What if Birdman hadn't won best picture?

There are only three of my 26 #1 movies that I have to look at through the lens of having won best picture -- an honor that occurred after I anointed them as my personal favorite. And winning best picture always creates the possibility, if not the likelihood, of backlash.

With Parasite, there's no backlash. It's either too soon, or most people just agree it's an incredible movie. Yeah I have one friend who thinks it's overrated, but I actually think he's the only person I've ever heard say that. "Backlash" is a word that has no practical meaning in relation to Parasite.

With Titanic, it's all backlash, all the time. But I don't care because I still love it, and always will.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) falls somewhere in the middle. Many people still respect it, but there's a vocal quantity who always thought it was a fatuous critique of show business with ostentatious technique that was always designed to call attention to its own brilliance.

Or so they say. See, if Birdman hadn't won best picture, I suspect it would occupy a far less problematic space in their minds.

I finally got to Birdman on Friday night in my 2022 rewatch of all my former #1s. That gets me down to only seven more of the 26 that I need to watch before the end of the year, when I will duel them all in a special Flickchart account to arrive at a definitive ranking.

Although I ultimately wouldn't need four viewings of it by this point -- the second was for pleasure, the third for considering it for the best of the 2010s -- I continue to really like Birdman. 

I should probably say "love" -- after all, it did end up as my #21 of that decade. Then again, only one of my #1s from the 2010s (Ruby Sparks) didn't make the top 25, and Birdman was the next closest to missing out -- my lowest ranked #1 in my top 25. (The #1s were bunched up in the middle, as it turned out, as my highest ranked #1, Inside Out, was all the way down at #7.)

In fact, as an indication of how things have shifted, it was bested by two other films I ranked in 2014: #10 Under the Skin, and #14 Boyhood, which was its primary competition for the Oscar that year.

Boyhood has always been a big problem for Birdman in terms of gaining greater popular love, or at least love among cinephiles. Indeed, the former film holds up better on rewatches for me too (just three total viewings for that one, in part because of its ungainly length).

What I fully expected to happen with Birdman was that it would be a critical favorite, but too eccentric to make the Oscar shortlist. Then when it did make that shortlist, I never expected it to become a frontrunner. Even as Oscar night approached and the buzz that it would win became deafening, it seemed more likely to me on some level that Boyhood would pull it out. It had been 17 years since my #1 movie had been named best picture, and I just wasn't used to it.

If Birdman had indeed gone quietly into the night, I think others would like it more today -- including myself.

I can't help but have internalized some of the criticisms of the movie, even if I can't name them for you as readily as I can with other problematic best picture winners (such as Crash and Green Book). I sometime think it's just a vibe people get from Birdman that they don't like, maybe a bit of a "try hard" mentality from director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu -- who in some ways tried even harder the next year with The Revenant. And since has not been heard from again in terms of feature films, though that will change in December, when Netflix streams Bardo (False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths). (Hey, the parenthetical title worked for him the first time.)

They certainly can't complain about the cast. I think everyone agreed that welcoming Michael Keaton back into the spotlight was a long-overdue revelation (pun intended, as he won best picture again the following year with Spotlight). Birdman showed us that there was never any reason Keaton should have stopped making films we'd heard of for more than a decade. The rest of the cast is filled with actors we all like or love, like Emma Stone, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. (I think people love Norton even if they've heard rumors that he's difficult.)

As for the storytelling gimmick itself, the appearance that the film takes place all in one shot, I think people were lying if they didn't admit this impressed them. If the Oscars aren't a good time to reward daring uses of the form and methods of creating movie magic in front of our eyes, I don't know when would be a better time.

The fears of the increasing irrelevance of a washed up white man? At the time we hadn't yet rightly concluded that this was a narrative perspective that needed to be retired, or at least sent on a long vacation. So you can hold that against Birdman in retrospect, but not so much in early 2015.

The "film industry sucks its own dick" aspect of the film can probably never be removed from it. We know the academy loves films that consider the plight of its own members, as movies about show biz, even if they are not directly about Hollywood, have always done well with voters. And I suppose Birdman really is about Hollywood, even though it's "about" Broadway, since its critique of superhero films is built right in. Then again, you could argue that Birdman has only increased in resonance in that respect, considering how much more superhero movies dominate the box office even than they did eight years ago. 

And movies about making movies shouldn't automatically carry a black mark against them. As just one example, Adaptation, another #1 of mine, has never really lost any of its luster -- among those who thought it had luster in the first place -- just because it's so much about itself. 

But we'll never know a world where Birdman didn't win best picture, so we can only hypothesize what sort of post-2014 stature it would otherwise have. 

For me, four viewings have not been enough to sour me on it, so I doubt an eventual fifth will either. That probably won't come for another ten years now. The technique of Birdman means there has always been a moment while watching it where I felt its length -- only two hours, but with this technique that feels like a lot. Four times in one decade is enough for now.

The best and worst annoyingly long movie titles

You’d think that there would not be any good “annoyingly long movie titles.” The very name discounts the possibility of them being good.

But I think it’s possible for something to be annoyingly long and still good, or at least, still funny.

Today I hope to throw some words at the topic of annoyingly long movie titles, inspired by the upcoming release of Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, which is decidedly an example of the latter. As in, the worst.

Come on, it’s just Birds of Prey, screw all that other noise. And most movie marquees around the country and the world will, indeed, be screwing all that other noise. You will not see the full title of this movie on any movie marquee in the world. But you will see it on every poster for the movie, albeit in significantly smaller type, which means some idiot in the marketing department at the studio is still trying to make And the Fantabulous Emancipation (breath) of One Harley Quinn happen.

But not every annoyingly long title is And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Maybe it’s only because I really liked the movie, naming it my #1 movie of 2014 and one of the top 25 of the last decade, but this new title reminds me most of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), a title for which I developed a limited fondness. As they are both, broadly, superhero movies, I even feel like Harley Quinn (I’m not writing that damn thing out again) is borrowing inspiration from Birdman. Both also seem to have pretentious ambitions, which again, I accept because the movie really worked for me in Birdman’s case.

Of course, probably the best example of the annoyingly long movie title is the one that does so specifically for the purposes of humor. Well, you might argue that most annoyingly long movie titles are done for humor, as otherwise you’d just switch to something more palatable. But there are certainly degrees to which the humor does or does not work.

Take, for example, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat’s broken, some might say strangled, English was one of the biggest jokes about the character, so a title that is grammatically awkward, unduly worshipful of the man’s home country, and also gets at an obsession with America and its pop culture, is like killing three birds with one stone. I’ve made it a point of pride that I can roll off this title without any errors, when asked. (Because that particular scenario arrives just about every day.)

But long character-based titles don’t work just because it’s a somewhat beloved character. Sometimes they just try our patience. A couple years ago, the movie with the longest title on my whole movie list came out. It was called Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. So Tony Clifton may not be beloved, but Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman may both be, to varying degrees. But this title pretty much just made me smack my forehead. Suffice it to say that I definitely had to look up the correct wording just now.

The movie whose title is long just to make fun of the idea of long titles is also usually a bust. The first movie I’m discussing today that I haven’t seen is a prime example of that. That would be Don’t be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Now that I’ve written it out, I think the title is not trying to make fun of the idea of long titles so much as it is being silly by trying to literally string together about four different titles. At least it’s better than Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13^th. There’s one more of these titles that is like twice this length but I’m having trouble tracking it down.

My favorite purely innocent long title is The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. I suppose there is something cheeky about this – they could have figured out a simpler title if they’d wanted to – but the title does do an admirable job of describing what the movie is about, as it is about a provincial debate in the Welsh countryside about whether a local elevated surface is better described as a hill or a mountain. For a while, this was my favorite movie title to bring up in joke circumstances, when I was looking for something awkward to encapsulate a small, idiosyncratic non-blockbuster.

Supplanting The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain as my go-to random long title was Jeanne Dielmann, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which is not an easy choice as I always have to look up the exact wording, but is fun anyway. As this is an arthouse film with a very serious demeanor, this title exists to capture the everyday humdrum quality of a person’s life by naming the movie after her street address, not to be whimsical in any way, shape or form.

It’s probably worth including a subsection in this post about earnest documentaries with long subtitles, like Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief or If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front or Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, but I don’t know that their length is “annoying.” Or if it is, it’s only annoying because it sounds more like the name of a graduate thesis than a movie.

I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of movies whose titles test our patience and don’t always reward us, but I can’t end this discussion without mentioning probably the actual best movie to be guilty of a thing like this, which is Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. If Stanley Kubrick did it, there has to be some merit there, right?

As for this new movie coming out, I think the main things that annoy me about the title are that it a) makes up a word, b) uses the word “one” as though pretending we don’t know who Harley Quinn is, and c) suggests that the movie is entirely about the fact that she has been “emancipated” from her relationship with the Joker, or at least so it would appear.

I think I’ve had enough references to the Joker for a couple years, thank you very much.

Useful in context, useless out of context

I've never been one to spend a lot of my free time listening to movie scores, and the Birdman score has just reminded me why.

Out of the context of the images, they can seem completely devoid of meaning. Completely devoid of, well, anything.

The Birdman score is probably a particularly extreme example of that, as the score consists only of percussion -- and fairly spare, indistinct percussion at that.

Don't get me wrong -- I thought Antonio Sanchez' music worked like gangbusters in the actual film. It was a perfect accompaniment to the project Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was trying to pull off, and not just because the drummer would sometimes actually appear on screen, as one of many semi-hallucinations of the main character (or is it just our hallucination as the viewer?).

Which is why, when I saw the Birdman score at the library, I figured "Hey, why not?" Since we now have a car, and since I now have a new computer that doesn't choke on discs from the library, I now have two ways to give it a listen, whereas just three months ago I would have had none.

But I was almost laughing as I listened to this score over the weekend. There's so little to it, I cannot imagine anyone -- even intense fans of jazz percussion, of which I am not one -- purchasing this and feeling like their $15 to $20 would have been well spent.

Nearly every track is under two minutes long, and they all seem to start up hesitantly before dissipating uncertainly. There's nothing distinctive about any of it as a standalone piece of music. Crucially, there are also no moments when you can say, "Oh yeah, this is that part when ..." Or none that I got to in about the first 14 tracks, anyway.

While I'm choosing to slam the Birdman score in particular, these are definitely more generalized feelings. And even my favorite musician of all time is not immune to them. When Trent Reznor delivered his brilliant score for The Social Network -- a score I've listened to at least ten times -- it was not a sign of things to come for him. I found nothing even remotely rewarding about slogging through all 37 tracks of the score to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Gone Girl connected with me only slightly more, a benefit of at least having a couple "oh yeah, this is the part when ..." moments.

However, this does not mean that musical scores are always useless out of context. Just recently I've been thinking fondly of Michael Giacchino's music in Inside Out, and was thunderstruck by Ennio Morricone's epic score for The Hateful Eight. Not only do scores sometimes immeasurably enhance a film, they do frequently make a good independent listen.

Or parts of them, anyway. I think with most scores, there are a signature song or two that you remember, while the rest basically feels like filler. And truth be told, filler is probably what scores regularly should be. You don't want a score to dominate a film. Sometimes you just want it to be background.

So I think what would really work for me as a listener of scores would be to extract individual songs, individual significant moments from films and put them together in a complication. In order to keep it from being discordant, the task would then be to find movies with scores that strike a similar tone, so you aren't jumping from Giacchino to Morricone and back again.

However, from the Birdman score I would extract nothing. Nothing in those first 14 tracks, anyway. If I listened to the rest of it I might feel differently. In fact, I kind of remember that moment near the end when the superheroes are dancing around on stage and the jellyfish are flopping around on the beach, and that comet is falling from the sky, as possibly being distinctive. Maybe.

It's not a conclusion I reach with any relish. After all, Birdman was my #1 movie of 2014. Ever since it won best picture last year, though, I've been finding reasons to have buyer's remorse about my choice. As Birdman backlash has kicked in full time, I haven't been immune to it. And this is just one more example.

Regarding Birdman, ignorance -- in other words, the time when it was just a good movie and not an Academy standard bearer -- was indeed a virtue.

Gimmick fatigue

I'm told some people didn't like Birdman because they felt exhausted by the lack of edits. Essentially, the gimmick of making the movie seem like one continuous shot was a burden that distracted them and eventually ruined the experience of watching it. Perhaps they felt that an edit would give them a chance to breathe, like how you sometimes welcome an ad break in a particularly intense TV show.

I know what they're talking about now, but not because I watched Birdman again last night. In fact, I liked Birdman just about the same amount on second viewing as I had on the first, with the one difference being that it actually seemed to move faster for me this time. So in that sense you might say I actually liked it better.

I know what they're talking about not because of the movie I watched on Monday night, but because of the one I watched on Sunday night. That was Nacho Vigalondo's Open Windows, and it was a fatiguing burden indeed.

Vigalondo is the director of the 2007 time travel movie Timecrimes, which is one of my favorite small discoveries of the past decade or so. We went in without knowing anything about it, and were thrilled to see where it went, what surprises it had in store, and what individual bits Vigalondo contributed to the already saturated genre of time travel conundrum movies.

Vigalondo has apparently had another film in between Timecrimes and Open Windows, 2011's Extraterrestrial, but that was actually not on my radar until after I'd finished Sunday's film. So I pitched Open Windows to my wife as Vigalondo's long-awaited follow-up to our much-beloved Timecrimes, and it jumped straight to the top of our queue.

I did also know the gimmick going in, and though it probably worried me on some level, I figured it would work out fine in Vigalondo's hands. The gimmick is this: The entire movie is supposed to take place on Elijah Wood's computer screen. Whatever would happen in the story of an obsessed fan stalking an attractive movie star would be reducible to what could happen on the open windows on his laptop. But given the multifarious types of video feeds that can now be accessed on a person's computer screen, this still left a lot of possibilities for the type of action the audience could witness.

Too many, as it turns out.

Open Windows barely considers it a limitation that the action is confined to Wood's laptop. The character, Nick, changes locations multiple times and gets involved in all manner of complicated hacker intrigue without even once losing his internet connection, to say nothing of the loss of battery life on his laptop itself. I mean, seriously -- couldn't they have spared a single line of dialogue explaining why he never drops his internet? They couldn't, because there was too much else ridiculous to accomplish that they literally didn't have the time.

I will spare you a deeper description of what happens in Open Windows, but know this: It relates to multiple video chats with hackers and other shady personalities, instant access to live security cams and other unlikely recording devices (a bag full of "ping pong ball cameras," anyone?), an omniscient awareness of what's going on by any number of people (yet an inability to hear each others' simultaneous chats on Nick's computer), and the unfettered ability of anyone to send various apps and live camera feeds to Nick's laptop at a moment's notice. For a guy who appears to know something about computing, Nick has a truly shitty firewall, and displays no aversion whatsoever to clicking on mysterious links offered him by sketchy strangers. At the very least, he should be worried about downloading a virus.

Oh, and all these high-level hacks, frame jobs and other intricate planning worthy of Jigsaw in the Saw series are in service of a plot to humiliate a movie star. That's a rather too pointed commentary on our celebrity-obsessed culture. If these people had these computer skills, shouldn't they put them to better use by hacking into a bank and stealing all its money?

Perhaps the worst part of Open Windows, though, was the claustrophobia I felt 20 minutes in to a 100-minute movie, knowing that I was going to be trapped in its format for the next 80 minutes. Looking at -- and trying to believe the reality of -- these cascading windows on his computer screen was going to be a chore to get through indeed. Vigalondo seemed to know this, which is probably why he gets Nick out of his hotel room and has him driving around a rigged-up rental car for the movie's second half. Of course, this was the worst of both worlds -- like the biggest concept offenders in the found footage genre, it violates the conceit nearly as often as it adheres to it. So while we're still stuck on Nick's computer screen, we can't buy anything that's going on. We're being tortured by someone teasing us with our freedom, then snatching it away.

Open Windows would be just a failed attempt to execute an ambitious concept if it didn't end with a truly inexplicable series of absurd twists that can scarcely be reasoned out or reconciled with each other. So after cheating on an exhausting gimmick for most of the movie, but at least holding together a basic storytelling logic, it then entirely collapses as a narrative.

To be fair to Open Windows, I may have already been conditioned against this gimmick from an experience a couple days earlier. The reason Open Windows came up at all for discussion, actually, was that my wife and I watched an episode of Modern Family on Hulu where the entire thing takes place on the screen of Claire's laptop. While that was executed a lot more cleverly, it was similarly unlikely in terms of her multi-tasking and shuffling between windows -- with the number of digital balls she kept in the air in this episode, you'd think she were a twentysomething, not a fortysomething. Making matters a bit more exhausting, we didn't get a break from the gimmick at all, because a glitch in Hulu caused none of the ads to play. (It was this experience that put me in touch with the value of having an occasional one-minute break from what you're watching.) So while I was laughing and ultimately applauded the effort, I felt a bit worse for the wear by the time the 22 minutes were up.

Now imagine that over 100 minutes, and you'll get an idea of the relentlessness of Open Windows.

If anyone felt during Birdman like I felt during Open Windows, I truly pity them.

Birdman and Whiplash - the same movie?

Of course not.

But consider:

1) Both movies involve a protagonist who is obsessed with greatness. One is seeking a future greatness, one is looking back on a greatness he worries has vanished.

2) Both view their greatness through the prism of a bird. Andrew Neiman wants to become like Charlie Parker, a.k.a. Bird, and listens to Parker's CD Birdland repeatedly. Riggan Thompson became famous for playing a superhero with bird features, and worries that the world perceives him as nothing more than a man wearing a bird costume.

3) Both characters talk specifically about being remembered after they're dead. Riggan discusses his fears of dying in the same plane crash as George Clooney, and having people concentrate on Clooney's death rather than his. Andrew speaks about being willing to die young, drunk and full of heroin as long as it means he will be remembered.

4) Both protagonists undergo severe psychological torture while pursuing the performance they believe will define them, for better or worse.

5) Both protagonists bleed, literally, for their craft. In fact, they both receive serious head wounds for their craft.

6) Both are driven by a perfectionist who challenges them to succeed in unconventional ways. Andrew is tormented by his teacher, Terence Fletcher, who pushes his students past the brink of sanity and self-esteem in order to force them to try harder to attain greatness. Riggan is tested by two different characters, the actor Mike Shiner and the critic Tabitha Dickinson. Mike is always trying to push Riggan out of his comfort zone on stage to see how he will respond, while Tabitha lets him know that it will take nothing short of a miracle to get a good review from her. Both protagonists ultimately meet the high bar set for them by those who test them, but not without first engaging in a physical altercation. Those who test them also use acting as a devious method of manipulating them.

7) Both movies feature suicide attempts, either successful or unsuccessful, that result from the failure to live up to the exacting standards of the perfectionist.

8) Both movies feature the protagonist trapped outside a performance space due to unforeseen circumstances, desperate to make it on stage in time for his entrance.

9) Both movies prominently feature drums, either as a direct part of the plot or as the musical score.

10) Both movies follow characters from behind as they walk on stage, off stage, and through backstage corridors.

11) Both movies feature characters shot from behind looking out at the audience, with the footlights keeping us from seeing their audience.

12) Both movies speak of a miniature version of one of the characters. In Birdman, Riggan likens his show to a small version of himself, following him around and hitting him in the balls with a tiny hammer. In Whiplash, Fletcher dismissively refers to an assistant of his as "Mini Me."

13) Both movies make prominent use of understudies.

14) Both movies feature a romantic relationship that is ruined in part by the protagonist's quest for perfection.

15) Both movies take place in New York City.

16) Both movies end in ambiguous fashion, leaving the viewer to debate what actually happened, and what happens next.

Is 16 major similarities enough for you?

In my second viewing of Whiplash, my sixth favorite movie of 2014, on Sunday night, it was all made so clear to me.

Maybe my upcoming second viewing of Birdman, my favorite movie of 2014, will reveal even more.

My highest Oscar stakes ... ever?

I haven't missed an Oscars since sometime in the late 1980s. But it's been a good ten years since I really felt the stakes of the contest.

Sure, every year I have my favorites, as well as those I really want to see shut out. But it's been since 1997 that my favorite film of the year actually had a legitimate chance of winning best picture. Titanic did that, but there also wasn't much drama to it. It was the foregonest of foregone conclusions.

In 2014, my favorite movie was Birdman (let's do away with the subtitle, even though it took more words to explain doing away with the subtitle than it would have to just type it). Birdman has an actual shot of winning best picture, and according to whom you ask, it may actually be the favorite. But it has no Titanic-sized lead, so it will be pretty exciting when some aging Hollywood luminary finally tears open that envelope.

A moment I'll be seeing probably about eight hours later than the rest of you will see it.

Yep, I'm in Australia, and yep, it's Monday, and yep, that means I go to work. The Oscars air both live here (at 12:30 p.m., the time I have to remind myself to get off Facebook) and then at some ungodly hour at night on replay (I think it's like 9:45, though only the broadcasters understand the thinking behind that time slot). Fortunately, I did remember to set up the recording last night (after a weekend away, when my brain was fried), so we should be able to settle in at a more reasonable 8 or 8:30, once our kids have finally given up for the night.

I said a few weeks ago that I may actually be rooting for Boyhood, Birdman's main competition, despite the fact Boyhood was only my #8 of the year, while Birdman was #1. I can't deny, though, that my tune has changed since then. I feel myself growing more excited the more I hear Birdman discussed as the potential winner, the more I see Birdman detractors starting to show sour grapes, which somehow seems like a confirmation of its impending victory. I mean, I won't be disappointed if Boyhood wins -- it's a great film whose win would say a lot for the Oscars' capacity to surprise us -- but I now know where my true rooting interests lie.

I don't know why I need the Academy or some other body to confirm my own tastes. Over the nearly 20 years I have been keeping track of my favorite movies of the year in list form, my #1 has only received a nomination for best picture five previous times: Titanic, Gosford Park, Lost in Translation, There Will Be Blood and 127 Hours. And that last probably only made it because of the expanded field of nominees. So I haven't had this type of alignment much, and I can honestly say I haven't needed it. If the Academy does not want to save a best picture slot for Ruby Sparks, that's their business. (Ha.)

But now when I'm faced with it, with the possibility of my own favorite film being feted as everyone's favorite film (so to speak), I am really relishing the possibility. Although critics should be confident in their pronouncements and must trust their own aesthetic sensibilities, we also want to be right. A conclusion we reached about a film before it was nominated for an Oscar is something we want to have validated, because it means, deep down, that we are actually good at our jobs. Or it might mean that, anyway.

So yeah, that's pretty high stakes indeed.

We will see in a couple hours whether I'm any good at mine.

The unconventional 2014 best picture winner

Whatever else they've been, the recent best picture winners have been conventional choices.

That doesn't necessarily mean they've been the movies you initially expected to win. But it does mean that once they won, you could construct a short, simple, cynical, reductive explanation as to why Hollywood might have chosen them.

Let's consider the past five:

2013 - 12 Years a Slave (political correctness) 

2012 - Argo (Hollywood to the rescue!)

2011 - The Artist (classic Hollywood)

2010 - The King's Speech (classic Oscar bait)

2009 - The Hurt Locker (war movie)

You have to go back to Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 to find a movie that Oscar anointed simply because it was a "good movie." This isn't to say that Slumdog is better than those movies, just that you can't immediately summarize the thinking that made it the obvious choice to win, other than its quality. It has no other element that traditionally ensnares an awards body with a particular mindset and a particular tendency to congratulate itself. I'd argue that the two that came before are similarly unusual choices (No Country for Old Men and The Departed), and that you have to go back to Crash in 2005 to get another "typical" best picture winner (important social issue movie). 

Well, it's possible that this year will kick off another three years of Oscar iconoclasm. 

At this point in the season, you'd have to say that the race boils down to the two B's -- Boyhood and Birdman. The frontrunner had been Boyhood all along I think, but some recent significant wins have caused this website that devotes itself to handicapping the winners (http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/oscar-predictions/best-picture/) to anoint Birdman the new frontrunner. 

And either would be a "weird" best picture winner indeed. 

On the one hand you have a movie made over the course of 12 years, with virtually no input from Hollywood and featuring a handful of non-professional actors. It doesn't have a traditional narrative, narrative structure or catharsis, and on a technical level it is rather workmanlike. It is a contender primarily because it is believable, relatable and sneakily emotional. It created perhaps the year's most communally shared audience experience. But rarely do you see a movie that closely reproduces a realistic version of life in line for such accolades.

On the other hand you've got a movie that is cynically reducible to one crazy stylistic choice, which is to shoot the entire movie as though it were one shot. While this tends to get film geeks aflutter, it typically does not translate to the type of success with mainstream audiences that Birdman has enjoyed. It does have some classic Oscar credentials by being about the theater (which captures Oscar's desire to celebrate entertainment history) and by involving the redemption of a Hollywood actor (a little bit of the "Hollywood to the rescue" mentality of Argo). But canceling that out is the fact that it's about a guy who played a superhero, and has a title (an abbreviated title, anyway) that sounds like an actual superhero movie. No superhero movie has ever been nominated for best picture.

Either winner would be a celebration of some kind of landmark technical achievement. In fact, the way they were made has been an equal part of the conversation as what they are actually about. In Boyhood, the way it was made and its subject matter are intrinsically linked. In Birdman, they have nothing to do with each other. In both cases, you'd have to say that without the unusual technical approach to making them, they would not be nominated this year (though I do sometimes wonder how many of Birdman's viewers actually notice that there are no visible edits).

Like them or not, these are weird movies. They are made by filmmakers who were thinking way, way outside the box. In most years, both would be the consensus deserving choice that ended up losing to something like The Imitation Game. This year, one will win. 

Having had both in my top ten, and one at my #1 spot, I'd honestly be happy to have either carry off the win, which is an unusual position to find myself in. Most years I have a favorite I'm clearly rooting for over a rival I don't find deserving, but not this year. Unless some more conventional movie makes a last gasp at contention, it'll be one of these two -- and I don't see The Imitation Game suddenly coming out of nowhere to seize the zeitgeist. (The Grand Budapest Hotel would also be a good unconventional choice, but I'd have to say it's a longshot at this point, despite tying for the most nominations.)

So what will happen?

If we are to further psychoanalyze Hollywood -- which is the premise this entire post is based on -- I'd have to say that Birdman will emerge. As unconventional as it is, it is definitely more conventional than Boyhood, in the sense of celebrating Hollywood and featuring actors it is time to honor (Michael Keaton has a significant edge over Ethan Hawke in that regard, though Patricia Arquette should definitely win in the best supporting actress category). And if you believe the narrative that the most critically acclaimed film of the year is the one that never wins best picture -- see examples like The Social Network and L.A. Confidential -- then that same fate could easily befall Boyhood.

The thing is, I don't get the sense that Boyhood's most ardent supporters consider whether it wins best picture to be any necessary measure, or perhaps even a desirable measure, of its success. They don't need to have that external validation of the emotional experience they had watching this movie. And even if they do secretly crave that external validation despite being unwilling to admit it, they will be satisfied with Arquette's win. And Richard Linklater seems the best bet to win best director whether his movie wins or not. 

I said earlier that I didn't care which movie won, but I obviously did have one ranked higher than the other. Boyhood was only my #8 movie of the year, while Birdman took top honors. So I should be rooting for Birdman to win, right? I actually don't think I am, and here are three reasons:

1) A win for Boyhood would be a much-deserved recognition of the myriad ways Richard Linklater has been expanding our cinematic horizons over the course of his career. Boyhood is not an isolated experiment for Linklater. It is just the latest in a career defined by (mostly successful) experiments.

2) A win for Boyhood would celebrate the movie of the year. I would say Boyhood defined 2014 at the movies, whereas Birdman just happened to come out in 2014. 

3) But perhaps most importantly, a win for Boyhood would be the choice that gave me the greatest reassurance that the system is not broken. A win for Boyhood would teach me that just when I thought I had gotten the Oscars all figured out, I had to go back and reconsider all my assumptions. A win for Boyhood would condition me to expect the unexpected in Oscar's future.

Also, it's just a damn fine movie. 

2014 has flown the coop

Well here we finally are, at the end of the 2014 ranking season. And what a ranking season it was.

If you told me that my first full year in Australia would result in the most movies I've ever ranked, I'd say "What? You're crazy. Movies are more expensive here than in the U.S., and a lot of the big awards contenders don't even get released until after my ranking deadline."

If you told me that the first full year of having two children would result in the most movies I've ever ranked, I'd say "What? You're crazy. Parenting one child is hard enough -- if you add a second into the equation, something has to give."

Well maybe something did give, but if so, it wasn't the amount of movies I watched. My 2014 total beats my previous record (set last year) by a whole eight movies. I somehow cranked out 136 viewings that I deemed to qualify for 2014 -- and yet am more aware than ever of the films I didn't get to see. (Thanks, 67 movies on my Letterboxd watchlist, for giving me such crippling cinephile guilt.)

So in the spirit of one of those movies, here are the top five movies I wish I'd had access to see before my ranking deadline:

5. Wild
4. Dear White People

3. Selma
2. Top Five
1. Inherent Vice

Honorable mentions: American Sniper, Mommy, A Most Violent Year, Still Alice, The Theory of Everything

So yeah, movies not having released yet in Australia is still a problem. But at least that problem was somewhat mitigated by seeing Birdman, Foxcatcher and The Interview, all before their Australian theatrical releases. Which ended up being pretty significant for this year's list, as we shall see.

To what do I owe this uptick in movies? My trip to the U.S. was a pretty big factor. I watched 11 movies on four plane flights on that trip, which was a big boost to my total. I also pushed harder than usual in January, with a lot of factors falling my way to either get me to the theater more regularly, or to give me the stamina to stay up for viewings that finished after midnight -- sometimes well after midnight.

It was a pretty good year to set a record, as 2014 is top-heavy with quality. There may have been a comparatively small group of movies I truly loved, but the movies I gave four stars stretch on down into the 50s on this list. (Which isn't to say there aren't some 3.5-star movies that may have crept in ahead of them -- that's the nature of a list like this.)

But before we get to my actual rankings, it's time for the resumption of a tradition I started last year -- counting down my top ten in reverse order, with a blurb on why I chose each. It restores some of the drama that certain pictographic choices I've made on the layout of this post have already dissipated.

10. Under the Skin - This is the movie on this list I most admire without being able to say I truly love it. I wasn't sure exactly what I felt about it when I first saw it, then lived with it awhile and felt it grow, then saw it again and began to question whether it is indeed a masterpiece. It is, almost without argument, the most arresting series of pure images caught on film in 2014, and the most vital reminder of film's unique ability to move us via the image rather than dialogue or plotting. It is clearly a major achievement for director Jonathan Glazer, whose only misstep (Sexy Beast) has been amply answered for first with Birth, and now this. Though it's the type of movie where analyzing the themes seems an almost pedestrian activity, one certainty is that it was a masterstroke to cast one of our most beautiful women -- Scarlett Johansson -- as an observer of the behavior of human beings when confronted with the physical ideal. The growth of empathy in her character is tender in a manner that's at odds with how Glazer's images and soundtrack are often dischordant. Great movies can have it both ways, and Under the Skin is such a movie.

9. Enemy - Never before have I been so happy to watch one of those video film essays on the interwebs. After my viewing of Denis Villeneuve's film, I thought it was an odd little mystery about identity and gender politics that favored surreal imagery and metaphors, one that I suspected was quite good. However, one of the members of the Flickchart Facebook group had posted a link to a Youtube video by Chris Stuckmann that had a much more unified theory of its layers of meaning and interpretation ... and this video made me fall in love with the movie. In fact, I loved it enough that I purchased it again on iTunes, although that second viewing ultimately didn't transpire before the 30-day rental window closed. It'd be higher in my top 10 if there weren't that nagging part of me that questioned whether I arrived at my love of the movie purely. But I do love it, and that's enough.

8. Boyhood - I did not experience quite the same transcendent pleasure others experienced while watching this movie. My consistent question to others has been "Did you love Boyhood, or just really like it?" I have felt, and I guess still feel, stunted in a state of "really like" when it comes to Richard Linklater's grand cinematic experiment. But when I think about any individual moment from the life of Mason, our young boy who grows into a young man over the course of two-and-a-half hours, I think about how lovely it is, and how it fills me with a sense of melancholy about the passage of time in my own life. Of course, even just writing these words now, I'm getting chills, because I realize that the melancholy that runs through this film is always rubbing elbows with the joy. I think that's the kind of life any of us would like to live, and they make for the ingredients of an unforgettable movie ... one I may eventually say I truly love.

7. Love is Strange - Guess my top ten wasn't so finalized after all. If you recall yesterday's post, you'll remember that I chose this story of an aging gay couple (Alfred Molina and John Lithgow) who finally marry after decades together as my final viewing of the year, hoping not to create a disruption to too much I had in place. Well, it was a welcome and wonderful disruption. Simply put, this is one of the most beautiful and elegiac films I have seen in some time. Ira Sachs skirts the hot-button issues you'd expect a film like this would court through his enviable low-key approach to the material. There's no need for Ben and George to stand in for every gay couple contemplating marriage, and perhaps failing to contemplate the unintended consequences of their actions. They are simply two human beings who care for each other, surrounded by caring friends and family, and how all that is put under stress by a society that is as it is, and erects regular roadblocks to their happiness. If there's outrage in this film, it's in the margins; it's incidental to this intimate look inside a relationship that is more real than any I have seen on screen in some time.

6. Whiplash - Whiplash stands as the exception to the rule that states "the more you see a trailer for a movie, the less chance you have of liking it." I saw the Whiplash trailer at least three times before buying my tickets ... and was enthralled by it anyway. Whiplash is not only a major technical step forward for Damien Chazelle from the grainy indie Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench, but it actually has the kind of maturity of form that the driven musicians in the story aspire to. I'm not a jazz fan, but I'm a fan of how it is used here, as a way to symbolize (cymbalize?) the rhythms of great storytelling. And Whiplash is storytelling at its finest, detailing the physical and emotional sacrifices necessary to attain greatness ... and being shrewd enough not to endorse a particular viewpoint on whether such sacrifices are ultimately worth making. Two of the year's best performances, by J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller, leave this thing pretty damn close to perfection.

5. Edge of Tomorrow - The biggest surprise about Edge of Tomorrow was not Doug Liman's handling of the sci-fi and action elements, or the delirious joy of the repeating structure. It's that the thing is so damn funny. Yes, it wasn't only this year's most exhilarating and deliciously plotted summer movie, it was also the funniest. A hybrid of Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers that earned it the nickname Groundhog Troopers, the movie had plenty of title changes and identity problems that culminated in one of the poorest marketing jobs since The Iron Giant. Let's hope the ultimately positive response by critics and audiences will encourage studios to continue taking risks on this type of original material, the kind that feels familiar yet fresh, without relying on superheroes or other reliable brands. As hard as Tom Cruise works and as awesome as Emily Blunt is -- both in general and in this movie -- Edge of Tomorrow gave me my purest adrenaline high of the year, and the year's first perfect rating on Letterboxd.

4. The Skeleton Twins - Ever since seeing this movie at the Melbourne International Film Festival, I have been wondering if I might have watched it through "festival goggles." It has not turned up on any prominent top ten lists and it has actually been derided in some circles as little more than "typical indie movie fare" which may in fact fumble its handling of suicide as a social issue. However, I can't forget that I sat in such a contented stupor on the tram ride home that I forgot to even listen to my iPod. SNL alums Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig blew me away with their flawless dramatic turns, yet also made me laugh harder than almost any other movie this year. (And let's not forget one of the most deceptively lovable performances you'll ever see from Luke Wilson.) More than anything though I was moved by the strength and realism of their brother-sister bond, the kind of bond that made me eager to see my own sister as soon as possible.

3. Ida - Let's get this out of the way at the start: I'm into nuns. Okay, that's not really true, but you'd suspect that were the case after I ranked Beyond the Hills #1 last year, and then gave my #3 spot this year to Pawel Pawelkowski's masterpiece. One of the things I loved about both films was their exquisite composition, and in the case of Ida, that isn't only the unusual framing (characters are often sunken low into the frame, giving the screen a cathedral effect and leaving space for a Bergmanian deity), but the astonishing use of black and white. Bergman is indeed an obvious point of comparison, but here's one that's not so obvious: The lead character's quest for a sordid truth through a dangerous Polish countryside reminded me of Winter's Bone, one of my favorite films of 2010. Pawelkowski so densely packs his film's 80 minutes with such rich material that you kind of want to start watching it again as soon as you finish -- even though it's also damned depressing. But in reality, moviemaking this superlative can never truly depress us.

2. Like Father, Like Son - Another film suspiciously absent from top ten lists, possibly because many critics saw it in 2013. But Hirokazu Koreeda's remarkably moving and perfectly scripted family drama opened in the United States on January 17th, so some critics are just snoozing on this. In an unimaginable scenario that raises questions parents dare not answer, two Japanese families realize that their sons were switched shortly after birth as part of a hospital clerical error. The problem is, their sons are now six years old, and the families must decide whether to "switch back" -- a choice made all the more problematic by a society in which patriarchy and blood are prized above all else. The film struggles with the clash of modern Japanese society with its ancient traditions, and it has a field day with the nature/nurture questions at its core, exploring why the children have become what they are, what we can expect from them in the future -- and whether their parents are satisfied with that. Basic parental love is caught somewhere in the middle. It's the most moved I was by any film this year.

1. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) - No 2014 film exhilarated me more. If it wasn't the ostentatious "single take" technique of DP Emmanuel Lubezki leaving me absolutely floored, it was the performances of the best ensemble cast of 2014, led by Oscar frontrunner Michael Keaton. Rarely have a camera and a cast been able to so intimately bring me inside the lives of such a fragile cross-section of individuals, each with their own relatable foibles and moments of surprising transcendence. Instead of feeling like a fly on the wall, though, I felt like a fly in flight, especially as the camera zooms in with discomfiting intensity on the face of Emma Stone as she lays all her father's delusions bare. What's even more exciting about Birdman is that there's a whole interpretation of the events of this movie, relating to an incident on a beach involving jellyfish that may not be as far in the past as we think, that I haven't even heard put forward. The richness of this movie continues to unfold for me, and it represents a major comeback for its director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

And to think ... if I hadn't seen Birdman in the U.S. in November, I would have been faced with that dilemma I am always trying to avoid: seeing your potential #1 on the last day of the ranking period. Birdman didn't open in Australia until yesterday, which is today for people in the U.S. I would have had to see it after the kids went to bed on Thursday night, and then had only 90 minutes until my self-imposed ranking deadline to consider whether it was truly my favorite movie of the year. If Inside Llewyn Davis had had longer to sit with me after a final-day screening last year, it might have been my #1 of 2013 rather than just #3. (I didn't expect Unbroken to give me the same type of headache, but skipped it this year for similar reasons of getting its Australian theatrical release just hours before my deadline -- and because I don't like Angelina Jolie.)

Now, my five worst:

5. I, Frankenstein - Movies involving demons and winged creatures and, oh yeah, Frankenstein's monster don't get much dumber than this. Why, Aaron Eckhart? Why?

4. The Nut Job - One of the five worst animated movies I've ever seen, and one of only two I'm sure I gave a one-star rating. All Dogs Go to Heaven, you've got company. A simply abysmal collection of unlikable characters and animated pratfalls.

3. I Origins - The best thing about this pretentious piece of B.S. existential philosophizing is the nickname my wife came up with for it: I Snorigins.

2. Dom Hemingway - Jude Law begins this movie with a three-minute ode to his own member while it's being serviced by a fellow prison inmate, and things never get any better.

1. Wolf Creek 2 - A mercilessly brutal horror sequel that is entirely devoid of cleverness, and anything else of redeeming value. Its worst sin, though, is to rob the killer of all his mystique by showing him in every damn frame of the whole movie.

Now on to the good stuff, the movies ranked from #1 to ... shit, I've lost count.

1. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
2. Like Father, Like Son
3. Ida
4. The Skeleton Twins
5. Edge of Tomorrow
6. Whiplash
7. Love is Strange
8. Boyhood
9. Enemy
10. Under the Skin
11. The Interview
12. Life Itself
13. The Lunchbox
14. The Babadook
15. Snowpiercer
16. Foxcatcher
17. The Grand Budapest Hotel
18. The Congress
19. Begin Again
20. Only Lovers Left Alive
21. Night Moves
22. Cheap Thrills
23. Locke
24. Two Days, One Night
25. The Sacrament
26. Mistaken for Strangers
27. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
28. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
29. Mood Indigo
30. Happy Christmas
31. Blue Ruin
32. Frank
33. Oculus
34. Tusk
35. Joe
36. Magic in the Moonlight
37. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
38. The Final Member
39. The Taking of Deborah Logan
40. Gone Girl
41. What We Do in the Shadows
42. Starred Up
43. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
44. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
45. Belle
46. Venus in Fur
47. Winter Sleep
48. 20,000 Days on Earth
49. The Unknown Known
50. Draft Day
51. The Lego Movie
52. Young & Beautiful
53. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
54. They Came Together
55. Felony
56. Space Station 76
57. Listen Up Philip
58. Force Majeure
59. Advanced Style
60. Dumb and Dumber To
61. The Fault in Our Stars
62. Lucy
63. Predestination
64. Big Hero 6
65. Walk of Shame
66. Interstellar
67. The Trip to Italy
68. How to Train Your Dragon 2
69. Sabotage
70. The One I Love
71. Manakamana
72. These Final Hours
73. Life of Crime
74. Non-Stop
75. The Wait
76. X-Men: Days of Future Past
77. Cuban Fury
78. Neighbors
79. Obvious Child
80. Men, Women & Children
81. Tracks
82. God's Pocket
83. Maleficent
84. White God
85. Paddington
86. We Are the Best!
87. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1
88. Memphis
89. Noah
90. The Imitation Game
91. The Rover
92. 22 Jump Street
93. A Most Wanted Man
94. Guardians of the Galaxy
95. Pompeii
96. Black Coal, Thin Ice
97. Alan Partridge
98. Nightcrawler
99. Bad Words
100. Rage
101. Wish I Was Here
102. Nymphomaniac Vol. II
103. Earth to Echo
104. Into the Storm
105. Veronica Mars
106. Grand Piano
107. Tammy
108. Willow Creek
109. The Zero Theorem
110. Life After Beth
111. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
112. St. Vincent
113. Calvary
114. Ride Along
115. Particle Fever
116. The Immigrant
117. The Pretty One
118. 3 Days to Kill
119. Nymphomaniac Vol. I
120. Odd Thomas
121. Godzilla
122. Into the Woods
123. Sex Tape
124. Le Week-End
125. The Double
126. That Awkward Moment
127. Heaven is for Real
128. Vampire Academy
129. Chef
130. The Monuments Men
131. Fading Gigolo
132. I, Frankenstein
133. The Nut Job
134. I Origins
135. Dom Hemingway
136. Wolf Creek 2

That's it. That's all. Except for your comments. Please be generous with them!

The happy return of an old gadget

Those items appearing down the right side of my blog are called "gadgets" in blogger terminology, and I've just brought an old one back.

You'll notice it under Most Recently Seen for the First Time and Most Recently Revisited, and it's my list of movies I've most recently reviewed.

When I was writing reviews for AllMovie.com, a gig that lasted me from the year 2000 to the year 2011 (with an externally imposed break that lasted from late 2003 to early 2005), I would update this gadget to show you the three most recent movies I had reviewed for the site. I tended to write at least a half-dozen reviews a month, so this gadget was regularly updated.

But as 2012 wore on and it became pretty clear I wasn't going to immediately return to a reviewing gig, I sadly retired the gadget. It was a rough moment, believe me.

Now, though, I'm proud to say it's ripe for revival.

I'm not getting paid to write reviews again. Any former or would-be critic can tell you that ship has pretty much sailed.

But I do have a new gig with an Australian film website called ReelGood, which is reachable at www.reelgood.com.au. It's a gorgeous-looking site that posts all variety of film content. I started out writing lists for them (10 Movies That Changed Outer Space at the Movies was one example), something I intend to continue doing. But the last three pieces I've written have been reviews, and three is the magic number for bringing my Most Recently Reviewed gadget back to life.

Oh happy day.

When I returned from the U.S., I had something unique to offer the site's editor-in-chief, which was that I had seen Birdman and Foxcatcher -- both movies that don't open in Australia until January. He leaped at the opportunity to get up early reviews of them, and liked my writing enough that he quickly began talking about getting me to attend some media screenings, especially while he is on vacation during January. So I may not have any pay immediately forthcoming, but to film lovers, free screenings are a kind of currency of their own.

After I saw The Interview on Christmas and realized it was not yet reviewed for the site, I reached out to the editor and told him I could review it, it being so time sensitive and all. He'd actually caught it as well -- he must also have a VPN that tricks the internet into thinking he's in the U.S. -- but was too "flat out" to write the review, what with his holiday coming up. As it turns out I disagreed with him on the movie, but he was again incredibly happy with what I'd written -- even if he characterized his take as "the exact opposite."

I'm now confident enough in where this will go that it's time to bring the old gadget back.

Except it's not exactly the same as the old gadget. The old gadget was just text, informing you of the film I'd reviewed but not telling you where you could actually read the review. That's because I was keeping my blogger identity hidden under a blogger handle, something I felt was necessary at the time. I don't know what service I hoped to provide my readers by just telling you what I'd reviewed, except that it was just a way to document my activities.

Well, now I've got a much more effective way that's also useful to you. That list is now a link list rather than a text list, meaning it's comprised of links to the reviews. You can see not only what I've been up to, but what I think about what I've been up to. So have at it, readers -- check out my thoughts on Birdman, Foxcatcher and The Interview over at ReelGood.

Me, I'll just bask in the warmth of this warm Tasmanian morning as I look out over Hobart harbor from the deck of my mother-in-law's house. And pretty soon think about updating the blurb at the top of my gadgets, which still says I'm "between gigs."

And wonder, with a tinge of self-satisfied glee, what movie I may be reviewing next.

Fox caught

It's 11:30 on Thanksgiving Eve and it's been two weeks since I've updated the blog and I'm still up, so I thought I'd write you a quick one. You know, to tide you over until I get back to Australia next week.

I thought November would be a comparatively dry month for movies, what with me spending over half of it on vacation. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've seen seven movies over the course of three different plane trips (of the four I've taken), and four other movies, meaning 11 total since I left. More on the plane movies when I return, and complete my total with at least two and probably more on the return flight. Wish I Was Here, I've got my eye on you. You'd make a perfect plane movie.

But what I want to tell you about now is that I achieved my goal of movies to catch, so to speak, in the theater while I'm here in the U.S.

Birdman was optional. The movie opens on January 15th in Australia, which means I can watch it and then immediately add it to my list before the list needs to be finalized a few hours later. Did it last year with Inside Llewyn Davis and Her, and it worked out great. (Though given a few more days to think about it, I would have ranked Davis -- which ended up my #3 -- even higher, and probably dropped 21st ranked Her by as many as ten spots.) And I did see Birdman our second afternoon in Maine, when my dad watched our kids so both my wife and I could go.

But the real prize was Foxcatcher, which doesn't open in Australia until two weeks after my rankings close. Last year, the delayed release date of prestige pictures kept me from ranking 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street, Nebraska and Dallas Buyers Club, among others. I already know I'm losing a big prize, Inherent Vice, this year. I don't think it opens until February.

Foxcatcher would have befallen the same fate, except it's already open in Los Angeles -- which means not only am I not seeing it two months later than you are, but I'm actually seeing it earlier than most of you.

This pleases me. This pleases me greatly.

And saw it I did on Tuesday morning, while my wife was on a play date with one of her friends. (Their respective children were there too.)

The fact that I'm seeing it before most of you is not what pleases me, though my phrasing might indicate otherwise. It's that I get to include it on the list. A year-end list of movies loses a touch or two of credibility when it doesn't contain, oh, half of the best picture nominees, as was the case in 2013. I don't know if Foxcatcher will receive a best picture nomination, but it definitely could, and Steve Carell is almost certain to receive a best actor nomination. (High creep factor. High.)

There may be others I will miss this year -- in fact, I'm sure there are. In fact, I can tell you some of the titles: Wild, The Theory of Everything and The Interview will all slip beyond my grasp. The Theory of Everything is actually also open here, so if I'd structured my visit a little differently, maybe I'd have seen that too.

But I'm happy enough to have caught the Fox.

As a movie completist, I now feel a little more complete.

When you do end up seeing Foxcatcher, I want you to tell me which is the most impressive artificial enhancement to an actor's appearance: Carell's prosthetic nose, Mark Ruffalo's receding hairline or Channing Tatum's cauliflower ears.

Something not Marvel-related for a change

There have been so many movie announcements and casting announcements from Marvel in the past couple months --

["How many have there been, Derek?"]

-- that basically nothing but these announcements has been filling up our movie-related news feeds.

So it's kind of a relief to see a movie called Nightcrawler hit theaters that has nothing to do with comic books.

One of the X-Men characters -- whose rights are split in some complicated way between Marvel and Fox -- is named Nightcrawler, and with the way these characters have been spun off into their own stand-alone movies or even franchises, it's remarkable that the rights owners would even allow a movie unrelated to this character to bear his name.

Yet Nightcrawler IS completely unrelated. It's a Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle about an ambitious journalist armed with a video camera, which is drawing more comparisons to Taxi Driver than to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

And unfortunately, I'll have to wait a month more to see it, as it actually doesn't come out until November 27th in Australia. (Funny -- Halloween release date in the U.S., Thanksgiving release date in Australia.) So yes, what you are currently reading is that good old-fashioned American release date preview post, an endangered species on this blog since I've moved to Australia and never seem to know when anything is coming out anymore.

Actually, I could see it before then, as I'll actually be in the United States from November 13th to November 28th. So that's when you can prepare yourself for a little Audient sabbatical, or at least, only a few very brief updates.

But I'll have bigger movie fish to fry when I'm stateside. My biggest priority will be Foxcatcher, which I understand will open sometime while I'm there, but won't open here until after the cutoff for my 2014 rankings in mid-January. Then there's Birdman, which gets a release date on the final day of my 2014 list eligibility, just like Her and Inside Llewyn Davis did last year. I'll have to go see it on opening day if I want to include it.

So while I'm in the U.S., I'll be catching either a fox or a bird, or possibly both.