‘Winter Wooskie’ is the third track on Belle & Sebastian’s 2000 Legal Man EP, released back in the days when the band would put out new material on singles in between their full-length albums.
The 25 songs they released this way between 1997 and 2001 combine to rival any of their LPs, and in fact the whole lot were released on a double disc in 2005 with the title Push Barman to Open Old Wounds.
You could have predicted as early as 12 years ago that Richard Linklater’s Boyhood would be my favorite film of 2014. That’s when he started shooting this examination of a boy’s life from kindergarten through the start of college.
I’m a Linklater fanboy, for starters, and I’m a sucker for this sort of visual time travel. I’m the guy who takes a beach photo every year on my daughters’ birthdays so I can run them in a sequence and marvel at their growth.
Jon Favreau delivered an unexpected delight, and my second favorite movie of the year so far, with Chef, the tale of an L.A.-based chef who reconnects with both his love of cooking and his son.
Chef is a smart comedy, a tender film about family, a sumptuous travelogue and one of the best foodie movies ever made. You will never look at a grilled cheese sandwich quite the same way again.
The LEGO Movie is the happiest surprise of the year so far. What could have been a crass attempt to market an already over-exposed toy line is instead a witty, wise and subversive burst of ecstatic filmmaking.
This kids’ movie is both the funniest and one of the most profound films of the year. It’s also the most visually impressive, with every inch of the frame put to brilliant use.
As Wes Anderson has released his meticulous cinematic concoctions at a clip of about one every three years, a segment of the audience has begun to tire of him.
I sympathize with those naysayers. I can’t deny that his films have an insular, fussed-over quality that sets them a little too far away from what most of us consider real life. It’s tempting to be turned off by the certainty that he spent as much time worrying about the art direction and costumes as he did about the script and actors.
