Every movie year is backloaded.
Major studios usually save the releases they’re proudest of - or at least the ones they think most likely to grab Oscar or Golden Globe glory - for the
final quarter of the year.
That’s the only time they really court critics. Since the middle of November, I’ve been invited to see more than 170 movies.
Every day (except during our little ice storm) for the past couple of months, my house has been visited by UPS and FedEx carriers bearing DVD screeners marked “For Your Consideration.” Some come by mail too. But most arrive via email - a link I can click on to stream a movie.
It is a very different experience from that of most moviegoers. Ideally, you don’t want Gravity on your TV or Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom as the back end of any triple-feature, but that’s how I saw it. I can pretend that didn’t affect the way I received those films, but environmental factors figure in to how well we enjoy any given film. Most people see 10 movies (or fewer) a year in theaters.
In the fall, I am liable to see that many in a couple of days. So no, don’t attend to me as the voice of the common moviegoer.
It seems silly to try to find some theme or organizing principle in a given year’s releases. I’m too close to 2013 to tell you what the movies released this year mean. It’ll be a couple of years before we will be able to tell whether this was a great year or not. Right now, 2013 feels like an extremely deep year. In the recent Top 10 poll of film critics working in the South that I helped tabulate a couple of weekends ago, 81 films received votes, about 25 percent more than get mentioned in a typical year. I had no trouble coming up with 30 movies I think most people would want to see. After you get past the first two in the following Top 10, I don’t perceive much drop-off in quality. Any of the films in my alternate Top 10 could have made the official list, and any of the next 10 or the honorable mentions could be bumped up a classification as well. There are lots of good movies out there, but I don’t know that there are more than a couple that will still have currency in five years.
When the first Anchorman came out nine years ago, I don’t think anyone expected it to have the cultural capital it evidently does. But its place in the zeitgeist is indisputable. Some movies will stick and some will be forgotten; anyone’s list of what’s good will ultimately be irrelevant to that process. This is a snapshot of my taste at the end of the year.
If you’ve been following along for the past 15 years or so, you might notice I’m taking a slightly different tack in my notes on these films. I figure you either know what they’re about or can look it up.
THE OFFICIAL CUT OUT AND CARRY IN YOUR WALLET TOP 10
Inside Llewyn Davis - Depending on whether or not it just opened, I’ve either just reviewed this film or my review will run soon. I’ll probably write a long piece about it on my blood, dirt & angels blog. This may be the Coen brothers’ best film and was the most fun I had at the theater all year. Still, I am surprised that so many people seem to agree, because I thought that some specific and arcane knowledge might be prerequisite to a genuine enjoyment of the movie. Other reviews, as well as the reaction from moviegoers, seem to have proved me wrong.
Spring Breakers - I’ve been somewhat skeptical about Harmony Korine’s work. But this is pure cinema, a candy neon black light blast. Lots of this year’s serious movies meant to take on American consumerism and ennui; this was the best of a pretty stellar lot.
American Hustle - An amiable mess of a period film that manages to get an awful lot right, even if it doesn’t seem to be trying all that hard. I’m not sure that David O. Russell actually intended all the cool stuff that goes down on the screen, or if he just got lucky by casting some very game and capable performers, but it’s a wonderful watch.
Blue Is the Warmest Color - I’m going back and forth on this and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt as the year’s best foreign language film. Throw Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills in there as well. I’m so conflicted that when I turned in my ballot of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, I listed this one in my Top 10 but later down the ballot placed it behind The Hunt in the foreign film category. Anyway, it’s not nearly as scandalous a movie as you might have hoped and it doesn’t track the precise trajectory of the excellent graphic novel. But it gives us as true a look at how it feels to fall in love as any movie I can remember, with the possible exception of ….
Her - Spike Jonze’s gentle yet deceptively profound study of how love evolves in the near future, with an utterly charming Joaquin Phoenix as a nebbishy, not-quite-obsolete belletrist who falls under the spell of his computer operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). What might have been a slight, gimmicky movie (a scoffing peer derides the film as an updating of 1984’s Electric Dreams) ends up as utterly devastating.
12 Years a Slave - While it’s an excellent film and doesn’t suffer from the didactic airlessness of something like Spielberg’s Lincoln, it is a difficult, lacerating watch. It has my full respect and I fully grasp its value. It’s a little shaming to know that it took a British director and a largely foreign cast to finally seriously engage America’s originals in. I’d be in favor of making it part of the core curriculum of every American high school, but I simply don’t want to see it again. It will rightfully win a lot of awards.
Mud - Jeff Nichols’ latest was hurt - at least in the awards race - by its relatively early release. But for most of the year it was the best movie I’d seen. It’s one that people will remember 20 and 40 years hence.
The Wind Rises - This is by far the best animated film in a year where there weren’t many good ones - or at least no good Pixars. Hayao Miyazaki’s alleged swan song isn’t a cartoon for children, but an impressionistic and grown-up bio-pic of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of Japanese fighter planes (most notably the Mitsubishi Zero) in the run-up to World War II. Like all Miyazaki’s films, every frame is crammed with style.
Short Term 12 - The Little Rock Film Festival scored a good one when it programmed this naturalistic little gem that has the feel of an offhand documentary. Brie Larson will not win an Academy Award for her performance and probably won’t even get a nomination, but no one did better work onscreen.
Nebraska - Alexander Payne’s movies have at times been problematic - I did not like About Schmidt - but this odyssey through the Great Plains is tender, humane and observant. The key performance by Bruce Dern as a gentle, damaged man for whom things never really worked out is heartbreaking. And the black-and-white cinematography is simply breathtaking.
ALTERNATE 10
Beyond the Hills and The Hunt - I never know whether it was a good year for world cinema or not until everything comes out on DVD. These two movies argue that maybe it was pretty good overseas as well.
Enough Said - James Gandolfini gave a beautiful, nuanced performance in one of his last movie roles. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener is like Woody Allen without the indifferent every other movie.
Computer Chess - The year’s hippest critical darling is also a sneaky-smart, modest movie with remarkably naturalistic acting. It might well be the greatest “mumblecore” film of all time, and while that might seem like faint praise, it reminds me in some ways of Inside Llewyn Davis in that it captures - to all appearances quite accurately - a subculture that’s about to be exploded. If I were as invested in that milieu as I am with the folk scene limned in the Coen brothers’ film, I might be infatuated with Andrew Bujalski’s period piece (lovingly shot on vintage video cameras) as well.
Frances Ha - I think the film is only slightly overrated.
Like Someone in Love - Another foreign language film: Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (Certified Copy), working in Tokyo, explores an odd triangle between a Japanese student moonlighting as a call girl, her elderly professor client and her violence-prone boyfriend. A disquieting take on a Pretty Woman-esque scenario.
After Tiller, The Act of Killing and Leviathan - Let this hold the place for a slew of great documentary films that came out this year. On my blood, dirt & angels blog, I published my ballot in nonfics.com poll of the year’s best. I listed 20 films and had to leave off some notables, such as the Levon Helm movie Ain’t in It for My Health.
Blue Jasmine - Good Woody Allen film in San Francisco with Cate Blanchett.
Dallas Buyers Club - Ultimately the must-see performances by Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto elevate what is a rather routine medical drama.
Upstream Color - More a visual tone poem than a coherently structured story, but nobody ever said movies needed to be coherent.
Gravity - The first, and maybe only, movie I would recommend seeing in an immersive 3-D Imax setting.
Honorable mentions (in no particular order, excluding documentaries): Captain Phillips, The Wolf of Wall Street, August: Osage County, This Is the End, Pain & Gain, Prisoners, Lore, No, War Witch, Renoir, What Maisie Knew, Before Midnight, World War Z, A Hijacking, The Spectacular Now, The Way Way Back, Still Mine, In a World, Sunlight Jr., Philomena, Blue Caprice, The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete.
Top 20 Documentaries: After Tiller, The Act of Killing, Leviathan, American Promise, Room 237, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, Blackfish, These Birds Walk, The Punk Singer, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, 20 Feet From Stardom, At Berkeley, The Gatekeepers, The Identity Theft of Mitch Mustaine, Muscle Shoals, Bridegroom, Dirty Wars, Cutie and the Boxer, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, Oxyana.
Double features I’d like to see: Captain Phillips and A Hijacking; All Is Lost and Gravity; Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle; Her and Blue Is the Warmest Color; Nebraska and August: Osage County (gawd, that’s my family on the screen).
Didn’t see and wanted to: Rush, The Great Beauty, The Unknown Known, Don Jon, The Broken Circle Breakdown, The Invisible Woman, Labor Day.
Disappointments: Lee Daniel’s The Butler, The Fifth Estate, Salinger.
Local heros: Market Street Cinema, The Little Rock Film Festival, Derrick Sims (Come Morning), Matthew Wolfe (The Identity Theft of Mitch Mustaine), Courtney Pledger, Chris Crane.
Comeback Player of the Year: The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.
Style, Pages 45 on 12/29/2013