been diminishing a little bit in recent years anyway. Fast forward to 2014, when I've still only seen just over half of the best picture nominees (Nebraska earlier this week took me from just under to just over), and my once-intimate connection to the Oscars has been dealt another blow. At this point, I'm not even sure how we're going to watch it, whether we're going to live-stream it or wait four or five hours and watch it on TV. At least, I think it will be shown on TV here on Monday night. The fact that my dad and his wife will be in town, on the first full day of their visit, complicates our viewing plans even further.

So what am I doing on this blog -- a movie blog, I should remind myself -- to recognize the approach of this hallowed event?

You're looking at it.

A non-preview preview, written mostly to explain its own lameness, written because I don't want you to think this blog has become just a repository for my reviews of the two movies per week I'm watching.

However, it really sucks to read an entire post where all the content is non-content. So below, I will list five categories where I'm really hoping for a particular winner, and my reasons for it.

Best Original Score - Gravity

As much as Gravity is, in many ways, about what we're seeing, the actual phenomenon that I keep returning to the most is the dread-inducing orchestral strains that accompany every onset of that unrelenting debris field. It's chilling me right now as I think about it.

Best Production Design - The Great Gatsby

Yep, I'm shilling for Gatsby again. All the other nominees in this category are also best picture nominees, and it seems likely the Academy will recognize one of those here. But even if you didn't like Gatsby, you have to admit its production design was absolutely rapturous. Who would have imagined that such a sumptuous recreation of 1920s New York would have been possible?

Best Original Song - "Let It Go," Frozen

Here's a case of front-running if I've ever seen one. I wouldn't even mention it except it gives me an opportunity to take a subtle dig at the movie (having recently argued the merits of Tangled relative to it, and been told I was wrong). This song is easily the best part of the movie, and gave me a genuine rush of emotion -- even if I wasn't actually feeling the character's emotional release at the time it was playing, because the script isn't very good.

Best Adapted Screenplay - Before Midnight

Although I don't naturally think of this as an adapted screenplay, I join Nick Prigge of Cinema Romantico in saying that this would be a nice way to crown the trilogy, similar to what they did with The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. It'll never happen, but these aren't predictions, they are merely rooting interests.

Best Picture - Gravity

This was only my ninth favorite movie that I saw in 2013, but it was the highest of the four best picture nominees I'd seen at that point. I don't feel that strongly about this winning the award, in reality -- in fact, I'm kind of rooting for 12 Years a Slave, even though I haven't seen it. But you can't have an Oscars post without mentioning your preference for best picture, can you? It seems like a good mainstream winner that won't be scoffed at in future years -- or not that much, anyway -- and it definitely reflects what people were talking about in 2013. I'd love to see the career-long visionary genius of Alfonso Cuaron recognized in some way, in any case. Maybe I should have included Best Director as one of these categories ...

Enjoy the Oscars -- wherever or whenever you watch them.

2013 Wrap Party

Welcome to my second annual year-end wrap-up post, where I go beyond my rankings (posted on Friday/Thursday) and single out some other noteworthy moments in The Cinema of Vancetastic in 2013. I'll more or less follow the template I established last year in the inaugural run of this piece. I said I'll go beyond my rankings, but I'll also use them as a jumping off point (and often mention them in parentheses after the movie title) in order to contextualize my feelings on the year gone by.

Three who had a good year

Nicholas Hoult - Twenty thirteen was the year that they really tried to make the kid from About a Boy happen ... and I'm one of the only ones who really bought into it. Hoult appeared in two of my surprise loves of the year, both of which occupied spots in my top ten for an unexpectedly long time: Warm Bodies (#12) and Jack the Giant Slayer (#16). Hoult may have been incidental in some ways to the success of those films, but I know in terms of Warm Bodies in particular, his Young Zombie in Love oozed the kind of starry-eyed humanism that made that film such a pleasure for me. Neither critics nor audiences were particularly kind to either film, but don't overlook them -- Bodies is directed by Jonathan Levine, who got a lot of critical love (though not from me) for 50/50, and Slayer director Bryan Singer should have earned your benefit of the doubt by now. Holt's innocent yet determined quality makes him a star on the rise, and I can't wait to see where he goes from here.

James Franco - Even those who didn't like Spring Breakers (#7) admitted that Franco brought something unusual and wonderful to the table, but this was also a year where I was impressed by him in Oz the Great and Powerful (#14) (he did not phone this one in, unlike in Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and where he directed As I Lay Dying (#50), an extremely challenging adaptation of a text written by none other than the unfilmmable William Faulkner. In short, this was the year I really began to appreciate Franco's crazy versatility, his desire to do just about anything and his success at just about everything he does. Let's also not forget that he allowed his public image to be skewered in This is the End (#30); unlike what Seth Rogen was doing (writing himself a character that every other character seemed to love) and what Michael Cera was doing (going over the top in giving us something other than what we expect from him), Franco allowed the jokes at his expense to hit close to home about the real James Franco. Then again, we may not know the real James Franco, and that's cause for further fascination.

Carey Mulligan - Inside Llewyn Davis (#3) is wonderful for any number of reasons (some of which I have yet to explore, as it was the second-to-last film I saw before I closed my rankings), but high up among those is Carey Mulligan's Jean, a precise creation composed of frustration, spurned love, delicate beauty and buried impulses toward kindness. To put it another way, she's luminous, looking particularly so under the magical lens of DP Bruno Delbonnel. The accessible yet otherworldly quality Mullligan brings with her also did wonders for her in The Great Gatsby (#15), where we do truly believe that Jay Gatsby would build an empire from the ground up just to win back her tragically fickle attentions. I just noticed that Mulligan is filming an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd -- which I happen to be currently reading -- so now I'm infinitely more excited for that project as well. Quite simply, Mulligan's "got it."

Honorable mentions: Michael Cera (Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and 2012, This is the End), Harrison Ford (42, Ender's Game, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues)

Three who had a bad year

Jim Carrey - Carrey was only asked to play second fiddle in 2013 movies -- that may be the current stage of his career -- but he utterly failed to elevate two movies that really could have used it. In The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (#127), he plays a David Blaine-type rock star magician whose main gimmick is to actually subject himself to horrible agony and perhaps permanent disfigurement. He was my lifeboat in this terrible movie, but he wasn't seaworthy. And in Kick-Ass 2 (#111) he was a commando superhero drowning under at least three layers of shtick, which didn't work either. The reason I'm including this longtime favorite of mine on this list, though, was because he tried to publicly distance himself from the violence of Kick-Ass 2 in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary school. While on the surface that's a commendable stance, it reeks of hypocrisy -- why else would Carrey have gotten matched up with this movie if he didn't dig the comic book ultraviolence of the original Kick-Ass?

Steve Carell - I really liked Steve Carell on The Office and he seems like a really nice person, but his persona in the movies flops for me far more often than it succeeds. He had two such flops in 2013: the aforementioned The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and The Way, Way Back (#89). The choices Carell makes as Burt Wonderstone are ill-advised at best; because the movie starts with a flashback showing him bullied as a kid, it's all the more of a dumb decision to play Wonderstone as an egotistical boob who is completely out of touch with the common man. Even with the character's inevitable personality rehabilitation, he never becomes any more likable. Then Carell was more or less the embodiment of why I didn't really buy The Way, Way Back -- his "bad boyfriend" is a false series of exaggerations. Why would the main character's mother ever go for him?

Naomi Watts - It's really saying something that the "best" of three Watts performances in 2013 was the critically reviled biopic Diana (#86). I couldn't full understand why that movie got such a bad rap -- though I can't say the same for Adoration (#96) and Movie 43 (#126). I was momentarily tricked by the beautiful coastal New South Wales setting of Adoration (called Adore in the U.S.) into thinking I might like the movie, before ultimately realizing that the two male leads couldn't act, and the whole "sleeping with your best friend's son" motif was pretty icky. At least Watts had her partner Liev Schrieber along with her for the Movie 43 bit involving parents who replicate a real high school environment when home schooling their child. Call it a weird coincidence that this also involves icky sexual behavior between the 45-year-old Watts and a teenage boy.

Dishonorable mentions: Stephen Merchant (Movie 43, I Give it a Year), Rose Byrne (The Internship, I Give it a Year)

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here

Last year I used this spot to discuss a phenomenon in the movies from the previous year as a short essay, just any random thing I wanted to stick in here. I think I'll do that again.

Two differently highly ranked movies captured something that I realize is something I'm really interested in: that melancholy moment after the lights go up at a party. Whole sections of Spring Breakers were about that, but there was one two- or three-minute section in The Great Gatsby that also deals with it. The good times, so recently accessible and current, are now just a fond memory.

One of the songs Skrillex wrote for the terrific Spring Breakers soundtrack (my favorite of the year) is like an anthem to leaving the party. It's called "Ride Home," and appropriately, it plays each time one of the four central spring breakers finally concedes that the party is over and endures the gloomy ritual of riding the bus home. It's a perfect "staring out the window and remembering" song, and if you don't know it, see/hear below:



In The Great Gatsby, the scene comes at about the 20-minute mark, when Nick Carraway's first Gatsby party breaks up and people stumble over passed-out bodies and empty champagne bottles toward the exit. Something about the way Baz Luhrmann stages this scene gives it the same kind of melancholy as "Ride Home" in Spring Breakers. 

If I were blessed with the skills to make one of those supercuts, which edits together movie moments behind a music score for the whole internet to see, I'd probably set mine to "Ride Home" and find all my favorite movie moments involving people leaving a party. "Leaving a party" can be an emotion unto itself, and I appear to be especially interested in seeing it dramatized. 

Filling the various buckets

Everyone has genres they gravitate toward, and I am no exception. But because I like to have my year-end list function as a representative sample of all the movies that were released in the previous year, I like to make sure I've gotten in enough types of movies that are not necessarily in my wheelhouse. Or maybe are in my wheelhouse, but aren't publicized extensively so they take a little seeking out.

Okay, so let's see how I filled these buckets:

Foreign language films (8): Beyond the Hills (Romania), In the House (France), The Silence (Germany), No (Chile), Drug War (China), The Act of Killing (Indonesia), Something in the Air (France), Post Tenebras Lux (Mexico). Last year: 13. How I did: Not great. I'm going to say that my move to Australia further confused my sense of which films were coming out in which years. However, my #1 overall was a foreign film, so there's that.  

Documentaries (7): Stories We Tell, A Band Called Death, Twenty Feet From Stardom, Blackfish, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, The Act of Killing, Salinger. Last year: 6. How I did: Well, better than last year, I guess. The unusual part is that I saw five of these seven in the theater. Most years, it would be reversed, but being able to see a movie every Monday at Cinema Nova for only $6 freed me up to plunk down money for things I might not otherwise have seen in the theater. I should note that two of these were documentaries I snuck into after seeing a fiction film. 

Movies featuring primarily African-Americans (8): Gimme the Loot, Fruitvale Station, A Band Called Death, The Butler, Twenty Feet from Stardom, Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, Newlyweeds, A Haunted House. Last year: 4. How I did: Double last year, which is pretty good, considering that fewer such movies are available in Australia than they are in the U.S. And this without having the opportunity to see 12 Years a Slave yet. 

Chick flicks (4): Safe Haven, About Time, The Big Wedding, I Give it a Year. Last year: 5. How I did: Poorly. Is this even worth having as a category? So many movies appealing to women are a hybrid involving some other genre these days. 

Animation (6): Monsters University, Frozen, The Croods, Epic, Planes, Escape From Planet Earth. Last year: 6. How I did: Same as last year. Among films I wanted to see, only Turbo did I miss. (For some reason, I never formulated any sense of anticipation for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, even though I liked the first one quite a bit.) 

Horror (8): Berberian Sound Studio, Maniac, Mama, The Conjuring, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, The ABCs of Death, Evil Dead, The Purge. Last year: 7. How I did: Pretty good, considering. I don't mean to imply that horror is not in my wheelhouse, because I do love a great horror. There are just so few great horrors that I consider myself wary enough of the genre to avoid most of its entries.

Best non-2013 movies of the year

Naturally, I watched a lot of movies last year that didn't come out in 2013. These were the ten best, in alphabetical order.

Ace in the Hole (1950, Billy Wilder) - This just might be my favorite Billy Wilder movie, which is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say -- and tells you just how good this movie is.

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996, Robert Rodriguez) - I have no idea why I always turned my nose up at this. It's incredibly fun.

The Interrupters (2011, Steve James) - Inestimably powerful documentary about street violence in Chicago.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936, Frank Capra) - Capra, man.

Mystery Train (1989, Jim Jarmusch) - After all these years, I have finally fallen in love with Jim Jarmusch. 

Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati) - What delightful absurdity.

Prince of the City (1981, Sidney Lumet) - Proof that Lumet really brings it even in lesser known movies.

Rocky (1976, John G. Avildsen) - My most embarrassing unseen movie is now finally seen.

Smoke Signals (1998, Chris Eyre) - This story of Native American fathers and sons caught me by surprise and left me a blubbery mess.

Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky) - So, so, so much better than Steven Soderbergh's remake. 

Lightning round

Best conclusion of a trilogy: Before Midnight
Worst conclusion of a trilogy: The Hangover Part III
Oldest movie: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (made in 2006)
Newest movie: Her (made in the future, I think)
Low ranking I'll get the most guff about: The World's End
Low ranking I'll get the least guff about: Movie 43
High ranking I'll get the most guff about: Oz the Great and Powerful
High ranking I'll get the least guff about: Inside Llewyn Davis
Movie I least expected to see in the theater: 2 Guns
Movie I least expected to see on video: The World's End
Worst movie by a person I really like: Katie Aselton (Black Rock)
Best movie by a person I really don't like: Michael Bay (Pain & Gain)
Director I'm writing off: Seth Gordon (Identity Thief)
Director I'm welcoming back into the fold: Joel & Ethan Coen (Inside Llewyn Davis)
Best first third of a movie: The Place Beyond the Pines
Worst last third of a movie: The Place Beyond the Pines
Least original good movie: The Conjuring
Most original bad movie: Upside Down
Most accurate title: Struck by Lightning
Least accurate title: John Dies at the End
Worst title for a good movie: Prince Avalanche
Best title for a bad movie: Only God Forgives
Highest ranked best picture nominee: Gravity (#9)
Lowest ranked best picture nominee: American Hustle (#53)
Unseen best picture nominees: Dallas Buyers Club, Nebraska, Philomena, 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street (ugh)

Okay, enough of this nonsense! On to 2014.

Beyond 2013

This has been, by far, my weirdest ranking year ever.

Since this post is going to contain a ton of list activity, why don't I start with a list of what has made this year so weird:

1. I moved to Australia in August.

2. My second son was born just over two weeks ago.

3. Half the prestige films getting nominations (and already winning awards) have not even been released yet where I live.

4. Yet somehow, I still ranked more movies this year than I ever have before: 128, beating my previous high by a whopping seven films.

It's #3 that has been the most difficult for me to grapple with. The last time Martin Scorsese made a movie that I didn't get to rank in its release year, it was Kundun in 1997. (Still haven't seen it.) The last time Alexander Payne made a movie that I didn't get to rank in its release year, it was Citizen Ruth in 1996. Yet this year I can rank neither The Wolf of Wall Street nor Nebraska, because neither has been released in Australia, and Nebraska still has more than a month to go before hitting theaters.

This seems like a good time to list the other movies I most regret not seeing in time to rank them, a section I usually save until after my list. In alphabetical order:

All is Lost
Blue is the Warmest Color 
Labor Day
The Past
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
12 Years a Slave

Only Walter Mitty can I blame on my son, for limiting my ability to get to the theater since he's been born. The rest are still awaiting their Australian release date. And thank goodness Her and Inside Llewyn Davis both had a January 16th release date, meaning I had a chance to watch them before my deadline, the announcement of the Oscar nominations some 12 hours later. Otherwise, this list would be even longer.

I suppose it's appropriate, then, that my #1 film of 2013 isn't even from 2013, if you count its initial release in its country of origin. That's something I haven't done since I made the 1998 German release Run Lola Run my #1 movie of 1999, and it's something I've said I would try to avoid doing at all costs. (That makes it hard on foreign releases, but A Separation slipped in two years ago because it happened to be released in both Iran and the U.S. in the same year.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First I'd like to change up the format a little bit on this post, which in the past has included just my rankings from #1 to #whatever. This year, I'm going to count down my top ten and my bottom five, with a short blurb on each. So let's finally get to that:

10. Prince Avalanche - One of the biggest surprises in my top ten, especially considering my less-than-stellar history with David Gordon Green. This story of two guys refurbishing Texas roads after a series of devastating fires in what would appear to be the late 1980s is quirky, oddball, and moving when it wants to be. I loved the atypical performances submitted by Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, finding them eccentric in all the right ways. As often as I was reminded of something like a milder version of Napoleon Dynamite, I was also reminded of cinema's great melancholy stories of post apocalypse. It left me in a dreamy stupor with a smile on my face.

9. Gravity - The only film I saw twice in the theater this year, and I believe the first film I've seen twice in the theater since Cloverfield way back in 2008. If I'd seen it only once, it might have been even higher on my list, but the second viewing awakened me to the story problems I was content to overlook during the wondrous spell cast over me on my initial IMAX 3D viewing. (On the world's third largest IMAX screen, no less.) Alfonso Cuaron's technical marvel is quite possibly one of my ten most awe-striking theater experiences of all time -- a near perfect simulation of life in space, complete with the impossible camera tricks that are his trademark. That certainly makes it one of my ten best films of 2013.

8. Gimme the Loot - Because Cinema Romantico's Nick Prigge had this film among his top ten of 2012, I considered it off limits -- until the end of this year rolled around, and critics began throwing it some 2013 love. I watched Adam Leon's film less than a week ago and fell in love myself. Rarely have I seen the lives of urban youths (two Queens graffiti artists who want to tag a landmark at the New York Mets' ballpark) portrayed with both an acknowledgment of life's miseries and hardships, and an intoxicating joie de vivre that makes the journey downright bouncy in its sense of optimism. And as in the aforementioned Mr. Cuaron's classic Children of Men, the male half of the pair goes around most of the movie without any shoes.

7. Spring Breakers - A lot has been written about why to like or not like Spring Breakers, but I'll just offer this inarguable piece of reasoning: It's the 2013 film I've spent the most time thinking about, and that has to count for something. The reason I chewed over Harmony Korine's film so much has something to do with a personal affinity for seeing the following dramatized: the familiar phenomenon of staying somewhere past the point where it has ceased to provide you that ephemeral emotional peak. No 2013 movie gave a more dreamy (and sometimes critical, maybe, sort of) glimpse of that high, and a more thudding sense of its toxic aftermath. The film's constant duality is expressed perfectly in its signature song by Skrillex, in the title alone but in the music as well: "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites."

6. What Maisie Knew - I don't know how much of the giddy five stars I allotted to What Maisie Knew after seeing it in September was the result of the film really being amazing, or just my jaw dropping so much at the performance of then 6-year-old Onata Aprile. And then I don't know how much credit to give Aprile for the most astonishingly naturalistic performance I've seen from a child actor in years, and how much to give to her directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Then there's the impressive fact that this modern-day movie is an adaptation of an 1897 Henry James novel. Rarely has the plight of a girl being passed around between two unfit parents and their unwitting significant others been so terribly poignant.

5. Berberian Sound Studio - This has been the most determined climber in my top ten since I first ranked it a couple weeks ago. If I weren't closing these rankings now, #1 might have to watch its back. I was quite simply spellbound by Peter Strickland's psychological horror -- one of the most effective I've seen in years -- of a mousy British sound engineer (Toby Jones) hired to supervise the sound design of a grisly 1970s Italian horror movie (think Dario Argento). You never see the actual film he's working on (with the wonderful title The Equestrian Vortex), but the things you hear -- vegetables being wantonly chopped and smashed, blood curdling screams of actresses -- give you a clear picture of why this man is losing his sanity.

4. Stories We Tell - In a year where The Act of Killing was endlessly lauded for breaking down the documentary form, the documentarian making truly unorthodox choices was a sometimes actress and fiction filmmaker: Sarah Polley. As the Canadian walks us through interviews with her family members, both known and heretofore unknown, in discovering the true identity of her birth father, she also entirely reimagines ways of telling us the story, including impeccably crafted stagings of imaginary 8 mm home videos from her youth. It's both touching and incredibly creative, and if Polley hadn't become a tad redundant by going on for ten minutes too long, this remarkable film would be even higher on my list.

3. Inside Llewyn Davis - The Coens' best film since Fargo. It's been less than 12 hours since I saw it and I'm still processing, but one thing I loved: noting that Llewyn Davis' travels seemed like those of Homer's The Odyssey (even more so than in the Coens' similarly music-themed O Brother Where Art Thou?), and then learning that the Gorfeins' cat -- the symbol of Davis' soul -- is named Ulysses. Resembling a young Al Pacino, Oscar Isaac plays Davis as a lonely traveler indeed, as the unlucky folk singer's episodic interludes go from comic to sardonic to just plain spooky. Everyone is on a lonely, wintry journey, the film seems to say. Some people are going somewhere. Others are going nowhere. It's my third favorite film of the year even though I'm not sure I understand the ending. Googling should help with that.

2. Before Midnight - The two previous films in this series indulged in a fantasy. Before Midnight brings things crashing back to reality for Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) -- even while existing in arguably the most gorgeous setting of the three films. What connected me so much to this film is not just that it finds its characters addressing the challenges that deteriorate even the happiest of marriages, but that it isn't sure things are ultimately going to turn out alright for the hopeless romantics we've loved for 18 years. I'm a husband, and I know I live with that fear every day. I also loved the one formal departure of this movie from its predecessors, the scene where life and love are discussed among three generations around the dinner table, against the Aegean Sea. Richard Linklater is a writer-director who thrives on ideas, and for this 15-minute scene, he just lets them flow.

1. Beyond the Hills - Okay, so I already ruined the surprise. Romanian director Cristian Mungiu can do no wrong in my eyes, having directed the near-perfect 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (my #2 of 2008), and following that up with this, the most beautifully composed film I have seen in several years. Mungiu is a master of what to show, what not to show, and how to arrange shapes and figures in the frame, all of which is in service of trying to help us figure out what could have or should have happened at a Romanian convent during an attempted exorcism. The surface pleasures of Mungiu's craft, the performances of his leads and the unanswerable questions about love and faith at the film's core made me love it. But realizing that it also functions as metaphor for a terrible breakup, where the dumper destroys the dumpee by trying to be nice about it and complete the breakup in "let's be friends" half measures, made me declare it my favorite of the year.

And now my five worst of the year:

5. The Hangover Part III - I don't know why I expected an uptick in the fortunes of the Hangover series after the execrable second entry -- maybe it was the decision to return to Las Vegas. If Todd Phillips' concluding chapter is better than The Hangover Part II, it's by such a small margin that it's not even worth mentioning. This time the big mistake is one of tone, as we get a violent thriller more than a comedy. Good riddance, Wolfpack.

4. Black Rock - This feminist restaging of Deliverance just gets worse the more I think about it. It's a truly clunky and brainless creation, which is all the more shocking given the track record of screenwriter Mark Duplass and director and star Katie Aselton, his wife. The characters in this one may as well be cardboard cutouts, and the final showdown is downright laughable. 

3. Movie 43 - I would have been within my rights to rank this last among all the movies I saw this year; that's just how dumb this omnibus comedy film is. The only reason it's only third worst movie is that I applaud the effort, which attracted more actors who should know better (such as Kate Winslet and Naomi Watts) than you can shake a stick at. I also may have laughed once, which would be one more time than ...

2. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone - Comedies rarely get more inept than this. I've hated Steve Carell plenty of times at the movies before -- Get Smart and Dan in Real Life come quickly to mind -- but rarely has he seemed to phone one as much as he does here. Even Jim Carrey, a personal favorite, couldn't bring a smile to my face.

1. Only God Forgives - Nicolas Winding Refn's follow-up to Drive may not be the worst film of the year, but it's certainly the most pointless. And when a film is this brutal, violent and nihilistic, pointlessness is a grave sin indeed.

And now my complete list:

1. Beyond the Hills
2. Before Midnight
3. Inside Llewyn Davis
4. Stories We Tell
5. Berberian Sound Studio
6. What Maisie Knew
7. Spring Breakers
8. Gimme the Loot
9. Gravity
10. Prince Avalanche
11. Fruitvale Station
12. Warm Bodies
13. Upstream Color
14. Oz the Great and Powerful
15. The Great Gatsby
16. Jack the Giant Slayer
17. Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and 2012
18. A Band Called Death
19. Frances Ha
20. Side Effects
21. Her
22. How I Live Now
23. The Butler
24. 42
25. Maniac
26. Blancanieves
27. Much Ado About Nothing
28. Twenty Feet From Stardom
29. The Bling Ring
30. This is the End
31. Pacific Rim
32. Mud
33. In the House
34. Blackfish
35. Elysium
36. The Silence
37. Monsters University
38. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
39. Ender's Game
40. Mama
41. The Sapphires
42. This is Martin Bonner
43. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
44. Enough Said
45. Computer Chess
46. No
47. It's a Disaster
48. Captain Phillips
49. To the Wonder
50. As I Lay Dying
51. Don Jon
52. The Conjuring
53. American Hustle
54. Sightseers
55. Frozen
56. The History of Future Folk
57. Prisoners
58. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
59. Drug War
60. The Place Beyond the Pines
61. Safe Haven
62. Blue Jasmine
63. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
64. The Act of Killing
65. The Last Stand
66. Europa Report
67. Star Trek Into Darkness
68. Pain & Gain
69. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
70. Salinger
71. The Call
72. World War Z
73. Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor
74. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
75. We're the Millers
76. The Spectacular Now
77. The Croods
78. About Time
79. Admission
80. Drinking Buddies
81. The Lifeguard
82. Epic
83. Antiviral
84. Newlyweeds
85. Planes
86. Diana
87. The World's End
88. Disconnect
89. The Way, Way Back
90. Something in the Air
91. Short Term 12
92. The Internship
93. Post Tenebras Lux
94. Stand Up Guys
95. Broken City
96. Adoration
97. Escape from Planet Earth
98. A Haunted House
99. Upside Down
100. Now You See Me
101. Wrong
102. 2 Guns
103. Trance
104. Oblivion
105. The Wolverine
106. The ABCs of Death
107. Struck by Lightning
108. The Big Wedding
109. Lovelace
110. Man of Steel
111. Kick-Ass 2
112. After Earth
113. The Lone Ranger
114. John Dies at the End
115. Evil Dead
116. Stoker
117. Passion
118. The English Teacher
119. Identity Thief
120. A Good Day to Die Hard
121. I Give it a Year
122. The Purge
123. Parker
124. The Hangover Part III
125. Black Rock
126. Movie 43
127. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
128. Only God Forgives

Thank you for reading, and please -- let me know what you think of my choices.