The Best Screenplays, Directors, and Films of 2014

How do you split up screenplays and genres of film? Best original and adapted screenplay? The lines bleed into each other. Inception was nominated for Best Original Screenplay a few years ago despite being based on an unpublished short story. How do you judge something like Foxcatcher, which was based on real events. Certainly, it’s more adapted from existing material than, say, Birdman.

And what about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the film that spurred this entire conversation among us. Sure, it’s derived from Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes, but does a franchise in its second reboot and third adaptation really have much to do with the original novel anymore? Or is it adapted from the first film franchise? Or Tim Burton’s second (let’s hope not). The point is, while Pierre Boulle certainly deserves credit, is Dawn of the Planet of the Apes that particularly adapted from source material, or is it more part of a franchise that chucks as much of the previous Apes baggage overboard in an effort to tell a new story?

So let’s throw adapted and original screenplay out the window.

As for splitting up films, how do we judge these? The Golden Globes split films into drama and musical/comedy categories. This results in some incredible cognitive dissonance, such as In Bruges competing with Mamma Mia! or the entire 2013 slate (American Hustle, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, The Wolf of Wall Street) having as much claim to dramatic status as they do comedy. Too often, the category is used for films that don’t make the cut of 5 to be considered drama, as if musical/comedy is an extended second class of dramatic film.

I’m not one to complain, either. My comedy of the year for 2014 would be Nightcrawler, the most disturbing and unsettling film I saw. It follows the structure of a rags-to-riches comedy almost to the letter, and it creates audacious moments of black humor – these are key to helping you understand the attraction of its main character’s sociopathy. Nevermind that much of the substance inside the film is dramatic – if we use the old Greek definitions, Nightcrawler is a comedy through and through.

The Oscars don’t bother with categories, but this usually results in less serious films being completely tossed to the side.

So let’s throw drama and comedy categories out the window, too.

What we decided on is budget. Screenplays are written and rewritten for specific budgets, and it’s the primary factor directors must use in shaping their film. How else are we supposed to compare Interstellar and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to, say, Nightcrawler and Birdman?

The demarcation between Best Low Budget Film and Best Big Budget Film is a tricky one. For now, we’re going with $25 million, and our numbers are cobbled together from Box Office Mojo, The-Numbers, and Google Reports. Could someone be lying about their budget? Sure, that happens often, but no one claims a $50 million movie only cost $25 million. It’s not that egregious.

In the future, we may expand this. Right now, a $30 million film like The Grand Budapest Hotel is above the cutoff, and so is in the same category as Interstellar. That’s a little unfair. Maybe we’ll have low, mid, and big budget categories. For now, we’re just sticking to low and big, and it’s a way of recognizing and pushing smaller films while also not discounting films that have more resources and support behind them. To us, it’s a fairer way of doing things than splitting movies up along increasingly fuzzy genre lines or declarations of what is or isn’t adapted. Here we go:

BEST SCREENPLAY, LOW BUDGET

SL: Birdman (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo)
Eden: Selma (Paul Webb)
Cleopatra: I Origins (Mike Cahill)
Amanda: Selma (Paul Webb)
Rachel: The Double (Richard Ayoade, Avi Korine)
Vanessa: Selma (Paul Webb)
Gabe: Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)

WINNER
Paul Webb, Selma

Birdman is a marvel of timing, and that begins with the script. I Origins is the hidden gem of 2014, a microbudget thriller that boasts two of the most beautifully break-you-down moments in film I’ve ever witnessed. The Double is based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel. I’ve discussed Nightcrawler above – its plot and language are a gift to its actors, filled with high tension scenes and commentary on how we produce and watch news today.

Selma wins, though. Technically, the screenplay’s by Webb alone, but both he and director Ava DuVernay have been open about the fact that she rewrote much of it on the fly. The result is undeniable – a film that considers the place of social activism in a modern world by peeling back the strategy that made it work 50 years ago. Its toughest obstacle was not having the rights to any of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches – Steven Spielberg has those locked up for a film that has yet to come to fruition. This meant that they had to recreate King’s speeches without being able to quote them. In the end, they turn this into a strength of the film, allowing Webb and DuVernay to create commentary that acknowledges many of the struggles African-Americans face today, while still dealing with the plot taking place in 1965.

BEST SCREENPLAY, BIG BUDGET

SL: Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
Eden: Interstellar (Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan)
Cleopatra: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver)
Amanda: Noah (Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel)
Rachel: Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
Vanessa: Fury (David Ayer)
Gabe: Fury (David Ayer)

WINNERS
David Ayer, Fury
& Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

I don’t think we can pretend there’s any agreement here, but that’s OK. This exercise isn’t about agreement, but rather seeing where our choices converge and where they don’t. I have problems with Interstellar‘s script at points, but there’s no questioning what it achieves in the end – an audaciously philosophical journey with some of the tensest adventure scenes in recent memory. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes boasts one of the most underrated screenplays of the year. Noah is a mad creation that has moments of pure transcendence – when it works, it works like a fever dream.

Gone Girl and Fury are the only two that come away with more than one vote. Gone Girl is such a precise creation, it’s difficult not to marvel at just how well constructed it all is – as a thriller, as a put on, as a takedown of marriage. It’s a beautiful film, and it boggles the mind that it only received one Oscar nomination. Fury, on the other hand, is a singular conceit that uses war to define how men are broken down and retrained in a patriarchal image. It recalls films like Full Metal Jacket not in style, but in how completely it breaks down how men are taught to hate and possess.

BEST DIRECTOR, LOW BUDGET

SL: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Birdman
Eden: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Birdman
Cleopatra: Mike Cahill, I Origins
Amanda: Ava DuVernay, Selma
Rachel: Ava DuVernay, Selma
Vanessa: Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin
Gabe: Ava DuVernay, Selma

WINNER
Ava DuVernay, Selma

I’m glad to see Cleopatra sticking up for I Origins. It really is something special, and if we had a microbudget category, I’m pretty sure it would walk away with everything we could give it. Jonathan Glazer was winning this for me most of the year – he lets his artists and performers loose inside the structure of Under the Skin, allowing them each to create elements of it from their own perspective, and then he manages to marry it all together so that those unique perspectives remain intact inside the larger, fused film.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu almost takes this for Birdman, which is an incredible vision, but I think Ava DuVernay simply cannot be denied this year – unless it’s by, you know, the Academy. Her framing, the Edmund Pettus bridge sequence, and how she uses one early moment to completely define the lens through which she wants the viewer to inhabit the rest of the film…there’s as sure a hand to Selma as in any film this year.

BEST DIRECTOR, BIG BUDGET

SL: David Fincher, Gone Girl
Eden: Christopher Nolan, Interstellar
Cleopatra: Christopher Nolan, Interstellar
Amanda: Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Rachel: David Fincher, Gone Girl
Vanessa: David Fincher, Gone Girl
Gabe: Christopher Nolan, Interstellar

WINNERS
David Fincher, Gone Girl
& Christopher Nolan, Interstellar

Well I guess that’s it. David Fincher and Christopher Nolan in a death match. Sorry Wes Anderson. In contrast to our low budget directors, Fincher and Nolan are two very tightly controlling personalities. Fincher, especially, has a reputation for obsessing over every small detail in each scene. This carries over into his films – they each boast a suffocating atmosphere that seems half-intentional, half-artistic byproduct.

Our low budget directors – DuVernay and Glazer, especially – seem to create out of a sort of organized chaos. There’s less opportunity for control when you have less money, and there’s more room to let a day go because things aren’t absolutely perfect when the budget can afford it.

For the next two awards – Best Film for low and big budget – I asked everyone to name their top 3 of the year.

BEST THREE FILMS, LOW BUDGET

SL: Birdman, I Origins, Whiplash
Eden: Under the Skin, The Raid 2, Birdman
Cleopatra: I Origins, Under the Skin, Selma
Amanda: Selma, Only Lovers Left Alive, Belle
Rachel: Selma, Nightcrawler, A Most Violent Year
Vanessa: Under the Skin, Selma, The Raid 2
Gabe: Under the Skin, Selma, I Origins

WINNERS
Selma (5)
Under the Skin (4)
I Origins (3)

Surreal comedy Birdman and Indonesian martial arts epic The Raid 2 both get 2 mentions. Old-fashioned crime epic A Most Violent Year, period drama Belle, Nightcrawler, vampire rock meditation Only Lovers Left Alive, and Black Swan-for-drummers Whiplash also get a mention apiece. I’m surprised there’s nothing her for Foxcatcher.

I’m happy to see that I Origins is being remembered by others, too. It knocked The Raid 2 and The Rover out of that third and fourth place for me, and I Origins makes me lose it (i.e. cry) as much as any film since Requiem for a Dream – albeit for very different reasons.

Under the Skin is a unique experience. It’s been compared to the work of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, but it’s very different from each, and it’s not “art house” either, no matter how many people like to abuse the term. It has more to do with Scotland’s visual arts movement than any of those other comparisons. It gets three first places where Selma gets two, but Selma gets more mentions, so take that however you like. They’re both must-see films if you’re anything of a cinephile. Selma feels like it speaks directly to this moment in U.S. history by offering us a defining look at another.

BEST THREE FILMS, BIG BUDGET

SL: Gone Girl, Interstellar, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Eden: Interstellar, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Cleopatra: Interstellar, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Amanda: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Interstellar
Rachel: Gone Girl, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Unbroken
Vanessa: Gone Girl, Interstellar, Fury
Gabe: Interstellar, Fury, Gone Girl

WINNERS
Interstellar (6)
Gone Girl (4)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (3)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes both get two mentions, which goes to show you just how far our comic book and action movies have come in reflecting harder messages (Captain America‘s real assault is against the relationship the military, private contractors, and government hold with each other, while Dawn creates a commentary on the wars of race and hate we can’t seem to escape right now). Fury also gets two mentions, and I really do think it’s the military movie for our time. Hmm, there seems to be an awful lot of commentary on how our military is misused these days.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya, a beautiful animated movie, and Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s big budget directorial debut about a World War II POW also get a mention. Not many have seen Kaguya, and Unbroken‘s interesting in that critics were repulsed by it and audiences loved it. Go figure.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, the kind of time-hopping, deeply personal confection of a frame story only Wes Anderson could create, gets three votes, and deservedly so.

Gone Girl and Interstellar both get three first places, although Interstellar is on 6 of our lists while Gone Girl only on 4. Again, interpret how you will and, again, both are musts if you’re a cinephile.

Gone Girl is the tightest thriller of the year and suffers mostly because of its intentionally cold exterior. It’s a film that tricks and misleads you the way the best thrillers do, but that values its meta commentary more than the plot and couldn’t care less. Few masterpieces are built around so willfully and unabashedly manipulating their audience.

Interstellar, on the other hand, wears its heart on its sleeve and, if you still don’t see it, will have Matthew McConaughey weep until you do. It’s a brilliantly felt movie, complex and elusive at times, but simple and accessible when you need it to be. Few masterpieces are this honestly emotional without being cloying. Like Under the Skin and Selma, Gone Girl and Interstellar are about as opposite as movie experiences can be.

We hope this is useful to you. It’s not meant to necessarily declare “the best” in something as it is to introduce films you may not have heard, and to remind you of some of the films we liked that were overlooked by awards ceremonies this year.

Explaining the Ending of “Interstellar”

by Gabriel Valdez

If there’s one thing Interstellar does badly, it’s accessibility. You can slow things down and have characters explain each challenging scientific concept, or you can speed things up and just let the audience experience a film’s craziest moments in a more surreal manner.

Interstellar sometimes sits uncomfortably in the middle, so that if you haven’t watched countless hours of NOVA, read back issues of Scientific American, and written an entire script based around Lee Smolin’s fecund universe theory like some huge nerd (hi!) you might find yourself left a little in the dust. At the same time, there’s enough explanation left in the film that – like a rushed lesson – you fuzzily grasp at the basics while the plot moves on before you fully comprehend it all.

That said, I’ve been a bit disappointed in the critical community’s reaction to Interstellar. While critics have liked it, I’m frustrated that film experts have looked at something many don’t understand and, instead of criticizing Interstellar for rushing the explanations, they’ve simply said Interstellar is wrong or scientifically inaccurate. Because they’re experts in one thing (film), they don’t want to admit that they’re not experts in something else (astrophysics). They worry that lacking a reader’s trust in one area will influence the reader to distrust them in others. (That doesn’t put much faith in their readers.) They seem to forget that the first step to being an expert about anything is to say, “I don’t understand.”

There are plenty of things on which I’m not an expert. I am, at best, a talented layperson when it comes to astrophysics, but that’s enough to explain what Interstellar is doing.

OBVIOUSLY, THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR INTERSTELLAR. YOU SHOULD REALLY SEE THE FILM BEFORE READING ON, BECAUSE IT IS A RARE AND INCREDIBLE FILM EXPERIENCE.

Interstellar ends with our pilot, Cooper, falling into a black hole. He doesn’t die, however. Instead, he arrives in a complex built for him to see all of time at once in a fixed place – his daughter’s bedroom. It is built specifically for Cooper to be able to influence the time line of his daughter Murphy. He even says this out loud.

Critics have derided this as scientifically inaccurate because a black hole would tear your body apart before you got to any interior complex built inside of it. I hadn’t known critics were experts on building complexes inside of black holes that allow you to change time itself. Obviously, I’m not taking full advantage of the career.

It stands to reason that, if you can build such a complex specifically for Cooper to use, you can remember to flip the “Don’t tear Cooper apart on the way in” switch.

It’s said time and again in Interstellar that the wormhole is a tool sent from aliens. It turns out to be from future humans, but for the purposes of this next explanation, it doesn’t matter. Point is, it’s a tool. One criticism insists that the wormhole, like the black hole, would tear Cooper’s spaceship apart.

So the wormhole and black hole are both tools. If both are tools, then it’s safe to assume they’re user friendly. We don’t make hammers and screwdrivers that tear the user into shreds when he hits a nail or turns a screw. It stands to reason that if the black hole is a tool built for Cooper, and it’s on the other side of a wormhole, then the wormhole is a tool put there for Cooper, too.

If both the wormhole and black hole are tools designed to one day be used by Cooper, let’s assume they BOTH have “Don’t tear Cooper apart on the way in” switches. Future humans? Big on toggle settings.

Why build this time-hopping facility inside a black hole? Because, in astrophysics, black holes are the only things that are theoretically capable of inverting time and space. Supposedly, future humans might wander through time as they please, but Cooper’s a modern human. He still can’t – he needs a bit of help.

We see a black hole the same way an ant might see a car – as something that can’t be fully understood with the knowledge at hand. Ants get crushed if they get rolled over by the tire of a car. That doesn’t mean we humans don’t use the car as a tool to get somewhere, and if the ant climbs into the car and hitches a ride elsewhere, it doesn’t mean his journey is scientifically inaccurate.

The whole idea of the ending is that, if time is a dimension, causality can be designed. Just as Cooper floats through time to create the causalities that get him there – knocking books off his daughter’s shelf, writing coordinates in falling dust – the future humans create these tools (wormholes and black holes) as causalities intended for Cooper’s use.

In essence, future humans create causalities that allow Cooper to create causalities.

It’s a bit complicated, but if A leads to B leads to C, and time is as easy to walk through as your living room, then C can lead to B can lead to A without breaking a sweat.

Cooper doesn’t beat the universe with the power of love, as many critics have misunderstood. He is briefly given the tools to create new causes and effects in time itself. These tools are supplied him by a future human race.

Humans have taught dogs to drive cars in controlled situations (sorry about all the car metaphors). The car’s locked at 5 miles an hour in an empty parking lot and sometimes the human has to gesture for the dog to make a correction. Because it’s impossible for dogs to understand how the engine of a car works, however, does not mean the dog is driving that car with the power of love for his owner. They’re using their feet and specially designed pedals and why are we teaching dogs to drive cars again? But the point is, you have an animal using a tool that’s been adapted specifically for that animal to use in a controlled circumstance. That’s all the ending of Interstellar is.

Obviously, director Christopher Nolan wants this to be visually vibrant and metaphorically meaningful, so he doesn’t put Matthew McConaughey in an empty parking lot and have some magical future human energy being going, “No, left! Go left!” The sequence needs to be more intuitive than that, but when boiled down, that’s what’s happening.

The last complaint I’ll address is Cooper being transported back to our solar system at the end of it all. With everything else we’ve seen, I don’t think it’s a stretch that future humans might flip the “transport Cooper back because we’re not sadistic jerks” switch.

(The “transport TARS back because he’s awesome” switch was probably a given when future humans were blueprinting this. I bet it was the first idea they came up with. I can picture them in their future human conference room going, “TARS is going to be OK, right,” before anyone even introduced themselves.)

In brief, future humans build the wormhole and black hole specifically to draw Cooper there so that he can use the tools they’ve retrofitted for him to change his daughter’s time line so that she can save the human race so that there can be future humans who build a wormhole and black hole specifically for…causality, everyone. We might not understand causality that way yet, but dogs driving cars are probably going, “I am a pioneer bravely going into the unknown via the power of magic – look at me!”

Interstellar fits this all together very neatly. Many of the plot holes and scientific inaccuracies some critics complain about just aren’t there. It’s OK to not understand Interstellar fully, because that’s partly the movie’s fault. The blame for that absolutely lies with Nolan wanting to explain a little, but cutting a lot of it out for pacing. And sometimes composer Hans Zimmer couldn’t care less about you hearing the explanation because he’d rather you go deaf to his ridiculously awesome organ music.

There’s a difference, though, between not understanding fully because Interstellar doesn’t always explain things well, and pretending you understand everything perfectly and insisting it’s wrong. Criticize Interstellar for what it fails to do: explain. Don’t criticize it for what it actually does very right, very tightly, and far more bravely than most films would ever try.

Trailer of the Week — “Interstellar” & “Horns”

We’ll get to adult Harry Potter’s misfortunes in a second, but right now, Interstellar simply owns the world of trailers. Combining Michael Caine monologues with Matthew McConaughey’s uncanny ability to cry so hard it looks like his face is melting, its trailers are some of the most emotional we’ve seen all year. In two minutes, the two sides of our social conscience are reflected – our blasé nonchalance to the inevitable burnout of our planet, and the hope and determination that discovery and scientific pioneerism can save it. The former is giving up, easier and easier to do in a tougher and tougher predicament, the latter is hard work and no guarantee of success.

Nolan could sell us on what looks to be a nailbiting, rollicking journey through space. That would be easy to do, especially the year after Gravity. Yet he doesn’t. Nolan’s never been interested in that – look to The Dark Knight trilogy and the first thing you see is a riot of ideologies – Batman’s vigilantism, Rachel Dawes’s strict law & order approach, Commissioner Gordon’s more practical balancing act between the two, all posed against Joker’s anarchy and Ra’s al Ghul’s broader notion of cyclical civilizational decline. Don’t mistake The Dark Knight trilogy for anything but a political anthropology thesis.

This is the way he’s selling Interstellar and, more importantly, this is why we’re buying it. It’s clear the story audiences are primarily interested in seeing him tell is the moral one, not the one that takes place via visual effects. It reflects the trust and expectations we once placed on our best science-fiction storytellers, on figures like Asimov, Heinlein, and Le Guin of years past, who could move us with ideas first, and the genre’s flash a distant second.

Horns
Based on his selection of projects, I’m very much looking forward to Daniel Radcliffe’s career as an adult.

Horns is the best debut trailer this week. Indie films have always offered unique twists on classic fairy tales. In this, Daniel Radcliffe’s Ig is accused of murdering his girlfriend. He maintains his innocence, but it hardly helps when he starts growing devilish horns from his forehead.

Combining black comedy with religious satire? Taking the Nancy Graces of the world to task? Daniel Radcliffe playing such a bad boy the role was originally given to Shia LaBeouf? That lush, small-town, Pacific Northwest feel that screams, “All your supernatural fears are about to descend from the trees!”

It all sounds like the perfect late night showing.

Honeymoon
I’d also like to highlight Honeymoon. The trailer’s a few weeks old, but 2014 has been the worst year for horror in recent memory. It’s up to these independent projects that come out of left field to keep genre fans sated. This one looks good, and I’m always happy when a female director like Leigh Janiak can break into the boys’ club that is horror filmmaking. It’s a promising sign when the trailer itself can creep me out.

Others
More trailers of note this week include the international trailer for Michael Keaton project Birdman, which looks crazier every time I see it; the second trailer for the newest YA-adaptation on the block, The Maze Runner, which looks like a film that could go either way; and a project that looks intriguing but suffers a rather ordinary trailer, War Story, which stars Catherine Keener as a war photographer suffering PTSD.

Into the Woayj
There’s one trailer for a high-profile project this week that just didn’t sit right. Nobody comes out of the Into the Woods trailer looking good, except Anna Kendrick and Chris Pine, who always look good but hardly look as if they inhabit any kind of believable fantasy world. Into the Woods is, simply put, one of the best stage musicals we have, subversive, mature, and hilarious as hell.

For people who know the play, this trailer doesn’t fit the tone at all, and news that anything remotely dealing with sex (which is, basically, the entire play) has been scrapped (including the best song) leaves one wondering what the hell they’ll fill that runtime with (probably more violence). For people who don’t know the play, there’s no hint in the trailer that this is a musical, and it comes off looking like Maleficent with a better FX budget and worse everything else. It could be good (though I’m generally underwhelmed by Rob Marshall films), but this trailer is piecemeal and inconsistent.

Worst of all, the only time we see the film’s title, we can read, “Into the…” but aren’t given enough time to decipher the knotty bramble that (badly) spells out, “Woods.” This is even more egregious in the theater, where the big screen means your eyes take a bit longer to decipher angular shapes. I just typed “Into the” into Google and the most popular search term that showed up was “Into the Wild.” At least now, people will discover one of the best films of the last decade and an awesome Eddie Vedder soundtrack. “Into the Storm,” which opens this Friday, also thanks you for the free advertising.