25. "Daddy's Girl" - Natalia Kills

This was one of my more unusual finds of the year – I stumbled across it while trawling iTunes for upbeat songs for a sorority recruitment video – but I’m glad I did, because I don’t think I would have found this artist any other way. Because she has one of the weirdest resumes of anyone I’ve ever seen.

Natalia Kills is actually the stage name of British singer and actress Teddy Sinclair, which is the stage name of Natalia Noemi Keery-Fisher. I highly recommend perusing her Wikipedia, which contains paragraphs like this: 

She ran away from home when she was 14 and shifted her focus away from acting. She has described her teenage years as "degenerate," stating that she tried to set her ex-boyfriend's house on fire while both were in it. She had frequent legal trouble and periodically experienced suicidal depression. She was also briefly involved with a religious cult.

It was inevitable that the full-length debut from Key and Peele would be compared to their sketch show, and be referred to as “a sketch stretched out into a movie.” Remember how the Simpsons movie felt distinctly like a full-length movie, but people still referred to it as “three episodes stuck back to back?” You just can't escape it. It wouldn't matter if their first film had been 12 Years A Slave, people would have still stuck K&P gifs into their recaps.*

You gonna kidnap Chiwetel Ejiofor** and make him a slave and think he's not gonna find a way to escape? YOU DONE MESSED UP, A-ARON!

**I can now spell Chiwetel Ejiofor without looking it up, which I think is a testament to how good Ejiofor has been in everything he's done that this is now the case.

With this one, we've moved up a level from “movies I don't really recommend” to “films I enjoyed but ultimately felt were a little undercooked or slightly underwhelming.” The sort of film that sort of hides in the back of your mind and you aren't sure how you felt about it until you catch part of it again a year or two later and you say either, “you know, I really like this! This really grew on me,” or “I can't believe how little I am enjoying this,” with really no in-between.*

*My best example of this is last year's Jurassic World, which I started rewatching and my opinion jumped from "what a fun bit of nonsense!" to "God, this movie is just interminable."

There's a level of adoration cinephiles have for the Coen Brothers that I cannot quite get behind. I enjoy their work immensely. Like any other former film school student, I have a list of my ten favorite Coen movies.* I'll turn out for pretty much anything they do.

*Okay, looking at it, I've seen less than I thought. I can actually just BARELY get there. 
1. Inside Llewyn Davis
2.  The Big Lebowski
3. Fargo
4. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
5. No Country For Old Men
6. True Grit
7. Raising Arizona
8. That Section They Did in Paris, je t'aime
9. Burn After Reading
10. Intolerable Cruelty

I hate to put this movie this low, because I really did admire what it was trying to do. Christian movies are bad – they're badly conceived, badly developed, badly written, badly shot – and the people who stan for them are people willing to overlook a great deal because they want to like them so badly. I understand the feeling entirely – anyone who loves movies has convinced themselves they're having a much better time at a critically acclaimed movie than they are at one point or another.

Risen is not bad. It's not good, really, but it's not bad. It's fine. It exists. It continues along for a period of time, then comes to an end.