People, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical ILX 2014 Film Poll Thread - Voting closes Friday, Feb. 21st at Midnight EST.

How is Strange Little Cat so low? There's so much (filmmaking) magic in that one.

estimated number of ilxors who saw it: 3

gone, girl

I liked The Strange Little Cat but I forgot to vote for it.

I liked The Strange Little Cat but I forgot to vote for it.

32. Force Majeure (86 pts. 4 votes)

http://s1.postimg.org/nxgla9067/32_Force_Majeure.jpg

The first half hour is the best

Apologies everyone. I just got called into work. I'll post one more then I'll be back in 5 or so hours.

31. Love is Strange (90 pts. 4 votes)

http://s9.postimg.org/5yg6gkosv/31_Loveis_Strange.jpg

a snow job

xxxp

have not seen nearly as many of even these top 10 as i would've liked - v interested in love is strange, force majeure, lucy, leviathan. strange little cat looks potentially hit or miss

aw LIS

i thought Michael Sicinski had a neat, gentle way of letting down the gentility of LiS, which rather bored me.

http://letterboxd.com/msicism/film/love-is-strange/

"But these men will, thankfully, represent one of the last generations of gay men desirous of marriage and yet deprived of it for the majority of their lives."

well put

Molina was great in Prick Up Your Ears as Halliwell, hardly seen him in anything notable since.

really? he's had a rather busy career in the intervening ~30 years.

Yeah he has done a lot movies and tv work, wouldn't want to watch any of it though.

hurrah for you i guess

theatre too but obv that doesnt count, too ephemeral

This movie looked like honest Oscarbait. A shame it didn't take off like The Kids Are Alright.

I don't disagree with anything Sic says there, but think he gives too little credit to the "occupy normalcy" angle.

strange little cat is the only film i voted for to show up so far. deserved better, but i'm happy to see it place, as i figured it a long shot.

otoh, i cannot believe anyone liked or voted for gone girl. among the most dismal and pointless films of the year. shame on all four of you.

lucy's awful damn silly, yet not quite silly enough. forgivable.

i didn't vote for gone girl [bc i didn't see it] but after alfred rended garments over its unpolitical correctness i really wanted to

yeah, the "politics" are annoying, but it's the drab vacancy that really did me in

i get people not liking gone girl for various filmmaking-related reasons, or questions over the plausibility of the plot but do people really think that gillian flynn created a woman psychopath bc she has politics that'd make her like, the fuckin camille lapaglia of crime writers?

NYT: Were you surprised that that was the reaction you got?

Flynn: I had about 24 hours where I hovered under my covers and was like: “I killed feminism. Why did I do that? Rats. I did not mean to do that.” And then I very quickly kind of felt comfortable with what I had written.

i've read flynn's other books (one of which, dark places, is really good, arguably better than gone girl) and i don't see anything in them that points toward her being an anti-feminist woman, especially given the hideously sad way that dark places plays out.

that said, if the main argument is that the dangers of the potential interpretation by the audience - especially the dumber and unenlightened-male portions of the audience, which are certainly sizable - trumps the intent of the writer, i get that.

as an obvious example of such a thing happening, NPH's oscars "joke" that the alternate title of GG should be "bitches be trippin yo" or whatever he said was really NAGL at all

I didn't see enough to vote in this, but I did see enough - an unusual amount for me - to comment.

The best/my favorite things I saw for the first time this year were by Kiarostami (The Wind WIll Carry Us and Where is the Friend's House), Rohmer (A Summer's Tale - quite possibly my favorite thing I saw all year - The Green Ray, and A Tale of Winter), and maybe Marker (Sans Soleil), with honorable mentions to a not-yet-seen Kubrick (The Killing), my first Leos Carax (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, a visually striking, very well-done example of not quite my thing), and a trio by Les Blank that didn't quite match up to most of the half-dozen others I've mostly loved.

Of new stuff, Exhibition is probably the only great film I saw, but I probably had warmer feelings towards Boyhood, an I-wouldn't-say-great movie that I enjoyed thoroughly and whose sequel I was ready for immediately. The The National doc Mistaken for Strangers functioned in a somewhat similar capacity (to both?) for me given that I've vaguely known one or two of its subjects, though, like Life Itself, which I caught on CNN, I'm not sure I needed to see it in a theater even if I'm glad I did. Mr. Turner was one of the best-made films (or just the most recent?) I saw, and both entertaining and thoughtful, but not as much of either as Topsy-Turvy, perhaps among others of his. Some others similarly didn't quite match high expectations - The Grand Budapest Hotel (which I enjoyed, partly through screening issues, with a quibble or two about subject-matter and star that I've never liked) and Night Moves (quite well-made, but maybe minimalism has been covering difficulty with narrative, and a bit disturbing how good the generally appealing Eisenberg is at the psycho act). Only Lovers Left Alive, otoh, was slightly more enjoyable, in a relatively louche way, than expected, while lacking the intensity of its less enjoyable (or successful?) predecessor. Not that it made any more lasting an impression - probably less - but I loved The Trip to Italy, whose predecessor I'd missed, probably my favorite of the movies I saw in part for the scenery, as I tend to do. Among those, Force Majeure was a better movie than Wild, but its subject and attitude interested me less. Garrel is not necessarily my style either, though I'll probably take French over Scandinavian most days, but I saw and at least appreciated Jealousy, which might have rivaled the last of the Rohmers.

Things I most regret missing, in roughly descending order - National Gallery (with general reservations re Wiseman), Antarctica: A Year on Ice, Unrelated, Double Play: James Benning | Richard Linklater, Manakamana, Snowpiercer, Expedition to the End of the World, The Great Flood (with live music), Archipelago, The Homesman, Gone Girl (with particular reservations that may drop it lower), Get on Up, This Ain't No Mouse Music, Noah, John Wick, Interstellar, Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity, Happy Christmas, Under the Skin, Jimi: All Is By My Side. I may still get around to Virunga, Inherent Vice, which I haven't and likely won't read, Goodbye to Language, or Ballet 422, but I doubt it, and I probably got my Cumberbatch fill via tv and the NT's Frankenstein.

also that Everest archival film they had at the Rubin

Out of that batch so far I want to see Leviathan the most

30. Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (91 pts. 4 votes)

http://s17.postimg.org/uafwezji7/30_Vic_Flo_Sawa_Bear.jpg

Back for the night. I'm going to do at least ten more. I'll do the whole lot if you all want me to, though I know that's unfair on the Europeans. Otherwise I can just roll out 10 or 20 tonight and the rest in the morning (before noon EST).

in my top twenty. One of the few surprising twists in a movie this year.

ILX Did Not See Vic + Flo

I feel bad that I had a copy of it but didn't get around to watching it. It was there, though.

well we await the all-space-raccoons and Oscars top 10 in the wake of your watch pile

Easy to mock I know but I'm much more inclined to go to the cinema than I am to sit at home and watch something on a computer.

but speaking of Oscars...

29. CITIZENFOUR (97 pts. 4 votes)

http://s21.postimg.org/6io6c8ffb/29_Citizenfour.jpg

that one barely made my 25 because it does lose intensity once the HK hotel section is over, but obviously it showing up this low is of dark portent.

had V + F top ten as well

Speaking of dark portents...

28. Edge of Tomorrow (99 pts. 4 votes. 1 #1)

http://s11.postimg.org/gw9xv5xlf/28_Edgeof_Tomorrow.jpg

Might actually be Live. Die. Repeat. or something now.

lol i think that was my #1

such a video gamey kind of movie

would recommend going no further than 21 tonight, gubke.

honestly, i'd keep it to 10 a day at this rate, but it's your show...

I feel kind of bad for not liking V+F, especially since I cannot wholly articulate what it is that I didn't like about it, beyond the somewhat trifling, but nonetheless reductive detail of the bisexual character naturally being the promiscuous/unfaithful half of the couple.

saw about half of live.die.repeat. on a plane, switching back and forth between that and maleficent. didn't incline me to track down the rest of either.