I could not tell you the last time I went to the theater to see a movie. For a preteen or adolescent of the early aughts, East Louisville's Cinemark Tinseltown was the place to be at 8:30pm on a Saturday. But times have changed, teenagers have changed, I've changed, and everyone who's anyone has Netflix. When I entered my late teen years and loitering in the multiplex parking lot fell out of vogue, I began to regard myself somewhat of a (pseudo-)intellectual and seasoned film buff and nothing at all was lost. Only in the last few years have I completely fallen out of touch with modern cinema. The impending award season serves as a stark reminder of just how fundamentally uncool I've become.
The annual sense of panic triggered by the announcement of Golden Globes inspired me to create a system in years past, in which I prioritize and binge-watch as many critically acclaimed motion pictures as humanly possible before one gilded statue is given to Daniel Day Lewis again. Of all the films or performances with nominations I've only had the pleasure of seeing The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Theory of Everything, and Gone Girl, all three of which I enjoyed. The next seven on my list are under the cut.
Nightcrawler
I tore a picture of Jake from an issue of Teen People and hung it above my bunk during my first summer at sleepaway camp. Let me have this.
Ida
It's no secret how I feel about nuns. And I understand that the premise has something to do with the discovery of secret Nazi evading Polish-Jewish relatives? Believe it or not, that also hits fairly close to home. The cinematography looks delicious. I'm intrigued.
Boyhood
The Before triology is a big fat life-ruiner in the most beautiful sort of way, and I expect nothing less from Richard Linklater's latest.
Force Majeure
The second foreign film on my shortlist studies a couple's dynamics following a would-be disaster and sometimes I just want to watch something that makes me delightfully uncomfortable.
Still Alice
Alzheimer's hardly sounds like a fun time but I won't not watch any critically-acclaimed Julianne Moore performance.
Pride
After I'm finished watching something certain to be so harrowing, I'd like to have a laugh. Gay activists helping miners on strike in mid-80s Britain just might do it.
The Imitation Game
While I do often find films centered around the second World War to be oversimplified cop-outs of varying degrees that draw comfortably clear moral lines which allow audiences to go home feeling all warm and patriotic inside, that doesn't mean I don't enjoy them.
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