Best of 2014

2014 was a such a great year for me in terms of movie watching. I started volunteering at an art house theatre again, so I've been able to see far more and better movies than I managed to in past years. I didn't see as many movies at the 2014 VIFF, since I had family visiting while it was on, but I still got in 30+.

Thinking on what I saw this year that impressed me most, I keep coming back to Le Sel de La Terre, (The Salt of the Earth), which is actually a documentary about the reknowned photographer, Sebastião Salgado. It's somewhat a false dichotomy to pit docs against fictional fare, but for sure documentaries are impressing me more than the nonfic films lately, and I don't think that's because I'm seeing bad movies either. Seems like more resources are spent to less effect making shitty movies, but that's a whole other subject. Primarily written and directed by Salgado's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, with Wim Wenders, Salt is a gorgeous, gorgeous film, that has devastating insight into the problems facing humanity. What's more important, it offers hope and solutions too, principally through showing the efforts of one man. Granted, most of us don't have as much personal wealth, social pull and power, to work with as he does, but it's definitely inspiring to see what he has done with his sway. The world and society aren't doomed, and that you can make a difference, is what I came away with. I missed the beginning, which I don't think matters much in my evaluation either.  I just missed out on more awesome examples of Salgado's premier photojournalism.  I can't wait until I get a chance to see it in it's entirety, I only wish it could be at the Performing Arts Centre's humungo screen again.

In terms of fictional films, I saw sooooo many good ones. Birdman, Dance of Reality, The Editor, Force Majeure, Foxcatcher, Grand Budapest Hotel, Locke, Mommy, Nightcrawler, Nymphomaniac, Snowpiercer, Under The Skin, and Whiplash, are some of the standouts released this year that I managed to see, and I saw a lot of older films that were awesome too. Finally got to see Touch of Evil! Not to forget the Cronenberg and Jodorowsky stuff I was missing, plus I got a few more Godard films under my belt as well.

I saw a ton of good docs too, volunteering at a documentary festival definitely helped my numbers there ;) 69: Love, Sex, Senior, 1971, 20,000 Days on Earth, Advanced Style, Art and Craft, A Brony Tale, The Case Against 8, Crazywater, A Fragile Trust, Freak Out!, Huicholes: The Last Peyote Guardians, Honour Your Word, The Internet's Own Boy, Jodorowsky's Dune, Life Itself, Mirage Men, The Overnighters, Plot for Peace, The Red Army, The Reunion, Whitey: The United States vs James J. Bulger, are the best that I can recall at the moment.

My top 2014 regular movie pick is Wild though, and I notice while it's not a documentary, it is a dramatization based on a true story - the memoir that Cheryl Strayed wrote about her epic 1800 km hike along the Pacific Coast Trail.  It's my top choice because it's one of the films that had the most emotional resonance for me, and also because it had a very humanist theme of acceptance.  Plus, visually it's practically 100% camping porn.  I think Reese Witherspoon has a good shot at taking home an Oscar for her performance.

Perhaps films based around real life experiences are simply bound to have more profound and relatable emotional payoffs.

I loved the soundtrack too.

Since I've been watching more and BETTER flicks, I've noticed I generally have less desire to articulate my opinions on them.  I don't know if that's because I have less time to so, what with seeing more altogether, and having time taken up by work too - probably both. In any case, I've decided I'll make time to at least keep track of every film I see and post a trailer or poster pic, even if I don't express any judgements about them.  This is my film nerdery rising up I guess, but there's something oh so satisfying about making lists, and documenting your actions.


I have yet to see these 2014 offerings: A Most Violent Year, A Most Wanted Man, Accused, American Sniper, Annie, Begin Again, Belle, Beyond The Lights, Big Hero 6, Black or White, The Book of Life, The Boxtrolls, Cake, Calvary, Camp Xray, Cheatin', CitizenFour, Corn Island,  Dear White People, The Drop,  Elsa & Fred, End of the Tour, The Equalizer, Exodus, The Fault in Our Stars, Fort Bliss, Fury, The Gambler, Get On Up,  Goodbye to Language, The Guide, The Homesman, How to Train Your Dragon 2, The Humbling, The Hundred Foot Journey,  The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, Inherent Vice, The Judge, Kill The Messenger,  Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, Leviathan, Love is Strange, Low Down, Magic in the Moonlight, Mateo, Men Women and Children, Miss Julie, Mr. Turner, My Old Lady,  Obvious Child, Olvidados, The One I Love, Pride, The Railway Man, The Rover, Rio 2,  St Vincent, Selma, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Song of the Sea, Still Alice, Two Days, One Night,  Tangerines, Timbuktu, To Kill a Man, Top Five, The Tribe, Unbroken, Wetlands, White Bird in a Blizzard, White God, and Winter Sleep, among others.

So good movies and the opportunity to opine on them abound in my queue still. :)

Dallas Buyers Club

directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (2013)

This based on a true story flick by the Canadian director of the awesome C.R.A.Z.Y.,  is one of the most entertaining movies I've seen this year.  Dallas Buyers Club is bookended with scenes of Ron Woodroof, as portrayed by a shockingly bone rack thin Matthew McConaughey, rodeo riding massive bulls, and that image so symbolically portrays the tenacious bravery of the man who battles the government, crosses borders , bluffs and bribes his way around international law, and just generally doesn't ever, ever, give up in his pursuit of health.

Ron doesn't take shit from anyone, he's a Texas tough ass scrawny mother fucker,  Rooster Cogburn type, roused up through self interest to battle at the injustices of the parasitical relationship between the FDA and Big Pharma.  The movie is part procedural, and part lionising character study, except Woodroof is an unlikely hero.  He's a homophobic, slutty cowboy; a drug selling, hard drinking, gambling man. Sure he's an ignorant trailer trashy electrician roughneck, but surface first impressions are deceptive.  Don't be so quick to judge because you can never tell how people will respond to crisis, and illness is probably the most common personal crisis around that everyone eventually becomes familiar with, granted they live long enough.

And this guy has an arc too. He has a strong moral and ethical core, but the good ole homophobe gets enlightened around his ignorant prejudice and selfishness.  Suffering can create compassion because it's hard to keep a hate on for people in the same exact situation as yourself.

Jared Leto was awesome, as the gorgeous pre-op transwoman,  Rayon.  She's dressed to the glamourous 9's for much of the film, with fierce style and sass for days.  And she won't tolerate no bullshit when she meets her hospital roommate, Mr Mas Macho, and dishes it right back. She loves Marc Bolan and the glam looks, and so tragically wastes away throughout the film.  Her looks are so important to her identity, and to see her coming to grips with their fading, along with her vitality, was so so heartbreaking to see.

The film pulls no punches in portraying these folk, they're unapologetic hedonists, just they got sick eh? And illness knows no morals - a virus has no agenda.  It's an equal opportunity villain.

Rayon was one of the "lucky" ones,  being among the first of the AIDS patients chosen for a double blind study on the efficacy of AZT, that actually received the drug instead of the placebo given to the control group.  She would have been better off with the sugar pills as AZT had serious side effects - which were suppressed in terms of getting the go ahead for FDA approval for the treatment of AIDS.   And this too is what's messed about drug testing: early days of research for human trials are hell. As Woodroof says when the nature of the study is explained to him, "You're going to give dying people sugar pills?"

Jennifer Garner does a good job as the doctor working inside the medical establishment.  She's privy to the fact that the study patients are NOT doing well on AZT, while the border crossing club patients are faring much better.  "Fuck all y'all!" The doctor echoes Woodruff's dismissal of the medicos,  when she finally bucks the broken system she's been compromising her values to stay within and be the good little doctor just following the orders she knows are immoral.

The AIDS crisis of the 80's was a crucible of fraught circumstances - a disastrous epidemic that snuck up on the populace and was at first ignored because who was it killing?  Folk who challenged the mores of the status quo - the queers and the liberals, the degenerate fucking drug users - fucking being a literal multi use term here.   Of course those with a fundamentalist conservative agenda felt good gloating over god's hand directly intervening in their hateful world view, to strike down and punish the ostensible sinner.  In fact there are conspiracy theorists, who are certain AIDS was deliberately created to eliminate undesirable portions of the population.  That's pretty out there, but in any case the sentiment that this plague was a case of just desserts, was and is very widely held, still.

The biggest problem in the film was not so much AIDS, but rather, how the pharmaceutical industries operate in their pursuit of profits.  The drug companies have an unhealthy relationship with the FDA where the agenda around legitimising some treatments of illness and discrediting others, is entirely suspect due to the incredible amounts of money to be made if a drug gains approval.  The FDA, which is supposed to be an independent body protecting the interests of a populace that has expectations of their health being paramount - that ideal is entirely compromised, when the FDA is made up of former drug company CEOs, with lobby groups and their fat pockets petitioning for laws that favour the companies bottom line interests.  In truth, the FDA function is more lapdog lackey to Big Pharma, and its practical operations are all about restricting access to alternatives to the Big Pharma offerings.  The FDA is the dog in the manger of treatment options barking at the behest of the pill pushers who want to keep their possible markets as far far away as law can mandate, from accessing alternative forms of therapy.

Health is so NOT the primary concern, when you look into the shenanigans the developers of new drugs get up to in search of FDA approval.

Last spring, on a flight back to Van from Montreal,  I sat between two guys who oddly enough ended up being from the same small town in NB, as we discovered in the course of conversation, but I mostly spoke to the one who worked for a Canadian pharmaceutical company.  His specialty was getting contracts for analogue drugs for distribution in Canada.  Mostly this involves tweaking an existing drug so that its patent life and money making window is extended.  It's a fairly complicated legal process, but the most important aspect of our conversation relates to the fact that the profit imperative directly opposes health.  There's a lot of older drugs that may be very effective, but are considered worthless in terms of distributing, because they are longer able to produce the revenue shareholders demand.  He was proud of how his company was continuing to produce some drugs for "orphan diseases", in spite of the fact that they weren't making money off of them, and he explained too how for some of these effective drugs that weren't profitable anymore, they were still viable commodities in terms of dumping them in 3rd World Nations. Probably getting a big tax write off to balance their end of the year bookkeeping too, as it's not cheap disposing of medical waste.  So yeah charity!  And yeah, it's still all about the money eh?

Even more disquieting are the results of a recent sting operation where a bogus cancer study was sent out to a number of peer reviewed scientific journals to test the level of thoroughness in inspecting the veracity of any submission. 70% published the fraudulent study!!!

The game is rigged. Too much authority and power in the hands of too few, and too much money at stake, means peoples' health is sacrificed to the almighty dollar.  Greed is definitely not good in this area, and profit being such an unregulated factor in this industry increases the probability of corruption, and flies in the face of peoples' quest for wellness.

First do no harm is the hippocratic oath, more like hypocritic oath seems like.

In any case it's a good film, and I predict if not Oscar wins for Matt and Jared, at the very least they'll be nominated.

And here's a couple great interviews:  Jean-Marc Vallée talking up Matt and his movie, and McConaughey doing his take on things.

And here's an article about the FDA going after a walnut company because the packaging referenced the omega 3 fats found in the nuts as being beneficial.  Something is nuts there and it sure ain't the walnuts.