Best of 2014, Part 1: Top 20, Zen Awards

I have to admit something. It's a dirty secret, but I trust all of you, so here goes--but don't tell anyone. Ready? Here it is:

I love movies.

Like, a lot.

Whew. Glad that's off my chest.

In all honesty though, one of the purest, wackiest, elegant and profuse sources of joy in my life is to crawl into a dark theater, force myself through seeing the trailer for Insidious 3 for the 10th time, and then take a roller-coaster ride with a group of strangers. It's basically what I'm here for--that moment of transcendence, of being so completely and wholly transported and transformed by the experience of seeing light on a screen that I forget where I am, what I'm doing--I forget everything. I fly. And I think that's what we all do when in the presence of great movies--we fly. We giddily give the finger to the spindly little ropes tethering us to reality and fly off to find something better. And that's gorgeous. And important. And it's just impossible to believe that all of that can come from watching some light projected onto a screen that shows a story that was probably written in a cocaine-addled fever dream. But here we are. It's something that happens. And if that's not groovy, I don't know what is.

I know that I normally start these kinds of posts off with a ominously large helping of snark--and there is plenty of snark to come, I promise you--but I needed to spend a little serious-time paying love to my favorite medium. This past year of my life has been an interesting one, and full of changes. And I can't deny that some of it has been amazing and eye-opening and exciting and all that, but I also can't deny that some of it has been a bit of a slog. So how does all this connect? Well, the movies I'm about to spend entirely too much time describing helped to fill my life with joy. And that's something everyone needs.

So in interest of attempting to toss just a bit of that joy your direction, I'm here to share with you the experiences that made me giddy with weightlessness. I'll start off by doing write-ups on my top 20, and then I'll segue into my traditional Zen awards--if you've a better name, by all means please let me know. So if you can manage to drag yourself through 20 instances of me gushing over a movie you probably haven't seen, you'll be rewarded with me gushing about the strangest and silliest moments of the cinematic year that I can remember. Oh happy day! Check it all out after the jump.