351 – Inherent Vice (2014)

It’s all been leading up to this. After revisiting his feature filmography up to this point, it is finally time to review Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest film: Inherent Vice, based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the same name. Pynchon’s work has been considered unadaptable up to this point, as evidenced by the fact that no one has really tried in the last 50 years. But Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t just anyone. The filmmaker has embraced the challenge, describing his movie as a mixture of a classic noir, an Airplane!-style slapstick, and a Cheech and Chong-era stoner comedy. Does he hit that high? Or does Inherent Vice fall all over itself in a bad trip, man?

321 – Big Hero 6 (2014)

When Marvel Studios released a film called Iron Man back in 2008 expectations were quite low. Sure it featured the return of controversial public figure Robert Downey Jr. and purported to be the beginning of an entire universe of films, but Iron Man was little more than a secondary character at the time. Marvel took a huge risk, and it has since paid off to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. Other studios like Sony and Warner Bros. are trying to reproduce the success of Marvel’s comic book movie renaissance, but no one does it quite as well as the original. Marvel overlords Disney are now extending the comic book game into animation with Big Hero 6, though any connections to the paper-printed roots of the property are being downplayed in the marketing.