The 2014 I'm Right Awards

Velkommen, bienvenue, benvenuto, tervetuloa, and welcome, to the fourth annual I’m Right Awards! It’s so lovely to have all you beautiful and sophisticated people—with great taste in seldom-updated blogs—with me. No, you’re the best!

Quick rundown of the rules, which are mostly unchanged from last year: I’m going to go, category by category, through many of the Oscar categories and give my personal list of what the nominees, and winner, should have been. In my humble opinion, of course…though, after all, I am right. It says so right in the title.

Anyways, like in the past few years, I’ve replaced a few of the Oscar categories with new ones of my own. Some I ditched because I think they’re dumb, or at least don’t really fit in with the rest, like the shorts categories. Others I’ve chosen to replace simply because I haven’t really seen enough films to render any sort of opinion, namely Best Foreign Film and Best Documentary. I’ve gotten rid of a couple of my original categories from last year and replaced them with what I think are better one; Best Trailer is gone, as is Best Sequel, Remake, or Ripoff.

Finally, I’ve consolidated Best Adapted and Best Original Screenplay into one category (Best Screenplay); I understand the value of treating them differently (adapting source material and coming up with your own are very different tasks), but the distinctions were giving me a headache. So, fuck it.

And, without much further ado…the Pauls!

Best Visual Effects

The Nominees:

Gravity

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Pacific Rim

Star Trek Into Darkness

Thor: The Dark World

And we kick things off with a category I’ve traditionally given to shitty movies with impressive effects work, but not so this year! Even the worst movie on here (Star Trek) was pretty solid, but the award is going to the amazing work in Gravity. The first shot, a beyond impressive long-take that lasts nearly 15 minutes, really won the category all by itself, and the rest of the effects work doesn’t exactly look like crap either.

Best Performance by an Animal, Idea, or Inanimate Object

The first original category, this one’s been around for a few years but a quick primer if you’re new (or forgot. Or don’t care): This is the glibly-named category for something non-human that leaves a particularly strong impression. Past winners include Joey the horse from War Horse and the French flag from Les Miserables.

The Nominees:

Sisterhood—Frozen

Gravity—Gravity

Cleavage—American Hustle (just kidding…mostly)

Ulysses the Cat—Inside Llewyn Davis

Debauchery—The Wolf of Wall Street

Beer—The World’s End

Ulysses loses some votes due to some residual resentment stemming from his nomination over the other orange cat from Llewyn. Beer had a good year, and could just as easily been nominated from Drinking Buddies as The World’s End. Still, it had nothing on Debauchery, which submitted fine turns in Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain, and The Bling Ring in addition to it’s bravura, award-winning performance in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Best Film Editing

The Nominees:

12 Years a Slave

Captain Philips

Lone Survivor

Short Term 12

The World’s End

Actually a rather weak category this year. As tempted as I am to give it to Short Term 12, which had understated but very effective editing, I’m going to go with Captain Philips. I’ve had issues with Paul Greengrass’ shaky-cam/quick cut style before—it’s a big part of why I’m not very big on the Bourne trilogy—but the verisimilitude it brings works wonders for this film. It helps that there isn’t much in the way of traditional action sequences.

Best Costume Design

The Nominees:

12 Years a Slave

American Hustle

The Great Gatsby

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Inside Llewyn Davis

This category is always a little tough; it’s hard to nominate anything other than period pieces (though I considered Oblivion), and the older the time period, the more obvious the costuming gets. And, like a sucker, I’m going to be roped in and go with the movie that takes place longest ago (well, sort of). It’s hard to look at The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and not notice the impressively thorough costume work. It also helps that I’ve watched all the special features from the original Lord of the Rings* and know how much effort goes into the costuming.

Unfortunately for American Hustle, this category isn’t called Best Costume Design That Makes Me Stare At Amy Adams’ Chest For Two Hours.

*Oh please, like you’re surprised

Best Cinematography

The Nominees

12 Years a Slave

Gravity

Her

Inside Llewyn Davis

Mud

This is always one of my randomly favorite categories, and despite strong work from all of the nominees this year, it’s not a difficult call. Steve McQueen might have some occasional narrative issues in his films but, fittingly for a someone who’s background is in art-gallery short films, he quite the eye for cinematography and framing*. 12 Years a Slave looks gorgeous from frame one, and the beautiful camerawork contrasts well with the ugliness of what is actually happening on screen.

*Or at least know how to hire people that do. Sorry Sean Bobbitt. It’s always tough to know how much credit to give the cinematographer versus director. Same with editor.

Best Scene

The second original category, pretty self-explanatory. Like last year, I feel it’s appropriate to have ten nominees—this list is already damn hard to winnow down. And again, I’ve kept the scene naming vague to avoid spoilers. Hopefully, if you’ve seen the movie you’ll know what I’m referring to.

The Nominees:

Convincing Master Epps in the Night—12 Years a Slave

The Anchor Brawl Redux—Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Let it Go—Frozen

The Opening Shot—Gravity

Meeting Bud Grossman—Inside Llewyn Davis

Please, Mr. Kennedy—Inside Llewyn Davis

Showdown in Hong Kong Harbor—Pacific Rim

Anniversary Party for the Foster Parents—Short Term 12

The Earthquake—The Wind Rises

Lunch with Mark Hanna—The Wolf of Wall Street

All apologies to the fabulous Idina Menzel (or Adele Dazeem, if you’re John Travolta. Topical humor!) and that beautiful scene from Frozen, but the scene of the year has to be Lunch With Mark Hanna from The Wolf of Wall Street. Sharply written, hilarious, disturbing, thematically delicious (and timely), and featuring Matthew McCanaughey at his most…McCanaughey-est, I suspect it’s one that’s going to be remembered for many years to come.

Damn, I feel bad about Frozen though. Spoiler alert, but this was maybe its best shot. Or was it? Hmm, what to do…

Special Achievement in Ice Sorcery

The Nominees:

Frozen

If the Academy can do random lifetime achievement awards, I can do crap like this. The winner is The Ice Queen. Err, I mean, Frozen.

Best Art Direction

The Nominees:

12 Years a Slave

Elysium

Her

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Inside Llewyn Davis

This is a very strong category this year, I could easily give it to any of these. Yes, even Elysium, which was unforgivably dumb but looked great; Blomkamp’s script failed him, but his attention to visual detail remains just as impressive as it was in District 9. But I think the winner has to be Her, which had the visual detail, technical proficiency, and imagination to make its vision of the near future look both whimsical (sometimes bordering on Wes Andersonian levels) while also amazingly plausible.

Best Sound Editing

My traditional preface, because the distinction always confuses me: Sound Editing is the actual creation of sound effects, while Mixing is the process of placing them (together with score and dialogue) into the actual film. Or whatever

The Nominees:

Captain Philips

Frozen

Gravity

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Pacific Rim

It’s tempting to go with Frozen, if only because I’m always impressed by the sound effects in animated movies (which give many less auditory cues), but I’m actually going to go with Pacific Rim, for making both the jaegers and kaiju sound both impressively colossal and almost realistic.

Best Sound Mixing

The Nominees:

Frozen

Gravity

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Inside Llewyn Davis

Lone Survivor

For mixing, though, I don’t think there’s really any other choice than Gravity. The movie combines moments of quiet beauty with incredible bursts of tension, and the use of sound—effects, score, and dialogue—is a huge factor in it’s success.

As to how the winner of Editing isn’t even a nominee for Mixing, uh…hey, look over there!

Best Score

The Nominees:

Gravity

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Mud

The Place Beyond the Pines

The Wind Rises

It’s possible that if I put any effort at all into, like, researching this one that I’d have a different opinion (as well as nominees and winner), but I thought this was a pretty weak category this year. I had a ton of trouble even coming up with five scores I remembered liking, and none that really stood out as exceptional, to the point I even considered scrapping this category entirely. But that would be even lazier than I already was, so here it is. And, after writing all of this, I still haven’t thought of a winner. Dang, I was hoping it would come to me during the paragraph. Uhh…how about…The Wind Rises? Sure, yeah, that had a nice score. Read nothing into the fact that it was one of the last movies I watched before writing this. Moving on.

(editor’s note: I’m exaggerating a little on how little research I did. Beyond, you know, watching the movies, I did just spend a half hour on YouTube listening to snatches from some of these scores. But I wouldn’t exactly call it exercising total due diligence).

Best Animated Feature

The Nominees:

Frozen

Monster’s University

The Wind Rises

Unfortunately for Frozen, I managed to see The Wind Rises a couple days before I finished writing this. Frozen was really good, but The Wind Rises might just be great.

Most Enjoyable Feature

This one makes a return from last year. As the title indicates, this award is the movie that was the purest fun I had at a theater this year. Could be a kick-ass action movie, a really entertaining comedy, whatever. At some level, movies are supposed to be, you know, entertaining, and this category is my nod to that. Also note that this isn’t the Best Movie That’s Also Fun; a movie that’s pretty fun but very good (something like Die Hard ) wouldn’t necessarily win even if it’s one of the best movies of the year.

The Nominees:

12 Years a Slave (just kidding. Sorry, bad joke)

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Frozen

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Pacific Rim

This is the End

Per the above disclaimer, it’s not the best movie on this list (in fact, it may be the worst—it or Anchorman) but I don’t think I had a better time watching a movie this year than I did when I saw This Is the End. Aside from simply being hilarious, I was constantly entertained (and impressed) by it’s sheer audacity, starting the very premise of the film. The Jonah Hill exorcism was a difficult cut from Best Scenes, and Danny McBride would certainly be a Scene Stealer (we’re getting there) except he’s in the movie a little too much.

Best Screenplay

After years of frustration at trying to figure out which movies are Adapted, which are Original, I’ve decided to screw it and throw them all together. Maybe in the future I’ll pare this one down to five nominees, but, well, one change at a time.

The Nominees:

12 Years a Slave

Captain Philips

Frozen

Her

Inside Llewyn Davis

The Place Beyond the Pines

Short Term 12

This is the End

The Wind Rises

The Wolf of Wall Street

While it’s script seemed pretty great even while I was watching, it was only reading about it later that I understood exactly what was going on in Miyazaki’s lovely swan song The Wind Rises. The film merges the true biographical story of Jiro Horikoshi with a short story—the film’s namesake The Wind has Risen—from Japanese novelist Tatsuo Hori. It’s a strange choice, but it works brilliantly.

Best Vocal Performance

Hey, a brand new category! I wanted to find some way of recognizing vocal performances, which can be just as instrumental to the success of a movie as any filmed performance. The all-time best example here is Andy Serkis from The Two Towers.

The Nominees:

Kristen Bell—Frozen

Scarlett Johansson—Her

Benedict Cumberbatch—The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Billy Crystal—Monster’s University

Miori Takimoto—The Wind Rises

And specifically, I wanted to find a way of recognizing Scarlett Johansson’s fantastic work in Her. If her performance were even a little less natural and convincing, the entire film would have collapsed completely into laughable absurdity.

(Editor’s note: I saw only the subtitled version of The Wind Rises, so I can’t really comment on the quality of the dub, though Disney generally does a very good job with their Ghibli imports. I’m not sure how I would have handled this category had I seen both…what if I liked Emily Blunt’s performance as Naoko as much as Takimoto’s? Could I nominate both? Would that take up two slots? Fortunately, it’s a moot point.)

Best Scene Stealer

What, another new one?! What a bounty of riches I have bestowed upon you! This category is for someone especially memorably from a movie who only appears in one or two scenes, and who might not really have enough screentime for a full supporting performance. Consequently, a scene stealing performance need not even be all that “good” by normal standards.

Robert de Niro—American Hustle

Rooney Mara—Her

John Goodman—Inside Llewyn Davis

Antje Traue—Man of Steel

Matthew McConaughey—The Wolf of Wall Street

By the parameters that I just invented, I really can’t in good conscience go with anyone other than Matthew McConaughey from The Wolf of Wall Street, who manages to make as much of an impression in about five minutes as anyone other than DiCaprio does in the rest of the three hours. It’s an important piece of the recent McCaughn-aissance (copyright Andy Greenwald).

Best Ensemble

Another returning original category, this one celebrates the overall casting and depth of performance in a movie.

12 Years a Slave

American Hustle

Short Term 12

This is the End

The Wolf of Wall Street

A surprisingly weak field, actually. Even my winner has a little bit of a weak link—as good and absurdly deep as the cast of 12 Years a Slave was (almost every bit part is populated by a great character actor like Michael K. Williams, and even Taran Killam appears briefly and creepily as one of the initial kidnappers), it has a genuine weak link in Brad Pitt, who was a producer of the film and, in what I’m sure is a coincidence, appears as the heroic white contractor who alerts Solomon’s contacts in the North as to his whereabouts. Still, it’s a minor distraction from an otherwise extremely impressively cast and acted film.

Best Supporting Actress

Lupita Nyong’o—12 Years a Slave

Sally Hawkins—Blue Jasmine

Carey Mulligan—Inside Llewyn Davis

Reese Witherspoon—Mud

Toni Colette—The Way, Way Back

Another fairly weak field, though this one less surprising, unfortunately. There were a few more that I considered for this list (Sarah Paulson from 12 Years and Kaitlyn Dever from Short Term came closest), but not many. As usual, there just weren’t a ton of great supporting parts for women this year.

Anywhoo…this one’s tough to pick; all of these performances are very good, but I can’t say I’m utterly enamored with any of them. I’m a little tempted to go with Mulligan for degree of difficulty; her character (Jean) is surprisingly shrill and poorly written for a Coen creation, and it’s a great credit to Mulligan that Jean is as interesting as she is. But I can’t quiiite bring myself to do it so, somewhat reluctantly, I’m going to go with Sally Hawkins from Blue Jasmine, who gives her character a lot of depth and plays very well off of Cate Blanchett. Not excited about it though.

Best Supporting Actor

Michael Fassbender—12 Years a Slave

Barkhad Abdi—Captain Philips

Keith Stanfield—Short Term 12

Jonah Hill—This is the End

Kyle Chandler—The Wolf of Wall Street

By contrast, and per usual, this category is very deep. And no, the movie next to Jonah Hill’s name isn’t a typo—he’s good in Wolf, but kind of brilliant as a twisted, conceited version of himself in This is the End. His delivery of “Hello, God? It’s me, Jonah Hill…from Moneyball…” might be the single best line of dialogue in a movie this year.

But he’s not our winner. For that, we’re going to the ineffable Michael Fassbender from 12 Years a Slave, and his frightening, creepy, and compelling work as Master Epps. The performance oozes with rage both impotent and extremely potent, and drips self-loathing. It reminded me of Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goethe from Schindler’s List, and I mean that as a very strong compliment.

Best Actress

Cate Blanchett—Blue Jasmine

Olivia Wilde—Drinking Buddies

Sandra Bullock—Gravity

Rooney Mara—Side Effects

Brie Larson—Short Term 12

Also contrasting with Supporting*, I thought Leading Actress was a remarkably deep field this year; I came up with another five or six who easily could have been on here**. This top five is very, very strong—I loved all five of these performances and could have included another couple I thought were more than deserving***. Mara—who was also excellent in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and briefly in Her—was the best part of the pretty rocky Side Effects, Wilde acted circles around her co-stars in Drinking Buddies, Blanchett was as good as advertised and absolutely carried Blue Jasmine, and Bullock gave a performance that, frankly, I didn’t know she had in her in Gravity.

But even with all that said, this was actually a pretty easy choice. Giving a downright revelatory performance in the little-seen but fantastic Short Term 12, Brie Larson outshone a very good supporting cast and carried the film to remarkably strong emotional highs and lows. I’ve liked Larson before (she was surprisingly memorable in a fairly routine love-interest role in 21 Jump Street), but after seeing what she can do here, I’m really hoping some more great roles get passed her way in the future.

*Hmm, maybe shouldn’t start two consecutive sections with that particular little rhetorical device. Oh well.

**You have no idea how much it pained me to leave off Amy Adams for American Hustle here. In what is becoming an annual tradition of this piece, once again, please forgive me Amy. You’ll always be in my heart.

***I don’t actually have anything to say in this little aside. Just seeing if you’re paying attention.

Best Actor

The Nominees:

Chiwitel Ejiofer—12 Years a Slave

Matthew McConaughey—Dallas Buyers Club

Oscar Isaac—Inside Llewyn Davis

Bruce Dern—Nebraska

Leonardo DiCaprio—The Wolf of Wall Street

Joaquin Phoenix from Her was a hard cut, but other than that I’m pretty happy with this group of five. There were plenty of other good male leads—there always are—but I actually found it quite a bit easier to narrow down than Actress. Picking a winner, though, is a little more difficult.

But I’m going surprise myself a little and go with Leonardo DiCaprio from The Wolf of Wall Street. I’ve never been a huuuuuge fan of Leo as an actor—I’ve always found him better as a movie star that holds a film together than someone who really creates a character. Think someone like Tom Cruise. But he showed me something in Wolf that I’d only seen glimpses of before, finally marrying consistent, convincing acting with the easy charisma he’s always possessed in spades. Leo is in virtually every scene of Wolf, and somehow I wasn’t even close to tired of the performance even after nearly three hours of it.

Best Director

Once again, I can’t really wrap my head around separating Best Director from Best Picture, so here are the four that didn’t win. Maybe someday I’ll be able to split, but that day is not this one. But I’m getting rid of the goofy Second Best Director thing I did last year, because it was stupid.

The Nominees:

Steve McQueen—12 Years a Slave

Dustin Cretton—Short Term 12

Hayao Miyazaki—The Wind Rises

Martin Scorcese—The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Picture

As with last year, the winner also gets Best Director. And I know it’s boring, but try as I might I just couldn’t justify having any difference in the five Director nominees and the five Picture nominees.

The Nominees:

12 Years a Slave

Gravity

Short Term 12

The Wind Rises

The Wolf of Wall Street

This is the part of the roundup where I talk briefly about the overall year in movies. On the whole, I thought it was a pretty good year, though not maybe the historically great one I know a lot of critics lauded it as. While not as stacked as 2012 or 2008, it was pretty deep, and the top fifteen to twenty hold up pretty well. As of this writing, three films from this year have made my personal top 100, which is about average for the last decade (for context, I’ve seen about 1,050 feature films, so the top 100 is roughly the top 10%. Thirty-two are from the past decade), though this year’s Best Picture winner is my least favorite since 2007; I liked Zero Dark Thirty (2012), The Tree of Life (2011), Inception (2010), A Serious Man (2009) and The Dark Knight (2008) all quite a bit more.

Still, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity was pretty damn good. Technically innovative in a way we haven’t seen since Avatar but with a compelling story, acting, and sheer artistic vision that are almost as impressive, Gravity might just be the best survival movie ever made, taking the genre in unexpected and exhilarating new directions in the same way Inception did for heist movies a few years ago. It’s an unforgettable theatrical experience, but also a compelling film, in the same way that Lawrence of Arabia apparently was fifty years ago. It isn’t perfect—there’s some somewhat ponderous dialogue, some physics and general special relation issues, and there’s a dream sequence that I’m not wild about—but it hardly matters. Gravity is beautiful, thrilling, and unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s the best picture of 2013.

Well, at least that I’ve seen.

And that’ll about do it for the fourth annual I’m Right Awards. Thanks so much for hanging around, and I’ll see y’all next year—or maybe not, I might get a little too busy in law school to see enough. Though right now it looks like I’m probably headed to USC to study Entertainment Law, so having that stop me writing about movies would be unfortunately ironic. We shall see.

The final tally:

12 Years a Slave: Twelve nominations (I promise, that number’s a coincidence) and three Pauls for Best Cinematography, Best Ensemble, and Best Supporting Actor for Michael Fassbender.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues: Two nominations and zero Pauls

American Hustle: Three nominations and zero Pauls

Blue Jasmine: Two nominations and one Paul for Best Supporting Actress for Sally Hawkins

Captain Philips: Four nominations and one Paul for Best Film Editing

Dallas Buyers Club: One nomination and zero Pauls

Drinking Buddies: One nomination and zero Pauls

Elysium: One nomination and zero Pauls

Frozen: Nine nominations and one Paul for Special Achievement in Ice Sorcery

Gravity: Ten nominations and four Pauls for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Mixing, Best Director for Alfonso Cuaron, and Best Picture

The Great Gatsby: One nomination and zero Pauls

Her: Five nominations and two Pauls for Best Art Direction and Best Vocal Performance by Scarlett Johansson

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: Seven nominations and one Paul for Best Costume Design

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire: One nomination and zero Pauls

Inside Llewyn Davis: Twelve nominations and zero Pauls

Lone Survivor: Two nominations and zero Pauls

Man of Steel: One nomination and zero Pauls

Monster’s University: Two nominations and zero Pauls

Mud: Three nominations and zero Pauls

Nebraska: One nomination and zero Pauls

Pacific Rim: Four nominations and one Paul for Best Sound Editing

The Place Beyond the Pines: One nomination and zero Pauls

Short Term 12: Eight nominations and one Paul for Best Actress for Brie Larson

Side Effects: One nomination and zero Pauls

Star Trek Into Darkness: One nomination and zero Pauls

This is the End: Four nominations and one Paul for Most Enjoyable Feature

Thor: The Dark World: One nomination and zero Pauls

The Way, Way Back: One nomination and zero Pauls

The Wind Rises: Seven nominations and three Pauls for Best Score, Best Animated Feature, and Best Screenplay

The Wolf of Wall Street: Nine nominations and four Pauls for Best Performance by an Animal, Idea, or Inanimate Object for Debauchery, Best Scene, Best Scene Stealer for Matthew McCaunaughey, and Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio.

The World’s End: Two nominations and zero Pauls

That’s thirty-one movies nominated and twelve with at least one win, out of the fifty-six I saw as of this writing (for a complete list of what I’ve seen, from 2013, in totally fluid and arbitrary order of overall preference, click here. Note: that list will be updated as I see more movies, so if there’s more than fifty-six there, I’ve seen stuff since writing this).

Now, just for fun:

Most Overnominated: Probably Mud, which was no better than “okay” but got three nominations.

Most Undernominated: Either Lone Survivor or The Place Beyond the Pine. The latter in particular was cut at the very end from all sorts of categories to make room for something just a liiiiitle better, including Scene, Script, Supporting Actor, Editing, and Cinematography.

Most Amusingly, Fittingly Disrespected: Inside Llewyn Davis, which sets a new record for Paul futility by going 0-12. I promise it wasn’t on purpose, but if you’ve seen the movie it’s really kinda appropriate.

Best Movie You’d Never Know I’d Seen By Reading This: That’d be either Spring Breakers or Trance, both wacky movies with more going on than you’d think, especially the former.

Movie I Promise I Saw But Just Couldn’t Find Anywhere On Here For: Philomena, which was...okay. Both Judy Dench and Steve Coogan were relatively final cuts for Best Actress and Actor, respectively.

Worst Movie Represented: The Great Gatsby, without a doubt. But I can’t deny it’s pretty amazing costuming work.

Worst Piece of Crap I Saw from 2013: Prince Avalanche, which might be the worst movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Barf

Category I Almost Included But Thought Better Of At the Last Minute: Irrational Bitch of the Year; the nominees would have been Jude Law’s wife from Side Effects, the rival dude from Pacific Rim, Thranduil from The Hobbit, Sister Hildegaard from Philomena, with the winner being Jean from Inside Llewyn Davis.

Movie I Should Be Most Ashamed of Not Seeing Before Writing This: Probably Before Midnight. I’d never seen any of the Before Trilogy and just ran out of time, though I did get to Before Sunrise. Honorable mentions include Fruitvale Station, Enough Said, The Grandmaster, The Hunt, All is Lost, and any documentary. Like, at all.

Movie That I Insist Is Actually Kinda Good But No One Agrees With Me: I’m going with Man of Steel which was, like, fine.

Movie That I Insist Is Awful But No One Agrees With Me: Besides Avalanche, which for some reason didn’t seem to make anyone gouge out their eyeballs and/or eardrums (okay, I might be overselling it a little), I’ll also go with Frances Ha, which I still believe was at least thirty fucking times longer than The Wolf of Wall Street despite the fact that Wikipedia insists it was only eighty-six minutes.

Most Pleasantly Surprising: If you don’t count Short Term 12 (which I had no expectations for), probably Spring Breakers, which I had very low expectations for but which was actually pretty good.

 

Most Disappointing: Monster’s University is an honorable mention, but it’s gotta be Elysium, which absolutely thought that it was at least as good as District 9 but was just kinda stupid.

And that's it. G'night all and, if by some miracle (or desperate boredom, or maybe you're, like, in prison and this is all you have access to) you're still here than thanks for reading.

Or g'day, or g'morning, or...hell, I don't know when the hell you're reading this.