Tag Archives: 2014 in review

Lists, Movies, Music, TV

Best of 2014

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Nathaniel
Nathaniel
SportsAlcohol.com cofounder Nathaniel moved to Brooklyn, as you do. His hobbies include cutting up rhubarb and laying down. His favorite things are the band Moon Hooch and custard from Shake Shack. Old ladies love his hair.
Nathaniel
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Here it is, you’re one stop place to see all of SportsAlcohol.com’s Best of 2014 posts!

MOVIES

We wrote about 14 of our very favorites here, including not-so-usual suspects like We Are the Best! and Obvious Child.

Our very favorite movie of the year, The Grand Budapest Hotel, deserved its own write-up.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies was never in contention for our Best Of list, but it does have the most variety in animals that are ridden, so we did a podcast about it.

TV

We counted down the top ten best TV shows. This year will be remembered as a year of comedy!

We provided alternatives for those who are so sick of hearing the rest of us gush about our No. 1 pic.

We noted that Comedy Central has really been living up to its name lately.

We lamented that no one else was watching Peaky Blinders (well, at least one of us complained about that).

We recorded a podcast about The Newsroom. How that show smarmed its way into a best-TV round-up is anyone’s guess.

MUSIC

We crowned St. Vincent’s St. Vincent as the best album of the year, doing a track-by-track analysis of her greatness (and also a quick study of her magnificent hair).

We also celebrated four other albums as the best of the year: Teeth Dreams by The Hold Steady, The Voyager by Jenny Lewis, Complete Surrender by Slow Club, and Lost in the Dream by The War on Drugs.

We called out the best-of-the-best, our very favorite songs from our very favorite albums, including “Blue Moon” by Beck,  “Goshen ’97” by Strand of Oaks, “Nothing but Trouble” by Phantogram, “Lazerray” by TV on the Radio, “Seasons (Waiting on You)” by Future Islands, “Your Love Is Killing Me” by Sharon Van Etten, and “Lights Out” by Angel Olsen.

We stumped for our favorite songs that didn’t come from our favorite albums, including “I’m Not Part of Me” by Cloud Nothings, “Bury Our Friends” by Sleater-Kinney, “Water Fountain” by tUnE-yArDs, “Mr. Tembo” by Damon Albarn, “Lariat” by Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, “Bright Eyes” by Allo Darlin’, “Backseat Shake Off” by The Hood Internet, and “Scapegoat” by The Faint.

Is there a Spotify playlist for all this?” you ask. Of course there’s a Spotify playlist.

SPORTSALCOHOL.COM

Rob picked out the best of ourselves, with his favorite contributions from the gang here at SportsAlcohol.com.

Movies

BEST MOVIES OF 2014 RECAP!

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Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes
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Last year (2014) was a good year for movies.

We wrote about 14 of our very favorites here, including not-so-usual suspects like We Are the Best! and Obvious Child.

Our very favorite movie of the year, The Grand Budapest Hotel, deserved its own write-up.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies was never in contention for our Best Of list, but it does have the most variety in animals that are ridden, so we did a podcast about it.

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

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Rob
Rob
Rob is one of the founders of SportsAlcohol.com. He is a recent first time home buyer and it's all he talks about. Said home is in his hometown in Upstate New York. He never moved away and works a job to pay for his mortgage and crippling chicken wing addiction. He is not what you would call a go-getter. This may explain the general tone of SportsAlcohol.com.
Rob
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Over the holidays, some of the SportsAlcohol.com crew got together and took in the (probably? hopefully?) final Peter Jackson film based on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. We discussed frame rate, plot, pacing, and the many wonderful animals used for transportation.

SPOILER ALERT: In this podcast we discuss a movie based on a popular book that’s over seventy years old with millions of copies in print. If you don’t know what happens, it’s your own fault.

NOISE ALERT: The were some weird clicks in the recording I couldn’t get rid of. Also, our cats were hungry, so you might here their bells or their whining in the background.

How To Listen

    We are up to five different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

  • You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
  • I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
  • I don’t really know what Stitcher is, but we are also on Stitcher.
  • You can download the mp3 of this episode directly here.
  • If you are lazy, like an automatic technical award nomination for a sci-fi/fantasy movie , you can listen in the player below.

Lists, Movies

The Best Movie of 2014: The Grand Budapest Hotel

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Jesse
Jesse
Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse
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I mentioned yesterday that there was a great variety of movies on the five different lists submitted for our Best Movies of 2014 poll. That’s true, but at the same time, one movie ran away with the top spot in a decisive victory: Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel didn’t just appear on every list, it ranked first on three of them and within the top five on all five lists. Rather than figure out who should write about this movie, then, we decided to talk about it together. Here’s SportsAlcohol.com on our collective favorite movie of 2014:
Continue reading The Best Movie of 2014: The Grand Budapest Hotel →

Lists, Movies

The 15 Best Movies of 2014

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Jesse
Jesse
Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse
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Finishing up our first ever year-in-review coverage for our first ever year in existence, we have for your approval or disdain.first SportsAlcohol.com list of the year’s best movies: The Top 15 Best Movies of 2014.

Fifteen, because ten was too few this year. Fifteen, because some of us were narrowing down our individual ballots from lists of thirty or forty. Fifteen, because it never hurts to offer more reasons to be hopeful about the future. Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, Maggie, and Jesse all sent in ballots, and a lot of great and diverse choices didn’t quite make our final list. But I think we explain pretty well why these movies went the distance. So let’s quit preambling and just get to it:
Continue reading The 15 Best Movies of 2014 →

Lists

BEST OF 2014: SportsAlcohol.com

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Rob
Rob
Rob is one of the founders of SportsAlcohol.com. He is a recent first time home buyer and it's all he talks about. Said home is in his hometown in Upstate New York. He never moved away and works a job to pay for his mortgage and crippling chicken wing addiction. He is not what you would call a go-getter. This may explain the general tone of SportsAlcohol.com.
Rob
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2014 was SportsAlcohol.com‘s first year of true existence. After years of us joking about the most perfect domain name, I bought it last December and made our first post this past January. Even though we didn’t have much of a plan, things kind of snowballed from there. Branching out from our core group of founders, we got a lot of our friends to contribute articles, blurbs, lists, comments, and their voices (to our podcast). Without checking with anyone else, I decree the following to be the best SportsAlcohol.com content of 2014!

Continue reading BEST OF 2014: SportsAlcohol.com →

TV

BEST TV OF 2014 RECAP!

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Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes
Latest posts by Marisa (see all)

In recounting the Best TV of 2014, we…

…counted down the top ten best TV shows. This year will be remembered as a year of comedy!

…provided alternatives for those who are so sick of hearing the rest of us gush about our No. 1 pic.

…noted that Comedy Central has really been living up to its name lately.

…lamented that no one else was watching Peaky Blinders (well, at least one of us complained about that).

…did a podcast about The Newsroom. How that show smarmed its way into a best-TV round-up is anyone’s guess.

Music

Your Sad-Bastard Christmas Songs of 2014

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Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes
Latest posts by Marisa (see all)

When it’s seasonally appropriate, I love all types of Christmas music. I don’t care if it’s the hokey Andy Williams stuff or the cash-in “Last Christmas” covers or the well-meaning but wrong-headed charity songs that don’t realize that it totally does snow in Africa because there are mountains. But if there’s a particular sub-genre of Christmas music I love the most, it’s sad-bastard indie rock that’s only tangentially about Christmas.

If you didn’t realize that was a particular sub-genre of Christmas songs, I direct you to some of my favorites: “Xmas Cake” by Rilo Kiley (on perhaps my favorite Christmas compilation ever), “Christmas TV” by Slow Club (from an amazing Christmas EP that has the best “Christmas, Baby Please Come Home” I’ve ever heard), “It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop” by Frightened Rabbit (which looks like it’s free right now if you have Amazon prime), plus any of those Sufjan Stevens Christmas originals (though I’m especially partial to “Get Behind Me, Santa”). And even though “Christmas Number One” by the Black Arts (aka Black Box Recorder and Art Brut) sounds mostly happy, it does sort of criticize the way holiday music is slapped together in August in hopes of making money in December (and it laments the loss of Top of the Pops).

So, every year, I seek out more sad-bastard indie Christmas music to add to the ever-growing playlist. Here are the best selections for 2014.

Continue reading Your Sad-Bastard Christmas Songs of 2014 →

TV

BEST TV OF 2014: Comedy Central is Living Up to Its Name

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Nathaniel
Nathaniel
SportsAlcohol.com cofounder Nathaniel moved to Brooklyn, as you do. His hobbies include cutting up rhubarb and laying down. His favorite things are the band Moon Hooch and custard from Shake Shack. Old ladies love his hair.
Nathaniel
Latest posts by Nathaniel (see all)

An observation about the SportsAlcohol.com Top Television of 2014 list: only one network comedy made the list. We’re a pretty comedy loving bunch, but I’ll admit to being a little surprised, not because there’s only one network show on our list, but that there are any at all. I like the show on our list a lot, and I can think of other worthy contenders (my darling, my Bob’s Burgers), but network comedy is in fairly dire straits at the moment. NBC’s once hallowed (and then hallowed by comedy nerds, if not general audiences) Thursday night comedy block is no more, and the other broadcast networks seem to have similar trouble developing and keeping interesting comedies. And while the age of the incredible cable drama has provided more quality hour-long television than anybody can reasonably keep up with, the comedy offerings on cable haven’t entirely kept pace (not that you’d know it from the great comedies that made our list). But allow me, for a moment, to join in the growing chorus of people trying to draw your comedy-seeking attention back to Comedy Central. Perhaps you think (like I did!) that Comedy Central had given over to a schedule made up entirely of stand-up specials, MadTV reruns, the occasional new episode of South Park, and waves of Tosh-esque smirky misanthropy. But it turns out that in 2014 the network had maybe its strongest collection of original programming ever. In addition to the vital-as-ever Daily Show and Colbert Report, over the last two or three years Comedy Central has amassed a handful of shows with distinctive, well developed comic personality. Sara makes a great case for Broad City (I haven’t seen it! I’m hoping the first season goes back up on Hulu in advance of the second season’s January 14th premiere). But here’s a quick look at five other terrific shows: Continue reading BEST TV OF 2014: Comedy Central is Living Up to Its Name →

TV

BEST TV OF 2014: Nobody Will Watch ‘Peaky Blinders’ with Me but Everyone Should

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Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes
Latest posts by Marisa (see all)

When Peaky Blinders debuted across the pond, it seemed like it was tailor-made for me—and possibly only me. I can see why other people wouldn’t seek it out the way I did, because they might not share:

  1. My love of Boardwalk Empire, which I think exceeds most people’s, at least until that deadly fourth season.
  2. My demonstrated, um, interest in Cillian Murphy.
  3. My love of what’s rapidly becoming my favorite genre of TV and movies, which I can only describe as “Don’ You Go Rounin’ Roun to Re Ro” (or British petty crime thingies that seem like they have “a lot of killing over a very small amount of money”).

So, yeah, I resigned myself to watching the first season of the show—about a gang of toughs trying to seize control of the horse-race betting racket in post-WWI Birmingham—as a solo venture.

Everything changed for the second season. It was available on Netflix almost right away, so it didn’t require as much effort to watch. The show expanded its focus to interest people other than me and only me (and by “expanded its focus,” I mean “added Tom Hardy”). More people were watching Sherlock than ever (at least on my Twitter feed), so they were more used to checking out BBC shows for quality entertainment. And…I’m still the only one I know who watches Peaky Blinders. D’oh!

But someone out there should watch this with me. Here’s why.

Continue reading BEST TV OF 2014: Nobody Will Watch ‘Peaky Blinders’ with Me but Everyone Should →