Social Underground Best Of 2014
Some amazing things happened this year. We were treated with great films and even more proof that television is becoming the best storytelling medium. When you start listing off the best things of any given year, there’s always backlash met with agreement. You leave out one thing that also happened to be great in popular culture, and the internet is relentless in letting you know. We understand that here at the Social Underground. We will do our best at sifting through everything that went on this year to let you know what you already know, let you know what you didn’t know, and probably a few things you didn’t know existed.
BEST FILMS OF 2014
- Interstellar
- Boyhood
- X-Men: Days of Future Past
- Birdman
- Blue Ruin
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- John Wick
- Coherence
- Snowpiercer
- The LEGO Movie
- Nightcrawler
- The Babadook
Now, none of these movies are in any particular order. I see anywhere from 50-100 movies a year and bring a notebook with me every single time, unless I see a movie with friends, then I have to wait to see it by myself to really delve into them. Each one of these movies had something that most of the other movies didn’t: Ambition.
Interstellar – A big budget movie based on heavy science.
Boyhood – A 10-year project that lets the audience actually watch a boy grow into a man.
X-Men: Days of Future Past – A movie willing to erase every movie that came before it and start anew.
Birdman – Watching a washed-up actor come to grips with being typecast as a superhero and how it changed him.
Blue Ruin – A revenge film where the man enacting revenge wasn’t a professional killer so he was bumbling around A LOT.
Guardians of the Galaxy – The goof from Parks and Rec, a talking Racoon, and a tree as superheroes turned into a fun world building space adventure that is probably one of the best Marvel movies to come out.
Coherence – A mind-bending movie that starts with a simple dinner party that spirals into something out of a Twilight Zone episode.
Snowpiercer – A train full of the last remaining people on the planet that has to constantly run.
The LEGO Movie – One of the best animated film since Toy Story.
Nightcrawler – Jake Gyllenhaal disappears into his role as a sociopathic filmer of crime scenes to sell to hungry news agencies. I know Jared Leto is playing The Joker in Suicide Squad, but they should reconsider. I think he may get the Oscar for this role.
The Babadook – A horror film that goes back to the good ol days where a film didn’t need jump scenes to scare you or pure torture porn scenes to gross you out.
Six years after the violent death of her husband, Amelia is at a loss. She struggles to discipline her ‘out of control’ 6 year-old, Samuel, a son she finds impossible to love. Samuel’s dreams are plagued by a monster he believes is coming to kill them both. When a disturbing storybook called The Babadook turns up at their house, Samuel is convinced that the Babadook is the creature he’s been dreaming about. His hallucinations spiral out of control, and he becomes more unpredictable and violent. But when Amelia begins to see glimpses of a sinister presence all around her, it slowly dawns on her that the thing Samuel has been warning her about may be real.
It’s basically, “You know all those horrible monsters that lived in your closet that terrified you as a kid? That’s this.” PLUS, Essie Davis, the Mother in the film, should be nominated for any award there is. She’s magnificent.
Could I add to this list? Sure. There were a lot of good films this year, but when they aren’t good enough to remember that you saw them in theaters, they don’t make the list. A good movie gives you a wide array of emotions and it tries to do something different. Guardians of the Galaxy can be debated about being on the list, but it’s the best Marvel movie to date. The fact that they pulled out a random comic and made it one of the biggest and most loved movies of the year is impressive.
BEST TV OF 2014
- Fargo
- True Detective
- Breaking Bad
- Silicon Valley
- Justified
- Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
- Outlander
- South Park
- Game of Thrones
- Masters of Sex
- The Americans
Serious dramas, comedy shows, working through the taboo of sex, GAME OF THRONES, elaborate dick jokes, and Matthew McConaughey. This year has been pretty fantastic for television. Television has the ability to tell long-form stories and generate discussion online and around the watercooler. True Detective has friends and I discussing each episode at length. Some were disappointed with the ending, but they were the people who thought the show was infused with supernatural elements. Nope. It wasn’t, it has been just a fantastically constructed detective drama. Also, this 6 minute tracking shot (uncut, seamless take in a film) which may be the best pulled off shots in television history.
South Park changed up how they wrote their episodes by having a continuity between the episodes and it led to one of their best seasons in years. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver proved Oliver has the chops to host his own show like The Daily Show. It may even be better than The Daily Show…
Here he is discussing student debt:
He takes one big subject and deconstructs it like a doctoral thesis every week. His breakdown of student debt in America is hilarious and crushingly depressing. My Mother would explain how she would work a job and pay for college herself. Yeah, that’s all well and good, but when I must have a $100,000 a year job to pay for college, that’s impossible. I need a college degree to hope to make that much money a year, so I was left in a Catch-22. I need one to get the other, but I get the other without the one. Hence, my $22,000 student loan debt for a degree I don’t even use. Not to mention, you don’t retain most of the shit you learn in college, so you immediately Google something that you need to know. My internship was me Googling everything I was asked to do. My college taught me about things, but not how to do them.
BEST MUSIC OF 2014
- Aphex Twin – SYRO
- Jack White – Lazaretto
- Prince – Art Official Age
- Thom Yorke – Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes
- Lana Del Rey – Ultraviolence
- The War on Drugs – Lost in the Dream
- Beck – Morning Phase
- Damon Albarn – Everyday Robots
- Flying Lotus – You’re Dead
- St. Vincent – St. Vincent
BUT WHAT ABOUT (insert band/album)?! There was a ton of good music that came out this year. I have saw many lists this year that had Taylor Swift on them. I checked out the great reviews. I listened to the album. I listened to it AGAIN. It’s not good, or maybe there is something in my brain that made me think of going out on a date with a beautiful girl, but all she did was complain about her ex and then tell me to leave the server a good tip. That is the only way I can describe that album. A seemingly nice girl who won’t stop talking about her ex put to music. Not my cup of tea. I even heard that “Shake It Off” song on the album. I remembered hearing it for a moment on the radio. The lyrics that I heard were:
My ex man brought his new girlfriend
She’s like oh my god
But I’m just gonna shake
And to the fella over there with the hella good hair
That’s when I changed the station and said to myself, “Ugh, get over it.” without even knowing it was Taylor Swift. She is the female equivalent of the lead singer of Staind, who can’t seem to stop singing about the bad relationship he had with his Father. We get it! My main point I’m making here is that music is very subjective. I could listen to a song and think it has a beautiful melody with a great singer, but my friend will listen and tell me it sucks. He’d then play a song for me and he would say it’s great and I’d tell him it sucks. Music, like art, is subjective.
BEST BOOKS OF 2014
Okay, brace yourself. People still read books. I know, it’s hard to imagine thinking that people still pour a glass of wine, sit next to a fire, and read a book for hours. People like that exist and one of them is me. There is something about getting to that last page and feeling a sense of accomplishment. Watching a book look brand new and then get used to where the spine of the book wrinkles like a wise old man’s forehead. It’s even better when the book isn’t awful. Most awful books are in the “Young Adult Fiction Section.” Don’t go in there.
Here are some of the best books that came out this year. I know it’s no seal of approval from Oprah, but it’s a seal of approval from someone who actually read the book instead of just promoted it without reading it:
- No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald
- All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel by Anthony Doerr
- Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer
- On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee
- Radiance of Tomorrow by Ishmael Beah
On top of reading these books, I’ve been reading the Game of Thrones book series, which I estimate at 28,000 pages. So, if you have a book suggestion of something you read that left you wanting to tell everyone about it, leave it in the comments.
FOLLOW JEFF SORENSEN ON TWITTER
Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post, UPROXX, BGR and by just looking up his name.