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.