Better late than never! In this episode, Jon Carnegie (@jon_carnegie on Twitter) joins me on the podcast to discuss all the great television in 2014. Man, people really liked this one show called True Detective.
Reminder: All episodes are available on iTunes.
“Does Lorelei Linklater look bored?” “No she’s not bored…that’s just the way her face looks…” Image via Yahoo
Tonight, I saw the best of the Globes, and the worst of the Globes.
I saw some truly deserving winners. I saw some truly headscratching ones, and others that were victims to genre confusion. That is an accurate way to describe about any awards show. However, there was something weird in the air at this year’s ceremony. It probably started when the entire audience couldn’t handle a Bill Cosby joke. But most likely, it was because I felt like I was being judged the entire time by Amal Clooney, who is clearly smarter and more accomplished than I will ever be in my entire life.
I hope you have all recovered from my Pulitizer Prize winning Golden Globes Drinking Game and are ready for the highlight reel. I have decided to put the show together in a neat little package, going through the things I liked and didn’t like about the show. Overall, I don’t really know what to say about a show that leaves Whiplash and Valerie Cherish off the shortlist, but here we go:
It takes a rare kind of film to be devoid of both action and dialogue for its first twenty minutes and still keep the excitement flowing.
Blue Ruin tells a revenge story in a topsy-turvy sort of way. One murder happens very early in the film that would normally happen much later, while a major truth is withheld until the film is nearly over. It is an unexpected way to tell a predictable sort of story.
Another year, another winter, another awards show.
The Golden Globes air this Sunday and as pointless as they may be, they are one of the more entertaining awards shows to watch. All of your favorite celebrities are sitting and drinking together in the same room. After the third glass of champagne, the smiles seem a lot less forced.
So, why not pretend you’re hanging out with George Clooney and Jennifer Lawrence? I mean, you’re not; you’re probably somewhere somewhere outside Toledo with a bottle of Fleischmann’s Vodka and some Chinese food (Note: Chinese food is the perfect dinner for any awards show and also any occasion in general). Award shows are predictable, so use that to your advantage and get drunk. Without further adieu, here are the rules for the Reel Deal approved 2015 Golden Globes Drinking Game:
Image via Variety
In most comedies, there are two types of characters that need to exist in order for the humor to work: the laugh-getter and the straight man. The laugh-getter is the one who causes the chaos, while the straight man is the one who reacts to it, often making the situation even funnier. Force Majeure is a comedy of sorts that is filled with characters who solely react to the world around them as they all reach the verge of total meltdown.
Force MaJeure is a constant battle between pleasantry and misery. A Swedish family goes on vacation in the French Alps. Their dynamic is flawlessly set up in the first scene, when a photographer really has to force them all to smile. This is a family that looks normal, but has no idea how to behave normally.
Mmmm…ketchup. Image via Film School Rejects
“Movies are dead,” the crowd shouted, “long live TV!”
“All art forms can co-exist,” the pseudo-intellectual blogger shouted back.
As I have said before, it was a great year for television, and it was almost just as good of a year for film. In fact, there are very few years I can point out as weak years for film (maybe 2005 and 2008, but that is it). This year also happened to be the year where a handful of smart, mature dramas turned a huge profit at the box office while a blockbuster starring a talking raccoon and an untested star was king.
I will admit, this was the year I finally saw some of the shortcomings of being a modern movie lover. For instance, all of the most amazing television shows are available at the click of a button. Yet, if you want to see a truly great film, you might have to travel a few hundred miles or wait a few weeks like a goon. We live in an age where everything is readily available and nobody has any patience anymore, so film distribution now seems a bit backwards. Because of this, I learned my limitations and I admit that there were a lot of films that came out in 2014 that I unfortunately missed. I hope Hollywood eventually gets the hint that there are smart people who want to watch smart things in places not called New York or Los Angeles.
Year end lists are tricky. Opinions change over the years. My top pick of 2011 was War Horse, and I have never lived it down. In retrospect, the best film of that year was Young Adult. It might be self-defeating to admit that a lot of these numbers are irrelevant. The top five probably matters the most. But let’s live in the moment and not think about ten years down the road, because by then, we will probably be working for robot overlords while two second bits of sponsored content gets zapped into our brains with clickable clickbait headlines.
So without further adieu, here are my top ten films of 2014:
Let us gingerly touch our tips! Image via Huffington Post
So, I have ranked all of the best TV shows of 2014, but now let’s look at them through an even smaller lens.
Most shows today are being watched in one long sitting and with that, we lose the value of the episode. Not that they aren’t important, but after watching five or six episodes of Homeland in a row (if you are crazy enough to still be watching that show), everything becomes a blur. We might not watch shows week by week anymore, but the individual episode still deserves to be celebrated.
Without further adieu, here are the the 10 best television episodes of 2014:
Image via Serial
All it took was one little girl to mispronounce the word chimp and suddenly podcasts were all anybody can talk about.
Honestly, I live in a such a bubble that I forgot that most people don’t listen to podcasts, let alone have even heard of one. Then, Serial rolled around and it became the new form of small talk. Thanks to that, people were now going and listening to other podcasts. Finally, I could talk a lot of my friends about Marc Maron! All was well in podcast land.
This is the first year I will be sharing a list of podcasts. This is not the first year that I have listened to enough podcasts to compile a best of list, but it is the first year where I actually think I understand podcasts and have gotten a taste of the wide variety out there. Before this year, I mainly listened to comedy podcasts. In 2014, I opened my heart to a single one about business. What a world.
Without much further adieu, here is my list of the five best podcasts of 2014, not including my own because I’m not that much of an ass:
Image via New York Post
So, where do you even start a review of a movie that stopped world news and got the attention of the President of the United States? Just focus on the movie, that’s the mantra. Just focus on the movie. Let’s see how far that gets us.
The Interview, the second film directed by writing duo Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, has caused a huge a stir (Damn! Broke it already!). When you see what all the fuss is about, you might realize that people are really good at getting offended before getting the full story. Political satire has been around since humans were grunting at each other in caves, so making a movie poking fun at Kim Jong-Un shouldn’t feel that radical.
“The doctor is busy.” “He didn’t look busy.” “…he’s thinking.” Image via YouTube
After watching Inherent Vice, I asked myself two very different questions:
1) Why would I watch this?
2) Why wouldn’t I watch this?
Sometimes, I found myself asking both questions at the exact same time.
With Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson uses his well-earned creative freedom to go down some very strange paths. But with the overlapping stories, Los Angeles setting, and 1970s fashion, Paul Thomas Anderson has never been more at home than he is in Inherent Vice.