Matthew McConaughey stars as Ron Woodroof in Jean-Marc Vallée's fact-based...

Matthew McConaughey stars as Ron Woodroof in Jean-Marc Vallée's fact-based drama, "Dallas Buyers Club." Credit: Focus Features

Some of the year's best movies took us to places we probably never thought we'd go, and our guides were often figures from real life. In each case, they offered new ways of bringing us into stories that, initially, seemed all too familiar.

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The overblown reaction to her sexed-up performance at the MTV Video Music Awards surprised even Cyrus, who thought the whole thing was hilarious. "How many times have we seen this play out in pop music?" she told MTV later. "It's a strategic hot mess ... If I wanted to do an actual sex show, I wouldn't have been dressed as a damn bear."

Throughout the year, she continued the tweaking-and-twerking to maintain her extraordinarily high profile -- from her strategically naked video for "Wrecking Ball" to her pronouncements on the sex life (or lack thereof) of the over-40 set, to twerking with Santa. If only she put this much attention to detail to her music ...

West's take-no-prisoners approach to life works really well in music. His boasting, his complaining, his personal revelations -- it's all captivating when done in his rhymes, especially when accompanied by the first-rate sound collages of his album "Yeezus" and in his first-rate live show. It even worked well in the performance art that accompanied the album's release, where he projected his music videos on buildings around the world so that people could experience his new music together.

All of his pronouncements are not quite as effective, or entertaining, when they come in real life. But maybe he'll get to a point where that won't need to happen any more.

It was, with apologies to Jay Z, the blueprint for how future superstars are going to roll out their projects. And he was rewarded with the biggest opening week of the year with 968,000 copies sold and nearly 3 million in sales of both parts of "Experience."

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