2014 in audio-visual media

I don't keep a spreadsheet of every movie/tv show I watch, but Netflix does provide a list of every DVD we've rented and everything we've streamed, which is pretty close.  So I know, for example, that in the ten years since we cut cable TV and joined Netflix, we have rented 1291 discs, with a very small year-to-year variance; in 2014, for example, we had 131 discs out.  That's a lot of movies and TV shows over the years.  2015 will be different, though, because we've cleared the backlog of older movies in our "to see" list, and more movies appear to be available via streaming, so we've gone to 1 at-a-time.

What I'm not seeing, as I scan the list of 2014 rentals, is a lot of 5-star ratings, or even 4's, that we were seeing for the first time.  With that said...

Best of what we saw for the first time in 2014:

• Gravity.  This provides a textbook example of how to start, pace, and end a movie.  No wasted minutes here.
• Veronica Mars.  This is the movie funded on Kickstarter, not the TV show (we watched that in '09).  It's not a great movie, but there were enough moments that tickled our fondest memories of the TV show that it belongs here. 
• Avatar: the Last Airbender. This is the cartoon TV show, not the dreadful live action adaptation.  The first few episodes of this are really slow, but we stuck with it because a friend recommended it.  It gets better.  Much, much better.  It can be a little simplistic at times (hey, it's a kids show), but it has fantastic characters, some excellent plotlines to follow, and an epic "The Beach" episode in Season 3 that is mostly a total digression from the main plot, but is soooo worth it.  And no, you can't simply go watch "The Beach" episode on its own.  It won't make sense unless you've watched everything before it.
• Your Lie in April.  This is an in-progress anime, based upon a manga. We're actually watching this on Hulu, not Netflix.
• Young Justice.  We discovered Teen Titans last year, but this is the year our kids became netflix-streamed superhero cartoon junkies, starting with Spiderman and His Amazing Friends (shockingly rewatchable after 30 years), Justice League, JL Unlimited, Batman: the Brave and the Bold (the best possible show with a 60's-70's kitsch ethic), a variety of X-men shows, and, my personal favorite, Young Justice (so far, we only have access to the first season; maybe it's no good after that, I don't know).

Better than it should have been:

• Pacific Rim put Godzilla to shame and, for all of its flaws, became the standard bearer for what a modern kaiju film should be like, taking the mantle that Destroy All Monsters held for 45 years.  The only good things I can say about the 2014 Godzilla film are that I like the 2014 Godzilla monster design, and that this movie made me realize that the 1998 Godzilla film may not have been quite so bad after all.
• Arrow.  If you told me just ten years ago that my favorite live action superhero TV show would be about Green Arrow, my first reaction would have been, "Who?" and my second would have been "GTFO!"  But it's true.  There is nothing remotely deep going on here, and no single episode stands out as particularly good, but the first season has a solid overarching plotline, characters we care about, and the show is relentlessly watchable.  
• Reign.  Sarahmac discovered this in the fall; I haven't watched all of it, but Season 1 grew on me. But this reminds me of something we watched earlier in the year: Davinci's Demons is another pseudo-historical drama that is obviously someone's labor of love.  There's a lot of potential here, but there's also a lot of unnecessary "hey, cable TV can show sex and violence!" pandering that doesn't fit into this show as well as it does in Game of Thrones.
• Given how well it was received, I'm not sure Guardians of the Galaxy belongs on this list, but I never really liked any of Marvel's forays into space before.  Guardians of the Galaxy hits the right tone in the opening credits, features an incredible scene-stealing voice acting performance by Bradley Cooper**, and is a great prison break movie, but then there's another hour of film and a bit too much soul-searching before Quill's dance off with Thranduil, I mean, Ronan. I really wanted to like X-men: Days of Future Past more, but while it features a lot of really good actors, the only scenes that stand out in my memory are Quicksilver's.  The "Time in a Bottle" sequence and the opening of X2 are the two best effects scenes in the whole X-men movie franchise, including the Wolverine movies.
• Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.  This really doesn't belong in this post, but I started a post on "Rob Corddry and light apocalyptic romantic comedies" after we saw this and Warm Bodies, and never finished it.

Stuff we actually saw in the movie theater:

• The Lego Movie.  Also belongs in the "Better than it had any right to be" list; it's up there with the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie among my favorite movies that should have been awful, shameless marketing hacks but rose above that and went on to lead respectable lives.
• The Hobbit: the Battle of Five Armies.  I'm tired of saying and thinking negative things about the Hobbit movies.  I loved the image of Thorin pacing the golden hall that was created in the second movie; I wish we saw more of that.  And while I'm at it, I want a war elk and a prequel movie with more Lee Pace as Thranduil.

** GotG put me in the mind of Aladdin, which also featured a personable roguish male lead and a somewhat faceless female lead that you get the feeling is a lot more interesting than the script allows them to be, who are both overwhelmed by a larger than life personality who becomes the focus of every scene he's in.  I'm not sure which of Drax and Groot is the magic carpet and which is Abu, but the comparison ends with Ronan=Jafar, because I simply can't see Gilbert Gottfried as Amy Pond.

2014 in reading

I continue to maintain my spreadsheet of books read, and I've gotta say that 2014 was a fantastic year for reading books, even if I only read two books that were actually published in 2014:

• The Blood of Olympus ends the latest Percy Jackson series.  It's a perfectly enjoyable read, but feels like a step down from the quality of structure Riordan achieved in The Son of Neptune.  Still, my family will be back next year for the first book in his Norse gods series.
• In the Red is Elena Mauli Shapiro's second novel (full disclosure: the author is a friend), and the story is completely unrelated to her debut novel 13, Rue Thérèse.  I liked In the Red, because I greatly appreciate the brutal honesty of Elena's prose, but both liked and enjoyed 13, Rue Thérèse.  

Books I wish I'd known about before:

• Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint and Privilege of the Sword.  The latter was on my reading list only because it was a finalist for the 2007 Nebula Award (I'll hold off on saying it was robbed until I read Seeker), but it's even better if you've read Swordspoint, an excellent and extremely underappreciated novel when it was published in 1987, as an appetizer.
• The Awakening. I suppose it's been on the shelf since I moved in with my spouse, but I never really looked at it before.  The Wikipedia article calls Wharton and James contemporaries, but Kate Chopin is dead before The House of Mirth is published, and something about James' writing has always driven me nuts; I can't read him. So The Awakening is huge to me.  

Books that were better than I expected:

• The Rise of Silas Lapham suffers from some dull moments and a dreadfully poor Impediment To Happiness, but also has some very well-written and funny passages.  For a novel published in 1885 by an author I'd never heard of, it was a pleasant surprise.
• The Quiet American is a Vietnam war novel.  At first, I thought, "Yawn, we've seen it before."  But... it's set in the early 50's, before the United States is fully engaged, so it's a very different sort of story.  Well worth the brief time it took to read.  (Then as an antidote, the hilarious Our Man in Havana; while reading it, I imagined Alec Guinness in the lead role of a film version, and to my delight, such a thing exists!)
• Among Others, for reasons explained in the linked-to blog post.
• But the biggest surprise of all was Moonraker. I hadn't read any of Fleming's books before this year, so my mind's concept of Moonraker is that awful 1979 Roger Moore movie.  The book, though!  My, my, my.  I may have to read the rest of the Bond series.

Other highlights:

• The Fault in Our Stars may actually have been my favorite book this year.  By stars in my "rating system" it is, but with 20/20 rosy memories, I may be more fond of Kushner.
• There were several other books on my reading list with a star.  I'm too lazy to call them all out here, go look for yourself (scroll to the bottom).

Ender's Game (2013)

So, we netflixed Ender's Game.

It's a solid SF film with some good performances, and is reasonably true to the book, or at least my 20+ year old memories of the book. 

I would like to see a version in which Harrison Ford and Viola Davis switch roles.  They would both be capable of this.

You might recall that, at the time the film was released, there grave concerns about Orson Scott Card's homophobia, and whether one can support the art without supporting the person.  Generally I'm for listening to Wagner and opposing anti-Semitism, living by Jefferson's ideals and opposing slavery, and so on.  Still, everything they have done carries a taint for me.

This put me in mind of Bill Cosby, because I find it easier to separate Card, Wagner, and Jefferson the sometimes-a@@holes from their work.  Why is that?  I think it's because the "persona" of Bill Cosby the man, even if it is merely a front, is inextricably tied to his work, so I can't watch "Bill Cosby: Himself" any more.  It would be like if any of the Fred Rogers rumors were true.

My contribution to Movember 2014

Lord Marshal Sideburns

This was inspired by Sarahmac's recent infatuation with the first season of Reign, which is at times a surprisingly well written teen girl dramedy that has an unfortunate tendency to delve into testosterone-driven male adventure and unnecessary pseudo-mystic BS.  

At any rate, Sarahmac is on Team Francis, so I decided to grow cheekburns, which turned into sideburns that Ambrose Burnside wouldn't be ashamed to have in his regiment.  

On the other hand, maybe I just look like Sam the Eagle.

Customer service follies (motor vehicle service edition)

We purchased new tires for our car last December (through the dealer, Heritage Toyota, which was our first mistake, but they had been pretty good on the service front).  Over the course of the intervening year, we noticed that we were regularly having to put air in the tires, and when Sarahmac took the car in for regular service today, she pointed that out to the service tech.  They made sympathetic noises, but didn't find any leaks in the tires, but that there was significant damage to the wall of the right front tire, and recommended replacing it immediately (and that we should pay for it).  Sarahmac naturally didn't want them to install another crappy leaky tire, and brought the car home.

I called the dealer and explained in no uncertain terms that I was unhappy with having bought tires that needed to be replaced after a year; they said they could look over the tires and determine whether anything could be done (because, apparently when Sarahmac mentioned it this morning, they didn't take the uterus-haver seriously); I said I would bring it back immediately, and that I needed the work done in two hours so I could pick up the kids from school.

When I arrived, there was nothing in the system about my problem; I asked in no uncertain terms for the tech to hunt down the tech I had talked to on the phone because I didn't want to explain everything all over again; no, I didn't have her name, because I had assumed we were in the 21st century and that when I arrived they would route me to the correct person (also, when I'm furious and furiously trying to contain that fury, I forget to write down the name of the person I'm talking to), and now this apparently makes me the bad guy because the tech I'm now talking to gets an attitude.

He finally goes off in a huff to find the tech I talked to on the phone, and when she arrives, everything is okay, they're ready to work on the car.  After an hour and a half, the car is ready, they determined that there was a leak between the tires and rims (translation: they installed the tires incorrectly a year ago) which was now fixed, and they replaced the bad tire for free.

Everyone (well, everyone except the snippy tech) was perfectly "nice", but they didn't do the right thing by the customer until I started playing bad cop.  I expect that when dealing with out-of-state institutions, but didn't expect it when dealing with Vermonters.  Oh, well.