Coraci: Blended (2014)

It’s no coincidence that Adam Sandler has worked with Drew Barrymore more consistently than pretty much any other actor during his career, nor that she’s the closest he comes to a genuine foil. Since The Wedding Singer, something has set their films together off from Sandler’s body of work, tempering both the anarchic and sentimental poles of his screen persona into something resembling a genuinely feel-good ethos, a feel-good ethos that somehow remains distinctly 90s. Blended, as the title might suggest, takes us to a place where that rapport has become so natural and intuitive that even when Sandler and Barrymore are at loggerheads, it doesn’t really feel that much less affectionate or simpatico than when they’re making love. As a result, there’s a curious and comforting lack of net movement or development to Blended, which starts with Sandler and Barrymore sharing a disastrous double date, only to reconnect later on when they get to know each other’s kids, and start to sympathise with each other as single parents. Part of what gives the film its momentum, then, is a quite dramatic change of location, taking us from Sandleresque suburbia to a resort for “blended” families – families in which both parents have children from previous marriages –  in the luxurious Sun City casino in the North West Province of South Africa. Certainly, it’s yet another example of Sandler’s almost ludicrous ability to expand product placement into the entire venue and backdrop of his film (the cruise ship in Jack and Jill seems quite tame by comparison), as well as a pretty neat embodiment of everything that’s insular about his worldview, with what amounts to resort blackface intruding from time in a kind of SNL Ladysmith Black Mambazo outfit that keeps turning up to offer choric refrains at critical moments. At the same time, though, it’s a backdrop that absorbs a lot of the most preposterous moments in the film, leaving Sandler and Barrymore room to groove into the tenderness that they only really seem to nail when they’re acting together – a tenderness that often feels as if it’s gravitating this “blended familymoon” into something closer to an updated Brady Bunch, or one of the latter-day Brady Bunch movies. Happy Madison films tend to involve Sandler accepting who he is, and getting every other character to accept and like him in turn, but Blended nails the way Barrymore encourages him into a more blended awareness, open to change in ways that may preclude the insane edge that makes his other comedies so distinctive, but for the sake of a different kind of warmth that fits him just as well. 

Clooney: The Monuments Men (2014)

Based on the bestselling book by Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men follows a special WWII Allied Army unit headed by Frank Stokes (George Clooney) charged with recovering artworks damaged or in danger from Axis and Allied forces, as well as artworks that had been appropriated or were in danger of being appropriated for Hitler’s projected Fuhrer Museum. Drawn from virtually every artistic and architectural field, the unit plays, for the most part, as a kind of embodiment of mid-century American modernism, which prevents them ever feeling too sanctimoniously indebted to the buildings, monuments and artworks they’re preserving and recovering, to the point where it quickly comes to feel as if the treasures of Europe are best housed in American institutions, or at least the mobile, elastic exhibition and curation space that the Monument Men seem to carry with them wherever they go. As a result, the architecture of the group tends to outweigh the individual charisma of its members, a surprisingly effective approach given that it’s populated by such a charismatic group of actors, with Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Bob Balaban and Hugh Bonneville at its core core. At times, it almost feels as if the film is shot entirely within the ambit and ambience of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not least because Damon’s character is based on James Rorimer, director of the Met and founder of the Cloisters, whose project of appropriating and transporting medieval architecture and artefacts to New York City occurred contemporaneously with his work with the Monument Men, and was surely continuous with the kind of curatorial ethos on display here, which tends to favour medieval and early Renaissance magnificence above all else. Buried all beneath it somewhere, then, is a sublime, heroic confrontation between the Met and the projected Fuhrer Museum, with the Monument Men almost content to be so many monuments adorning the porticos and flanks of the former, as they seek out their treasures amongst ever more sublime and imposing European landscapes. At its most sweeping moments, there’s even a sense that American art institutions have eclipsed the Vatican, since the searches tend to converge on the Ghent Altarpiece, pride of the Catholic Church, which can nevertheless no longer find safe harbour, even in Rome. That might sound like the film is more interested in venues than artworks in themselves, but the very venueless of these masterpieces – especially Michelangelo’s Madonna, which eludes the unit for most of the film – gives them a new magnificence, as well as an odd nostalgia for the rapturous communion that must have been possible with them, with all of Europe, on the eve of their imminent destruction, the last few, hushed, furtive moments before they were reduced to reproductions forever. As a stirring, muscular riposte to everything that made Hitler a bad artist and aesthete, then, it’s quite unmatched, just as it’s hard to think of a cinematic take on Nazism that’s so riddled with Hitler’s artistic impotence, or that ascribes so much of his final failures to his earliest ones

Thurber: We're The Millers (2013)

An austerity comedy hiding inside a Fourth of July comedy, We’re The Millers is about a quartet of downwardly mobile no-hopers who all live in and around the same Denver apartment block – or in one case, on the doorstop – and who decide to escape from what initially feels like a millennial version of King Vidor’s Street Scene by embarking on a road trip to transport drugs across the Mexican border. The thing is, for  petty drug dealer David Clark (Jason Sudeikis), stripper Sarah O’Reilly (Jennifer Aniston), abandoned nerd Kenny Rossmore (Will Poulter) and homeless misfit Casey Mathis (Emma Roberts), to be even remotely credible as drug traffickers, they have to pose as a stable nuclear unit, drenching themselves in so much family values that nobody would ever think to suspect them. All a hair’s-breadth away from eviction and homelessness, they have to learn to pass for white as never before – or to pass for gringos, which means being whiter than white, as they find out that the drugs in their boot are the least of their problems as their road trip balloons out into the riotous, anarchic vision of widescreen, frontier America that tends to characterise the best Fourth of July comedies. In fact, the more antagonistic and tense things get between them, the more their banter and bickering starts to feel like a real nuclear family, as they realise the middle-class fantasy they’re aping isn’t really that much less downwardly mobile than where they started off, and that pretending to be a nuclear family isn’t really all that different from simply being a nuclear family. Although all the performances are great – aided in part by a script that manages to be sharp and crude at the same time – it works particularly well for Sudeikis, who tends to be best when playing the sleazy family man who’s going through the motions but doesn’t really have his heart in it. For all their crudeness, films like Hall Pass and Horrible Bosses have tended to resist fully giving Sudeikis to that role, or at least temper it with prudent sentimentality, but We’re The Millers embraces that side of his charisma with aplomb, putting the final touch on a comedy that’s far more irreverent and unconventional that might seem at first glance.

Kasdan: Sex Tape (2014)

Sex tape scandal now feels like a thing of the past, the relic of a dial-up era in which the sex lives of celebrities were yet to proliferate and dissipate into reality television. Released a decade after the great wave of sex tapes in the early 00s, Sex Tape revolves around a couple, played by Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, who decide to make a sex tape of their own, only to accidentally upload it to their iPad cloud. That might sound like quite an explicit premise, but one of the running jokes of the film is how normal and commonplace sex tapes have become, or at least how normal and commonplace it’s become to find a camera in your bedroom, a violation that seemed quite titillating and transcendent when the first sex tapes came out, not unlike the strange thrill of the earliest webcams, but is completely banal in a wireless era in which it’s probably rarer to find a room in your house that doesn’t have easy access to a camera. In fact, the sex tape, and the way the couple make it, is so commonplace that it almost feels as if we’re watching yet another romantic comedy based on a relationship bestseller, or perhaps a relationship blog. All of which is to say that it’s a film about suburbia rather than the sublimely indiscernible and miscellaneous backdrops of the great sex tapes, not least because the tape becomes so interchangeable with the couple’s iPad cloud that the whole film comes to feel like an evocation of the cloud as it ripples across everyday suburban America, precipitating most of the drama once the sex tape’s done and dusted. In fact, it often feels as if the cloud is precipitating suburbia itself, since the couple’s iPad community is poised somewhere between their neighborhood and their network in a way that conjures up an older kind of suburban awareness that’s been decimated by the very digital propinquity that strangely brings it into being again here. Trying to recover all their synced iPads over a single night brings them into contact with everyone they’re synced with, a collection of users that includes their family and friends, but also their postman, giving the whole film a comforting, sleuthing kind of a vibe, a tour of all the places in a suburban house where an iPad might be hidden, or a cloud might be concealed. And in doing so it strangely recovers the titillating kernel of sex tapes – your access to a concealed camera – while enjoyably puncturing it at the same time, in a comedy about sex tapes that doesn’t parody so much as fondly and elegiacally offer some of the same experiences as that genre in its heyday.

DuVernay: Selma (2014)

Selma is a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic made for the era of Ferguson and Eric Garner, featuring David Oyelowo as King and revolving around the 1965 Selma to Memphis Voting Rights March. In fact, it’s the first King biopic full stop, or at least the first biopic made for cinema, although the focus of the film is not exactly King’s biography so much as his political and ethical personality. For the most part, Ava DuVernay steers clear of the more sentimental King that’s been handed down to us by the mass media, instead presenting him as a consummate strategist, who’s quite militant in his sense of demonstration, organisation and visibility, particularly when it comes to raising “white consciousness” through  tactical media exposure. Among other things, that tends to collapse the conventional distinction and tension between King and Malcolm X - it can't help but shrug Spike Lee off a bit in that respect - as well as between active and passive protest more generally, as the film goes to some lengths to detail how much action actually went into King’s brand of nonviolent protest, as well as how much it was aimed at orchestrating, manipulating and exposing white violent protest. For that reason, the demonstration scenes tend to be the most electrifying in the film, a situation that’s enhanced by a slightly bland screenplay, albeit a blandness that seems more about getting a bit of breathing space from the King legend than anything else, or perhaps giving the legend itself a little bit of room to breathe. It feels right, then, that the biopic omits King’s assassination, since it’s not exactly about mourning his legacy so much as reminding us how urgently we need to keep it with us, not just because of what may be the greatest Civil Rights agitation since King’s own era, but because so much of the United States' self-determination now seems to depend on finding the right balance between active and passive protest in the way that King made his mission, at least as the film tells it. In some ways, then, it has more in common with the earliest King documentaries – especially Sidney Lumet’s King: A Filmed Record, Montgomery to Memphis – than with more recent films, since, for all its elegiac, period drama trappings, it’s aiming for the immediacy of found footage, or trying to segue King back into contemporary found footage, culminating with the music video by John Legend and Common that plays over the closing credits, and its reminder that "when the camera panned up, King pointed to the mountain top and we ran up."