The Best Movies of 2014, Nos. 6 & 5: Guardians of the Galaxy; The Imitation Game
The Manifesto is wrapping up its rankings of all of 2014’s movies with its look at the best movies of the year. If you missed previous installments, check out the following links:
Nos. 10 & 9: Locke; The LEGO Movie
Nos. 8 & 7: Nightcrawler; Boyhood
6. Guardians of the Galaxy (directed by James Gunn, 91% Rotten Tomatoes, 76 Metacritic). It is so, so hard to make a good comic-book movie, much less a distinctive one. The genre’s myriad requirements—the commercial imperative for outrageous spectacle, the numbing obligation of fan service, the daunting duty to connect with installments from other franchises—all conspire to make comic-book productions feel more like prepackaged, interchangeable morsels of formula than actual movies. But despite its cutting-edge special effects and dazzling space-opera aesthetic, and despite a cameo from the mega-villain of The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy never once feels like it rolled off the blockbuster assembly line. This is partly due to what it lacks: It doesn’t feature any historic action sequences, it doesn’t conjure a particularly menacing antagonist, and it doesn’t even tell an especially original story. What it has, however, is something far more important: a personality.
Can a computer have a soul? Can a movie? Her, Spike Jonze’s breathtaking, devastating film about a lonely man and his sentient operating system, spends a good deal of time pondering the first question and, in the process, answers the second. But let’s not bury the lede here: This is a movie about a man who falls in love with a machine. No matter the miracles science has provided in the new millennium, this is a tough sell. Yet the unique genius of Her—beyond its remarkable and vast imagination—is that it acknowledges the absurdity of its premise while simultaneously committing to it with the utmost sincerity. The result is a film that’s often uproariously funny, playfully mocking its gorgeous self-made universe with wit and good humor. But Her also, through a combination of sublime technique and heartfelt storytelling (Jonze also wrote the script), offers acute insight into the dynamics of modern relationships: what it means to be alone, to be loved, to be depressed, to be happy. It’s a movie about machines that affirms our very humanity. And it makes resoundingly clear that even if computers may not have souls, some movies surely do.
“I’d like to think that there’s more to a person than just one thing,” Aimee Finicky says early in The Spectacular Now. I’d like to think she’s right. There is certainly more than just one thing to The Spectacular Now, James Ponsoldt’s swooning, touching third feature. Like Aimee, it refuses to be pigeonholed. This is partly because, in strict genre terms, it has no strict genre; instead, it melds elements of various tropes, making it not only a winning coming-of-age story, but also an earnest teen romance, a wistful family drama, and even a sobering study of addiction. But far more important than the multiplicity of the film’s form is the raw power of its content. The Spectacular Now is not one thing, because it is many things: spry and funny, sad and heartfelt, honest and scary, rueful and rewarding. It’s a movie that would make Aimee Finicky proud.