Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Your columnist suspects that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences favors films about motion pictures and the people who make and profit from them. 2014’s Best Film winner, Birdman, is essentially a tedious procession of egos and the exaggerated trials of folks who might benefit from having a real job. Still, there is some grace to the arc of this story. And if you can’t name characters consistently worthy of sympathy, you can spot moments when they earn it. Post-prime film actor Riggan Thomson—played by the superbly cast Michael Keaton—attempts a last-ditch transition from screen to stage. If he was your friend, you’d advise him against it. Since he’s not, you root for him.
Boyhood
Probably the finest film released during 2014, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is one of the most unusual and atypically comfortable films ever made. Without intruding or interfering, this film observes 12 years in the life of young Mason Evans Jr. (played with ease and charm by Ellar Coltrane over that same time span). There are minor crises and conflicts and resolutions and compensating pleasures that arrive via the passing of time. And so goes a life, like so many others, important because we know the one doing the living and feel like stakeholders. According to interview comments from Linklater, production plans and the script evolved as the lives of the actors recommended changes. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
This nostalgic Euro-fantasy marks a return to form for director Wes Anderson. Not since The Life Aquatic has he so successfully invented and transported viewers to a world. Just as Anderson has created safe spaces in the past for Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe (both of whom have supporting roles here), with Hotel he gives F. Murray Abraham and Ralph Fiennes access to a zone of wit and warmth that they’ve never before had in front of the camera. It did not deserve the Best Film Oscar. But it certainly deserved to be nominated and it deserves to be seen.
Finding Vivian Maier
The introverted and mysterious Vivian Maier, who died in 2009 at the age of 83, supported herself primarily as a nanny. She was also a masterful street photographer and thus made her child-minding perambulations interesting to herself. She took over 150,000 photos, none of which were published during her lifetime and many hundreds of which were undeveloped when she died. Filmmaker John Maloof happened upon a cache of Maier photos and negatives while researching another project. There are too few new reasons to talk about photography, and these photos—especially those in which she has captured her own reflected image—are stunning. Remember the name Vivian Maier for that delicious day, bound to come, when your young one asks you the difference between a selfie and a self-portrait.
Chris Barrett's Shelf Life alerts readers to new arrivals at the Lawson McGhee Library's stellar Sights and Sounds collection, along with recommendations and reminders of staples worthy of revisiting. He is a former Metro Pulse staff writer who’s now a senior assistant at the Knox County Public Library.
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